[Reviewer Fazli examines this new History of the Democratic Party,
written by a former editor of Dissent magazine. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

LOSING BY NOT WINNING  
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Shehryar Fazli
May 22, 2022
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ Reviewer Fazli examines this new History of the Democratic Party,
written by a former editor of Dissent magazine. _

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_What It Took to Win
A History of the Democratic Party_
Michael Kazin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374200237

WHY IS IT that even when they occupy the White House and control
Congress, Democrats seem to be the minority party in waiting while
their Republican opponents surge? This sense of fragility seems
strange for a party whose presidential candidate has won the popular
vote in all but one election in the last 30 years.
Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was meant to change this. “George Bush
has fucked up so bad, he’s made it hard for a white man to run for
president,” said Chris Rock in a stand-up special just before that
election. With Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, the new
president promised to repair a corrupted social contract and
revitalize government and American democracy itself, after the
excesses of a deregulated financial industry provoked the Great
Recession. And yet, two years later, a right-wing Tea Party wave
helped deliver the Democrats’ famous shellacking in the 2010
midterms. Six years later, Republicans won full control of government,
on the back of a man who represented (and still represents) the
antithesis of democratic renewal.

Obama’s Democratic successor assumed office at a time when most
Americans looked to government to help them out of a crisis, this time
a global pandemic, after four years of an inept Republican. Yet, Joe
Biden’s domestic agenda, the most progressive since LBJ’s Great
Society, has already faltered, even as Republicans continue to embrace
Donald Trump and accept his supporters’ January 6 assault on
American democracy.

Republican successes are often the product of a coherent conservative
movement, while Democratic triumphs have depended on building and
maintaining unwieldy coalitions. The bigger the party tent grows, the
more difficult it is to get everyone to agree. What keeps the party
together is a compelling fiction about its essential character.
Georgetown historian Michael Kazin explores the development of that
character in _What It Took to Win_, a rewarding account of a party
whose fate was tied to class, race, and gender but whose formative
myths provided the tools to create a dynamic whole.

The Democrats’ icon among the Founding Fathers was once the
slave-owning Thomas Jefferson, who “actually detested competitive
political parties.” To turn him into the emblem of democratic —
and Democratic — principles meant accepting, on faith, that
Jefferson’s and the party’s commitment to freedom was absolute.
This was no trifling maneuver for an organization that depended on a
Southern bastion of white supremacists wholly opposed to Black
emancipation.

As Kazin writes,

The contradiction that would bedevil Democrats until the final decades
of the twentieth century was thus imbedded in the identities of its
putative founders: the party of “the people” could get a chance to
govern the nation only if it acquiesced to a realm of unfreedom south
of the Mason-Dixon Line.

In those days, the system’s structural biases, especially the
three-fifths clause that defined the Electoral College, were vital to
the Democrats.

But myths, as Kazin argues, “have power when they stir politicians,
activists, and voters to act as if they were true.” Party-building
thus proceeded from these fables about Jefferson and the new
organization ostensibly made in his image. The Democrats would
eventually find a foundational ethic in what Kazin calls “moral
capitalism,” which would ultimately help define them as the party of
labor in the 20th century.

In the republic’s early days, the party of the people opposed
federal government interventionism, believing it served only the
elite. This aligned neatly with the creed of white supremacy and its
corollary of states’ rights. Even Northern Democrats, who feared job
competition if enslaved Black people in the South were freed, could
thus “condemn abolitionists as dangerous meddlers with the rights of
agrarian property-owners.”

If the third president was the soul, the man who would later become
the eighth president, Martin Van Buren, built the body. Defying the
animus toward political parties from the likes of James Madison (and,
indeed, Jefferson), Van Buren and his allies argued for parties to be
“the vigilant watchman over the conduct of those in power.” That
role would require grassroots organizations, patronage networks, a
press, popular participation through nominating conventions, and other
measures that the Democrats were the first in the world to try.

It was Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaign that gave the new
party an “opportunity to put these methods to work in the nation as
a whole.” As Jill Lepore writes in _These Truths_, “Jackson’s
rise to power marked the birth of American populism,” which, she
reminds us, is at its heart, “an argument about numbers.” Jackson,
Lepore says, “would make his lack of certain qualities —
judiciousness, education, political experience — into strengths.”
This outsider brand wouldn’t have worked in earlier elections. But
by the time of Jackson’s campaign in 1828, 21 out of 24 states had
abolished property qualifications for voting, and a significant
majority of states sent popularly elected delegates to the Electoral
College. Poor white men were voting for the first time, and with
Jackson’s election, the elite monopoly over the presidency was over.

Jackson’s defining moment was his refusal to recharter the Second
Bank of the United States, the federally authorized national bank that
one Democratic senator likened to “the Whore of Babylon,” serving
the Northeastern elite over Midwestern and Southern farmers. Kazin
writes, “The economic logic of their position was shaky at best. It
assumed the superior virtues of a preindustrial nation of small
farmers that was rapidly receding into memory and myth.” But this
reactionary impulse made for good populist politics.

Jackson was also shamelessly partisan in his administration of public
services, appointing party loyalists to such vital institutions as the
post office to replace perceived opponents. This would become the norm
for many years. Kazin writes,

Such blatant awarding of the spoils of office violated the Founding
Fathers’ ideal of politics as a public-spirited endeavor. […] But
however deplorable partisan patronage might be, it helped establish
the Jackson party as an institution with roots in nearly every corner
of the nation.

Justifiably, we frown at the spoils system as corrupt, especially
because today it’s dictated by the size of campaign donations. But
I’m sympathetic to Kazin’s point here: at a time when suffrage was
only just expanding, partisan patronage that rewarded grassroots
organizers was arguably the most effective way to politicize the
nation, pushing up voter turnout and other forms of political
participation, thereby strengthening democracy. The most evocative of
Kazin’s accounts of Democrats’ patronage-driven machine politics
is Tammany Hall, which was led by recent Irish immigrants and
dominated New York for over a century and a half.

Yet, the bigger the party became, the more conspicuous the disease at
the core of the project: no matter its size, this club was whites
only.

¤

The Democratic DNA changed in the early 20th century. The Populists,
who called for the railroads and telegraph to be nationalized, merged
with the Democrats around William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 presidential
campaign. Doing so, they introduced the genetic material for embracing
an active federal government role in the economy, which would find
expression in the 1930s during the Great Depression. The emergence of
an industrial labor movement was the defining event in this period,
with the Democrats becoming “the closest thing the United States
would ever have to a party dependent on the support of organized
labor.”

Women’s suffrage and political participation also realigned American
politics in the first half of the 20th century. After securing the
franchise, women campaigned less for women’s rights than for such
issues as public ownership of waterpower, job safety, a minimum wage,
and higher taxes on the wealthy. They formed and integrated women’s
clubs into local party machines, registered and mobilized voters, and
publicized Democratic achievements and positions through the powerful
new medium of radio.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal gathered and converted these forces
into a new social contract, the closest the United States came to a
welfare state. Union membership, now the Democratic backbone,
ballooned. After a gloomy 1920s of successive electoral defeats, the
Democrats would now enjoy a lasting majority. But although unions were
organizing and speaking for wage earners of all races, the Roosevelt
administration deliberately excluded Black people from the full
benefits of the New Deal in order to retain the South. It would take
three decades to exorcise that devil.

The labor and women’s movements are where Kazin is most engaged with
his material. One senses his delight in writing about the activities
of these campaigners and proponents like Sidney Hillman, Robert
Wagner, Frances Perkins, and Eleanor Roosevelt; entities like the
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations
(which would unify again in 1955 to form today’s AFL-CIO); and the
internal conflicts between new and traditional Democratic forces —
CIO, quipped one evangelical minister, stood for “Christ is Out.”

For large stretches of the book, however, Kazin offers just a panorama
of developments rather than going behind the scenes to give us the
sights and sounds. At an aerial view, a party history can easily
become a parallel history of the United States, over ground covered by
Lepore and many others. Robert Caro’s volumes on Lyndon Johnson
offer richer accounts of events on the streets as well as the smoky
backrooms of party politicking, particularly in midcentury.

There are also some strange omissions. While discussing Lincoln at
length, his assassination gets no mention, even though it provided
abolitionists a martyr and created, in Lepore’s words, “a religion
of emancipation.” The 13th Amendment ending slavery was ratified as
the nation mourned his death.

It would also have been worthwhile to tell readers of the Compromise
of 1877, which settled a disputed 1876 presidential contest between
the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden (whom
Kazin discusses in some depth). In return for accepting Hayes as the
victor, Southern Democrats negotiated a Republican pledge to remove
all federal troops from the South, consolidating Democratic control
over the region. Hayes made good on the deal two months into his
presidency. Reconstruction thus ended with one-party rule in the South
but also an accommodation in the two-party system that the scholars
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue enabled democratic
continuity. In _How Democracies Die_, they describe the Compromise of
1877 as an “original sin” that “permitted the de-democratization
of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow. Racial exclusion
contributed directly to the partisan civility and cooperation that
came to characterize twentieth-century American politics.” By the
1920s, when Democrats lost much of the West and industrial North,
their rule of the South ensured the two-party system’s survival.

In today’s divided and dysfunctional Congress, one can feel
nostalgic for an era of partisan civility. But reading this account of
the compromise, I was reminded of Israel Shahak’s response to
Christopher Hitchens’s question about Israeli politics — that
there were “some encouraging signs of polarization.” Bipartisan
cooperation can sometimes come at too steep a price.

The party leadership realized this by the second half of the 20th
century, a time when Southern Democrats still dominated congressional
committees and commanded major vote banks. The re-democratization of
the South would break the Democrats there, forecasted famously by
Lyndon B. Johnson as he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, declaring
that his party had just lost the South for a generation.

¤

It took time for the party to become internally democratic too. In
1960, a young senator from Massachusetts won the nomination that LBJ
believed was his by virtue of being the de facto party boss. It was
because John F. Kennedy campaigned in and won several primaries, which
in turn shaped delegates’ perceptions of his electability over that
of Johnson, who refused to contest a single primary. Robert Kennedy
pursued the 1968 nomination through the same approach as his brother.
His assassination immediately after winning the California Primary
returned the center of gravity to party backrooms. The Democrats were
bitterly divided between those who opposed LBJ’s Vietnam War (who
had supported Kennedy) and those who still defended it. In Hubert
Humphrey’s nomination, party bosses and delegates opted for
continuity.

But the internal divisions were manifest in the violent drama outside
the convention hall, as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s police charged
young protesters with batons and hosed them. After Humphrey’s loss
to Richard Nixon, the party formed a commission headed by George
McGovern to rethink the nomination process. From 1972, binding
primaries would determine the presidential nominee (in both parties).

But the party of labor would never recover from the conflicts of the
’60s, notwithstanding the unhappy Carter interregnum. Ronald
Reagan’s assault on unions accelerated a process that began with the
1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which restricted union recruiting and was
passed by a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans that
overcame Harry Truman’s veto. The New Democrats that emerged at the
end of that freewheeling decade, and took back the White House in
1992, appeared as friendly to Wall Street and almost as hostile to an
activist federal government as their opponents. Kazin doesn’t say
this explicitly, but one can deduce from his narrative that the death
of unions deprived the Democrats not only of a grassroots base but
also of a critical source of funding. Wall Street banks filled the
breach.

Kazin, a declared Democrat who, for “most of the past six decades,
through thick and thin, [has] done what [he] could to advance the
partisan cause,” seeks a path back to that golden age when his party
spoke clearly for the economic interests of “the ordinary working
person.” He writes, “To put political muscle and government
funding behind the Constitution’s vow ‘to promote the general
Welfare’ has been and remains the best way to unify Democrats and
win their candidates enough votes to make possible the creation of a
more caring society.”

This strikes me as a tad sentimental. Although the major progressive
reforms and institutions like Social Security, Medicaid, and Obamacare
remain popular and have survived Republican bids to dilute or
dismantle them, it hasn’t stopped those same Republicans from
winning office, appointing judges who are willing to nullify important
parts of these programs, and preventing Democratic majorities from
achieving legislative success. This includes blocking structural
reforms like ending the filibuster and partisan gerrymandering, which
would produce more responsive and representative government. And
anyone who believes that voters will put their welfare first may be
disabused by Arlie Russell Hochschild’s superb _Strangers in Their
Own Land_, where the author tries to understand the “Great
Paradox” of a destitute community in Louisiana that needs federal
help more any other, and yet whose members viscerally reject and vote
against it. They do so, Hochschild finds, out of a sense of honor in
surviving hardship without the humiliation of government assistance.

That said, there is no doubt that the Democrats need to present a
coherent progressive economic vision to complement the energy that
Black Lives Matter, environmental activists, and LGBTQ-plus rights
advocates have brought to the party. The absence of that vision
enabled insurgents like Bernie Sanders to almost win the presidential
nomination twice and, above all, Trump’s shocking 2016 victory. The
revival of labor drives Joe Biden’s economic agenda. Once the
epitome of Democratic centrism, he scored important progressive
victories in his first year. But his is a party that, as it once
accommodated both Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and George Wallace, today
accommodates both Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin. Sanders and Manchin
don’t represent as wide a gulf as the former two, but unifying the
conservative and left-wing factions long enough to produce a lasting
Biden legacy seems frustratingly elusive.

While the Democrats retain control of government, it is tempting to
apply the standards of an insurgency: Republicans win by not losing;
Democrats lose by not winning. What it took to win is one thing. In a
broken estate, to make change out of victory is another.

¤

_Shehryar Fazli is an author and political analyst who divides his
time between Canada and Pakistan._
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