Michael Kazin is a professor at Georgetown University, an expert on populism and labor unions, and editor emeritus of Dissent Magazine, an institution of the American left. In 2016, he noted that in the country’s vast library of political essays, there was no “institutional” history of the Democratic Party, which he describes as “the oldest mass party in the world.” There were, yes, hundreds of books on each of their Presidents and First Ladies, masterful chronicles of torturous campaigns, and “many, hundreds of biographies of… [Andrew] Jackson, [Thomas] Jefferson, the Roosevelts…” “But no attempt to connect all the dots,” he said in a recent interview at an Afghan restaurant in Washington. So he came along. The result is the essay What it Took to Win (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2022).
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Therefore, the question of what it would have taken for the Democratic Party to win in this Tuesday’s midterm general election, which will see a reshuffle of all of Congress and a third of the Senate, seems obligatory. The polls say they will at least lose control of the House of Commons. That means that even if they keep Alta, the possibility that the remainder of Joe Biden’s tenure will be written off is very real. “If the Republicans win, it will be out of fear and anger. fear for the economic situation. And rage about issues like coping with the pandemic, education or critical race theory,” he says. “Many predictions are that the Democrat loss in the House of Representatives will be between 20 and 30 seats. And that’s not a win by today’s standards, but it’s also not as disastrous as the results of 2010, when the difference was 63 seats, or 2018, when the Republicans lost by 41 seats.
In the Senate, he says the Liberals are also having a hard time. “It will depend on the mobilization,” he warns. “Ironically, the loss of both cameras could be good news. Then Biden (or whoever is running) can go up against the Republican Congress in the 2024 campaign and tell voters, “Look, this is what will happen if you vote for them.” Kazin draws on a historical analogy to support this idea to clarify: “In 1946, Harry Truman, the President, had succeeded the immensely popular Franklin Roosevelt. He lost the midterm elections, and that allowed him to win the 1948 presidential election against what he called these “Republicans doing nothing.” [Do-Nothing-Republicans]. While it’s true that history doesn’t usually repeat itself, sometimes it does provide clues.”
The most interesting (“and most controversial,” he admits) of his book is the idea of the “invisible thread” that held the institution together in victories and defeats. It’s about the “moral capitalism” that has run through the history of the party since its inception, by Martin van Buren, who in the essay enjoys a kudos he didn’t always have, or the war on Jackson’s banking monopoly, his first President who knew how to perfect the art of polarization, right up to the promise of full employment in the Humphrey Hawkins Act of 1978 with Jimmy Carter in the White House.
“Democrats picked up this thread again after the Great Recession of 2008 with Obama,” writes Kazin. Later, Bernie Sanders would run for office in 2020, promising to “tax the extremely wealthy,” and Biden included in his speech the mantra that he aspires to become the “most pro-union president in history.” According to the author, this “moral capitalism” is a transversal concept that combines rights such as private property and commercial success with the protection of “the well-being of those employed by others of little or modest means”.
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Then how could it be that after Obama came the flood of Donald Trump in 2016 and managed to steal the idea from the working class? “Strictly speaking, we should be talking about ‘white working class,'” warns Kazin. “Blacks and Latinos have consistently voted Democrats since the 1960s. But with the whites it happened without a doubt. At the end of that decade, the exodus began because the Democrats were perceived as the party that cared most about African Americans. In the 1970s, the desire for big government collided with business. And they blamed it for the stagflation that started with the 1973 oil crisis. [El presidente Jimmy] Carter became something of a symbol of a failed government that had been unable to continue with that Keynesian promise that came out of the New Deal days. With Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, other cultural issues came into play: many, especially Catholic workers, opposed the Democrats on issues such as abortion and gay rights. They were religious and went to church.”
This hemorrhage of workers parallels the decline of unions throughout the book until the final chapter, which takes the example of West Virginia, a state that went from blue bastion (Democratic) to support with 68.5% of the unions voting for Trump.
Recent Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, championed the party’s nominees in Pennsylvania at a rally in Philadelphia on Saturday. Mark Makela (AFP)
On the basis of such teachings, the formation has been trying in recent years to restore this harmony with the workers, whom they consider the “party of the rich”. Hence Biden’s insistence on the union alliance, whom the professor describes as “a terrible speaker” (“after fifty years in politics, he should have corrected that,” he adds).
Kazin, who is already working on his next “Labor History” essay, advises taking signs that the United States is experiencing a “Union Spring” with caution. “It’s a pretty modest renaissance,” he clarifies. “The membership peaked at 35% in the 1950s. Since then it has suffered an inexorable decline. Now there’s news that there are Amazon warehouses like the one in Staten Island that are unionized, but it’s pretty anecdotal when you think about it. How many? Two hundred workers in a workforce of several hundred thousand?
The best thing that can be said about this campaign’s freshest candidates, from John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) to Tim Ryan (Ohio), is that they “don’t look like Democrats.” “It’s a terrible testament to what voters think about the party,” says Kazin. “They identify them with the cultural establishment, people with more money and better education, who scold them for things like using pronouns. Take the Latinx case [el modo neutro que se prefiere en los círculos progresistas para referirse a la comunidad latina]: Only 3% are shown to agree with this usage, and Hispanic is also neutral. The same goes for racism. It’s obvious that it’s a big problem in this country. But you have to do it in a way that doesn’t divide the people you’re trying to convince.”
Are Republicans better soldiers in the Kulturkampf? “They are very clear about their clientele, which is essentially white and Christian, so they can attack certain issues clearly. This brings them revenue in the short term, but can be counterproductive in the long run. Young people are not amused by their positions on issues like transgender rights. This is a trend that has continued since the 1990s. Your political stance is currently defined by how you position yourself on issues such as abortion, masks and vaccines, or racial criticism theory.”
The theme of race is fundamental throughout the book. Kazin does not hide the original sin of the Democratic Party, whose first protector, Jackson, was an “Indian genocide” and which, until the 1960s, was the American Alliance South among workers, small business owners, and farmers whose glue was anti-Black and Asian racism. Then they realized that it wasn’t necessary to win: before 1948, no Democrat won the White House without a majority of white votes; after 1964 no one did so without losing that majority. This course correction, when it came, allowed the party to agglutinate the majority of female and African-American votes.
It remains to be seen if they can count on the Latino and black support they have counted on in this general election. “For the first ones, they were wrong to think of them as something compact. They are more diverse as a collective than African Americans, and many do not necessarily see themselves as an oppressed racial group. For their part, blacks have been a mainstay in the cities and industrial areas, but now they are beginning to think they haven’t helped them as much as they were promised. Maybe they won’t vote Republican, but it’s possible that many, especially men, won’t vote in those elections,” he explains.
The historian is the son of Alfred Kazin, a leftist New York intellectual and literary critic whose autobiographical cycle (A Walker in New York, Starting Out in the Thirties, and New York Jew) marked a milestone in 20th-century American memoir. In What It Took to Win, he also throws in some personal touches when he clarifies that his association with the party dates back to 1960, “when he participated in his first debates at school with a Republican majority in favor of Kennedy. “He’s been supporting him campaign after campaign and mutation after mutation ever since.
Today the party still contains crowds, as in Walt Whitman’s famous quote, one of which is included in the book (another is from the critic James Wood who says that “parties exist to win elections”). The current trend merging favors odd bedfellows like old West Virginia moderate Joe Manchin III, also known in Washington as “the most Republican of the Democrats,” with the most progressive wing, whose most recognizable face is Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who believes that she could have a bright future in the party “if she turns more to the left” (she’s not so clear about her options as a candidate outside of New York).
Regarding the upcoming elections, whose campaigning begins in a way with the end of the general election, he thinks that Biden should better not appear. Propose Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as a nominee, also seeking re-election this Tuesday. “I think it’s about time the United States had a woman president and she seems to have better options [la vicepresidenta] KamalaHarris”.
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