It’s not as if the Democratic Party was ever “the party of the people” – at least not in the mystical sense depicted by both party loyalists and some on the left who are nostalgic for the liberal tradition established by Franklin Roosevelt and carried forward by Lyndon Johnson.
But the party was, at one point, quite responsive to democratic pressure from below – and systemic change has always been prompted by movements, not party leaders.
The New Deal was possible not because Roosevelt was a benevolent warrior of the working class, but because, as the historian Robert Brenner has put it, “starting in Detroit auto plants in spring 1933, you got a series of ever larger and more encompassing strikes, mobilizing ever broader groups of workers on the shop floor and the streets – organized and unorganized, employed and unemployed, in an ascending wave.”
“Programmatic demands and ideas that seemed pie in the sky were now, with the increase in workers’ power, plausible and actionable,” Brenner concludes.
In the decades following Roosevelt’s time in office, however, the reforms that imperfectly but substantially enhanced worker power and protected laborers from the ravages of capitalism were gradually and systematically rolled back. Commentators frequently begin the story of the New Deal’s demise in the 1970s with the Powell memo, a “call-to-arms for corporations” that urged business leaders to push back against a perceived “assault on the enterprise system” by “Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries.”
In reality, though, resistance against the reforms of the New Deal began as soon as they were implemented, as Kim Phillips-Fein documented in her study Invisible Hands. And, as Phillips-Fein emphasized, pro-business reactionaries led the fight. From the beginning, they viewed the struggle to peel back progressive gains as one that would take place over a long stretch of time – and one that would require tireless coalition-building, message-making, and influence-peddling.
Surveying the political and economic landscape today, a scene beset by incredible corporate power and soaring income inequality, it is impossible to deny that their efforts, which continue to this day, have been a staggering success. And the Democratic Party, it must not be forgotten, played a key role in institutionalizing these successes.
Because Democrats, too, were susceptible to the pressures imposed an increasingly aggressive business class, and it was under Jimmy Carter, not under a Republican, that neoliberalism began to take hold.
“The austerity so often associated with the Reagan presidency actually began with Carter, under whom spending on welfare, for example, contracted more rapidly than it ever would under Reagan,” notes the historian Paul Heideman. “Carter also moved to deregulate huge sections of American industry, including the airlines, trucking, and, perhaps most saliently today, banking.”
This rightward trend continued in the aftermath of the Reagan-Bush years; Bill Clinton, in fact, quite explicitly ran on a platform of continuing the right turn that characterized the Carter presidency. Clinton ambitiously declared that “the era of big government” – by which he clearly meant the New Deal and the Great Society – “is over.” He went on to destroy welfare, as promised, and to continue the deregulation of industry that began under Carter. He also signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, which rapidly accelerated job loss.
This history cannot simply be wished away – and it cannot be ignored when discussing the present.
Over a period of decades, the composition of the Democratic Party, as scholars and commentators have emphasized, rapidly transformed. It can now rightly be considered an “unruly coalition,” one that brings together high-income, white-collar professionals and low-income workers, many of them minorities.
Unsurprisingly, given its wealth and political clout, it is the former faction that exerts the most influence.
Yes, the Democratic Party Did Abandon the Working Class