Party of None: How Democrats Lost The Working Class

Part One: A Brief History of the Democratic Party

This is the first of a multipart series that will give you a brief overview of the way the Democratic Party went from the party of FDR and the Great Society, to a party of corporate-owned out-of-touch elites who despise their base and fail at every turn. While this history is by no means comprehensive, it will hopefully provide some insight into what the hell happened and where to go from here.

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We are in a crisis. Right now, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their various lackeys are ripping through the administrative state with reckless abandon. They are ruling by decree, dismantling key agencies, locking government employees out of their work computers, and destroying records. Worse, they seem to have no opposition at all. Even some of the most partisan liberal voices are noticing that the Democrats have completely surrendered. They haven’t even sort-of pretended to put up a fight against this catastrophic onslaught by the Trump administration that is certain to destroy countless lives. They have rebuked their base for demanding action, made excuse after excuse, touted bipartisanship, voted to confirm Trump’s nominees, and refused to fight at every turn. The behavior of the Democratic Party can be baffling to witness. Why don’t they care? Why aren’t they acting like the opposition? Why are they throwing their hands up against a person they called a fascist only a few months ago? The answer can be found in an examination of the party’s history over the last 50 years.

How did the Democrats go from FDR and the New Deal, LBJ and the Great Society, to sneering upper-crust elites who are bribed by billionaires to betray the working class, self-justify inaction at every turn, and collaborate endlessly with the right? The Democrats evolved into what you see today through a series of very deliberate choices that have transformed it into an organization that functions as more of an elite protection racket and jobs program than anything resembling a serious political party. The story of the Democratic Party is one of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. This isn’t a problem of “messaging”, nor a problem of mere weakness. This is a problem of big money, of cronyism, of elitism and deference to the professional class, of rigid hierarchies and insulation from consequences. Most of all this is a problem of deep complicity. This story begins decades ago.

From The Great Society to the End of Big Government

From the 1930s to the 1990s Democrats enjoyed a large coalition of the blue-collar, unionized working class. Even West Virginia was a Democrat stronghold. If you were a worker, if you wanted strong unions, if you wanted redistributive fiscal policy, you voted Democrat. The erosion of this coalition started in the late sixties, after Hubert Humphrey lost the presidency to Richard Nixon. Following that loss, the McGovern Commission was formed to change the way the party nominating process worked. While some of these reforms were undoubtedly positive, they also dislodged the structural power that unions had within the party itself. In 1974, a new crop of Democrat politicians emerged called “Watergate Babies” who wanted to push the party towards the economic center. These leaders wanted to win back white suburban professionals they had lost during the Civil Rights era and they wanted to do it with pro-market policies that would leave their traditional base behind. This was deeply ideological. These politicians, later dubbed “Atari Democrats” for their focus on high-tech job growth, believed passionately that meritocracy — where a highly credentialed professional class of “knowledge workers” inherited the spoils — was the future of the party and the country itself. They were desperate to close the chapter of the New Deal era, and thought of that era as more of an aberration than a commitment they owed to the people who elected them.

On the judicial front, the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision by the Supreme Court had changed campaign finance for the worse. This ruling differentiated between campaign contributions and campaign spending by groups and candidates, and ruled that any limits on campaign spending were limits on political speech. This kicked off the era of unlimited corporate cash infusions under the guise of “party building”. While many cite Citizens United as the ruling that truly destroyed democracy, the roots of that destruction happened much earlier and the Democratic Party’s destiny as a party for big donors was sealed.

In 1985, a think tank called the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was formed, and consolidated this neoliberal turn. This group was hardly grassroots — much of its early funding came from Chevron, Merck, Du Pont, Microsoft, Philip Morris and Koch Industries. The DLC coined the term “New Democrats” and sought to remake the party into an explicitly anti-welfare-state, pro-market, pro entrepreneurship, pro-globalization, Third Way beast. And it worked.

Many of the Democrats still in Congress today got their start during this ideological revolution and have maintained that there is only one cure for any problem the party faces:

“The DLC had a single-factor theory of politics: that voters had grown disgusted with the cultural liberalism of the post-McGovern era. Why did Carter lose in 1980? Too damn liberal. Why did Mondale lose in 1984? Still too liberal. Why did Dukakis lose in 1988? Liberal again. The DLC also had but a single prescription for this malady: the Democratic Party could only win if it moved to “the center,” severing ties with its constituent groups and embracing certain free-market policies of the right.” -Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

With the election of Bill Clinton, one of the founders and former head of the aforementioned DLC, came a full embrace of Reaganite fiscal policy by the Democrats. While Clinton ran a relatively populist campaign that spoke to rising inequality in the recession-plagued early nineties, he was anything but their man. Clinton famously declared “the era of big government is over”, and with that, there was now no political party in the United States who believed that government could be a force for good. The Clinton Administration and Congress whittled down the welfare state, signed NAFTA, deregulated the financial sector with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, and repealed Glass–Steagall, all to disastrous consequence for the working class that would be felt for decades to come. NAFTA in particular alienated large sectors of workers that would run to the Republican party and eventually make up a decent portion of Trump’s base. Clinton left a legacy of companies offshoring millions of good paying jobs, banks becoming large conglomerates invested in risky securities that would set the stage for the 2008 financial crisis, and job growth in sectors that provided no benefits and would eventually turn into the “gig economy”. The next 8 years would be under Republican rule with the election of George W. Bush, but the Clinton Administration sealed the country’s fate as a nation with two economically conservative parties, and zero representation for the people.

A New Horizon

In 2007, a young, charismatic, talented Democrat politician came onto the national scene with a progressive message of “Hope and Change”. He was running for president as an outsider candidate against Hillary Clinton who represented the establishment politics that hadn’t done anything for workers in decades. He was a talented orator and a passionate advocate for health care reform. After two Bush terms and the post-9/11 recession and tax cuts for the wealthy that squeezed the working class, people were hopeful that this virtual unknown who was running on progressive values would shake up DC and make their lives better. Obama, unfortunately, had other things in mind.

Although the country awarded Obama’s historic campaign with supermajorities that have not been seen since, this golden opportunity was squandered on the meager, feckless incrementalism that the party is now widely known for. In reality, Obama was always a tool of Wall Street. He notoriously made a show of leaving the campaign trail in ‘08 to cast a pivotal vote for a no-strings-attached $350 billion in bailout funds for banks responsible for the financial crash. Just two months into his first term, Obama met with CEOs of the big banks and told them “help me help you”. He also used his new role to ensure that Democrats did not block bailout funds from going to large executive bonuses and signed legislation that rescinded the ability of the government to help homeowners who were devastated by the crash. In the end, the banks were rescued while Main Street was hung out to dry.

Obama’s big ticket item, healthcare reform, was supposed to include a public option that would serve as the gateway to universal healthcare — something every industrialized nation on Earth besides ours already has. This, of course, never came to pass. Despite a supermajority in the Senate, Obama allowed himself to be stymied by an obstinate Independent from Connecticut who was vocally against the measure: Joe Lieberman. After Lieberman threatened to filibuster the bill if it included the public option, many conservative Democrats followed suit and the dream of a path to universal healthcare was dead. Incidentally, a lot of those Senators became lobbyists shortly after.

While Obama undoubtedly faced Republican obstruction that was unprecedented in modern history, he also took a weak, technocratic approach to policy even when he had supermajorities on his side. He filled his cabinet with a coterie of of Wall Street goons whose primary interest was protecting banks and increasing shareholder profits. He appointed Rahm Emanuel, the vainglorious, left-punching former investment banker and once-head of the DCCC, as his chief of staff. (We’ll explore Rahm’s significant role in shaping the contemptibility of the modern Democratic Party later.) At every turn, Obama showed his loyalty to elites and professionals and not the broad working class base who elected him.

Obama’s betrayals cost his party a historic blowout in 2010, with Democrats losing over 1000 seats across the country. While he ran on being a bold, brave, maker of change, his tenure was an endless barrage of excuses, unnecessary compromise, and tinkering around the edges, while the quality of life for the working class nosedived. All the villains of the financial collapse went unpunished, maintaining their wealth, status, and control, while workers became more disillusioned and dispossessed than ever. You could say Obama’s biggest accomplishment was preserving a status quo that had ripped lives apart instead of seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save the system from itself.

The Escalator Ride That Changed Everything

After two Obama terms where the change that was promised was never delivered, the hollowed-out working class was furious. A populist resurgence took place in both parties, whose bases were desperate for something to believe in. While Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist and Independent from Vermont challenged Hillary Clinton for her rightful throne, a right-wing pseudo-populist in Donald Trump was vying for the Republican nomination.

While Bernie and Trump could not be more different, they share one thing in common: both of them were tapped into the anger of the American populace and knew how to validate it. For Bernie, this was a message that focused on the economic despair people were feeling and named the ruling class who was causing it. For Trump, it was about how immigrants were ruining their country, taking their jobs, making them poorer than they were a decade ago. Tired of a status quo that had done nothing but erode their quality of life, voters were searching for someone who would shake things up, who was an outsider, who knew their economic struggles were real, and gave voice to that pain.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was a known quantity. She was part of a political dynasty that had inflicted mass economic suffering on the population and was the embodiment of an establishment that the workers had turned against. Her run for president was more of a coronation than a legitimate bid, and the refrain was that it was “her turn”. Instead of a bold vision for a future that tackled rising wealth inequality, her platform was more of the same beltway insider neoliberal incrementalism that had destroyed large swaths of the working class for decades. While Sanders made universal healthcare a key part of his campaign, Hillary favored a “market-based” approach that left tens of millions uninsured. Sanders was able to hit Hillary hard for her paid private speeches to Goldman Sachs and her cozy relationship with Wall Street more broadly. Clinton represented a politics that the country no longer had an appetite for. The people wanted change and they weren’t afraid to demand it.

Instead of harnessing this populist momentum, the Democratic Party spent much of their energy and resources in 2016 on making sure that Bernie Sanders would not clinch the nomination. They were so threatened by his proposals for a fairer society that would ultimately make it harder for politicians and their donors to get rich, that they all but ignored the true threat that was rising in Donald Trump. In fact, Clinton employed the “pied piper” strategy to deliberately elevate Trump so that he won the nomination in the mistaken belief that he would be the easiest to beat.

Not to be swayed by what the activated young people within the base wanted, the Clinton campaign used an array of tactics to silence dissent and win the nomination by any means necessary. With the help of the media and a David Brock-controlled botnet, Hillary’s campaign successfully smeared Sanders supporters as “Bernie bros”, painting them as mostly upper middle class white men who were abusive and sexist and opposed Clinton because of her gender, not because she was a Wall Street darling who was disconnected from the working class. While the media used underhanded strategies to tip the scales for Clinton like combining the superdelegate counts with primary vote tallies, WikiLeaks revealed that Clinton was actively colluding with the DNC to rig the primaries in her favor despite polls showing over and over again that Bernie was the only candidate that could credibly beat Trump.

The party bet it all on a strategy that would allow them to ignore the populist surge within their base, instead pinning their hopes on the mythical swing voter to deliver them to victory. They didn’t need voters to choose them, they would instead choose their voters. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia”, proclaimed Chuck Schumer, making it clear the voters to their economic left were not needed. The Hillary campaign eschewed economic messaging, preferring to hit Trump for being boorish and uncouth, which failed to resonate with voters who were loudly declaring that this election was a referendum on the status quo. The Clinton campaign was so self-assured of their inevitable victory that they even failed to campaign in the vital Rust Belt states. As we know, this ended in catastrophe. Clinton lost the election to Trump and the country lost perhaps it’s last real offramp before total barbarism.

Naturally, Democrats took all the wrong lessons from this cataclysmic loss and continued down a path to total irrelevancy. The next 8 years would be one missed opportunity after another that would have devastating consequences for the working class, the country, and the world at large.

***This is the first of a multipart series on what happened to the Democratic Party. The next installment will focus on the #Resistance, the fundraising, and how Biden’s squandered term paved the way for a total blowout in 2024***

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