LEFT BEHIND

A history of the Democratic Party’s late-20th-century shift from anti-poverty programs focused on redistribution and governmental support to policies reliant on entrepreneurship and the private sector.

Beginning in the 1970s, the Democratic Party began to abandon the liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. These so-called New Democrats, writes political historian Geismer, “contended that the forces of banking, entrepreneurialism, trade, and technology, which had created the economic growth and prosperity of the 1990s, could substitute for traditional forms of welfare and aid and better address structural problems of racial and economic segregation. In this vision, government did not recede but served as a bridge connecting the public and private sectors.” With the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council, founded in 1984 by several colleagues of Gary Hart, who had just lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Walter Mondale, the New Democrats worked to replace the party’s traditional constituencies of labor unions, African Americans, and low-income families with college-educated, nonunionized workers. Anti-poverty policies, moreover, would now emphasize market-based solutions, personal responsibility, and the social obligations of corporations—all ideas that permeated Bill Clinton’s administrations. Geismer deftly weaves politics with policy to show how the Democrats reimagined poverty as a market failure. “The New Democrats,” she writes, “were genuinely convinced that the market could improve the lives of poor people.” The author provides detailed descriptions of the people and ideas behind microloan initiatives, such as SouthBank in Chicago and the Southern Development Bancorporation in Arkansas; Empowerment Zones, “which used tax incentives to lure business into distressed areas”; work-oriented welfare reform; the mixed-income HOPE VI program, designed to replace public housing; and charter schools. At the end of the 20th century, however, the U.S. was more unequal than when the New Democrats began their quest, and post-Trump, the Democratic Party is once again searching for a politically viable and cohesive identity.

Catnip for policy wonks and political junkies, offering solid lessons for Democrats going forward.