Why is the Democratic party in trouble?

A long form look at how the party ended up where it is today

Over the next week or so we’re sharing a long form version of how the Democratic party ended up where it is today — Democrats, the liberal party, FDR’s party of experimentation and change, have become stagnant, conservative in the traditional sense of being averse to change and innovation. How and why did this happen?

We’re dividing the analysis into six installments.

I. A brief review of party history up to 1964

II. The Democrats from 1964 to the new century

III. The aughts were a hopeful time, but problems lurked under the surface

IV. An electoral deadlock develops between the parties, to the Democrats’ disadvantage

V. 2024: A case study in party dysfunction

VI. The party establishment has its head in the sand, and concluding thoughts

We begin the story today by looking at the party’s roots going back to Andrew Jackson and even Thomas Jefferson, continuing to their greatest success in the New Deal era and the decades following. In the next installment we’ll look at the changes that began in the 1960s, changes that culminated in a takeover by an elite liberal element that has, we can see in retrospect, dominated the party for more than 50 years.

Democrats — the Grand Older Party
The Democratic Party’s history goes further back than the Republicans’ even though the Republican Party is often called the Grand Old Party. Democrats trace their lineage to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson; in fact, some state parties still have Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners to bring supporters together for fundraising and other purposes.

The party’s roots were in rural and small-town America, promoting the cause of the workingman, originally thought of as a small farmer or tradesman. Their guiding principle was protecting the states’ prerogative to control their domestic affairs free of federal interference. This idea was called “states’ rights.”

The key to the philosophy was the belief that the people’s “inalienable rights” were only secure if federal overreach was prevented, or at least reigned in. Government closer to the people at the state and local level was less likely to infringe on liberty. This concept was connected to the interests of the ordinary workingman, whose livelihood would be more of a priority in state government than in the far reaches of a federal government where urban commercial interests might hold sway. That regional and cultural divide between rural and urban America remains central to political differences to this day.

Democrats in the south
In the south (the 11 states that were part of the Confederacy, sometimes expanded to include border states such as Kentucky, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Maryland) the Democratic Party was the political force behind slavery. After slavery was abolished it eventually became the power behind the system of legal apartheid dividing the black and white races that began in those states around 1880. The region became known as the “Solid Democratic South,” a depiction that lasted until the 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement and federal legislation put an end to legal segregation.

Throughout that nearly 100-year period most officeholding southern Democrats held conservative positions across the board, not just on race issues: They were pro-defense, anti-union, and generally opposed to federal intervention in local affairs. There were a few elected officials who were populist in their economic policies, favoring redistribution of income, but most of those didn’t challenge the racial status quo.

Democrats outside the south
In other parts of the country Democrats evolved very differently as the 20^th century progressed. In the industrial north and middle-west they were apt to be pro-union and in favor of a range of government services. In some major cities – Chicago, for example – the party was instrumental in assimilating masses of immigrants from Poland, Ireland, and other European countries. In some places African Americans played a role in party machines, at least insofar as providing votes in exchange for jobs. With Catholics and Jews often serving in important leadership roles, Democrats were diverse in urban areas, especially as compared to the overwhelmingly white Protestant members of the party in the south. Blacks were denied the vote in that region – at least anywhere they resided in large numbers and posed a threat to white rule – until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To the extent blacks did vote in the south in those days it often was for Republicans.

For many years the Democratic party’s diverse regional elements managed to co-exist despite their profound differences in viewpoint and complexion at the state and local level. This was because of the party’s original philosophy that states should run their own affairs as they saw fit – a philosophy that extended to the state party units. The party did have some tumultuous national conventions from the late 1890s into the 1920s because of the widely varying views among the state parties, but as long as the more liberal members of the party didn’t meddle with the South’s system of segregation, accommodations of one sort or another were eventually reached.

Things began to get trickier in the 1930s when Franklin Roosevelt, a big government, pro-union liberal, dramatically expanded the reach of the federal government into states’ affairs with the New Deal policies that were implemented in response to the Depression. This was the change that leading southern Democrats had feared, as they believed it would be the first step toward the federal government trying again to desegregate the region.

But Roosevelt was very careful not to get into the internal affairs of southern states when it came to race relations. He had won all those states easily in 1932 – his support ranging from a low of 68% in Virginia to a high of 98% in South Carolina. But he knew that meddling in racial matters might well cost him and his party at the ballot box in future elections. The south stayed loyal in those days in part because it benefited immensely from New Deal federal largesse – it was by far the poorest region of the country and in dire need – but mostly because of the deep-seated animus white people in the region still felt toward Republicans. After all, they were the party that crushed the rebel cause in the Civil War.

Democrats in Congress in mid-20^th century America
At the congressional level what had developed in the middle decades of the 20^th century was a Democratic party that had some of the most liberal people in the House and Senate, pro-union followers of Roosevelt who supported an expanded federal role, and some of the most conservative. The 125 or so southern Democrats in the House and Senate were almost uniformly strict segregationists and suspicious of the federal government imposing union requirements or meddling in education, health, and other areas.

The arrangement that made this so-called New Deal coalition possible wasn’t that complicated: Rural Democrats agreed to vote for funding urban programs if urban Democrats would reciprocate on the priorities of their southern and western party colleagues. It was also commonsense — I can’t get my programs without your vote and you can’t get yours without mine. Deal. In addition, by holding together the party could more easily retain a majority in Congress and all the perquisites that came with that – chairing committees, issuing subpoenas, conducting investigations, and determining which legislation came up for consideration.

1948-1964: Cracks form in the New Deal
Cracks in the coalition began to form in the immediate post-World War II period. President Harry Truman desegregated the military in 1948 by executive order, and at the Democratic convention that same year then-mayor of Minneapolis Hubert Humphrey offered a civil rights platform plank that precipitated a walk out of some southern delegations. Ultimately South Carolina’s Democratic Governor Strom Thurmond ran as a “Dixiecrat” for president, winning four states in the deep south. Truman still managed to win the election, but losing those usually reliable southern states was a harbinger of things to come.

Democrats managed to keep the New Deal coalition together in the 1950s despite some inroads at the presidential level by Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 and 1956 elections. The southern delegations in the Congress remained almost entirely Democratic, as the Republican party had made little progress below the presidential level in the region – and in fact were barely organized and rarely even offered up candidates.

The 1950s saw many contentious debates in Congress on the major issues of the day, including the role of the federal government in education, in regulating the economy, and in the status of civil rights for African-Americans. But those debates did not break neatly along party lines. Both parties had liberals and conservatives who took different stances on these issues. The coalitions in support of this or that specific policy shifted constantly as a result. Congress and the country were polarized on many important questions, but that polarization was often not along party lines.

The parties begin to sort ideologically
That all began to change in the 1960s as a dynamic called “ideological sorting” began. The newly-elected administration of John Kennedy, after some fits and starts, took a clear position in favor of civil rights in June 1963. He declared civil rights a “moral issue” on national television in the aftermath of the brutal Birmingham police riot that featured attacks on peaceful demonstrators opposing segregation in public accommodations.

Following Kennedy’s assassination in November of that year President Lyndon Johnson wasted no time pushing hard for federal legislation ending legal segregation. In hindsight, we can see that 1964 was when the process of ideological sorting that resulted in conservatives abandoning the Democrat party and liberals abandoning the Republicans began in earnest. This dynamic applied not just to civil rights but also to other issues.

To summarize this watershed moment:

1. Johnson, a Democratic president – and a southern one at that (he was from Texas) – put his considerable political capital and skills behind the Civil Rights Act, legislation that would end legal segregation in the South. He told aides privately that, by supporting this bill, he had lost the South for the Democratic party for a generation. (As it turned out he underestimated.)

2. The Democratic party, traditionally the party of states’ rights, moved for the first time at its national convention to penalize a state party for refusing to seat an African American in its delegation. The all-white Mississippi delegation was challenged by a racially-mixed rump group, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which protested the segregationist policies of the state party. Up until that time, the national party had heeded each state’s right to choose its own delegation without interference. The central tenet of the party – states’ freedom from national control – was for all intents and purposes jettisoned.

3. The Republicans nominated a resolutely small-government, anti-New Deal, pro-states’ rights conservative for president, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

The result of these events was that the national Democratic party moved unmistakably in a liberal direction, upstaging the conservative wing of the party at the ’64 convention and in Congress. Conversely, the Republican party went full force against its liberal elements in nominating Goldwater.

While not immediately evident, in the fullness of time these changes proved lasting. Ever since at the national level in presidential campaigns Democrats have been pro-civil rights, liberal on social issues (abortion, rights of the accused, gay rights, and so on), and strongly in favor of government intervention in the economy.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: The Democrats from 1964 to the new century