I got my first real job after college when I was hired in 1989 to work at The American Prospect, which had just launched. It was a dark time for progressives. Republicans had cruised to victory in a third straight presidential election. The Democratic Party was deeply demoralized and there were no strong social movements on the left.
Fast-forward to the present, and it is night and day. Never before in my lifetime has there been so much progressive energy, whether you’re looking at the world of activism or think tanks or media. Even worker organizing is enjoying a Renaissance, as a new labor movement scores some big victories, like passing a ballot initiative in Florida last November raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. As for the Democratic Party, while it is far from dominant today and struggles to win elections in many places, I cannot recall a time when the party felt more like the vehicle of a true political movement. There’s so much going on these days in the progressive world that it can be hard to get your arms around it and see the big picture.
So I was excited when Robert Kuttner recently published a lengthy and insightful article on Democratic politics and the progressive movement in The American Prospect. Bob is co-founder of that magazine and was one of my bosses when I took a job there, along with his co-founder Paul Starr. Bob has been a keen student of the Democratic party for a very long time, publishing a book on this subject way back in 1987, one of his many, many books. For this recent article, he interviewed more than 60 people. I recently talked with Bob about what he learned in this deep dive and how what is happening now in progressive politics fits into a bigger story he’s been writing about for decades. You can listen to the podcast—the latest for my new show, Inside Change—or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
David: Hi, Bob. Thanks for coming on the show.
Robert: Happy to be with you.
David: I want to talk to you about what’s happening today in the Democratic Party and progressive politics. But before we get into that, I thought we could turn back the clock a few decades to the late 1980s, right before Michael Dukakis got shellacked by George Bush in the 1988 election. You published a book called “The Life of the Party,” which was a pretty stinging critique of the Democratic Party back then. What did you argue at that time?
Robert: What had been happening to the Democratic Party was that it was moving away from the vision of Roosevelt and trying to modernize itself by becoming a little bit more like Reagan, because that seemed to be fashionable. At the same time, it was becoming more donor-dependent. And the combination of those two things completely muddled the party’s message. And so the party was caught between two stools. There’s an old saying, I think attributed to Harry Truman, that if you give a voter a choice between a Republican and a Republican, they’ll pick the Republican every time.
Democrats were trying to run as Republicans light, and then you had the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton proposing that new Democrats who were more moderate on economics, more moderate on social issues, more moderate on race, could somehow seize the political center. Five years later, after I wrote that book, it worked well for Clinton personally, with his triangulation. But it didn’t work well for the institutional Democratic Party, which just got clobbered in 1994 in Clinton’s first midterm.
One of the catastrophic mistakes that he made—and maybe it wasn’t a mistake, maybe it was deliberate but it turned out to be bad for the party—was to embrace NAFTA. The whole view of free markets that went with NAFTA, and the whole embrace of Wall Street that went with NAFTA. He had to do that with the support of Republicans in the House, and the opposition of two-thirds of the Democratic caucus. So the whole Clinton strategy of triangulation split the party and mixed the message. I guess my concern is that the Democrats have been mixing the message for 30 or 40 years, and it hasn’t worked. The consequence of all of this was Trump. Where economic frustrations led Democrats of a different era to turn to Roosevelt, now, because the Democrats are so inconstant as tribunes of the ordinary person, a lot of frustrated white Democrats turned to Trump.
What’s tricky here is that you can’t attribute all of the Democrats’ problems to being less than clarion on the pocketbook frustrations of ordinary people because race complicates the picture. It always does. Roosevelt finessed that, of course, by getting into bed with Dixiecrats so that he could pass a progressive economic program, as long as it excluded Black people. Once you let Black people in, the economic populous message gets complicated by the racial justice message, which Johnson was able to pull off for a little while, but then we had all this backpedaling. Not just on the part of Democrats, but on the part of the country, on race, beginning in the ’80s.
As soon as Republicans discovered the formula of replacing the Dixiecrats as the party of white racism, they became the majority party in the South. And I think Democrats are still wrestling with that.
David: Democrats in the ’90s were often criticized for abandoning the white working class with their embrace of free trade and neoliberalism, but as I read the story, it seemed like the white working class abandoned the Democrats when they embraced racial justice in the ’60s and ’70s. So I guess I wonder in that story, which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Robert: Let’s put it this way, if you were not going to deliver on pocketbook issues for white working-class people, racial justice is a much, much harder sell. Even if you do deliver on pocketbook issues, racial justice, it’s a hard sell, but it’s even harder if you’ve gotten into bed with Wall Street.
David: The 1990 years was a pretty grim time for progressive populists like yourself, with the centrist wing of the party dominant. It seems like one pivot point where the narrative begins to change, and we start to see this building up of new grassroots energy in the Democratic Party, was with Howard Dean setting out to create a 50-state strategy when he became chair of the DNC. What was he trying to do? And what did he accomplish?
Robert: I think it’s important to point out that the new chair of the National Democratic Party, Jamie Harrison, describes himself as an acolyte of Howard Dean. Dean and Harrison are very close. And he views Dean as a kind of a mentor. Dean’s strategy was to look to so-called red states or purple states that the National Democratic Party had written off.
One of the things I like to point out is that when I worked in the Senate in the 1970s, you could take a car trip from Washington State through the Dakotas, through Montana, down through Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, into Tennessee, into West Virginia and not encounter a Republican senator. Even more to the point, all the Democratic senators in those states were progressive. And even more to the point, they were all labor Democrats. So, that tells you that the story that you often hear—that we are hopelessly the minority party because of the original gerrymander, rural states getting two senators—that’s not necessarily so. If you deliver for folks in rural states, the way Democrats did in that era, you can pick them up. So Dean’s notion was, let’s not give up on those states. Let’s do it with grassroots organizing, let’s put the party on the same side as grassroots organizing.
That was the heyday of the original generation of the netroots, not just as celebrity bloggers, but as progressive activists. Howard Dean was their candidate when he ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004. And then, when he lost that, he was their candidate for chair of the DNC. There was this coming together of the progressive grassroots and Dean as the party chair.
In 2008, Obama piggybacks on Dean’s strategy. He also piggybacks on the net root strategy of grassroots fundraising and organizing. And then tragically, he unceremoniously dumps Dean as party chair and doesn’t quite know what to do with OFA, Obama for America.
And there’s about a two- or three-month period where the political insiders who were advising Obama are not sure what to do. Then finally, they say, “well, we can’t have an independent organization that you don’t control acting in your name. So let’s just bring it inside.” And they kill it.
So all of this incredible grassroots energy that begins with a Dean campaign and continues with the netroots, that gets extinguished. And by 2016, the DNC is a wholly owned subsidiary of the White House, and all this organizing energy has gone down the drain. The turnout in ’16 is dismal, and that’s one of the reasons why Hillary loses.
Usually, when a Democrat takes office, the last thing in the world they want is a party that they don’t totally control. The party just becomes an adjunct of the White House. This time, partly because Jamie Harrison was James Clyburn’s top staffer and Clyburn more than anybody else was responsible for getting Biden the nomination based on the South Carolina strategy, and partly because they trust Harrison, they’re going to give Harrison a fair amount of leeway to really pursue a 50-state build-up of the grassroots parties again. So I’m hopeful that we’re going to have more of a grassroots strategy than we usually do when a new Democratic president takes office.
David: Let’s walk through some of the different pieces of the infrastructure on the left. Let’s start with the strength of social movements and grassroots organizing. You’ve been a student of progressive politics for a lot longer than I have, going back to the 1960s and ’70s. Have you ever seen the kind of grassroots energy that we see today on the left?
Robert: I have, but what I have not seen is the unity. So you had a ton of grassroots energy in the ’60s. The problem was that some of that grassroots energy was devoted to civil rights, some of it was devoted to anti-war. The grassroots were completely schizophrenic on the subject of Lyndon Johnson. I remember an SDS pin that I wore to the 1964 convention, and it said, “Part of the Way with LBJ.” And that was a lovely pun because it meant he’s only going to get us part of the way. And it also meant that we’re only with him on some things. We’re with him on the war on poverty, we’re not with him on the Vietnam war. You had a lot of grassroots energy, but it was fractured. And then, of course, it all falls apart in ’68. What you have now is a ton of grassroots energy, but people who were not all that enthusiastic about Biden being the nominee nonetheless campaigned very enthusiastically for him because the top priority was to get rid of Trump.
And then Biden pleasantly surprised a lot of progressives by appointing a mostly progressive team to run the country. You’ve got to go pretty far left to find people who are sniping at Biden. You’re getting loving pressure on Biden to appoint progressives, but you’re not getting ad hominem attacks that “Biden is personally a sellout and we hate him.”
This is very unusual for Democrats, who are famous for eating their own. I think because the stakes are so high, that unity just might hold. Now, with that said, you’ve got a plethora of different kinds of groups with different kinds of goals. You’ve got the risk of the more radical groups becoming the face of the party—“defund the police,” that kind of stuff. But for the moment, everybody’s behaving themselves. Look at Bernie—he’s Mr. Loyalist. He could not have behaved himself better in the campaign. He’s head of the Senate Budget Committee. So why would he not want to be close to the administration? And so I’m holding my breath, but right now, this unity is not splintering yet. And that just might go on for a while.
David: I think it’s striking the degree to which social movements have turned their attention to the electoral sphere. For so long, the complaint on the left was that our social movements didn’t do that; Occupy Wall Street is the most striking example. Whereas the activists on the right have long done a brilliant job of really focusing on politics and winning elections. You think of the Christian right, the gun rights people, the Tea Party, the Trumpers—they’ve all been super-serious about winning elections and changing policy. It seems like we’re finally catching up on that.
Robert: I think that’s right. Let me draw another distinction. I think when Democrats do focus on elections, they tend to focus on this election, this month, or the last three months before the election. Very short-term. Now, I think what you’re finding is organizing for the long term, which then has payoffs in election years.
The not-so-good news is that you have a zillion groups all competing for funding and all competing for branding. So you have five people with a million-dollar organization with no mass membership run by professionals out of Washington, and you multiply that times 10,000, and you have fragmentation on the progressive side.
On the conservative side, you got a handful of big groups with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe underwritten by the Koch brothers or underwritten by one of the other foundations. If you do a chart of the infrastructure on the Republican side, it’s simpler, it’s more elegant, it’s more coherent, it’s cleaner.
I think one of the other problems is their groups tend to have real memberships. The NRA has real members. A lot of the groups on the progressive side, even groups with big budgets, they are professionally staffed. They don’t have chapters, they don’t have members, they’re acting in the name of some good cause.
The Sierra Club is one of the very few that has chapters and has members and votes for officers and will pay dues. But even the Sierra club gets a ton of foundation money. So this is a problem. This is the people’s party relying on billionaires and relying on foundation grants instead of relying on dues-paying members.
The exception, of course, is the labor movement, which does have dues-paying members. But the labor movement has been clobbered, and rebuilding the labor movement is a big part of rebuilding the Democratic Party.
David: Let’s talk about the Democratic Party establishment and its machinery. You write about the growing tensions between the grassroots left, which is on the ground, in these places where they know, where they’ve grown up, fighting electoral battles. Then you have these Democratic campaign committees that parachute in and throw their weight behind what [are] often seen as weak candidates who go on to lose—give me some examples of how that plays out.
Robert: Well, it drives the grassroots people crazy. Schumer, I think, is particularly resented because, I forget who’s the nominal head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, but Schumer runs it. So Schumer staff will look at a given state and find somebody, typically who’s a veteran, typically who’s centrist, who can raise a ton of business money, or who can self-finance, and they will intervene in the primary. They will support that person in the primary, they’ll signal other donors that that person is the candidate to support.
In Texas, they picked somebody who was a woman, a vet, a former Republican, over two progressive populist candidates—one African-American, one Hispanic, who were really exciting candidates. The officially anointed candidate, who barely won the primary, lost by 11 points and ran five points behind Biden. That story is replicated in state after state. The DCCC on the House side, same story.
It’s one thing to back a centrist in a centrist district. It’s another thing to back a centrist in a progressive district. They should not be interfering with the ability of local people to have their primary, pick their candidate. The role of the DCCC is to back the candidate in the general, it’s not to pick favorites in the primary. There’s a huge amount of resentment.
David: Let’s talk about the money. The donor class, to me, is a classic good news/bad news part of the story. It’s great that Democrats suddenly are swimming in cash like never before. The amounts of money raised in that Georgia Senate runoff were just out of sight. Democrats spent $8 billion in the last election cycle, which blew me away. On the other hand, what’s not so great is the way this money is often deployed and who’s making the decisions. What are the criticisms that you heard when you went out there of the Democratic donor class?
Robert: It’s two big things. First of all, billionaires tend to be very self-confident and they tend to be very impulsive. Mike Bloomberg dumps a hundred million bucks into Florida in just a scattershot way and it makes no difference whatsoever. And a month after the election, there’s nothing to show for it. That’s the extreme case. Tom Steyer has rather sensibly put a lot of money into long-term organizing. But you never know what billionaire you’re going to get and what he’s going to do. And it’s all up to the whims of very wealthy people. The other problem is that Democratic billionaires as a class tend to be left-wing on everything but economic populism.
David: What are the alternatives in terms of raising the kind of money necessary to compete? We don’t have those mass-membership organizations that can provide dues. How do you see a way out of this reliance on the donor class?
Robert: You’ve got Act Blue. They finally created a platform where you can raise a lot of small money. Now, I don’t want the billionaires to go away, we need their money. But I want them to be more strategic and I don’t want them to work the party’s message when it comes to populist economics.
David: I do think that there are some bright spots with this donor class—like the Susan Sandler fund, which was recently created to put a lot of money into state-based organizations focused on lasting change through grassroots organizing. A lot of the new progressive organizations on the ground are raising money like never before.
So to me, that’s some good news. And as you say, the small donors have stepped up in a way we’ve never seen before. That allows somebody like Bernie Sanders to be competitive in a way that would have never been the case 20 years ago.
Robert: On the whole, my mood is fairly good. I think the developments in the past year or so are very, very encouraging. If you look at an Arizona or a Georgia where it all comes together, that’s super-encouraging. If you can do it in those states, you can do it in other states.
David: Bob, thanks for coming on the show.
Robert: Pleasure.
