Looking at Today's Democratic Party
Make more, share better: it has to combine supply-side dynamism to fair distribution. But is there any reason to think that that prestidigitational construction and maintenance of such an incredibly broad political coalition is not an impossible lift?…
Ezra Klein writes:
Ezra Klein: <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/democrats-liberalism-elections-crick.html>: ‘The Democratic Party does not need to choose to be one thing. It needs to choose to be more things…. People tell me about issues where the Democratic Party departed from them. But they first describe a… Democratic Party, [that] they [have] c[o]me to believe, does not like them…. Social media has thrown everyone involved…into the same algorithmic Thunderdome…. We always know what our most online peers are thinking. They… set the culture…. And there is nothing that most of us fear as much as being out of step with our peers….
Today, political tolerance is harder for many of us than religious tolerance. Finding ways to turn our disagreements into exchange, into something fruitful rather than something destructive, seems almost fanciful. But there is real political opportunity…
And Henry Farrell glosses:
Henry Farrell: Liberalism Transforms Plurality from Weakness to Strength <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/liberalism-transforms-plurality-from>: ‘At least it does when it works right…. [But] the Democratic party has become a much more unwelcoming place for people who are out of step with an online consensus that favors a particular kind of online purity. What we want instead is liberality…. [Ezra Klein] seems to me to be to be recognizably right…. The fundamental message of Ezra’s piece is not that the Democratic party needs to become a moderate party. It is that it needs to become a party that is welcoming to moderates, as to others who don’t completely share its beliefs, if it is to succeed….
Figuring out ways to manage… differences inside the party… may [also] help it to build stronger and more enduring coalitions among citizens too. They… are more likely to be attracted by a party that is more interested in bringing people in, than in telling them what they ought to do or who they need to be. The lesson… is not that managing pluralism is easy…. It is that building tolerance and figuring out how to work through the inevitable messiness and conflict, can not only create common purpose internally, but attract others to your cause…
Indeed, 75 years ago Dean Acheson, ex-Secretary of State under Harry S Truman, wrote:
Dean Acheson: A Democrat Looks at His Party <https://archive.org/details/democratlooksath00ache>: ‘The [Democratic] party’s earliest efforts were to bring the many into control of government through the extension of the franchise and through frequent elections…. [Now the] many… are not necessarily more right, or wiser, or more devoted to the public good than a few people. But… they have many interests, many points of view, many purposes to accomplish, and a party which represents them will have their many interests….
The dichotomy [between Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans and Democrats] has not been between a party of property and a party of proletarians, sans-culottes, or descamisados. It has been between a party which centers on the interests deriving from property in its most important form and a party of many interests…. The economic base and the principal interest of the Republican party is business…. Here lies the significant difference between the parties, the single-interest party against the many-interest party….
For all the apparent contradiction in the fact that the Southern racist belongs to the same political party as the New York supporter of the F[air ]E[mployment ]P[ractices ]C[ommission], the inner logic which holds them together is that each speaks for the dispossessed, whether in his rural or urban form…
What is my reaction to all of this?
First, Acheson is long out of date and obsolete. The Republicans of seventy-five years ago were indeed the party of business, enterprise, entrepreneurship, and wealth—the party of millionaires and of those who aspired to become such, of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” in John Steinbeck’s phrase. In the long mid‑century arc from the McKinley‑Coolidge synthesis through Eisenhower, their median coalition priorities were predictable, and made sense as promotors of growth, albeit maldistributed growth, in a world where capital was scarce, organized labor rising, and the commanding heights of the economy were steel, autos, and oil—industries whose owners sought quiet, predictable returns rather than disruptive redistribution. But the political economy has since shifted: the locus of rent extraction, the sectoral composition of wealth, and the technologies of information, finance, and platform power have reconfigured the right’s coalition and agenda. Thus to treat the present Republican Party as the same one Acheson faced is to commit a historian’s category error: the rhetoric may rhyme, but the material base—and so the program—does not.
Seventy-five years ago, the Republican core talked as if economic growth, technological change, and Schumpeterian creative-destruction were indeed the point: the disruptions were the price of admission to Abundance, and Abundance was the telos. Entrepreneurs would churn, incumbents would be dethroned, factor reallocation would do its work, and—even though there were big losers in the short run—a political economy of patience would yield a long-run positive-sum harvest: higher productivity and broader consumption possibilities. Dynamism was a civic virtue. The state’s role was to heat up the furnace so that the competitive process could run as hot as possible, That was the catechism: trust the process of innovation and market selection because the business of America was business.
But today’s party is much less animated by the restless energies of enterprise than by the defensive custodianship of property—material holdings, yes, but also status and symbolic hierarchies. The expected upside from market-driven change has, for the Republican core, shrunk relative to the perceived downside risks. The coalition has pivoted from Schumpeterian embrace of creative destruction to protection of incumbencies. In the late nineteenth century, this took the form of tariff fortifications and gold-standard orthodoxy; in the interwar and late-twentieth episodes, it appeared as regulatory veto points and cultural retrenchment designed to slow redistribution of rents and recognition. The thread is one of a party reoriented toward guarding what is already owned rather than widening the frontier of abundance. Growth-friendly openness has fallen for a politics of scarcity, in which loss-aversion governs both economic policy and cultural stance.