Parties, coalitions and saving democracy

This week I had the pleasure of visiting Stanford (where, unlike Milwaukee, the weather was above 12 degrees) for the launch of Didi Kuo’s new book, The Great Retreat.

The book makes the case for the importance of political parties in a democracy – their role as “linkages” between society and government. Even though parties are increasingly reviled, Kuo argues that this is because of specific political choices to move away from representation and engagement with the public – not because parties themselves have declined in relevance as a form. This argument is a robust defense of the idea that parties still have the potential to engage in meaningful representation and can be part of the solution to the problem of democratic backsliding.

The Great Retreat went to press (I assume) before the November election and the onslaught of attacks on democracy that we’re now experiencing. At the book event, we contemplated whether parties still have a role in addressing this crisis, and while they aren’t a direct response to attacks on the separation of powers or rule of law, parties are still relevant. What parties can do is distribute power around – among state and local leaders, Congressional leaders, and civil society groups that they affiliate with. When parties perform this function, they undercut personalistic politics and thus loosen presidential control over the broader political environment. Sounds like a check the GOP could use right now. But parties – both parties – have become increasingly nationalized and presidency-centric over time, and that’s a development we’re all dealing with now.

One of the parts of the book I found most compelling was the account of the Democrats’ turn to centrist “third way” politics as a response to the need to be nationally competitive in the 1980s and 1990s. Kuo identifies centrism as a significant threat to representation. She writes (page 73), “moving to the center does not entail a specific political agenda. The political center is a nondescript place, a nonexistent voter – yet it looms large in the public imagination.” This challenges several decades of conventional wisdom in the polarization literature– popular and otherwise – about the “disappearing center.” Instead, this implies that “the center” is a recent and deliberate construction.

And the center certainly does occupy a lot of real estate in contemporary discussions about how to build a pro-democracy coalition. As most accounts of the “third way” movement and the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council will acknowledge, this ideological shift was also one away from constituencies in the Democratic Party perceived as radical or alienating to centrist – usually white – voters, and turning away from figures like Jesse Jackson who advocated for more forthrightly left-wing policies.

These explanations and suggestions were offered in the wake of multiple, consecutive, devastating presidential losses by Democrats in the presidential elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988 (in some cases, corresponding with Congressional seat losses). And while the party has changed – experienced a resurgent left wing, even – some of the same arguments are resurfacing after the 2024 contests.

The context is different for these arguments. One the one hand, as frustrating as the 2016 and 2024 losses were for Democrats, they’re nothing like the defeats of 1984 and 1988. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than Trump did in 2024! Democrats not only did fairly well in 2020, but managed to avoid the “midterm curse” in 2022. It’s not really clear that either party wields a stable majority.

But the other difference is the more pressing one: the stakes are much, much higher. What is clear is that one party has abandoned its commitment to democracy and the rule of law. This has been apparent for some time now, but the last month has eliminated any doubt. The current situation has made developing a robust coalition not just an electoral imperative for Democrats, but a pressing concern for anyone wanting to save democracy.

And thus the commentary on embracing the center, abandoning radicalism and identity, etc. I want to offer some humility in the sense that – as I admitted last week – I don’t really have a definitive answer about why the anti-fascist majority keeps failing to materialize, nor do I have any hard evidence at this point such a majority even exists.

What I do have is a decent store of historical knowledge about what happens when we try to compromise our way out of the hardest questions. One thing I want to respond to is Matt Yglesias’s contention that even deep crises like the Civil War have required measured and “normal” responses. It appears that in the same post he also talks about building a coalition by backing off more extreme stances on things like identity politics, gender and DEI – possibly not connected to the Lincoln/FDR point, but I’m treating it as a good point of departure. And I’m not trying to pick on anyone in particular here – a lot of people think this way, and a more detailed breakdown of these crisis presidencies and their approach to coalition-building can be really instructive.

Abraham Lincoln is a particularly poor example of caution as an advisable strategy. While his leadership through crisis has many admirable elements, the best of it was not when he was adhering carefully to compromises and constraints, but when he maneuvered through institutions to make bold change. We don’t remember Lincoln for his vague support of the (failed) Corwin amendment, which would have prevented Congress from interfering with slavery. We remember him for his boosting of the thirteenth amendment that banned slavery. We remember the Emancipation Proclamation, which harnessed presidential war power to undermine the slave trade and recruit the formerly enslaved in the Union military cause. We remember the Gettysburg Address, where he identifies equality as a part of the national purpose. (We also remember the Second Inaugural, which is a bit more conciliatory, but still takes it to slavery advocates a little bit.)

Lincoln was assassinated in April, 1865, and as a result we’ll never know what he would actually have done to lead the reconstruction of the South and the nation after slavery. We do know that either he or his party selected former Democrat Andrew Johnson in the service of building a broad coalition to save the Union. The ticket won the 1864 election. Johnson proved to be an unfit president in many ways, leading a Reconstruction that allowed racial hierarchy and violence to flourish in the South and beyond. And while we don’t know for sure what Lincoln would have done, before his death he advocated for a fairly lax plan to allow Southern states to rejoin the Union. In other words, Lincoln’s bolder moments saved the country. His compromises left us with a troubled and messy legacy of racial inequality that still informs many of the problems we face.

Similar lessons apply to the example of FDR: one of our most experimental and norm-breaking presidents was reluctant to wade too far into anything resembling race politics. He declined to take strong moral stances, to endorse anti-lynching legislation. More well-known are the compromises on New Deal programs that excluded African Americans in various ways. This just left these problems, and the harms they caused, for later leaders to deal with.

The constraints driving these choices are fairly clear from the historical record. But that doesn’t make the examples to emulate. You can’t build a pro-democracy coalition by excluding the most vulnerable or marginalized members of society. You can’t define democracy down to exclude groups that are politically inconvenient. You don’t build power by catering to a vision of centrism, that may or may not exist. Sure, using existing institutional avenues may be strategic or valuable, but that’s not the same thing as abandoning the values that you’re claiming to defend.