The Democratic Party is going through one of its periodic convulsions, with an insurgent left battling for pre-eminence over a centrist establishment led by President Biden.Biden struggled to balance these two wings in his first year in office, often having to shuttle between one faction of lawmakers and another to forge compromise.There is no better example than his ill-fated promise to bind together two major pieces of legislation, Build Back Better and the infrastructure bill, in a kind of pinkie promise between progressives and moderates.Now, as Biden confronts the daunting challenge of holding his party together through a difficult midterm campaign season, his big-tent approach is getting support from one of the left’s most influential public intellectuals: the Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin.Kazin’s book, “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party,” traces the party’s evolution from its roots in the 1800s and argues that Democrats have been most successful when their wings have been united.But for a younger generation of progressive politicians, like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri, who came of age at a time of growing disillusion with the syrupy pace of electoral politics, unity hasn’t always been the path. Ocasio-Cortez was one of few Democrats who voted against the president’s infrastructure bill, and she has aggressively backed primary challengers to Democratic incumbents.Kazin concludes his book with a warning to his own side, that the party “can taste victory consistently only if its activists, candidates, and officeholders debate their differences without one side denouncing or seeking to purge one another.”What is the Democratic Party, anyway?
The book tries to link the party’s origins in Andrew Jackson’s fiery Southern populism to today’s cosmopolitan coalition of “college-educated people of all races in major metropolitan areas and Black and Hispanic working people,” as Kazin defines it.It’s a difficult throughline to draw. The distance between those two Democratic parties is vast, and Kazin must constantly temper his admiration for an institution founded on the idea “that the economy should benefit the ordinary working person” with his disgust for its past sins of supporting slavery and Jim Crow.The book’s very title hints at the moral compromises Kazin implies were necessary for the party to win power over its 194 years of existence, but it’s also a nod to “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s acclaimed account of the 1988 presidential race.The exercise of trying to connect the party’s distant past with its fractious present raises a fascinating question: What, exactly, is the Democratic Party? Is it a set of ideas? An institution? A coalition of certain types of voters?“It’s all those things,” Kazin said in an interview. “But the real question is: What does it stand for?” socialist’s answerKazin, who has edited the left-wing magazine Dissent for many years, comes to the project as a longtime activist and a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America. “My commitment to the Democrats is an ambivalent one, alloyed with regret and caution,” he confesses.So the book is not just a straightforward recounting of events — it doubles as a gentle manifesto in favor of what he calls “moral capitalism.”“Throughout their history,” Kazin argues, “Democrats won national elections and were competitive in most states when they articulated an egalitarian economic vision and advocated laws intended to fulfill it.”He wrestles with what Democrats must do to win back the white working-class voters who have been abandoning the party for decades and culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The debate often boils down to: Culture or economics? Identity or policy?In Kazin’s view, Democrats should embrace the kind of populism that has worked for Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a lonely blue survivor in a state that has grown ruby red over the last decade.“Democrats have to stand for economic programs that help people who would never think of voting for them,” even if the political payoffs are only incremental, he elaborated in our interview.It’s a discussion that inevitably runs into fraught territory. The cultural divide in the Democratic Party — between the well-educated elites who run it and the working-class base — has only deepened in recent years, and Republicans have been adept at exploiting that gap.Intellectuals like Ruy Teixeira argue that Democrats should forcefully rebuke progressive activists who have embraced politically unpopular slogans like “defund the police” — even if it means provoking a clash within the party.Kazin, an old friend ofBy: Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam
Title: From the Left, a Historian’s Plea for Democratic Party Unity
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/us/politics/biden-midterms-michael-kazin.html
Published Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2022 00:00:05 +0000
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