Five Models for Progressives

The second half of the 2020s augurs a period of accelerating generational change in American party politics. As magnified by new revelations about Joe Biden’s decline, persistent questions about Donald Trump’s own health and acuity, and an increasingly gerontocratic Congress marked by deaths in office, both the Democratic and Republican parties are overdue for a changing of the guard.

Undoubtedly, the possibilities for reform on the Republican side remain quite inchoate—if not entirely stymied—under Trump. But the outlook for progressives is also uncertain. Divided between a handful of coastal power bases driven more by personality than a strong philosophy, Democrats seem unwilling to admit many working-class constituents have lost faith in their ability to govern well. Making matters worse, progressive activists still have a tendency to dwell on America’s moral failings, past and present, rather than advance ideas and themes that might depolarize the electorate. This fuels a kind of political amnesia, inhibiting would-be reformers from invoking past leaders, understanding their legacies, and appreciating the political and economic challenges they faced.

In the spirit, then, of rediscovering lesser-known political figures, this Memorial Day post highlights five, independent-minded leaders whom Democrats (and a few Republicans) might learn from.

Daniel J. Evans (1925-2024)

In the wake of the sole debate between Trump and Kamala Harris, the death last September of Daniel J. Evans, a former Republican governor of Washington and U.S. Senator, barely registered a note in national discourse. During his heyday as governor in the early 1970s, however, Evans epitomized the kind of constructive, pluralist Republicanism that came under assault from the GOP’s Goldwater-libertarian wing. According to his obituary in the New York Times, Evans invested in education, particularly community college; expanded social services in deprived urban neighborhoods; established the nation’s first-ever Department of Ecology while also endorsing nuclear power; and made groundbreaking appointments for minorities and women.

Now, of course, most of Evans’s accomplishments sound like a progressive wish list. Along with other midcentury Republicans such as Earl Warren and George Romney, Evans’s legacy, rather than connoting the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” worldview typically (and often thoughtlessly) ascribed to the country’s now extinct strain of progressive Republicans, symbolizes the path not taken by the modern GOP. Indeed, he did more than oppose on principle those who fanatically sought to dismantle “big government.” Unbound by dogmatic ideas about what government ought and ought not to do, Evans took steps to respond effectively to the exclusions and shortcomings of midcentury America as well as the early omens of industrial decline.

That independence and can-do attitude should be instructive for local GOP parties that cannot even field competitive, common-sense candidates in most blue states and large coastal cities. But there are lessons here for Democrats, too. Evans reached out to interest groups almost unanimously equated with the current Democratic base, but he was motivated by reform and useful policies, not the machine politics and pandering that so often substitutes for accountability under Democrats’ one-party rule. Perhaps most important, he understood that sound environmental protections did not have to fetter development, including progress toward energy security. Progressives seeking to reinvigorate urban and state politics should remember that independence of the kind Evans demonstrated is not a euphemism for tepid action or bland technocracy.

Silvio O. Conte (1921-1991)

Like Evans, Silvio O. Conte hailed from a state once dominated by an older Republican establishment before it became synonymous with the liberalism of ethnic urban machines and, later, educated professionals. His long career as a U.S. Representative from Western Massachusetts began in 1959, following a stint in the state senate; he first became a Republican after being deterred by the local Irish Democratic machine from trying to earn its support. Conte’s strategy may have smacked of self-interested maneuvering. But, Conte later suggested, it gave him more leverage in the House than he would have otherwise obtained as another member of the state’s Democratic delegation.

That theory was frequently borne out over the course of three decades. Amid waves of offshoring, Conte was an undaunted champion of his region’s manufacturers and workers. He also supported civil rights and multiple pieces of environmental legislation. During the Reagan Revolution, he was a leading voice among the GOP’s so-called Gypsy Moths—mostly Northern Republicans who opposed steep cuts to federal aid to cities and regions rocked by high unemployment, high energy costs, and fiscal crises. Though only moderately successful in 1981-1982, that principled dissent contrasts with Mike Johnson’s House Republicans, who recently passed a regressive budget heavily favoring the rich.

Another of Conte’s commendable stands that diverges from Trump’s GOP: he strongly supported funding the National Institutes of Health throughout the Reagan era. Today, several centers bear his name. While DOGE’s reckless cuts to federally-backed science and research are already expected to worsen Americans’ life chances and health outcomes, Conte’s consistent advocacy is a reminder that some causes to advance the general welfare should be beyond the reach of ideological meddling.

However conventionally liberal, Conte’s record would thus seem to impart lessons for Rust Belt Republicans angling to earn their “pro-worker, pro-family” bona fides. But progressives flummoxed by working-class dealignment might consider his example as well. Conte’s lifelong dedication to the underdog—and reputation for staying closely connected to his blue-collar constituents—encapsulates what cross-partisan progressive governance used to mean. That spirit of public service is desperately needed in a Democratic Party increasingly consumed by the trappings of celebrity and social media echo chambers.

Fred R. Harris (1930-2024)

Another once-prominent figure who died in the shadow of the 2024 election, Democrat Fred R. Harris of Oklahoma strove to update America’s prairie populism for the post-Vietnam era. His “meteoric rise and fall” in the public eye, wrote Robert D. McFadden for the New York Times, was characterized by an equally rapid political evolution amid the tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It began with Harris’s special election to the U.S. Senate in 1964 following the death of Democratic Sen. Robert S. Kerr, one of the state’s most powerful operatives; initially, Harris was a close ally of President Lyndon Johnson, supporting the Great Society and the Vietnam War, and won a full Senate term in 1966. As his term progressed, however, Harris moved forcefully against the war’s escalation, and, during a brief run for president in the early days of the 1972 campaign, became a vociferous opponent of concentrated political and economic power. Despite his rapid political ascent and strong ties with the party’s senior leaders, Harris decided to leave the Senate and reinvent himself as a Washington outsider.

On the face of it, that transition—from savvy player in state politics to loyal Great Society liberal to left-wing populist—was part of a quixotic plan to lay the groundwork for the 1976 Democratic nomination, which also fell apart. Harris became convinced of the possibility for a big-tent, grassroots movement to succeed an increasingly managerial form of liberalism. But his “New Populism,” expounded in a 1973 book, failed to coalesce a Democratic coalition fracturing over race, foreign policy, urban disorder, and different regional economic priorities.

In other ways, though, Harris’s antipathy toward the establishment foreshadowed the political insurgencies of the 2010s. He anticipated, moreover, the economic conditions which would subsequently rekindle the anti-monopoly tradition. As a new generation of trustbusters look for ways to build a broad-based movement, they might consider what the media-hungry Harris got right, and where he stumbled, in his ill-fated quest to forge a populist movement that transcended his era’s many divides.

Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings (1922-2019)

The rapid the decline of the Democratic Party in the South over the last three decades has dimmed memories of its post-Jim Crow leaders. Most are considered to have been “New Democrats” in the mold of Bill Clinton—consummate pragmatists who occasionally courted blue-collar voters but ultimately upheld the Washington Consensus on globalization. The legacy of South Carolina’s Fritz Hollings, who served six terms in the Senate, challenges that convention.

Sometimes misconstrued as a conservative, Hollings is better described as a liberal economic nationalist. He first rose to prominence as governor of South Carolina; though he opposed desegregation during his 1958 gubernatorial campaign, Hollings oversaw Clemson University’s integration at a time when most other Southern Democrats balked at such efforts. Echoing Lyndon Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, and other prominent liberals troubled by the limits of post-war growth, Hollings later argued during his first Senate term that hunger and pockets of entrenched poverty were one of America’s central challenges. However, as the pattern of import competition and outsourcing intensified and reached Southern textile districts, Hollings increasingly focused on the foundations of long-term prosperity as such.

That neo-Hamiltonian turn was rather unusual for a Southerner, given the region’s historical support for free trade. While many of his colleagues, Republican and Democrat, grew amenable to globalized supply chains, Hollings sounded the alarm throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Today, some progressives might tag his broadsides against unfair competition from Japan, and later China, as a shade too close to MAGA. But Hollings, like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, understood the connection between powerful multinationals, disinvestment, and falling life chances. He grasped that a trade system impervious to democratic pressure would weaken and divide the country, and that without a strong manufacturing base and tough antitrust enforcement, liberalism itself would lose its moorings.

Vance Hartke (1919-2003)

One of the unsung liberals of the 1960s, Hoosier Vance Hartke deserves greater recognition for his efforts in the Senate to pass Medicare, Medicaid, and other Great Society legislation. He was also one of the first of Lyndon Johnson’s lieutenants to break with the administration over the Vietnam War, going public with his opposition over the course of 1965 and 1966. But Hartke is probably best remembered for his repeated efforts in the early 1970s to dramatically revise the post-war trading system, establish heavily monitored import quotas, and reverse deindustrialization. That agenda, backed by textile unions and import-sensitive sectors, was roundly denounced by multinationals, business lobbies, and mainstream economists as a ruinous scheme to make America autarkic.

Much like Hollings, however, Hartke was rightfully concerned by government’s increasingly laissez-faire attitude toward industrial decline. More than Indiana’s troubled steel sector weighed on him. He was wary of the long-term ramifications of cross-border and multistage supply-chains, registering that plant closures due to outsourcing didn’t just mean lost jobs and municipal revenue but a loss of technical know-how as well. “Quality cameras, portable radios, electronic calculators and many other items are no longer produced in this country at all,” he wrote in a 1972 op-ed; the uprooting of entire industries, he added, only made “investment capital [harder] to come by” in hard-hit towns and cities.

In light of Trump’s heavy-handed (and extremely disorganized) protectionist gamble, it is worth imagining what the country might look like had Hartke not been wholly thwarted. Would it have rapidly stagnated behind a wall of protectionist controls, thereby hastening the decline of America’s hegemony and global leadership well before the rise of China? Or would have a less sweeping version of Hartke’s legislation, focused more on targeted industrial policies and vocational training, averted the regional inequality and nativist populism that have so palpably rent the country in the last 15 years?

Of course, these different scenarios become harder to picture with the passage of time. And the Democratic Party’s abject withdrawal from much of the Midwest, alongside the decline of union membership, makes it all the more difficult to think liberals in Hartke’s vein will ever mount a comeback. Still, Hartke could prove to be a guiding light for Democrats determined to rebuild their coalition. Whatever the less practical elements of his vision, he was attuned to the interconnected problems of globalized trade and prescient about the costs of lost manufacturing capacity. Progressives tempted to simply ridicule Trump’s tariffs should recall there is a laudable tradition of economic patriotism, traceable to principled leaders like Hartke, that is worth updating for the 21^st century.

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There are certainly other figures and political icons in the pantheon of midcentury reformers worth revisiting. Several accomplished more than these men. But what unites this seemingly random grouping is their resolve to take principled stands when it would have been easier to show fealty to their party’s leadership, hew to partisan talking points, or follow the prevailing winds of mainstream economics. Progressives determined to look past the defeats, missteps, and disappointments of the past decade should take note: Somewhere between Evans’s good government pluralism and Harris’s brash populism lies a formula to take on today’s ossified party system and vested interests.