The Importance of Race in the Democratic Party

The war. Tamped down class conflict at every level, but by that time you've got Truman and the hacks back in complete control. The inability of the popular front part of the Democratic coalition to insist on that and to keep him on showed that they had over the course of the war lost their advantage. So it wasn't just Truman. Like having lost the terrain of geopolitics, like, you know, whether we were going to ally with the Soviets after the war,. That had been lost. But like the domestic question of civil rights, that could be won. And so that is where the liberal part of the Democrats turned their attention.