AHA Session 282
Sunday, January 11, 2026: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
Marquette Room (Hilton Chicago, Third Floor)
Chair:
Cory Haala, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point
Session Abstract
In recent years historians have devoted prodigious time and effort to defining the conservative ascendance and, more recently, the rise of neoliberalism in the Democratic Party during the 1970s, 80s and 90s. These studies have enriched our understanding of the remaking of the two major parties, and the expansion, transmogrification and mainstreaming of the radical Right. We have largely failed, however, to discuss the other end of the political spectrum: progressives and the left. Outside of an initial burst of research by black studies scholars, political scientists, and sociologists of rural activism, there is less on the many groups that sought to create a progressive resistance to Reaganism and its imitators.
This panel features the work of several historians seeking to remedy this oversight. The papers explore some of the myriad ways progressive activists navigated the increasingly hostile structural and cultural terrain of the 1980s and 1990s, challenged the notion that triangulation and neoliberalism were the only viable path to electoral victory, and struggled over the role of grassroots energy and marginalized groups in the Democratic Party. Through the visions and experiences of overlapping activist movements like Citizen Action, the New Party, the New Populist Forum, and presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson under the banner of the National Rainbow Coalition, this panel details progressive, populist alternatives to market-oriented neoliberalism while highlighting how those movements built bottom-up political support.
