Neal Meyer

Especially in congressional elections. In congressional elections, this is the reason why Democrats dominated every single congressional election, with only a few exceptions, between 1933 and 1994.

People forget that. They think it’s a law of politics that parties have to swing back and forth in terms of control of Congress. That wasn’t true. For almost sixty years, the Democrats had basically a lock on Congress, because they had a strong base in the working class that reliably voted for Democrats year in and year out.

In presidential elections, the story is a little bit different. The Democrats did poorly after Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, after the upheavals of the 1960s; Democrats did poorly in many of the following presidential elections. Democrats lost a majority of white working-class and white middle-class voters alike in presidential elections.

But there’s still a class polarization in that vote. Even though they’re losing a majority of white voters of both classes in those presidential elections, they’re gaining a disproportionate share of support from white working-class voters still. If you’re a middle-class white person, you’re still much more likely to vote for the Republican presidential candidate. So the South was a more competitive region of the country than it had been previously, but the Democrats were still clearly the majority party in the South. That trend we’re talking about here is true nationally as well.

Neal Meyer

There are a couple problems with that account. One is that it radically glosses over all the problems that regular people have been experiencing in the last thirty years.

We still have a working-class majority in this country. Their occupations may have changed, but their struggles are the same. They’re still struggling with health care costs, with bad bosses, with low wages. The party is still confronting an electorate that’s majority working class, and it needs to think about how to win in those conditions.

The important thing here is that the party’s economic program really came first. So in 1993, Clinton comes into power. Democrats push through this very capital-friendly, business-friendly economic program, and then in ’94 they reap what they sowed.

They were conscious of that. There are these memos and interviews, oral-history accounts of people in the White House at the time, and they are talking about how even in ’93, they knew what was going to happen with NAFTA, with budget austerity. They knew they were going to lose a lot of working-class voters.

Neal Meyer

Yeah. There’s a natural affinity there, too, between the program that they had pursued and this new base that they’re searching for. And they talk a lot about this — they talk about these suburban voters, these “wired workers,” being the base for an economically conservative, socially liberal program.

What I found in my research is that there are two different camps of people pushing the Democratic Party’s strategy on domestic policy. These camps really started to develop in the 1980s.

The first camp is this group of economic strategists. Wall Street–banker types and Harvard economic people like Larry Summers, get pulled into this circle; these people begin to shape the economic program of the party. They’re working on one aspect of the party’s strategy, and they’re always the key economic team behind every Democratic presidential campaign, starting with Walter Mondale in 1984, then [Michael] Dukakis in ’88, and Clinton and John Kerry and then Obama.

They’re key economic advisors to the presidential campaigns. They’re also the major fundraisers. Then once Clinton and Obama get elected, they become the key figures in their economic cabinets.

Neal Meyer

The most important figure is Robert Rubin, a banker with Goldman Sachs, who becomes Clinton’s treasurer. They name Clinton’s economic program “Rubinomics” for a reason. He’s considered basically the godfather of this circle. Other people around him include Roger Altman, who’s a very important banker; Larry Summers, of course, bringing up the more academic side; and the more recent crowd includes people like Jason Furman and others.

In the mid-2000s, they start this group called the Hamilton Project, which is sort of their government in waiting before Obama comes to power in 2008. This is a very well-connected, well-resourced, and powerful group that’s developing the economic program for the party.

The second part of the equation is the political team. When Clinton gets elected in ’92, he’s got this kind of populist political team around him. James Carville was part of that at the time, and Stanley Greenberg. They come in ’93 with this idea that Clinton’s going to pursue some sort of populist economic program, and they are actually very concerned about the direction that Rubin and the economic team starts to push in early 1993, with the free-trade, budget austerity program. They’re warning Clinton and leading Democrats that this is not a good direction for the party to go down, that it’s going to cost them a lot of votes in the Midwest and working-class communities.

In 1994, when their predictions come true, Clinton decides not to heed their warning but instead turns on them, and he demotes their position inside of his administration while promoting the economic team’s. After ’94 is when Rubin becomes Treasury secretary and other people rise up the ranks.

That’s the state of play in ’94. Clinton now has to figure out, what is the path forward? Because everyone is convinced in 1995 that Clinton is going to lose the presidential election the following year. This is when he starts to bring on people affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council [DLC] as his political team.

Neal Meyer

I think the popular memory of the Obama administration is that the filibuster was what really did him in. Again, on both these policies, that is not really the case.

The leading Democrat in the Senate who was trying to put together a coalition to enact labor law reform, Tom Harkin from Iowa, was actually relatively successful in finding the votes he needed to overcome a filibuster. There’s an incredible oral-history interview with him where he talks about this, and you can see the anger in his face about what happened. He got sixty votes to get over the filibuster, and then the Democrats would have a majority to pass labor law reform.

He has this coalition in September 2009, and he goes to Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic majority leader, and the Obama administration. Harkin says, “I’ve got the votes. Let’s get this on the table.” And they say, “No. We have to pursue health care reform first, then we’ll come to you, Tom.” And they put it off and put it off and put it off, until eventually the Democrats lose their sixty-seat majority that they would need to get this through.

So it’s not the case that the filibuster is what did in labor law reform, and the same is true of the public option. The public option is part of health care reform; health care reform was ultimately passed with budget reconciliation. The administration didn’t actually get the sixty votes to pass the rest of the health care reform, and it knew going into it that it was probably going to have to rely on reconciliation to do this.

Neal Meyer

Of course — “if you give us money.”

I am heartened by what we see with Bernie and AOC’s rallies. They’re very inspiring to a certain extent. But we have to figure out what to do with that energy. And there, I think, we have to change tack a little bit.

In 2021, in my opinion, what happened was the Sanders wing essentially joined the Biden presidency as sort of the junior partners to Biden and became his PR agents, to a degree, with left-wing and working-class voters. They were saying, “This guy really is on our side. They really are going to do it this time.”

In fact, we saw that this corporate filter we’ve been talking about was still in place. Most importantly, in 2009 and 2010, Obama mostly had to deal with business; in 2021 and 2022, Biden had to deal with the right wing of his own party. And he was completely unwilling to challenge them, completely unwilling to fight them in any serious way. That’s not coincidental. The right wing of the Democratic Party was actually doing the party a service, by blocking more redistributive programs that would upset capital.

We have to be realistic about what this party is about under the current leadership. You either have to figure out a way to replace the leadership of the party, or you have to find a way to get distance from it.

For people who think they can replace the leadership . . . there’s a lot of excitement right now around AOC potentially being a presidential candidate in 2028, and of course I would vote for her, a lot of us would. But the problem here is that even if she were able to win the nomination — which is no guarantee, especially in a party that is more middle class than it was in 2016 and 2020 — she would have an entire party below her — basically everyone in Congress, all the governors, would be against the kind of redistributive program she would want to pursue.

Neal Meyer

I think that’s right. So if AOC were to become the nominee, I think we’d have something like a Jeremy Corbyn situation, if she stuck to her guns. She’d have a party that’s constantly trying to stab her in the back and get rid of her. Or, she’d have to give way. She’d have to do what some progressive Democrats like Brandon Johnson in Chicago have done, where they come in with all these hopes and then basically have to backtrack, because they don’t have the base they need in the party to do the program they’re trying to pursue.

That’s one path forward, to try to replace the leadership — again, I’m very pessimistic about that being possible. The other path is a much more independent, aggressive, confrontational style against the Democratic Party leadership as it currently exists, and trying to build up something different, an alternative project or movement organization. We can marry that with this electoral machinery that people have been building on the Left.

Then, I think, we would have something to be hopeful about. Especially if we could get more left-led unions who potentially could be interested in a project like this. That’s the direction we really need to go in.