Lily Geismer is a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and author of two books, most recently Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.
Though the issue has been put on the back burner in recent years, the influence of big money is still wreaking havoc on US politics. Zohran Mamdani’s grassroots-powered, publicly funded campaign for New York City mayor suggests a way out of this morass.
Despite lofty ambitions, four years of professional-managerial approaches to governing moved the Democrats even further away from their New Deal roots.
Following a proud centrist tradition, Kamala Harris’s campaign promised to build an “opportunity economy” that would grant success to the deserving. The meritocratic pitch was emblematic of Democrats’ long march away from working-class voters.
National electoral campaigns are mainly staffed by political junkies from elite universities — exactly the opposite of much of the US public. No wonder they’re so bad at reaching working-class voters.
In the 1988 Democratic presidential primary, the pro-business centrism of Michael Dukakis faced off against the pro-worker populism of Jesse Jackson. Dukakis won — and set the stage for the Democrats’ decades-long race to the middle.
In the ’80s and ’90s, the Democrats took a jackhammer to education, housing, and social welfare. This isn’t the story of a weak party unable to defend its earlier gains, but a transformed party demolishing them in service of a new neoliberal ideology.
The Democratic establishment’s obsession with courting affluent suburbanites imperils progressive policies and overlooks the changing composition of US suburbs. A progressive strategy must look to mobilize the increasingly diverse, increasingly working-class parts of American suburbia.
Before Bernie Bros vs. the DNC, there was Jesse Jackson vs. the Atari Democrats.
Bill Clinton’s New Markets initiative tried to fight poverty by showering incentives on the private sector. And now Hillary has embraced it.
As organized labor lost strength, the Democratic Party turned to professional-class voters to shore up its base.