How Did the Democrats Get Here?

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: In what sense is the left “adrift” today?

Tim Shenk: Sometimes I think of the left as a restaurant with a suspiciously large number of items on the menu. If the same place is selling fettuccine alfredo, lamb vindaloo, barbecue chicken, and pork tonkatsu, you’re going to wonder what’s going on with the kitchen. Try to do everything, and you’ll just end up confused.

And this gets to why I think “adrift” captures the state of the left today. It’s not that we’re lacking for important goals; it’s that we have so many, and no consensus about priorities. This kind of diversity is a strength up to a point, especially for Democrats trying to piece together an electoral majority in a complex and sprawling country like the United States. But there needs to be an overarching vision, something to tie all the loose threads together.

Everyone makes fun of politicians for saying that the next election is the most important of our lifetimes. But I’ve lost track of the number of “defining struggles of our age” that I’ve heard lectures about during the 20-odd years that I’ve been following politics.

Setting priorities is especially difficult today because of a change that’s taken place in the Democratic coalition: the loss of working-class voters and the influx of educated professionals. This hasn’t stopped Democrats from moving left pretty much across the board over the last decade, but it’s a serious obstacle to building a durable majority that could pass structural reforms, and it raises hard questions about why so many people the left wants to speak for are moving toward Republicans.

DSJ: Is there a historical moment where the drift, in your opinion, commenced?

TS: The central point to keep in mind is that parties don’t naturally sort themselves into the haves and have-nots. Class is always a crucial sociological fact, but in politics it’s usually just one of many factors shaping electoral coalitions, alongside race, religion, gender, region, and a host of other issues. That’s true for most of American history, and it’s also the case for much of the world today, especially in wealthy countries.

In the United States, the story of Democratic troubles with the working class goes all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. His first reelection campaign, in 1936, was probably the most economically stratified in American history. But in his second term, as the conversation shifted from the Great Depression to World War II, blue-collar whites skeptical about foreign intervention gave Republicans a second look. At the same time, cracks were opening up in the old, solidly Democratic South. Roosevelt still did well enough to win two more terms, and Harry Truman proved that the New Deal coalition would show up when FDR wasn’t on the ballot, but the strain was showing by the time Adlai Stevenson—nobody’s idea of a working-class hero—became the Democratic standard-bearer.

Having said all that, the 1960s were still a turning point. Tensions that had been simmering for decades came to a boil in 1968, when Richard Nixon and George Wallace (as the candidate for the American Independent Party) won a combined 57 percent of the vote, pointing the way toward a new Republican majority with a decidedly blue-collar bent. The underlying logic was obvious to observers from across the left and right from the start. In 1970, for instance, the political scientist Walter Dean Burnham predicted that dividing the parties around “a polarized cultural conflict” would pit “peripheral regions against the center, ‘parochials’ against ‘cosmopolitans,’ blue-collar whites against both blacks and affluent liberals…a top-bottom coalition against a ‘great middle.’”

Sounds familiar, right?

Cultural polarization isn’t the whole story. Some of the most influential Democrats of the last 50 years—from Gary Hart and other self-described neoliberals in the 1970s down to the New Democrats of the Clinton years—defined themselves in opposition to New Deal economics, at least rhetorically. (Once again, this story goes back farther than we often think: By FDR’s second term, liberals were already moving away from the structural reforms of the early New Deal, and John F. Kennedy said that the economic controversies of the 1930s were obsolete in the 1960s.) It’s fine with me if you want to call this a neoliberal turn, and it undoubtedly hurt Democrats with the working class. But I’m with Burnham on the overriding significance of cultural polarization. Neoliberalism took a bad problem and made it worse, but the origins of the challenge lie elsewhere.

DSJ: You argue that “Bill Clinton and Tony Blair might talk about globalization in a different way than Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, but their politics revolved around a similar set of figures: clueless elites, an alienated public, and politicians who could exploit the gap between the two.” How important are the 1990s for understanding changes on the left, along with the wider political crisis in the US?

TS: Absolutely crucial, because this was the moment when a generation of politicians who came of age as class-based voting was fading got their chance to run the show. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are the key figures in the US and the UK. Their major economic policies have been discussed at length, and so have their costs. Free trade sent deindustrialization into overdrive, excessive deference to financial markets cleared the way for the Great Recession, and nobody came up with a plan for reviving organized labor. The economic boom of the 1990s covered up these weaknesses in the short term, but a system dependent on inflating asset bubbles while ignoring the decline of unions couldn’t deliver meaningful gains for workers over the long run.

But there’s another part of the story, which I don’t think has received the attention it deserves: the political strategy that gave Clinton and Blair the opportunity to put these policies into action. Because even if these two deserve membership in the neoliberal hall of fame, their electoral coalitions looked a lot like the old Democratic and Labour parties. Yes, they made significant gains with educated professionals, but their base was still the working and lower class.

This didn’t come about by accident. Reversing losses with downscale voters was an essential part of both their strategies. There’s a line from one of Clinton’s first speeches in the presidential race that I always come back to: “We have a solemn responsibility to honor the values and promote the interests of the people who elected us.”

It’s often forgotten today, but when Clinton was running in the 1992 Democratic primary, college-educated suburbanites were his weak spot. His greatest strengths were with blue-collar whites and African Americans. This means the road to neoliberalism runs through a coalition of the multiracial working class.

None of this lets Clinton (or Blair, or anyone else) off the hook. In fact, it makes the critique even sharper—not only did they fail to deliver for workers over the long run; they also betrayed the people who put them in office, giving right-wing populists like Trump and Boris Johnson more material to work with down the road. But it means the left shouldn’t just write them off as a bunch of corrupt hacks doing the bidding of Wall Street. The story is a lot more complicated, and there are lessons to learn from what they did right, along with their mistakes.

DSJ: To what extent is there an actual party realignment taking place today? What, for instance, do you make of the polls that show increasing support among Blacks and Latinos for Trump? To put it differently, are reports of realignment overblown or confusing realignment with dealignment?

TS: Let’s start by defining our terms. In political science lingo, “realignment” means a durable shift in the makeup of partisan electoral coalitions, while “dealignment” refers to a breakdown in old patterns that doesn’t give rise to a sustainable alternative, and “class dealignment” means the more specific shift of working-class voters to the right and college graduates to the left.

Republicans have been saying that a realignment is about to make working-class voters into the basis of a new conservative majority since the 1960s, and this kind of talk has grown even louder in the last few years. But even the best-case scenarios for Trump have him losing with Hispanic voters and being demolished with African Americans. He’s doing better with those groups than Republicans have grown accustomed to, and marginal improvements can decide the outcome of an election, but they’re not the stuff of a true realignment.

Still, Republican gains with working-class voters over the last decade are significant, and so is the Democratic improvement with educated professionals. Between 2012 and 2022, for instance, Democratic congressional candidates lost six points among voters without college degrees, with the biggest declines coming from African Americans and Hispanics. At the same time, the party improved with white college graduates by five points.

Even though people like Walter Dean Burnham saw that cultural polarization could turn Democrats into a top-bottom coalition while giving Republicans an edge with the broad middle, the process was supercharged in the Trump years. I think of it like a horror movie: In the 1960s, Democrats wandered into the spooky mansion built on top of the Native American burial ground, and then in 2016, Hillary Clinton decided to check out those funny noises coming from the basement.

Again, I still believe that talk about a post-racial working-class realignment is overblown, especially when we don’t know how the 2024 campaign is going to shake out. Some polls show the education gap widening even farther with Harris; others show her narrowing it down. There’s not going to be a definitive answer until well after the election, and we would all benefit from holding off on the big pronouncements until after the returns are in. But the class composition of both parties has changed in major ways, and there’s nothing to be gained from denying it.

DSJ: The protagonists of your story are the political consultants Stanley Greenberg and Douglas Schoen, who both worked for Clinton’s campaigns in the 1990s. What do they tell us about the transformation of the left that we don’t already know?

TS: First off, they drive home the point that we’ve been arguing about these questions for a long, long time. Greenberg and Schoen were right there with Walter Dean Burnham tracking the decline of class-based voting in real time—Greenberg starting with research he did for Bobby Kennedy’s campaign in 1968 while he was a graduate student at Harvard; Schoen with an excellent doctoral dissertation that he wrote at Oxford in the 1970s on anti-immigrant populism in the UK.

What happened next is even more important. Both Greenberg and Schoen went into political consulting, beginning in the US and then going international. Both launched businesses with partners who are more well-known outside the political class—in Greenberg’s case, James Carville; for Schoen, Mark Penn. Both viewed class dealignment as a potentially fatal threat to the Democrats and other center-left parties, and both came up with strategies for defusing it.

This is where the similarities end. Greenberg was a class-first leftist who mixed work for mainstream Democrats like RFK with a reading list that took him deep into the Marxist canon. Even as his politics moderated over the years, he held on to his belief that the Democrats could still be a bottom-up party dedicated to fighting for working people. He came up with a plan for reviving the FDR coalition by encouraging his clients—including Bill Clinton in 1992—to run as economic populists and cultural moderates, with the hope that turning down the volume in the culture wars would allow voters to hear an appeal to class interests.

Schoen had a different strategy, which he helped put into effect in Clinton’s 1996 campaign, after Greenberg had been sidelined following the 1994 midterm debacle. Schoen thought there was no use trying to bring back New Deal politics in Reagan’s America. Instead, Democrats had to move to the center on both the economic and cultural fronts, taking the strongest issues for Republicans off the table and claiming the middle ground for themselves. He didn’t promise a working-class realignment, just a temporary victory over cultural polarization that kept down losses with downscale voters while eating into Republican margins with professionals.

Lots of other center-left parties faced versions of this dilemma, and they often looked to American consultants to help them work through it, including Greenberg and Schoen. The UK and Israel are two cases I talk about at length in the book, but there were plenty of other examples I could have chosen. And even when those parties took a neoliberal turn on policy, some of their chief political strategists were preoccupied with the issue of class dealignment.

DSJ: In a sense, the debate between Greenberg and Schoen is quite an old one. I’m reminded of Max Weber’s distinction—in the early 20th century—between the ethics of conviction versus the ethics of responsibility. The former suggests that politics must be driven by ideological commitments, while the latter involves a kind of pragmatic approach that accepts compromise among competing ideals. Isn’t the latter perspective essentially the modus vivendi of the Democratic establishment today, which explains why it drifted into neoliberalism and forever wars? What, in other words, are the limits of compromise for the purpose of winning elections, if those compromises are no longer democratic?

TS: What drew me to Greenberg and Schoen is that they scramble the Weberian categories in fascinating ways. There’s a consistent ideological strain in Greenberg’s work, but he wasn’t above working for corporate clients like Monsanto or neoliberals like former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who was driven out of power following a military crackdown on protesters that led to 60 deaths. (For more on this, check out the documentary Our Brand Is Crisiswhich should be required viewing for fans of the 1992 Clinton campaign documentary The War Room.)

As for Schoen, even though he was happy to play the part of political mercenary, it’s possible to discern an ideological project in his work. I think he sincerely believes in the virtues of finding the middle ground and building a consensus. That’s not my politics, but almost a decade into the Trump show, I have a much better understanding of why people would find it compelling.

And for all their differences, Greenberg and Schoen also share an understanding of democracy that doesn’t fit with how the term is often understood on the left, where it’s regularly used as a synonym for “stuff that we like.” Your question, for instance, sets up a contrast between compromises to win elections and some authentically democratic alternative. But a compromise to win elections only works if a candidate has found something that most voters support, which you could say is the essence of democracy.

There are two competing understandings of democracy at work here. One is a normative version of democracy: a system that favors inclusive and egalitarian policies and is shaped by an ongoing dialogue with activists pushing from the outside. The alternative definition is more of an empty vessel: democracy as a system for turning public opinion into public policy, even when the majority’s preferences make our side queasy.

DSJ: What does that imply about Republican support for presidential nominee Kamala Harris? Is welcoming Dick Cheney into the coalition just the price of defeating Trump, or is it another sign of a left that’s lost touch with its guiding principles?

TS: A bit of both, but I also don’t think we have to worry about it too much in the short run. Harris can and should work to win over disaffected working-class voters who feel alienated from the political establishment—there are lots of Obama-Trump voters out there—while also letting every single Romney-Clinton voter know about the Cheney endorsement. It’s a question of making sure that people who have the economy as their top issue see Harris as more than the candidate of this ungainly coalition of Dick Cheney and Charli XCX.

In the long term, though, it’s hard for me to see how Democrats can fight class dealignment while defending the establishment. A professionalized Democratic coalition is going to have a hard time plausibly presenting itself as anything but a caretaker of the status quo—the party of “everything is fine, so long as we have the right people in charge.” But Americans have been telling pollsters that the country is on the wrong track for 20 years, and those frustrations are highest in the working class.

DSJ: What is the way forward for the left to move beyond the drift and find a new course for a new political age?

TS: Speaking to the legitimate anger of voters who know they’re playing a game rigged in favor of the powerful, and recognizing that we can’t get everything we want all at once. I’m not saying that mindlessly following the polls is the answer, either for Democrats or the left. But another case where Greenberg and Schoen agree—and where I think they’re right—is that populist movements erupt when the political class falls out of step with public opinion on issues that voters care about. People believe they live in a democracy, and they get angry when they aren’t being heard.

The left has an obligation to take this question seriously, because we want—or at least I think we should want—to give people control over their own lives. This means a life they choose for themselves, not one we impose from above. That’s never going to work in a democracy over the long run, and it doesn’t fit with the ideals that should guide the left.

The good news is that public opinion isn’t carved in granite. Just look at the revolution in attitudes toward LGBTQ rights that’s occurred over the last generation. Persuasion is possible—but it’s a lot easier when you take the time to understand the people you’re trying to persuade. That means listening, not lecturing, along with figuring out which battles are worth waging today, and how to best make your case.

What’s the reward of all this? Taking the wind out of the right-wing populist revolt, for one. Restoring the frayed connection between the left and ordinary workers, for another. No single candidate can force this shift, especially when voters are primed to believe that politicians will say anything to get elected. It requires a movement that runs candidates up and down the ballot, reinforced by activists who hold politicians accountable, and then delivers for ordinary people after taking office: improving living standards over the short term, increasing worker power over the long term.

So it’s a tall order. But I wrote Left Adrift because I think we can win this fight—and the time to start is now.