For over eighty years, the reformist left in the United States has sought to transform one of the capitalist parties into a “people’s” party. Both the Communist Party’s popular front strategy and the social-democratic strategy of “realignment” (formulated by the brilliant ex-Marxist Max Shachtman) sought to transform the Democratic Party. The Democrats, through the 1950s, were a coalition of urban real estate developers, Jewish and Catholic capitalists, and southern planters who enjoyed the voting support of northern industrial workers, black and white, middle-class liberals, and most southern whites.

The reformists’ goal was to drive out the conservative, pro-capitalist elements — especially the Dixiecrats — leaving the labor officialdom and middle-class liberals to dominate a “labor-liberal” Party. As Paul Heideman recently pointed out in a recent essay in Jacobin, there was a realignment in the Democratic Party in the 1970s — but not the one the reformists hoped for. The southerners abandoned the Democrats for the Republicans, but with urban growth the non–White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) capitalists were joined by new capitalists in high technology and the media, and an increasingly neoliberal urban middle class. Rather than becoming a labor-liberal party, the Democrats moved sharply right in the 1980s as the official leaders of the labor, civil rights, and women’s movements were marginalized.

Today, we are seeing a realignment within the oldest party of industrial capitalism in the United States — the Republicans. The party establishment — those with the closest historic ties to old-line, WASP manufacturers, bankers, and financiers — have lost control of the party to a right-wing populist, Donald Trump.