In the aftermath of the 1984 presidential election, media outlets spoke with one voice: New Deal liberalism was dead. Given the choice between Walter Mondale’s tax-and-spend liberalism and Ronald Reagan’s morning-in-America conservatism, voters had decisively sided with the incumbent president.

The only alternative for Democrats now was to modernize. Anything but a wholesale rethink of the party’s more social-democratic commitments would invite future electoral disaster.

The conventional wisdom had also fingered the culprits: the Democratic Party’s base. Attacking what they termed “interest-group liberalism,” commentators insisted that the party become a broad tent, moderate enough to win a general election and allergic to particularistic concerns.