In a recent contribution to Jacobin, Chris Maisano provides a potted history of two twentieth-century efforts at realigning the United States’ two main political parties. In one case, right-wingers succeeded in transforming the Republican Party of Dwight Eisenhower into a true conservative party, setting the stage for the party’s further-right realignment under Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, liberals, civil rights activists, labor leaders, and socialists worked to realign the Democrats in the 1960s and ’70s. Progressives did not succeed in their goal of winning a social democratic party. But they did succeed in pushing out conservative Southerners, remaking the Democratic Party from a Dixiecrat/New Deal coalition into a properly liberal organization.

The upshot of this history, Maisano argues, is that the Left today ought to embrace the strategy of attempting to realign the Democratic Party. If right-wingers could realign the Republicans and leftists could achieve a partial realignment of the Democrats, he seems to suggest, then the Left today might remake the Democrats in our own image.