Tail wags donkey
A history of the Democratic Party offers a lesson for its leaders today
Even more than those in most other democracies, America’s political parties must cater to a daunting range of people and priorities. With just two big ones competing for around 170m votes, rafts of unrelated policies are inevitably bound together. These days, for Republicans, touchstone issues include abortion and low taxes; for Democrats, gun control and squeezing the rich. In the latter case, the tensions that always arise in such eclectic coalitions are exacerbated by the history of the party—one of the world’s oldest. The trouble goes back to the beginning. Tracing their intellectual roots to Thomas Jefferson, Democrats now venerate Alexander Hamilton, his arch-rival.
In his fine new book, Michael Kazin, a left-leaning historian at Georgetown University, makes an ambitious attempt to hone a unified theory of the Democratic Party’s 194-year record. Its fortunes have followed a simple formula, he argues. Democrats have succeeded by appealing to the economic interests of a broad majority of the American people, developing and offering a philosophy that Mr Kazin calls “moral capitalism”. When they have neglected to do so, concentrating instead on cultural issues, they have failed. As he charts the party’s ideological twists and turns, the author stretches his concept of moral capitalism to take in disparate ideas—much as politicians themselves do with their slogans. Nevertheless, his account holds lessons for politics today.
Like his fellow Founding Fathers, Jefferson publicly rejected organised political factions. It was Martin Van Buren who built the early Democratic Party. Now known as a former president but often for little else, as a senator from New York he made pioneering use of the weapons of political combat that became central to American politics. When Andrew Jackson, a slave-owning war hero from Tennessee, won his second bid for the presidency against John Quincy Adams in 1828, his victory was powered by Van Buren’s party activists and partisan press.
Van Buren’s notion of the people and their economic interests would be largely unrecognisable to Democrats today. African-Americans, most of whom were still enslaved, were excluded. Jackson was lionised as an avatar of poor white people—and white farmers and workers, especially in the South, formed the Democratic base until the 1930s. But Van Buren’s own background—his father was a tavern-keeper of Dutch descent—points to the party’s wide appeal. Other supporters included Southern planters and recent European immigrants. In Mr Kazin’s summary, the party was for a century defined by a cynical mix of white supremacism and the promise of progress for communities such as Irish, Polish and German Americans.
An instinct for divining the economic preferences of this broad swathe of voters led to regular victories. Until the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, Democrats advocated minimal intervention in the economy, on the basis that a more activist government would be captured by the rich
and powerful. Sometimes, as Mr Kazin acknowledges, policies that yielded triumphs at the ballot box resulted in realworld disaster. Jackson’s crusade against a national bank led to financial instability. Grover Cleveland, another neglected figure, won a plurality of the popular vote three times, but his tight monetary policy exacerbated the economic crisis of 1893.
It was the economy, stupid
The New Deal marked a turning-point for the party—to a dramatically different policy platform and, eventually, an alternative base of support. The emergency of the Great Depression pushed Roosevelt to develop, in fits and starts, the beginnings of an American welfare state. In the process, Mr Kazin astutely argues, Democrats’ affiliation with organised labour led them to abandon their previous antipathy to monopolies: it was easier to negotiate collective-bargaining agreements with big employers than with small ones.
The result of this revamp was an electoral juggernaut. The Democrats championed the growing labour movement in the northern states while pursuing economic development in the South. They accommodated the segregationist laws that southern Democrats had passed while attracting African-American votes in the Midwest and north-east. From 1932, when Roosevelt first won the White House, until 1968, the Democrats lost presidential elections just twice, both times to Dwight Eisenhower, a cherished war hero.
In the last decades of the 20th century, the party’s dominance waned. Mr Kazin finds some explanations for that relative decline in poor tactical decisions; he mentions Jimmy Carter’s advocacy of initiatives that lacked public support, such as an amnesty for draft-dodgers, during his reelection campaign of 1980. Yet he evades some hard questions about how such defeats might have been avoided. Glaringly, he lambasts George McGovern for not emphasising his ambitious economic policies in the campaign of 1972, but concedes that “it is doubtful it would have made much of a difference to his electoral fate if he had.” If that is so, perhaps Mr Kazin’s economic formula for success is oversimplified.
More convincingly, he is critical of the party’s modern fixation on cultural and identity issues at the expense of an inclusive economic agenda. The eerie familiarity of some of its previous missteps will be alarming for Democrats willing to listen now. At the height of campus activism over Vietnam, Mr Kazin says, “more voters undoubtedly saw the left-wingers as threats to their traditional beliefs rather than as visionaries of personal freedom.” In electoral terms, it was a mistake to present the “Great Society” programmes introduced by Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, such as
Medicare and Medicaid, as help for minorities and the poor. Mr Kazin praises Barack Obama for downplaying cultural divisions—for instance, by initially taking an ambivalent stance on gay marriage—in favour of a relentless focus on the economy.
“What It Took to Win” ends in a gloomy mood, reflecting that of Democrats themselves, who hold power in Washington yet are divided and anticipate mid-term defeat. Whether moral capitalism, Mr Kazin’s flexible concept, has really shaped a record stretching from Jackson to Mr Obama is doubtful. But this well-researched, accessible book offers an important warning. The Democrats have flourished when they embraced the pragmatic pursuit of power—and floundered when they didn’t.