Radical Democrats: Ideology and Political Change in California in the Post-World War Two Era

从第二次世界大战结束到20世纪70年代，工业化国家政府对社会政策和经济增长问题的看法发生了巨大变化。这本书的目的是调查这几十年来美国温和的左翼政治发展到什么程度。这项研究将使战后美国政治的主流史学复杂化，后者倾向于强调在新政之后阻碍中左翼政治激进主义的制度和政治约束。加州之所以重要，不仅因为它在这一时期是一个快速发展的大州，而且它也是20世纪50年代和60年代发生重大政治变革的地方，这清楚地表明了社会变革和政治意识形态之间的联系，这是我想探讨的。20世纪50年代，民主党在加州建立了一个新的政治基础，利用基层行动主义动员跨阶层选民联盟，支持一个中间偏左的计划，从而推动民主党在政治上占据主导地位。我认为，在加州，左派意识形态的发展有相当大的空间，可以将工人阶级的元素与中产阶级的积极分子联合起来，以便在1958年之后巩固之前奄奄一息的民主党的权力。新一代民主党人对美国人人权的广泛解读，包括不论就业状况如何都有获得收入的权利，以及种族和性别平等的权利。本研究将检视加州民主委员会、民主俱乐部运动的建立与发展，以及民主党在州立法机关的立法计划，以评估当时主流政党政治与激进政治行动主义之间的联系。这本书将探讨在20世纪70年代权利革命爆发之前，加州自由主义圈子中关于福利国家和经济增长问题的辩论如何为他们提供了政治语言，以解释更广泛的公民权利和性权利问题。因此，本项目试图在美国的背景下解释战后社会民主思想和实践的成功与失败。发达国家其他地区的社会民主党和社会活动家相信，公民有社会责任为共同利益而行动，通过普遍征税来支持福利计划，并相信个人享有不分性别、种族和性别的公民平等权利。在英国和其他地方，战后时期的左翼政党不得不重新配置他们的政治计划，以适应一个富裕的时代，托尼·克罗斯兰（Tony Crosland）的《社会主义的未来》（1956）等作品强调了这一点。从这个角度来看，20世纪60年代早期加利福尼亚福利法律的巨大自由化等发展可以与其他地方的类似发展相提并论。然而，这一重要政治变革的动力是美国和加州所特有的。对加州民主党政策制定和行动主义的调查揭示了主流政治适应不断变化的社会观念的过程，包括对福利和“应得的”穷人、性、个人权利和资本主义监管的态度。金州在战后时期人口和经济的快速增长，加上其种族和阶级的特殊动态，使得致力于公民和社会权利的温和左翼新政治的出现成为政治变革的一个特别重要的案例研究，它有助于我们理解现代民主党的起源，以及近几十年来它对社会差异日益接受的动态。这本书对我们理解与社会变革有关的现代美国政治作出了原创性的贡献。

The era between the end of World War Two and the 1970s witnessed dramatic changes in the way governments in the industrialized world perceived questions of social policy and economic growth. This book project aims to investigate the extent to which a moderate left-wing politics developed in the United States in these decades. This study will complicate the dominant historiography on postwar American politics, which tends to stress institutional and political constraints hampering left-of-centre political activism in the wake of the New Deal.The state of California is important as not only is it a large and rapidly growing state in this period, but it is also the site of significant political change in the 1950s and 1960s that clearly demonstrates the link between social change and political ideology that I want to explore. The Democratic Party in California built a new political base in the 1950s that used grass-roots activism to mobilize a cross-class coalition of voters behind a left-of-center program that would propel the Democratic Party to political dominance. I argue that in California there was considerable scope for the development of an ideology of the left that could unite elements of the working class with middle class activists in order to entrench the previously moribund Democratic Party in power after 1958. This new generation of Democrats interpreted the human rights of Americans broadly to include the right to an income regardless of employment status, and the right to racial and sexual equality. This study will examine the establishment and development of the California Democratic Council, the Democratic Club movement, and the legislative program of the Democrats in the state legislature in the 1950s and 1960s, in order to evaluate the link between mainstream party politics and radical political activism in those years. The book will explore how debates in liberal circles in California about questions of the welfare state and economic growth gave them the political language with which to interpret broader questions of civil and sexual rights, in many cases before the explosion of the rights revolution in the 1970s. Thus this project seeks to explain the successes and failures of social democratic thought and practice in the postwar years in an American context. Social democratic parties and activists in other parts of the developed world believed in the social responsibility of citizens to act for the common good by supporting welfare programs through general taxation and in the right of the individual to civil equality regardless of sexuality, race, and gender. In the UK and elsewhere parties on the left in the post-war era had to reconfigure their political programs for an age of abundance, emphasized by works such as Tony Crosland's The Future of Socialism (1956). In this light, developments such as the great liberalization of California's welfare laws in the early 1960s can be seen in parallel with similar developments elsewhere. Yet the dynamics of this important political change were particular to the United States and to California. An investigation of Democratic Party policymaking and activism in California sheds light on the processes through which mainstream politics adapted to changing conceptions of society, including attitudes to welfare and the 'deserving' poor, sexuality, individual rights, and the regulation of capitalism. The rapid population and economic growth of the Golden State in the postwar era, together with its particular dynamics of race and class, make the emergence of a new politics on the moderate left committed to civil and social rights a particularly important case study of political change that helps us understand the origins of the modern Democratic Party and the dynamics of its growing acceptance of social difference in recent decades.This book makes an original contribution to our understanding of modern American politics as it relates to social change.