The "People's President", and the first President of the Democratic Party. Populist Andrew Jackson.
The History of the Democratic Party
It would seem we should turn to the Democrats next, but having taken up populism, we will deal with it now.
Or no, we won't.
Oh, yes we will, as the Democrats were the country's original populist party.
Populism has had a long history in American politics, and often been influential, but it's rarely been strong enough in modern times to actually control the country. Typically, in fact, one of the major parties will take the most popular and palatable of populist ideas, adopt them, and leave independent populist movements to die. This wasn't always so, however.
Populism first really began to strongly rise in the United States in the 1820s. Prior to that time there had been populists, but if you look at the early history of the country, politics tended to be controlled by elites. Populism brought the era of temporary and loose political parties in the US to an end, however, in 1828 with the formation of the Democratic Party.
The Democrats were formed as a populist party to boost the election of populist war hero, Andrew Jackson. Jackson was the "People's President", and had a platform of opposition to institutions, opposition to the Second Bank of the United States, and hostility and opposition to the United States Supreme Court. He'd have a home, quite frankly, in the modern Republican Party.
The Democrats remained the country's populist party for up until the late 19th Century. During that entire time they were opposed to the American System as they were opposed to a government role in the economy. They were also strongly regional in character, as they opposed a strong central government. They were vested in racism in the South due to an ill-defined cultural conservatism of a certain unthinking sort that was supported by their member's economic self interests. They got the country into the Civil War, and they were the prime movers in the Mexican War.
They were, quite frankly, hardly recognizable in contemporary terms.
Starting in the 1890s, the Democrats found themselves besieged from within and without by a strong left wing populist insurgency, something a right wing populist party found surprising. The populist grew in strength, from the left, to such an existent that the People's Party, a left wing Populist Party began to seriously challenge it, and frankly also began to challenge the liberal party, the Republican Party. While members of the Populist Party crossed back and forth into the Democratic Party, and were often members of both parties simultaneously, it was the Republicans who effectively reacted first, heading leftwards with stronger liberalism in the form of Progressivism. For a time, in fact, it looked like the GOP might effectively gut Populism.
Instead, the Taft Roosevelt split gave the Democrats an opening, and the adopted elements of Progressivism and Populism in order to propel a Southern Democrat via Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, into the White House.
That event was a foundational shift for the Democrats.
Prior to it occurring, the party had built its base in the North, to the extent it had one, largely on patronage through immigrant communities. This political move had nothing to do with the real politics of the party, and was a pure, if effective, power strategy. Republicans played it too, but much less effectively, being quite frankly a more moralizing party and one that had a stronger business base in the North. In the North, the Democrats operated through patronage. If you were Irish and wanted a job, the police department probably had one, or the fire department, but you had to be a Democrat to get it. The system was corrupt by modern standards, but very widely tolerated at the time.
Going into the Wilson administration, therefore, the Party dominated the South due to populism, although the party in the South was controlled by landed elites which excluded, ironically enough, all of the poorer whites that it could. It pretty much completely excluded blacks, who were almost all Republicans, if they could vote, which was rarely. In the North, the Democrats had bodies of immigrants and their immediate descendants, largely Catholic, who shared next to nothing in common with the Southern party. In the West, where it had inroads, it was with farmers who appreciated the party's anti bank and cheap lending policies. Wilson won, however, as he opposed entry into World War One, which the Roosevelt wing of the GOP favored, and his campaign had co-opted the more popular Progressive Republican policies.
The Wilson Administration was selectively liberal on things, as long as it didn't involve helping blacks, but the move fundamentally altered the Democratic Party. During the eight years of the Wilson Administration, the Republican Party fought a civil war on the left and then collapsed when Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919. Progressives in that time frame started moving out of the Republican Party, with quite a few joining the newly Progressive Democrats in the North. The Republicans regained control of the White House after Wilson, but with a new, Conservative, outlook. Democrats remained Progressive in the North. When the Great Depression hit, they retook the White House with the most Liberal administration in American history.
The direction that Wilson had put the party on became increasingly fixed during FDR's Administration. The second Roosevelt not only picked up progressive policies first proposed by his cousin, but went far beyond them with an administration that had an Imperial Presidency of a previously unimagined extent. Roosevelt not only brought liberals into the party in the main, but also radicals on its periphery, turning a blind eye to socialist and even communists at lower levels. He also took up almost ignoring the party in the South, which didn't appreciate the liberalism for the most part, but which did appreciate assistance to farmers in the still largely agricultural and agrarian South. The direction was noted, causing the Southern reaction expressed in I'll Take My Stand, and there was opposition from Southern Democrats, but it did not cause the party to officially split, largely due to racial reasons. The Southern Democrats, conservative and populist for the most party, had nowhere else to go. That encouraged the growing nationwide Democratic Party to ignore them.
The death of Franklin Roosevelt caused the liberal tide to retreat a bit, but Harry Truman, a Missourian, surprisingly didn't go back as far as he could have. Not anywhere near as liberal as Franklin Roosevelt, he nonetheless took domestic steps that Roosevelt never did. Truman desegregated the military and then started to dismantle Southern segregation, something that could not have been anticipated and which the South was not prepared for.
Starting in the 50s, the Southern Democratic Party put more and more distance between itself and the main party, which did the same. The post-war Democratic Party remained a center left party, but as with the GOP, it moved generally towards the center during the early Cold War except on matters of civil rights, in which it now joined with the Republican Party in championing. Southern Democrats began threatening to bolt, and occasionally did, although they did not bolt to the GOP where they were not welcome.
They were not welcome there, that is, until Ronald Reagan's "Southern Strategy" brought them in.
Before that, however, the events of the 60s brought an end to the post-war Democratic Party.
The seeds for dissolution had been long planted, as shown above. During the New Deal, the Democratic Party's leadership in the north was decidedly left of center, while the leadership in the South was solidly populist in base and conservative in leadership. When Truman took the party into the left center in the main with its policy, reaching down into the South with desegregation, elements of the party began to bolt, but most it remained. But in the 60s, with rising liberalism in the young, the stress was too high.
The post-war Democrats had supported foreign intervention in the name of anti communism, and had taken the US into the Korean War, a host of Caribbean and Central American interventions, and then into Vietnam. But as the populace grew weary of the war and the young began to oppose it, it was the northern Democratic Party in which the fight broke out, with it breaking out in full in the 1968 Democratic Convention. There, ethnic conservative "hard hat" Democrats, backed by the Chicago police, battled left wing protesters. Unable to see a way forward, Johnson pulled out of the Presidential race, and ceded the Democratic race to McGovern, who came from the left. The party never went back.
Post 1968 the party really became something else. It jettisoned the Democratic South, although it took years for the process to be completed, and really was only after the Republicans courted them. It retained an ethnic component, but it increasingly ignored it during the 70s. Essentially, it became the party of the WASPish elite, essentially becoming the difficult, embarrassing cousin to the Country Club Republicans. It's stayed there ever since.
That process too took years to complete, but as it did, entire sections of the post 1932 Democratic coalition evaporated away, with some of it still evaporating. The Democratic Party remains the largest party in the US by far, but it's in deep trouble even if it doesn't recognize it fully. Catholic Democrats, once a large component of the party in the North, left the party for the GOP or to become independents when their consciences couldn't tolerate left wing positions on abortion and gender issues. This included large ethnic components, some of which had weakened simply due to time, such as the Irish Democrats", but the process is being experienced now with Hispanic Democrats, and even with African Americans. In the rural West the party simply died.
So, over time, what has it meant to be a Democrat? Well, the following:
- From 1828 until the 1912, a very long period of time, it was a populist part, but one that essentially went from being purely populist to being populist in stance, but controlled in the South by economic elites who not only controlled the party, but were often opposed to the interest of rank and file Southerners. It was populist economically consistently.
- From 1912 until 1932, it was a left wing progressive party in the main, but with a Southern populist wing that was conservative/populist.
- From 1932 to 1945 it was an even more left wing progressive party which continued to retain a Southern conservative/populist wing.
- From 1945 until 1963, it was a center/left party that retained a disgruntled Southern conservative/populist wing.
- From 1963 until 1968 it was an emerging left wing party, that went fully left wing in 1968 and which remains there.
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