ABSTRACT
The current perception of the fragility rather than durability of liberal democracy is the inverse of the experience in the 1960s when Democrats governed the newly affluent society and legally included everyone in the economy regardless of race, national origin and sex and protected their right to vote as well. Many reformers today advocate a new New Deal, but this chapter proposes that liberal Democrats (as well as the opponents of the New Deal) contributed to the collapse of their democracy project. Scholars give three explanations for the breakup of the New Deal: the capitalist economy imposes limits on equity, inherent limits to the pluralist administrative model and the evolutionary logic of the political sociology of race doomed the party coalition. In contrast, this chapter argues that liberal Democrats mismanaged their reform project from failures to cultivate their commitment to worker participation in the context of these three challenges. The chapter presents three micro-case studies of the intersection of work and macroeconomic policy, national market integration and regulating race relations in manufacturing and construction. In each case, government officials established new rules to regulate employment that sidelined unions at work and politics in favor of the corporate reorganization of work.
