The Democrats Actively Expedited Class Dealignment
In the 1990s, Democrats adopted a neoliberal program to suit the needs of capital, driving many workers out. The party then adopted a political strategy meant to replace working-class voters with professionals — with disastrous consequences.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on stage during day two of the Democratic National Convention on September 5, 2012, in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Vivek Chibber
The Democrats’ crushing loss to Donald Trump last November made clear that the party’s fortunes with working-class voters of all races are continuing to sink. This process of class dealignment has been decades in the making, and the Democrats’ own strategic choices bear a large part of the blame for workers abandoning the party.
For a recent episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Catalyst editor Vivek Chibber talked to Neal Meyer about the state of the Democratic Party and how it got here. Meyer is the author of “The Democrats Embrace Dealignment” in the latest edition of Catalyst and a frequent Jacobin contributor. Chibber and Meyer discussed how the Democratic Party began to drive away workers with their embrace of free-trade deals and austerity in the 1990s, how Democrats responded by reshaping itself to appeal to affluent professional voters, and where this has left the party today.
Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. Subscribe to Jacobin Radio to listen to all of our podcasts here.
Let’s start with the state of play right now of the Democrats and where they’re at just over a hundred days into the Trump administration. What’s your take on the party?
It’s interesting to see us in a period where the Democrats are completely unpopular. Everyone has concerns about the Trump administration and what the Republicans are doing, but it’s definitely not redounding to the Democrats’ benefit yet.
There’s kind of a historic backlash against the party, even among many of the party’s longtime supporters. There’s a lot of anger out there. I think you can see it in the [Bernie] Sanders rallies that are happening across the country. You can see it online. You can see it in these “Hands Off” protests that have been happening against Trump — but they’re also in a certain way a criticism of the Democrats for not acting more aggressively. There’s a lot of anger against Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader.
In response, I don’t think the Democratic leadership has any real strategy. There’s no direction; there’s no plan for what to do this year. They’re basically trying a wait-and-see approach to the Trump administration, and they’ve gotten a lot of flak for that. Now they’re trying to come up with some sort of oppositional approach, but there’s been no crystallization yet of a new path forward for the Democratic Party.
If anything, the party seems to be taking James Carville’s advice to heart. Carville said what we need to do is simply lay low and let the popular anger toward Trump grow, to the point where the Democrats come back into power through a negative vote against Trump.
But in the longer run, how is that going to sustain any kind of comeback for the party, when they’re gonna be going like ping-pongs from one rejection vote to another rejection vote? First, anti-incumbency against Trump, then anti-incumbency against them. They still haven’t learned the lesson that you actually have to be able to promise something to voters.
That’s something that Bernie Sanders said the other day that I thought was really effective. Someone asked him about calls for unity in the party, if the Democrats could close ranks and really oppose Trump. Sanders asked quite rightly, unity around what? Around what program? What are we doing here?
There’s no program.
I think people on the Left could get ahead of themselves and hope that this crisis will mean that Democratic leaders will have to rethink what they’re doing. The Carville strategy — as horrible as it is from the point of view of actually trying to stop what Trump is doing, of actually trying to build a real working-class majority, a progressive majority in this country — it may be effective in helping the Democrats do the thing they actually care about, which is winning an election in 2026. Their bet is basically that 2026 will be 2018 Redux. And they might be right about that.
That strategy for the last twenty years has been to keep the promises to a minimum.
You have to do that if your coalition is divided so much, between the Liz Cheney Republicans who are now Democrats, and then the Bernie Sanders, working-class labor people on the Left. If you have a coalition that broad, you have to have a catch-all strategy. You can’t really promise anything in particular on the campaign stump. You have to be an “anti-” party.
So that’s what they’ve done. That is a product to some extent of the realignment of the party, the loss of its once-solid base in the working class, and that has manifested itself in this lack of direction.
The Democrats have always been a party with many different interest groups, many different movements housed within it. But for decades, the labor movement did give it an anchor, something that centered everything else.
You’ve used this term “dealignment,” and it’s used a lot; it refers to the party’s relationship to the working class. How do you define the term? And how has that process of dealignment unfolded over time?
“Dealignment” is definitely a term I’ve noticed becoming a buzzword, and so we have to be careful of that. But it is a useful term, and it describes this process of the unwinding of the classic political coalitions of the twentieth century and entering this new politics that we have today.
Classically — not just in the United States, it’s truer elsewhere in the world — the center left is the political position of the working class: people who support redistribution and some kinds of social democratic economic reforms. Working-class people have historically gravitated toward those kinds of politics.
There’s an alignment of the working class with center-left social democratic parties.
Exactly. And on the flip side, the middle class has been classically aligned with the parties of the center right, the conservative parties who’ve resisted redistribution, resisted progressive taxation, resisted unionization. That was the classic alignment of the postwar years.
This is true in the United States too. Right up until the 1990s, college-educated voters tended to vote Republican, and the blue-collar, nonmanagerial workers tended to vote Democrat.
That is the classic pattern. Before 1930, the parties were not really meaningfully divided on a left-right axis. But in the 1930s, under [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] and the New Deal, the Democrats recast themselves as a party of the center left, and they do start to win over this working-class base.
It actually progresses for decades: they continue to win more and more working-class people. As the South is finally democratized, you get this influx of black working-class voters into the Democratic Party in the South.
There is this view out there that with the Voting Rights Act, the Democrats lost the Southern working class. It’s certainly true that they took a hit, but did they actually lose the entire class in the South?
No. And they took a hit among all Southern whites with racially conservative views. That’s very important, because there’s a self-satisfied story that college-educated, middle-class liberals like to tell themselves that people like them have always been very progressive on racial issues. The reality is that a lot of affluent, fairly well-educated white people in the South were among the most pro–Jim Crow, among the most anti–civil rights in the 1960s.
They were a big part of that backlash against the Democratic Party. So it was a cross-class backlash among people who had very racially conservative views on things like school integration and redistribution toward poor blacks.
But that backlash had limits, right?
There’s a move toward Barry Goldwater and the Republicans in 1964 among racially conservative whites. That continues for a couple years, but there is a very clear limit. The Democrats are still a majority party in the South in the 1970s and ’80s, going into the ’90s even.
Even though they lost a chunk of the white vote, they remained competitive in the South with a white working-class electorate right up until the ’90s.
They have a biracial coalition. It’s a class-based, biracial coalition of white and black workers in the South who are electing Democrats up until 1994.
To recap then, the alignment of working-class voters with the Democratic Party is more or less intact, North and South, right up until the 1990s. Broadly speaking, that’s the alignment of the class with the party nationally.
Especially in congressional elections. In congressional elections, this is the reason why Democrats dominated every single congressional election, with only a few exceptions, between 1933 and 1994.
People forget that. They think it’s a law of politics that parties have to swing back and forth in terms of control of Congress. That wasn’t true. For almost sixty years, the Democrats had basically a lock on Congress, because they had a strong base in the working class that reliably voted for Democrats year in and year out.
In presidential elections, the story is a little bit different. The Democrats did poorly after Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, after the upheavals of the 1960s; Democrats did poorly in many of the following presidential elections. Democrats lost a majority of white working-class and white middle-class voters alike in presidential elections.
But there’s still a class polarization in that vote. Even though they’re losing a majority of white voters of both classes in those presidential elections, they’re gaining a disproportionate share of support from white working-class voters still. If you’re a middle-class white person, you’re still much more likely to vote for the Republican presidential candidate. So the South was a more competitive region of the country than it had been previously, but the Democrats were still clearly the majority party in the South. That trend we’re talking about here is true nationally as well.
So in congressional and in presidential elections, the working class is either solidly behind the Democrats, in congressional elections, or it goes more back and forth between the Democrats and Republicans in the presidential elections. But even in the presidential elections, they haven’t lost the working class until when?
Until the 1990s.
And that’s when you see a dealignment in both congressional and presidential elections?
Yeah. The beginning of the dealignment really takes place in 1994.
First of all, why ’94? And second, since ’94, has it been a steady hemorrhaging of working-class voters, or were there key moments when it really happened?
So ’94 is really decisive because it’s the year that voters basically rebel against the Clinton program. [Bill] Clinton gets elected in 1992. He comes to power with a lot of hope behind him. It seemed a lot like [Barack] Obama in 2008. There’s an excitement around his health care proposal; there’s a kind of populist energy. James Carville’s famous saying was, “It’s the economy stupid,” and they really hammered on the economy and economic-populist themes.
That’s what Clinton comes to power with. He is the first Democratic president in twelve years, and he immediately backtracks on all his campaign promises. Suddenly the Clinton presidency is about budget austerity and free trade — that’s a huge shift for the way that people thought about the Democratic Party in ’93.
The health care plan is jettisoned. They had talked about labor law reform, which is something Democrats always talk about ahead of a new presidency and never deliver on. And of course Clinton didn’t deliver on that either. So these populist hopes that people had placed in the Clinton administration are gone. Business is excited about this: “We’ve got a Democrat who’s championing free trade. We’ve got a Democrat who’s trying to balance the budget, who’s concerned about our interests.”
They’re quite happy about the situation, but voters are not. There’s a voter rebellion in 1994, and Democrats get wiped out. This is one of the worst drubbings for a party in a midterm election in the postwar period. It’s the first time since 1953 that Democrats lose control of both houses of Congress.
And ’94 is when the Republican Revolution happens, with Newt Gingrich coming into Congress.
The Republicans capitalize on this dissatisfaction with the Democrats, and they do extremely well in the South. It’s a little too soon in ’94 for people to feel the consequences of NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement], but they know what’s coming. People aren’t stupid: they know that this is gonna hurt their jobs, hurt the mill towns in the South, and so you see a lot of counties in the South that used to be loyally Democratic flip in ’94 and in the years after that.
So ’94 is the first episode of a huge flight of the working class from the Democrats. Do they continue to leave the party at a steady pace?
No. It’s not a steady decline of working-class support for the Democratic Party after 1994. You have a bit of a plateau in the late ’90s and 2000s, where the class alignment among both working-class and middle-class voters is more steady than it had been.
Then the next big change comes after 2008, which is like 1992 all over again. There’s a lot of dissatisfaction with George W. Bush’s presidency and the global financial crisis. Democrats come in again, this time with even larger majorities than they came into power with in 1992. They do extremely well in 2008.
All these hopes are raised about Obama ushering in a new era in American history and American politics. And again, there’s this incredible disappointment with what he delivered. So 2010 is when we start to see this second wave of dealignment. And in the 2010s, then it’s really working-class voters full-on moving out of the party. We have Trump come to power in 2016 on the back of some degree of working-class revolt, and that has been continuing since.
So that’s dealignment, and you say in the article that the Democrats actually embraced it.
One view that’s out there is that the electorate is changing: it’s more educated, it’s more diverse — and this is happening in Europe and in the United States — its preferences are changing, and that old blue-collar manufacturing working class that was the base for social democracy is gone.
So what these parties are doing is they’re finding that the ground under their feet has shifted, and they’re simply adjusting to the new reality, which is that their voting base is no longer what it used to be. In that sense, Obama’s retreat and then the [Joe] Biden phenomenon is more the party getting real about what its electorate wants.
Your argument, however, is that that’s not the way to understand dealignment. So how would you explain it?
There are a couple problems with that account. One is that it radically glosses over all the problems that regular people have been experiencing in the last thirty years.
We still have a working-class majority in this country. Their occupations may have changed, but their struggles are the same. They’re still struggling with health care costs, with bad bosses, with low wages. The party is still confronting an electorate that’s majority working class, and it needs to think about how to win in those conditions.
The important thing here is that the party’s economic program really came first. So in 1993, Clinton comes into power. Democrats push through this very capital-friendly, business-friendly economic program, and then in ’94 they reap what they sowed.
They were conscious of that. There are these memos and interviews, oral-history accounts of people in the White House at the time, and they are talking about how even in ’93, they knew what was going to happen with NAFTA, with budget austerity. They knew they were going to lose a lot of working-class voters.
This is important. They had an opportunity in seeing the possibility and the reality of working-class defection to try to tailor their program to win back what is in fact a majority of the voting population. But they chose instead . . . to do what?
Democrats chose instead to go ahead with this program. They experienced this big defeat in ’94, and then they have to think about, what’s our new strategy? How do we navigate this situation? And they’re basically searching for a base that will be compatible with that program that they’ve just pushed through.
And this program is what today we would call a neoliberal program.
Maybe left-neoliberalism compared to Ronald Reagan, but a neoliberal program nonetheless. They have to find a base for this program. That’s what Clinton — and people around him like Mark Penn and Dick Morris, these triangulators, the famous political hacks — find in the suburbs in 1996. This is why you start to see Democrats pursue a new kind of congressional district as their target. They’re focused on these more affluent, suburban, professional congressional districts.
The real change happens around 2004 and 2005, when you start to see Democrats pushing their resources toward these kinds of congressional districts and pulling them out of working-class districts that were no longer compatible with the economic program that they wanted to pursue.
Not only are they choosing to pursue a neoliberal program — they’re actually choosing to put more money into congressional districts and races in the suburbs, where they feel that the voters are more naturally aligned with what they’re trying to push, rather than in the traditional working-class districts that they used to control. They’re essentially relinquishing the working-class districts.
Yeah. There’s a natural affinity there, too, between the program that they had pursued and this new base that they’re searching for. And they talk a lot about this — they talk about these suburban voters, these “wired workers,” being the base for an economically conservative, socially liberal program.
What I found in my research is that there are two different camps of people pushing the Democratic Party’s strategy on domestic policy. These camps really started to develop in the 1980s.
The first camp is this group of economic strategists. Wall Street–banker types and Harvard economic people like Larry Summers, get pulled into this circle; these people begin to shape the economic program of the party. They’re working on one aspect of the party’s strategy, and they’re always the key economic team behind every Democratic presidential campaign, starting with Walter Mondale in 1984, then [Michael] Dukakis in ’88, and Clinton and John Kerry and then Obama.
They’re key economic advisors to the presidential campaigns. They’re also the major fundraisers. Then once Clinton and Obama get elected, they become the key figures in their economic cabinets.
Who exactly are we talking about?
The most important figure is Robert Rubin, a banker with Goldman Sachs, who becomes Clinton’s treasurer. They name Clinton’s economic program “Rubinomics” for a reason. He’s considered basically the godfather of this circle. Other people around him include Roger Altman, who’s a very important banker; Larry Summers, of course, bringing up the more academic side; and the more recent crowd includes people like Jason Furman and others.
In the mid-2000s, they start this group called the Hamilton Project, which is sort of their government in waiting before Obama comes to power in 2008. This is a very well-connected, well-resourced, and powerful group that’s developing the economic program for the party.
The second part of the equation is the political team. When Clinton gets elected in ’92, he’s got this kind of populist political team around him. James Carville was part of that at the time, and Stanley Greenberg. They come in ’93 with this idea that Clinton’s going to pursue some sort of populist economic program, and they are actually very concerned about the direction that Rubin and the economic team starts to push in early 1993, with the free-trade, budget austerity program. They’re warning Clinton and leading Democrats that this is not a good direction for the party to go down, that it’s going to cost them a lot of votes in the Midwest and working-class communities.
In 1994, when their predictions come true, Clinton decides not to heed their warning but instead turns on them, and he demotes their position inside of his administration while promoting the economic team’s. After ’94 is when Rubin becomes Treasury secretary and other people rise up the ranks.
That’s the state of play in ’94. Clinton now has to figure out, what is the path forward? Because everyone is convinced in 1995 that Clinton is going to lose the presidential election the following year. This is when he starts to bring on people affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council [DLC] as his political team.
What is the Democratic Leadership Council?
The Democratic Leadership Council is a group of conservative — they would call themselves moderate — Democrats, “New Democrats,” that came together in the 1980s to try to pull the party to the right in terms of their political strategy. Al From was the most famous CEO of these people, the exponent of a more conservative approach.
Al Gore was part of it too, right?
Al Gore was, and Clinton was also part of the DLC. A lot of prominent Democrats were attached to the DLC in the 1990s. The DLC’s major contribution to the party, especially in the second half of the ’90s, was to figure out what the political strategy was going to be going forward.
So there’s essentially a marriage of Rubin, Summers, the Hamilton Project group — which is the economic brain of Democratic neoliberalism — with the Democratic Leadership Council.
They’re distinct groups, but you’re right, there’s this coalition that they develop together.
And what they’re doing, the two of them together, is saying that not only are we aware that we’re hemorrhaging working-class support, but we are going to engineer a political strategy to deepen that process.
Exactly.
Now this puts these two groups in the cockpit, and they’re driving the party. You said that in the early 2000s, one consequence of this is that Democrats change their funding strategies in the electoral contests so that they’re pouring money into these new, more conservative districts because they think those voters are more aligned with what they want to do and they’re pulling out of the traditional districts the party had a real anchor in and essentially abdicating to the Republicans. This brings us to Obama.
Obama does something similar to what Clinton did in ’92. The contexts are not that different: there’s a recession, a lot of anger against a Republican presidency, in fact against a Bush. And Obama puts together a pretty broad coalition. He’s got this “hope and change” narrative. There are some populist commitments in there, like labor law reform — the Employee Free Choice Act — and the public option, which would give a national health insurance option for people to purchase as part of his health care reform program.
That’s what Obama comes to power with, and once a senator from Pennsylvania defects, Democrats have a supermajority in the Senate. They have a huge majority in the house. So again, there’s a lot of hope, a lot of excitement, and Obama doesn’t deliver on any of that.
What does it mean to say that he doesn’t deliver? After all, he had majorities in both chambers.
It was probably the largest majority the Democrats will ever have in our lifetimes. So it’s not the case that Obama was defeated. It’s not that he tried his best to get the public option, to get labor law reform, to get climate change legislation. These are things that Obama did not want to pursue, and it was very clear from the get-go.
His aides and advisors were leaking to the press or even explicitly saying to the press, “We do not want to pursue labor law reform.” They were behind the scenes talking to health care lobbyists and others in the industry about how the public option was not something they were seriously pushing forward.
These were not priorities for them. Their priorities were health care reform — but in a way that business would like to try to reform the health care industry — and then financial regulation, but again, in a way that the financial industry would be satisfied with and feel was in their best interests. It’s no surprise that the Obama crew was many of the same people who had powered the Clinton economic team as well.
One way to think about this is the idea of a corporate filter: that there are policies that the Democrats want to pursue that they can have allies in the business community back them up on and that these people actually want to see pursued. Then there are policies that the business world cannot live with. Labor law reform is definitely an example of the latter.
Essentially, policy choice went through a corporate filter. Those policies that made it out were the ones that business is willing to live with, and those policies that Obama let die were the ones that his corporate allies would be unhappy with.
Exactly. This is how we should think about the Clinton administration too — that they used that same kind of filtering mechanism to think about what to pursue.
In both administrations, there’s a kind of populist rhetoric that they use to ride into office. And then the second they get into office, they start backtracking on all the promises, in a situation where they were actually poised to be able to deliver. So no surprise, after each administration, the working-class vote goes the other way.
Right. And the real tragedy of the Obama administration is that both those policies I mentioned, which I fixate on because they are so important to the idea of what the Democratic Party is supposed to be about — expanding the welfare state in a pro-people, redistributive, government-led way and backing the unions — both those policies were quite popular in 2009. It’s not the case that there was a popular upsurge against the public option or that there was popular backlash against labor law reform. A majority of the country, especially among working-class voters, was eager to see both policies; polls at the time were very clear this was the case.
On the other hand, some of the things that Obama did pursue, like the mandate for health insurance, were extremely unpopular. The idea that popularity was the criteria that the Obama administration was using to decide what to pursue is completely false. Think about the bailouts. The bailouts were extremely unpopular, but Obama was dead set on pursuing them.
In fact, when he helped out the United Auto Workers during the 2008 crisis, it was with a promise from the UAW that they would accept nonunion wages for union workers. It was a way of harmonizing wages downward, forcing that down the throats of the unions, whereas no demands were put on the corporations.
I think the popular memory of the Obama administration is that the filibuster was what really did him in. Again, on both these policies, that is not really the case.
The leading Democrat in the Senate who was trying to put together a coalition to enact labor law reform, Tom Harkin from Iowa, was actually relatively successful in finding the votes he needed to overcome a filibuster. There’s an incredible oral-history interview with him where he talks about this, and you can see the anger in his face about what happened. He got sixty votes to get over the filibuster, and then the Democrats would have a majority to pass labor law reform.
He has this coalition in September 2009, and he goes to Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic majority leader, and the Obama administration. Harkin says, “I’ve got the votes. Let’s get this on the table.” And they say, “No. We have to pursue health care reform first, then we’ll come to you, Tom.” And they put it off and put it off and put it off, until eventually the Democrats lose their sixty-seat majority that they would need to get this through.
So it’s not the case that the filibuster is what did in labor law reform, and the same is true of the public option. The public option is part of health care reform; health care reform was ultimately passed with budget reconciliation. The administration didn’t actually get the sixty votes to pass the rest of the health care reform, and it knew going into it that it was probably going to have to rely on reconciliation to do this.
Reconciliation is what Trump is using now and what Biden used for his infrastructure bill.
It’s the way to get around the filibuster essentially. So Democrats knew this was an option. They didn’t do it.
When people have gone back and looked at what happened in the summer of 2009 around health care reform, it’s very revealing. There were several meetings assembled between the White House’s key health care team that was trying to develop this policy and leaders from the health care industry: pharma, hospitals, insurance companies, and so on. They came together in the summer of 2009 and basically made a deal.
The health care industry said, “We’re going to give you a lot of these things you want. We’re going to cut costs on this and this. We’re going to give public support for health care reform. And in return, we want things, including getting rid of the public option and also getting rid of the government’s ability to regulate prices of pharmaceutical drugs.” And the Obama administration said, “Great. This is an excellent deal.”
No fight. No negotiations. Nothing.
Exactly. And if you go back and look at what was going on, they don’t spend any time developing what the public option would actually look like. They’re not pushing for it. They continuously say — and these are comments meant for the industry, not for the people — “The public option is an ideal thing. It’s something we would like to have, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of health care reform.”
So the only intention was to use it rhetorically to bring business to the table.
It’s a negotiating tool. The funniest thing is some of the main opponents of health care reform in May of 2009, Republicans, are saying this themselves. They’re saying, “You guys are being tricked by the Obama administration” essentially. “This public option is basically a tool to get you to the table to negotiate, but they don’t have any intention of pursuing it.” They knew what was going on.
And once they were at the table, you’re saying the Obama administration negotiated against itself.
Well, that implies they really wanted the public option. But yeah, they gave it up in order to get these other things that they really wanted.
So what comes from this is an analysis that says there have been deep shifts within the voting population; there has been a demographic change. The population is more educated than it used to be, and there has been some change in its preferences. But the core of the Democratic Party’s working-class base not only still has the same interests, but even the same preferences.
And what’s happened over the past twenty-five years is that the party is essentially capitalizing on the changes in the electorate to try to craft a new coalition for itself, which will back the economic policy that the party wants to be committed to. That economic policy comes not from the voters, but from their corporate backers.
This leads us back to where we started. Today the party is in the doldrums. The business community seems willing to give Trump a chance, though that relationship is very fraught right now. On the assumption that Democrats will regain at least one of the majorities in Congress in 2026 and potentially win back the presidency, what can working people and progressives expect of the Democratic Party in this incarnation?
I would not have high hopes for this new Democratic Party either. I think we are basically in an endless cycle right now. We know the script: Democrats will retake control of Congress, potentially retake control of the presidency, and unless something else changes, I don’t see how we get out of this repeat of Democrats coming to power, disappointing, and Republicans coming to power on the back of that disappointment.
There’s no indication that Bernie Sanders and AOC’s [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] rallies and the mobilizations that they’re doing are taken seriously by the party at all.
No. I think the party leadership is to some degree impressed by what Bernie and AOC are capable of doing; but it’s not going to change its political program to suit the Sanders wing.
In fact, Hakeem Jeffries is pretty clear that he wants the billionaires to come back to the Democratic Party.
The “good billionaires.”
I think the definition of “good” is “if you back us.”
Of course — “if you give us money.”
I am heartened by what we see with Bernie and AOC’s rallies. They’re very inspiring to a certain extent. But we have to figure out what to do with that energy. And there, I think, we have to change tack a little bit.
In 2021, in my opinion, what happened was the Sanders wing essentially joined the Biden presidency as sort of the junior partners to Biden and became his PR agents, to a degree, with left-wing and working-class voters. They were saying, “This guy really is on our side. They really are going to do it this time.”
In fact, we saw that this corporate filter we’ve been talking about was still in place. Most importantly, in 2009 and 2010, Obama mostly had to deal with business; in 2021 and 2022, Biden had to deal with the right wing of his own party. And he was completely unwilling to challenge them, completely unwilling to fight them in any serious way. That’s not coincidental. The right wing of the Democratic Party was actually doing the party a service, by blocking more redistributive programs that would upset capital.
We have to be realistic about what this party is about under the current leadership. You either have to figure out a way to replace the leadership of the party, or you have to find a way to get distance from it.
For people who think they can replace the leadership . . . there’s a lot of excitement right now around AOC potentially being a presidential candidate in 2028, and of course I would vote for her, a lot of us would. But the problem here is that even if she were able to win the nomination — which is no guarantee, especially in a party that is more middle class than it was in 2016 and 2020 — she would have an entire party below her — basically everyone in Congress, all the governors, would be against the kind of redistributive program she would want to pursue.
You saw the panic when it looked like Sanders might win the primary. It was clear to me that the party would rather lose to Trump than win with Sanders.
I think that’s right. So if AOC were to become the nominee, I think we’d have something like a Jeremy Corbyn situation, if she stuck to her guns. She’d have a party that’s constantly trying to stab her in the back and get rid of her. Or, she’d have to give way. She’d have to do what some progressive Democrats like Brandon Johnson in Chicago have done, where they come in with all these hopes and then basically have to backtrack, because they don’t have the base they need in the party to do the program they’re trying to pursue.
That’s one path forward, to try to replace the leadership — again, I’m very pessimistic about that being possible. The other path is a much more independent, aggressive, confrontational style against the Democratic Party leadership as it currently exists, and trying to build up something different, an alternative project or movement organization. We can marry that with this electoral machinery that people have been building on the Left.
Then, I think, we would have something to be hopeful about. Especially if we could get more left-led unions who potentially could be interested in a project like this. That’s the direction we really need to go in.