Thread by @ezralevin

Happy Sunday! I do my best to learn from history, so here's a little history thread I think is relevant to this article. politico.com/news/2020/01/1…

The history is the big fight during the 1948 Dem Convention over whether to include a strong plank on civil rights. At a higher level, the fight was whether to "play it safe" for electability, or imagine a better party and fight for it. So it seems awfully relevant this year.

Now, the 1948 Dem convention was an anxious convention. All the Dems were very scared that the Dem nominee (Truman) was going to lose.

(This feeling held through election day, giving rise to the most famous pic of bad polling in US history.)

So at the Dem convention in '48, party elites and Truman himself wanted to play it safe. They opposed a strong civil rights plank.

It would fracture the party. It would alienate moderates. How would they attract white voters in November? They'd lose!

Young Hubert Humphrey had made his name as a progressive mayor and civil rights advocate. But he was genuinely torn about whether to fight for a strong civil rights plank. He'd piss off the party elders and wreck his political future, and he'd likely lose anyway.

The safe move would have been to avoid rocking the boat on civil rights, and then pray that the party would keep it together enough to limp into an unlikely November win. That's what the head honchos wanted.

But Humphrey decided damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. He went for it. He gave a barn burner speech at the convention in opposition to southern segregationist "states' rights." Here's a famous line:

Then two crazy things happened. First, Humphrey's speech worked. The strong civil rights plank won a majority vote. Civil rights won.

And second, Truman won the election in November.

In opposition to party elites, "smart" political prognosticators, and the President himself, civil rights advocates imagined and fought for a better Democratic Party. They won that fight, and an invigorated party then won a general election.

Had the "play it safe" crowd won, the party very well may have lost.

I was thinking about this because I'm re-reading Master of the Senate, part of Robert Caro's multi volume work on LBJ and political power.

Caro's assessment is that in winning the fight for a civil rights plank, Humphrey did more than anybody else to help Truman get elected.

(Not covered by Caro here was the brown- and Black-led civil rights movement that was largely excluded from the political process. Humphrey isn't the white savior who "won" civil rights, but he gets credit for using his power when he did. There would be many more fights to come.)

As we think about the Dem Primary now, there's a *lot* of focus on who can win in November.

I think this focus makes sense. No outcome is more important this year than defeating Trump (though taking the Senate is a close #2).

But I don't buy that the "play it safe" crowd has it right. I think starting from a place of fear, defensiveness, and weakness will not win an election.

Rather than resign ourselves to what we're scared of, I hope we'll embrace what inspires us. I hope that Democrats imagine and fight for what the party can be.

I think that's the right thing to do. And I also think that's how we win.

OK, that's the thought. Only other note is that I'm re-reading Caro now because the Senate is so key to everything in 2021. We need a Dem trifecta to save democracy in 2021, and then we'll have to fight for it. So by all means, throw yourself into a senate race too. /end