Identifying Democrats with "liberals" (as we say*) has always been wide of the mark -- much less with the proverbial "left," which many have opined simply does not exist in this country. (I disagree, by the way, if only on the premise that the term is relative, like "east" or "west.") Certain Democrats at notable times and places of course work harder than others to prove my point.
The point has been proven time and time again, however. After WW2, most people have probably forgotten, the US experienced a housing crisis, a severe one. Returning GIs + Baby Boom + years of an entire economy focused on the war to block the fascists from taking us over and instead dominate the world ourselves = just not enough places to live. During the conflagration the feds built housing for workers near war industries, not so they'd get blown up with the factories in the event of any attack, but just to get them in there making bombs. There was massive migration of black workers, for example, from the sharecropping South, attracted by industrial work abandoned by white soldiers. More on that story in a minute.
The Republicans, having begun their rightward shift not with the Tea Party or with Reagan or Nixon but with Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party exodus, had supported federal wartime housing construction only with the proviso that when the bombs stopped dropping the hated government intervention into housing markets would all be smashed up into jiblets or sold off to privateers (because the rich didn't get rich enough off the war effort itself) and the working poor would be parachuted back into the uphill slog to get housing over the array of bankers, developers, and other troll-bridge-occupiers weeding out the weak (social Darwinism of course being embraced by the same folks who deny the real, biological kind). But with the post-war housing famine, the US population needed more hated government intervention into housing markets, not less. So the Democratic Party appeared on the horizon once more in gleaming armor astride a white charger, the rising sun at their backs, and saved the day, right? Well...
Remember that wartime housing and the African Americans housees? We were all in it together to defeat fascism and make the world safe for democracy -- as long as white folks didn't have to live next to Negroes. It started (in earnest) with the New Deal, actually, and it's worse than you think. To mitigate poverty and keep the system alive, the feds built housing that increased or in some cases introduced segregation into some areas. They made all kinds of excremental excuses, and they did it with wartime housing, too. You won't be surprised that this evil continued after the war in the 1950s.
You may be surprised at the politik.
As labor historians know well, New Deal reforms like the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Wagner Act, and so on, passed the US Congress only by a terrible Faustian deal. They excluded agricultural and domestic labor to win the votes of racist Southern Dems, who were prepared to oppose anything that would help Southern blacks get out from under the white thumb, even if it also threw a much-needed lifeline to desperately poor (sometimes literally starving) Southern whites.
Federal housing projects became one more (lesser known) example of Democratic Big-Tent-ism (or I would have it in my title, diversity, but not the good kind), i.e., the so-called party was for many years and to now in different specifics, in reality a coalition -- of liberal, or more or less Keynesian, Northern industrialists and Southern white planters (and their respective acolytes). Check out Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law. This history is iconoclastic.
Federal housing construction, like all the public assistance programs known as welfare and (at one time) food stamps, helped far more whites than blacks. But Southern Dems would rather let their constituents (who in their minds did not include blacks, whom they'd rather prevent from voting than offer programs to win their votes) stew in their own juices than give in to the liberal emancipation scheme they had gutted like a fish ever since they got their power back. So FDR went down to the crossroads and made his deal. But the GOP, not to be out-cynicalled had a trick up their sleeve(s): they proposed desegregation language to poison the housing well! No joke, they knew it would put the Dems in a tight spot, and it did. FDR had to make a huge manure sandwich statement "hoping" that "our Negro friends understand" and killed desegregation to get the housing built -- segregated housing.
Some projects smashed up existing "Negro" or "mixed" housing to make way for the segregated government housing. Some introduced segregation into areas that had not been segregated before. And so on.
It's a pug ugly story (read the book), but the history lesson is not just or even mainly about the house divided that is still the Democratic Party, or even about the legacy of the left-right Democratic coalition we still suffer from today.
The real profundity here lies in this context: African Americans built large parts of the country with their forced, free labor, making many white people rich, North, South, East and West, and building up a social fabric that benefited millions of others, and upon which families were able to begin accumulating some small wealth, which they could not share. A war (three wars, I say) resulted before slavery ended and they were promised some meager compensation, which never came. They were forced back into servitude and serfdom, blocked from voting after Reconstruction by Jim Crow, barred from good jobs with decent pay and benefits, basically until the deadliest war the world had ever known created a tiny opening. Unions helped them keep what foothold they were able to maintain afterwards. But they were legally unable to get federal housing loans or assistance to move into the housing that others claimed in the victory buffet (meager though it was compared to what the rich got), relegated to segregated substandard housing meant to warehouse them until they were needed again, while others left the public housing projects with the aid of government assistance. Many white families were able to start accumulating something they could pass on to future generations, give them a little boost, get them started maybe not at the top of the ladder, but at least on the second or third rung. Black families were held at the bottom by public policy. Now they are asked why it is that they have been "free so long" from the bonds of slavery "like everybody else" but they still can't make it.
Black families did not fail to get ahead; they were prevented. They did not fall but were pushed.
*I'm using the term here as most people understand it, disregarding its historical uses, just as I would use the word "deer" to mean only those big ungulates, some of which can be measured in points, which tend to stand in front of oncoming motorized vehicles, and notwhat Shakespeare would have meant (pretty much any woodland mammal, as in "rabbits and other deer.")
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