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MotherJones.com / News / Feature

Life of the Party
Democrats need to start acting more like the people¹s party they once were
-- and less like a traveling road show that packs up after each election.

Michael Kazin
January/February 2005 Issue

Listening to the Democratic nominees during the 2004 presidential campaign,
it often seemed as if they were ashamed to belong to their own political
party. In his acceptance speech, John Kerry boasted that he ³broke with many
in my own party² to support a balanced budget and ridiculed the idea of
³Democratic values² and ³Republican values.² John Edwards gave a rousing
concession speech -- but didn¹t even bother to invoke the party¹s name.

The other side never makes that mistake. The day after the election, Dick
Cheney, one of the savvier, as well as most savage, politicians in America,
began his brief victory remarks by thanking his fellow Republicans and
saluting them for piling up larger majorities in both houses of Congress. In
doing so, he highlighted a key difference between GOP partisans and the
Democrats they had just routed: Today¹s Republican Party is in large part
the creation of a highly disciplined and motivated movement. Since the rise
of Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s, conservative activists have worked
diligently to fuse their own goals with the success of their party.

By contrast, even the fervor of this election couldn¹t obscure the fact that
in much of America, the Democratic Party was a glittering shell. Neglected
amid the rush to explain Kerry¹s defeat was the simple fact that he didn¹t
have a strong, broadly rooted party behind him. Certainly, the grim-faced
senator lacked charisma, felt uncomfortable talking about God, and was
crippled by his region and his past as a war protester. But no candidate
runs by himself. The party is the rock on which he or she stands or falls.

Alas, the Democrats in 2004 were more like a collection of pebbles. Few of
the volunteers who poured in to help defeat George W. Bush had worked in a
presidential campaign before or were committed to the party itself; most
were loyal to a particular cause, from gay rights to global warming. Kerry¹s
managers showed great zeal at raising money and getting movie stars to stump
and rock musicians to sing for their man. Yet George Soros, Ashton Kutcher,
and even Bruce Springsteen also reinforced the GOP¹s caricature of the
Democrats as a party that caters more to rich celebrities than to ordinary
people.

It wasn¹t always this way. Through most of its history, the Democratic Party
was the natural home of hard-pressed, unglamorous America -- manual workers,
dirt farmers, small businessmen just a bad month away from bankruptcy court.
Known during the 19th century simply as ³the Democracy,² it all but invented
the repertoire of mass politics with such innovations as storefront offices,
precinct captains, and torchlight parades. The party embraced immigrants,
Catholics in particular, who were set upon by ³anti-Papist² mobs and
moralists who tried to outlaw their saloons. Most Democratic stalwarts were
male, and nearly all were white. But they still proudly considered
themselves the bone and sinew of a ³people¹s party.²

>From the end of the Civil War to World War I, the GOP took hold of the
fastest-growing, most prosperous areas of the nation, and Democrats seldom
won the presidency. Their core electoral base was in the former Confederacy,
a fact that tarnished their claim to be the defenders of the hardworking
masses against the privileges of a few. But that changed with the Great
Depression, when a booming labor movement -- which welcomed workers of every
race and religion -- re-created the party in the industrial heartland with
its numbers and insurgent spirit. Cities and counties that hadn¹t voted
Democratic in decades, if ever, became mainstays of the coalition that
elected FDR and Truman, JFK and Johnson, and a stream of governors,
senators, and local officials. This sea change took hold in steel towns like
Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, the auto capital Detroit, and such commercial
metropolises as San Francisco and Philadelphia. It was the Democrats¹ golden
age. And the party¹s officeholders kept faith with their constituents. They
enacted policies that made workplaces more democratic and the elderly more
secure, ended official Jim Crow, and lifted millions of Americans into the
middle class.

Since the 1960s, the decline of organized labor has eaten away at the
Democratic Party¹s populist foundation. Strong unions didn¹t just furnish
Democrats with an ample supply of precinct workers. They established social
class, rather than faith or ³moral values,² as the crucial difference
between their party and the GOP. Republicans, the venerable party of big
business, would surely not have carried West Virginia in 2004 (or 2000) by
vowing to defend the Second Amendment and stop lesbian weddings if the
United Mine Workers still reigned in the coal-fields. The ebbing of labor¹s
clout has also made Democrats underdogs in Missouri and Ohio, states they
routinely carried back in the glory days.

Every campaign season, liberal idealists and political pros -- admakers,
pollsters, and fundraisers -- keep the Democratic edifice upright and
presentable. But the party still has not found a constituency with the size,
geographic spread, and resources to take labor¹s place.

Until 2004, most progressive activists didn¹t seem particularly concerned
about this. Many voted for Democrats with a yawn and a shrug, if not a
curse. Others dithered with third parties or imagined that electoral
politics had little to do with everyday life. We can thank George W. Bush
for blasting that illusion.

The upsurge of progressive activism in the 2004 campaign was quite thrilling
to behold. First-time activists worked alongside veteran organizers to make
the case against the incumbent, register new voters, and get them to the
polls. But, like any new movement, this one was a freelance affair,
haphazardly coordinated and badly in need of the direction only a strong,
motivated party can provide.

In Ohio, which decided the election by fewer than 140,000 votes, the
extra-party organizations had to do most of the work themselves. Not a
single Democrat holds statewide office there; the only Buckeye icon Kerry
could bring to his rallies was John Glenn, the elderly space hero who
retired from the Senate back in 1998. The campaign did pay $500 a week to
canvassers who helped turn out a big vote in the black neighborhoods of
Cleveland. But a crack organizer from Los Angeles spearheaded the effort,
not local Democrats.

I spent Election Day making calls from my Washington suburb to inner-city
Clevelanders whom the Democrats believed to be currently registered. The
list I was given was rotten with the deceased and the departed. At least
half the phone numbers on it were wrong. By contrast, the Bush campaign in
Ohio relied on some 85,000 in-state volunteers whose sole job was to contact
their neighbors and ensure that they got to the polls and voted right. You
can do the math.

The need to redemocratize the Democratic Party is as urgent as the task of
shoring up its tattered infrastructure. Polls show that a majority of
Americans disagree with President Bush on critical domestic issues: They
want to guarantee health insurance to every citizen, they oppose turning
Social Security over to the vagaries of the stock market, they think the
minimum wage is too low, and they want to boost teachers¹ salaries. Only
when the debate turns to terrorism and homosexuality do voters favor the
GOP. Yet the Democratic Party has done little to show ordinary Americans
that it desires their ideas and participation as much as their votes. In
states that voted solidly for Bush, knots of liberal activists can be found
mostly in college towns and capital cities, listening to National Public
Radio, reading the New York Times, and shuddering at Bible-spouters in the
outer suburbs and on the farms. Meanwhile, Republicans sew up veterans
groups, hunters, and small businesses, as well as white Protestants. Judging
from the polls, they are even starting to attract upwardly mobile Hispanics
who regularly attend church.

The United States remains a nation with an evangelical soul, a fact that
liberals ignore at their peril. But it is also a nation whose citizens
revere volunteerism and local decision making and mistrust politicians who
craft their ads and speeches to fit the latest survey. A reborn Democratic
Party would draw ideas and energy from states and local communities,
enlisting candidates and organizers who share the values and language of the
people whose votes they¹ll be seeking. It could sponsor comedy nights and
dance parties and debates about whether one can support gay marriage and
still be a good Christian; throw street festivals at which every immigrant
society, sportsmen¹s club, church, temple, and mosque feels welcome; offer a
place for seniors to meet and for community organizers to gather. In a word,
it could act a great deal more like the people¹s party of old, and less like
a traveling circus that folds its tents after the first Tuesday in November.

Progressives who dedicate themselves to building such a party may not elect
the next president. But they will be matching their political dreams and
electoral aspirations to institutional reality. They will also dispel the
toxic notion that they are cultural elitists who think about fleeing America
whenever conservatives win a presidential election. They might even make the
Democracy live up to its name.

Michael Kazin passed out leaflets for Adlai Stevenson on the streets of
Englewood, New Jersey, at the age of eight and now teaches history at
Georgetown University. He is currently at work on a biography of William
Jennings Bryan.

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This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress,
the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like
you.

© 2005 The Foundation for National Progress

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