The New York Review of Books - 26.03.2020

60 The New York Review

much beyond the hope that members of
a fractious public will recover a willing-
ness to listen attentively to one another.
Tamir takes a different tack. She
looks to economic remedies for the
sense of alienation felt by the so-called
left behind. In essence, she thinks we
need an updated version of Roosevelt’s
New Deal. Instead of the liberal fantasy
of the neutral state, we need a state that

is consciously devoted to reducing so-

cial and economic inequality, providing

greater economic security to the less

well off, and instilling the sense that

we are all in this together. This, she ar-

gues, needs the politics of a cross-class

coalition, without which politics be-

comes, as it has been for the past three

decades, a system run by and for the

best off. She quotes Elizabeth Warren’s

acerbic observation that there has been

a class war going on for the past thirty

years, and it has been won by the upper

class. She is eloquent about the self-

destructive contempt expressed by the

elites on both coasts for their less edu-

cated, God-fearing, socially conserva-

tive fellow citizens—self- destructive

because it alienates precisely the peo-

ple who might form such a coalition.

Like Etzioni, however, Tamir in-

duces a strong sense that this is all

whistling in the dark. A society as civil

as Etzioni desires, or as economically

fair and efficient as Tamir wants to see,

would have little difficulty pursuing

the politics of national cohesion and

defining the common good. The ques-

tion, as always, is how to get there from

here. Q

In early January, as Democratic voters
began to focus more intently on the ap-
proaching primary season, New York
magazine published a profile of Repre-
sentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.^1
The writer, David Freedlander, spoke
with her about the divisions within the
Democratic Party, and asked what sort
of role she envisioned for herself in a
possible Joe Biden presidency. “Oh,
God,” Ocasio-Cortez replied (“with a
groan,” Freedlander noted). “In any
other country, Joe Biden and I would
not be in the same party, but in Amer-
ica, we are.”
This was in some respects an im-
politic, even impolite, thing for the
first-term politician to say. AOC, a
democratic socialist, had endorsed
Bernie Sanders the previous October,
so it was no secret where her loyalties
lay. Still, Biden was at that point the
clear front-runner for the presidential
nomination, and freshman members of
Congress don’t usually make disparag-
ing remarks about their party’s front-
runner. Her comment thus carried a
considerable charge—a suggestion that
if Biden were the nominee, this lumi-
nary and her 6.3 million Twitter follow-
ers might not just placidly go along.
And yet, she is correct. In a parlia-
mentary system, Biden would be in
the main center-left party and AOC
in a smaller, left-wing party. So her
comment was an accurate descrip-
tion of an oddity of American politics
that has endured since just before the
Civil War—the existence of our two,
large-tent parties battling for primacy
against each other, but often battling
within themselves.
At the moment, as the Democrats
struggle over their future, one can le-
gitimately wonder whether the poles of
the Democratic tent are strong enough
to hold. The divisions are stark. This
historical moment is often compared
to 1972, when a youth movement simi-
lar to the one Sanders leads today took
over the party and nominated George
McGovern. But if anything, today’s di-
visions run far deeper. Then, the party
was split chiefly over the Vietnam War.
There were other issues, to be sure, and
the New Left—the 1960s movement
of student radicals that spread from
Madison to Berkeley to everywhere—
pressed a broader critique of American
society; but McGovern’s was funda-
mentally an antiwar candidacy. And
while the Vietnam debate was shatter-

ing to the party for a few years, wars

eventually end, as indeed that one did,

not long after the 1972 election.

Once it ended, and once the Water-

gate scandal mushroomed, the party

was able to stitch itself back together

with surprising ease. In the 1974 mid-

terms, both liberals and moderates

were able to run aggressively against

Richard Nixon, and the Democrats

made historic gains that year. Then,

with the country still agitated over

Nixon and Gerald Ford’s pardon of

him, and with a sunny southern moder-

ate vaulting over several better-known

and more liberal senators, they recap-

tured the White House in 1976.

The current divide is not about one

war. It is about capitalism—whether

it can be reformed and remade to cre-

ate the kind of broad prosperity the

country once knew, but without the

sexism and racism of the postwar pe-

riod, as liberals hope; or whether cor-

porate power is now so great that we

are simply beyond that, as the younger

socialists would argue, and more radi-

cal surgery is called for. Further, it’s

about who holds power in the Demo-

cratic Party, and the real and perceived

ways in which the Democrats of the last

thirty years or so have failed to chal-

lenge that power. These questions are

not easily resolved, so this internal

conflict is likely to last for some time

and grow very bitter indeed. If Sand-

ers wins the nomination, he will pre-

sumably try to unify the party behind

his movement—but many in the party

establishment will be reluctant to join,

and a substantial number of his most

fervent supporters wouldn’t welcome

them anyway. It does not seem to me

too alarmist to wonder if the Demo-

crats can survive all this; if 2020 will

be to the Democrats as 1852 was to the

Whigs—a schismatic turning point that

proved that the divisions were beyond

bridging.

When did it begin, this split in the

Democratic Party over these most basic

questions of our political economy?

One could trace it back to William

Jennings Bryan and the Free Silver

Movement (an early rebellion against

the eastern bankers), or perhaps even

earlier. But if pressed to name a mod-

ern starting point, I would choose the

mid-1980s: the crushing 1984 defeat

of Walter Mondale, and Al From’s

creation the next year of the Demo-

cratic Leadership Council, which was

founded to move the party away from

statism and unions and toward posi-

tions friendlier to the free market.

Mondale was the last old-fashioned

Keynesian to capture the Democratic

nomination. Ever since, the party’s

nominees have offered, to one degree

or another, hybrids of Keynesianism

and neoliberalism.^2

Bill Clinton, the 1992 nominee, prob-

ably tilted more toward neoliberalism

than any other Democrat, although

wholesale dismissals of him as a neolib-

eral sellout aren’t fair or accurate. Peo-

ple forget, for example, that he rolled

the dice on government shutdowns in

1995 and 1996 because he refused to

sign a budget Newt Gingrich and Bob

Dole pressed on him with enormous

domestic spending cuts. It was by no

means a given when the first shutdown

started that he would win that fight

politically (which he did, even if he lost

in another way, because of the intern he

met who brought him pizza while the

White House staff was furloughed).

Clinton was a Keynesian at times, but

in broad strokes, on trade and financial

deregulation, he pushed the Democrats

much closer to that then-aborning crea-

ture, the global financial elite.

Like Clinton, Al Gore had been a

“New Democrat,” as the more centrist

Democrats of the day called them-

selves, most of his career, but as the

nominee in 2000, he tried on both suits.

I was at the convention in Los Ange-

les for his surprisingly high-octane,

populist speech announcing that his

The Party Cannot Hold

Michael Tomasky

(^1) David Freedlander, “One Year in
Wash i ngton,” New York, January 6,
2020.
(^2) I have sometimes found this word con-
fusing. I first encountered it as a young
reader of The Washington Monthly, and
so I accepted the definition advanced
by that magazine’s founder, Charlie
Peters, who wore the label proudly. He
meant “neoliberal” as still working for
traditional liberalism’s goals but simul-
taneously casting away some prejudices
that had come to hurt Democrats po-
litically (being seen as antimilitary, for
example).
But in economics, the word has an
older meaning, going back to the 1930s,
and in this meaning, neoliberal is
pro–free market, antiregulation, anti-
Keynes—very much akin to what we
more commonly today call supply-side
conservative economics. The “liberal”
in this “neoliberal” is the liberalism of
the late eighteenth century, of Adam
Smith and his contemporaries, a lib-
eralism built around the concept of
protecting the free individual from
the coercive power of the state and en-
abling him to work for his economic
self-interest. In this essay, I use “neo-
liberal” in this sense.