The Democratic Party has hit a nadir — perhaps its lowest nadir of my Millennial lifetime. As if Donald Trump’s crushing re-election last year weren’t enough, now comes a new book, Original Sin, by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, on the coverup of Joe Biden’s mental incapacity by a coterie of the 46th president’s family members and senior staffers. News of Biden’s prostate-cancer diagnosis merely serves as a grim punctuation mark on a failed administration — failed on its own terms: because it yielded a second Trump term. And while Trump’s polling is beginning to decline, Democrats are in an even worse place.
Yet here I am — still a loyal Democrat. Why is that?
I don’t love modern progressivism. I reject its yearning to reform not just institutions, but people’s souls. Indeed, Marc Dunkelman’s recent book Why Nothing Works has all but convinced me that modern progressivism has turned into a cannibalistic movement chewing to death any attempts at meaningful reform. And with every breath that brings me closer to age 40, I become more and more skeptical of the notion that public policy can right the crooked timber of humankind or alter the fundamentals of human nature.
Given all that, could it be that my loyalty to Democrats has to do with mere tribal identity? I hail from deep-blue New York, which codes entirely Democratic on cultural issues. To a great extent, my Democratic sensibilities can’t help but be shaped by the fact that everybody I knew growing up was Democrat. But tribal identity and teenage gut feelings aren’t solid guides to thoughtful, grownup political participation.
Luckily, there is a better answer, and it has to do with the historical role of the Democrats in America’s modern party system: the fact that in the 20th century, the party has stood for mature governance, warts and all, while the other, the GOP, has been and remains a party too often averse to government as such. When we support political parties, we choose people to govern us. It’s one thing to reject the progressive dream. It’s another to insist upon good governance.
The Democratic Party was founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren as a vehicle for disaffected farmers and workers. If these groups’ interests didn’t always align, they shared a hostility to the Northeastern establishment ,embodied in the Second Bank of the United States, against which Jackson waged war as fiercely as he carried out Indian Removal. As the young republic developed, and sectional tensions over slavery intensified, Democrats found themselves divided in a way that simply wasn’t true of the Republicans, a party explicitly founded in favor of “free labor” and in opposition to the South’s Peculiar Institution.
It wasn’t until the 1890s, then, that the modern party system in America really took shape. At that point, the US basically was a single-party state. Having supported secession, pro-slavery Democrats had discredited themselves, and the party as a whole, gifting Republicans with a 30-year run of near-total electoral dominance. The reconstituted Democrats emerged first out of a kind of a yearning for a splinter movement. Attempting to be cutting, a Republican surrogate in 1884 accused the Dems of being the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” but there were enough Catholics and rum drinkers around that the label stuck and became a rallying cry. The Democrats became once more, as in their Jacksonian roots, the party of the underdog and particularly of the urban disenfranchised.
But that left the Democrats as merely a party of sentiment, not of ideas. The tossing-and-turning of the Grover Cleveland administration — a rare Democratic break in the GOP dominance of the Gilded Age — showed the need for a coherent political philosophy. Cleveland, a man of impeccable integrity, conceived of himself as a mountain of obstruction in the executive branch, scrupulously following the Constitution and vetoing everything that seemed out of bounds. And yet Cleveland was compelled, over the course of his presidency (especially in his second term), to abandon his entire political philosophy.
He sent the feds into Chicago to break a strike — with a number of strikers killed in the chaos. He laid groundwork for the annexation of Hawaii as much as he disliked territorial expansion. And he found himself turning the government into a kind of cash-for-gold program, stocking up gold reserves as much as possible and eventually turning to JP Morgan to bail out the Treasury. As Cleveland said of his reliance on the plutocrats, in a stinging rebuke of the populist wing of his party: “It never occurred to any of us to consult in this emergency farmers, doctors, lawyers, shoemakers, or even statesmen.… The prospect of what we needed might be somewhat improved by making application to those whose business and surroundings qualified them to intelligently respond.”
Every one of Cleveland’s decisions was almost certainly correct under the circumstances, but he left office as a pariah to his own party, at that time undergoing its Populist renovation. His GOP successor, William McKinley, planned to govern with traditional Republican values — above all, a protective tariff — but he, like Cleveland, found himself playing cards from a completely different part of the deck. He committed himself to massive territorial expansion, annexing Hawaii and eventually Puerto Rico, turning Cuba into a protectorate, and extending the US imperium as far as the Philippines. A president who had arrived in office anticipating enclosed continental borders was, by 1898, telling his staff, “it is evident that I must learn a great deal of geography in this [Spanish-American] war.” And protective tariffs — the cornerstone of McKinley’s governing vision — were all but forgotten as expansionism spurred free trade.
If the 1890s showed the incoherence of the governing philosophies of both parties, the 1900s helped to smooth them out. The United States came to terms with its expansionary role in the world — abandoning George Washington’s counsel against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address — recognizing it as a necessary adaptation to the era of high-seas navies, in which overseas territory not picked up by America would tend to fall to a rival. The new power of the executive branch was accepted in an era of heightened international exposure — and charismatically embodied in the almost universally popular Theodore Roosevelt. And the government could conceive of a new domestic role for itself: enforcing nascent antitrust legislation and curbing the monopolistic control of the trusts.
Having entertained William Jennings Bryan’s idiotic silver-standard movement, the Democrats straightened themselves through the Progressive Era, so that, as Dunkelman writes, the 1912 election would come down to “which version of Progressivism … would define the movement going forward.” Government was understood as what John Kenneth Galbraith would call a “countervailing power” checking big business, and an income tax was instituted to overcome the deeply unreliable revenue system of relying on tariffs (which, as often as not, had meant turning to Wall Street whenever there was a crisis).
“That left the Democrats as merely a party of sentiment, not of ideas.”
This, then, is the heart of what the Democratic Party means to me: a robust conception of government, in which government, without ever sacrificing popular legitimacy, carries out executive functions, above all in exercising countervailing power to curb monopolistic practices and in running a coherent, far-sighted foreign policy.
Neither one of these is exactly enshrined in the Constitution, but what everybody in power in the early 20th century discovered was that the Constitution couldn’t solve all problems — that it was necessary to develop a more robust government to deal with new crises: global power politics, predatory business practices, and then the Jim Crow regime that protected itself in appeals to local government and separation of powers.
Republicans would gradually forget all this. In the Twenties, the Republican Party rebranded itself — very far away from the party of Theodore Roosevelt — as isolationist, strictly laissez-faire in business, but with stultifyingly high tariffs and immigration barriers. That turned out to be exactly the wrong approach to an era of interconnected global crises, whether economic or political, and the result was not only a well-deserved 20-year loss of power for the Republicans starting in 1932, but the dominance of New Deal Democrats through the Sixties.
The making of the midcentury Democrats involved a transformation arguably more dramatic than Trump’s remaking of the Reagan GOP. Going back to its Jacksonian roots, the Democrats were beholden to a Jeffersonian vision of independent yeomen which saw the Hamiltonian state as, at best, an evil to be minimized and tolerated — barely. There was virtue to this vision, but it failed to answer the problems of the industrial age, when American craftsmen and yeomen became wage-earning employees, who owned neither their own tools nor land, and who were lorded over by enormous oligopolies controlling their respective markets. Prices were no longer a pristine index of supply and demand or marginal productivity, as in the pre-industrial world — but an expression of sheer market power.
Against this backdrop, the Democratic Party managed to refound itself. It adopted a Hamiltonian vision that accepted the rational need for larger institutions. As Dunkelman writes, “these [Hamiltonian progressives] came to believe that the [Jeffersonian] vilification of ‘bigness’ was fundamentally off base. In their view, the salve wouldn’t be in eroding concentrations of power, but in establishing new nodes of public power to hold vast concentrations in check.” In other words, to protect the ideal of republican independence and dignity, it was necessary to wield the apparatus of the federal government: “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends,” in the famous formula of the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
And it was that basic conception that drove the recovery from the Depression, the successful execution of World War II, and the phenomenal achievements of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years.
The tragedy of the 20th century is that at some point, the Democrats gave up on that political conception. In the Sixties, a progressivism emerged that was essentially nihilist, that believed in tearing-down all concentrated power, that mistrusted the very soul of America. I’m speaking, of course, of the decline of New Deal Democrats and the rise of the McGovernites and their ilk: the cohort that LBJ, the last New Deal Democrat, derided as “Harvard kids.”
In a way, the acme of this shift was the progressive historian Robert Caro’s ferocious attacks against the legacy of New York’s legendary urban planner, Robert Moses. In his 1974 book, The Power Broker, Caro painted Moses as a liberal autocrat who tore through Gotham’s organic fabric in pursuit of large, rationalized infrastructure. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, representing a similar tendency as Caro, mounted a parallel attack. The enduring result was to delegitimize the Hamiltonian impulse in Democratic government. As Dunkelman puts it, the party’s “previous inclination to build power up had been replaced by an almost insatiable impulse to tear things down.”
The result was paralysis and red tape everywhere. The Republican Party, having made its own peace with good government under Eisenhower and Nixon, had turned cannibalistic and libertarian by the end of the Seventies, demolishing everything in the American state that wasn’t the military. For their part, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party produced nothing but snarl. Anybody critical of Robert Moses’s excesses might pause to consider the 40 years it took, after Moses’s death, to build a meager extension to the Second Avenue Subway or the city’s utter inability to reconstruct Penn Station. Moses, by contrast, built up several enormous projects in far less time.
Which brings us to today’s Democratic Party. The party today still suffers from the damage wrought by its turn in the Sixties and Seventies. For example, the party’s 2020 assault on policing, now blessedly abandoned, was an echo of the same destructive tendencies that saw Democrats abandon New Deal models and New Deal patriotism in favor of McGovernite suspicion and Leftist excess.
Still, the Democratic Party retains enough muscle memory to be able — maybe, just maybe — to become once more the party of sound government. The movement for so-called abundance, spearheaded by the likes of Ezra Klein, promises to coordinate government and business in order to clear supply bottlenecks, lower prices, and promote the mass, middle-class prosperity that used to be the Democrats’ calling card. Some of this work is deregulatory and involves cutting the kinds of boutique environmental red tape that hinders development in the United States. Some of it, however, would involve — yes — proactive government where the market has failed: industrial policy, workforce training, and the like.
Compare this to the chaos wrought by DOGE Republicans, as they slash through not just things that need to be slashed — but also funding for the sorts of basic research in the health sciences that form the foundations of US prosperity. This policy can’t but have long-lasting, and destructive, ramifications: researchers and academics leaving the United States in the kind of “brain drain” associated with Third World countries; economic uncertainty prompting other nations to look for new trading partners.
Allies are caught in the lurch, not sure if they can rely on the United States to maintain its security commitments or even conduct a cogent foreign policy. The United States, whether it likes it or not, is an empire and a hegemon, and the nation owes it to the world to fulfill the imperial obligations it has accrued. That’s what both parties, actually, discovered in the crucial period when the modern party system developed, but the Republicans managed to forget all that and the Democrats almost have. But not quite as badly as the GOP.
So, yes, as much as Democrats drive me to distraction, I remain a Democrat. The party is flawed — deeply flawed — but the job of government, fundamentally, is to govern, and the Democrats are the only party of the two that still takes that task seriously.
