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ABSTRACT: In recent years, the United States has seen the entrenchment of an insurgent and overtly racist hard right, a retreat from fleeting but once seemingly sincere commitments to addressing the injus tices of police brutality and mass incarceration, and a growing backlash against voting rights, affirmative action, and other gains of the civil rights movement. How should we relate to history in a time like ours? Journalists Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Afropessimists Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton, have exhorted us to face the facts that the United States was founded by slaveholders who defined democracy in opposition to Black people, and that hoping to change that reality is at best naïve and at worst a distraction from the more urgent project of learning to live and thrive in a white supremacist nation. Meanwhile, many conservatives and progressives remind us that, from the founding, Black and white Americans have challenged the racial limits of democracy. For liberals, this means we should retain hope, as Martin Luther King Jr. declared, "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." For the right, that day has already come.

Review of Government Against Itself by Daniel DiSalvo. DiSalvo has a tendency to ignore obvious contradictions in his thesis, rely on scholars who share his ideological background while ignoring those who contradict him, and support his argument through theory and speculation more often than empirical data.

"The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which occurred fifty years ago this August 28, remains one of the most successful mobilizations ever created by the American Left. Organized by a coalition of trade unionists, civil rights activists, and feminists—most of them African American and nearly all of them socialists—the protest drew nearly a quarter-million people to the nation's capital. Composed primarily of factory workers, domestic servants, public employees, and farm workers, it was the largest demonstration—and, some argued, the largest gathering of union members—in the history of the United States."

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which occurred fifty years ago this August 28, remains one of the most successful mobilizations ever created by the American Left. Organized by a coalition of trade unionists, civil rights activists, and feminists -- most of them African American and nearly all of them socialists -- the protest drew nearly a quarter-million people to the nation's capital. Composed primarily of factory workers, domestic servants, public employees, and farm workers, it was the largest demonstration -- and, some argued, the largest gathering of union members -- in the history of the United States. That massive turnout set the stage not only for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which President John F. Kennedy had proposed two months before, but also for the addition to that law of a Fair Employment Practices clause, which prohibited employers, unions, and government officials from discriminating against workers on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or sex. And, by linking those egalitarian objectives to a broader agenda of ending poverty and reforming the economy, the protest also forged a political agenda that would inspire liberals and leftists ranging from President Lyndon Johnson to the Black Power movement. After watching organizer Bayard Rustin read the full list of demands, "while every television camera at the disposal of the networks was upon him," left-wing journalist Murray Kempton remarked, "No expression one-tenth so radical has ever been seen or heard by so many Americans." Yet, despite that success, the Left has largely relinquished its claim to the legacy of the March on Washington. Even before it occurred, Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X leveled the charge -- embraced by Black Power and New Left activists in the subsequent decade -- that the mobilization had been "taken over by the government" and deprived of its once-radical agenda. Meanwhile, liberals and even conservatives were happy to claim the demonstration as their own -- often focusing narrowly on the relatively moderate and conciliatory message of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech while overlooking more confrontational statements by A. Philip Randolph, John Lewis, and others. By the 1980s, a broad consensus had emerged that attributed the success of the protest not to its radicalism but to its narrow focus on, as journalist Juan Williams wrote for the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, "moral imperatives that had garnered support from the nation's moderates -- issues such as the right to vote and the right to a decent education.". Adapted from the source document.

A decade before Abram Hewitt defeated Henry George's bid for mayor of New York in 1886, he delivered a more lasting blow to the American Left. A prominent northern congressman and chair of the Democratic National Committee, Hewitt played a central role in negotiating the notorious Compromise of 1877, which conceded victory in a contested presidential election to the Republican Party in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops that had occupied the former Confederacy since the Civil War. That arrangement freed Southern Democrats to use fraud, intimidation, and outright terrorism to deprive most African Americans and many poor whites of the right to vote; it also gave wealthy landowners and industrialists unchallenged hegemony in the South and tremendous influence in the nation as a whole. When leftists won elections in New York and other northern states, whether as Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, or Progressives, their influence was constrained severely by the disenfranchisement of working-class voters and the weakness of organized labor in the "Solid South." Not until a coalition of civil rights organizations, interracial unions, women's clubs, and left-wing groups set out to "re-align" the Democratic Party during the Second World War did the Left begin to transcend the legacy of 1877.

A prominent northern congressman and chair of the Democratic National Committee, Abram Hewitt played a central role in negotiating the notorious Compromise of 1877, which conceded victory in a contested presidential election to the Republican Party in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops that had occupied the former Confederacy since the Civil War. The arrangement freed Southern Democrats to use fraud, intimidation, and outright terrorism to deprive most African Americans and many poor whites of the right to vote; it also gave wealthy landowners and industrialists unchallenged hegemony in the South and tremendous influence in the nation as a whole. Adapted from the source document.