An outsider candidate set against corporate influence in politics and the increasing concentration of wealth in this nation once transformed a directionless, regularly out-of-power Democratic Party. Could it happen again?
The politics of the Democratic Party of the late 19th century had little in common with the left-liberalism that would characterize it nationally from the start of the New Deal until the rise of neoliberalism in the later 20th century. Led by the conservative capitalist Bourbon Democrats, with support from Irish and German immigrants and white Southerners, the Party opposed many of the period’s prominent left-wing organizations and activists. Economist and speaker Henry George ran in 1886 for mayor of New York as the opposing United Labor Party candidate, while author and activist Edward Bellamy supported the agrarian Populist Party. Labor activists and anti-racists Lucy and Albert Parsons were both members of the Socialist Labor Party, and Knights of Labor leader Terence Powderly supported the Greenback-Labor Party, Populist Party, and eventually the Republican Party. How then, did the Democratic Party of big business absorb some of these progressive elements and become Roosevelt’s left-wing New Deal coalition within a few decades?
The answer lies in the work of U.S. Representative and later Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan who, in 1896, won the Democratic Presidential nomination at only 36. In 1892, Bryan was a party outsider who supported the Populist Party’s presidential nominee over conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland and was cross-nominated by the Populists in 1896. His platform included greater bank regulation, support for labor unions, farm relief, and an end to the gold standard. While he would lose the general election to Republican William McKinley, this 1896 primary upset and Bryan’s presidential nominations in 1900 and 1908 would elevate these progressive ideas and pull the party to the left— a move eventually cemented by FDR’s election as Governor of New York and then as president in 1928 and 1932.
After decades of little-interrupted conservatism in the United States since the 1970s, modern progressives have an opportunity to similarly re-energize and transform the Party. While Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run was ultimately unsuccessful electorally, elements of his platform have become increasingly popular and politically successful amongst Democrats both at the state level and nationally in the years since. One example is now-Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 platform in her high-profile primary upset against incumbent Joe Crowley, which included campaign-finance reform, Medicare for All, and tuition-free public universities. A second is the victory of former NAACP chair and Sanders-endorsed candidate Ben Jealous in a crowded Democratic primary to be nominated for Maryland governor. Jealous ran on a platform on Medicare for All, free public college, and a $15 minimum wage, though he was later defeated in the general election by incumbent Republican Larry Hogan. In the busy Democratic presidential race, numerous candidates have adopted Sanders policies to varying degrees, including expanding public spending on healthcare and college education.
The central challenge now facing this movement is to bring these progressive ideas to a wider audience without allowing them to be watered down. William Jennings Bryan’s success in the Progressive Era was in conveying the more radical ideas of earlier activists—for example, the Parsons, whose atheism and anarchism fouled their message amongst many Americans—to the general public using religious appeal and working within the two-party system, as historian Michael Kazin argues in American Dreamers. However, while Bryan’s work did facilitate the mainstreaming and eventual enactment of many of these left policies, his 1896 nomination by the Populist Party also led to its quick collapse, and Bryan himself, who had backed Populist presidential candidate James Weaver over Democrat and former President Grover Cleveland, was never fully accepted by the Democratic Party’s conservative wing. Over the subsequent decades, other leaders such as Woodrow Wilson would co-opt policies from the socialist and populist movement, enacting some genuine reforms such as an eight-hour workday, while ignoring other issues and regressing on some issue, including restricting civil liberties.
Sanders has for decades walked this thin line, and the future success of the modern progressive movement depends on its leaders’ continued ability to pursue greater influence and allies within the Democratic Party without making concessions on important issues of political and economic reform. Since her election, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed several progressive primary challengers in safely Democratic districts for 2020 including Jessica Cisneros, who is challenging sitting Democrat Henry Cuellar in Texas’s 28th district, and Marie Newman, who is challenging sitting Democrat Dan Lipinski in Illinois’s third district. Cisneros has also been endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Newman has been endorsed by both Sanders and Warren. Cuellar has opposed abortion rights, received an A rating from the National Rifle Association, and, as The Texas Tribune reported last year, assisted the 2018 fundraising efforts of Republican Representative John Carter, who ended up defeating Democratic challenger MJ Hegar by less than 3 points. Meanwhile, Lipinski voted against the Affordable Care Act and has opposed abortion and LGBT rights. While supporting challengers against incumbents may help move the Democratic Party ideologically, establishment centrists also have the power to hinder progressives — for example, many Maryland Democrats were slow to endorse progressive gubernatorial candidate Ben Jealous, never endorsed him, or even endorsed his Republican opponent, hurting his chances in 2018. As more progressives pursue office in 2020, it is yet to be seen how intraparty relations will affect their races.
Ongoing discussions of political labels are emblematic of this shift and its associated tensions within the Democratic Party. In the 2020 presidential race, some have pointed to Sanders’s use of the term Democratic Socialist as evidence that he is too far left for the American electorate. Other candidates have been clear to refute that label and refer to themselves as capitalists, including Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris, and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has used the term Democratic Capitalist to draw a clear ideological distinction. While candidates are free to identify with whatever label they choose for themselves, the weaponization of the term socialism, which has occurred in the United States for decades, jeopardizes the same progressive policies that many of them support. There is a point at which working to ensure an electable candidate and victory over Donald Trump becomes counterproductive, instead contributing to Republican characterizations of individual Democratic candidates and the party as a whole as extremist. During the 2018 Maryland gubernatorial campaign, Republicans benefited from this stigma. In an interview early in the race, Democrat Ben Jealous was recorded saying “Go ahead, call me a socialist. That doesn’t change the fact I’m a venture capitalist.” A Republican attack ad, designed to portray Jealous as too extreme for the state, then criticized his support for universal healthcare while playing a clip of only the first sentence out of context. While Sanders’s use of the term Democratic Socialist is somewhat ambiguous, given that his platform advocates a larger private sector than traditional socialism, many Democrats have continued the harmful weaponization of the term and have perpetuated a false choice between Soviet-style central planning and unrestrained capitalism. In addition, achieving moderate Democratic goals requires the existence of a progressive flank to pull the apparent center of politics away from the right— something that implementing anti-left scare tactics against fellow Democrats undermines.
The Democratic Party is currently in a moment of significant potential. Like Bryan’s party at the turn of the 20th century, it can rededicate itself to value working people over moneyed interests. But this can only happen if corporate loyalty and intraparty division driven by this transformation don’t stymie progressivism first.
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