The Democrats are in the midst of an existential crisis more profound than any since the Reagan Revolution. One explanation is that the party has failed to enhance working-class power as it did during the New Deal order. Since the 1990s especially, egalitarian redistribution and large-scale developmentalism have given way to the policy preferences of the donor class. For some, the problem is that the Democrats have lost their way after decades of playing defense against an increasingly radical Republican right. Despite promises of a new economic paradigm, an array of setbacks underscore that the Joe Biden administration lacks the resolve to meet this moment.

While accurate, this narrative nevertheless underplays the extent to which the neoliberal turn of the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt emerged organically out of the Democrats’ postwar professional-political networks. Rather than an accommodation to the Right, the Democrats’ neoliberal turn was an attempt to create a new social contract legitimized on meritocratic and pro-market principles, argues the historian Lily Geismer in Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.

Geismer, a professor of twentieth-century US history at Claremont McKenna College, is also the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. In her first monograph, she sought to explain the ideological shift within the Democratic Party, using a case study of Massachusetts to show how urban minorities and industrial labor unions were gradually marginalized in favor of suburban professionals. Her latest effort advances the uncomfortable thesis that Democratic neoliberalism “was based on a genuine belief in the power of the market and private sector to achieve traditional liberal ideas of creating equality, individual choice, and help for people in need.”