Party of None: How Democrats Lost the Working Class - Part Two

The Well Funded Road to Hell

This is the second of a multipart series on the incomplete history of the Democratic Party. You can read the first installment here.

Listen to an audio version of this article here:

The unexpected election of Donald Trump in 2016 sent a shockwave through the liberal populace and created a chance for Democrats to rebrand themselves as the resistance against the rising threat of fascism. This was a boon to a party that was allergic to a Bernie-style politics that could revitalize it, but still needed to present voters with some sort of value proposition. A coalition assembled comprised of liberal voters, “never Trump republicans”, online influencers, and media figures who vowed to #Resist Trumpism. This alliance revolved around the idea that the man was an aberration and removing him would restore this country to its former greatness. (You can read a full dissection on this era in an earlier piece I wrote here.)

While the Democratic Party was in the minority when Trump was elected, 2018 saw a “blue wave” in which Dems regained control of the House. In this wave, AOC came onto the national scene by unseating a powerful establishment Democrat. She and three others were elected as part of a movement to replace corporate Democrats with progressives, their bloc later dubbed “The Squad”. With the Democratic establishment feeling pressure to shift leftward, the House passed a variety of economically populist bills, including ones that would raise the minimum wage, ensure equal pay, tackle corruption, and lower prescription drug costs. Hundreds of bills passed the House with ease, with Democrats confident these were merely “messaging bills” destined for the graveyard of the Republican-controlled Senate. In stark contrast to what was actually signed into law when Dems later gained a trifecta, the Democrat-controlled House passed close to 400 bills from 2018 to 2019. While various social democrats and progressives attempted to primary their way to a better Congress, that project only succeeded in a few places. Control of the party remained in the hands of the corporate-funded DLC-era politicians who had taken it over decades ago.

Though Democrats played their role well, there was no true ideological shift to be found. One only needed to look at how House leadership reacted to the election of “The Squad”. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was openly hostile to this threat to her left and worked to make sure those voices were as marginalized as possible within the caucus, despite the fact that the policies these new legislators ran on were popular with young people and could’ve revitalized the party’s reputation.

I won’t bore you with a laundry list of the details of the Trump era, but it’s important to bear in mind that while Trump is undoubtedly unique in many ways, his first administration was filled with many of the same neoconservative establishment figures from previous Republican presidencies and the core of his agenda was not dissimilar to what the Heritage Foundation has been working towards since the 1980s. The Democrats may play at resistance, but when they retook power they left a lot of what Trump did in place, including large tax cuts for the wealthy.

The overlap between the GOP agenda and that of the Democrats is vast. Both center around privatizing public services and enriching the donor class. The biggest divide between the two parties is on social issues, which is why Dems and Republicans alike emphasize the culture war over anything economic. Trump was a gift to the Democratic Party, as they were able to use what felt like an existential threat as a cudgel against their base who was primed to ask for more. Instead of building a platform around the social welfare, Dems could rally their party around a nebulous “resistance to fascism”. The Democratic Party lucked into a situation where they could use messaging bills and empty symbolism to pretend to oppose Trump, while not upsetting the true donor-controlled order.

The irony is, of course, that liberalism is what paves the way for fascism. There could be no Trump without a useless liberal party that consistently fails to meet the people’s needs. The Democratic Party fails because their existence contains an immutable contradiction: they claim to work for the people, and are expected to, but no one can serve two masters. They are first and foremost a party of capital, and the interests of capital are diametrically opposed to the interests of their base.

The Kingmaker

The 2020 Democratic primary evidenced that the party would never shift away from their donors and towards the people. A total of 20 different Democrats were vying for the nomination to run against Trump, but by the time of the first primary, only 5 remained in serious contention: Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. Three of these candidates were running as moderates while Sanders and Warren took the progressive lane. After the first three primaries went to Bernie - including Nevada where he swept the field - the establishment was getting nervous. The widespread hunger by voters for a message of economic populism was undeniable.

Ahead of the South Carolina primary, James Clyburn endorsed Joe Biden. The media dubbed Clyburn the kingmaker and told their viewers that South Carolina would be determinative. Despite Biden’s poor showing in all three previous states, he wasn’t Bernie Sanders and the establishment needed an anti-Sanders to consolidate around. After Biden won South Carolina by 40%, the media narrative was that black voters in in the first-in-the-south primary state were representative of the base more broadly, and that Biden was the only person who could credibly beat Trump. Ahead of Super Tuesday, Barack Obama put his finger on the scale. He contacted Klobuchar and Buttigieg and convinced them to drop out and endorse Biden, clearing the field of every centrist but one. That was all the media needed to deliver the eulogy for Sanders campaign and push Biden as inevitable.

Despite the many warnings that Biden was not mentally fit to hold office, was not in touch with what a growing number of the Democratic base wanted, this backroom dealing worked. Sanders had a poor showing in many of the remaining primary states, and Biden won the nomination. In a bid to win over Bernie supporters in the general election, Biden established a task force with Sanders to try to marry some leftwing economic policy with Biden’s centrist agenda. It worked. Biden narrowly won the presidency, the House, and the Senate, due in part to this attempt to court the left, a pandemic lockdown that allowed Biden campaign from home (shielding the public from his mental decline), and a populace that was furious with the way Trump handled COVID.

The backdrop to all of this was the Black Lives Matter protests that spanned months in 2020, where tens of millions marched to demand accountability in policing after the murder of George Floyd. Democrats made some symbolic gestures to that end, even kneeling in Kente cloth in a ridiculous photo op [pictured above], but did not ever meaningfully address police reform. Biden himself even pushed back against the calls to defund the police in his first State of the Union, saying “No! Fund the police! We will fund the police”, resolved to give even more money to lawless police departments who regularly kill citizens without consequence. The party known for meaningless symbolism paired with acts that contradict their voters wishes, strikes again.

While Biden has been in politics since the 70s and has always been relatively right wing - he was a registered Republican before running as a Democrat in his first race - the agenda he promised in the beginning of his presidency would’ve been transformative for a nation who had been in the throes of neoliberalism for decades and never really had a good social safety net to begin with. Biden and Democrats told voters in the January special elections that if you gave them a Senate majority they would raise the minimum wage, pass the PRO act, cancel student debt, give you a public healthcare option, make public college free — not to mention write you a $2000 check. Not since the Great Society would there be such a massive investment in the public interest. Of course, this never came to pass.

Biden spent the first year of his term extolling the need for bipartisanship and giving Republicans a seat at the table as he crafted Build Back Better - the touchstone for his economic agenda - which would’ve provided a slew of social programs that the country needed and never had. While Republicans proved themselves to be what they’ve always been - fierce opposition - resistance to the bill from within his own party rose as well. Biden split the BBB into two bills; one for the people and one for the donors. The Congressional Progressive Caucus tried to keep the two bills together, worried that conservative Democrats in the Senate may try to weasel out of supporting the progressive bill. Biden personally intervened to convince the CPC to vote for them separately, giving them his word that both would pass. What Biden didn’t do was place the same kind of pressure on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who spent a year dragging out negotiations on Biden’s landmark legislation, and then refused to vote for it anyway. The bill died in the Senate.

The rest of the Democratic agenda was subject to the 60-vote filibuster threshold, blocking desperately needed legislation on abortion rights, voting rights, and more. While Manchin and Sinema became the faces of the opposition to filibuster reform, reporting revealed that there were many other Democrats who were also against changing the rule, but content to hide behind the party’s designated villains. Despite the urgency of protecting the right to vote and the right to bodily autonomy, Biden remained stalwart in his dedication to the institutional rules of the Senate and refused to vocally support filibuster abolition.

The Perfect Foil

If you talk to any hardcore liberal partisan, you will hear them repeat the same set of excuses that you hear from Democrat leadership as to why none of the good and popular things their base demanded over the last 50 years ever came to pass. It was Lieberman, it was McConnell, it was Manchin and Sinema, it was the filibuster, it was the Parliamentarian, it was the Supreme Court. There is seemingly no end to the obstacles standing in the way of Democrats passing a popular agenda when they have power. There always happens to be one or two obstinate Senators, an arcane parliamentary rule, or an all-powerful opposition party in between them and what they say they’d like to do. After decades of being foiled time and time again, one might start to wonder if they are really being obstructed or if they are instead crafting niche process arguments to get out of delivering for their base. Despite the looming rise of neofascism, a threat that Democrats have repeatedly referenced in order to raise cash and win elections, the urgency on the part of Democrats just is not there.

After a failed coup attempt on January 6th, Democrats prioritized “getting home for Valentine’s Day” to seizing the Republican disgust at President Trump and the narrow window where they might vote to convict — which would be the only way to bar him from becoming President again. Instead of living up to their commitment to restoring abortion access and voting rights, Democrats preferred to maintain their loyalty to a procedural Senate rule that requires an impossible number of votes to pass legislation. Instead of raising the minimum wage to a living wage and lifting a large percentage of people out of poverty, Democrats deferred to the opinion of an unelected bureaucrat that they could fire at any time.

All of this, when taken together, displays a stunning lack of interest in the welfare of the people Democrats are elected to represent. Blind loyalty to institutions and norms over the needs of their voters isn’t just a personality defect, but a feature of their class interests and insight into what the Democratic Party really is. Democrats are masters at constructing elaborate kayfabe that obscures the true reasons that they cannot and will not deliver for the working class. A party that truly wanted to deliver for the people would never let some silly Senate rule, a bipartisanship fetish, or a single bureaucrat stand in their way. They would move with the same conviction and clarity of purpose that the Republicans do even when they are in the minority. The Democratic Party is better understood not as a serious political party, but as a jobs program for the elite and a gateway into massive wealth accumulation — that also happens to be in possession of a very large email list.

Hi [voter] This is Nancy Pelosi. I Will KILL MYSELF IN FRONT OF YOU Unless You Send $15 Today

The hostile corporate and professional class takeover of the party that started in the 1970s went into warp speed after Citizens United. The unlimited corporate spending that this ruling countenanced allowed Democrats to never need to appeal to small dollar donors again, and to instead rely on the largesse of corporations and billionaires to fund their campaigns. This process is twofold: not only does this spending give business outsized influence over the policies that get passed through Congress, it also allows large special interest groups to blanket primaries in corporate cash to keep leftwing candidates out, ensuring that only those who work for their interests hold seats.

Despite this, Democrats are in possession of a massive contact list of voters that they are able to farm out to various shady marketing firms to raise money from their base; very little of which actually seems to go towards the process of winning elections. Using questionable-at-best marketing tactics to wring as much money from voters as possible, these firms have nevertheless followed a playbook the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) employed even earlier.

If you have ever donated so much as a dollar through ActBlue in the last decade you are probably quite familiar with the fact that this donation is treated as a blood oath that permanently marks you for endless Democrat spamming. Mothership Strategies, a firm founded by veterans of the DCCC, is one of the worst offenders and even brags about having “mastered the ALL CAPS SUBJECT LINE”. Little more than half of the of the tens of millions raised by these companies actually makes its way to the party, and of that money, much of it is wasted paying the exorbitant salaries of consultants, media advisors, and “digital strategists”, many of whom were previously Democratic Party operatives. Win or lose, everyone still gets paid. This was never so apparent as in 2024, when the Kamala Harris campaign raised over a billion dollars and was found to have squandered a lot of it on nonsense like a six-figure set for a podcast, giant ads on the Las Vegas sphere, and a million dollars to Oprah Winfrey’s production company.

Worse, recent reports have shown that the shady and deceptive text messages and emails sent by Democrat-aligned firms like Mothership Strategies have scammed elderly seniors and dementia patients out of anywhere from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of their savings. Many of these firms intentionally target the elderly by sending them emails that make them fear their Social Security benefits are under attack, and the only way to save it is to DONATE TODAY!!! With the option for recurring donations automatically turned on, they unwittingly consent to regular bank drafts. Hundreds of seniors have even given over their entire life savings to these firms, rendering them penniless. Meanwhile, the top three founders of Mothership were all able to buy themselves million dollar homes with the salaries they earned from this graft. While Mothership has now been shunned by the party, they still operate through Democrat aligned PACs using many of the same sketchy tactics, and the Democrat donation spamming through various other firms has not stopped.

Oh Come, Oh Come Emanuel

The Democratic Party operates like an elite club whose members move through the revolving door of the private and public sector. Congress is often a launching pad for one’s ambitions in lobbying, defense, or private equity. The platonic ideal of this unholy marriage can be found in one Rahm Emanuel. Political mercenary, disgraced mayor, investment banker, architect of the status quo, and fave of the Democrat establishment, Rahm’s career in politics epitomizes the deep rot within the Democratic Party.

Emanuel came into the party in the late 1980s, when the ideological transformation into Third Way neoliberalism was nearly complete. First as a national campaign director for the DCCC in 1988, Emanuel’s big break was when he became a top fundraiser for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. After Clinton won, Emanuel was appointed as an close advisor, where he spearheaded the passage of NAFTA “over the dead bodies” of labor and environmental groups. In 1998, Rahm managed to parlay the close relationships he formed with K-Street while in the Oval to a cushy investment banking gig where he reportedly earned over $16 million dollars in just two years. Clinton then named Emanuel to the Board of Directors of Freddie Mac where he made $320,000 for a 14-month stint that was plagued with accounting scandals that intentionally mislead shareholders about their holdings in risky securities.

Emanuel revolved out of the private sector and back into a House seat in Illinois in 2002 where he massively outspent his competition through the same K-Street backers he had worked closely with for the last decade. In 2006, Rahm was appointed as the head of the DCCC where he used heavy-handed tactics to meddle in local races and root out grassroots candidates in favor of corporate-backed ones. This remains the preferred strategy of the DCCC even today, which in practice is merely a protection racket for corrupt Democratic congressmen. Of the Emanuel-lead DCCC, one local Dem Party activist said it “drips with centralized arrogance and is as autocratic as any ensemble of Republicans.”

In 2008, Emanuel was appointed as chief-of-staff in Obama’s White House, which should’ve been the first warning sign that perhaps Obama would not be as progressive a leader as he appeared. If Rahm Emanuel was anything, he was an antagonist to the working class. He was, in fact, so hostile to organized labor, that he said “Fuck the UAW!” on record during the 2010 auto bailout .

Not only conservative on domestic policy, Emanuel is a fiercely pro-Israel foreign policy hawk, more-so than even most Democrats in Congress. His father was a former member of Zionist terror group Irgun Zvai Leumi, and he himself was previously a civilian volunteer in the IDF who has vocally supported Israel’s assassination policies.

Emanuel became mayor of Chicago in 2011, and was dubbed “Mayor 1%” for his penchant to sell off and privatize key public resources in the city. He oversaw the shut down of mental health clinics and public schools, abandoned plans to improve public transit, and gave huge tax breaks to corporations. He laid off public sector workers en masse and sat on millions in city funds earmarked for building more housing while waitlists for affordable housing exploded. He also diverted revenue from massive property tax increases to wealthy neighborhoods while poor ones languished.

During Rahm’s tenure as mayor, the Chicago Police Department was scandal-ridden and broke records for shooting deaths, but no sin was quite as egregious as the way he handled the case of Laquan McDonald. Laquan, a black Chicago teenager, was murdered in 2014 by a white police officer who shot him 16 times. After the fatal shooting, Emanuel spent 13 months trying to prevent the release of bodycam footage, only relenting when a judge forced his hand. He was accused of burying the tapes in fear that it would affect his bid for re-election. Meanwhile, the city council paid the McDonald family $5 million dollars in an attempt to buy their silence. The officer, Jason Van Dyke, was charged with first-degree murder, with the video that Emanuel attempted to suppress serving as key evidence.

Despite his attempt to cover up this murder, Rahm remained in the good graces of the Democratic establishment. In August of 2021, Biden named Emanuel ambassador to Japan, citing his ‘distinguished career in public service’. The story of Rahm Emanuel is a microcosm of the story of the Democratic Party. Once you’re in, you’re in, and no amount of corruption, failure, abuse, or even criminal negligence will cast you out. If you’re a part of the club, the Democratic Party will ensure that you can fail upward forever.

Oops! We Did It Again

Democrats lost the House in 2022, closing the door to even the potential for modest changes to our nation for the better. The next two years were defined in large part by a live-streamed genocide of Palestinians that the Biden administration fully funded and supported. Inflation was spinning of control, but the consultants insisted that Democrats dismiss these concerns as “vibes” and tell voters they were doing great, actually. During this time, Biden’s mental decline worsened. Undeterred, the Democratic establishment conspired hide this decline, eschew primaries, and run him for a second term. When the debate against Trump made the severity of Biden’s cognitive issues undeniable, Biden’s Vice President, Kamala Harris, was put in to replace him. Harris ran a truly right wing, consultant-driven, billionaire-funded, triangulating campaign that lost to Trump and delivered us to our present moment. She courted moderate Republicans, touted border hawkery, campaigned with Liz Cheney, promised to deliver the world’s “most lethal military”, and remained resolute in support of Israel’s genocide. The Harris campaign exemplified everything that is wrong with the modern Democratic Party — the ultimate manifestation of 50 years of corporate-backed strategizing, moral compromise, elitism, legal bribery, revolving doors, and general self-dealing that has strangled any hope for reform through the ballot in its cradle and revealed the ugly face of a failing, desperate empire clinging to its last breath.

***This is the second of a multipart series on what happened to the Democratic Party. Subscribe to get the next installment in your inbox***

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