CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Democratic Party, the DSA and the Last Hurrah

Photograph Source: Daniel Torok – Public Domain

Across New York, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, a familiar fight is playing out inside the Democratic Party. Centrist stalwarts and Democratic Socialists of America-aligned insurgents are squaring off in primary after primary, and the press keeps covering it as though it were a simple ideological dispute, left versus center, socialism versus liberalism. It is that, but it is also something else. It is generational. And anyone who has read Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 novel The Last Hurrah will recognize the shape of the story before it finishes unfolding.

The Last Hurrah is a fictionalized portrait of Frank Skeffington, longtime mayor of an unnamed New England city modeled unmistakably on Boston. Skeffington has been reelected again and again by doing what has always worked: attending the right funerals, delivering the right eulogies, handing out the right jobs, reciting the lines of Irish American machine politics that his constituents expect to hear. When he runs one more time, he assembles the same team, performs the same rituals, and pulls the same levers. He loses. He is stunned. He cannot explain it, until someone finally tells him the single word that accounts for everything: Roosevelt. Skeffington had built his career in the years before the New Deal, when voters depended on the ward boss for jobs, for the proverbial chicken in every pot, for the personal connections that made survival possible. The New Deal replaced the machine with the........

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