An excerpt from “What Happened to the Democratic Party? The squalid state of our present political institutions points to a failure of not just individuals but the system as a whole” by Chris Lehman at The Nation:
Two new books make this crisis of institutional atrophy and ideological entropy their central theme. In Left Adrift, the historian Timothy Shenk chronicles the Democratic Party’s path to a working-class dealignment—perhaps the single greatest demographic shift that sparked the rise of Trumpism as a bogus brand of right-wing “populism.” Meanwhile, in The Hollow Parties, the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld examine the broader drift of both major parties from their traditional mandates of building mass coalitions, promulgating policy agendas to serve their grassroots bases, and recruiting and cultivating leaders with material connections to those bases.
Both books ask how our political parties, which once represented somewhat coherent and wide-ranging coalitions and political ideas, morphed into zombie-like institutions that fundraise and battle over shrinking segments of the electorate while stage-managing random culture-war contretemps in each new election cycle. Both books also wonder if the return to an era of majoritarian party politics has become an unrealizable dream in the blighted 21st century. In past eras of modern liberalism’s history, the central protagonists would have been party leaders, such as Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson, or pivotal movement figures, such as Sidney Hillman or Martin Luther King Jr. But in our own age of retreating governing ambitions and malleable party messaging, it makes a grim kind of sense to foreground the thinking of hired-gun political strategists like Greenberg and Schoen, who have played an outsize role in the steady miniaturization of our public life.
For Shenk, these two men—bitter rivals for clout and clients in the retooling Democratic Party of the Clinton era—understood better than many traditional New Dealers in the party’s leadership caste that a massive, if slow-moving, political realignment was under way: the party’s abandonment of its traditional working-class base and its embrace of a professional, highly educated elite. This turn to a new breed of voters—“Atari Democrats,” as the journalist Chris Matthews called them—marked an ideological transformation in the party as well as a social one: Democrats began to preach a gospel of cultural tolerance and demographic diversity, even as they broke from basic issues of economic fairness. The party’s activist base, now broadly maligned as a backward-looking congeries of “special interests,” were replaced by a cadre of Ivy Leaguers weaned on the fables of a new information economy and avowing a politics of free trade, cheap labor, and a financialized model of national prosperity.
Greenberg, who came of political age during Eugene McCarthy’s incendiary anti-war presidential campaign in 1968, accepted this political shift as it gained traction in the Reagan era. But he did so from a defensive posture, seeking to persuade candidates and clients to echo vintage Democratic populist appeals in a last-ditch bid to arrest the dealignment of working-class voters from the party. Meanwhile, Schoen, a scion of Manhattan privilege, cheerfully welcomed the shift as the new consensus delimiting future Democratic agendas, policy goals, and political campaigns.
Using data gleaned from polls, Greenberg laid out his case for a more social-democratic path to winning back the working-class and suburban “Reagan Democrats” who had helped deliver Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980. In a series of focus-group studies in the suburban Detroit communities of Macomb County, he found many of these voters still receptive to universalist appeals to economic fairness and social-democratic equality—but wary of the racialized remedies and social-engineering planks of the Great Society. Writing in The American Prospect in the early 1990s, Greenberg divined the lineaments of a new “mass party, encompassing the needs of the have-nots and working Americans,” even as Democratic leaders pursued the interests of a new base of professionals and suburbanites. What was needed, Greenberg argued, was a party that “can speak expansively of broad, cross-class issues, such as full employment, tax relief, and health care.” But for that message to come through loud and clear to its target voters, Democrats had to purge “the demons of the 1960s.” As Shenk sums up Greenberg’s prescription for a renewed majoritarian platform in the pinched realities of the Reagan era:
Disillusioned white voters would not listen to what Democrats had to say about economics until the party showed respect for their values. A shift to the center on polarizing social issues was the price of admission for resurrecting the New Deal coalition. [Greenberg] had seen time and again in his work that class wasn’t just a matter of economics. It was an identity, and a fragile one at that. Getting voters to hear its call required turning down the volume in the culture wars.
Greenberg’s analysis was steeped in the anxious postmortems that the party launched after Reagan’s powerful new coalition made strong inroads among Democrats in the 1980s. But the presuppositions behind his counsel reflected a constrained and fast-obsolescing view of working-class politics and interests—and even of who was and who was not in the working class. While plenty of white workers fit into the Macomb model, the country’s working class was also composed of many groups who benefited from the Great Society’s programs. Likewise, the work of the working class was shifting as the service economy grew; the financialization of key sectors caused wage and wealth inequality to spike; and rural Americans were laid low by the farm crisis—a calamity compounded by the deregulation of the savings-and-loan industry. These other constituencies—far more complex and diverse than the ones found in a place like Macomb County—loomed large in the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s insurgent presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. They also served as a reminder that Greenberg’s version of a retrenched New Deal politics risked overlooking the actual makeup of working-class America.
….Meanwhile, class dealignment continued at a prodigious pace during Clinton’s two terms in the White House. Greenberg charted this baleful process closely, but he was largely left exhorting Democratic campaign gurus from the sidelines as Schoen and Penn’s argument won the day and Clintonite neoliberalism became the party’s savvy insider consensus. As the 2016 Trump campaign drew greater and greater support from disenchanted white working-class voters, Greenberg told John Podesta, the head of Hillary Clinton’s campaign that year, “You sound clueless in blue-collar America,” and later announced in The American Prospect that “the Obama years were the critical juncture when Democratic leaders stopped seeing the working class.” As Shenk observes, “Bill Clinton had managed to hold off the shift in the 1990s, but a gap had opened after his presidency that turned into a chasm in 2016.”
Even as the Democrats continued to lose more and more of the working class, Shenk tracks how the Greenberg-Schoen battle went abroad. The consultants’ own practices became global as they took on electoral clients in Israel (Labor and Kadima leader Shimon Peres and his embattled successor, Ehud Barak), Britain (New Labour’s lead apostle Tony Blair), and South Africa—where Greenberg worked with African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, before defecting in the face of mounting ANC corruption and ruling-class complacency to represent the first Black candidate fielded by the country’s traditional white rival party, Democratic Alliance.
Read more here.
