The Democrats’ Long Love Affair With “Opportunity”

The idea of promoting “opportunity” is deeply embedded in the history of the Democratic Party, especially the efforts by Bill Clinton and the New Democrats of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to reorient the base and priorities of the party toward professional-class liberals and Wall Street and Silicon Valley donors. There is a longer history, however, of Democratic politicians and policymakers embracing the term as a way to avoid adopting programs and policies that promote significant redistribution, class consciousness, and comprehensive racial justice. Opportunity was a core principle of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which is remembered now as redistributive — but in fact, it instead famously promised a “hand up, not a hand out.” The program aimed to empower the poor through training programs rather than offer cash assistance, and the Johnson administration accompanied it with tax cuts rather than tax increases.

Yet the term was more widely adopted by subsequent generations of Democrats as a means to signal a new direction for the party, away from its emphasis on government intervention to improve the lives of working people and its base of working-class union members and people of color. In the early 1980s, a group of “Atari Democrats” in Congress who were part of the Committee on Party Effectiveness  released a document called The Road to Opportunity: A Democratic Direction for the 1980s, which laid out a plan for creating long-term economic policy focused on private sector growth, especially in postindustrial sectors like tech and finance. The authors, led by then Colorado representative Tim Wirth, selected the title to signal their aim of moving the party away from the language of fairness, which they felt intimated generous redistribution, and toward a focus on opportunity, which signaled merely the ideal that everyone would have an equal chance to advance. It also marked a deliberate effort to evade the long-standing demands of the civil rights and welfare rights movements for racial and economic justice, including a racially conscious reallocation of resources.

The vision for the future outlined in The Road to Opportunity directly informed the DLC, which was founded just a few years later, and counted Wirth along with Bill Clinton and Al Gore as inaugural members. The explicit goal of the DLC was reinventing the party through a new electoral strategy and policy agenda. Calling themselves “New Democrats,” the DLC declared in its 1990 mission statement that the fundamental mission of the Democratic Party was to “expand economic opportunity, not government,” and that “economic growth is the prerequisite to expanding opportunity for everyone.”

The DLC also called for encouraging free markets and free trade and stressed market-oriented solutions over welfare assistance or affirmative action in order to encourage individual responsibility and empowerment of the poor and working class. Eventually, “opportunity” became the first word in the DNC’s official slogan: “Opportunity, Responsibility, Community.”

Opportunity was the centerpiece of Clinton’s presidential campaign and administration as well. He used the term thousands of times during his presidency. It is especially telling that it is embedded in the names of many of the administration’s signature legislation, including the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 — Clinton’s welfare reform that imposed work requirements on welfare recipients and caused a spike in extreme poverty. The DLC applauded Clinton’s signing of the legislation, suggesting that it would transform the welfare system “from one that creates dependence to one that creates opportunity.”

Opportunity was a core part of Clinton’s promises to reward those “who work hard and play by the rules” and stigmatize those who did not. He frequently invoked opportunity as a way to celebrate free-market capitalism’s ability to create upward mobility while downplaying the uneven development and structural discrimination embedded in the system that, for many people, make financial success nigh impossible.

For Clinton, adopting the language of opportunity was not just an effort to thwart the last vestiges of redistribution in the Democratic Party’s agenda. It was also a means to obscure basic class differences. Opportunity and hard work were, in Clinton’s telling, the essential keys to the fortunes of both Silicon Valley tycoons and single black mothers — both of whom had a chance to succeed in the “New Economy” of the 1990s.

This colorblind and class-blind idea was also widely adopted by Clinton’s successors, especially Barack Obama, in his optimistic depictions of the country’s core values. “Opportunity is who we are,” Obama declared in his 2014 State of the Union as he spoke about his “opportunity agenda.” Even as inequality entered the public lexicon in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, Obama still preferred to speak of opportunity. It gelled more with his promotion of tech-oriented entrepreneurship as the salve to the nation’s economic problems.

The Zombie Opportunity Pitch

Throughout the fall, Kamala Harris offered speeches that built heavily on the vision and promises of Clinton and Obama. In a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, for instance, she painted a picture of an “opportunity economy” in which people will not “just get by, but be able to get ahead” and where “ambition and aspiration” would lead to economic success.

It is unclear how persuasive the paeans to opportunity were during the Clinton and Obama years, but they were especially out of step with the priorities of large swaths of Americans in 2024. A Pew Research Center survey recently found that, for 92 percent of Americans, financial stability is more important than upward mobility. While promises of opportunity-laden upward mobility might still be appealing to the white college-educated professionals that Harris won in droves (the only group with whom she improved upon Biden’s results), this constituency is actually a relatively small part of the electorate.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to the idea of promoting equal opportunity, properly understood. The ideal of ensuring that people’s chances of living flourishing lives are not unfairly determined by their circumstances of birth is an essential one. But taking this seriously would actually require massive redistribution, to ensure high-quality schooling, medical care, transportation, and various other kinds of social infrastructure for all Americans — an approach that is anathema to Democrats’ narrow, meritocratic vision of “opportunity.” And equalizing opportunities, however it’s conceived, is no substitute for ensuring the basic economic security that all are entitled to, but that poor and working-class people all too often go without.

The desire for security rather than mere opportunity is something that Bernie Sanders recognized in his two bids for president, and it is also an understanding that shaped some core aspects of Biden’s economic agenda, particularly his commitment to new manufacturing jobs, strong support for unions, efforts to increase direct assistance to families and children, and efforts to intensify regulation of corporations.

Harris did not fully abandon Biden’s policies, but instead tried to fold them into the opportunity economy idea, promising to “bring together labor and workers and small-business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs, to grow our economy and to lower the cost of everyday needs like health care and housing and groceries.” Her plan included a price cap on prescription drugs and expanding the child tax credit to $6,000 during the first year of a child’s life. It also called for subsidizing the construction of new homes and providing $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers. This proposal had direct parallels to the Clinton Administration’s National Homeownership Strategy, a public-private effort to help millions of Americans achieve the “American Dream of private homeownership.” Harris’s definition of “opportunity” was also broad enough to include her promise to lower the capital gains tax to encourage investment and economic growth — a policy that, as the New York Times reported, was first vetted with Wall Street and Silicon Valley executives.

Even more than creating an often-contradictory agenda, the opportunity economy, as Bernie Sanders has pointed out, did not give voters in an economically precarious position a convincing narrative about who to blame for their problems. The opportunity economy does not sit well with a populist agenda, nor is it really supposed to. In fact, Harris’s decision to use the term is indicative of the anti-populist thrust of her campaign, which was also demonstrated by her unwillingness to show support for the regulatory and antitrust efforts made by the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration.

The ultimate lesson here is not that finding a new slogan to replace “opportunity” is the silver bullet that will solve Democrats’ problems and help them win back working-class support. It is clear, however, that the meritocratic and business-oriented ideology behind the term — and the Democratic Party’s penchant for running candidates, and having campaign messages crafted by people, so fundamentally out of step with the needs and demands of all but the most elite Americans — is making it ever more difficult for the party to stop bleeding working-class voters, with potentially disastrous consequences for their political future.