Looking at Today's Democratic Party

Make more, share better: it has to combine supply-side dynamism to fair distribution. But is there any reason to think that that prestidigitational construction and maintenance of such an...

Make more, share better: it has to combine supply-side dynamism to fair distribution. But is there any reason to think that that prestidigitational construction and maintenance of such an incredibly broad political coalition is not an impossible lift?…

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Ezra Klein writes:

Ezra Klein: <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/democrats-liberalism-elections-crick.html>: ‘The Democratic Party does not need to choose to be one thing. It needs to choose to be more things…. People tell me about issues where the Democratic Party departed from them. But they first describe a… Democratic Party, [that] they [have] c[o]me to believe, does not like them…. Social media has thrown everyone involved…into the same algorithmic Thunderdome…. We always know what our most online peers are thinking. They… set the culture…. And there is nothing that most of us fear as much as being out of step with our peers….

Today, political tolerance is harder for many of us than religious tolerance. Finding ways to turn our disagreements into exchange, into something fruitful rather than something destructive, seems almost fanciful. But there is real political opportunity…

And Henry Farrell glosses:

Henry Farrell: Liberalism Transforms Plurality from Weakness to Strength <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/liberalism-transforms-plurality-from>: ‘At least it does when it works right…. [But] the Democratic party has become a much more unwelcoming place for people who are out of step with an online consensus that favors a particular kind of online purity. What we want instead is liberality…. [Ezra Klein] seems to me to be to be recognizably right…. The fundamental message of Ezra’s piece is not that the Democratic party needs to become a moderate party. It is that it needs to become a party that is welcoming to moderates, as to others who don’t completely share its beliefs, if it is to succeed….

Figuring out ways to manage… differences inside the party… may [also] help it to build stronger and more enduring coalitions among citizens too. They… are more likely to be attracted by a party that is more interested in bringing people in, than in telling them what they ought to do or who they need to be. The lesson… is not that managing pluralism is easy…. It is that building tolerance and figuring out how to work through the inevitable messiness and conflict, can not only create common purpose internally, but attract others to your cause…

Indeed, 75 years ago Dean Acheson, ex-Secretary of State under Harry S Truman, wrote:

Dean Acheson: A Democrat Looks at His Party <https://archive.org/details/democratlooksath00ache>: ‘The [Democratic] party’s earliest efforts were to bring the many into control of government through the extension of the franchise and through frequent elections…. [Now the] many… are not necessarily more right, or wiser, or more devoted to the public good than a few people. But… they have many interests, many points of view, many purposes to accomplish, and a party which represents them will have their many interests….

The dichotomy [between Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans and Democrats] has not been between a party of property and a party of proletarians, sans-culottes, or descamisados. It has been between a party which centers on the interests deriving from property in its most important form and a party of many interests…. The economic base and the principal interest of the Republican party is business…. Here lies the significant difference between the parties, the single-interest party against the many-interest party….

For all the apparent contradiction in the fact that the Southern racist belongs to the same political party as the New York supporter of the F[air ]E[mployment ]P[ractices ]C[ommission], the inner logic which holds them together is that each speaks for the dispossessed, whether in his rural or urban form…

What is my reaction to all of this?

First, Acheson is long out of date and obsolete. The Republicans of seventy-five years ago were indeed the party of business, enterprise, entrepreneurship, and wealth—the party of millionaires and of those who aspired to become such, of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” in John Steinbeck’s phrase. In the long mid‑century arc from the McKinley‑Coolidge synthesis through Eisenhower, their median coalition priorities were predictable, and made sense as promotors of growth, albeit maldistributed growth, in a world where capital was scarce, organized labor rising, and the commanding heights of the economy were steel, autos, and oil—industries whose owners sought quiet, predictable returns rather than disruptive redistribution. But the political economy has since shifted: the locus of rent extraction, the sectoral composition of wealth, and the technologies of information, finance, and platform power have reconfigured the right’s coalition and agenda. Thus to treat the present Republican Party as the same one Acheson faced is to commit a historian’s category error: the rhetoric may rhyme, but the material base—and so the program—does not.

Seventy-five years ago, the Republican core talked as if economic growth, technological change, and Schumpeterian creative-destruction were indeed the point: the disruptions were the price of admission to Abundance, and Abundance was the telos. Entrepreneurs would churn, incumbents would be dethroned, factor reallocation would do its work, and—even though there were big losers in the short run—a political economy of patience would yield a long-run positive-sum harvest: higher productivity and broader consumption possibilities. Dynamism was a civic virtue. The state’s role was to heat up the furnace so that the competitive process could run as hot as possible, That was the catechism: trust the process of innovation and market selection because the business of America was business.

But today’s party is much less animated by the restless energies of enterprise than by the defensive custodianship of property—material holdings, yes, but also status and symbolic hierarchies. The expected upside from market-driven change has, for the Republican core, shrunk relative to the perceived downside risks. The coalition has pivoted from Schumpeterian embrace of creative destruction to protection of incumbencies. In the late nineteenth century, this took the form of tariff fortifications and gold-standard orthodoxy; in the interwar and late-twentieth episodes, it appeared as regulatory veto points and cultural retrenchment designed to slow redistribution of rents and recognition. The thread is one of a party reoriented toward guarding what is already owned rather than widening the frontier of abundance. Growth-friendly openness has fallen for a politics of scarcity, in which loss-aversion governs both economic policy and cultural stance.

Thus seventy-five years ago, you could argue—without too much insincerity—that the Republican Party truly was the party of abundance: more stuff, better stuff, cheaper stuff, as the assembly line met the transistor and productivity gains fed a virtuous circle of rising wages and falling prices. Acheson could presuppose that with the Republican catechism reliably delivering more stuff, better stuff, and cheaper stuff, the proper mission for the Democrats was the coalition politics of pre- and re-distribution. But that no longer holds. And so the social-democratic New Deal Order’s recipe of tax‑and‑transfer, social insurance, and institutional bargaining was astonishingly successful in its day. It converted productivity gains into widespread consumption possibilities, tamping down the volatility that Schumpeterian churn inflicted, and turning America from a Gilded-Age rich-and-working-class into a middle-class society. The pluralist Democratic Party coalition’s support of making prosperity truly mass prosperity—mortgages, schooling, healthcare, retirement—somewhat paradoxically allowed the Republican Party to remain a party of enterprise-and-growth rather than property-and-stagnation. It was a historical irony that distribution thus complemented rather than constrained growth: wide middle-class distribution underwrote aggregate demand and social peace, allowing creative destruction to proceed without triggering backlash powerful enough to shut the engine down.

Today’s Republicans, however, increasingly present as a coalition of insiders in retreat, mobilizing around a backward-looking project: to reassert the distributional patterns they remember as stable and favorable, and then to lock them in. And not just economic patterns. Cultural-socio patterns too. And so, rather than competing in a dynamic, contestable marketplace where creative destruction reallocates resources toward higher productivity uses, they seek policy instruments that reweight the game—selective protectionism, regulatory veto points, tax preferences for incumbent asset classes, and institutional rules that mute democratic feedback. Thus yesterday’s rents become today’s property rights, privileged as inalienable over growth and change that might alienate them. And the favor of the Trumpist kleptocratic state rather than enterprise and innovation becomes the favored road to creating more rents.. Narratively, it is the politics of “I’ve got mine” transposed into governance: roll back changes that have redistributed opportunity or voice, and then freeze the system as if history were a ledger to be balanced rather than a frontier to be expanded.

The deeper irony, as ever, is that the attempt to stabilize a favored hierarchy rarely produces genuine security; it more often chokes off the investment, adaptation, and social solidarity that make broad prosperity possible in the first place.

But the upshot is that the Democrats today need to be the party not just of fair distribution but of the creation of Abundance as well. A successful non-xenophobic non-white-males-only coaltion needs to deliver both fair distribution plus expanding the Abundance frontier all by itself. Why? Because the social contract works only when rising productivity and market dynamism can be paired with institutions that spread gains broadly and cushioned losses. Pre- or re-distribution without growth creates too many losers, and too many powerful losers, both economically and culturally. And without rapid growth, they really are losers.

Thus the Democrats must be not only the party that insures against downside risk and polices unfairness, but also the party that catalyzes the supply side: competition policy that pries open bottlenecks, public investment in research, infrastructure, and human capital, immigration to thicken innovative ecosystems, and macroeconomic management that keeps demand sufficiently hot to pull workers in rather than cast them out. Only by marrying distribution to production—by building the scaffolding that makes rapid change socially tolerable and politically legitimate—can the polity once again climb the Abundance gradient, rather than watch it recede to a few superstar enclaves.

If the Democratic Party does not accomplish this, than the remainder of the years starting “20…” will in no wise be any kind of American Century, and it will not be a successful policy-generating coalition. We will see a stalled epoch in which institutional drift, technological dislocation, and distributive conflict outrun state capacity to stabilize expectations and channel innovation into broad-based prosperity. It will be other countries that become, in Leon Trotsky’s words, the furnace where the future is forged. The policy-generating coalition will fragment into veto players and rent seekers, and productivity advances will remain decoupled from median welfare.

But being the party of both Abundance and Pre- or Re-distribution may well turn out to be an impossible lift. Outside relatively short epochs of Glorious Years, distributional coalitions have fragmented, and as sustained innovation generates concentrated rents and dispersed but still painful gains. Politics demands visible, near‑term cushions and future‑proofing—industrial policy, social insurance, labor power, antitrust—that temper market outcomes without stalling the engine. Bridging that gap requires a state capacity and social trust we have only intermittently possessed. To promise abundance while credibly engineering distribution, then, is a very hard state capacity‑building project.

Thus I find myself getting off on Henry Farrell’s streetcar where he writes:

Henry Farrell: Liberalism Transforms Plurality from Weakness to Strength <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/liberalism-transforms-plurality-from>: There is something awry with the left wing of the Democratic elite… [and] the centrist wing…. Each has been captured by its own ideological simplifications…. [Centrists] tend towards the apolitical… the technocratic adjustments of policies and messages to what the median voter wants…. Obviously, this is a caricature… but it’s a caricature with the same force as the cartoon lefty who cares more about ideological purism than winning elections…. If the left tends to overplay the importance of internal unity at the expense of the compromises required by actual electoral and movement politics, centrists… dismiss the problem of bringing different factions along as mere pandering to the “groups”…

Ralph Nader in 2000 did indeed care much more about ideological purism than about winning elections, didn’t he? It’s not a caricature. It’s not a cartoon. It’s a reality. Ralph Nader’s 2000 campaign. The policy distance between Gore and Bush on regulation, the judiciary, and macroeconomic stabilization was great, and has only compounded over the twenty-five years since. Yet Nader framed the Democratic Party not as an imperfect vehicle to be steered but as a corrupted duopoly to be shunned. Organizations and movements that are “groups” first and Democrats second, if at all—from La Follette to Wallace—believe that moral clarity alone can discipline a system that they assume to be insensitive to incremental leverage, or falsely believe that increments are of no value. By refusing incorporation into the median-voter machine, Nader and his posses throughout the ages assume they can build a genuine counter‑hegemony: only by risking short‑run losses could long‑run programmatic transformation be forced.

This does not work in first-past-the-post systems. And it does not work in proportional-representation systems either.

Nader’s wager was that denunciation would catalyze realignment; the reality was that it lost power to work for good without building any durable capacity for any sort of transformation of politics.

Analogously, but for bigger (and very deadly) human stakes, Netanyahu’s turning of the Gaza Strip into a 24/7/365 repertory perfmance of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Grave of the 100 Head” was and is despicable and criminal. But it is not a caricature to note that a lot of lefties of the online shouting class saw that as a reason to do what they could to lower the chances of a Harris-Schumer-Jeffries administration. What struck me about the online left’s reaction to Gaza was the continuity between moral outrage and opportunistic coalition-breaking. Biden’s policy of attempting to embrace-and-extend Netanyahu toward less war was a dismal failure, yes. But it is still the case that performative radicalism that mistakes purity tests for strategy hands power to those least constrained by humanitarian or egalitarian commitments.

Historically, durable reform has been the product of broad coalitions that marry moral claims to institutional capacity. To invert that calculus, even in response to atrocity, is to trade marginal but very real policy leverage for rhetorical maximalism that turns to ashes.

Thus Farrell’s equation here seems to me to be a peculiar version of “both-sidesism”. All the Democratic centrists I hang out with are extremely happy with the Whiggiest of men and women as candidates and office holders. And they in no wise demand Tory measures. Rather, they seek only measures that will, you know, actually work: create abundance and pre- and re-distribute it less unfairly. Farrell’s moral-equivalency elides the lived coalition arithmetic and policy genealogy that matter. The point for Democratic centrists is not to smuggle in Tory measures of entrenchment or privilege; it is to choose the instruments that work—competition policy, social insurance, capacity-building, and targeted transfers—that do actually generate abundance and spread it. Call that “centrism”, but the aim is policies that can be sold to a majority of voters that are Whiggish in substance rather than just in rhetoric.

But, perhaps: Hi! It’s me! I’m the problem! It’s me!

Perhaps I am still overly-scarred by the NAFTA debate of 32 years ago. But I remember wondering why David Bonior wasn’t spending even 1/5 as much o his rhetorical energy on praising Clinton for tax increases on the rich, the expanded EITC, and health care for all as he was damning Clinton for supporting a NAFTA with a Mexico that, IIRC, he said had nothing to offer America but illegal drugs and hepatitis. And I do remember Mickey Kantor’s argument that a U.S. auto industry that could not outsource labor-intensive parts of the value chain to Mexico in the same way that Japan’s and Germany’s did to Malaysia and Poland, and that NAFTA was a path toward more high-wage UAW jobs not in the long but even in the short run I remember Mickey Kantor being largely correct on this. And I remember it cutting no ice with “the groups” on the labor-activist side…

But, as I said, being the party of Abundance and Distribution may well turn out to be an impossible lift. Yet that is what Democrats have to become, at least for all the good possible futures I can see.

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References:

• Acheson, Dean. 1955. A Democrat Looks at His Party. New York: Harper & Bros. <https://archive.org/details/democratlooksath00ache>.

• Farrell, Henry. 2025. “Liberalism Transforms Plurality from Weakness to Strength”. November 3. Programmable Mutter. <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/liberalism-transforms-plurality-from>.

• Klein, Ezra. 2025. “This Is the Way You Beat Trump—& Trumpism”. New York Times. November 22. <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/democrats-liberalism-elections-crick.html>

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#looking-at-todays-democratic-party
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