This Democratic Party Is The Best Democratic Party

It’s a low bar. But nostalgia will not help us.

Mamdani being ceremonially sworn in as mayor by Bernie Sanders with Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji in the background.

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“It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders thundered following Trump’s 2024 victory.

This is a common theme for Sanders and for the left in general—and it is often framed, as Sanders does, with a kind of nostalgic tinge. To say that the party has “abandoned” working people suggests, after all, that Democrats at one point, in the past, were a working-class party, who rebuked billionaires and fought for workers, laborers and the underclass. The Democrats used to be Bernie’s party; they have fallen from grace and from class politics.

The problem with this analysis is that it is not true. The current Democratic party—the one we have right now, this minute—is as close to a party for working people as the United States has ever had. That is inextricable from the fact that the Democrats are as close to a multi-racial coalition as the United States has ever had.

When people on the left—and not just on the left—hark back to an earlier period of class solidarity, they are, in fact, harking back to a period of white racial solidarity, when white cishet men (of every social class) felt represented in large part because they were validated in their political ascension over Black people, Native people, Hispanic people, Asian people, immigrants, women, LGBT people, and everyone else. Making the history of white power into a class power idyll is the politics of MAGA. It leads nowhere good.

Black working people never had a party

The US was founded as a nation which enslaved Black people. That means Black people have always been (extremely oppressed) workers in the US, and it means that the working class has always been multi-racial. When we say that the Democratic party “abandoned” the working class, therefore we have to ask, during which period did Democrats, or any party, speak for all workers, of every race?

Reading Jullia Azari’s 2025 study Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History it quickly becomes clear that the answer to that question is a resounding “never.”

Azari’s study is an examination of presidential politics from the founding to the present, looking at how the politics of race have vacillated from white supremacist status quo to brief moments of racial progress to periods of violent backlash—and back to a white supremacist status quo.

“[P]residents rely on the kinds of compromises that have kept race off the political agenda or accommodated the most racially conservative forces,” Azari writes. In the period between the revolution and the Civil WAr, presidents (and political leaders in general) worked to avoid confronting slavery; in the period after Reconstruction, leaders worked to avoid confronting Jim Crow; in the period after the Civil Rights Movmeent, leaders worked to maintain a “color blind” approach to racism and to avoid seeing, or rectifying, ongoing inequities.

Different presidents and parties at different times did attempt to appeal to workers or less wealthy interests. But these gestures towards class politics were all, more or less explicitly, predicated on the fact that the workers being helped were only, or predominantly, white.

Andrew Jackson, presented himself as a populist fighting for the little guy against big banks and the elite. Part of fighting for the little (white) guy was committing a genocide against Native Americans so white people could get their land. Another part was allowing violent mobs to attack abolitionists with little rebuke. A hundred years later FDR positioned himself as a champion of workers—and passed much of his New Deal program by excluding Black people from them and backing Jim Crow in exchange for votes from southern Democrats.

Racial transformation and racial backlash

Azari highlights a few moments when presidents, parties, and the political system as a whole embraced racial transformation. After the Civil War, during the Civil Rights Movement, and with Obama’s presidency, the white supremacist status quo was shaken, and there was, to one degree or another, a new birth of freedom.

What generally happens in these cases, though, Azari shows, is a powerful backlash, and a swift effort by the political system to domesticate freedom into the more acceptable and familiar politics of everyday tyranny.

Following the Civil War, Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer and Andrew Johnson immediately rushed to try to restore the racist status quo in the south. He was stalemated by what I think it is fair to refer to as actively antiracist Republicans in Congress. But the legislation they passed to protect Black people—the most oppressed working people in the country—was almost immediately nullified by the usual compromises and indifference.

Ulysses S. Grant has sometimes been portrayed as a champion of Black rights, but Azari notes that his “willingness and ability” to address white Southern violence was limited. Even during his administration, “Republicans nervously began to suspect that being identified as the party of African Americans was a liability at the ballot box.” By 1876, the Matt Yglesiases of the day had won, and Republicans joined Democrats in open oppression of Black people.

The 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts, were, like the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment, a major, transformative watershed. But (again) like the Amendments, the party that passed them soon retreated in the face of backlash.

Johnson himself, as historian Elizabeth Hinton argues, embraced the idea that urban insurrections were an expression of irrational criminality rather than a response to injustice—an argument that Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and more picked up in their politics of law and order and mass incarceration. The next Democratic president, Carter, largely avoided ambitious civil rights initiatives and arguably “laid some of the groundwork for the colorblind ideology adopted by subsequent presidents,” Azari writes. And of course, then came Reagan and Bush and the Clintonian policy of triangulation—which meant betraying the multi-racial working class on mass incarceration and the social safety net, but doing so with somewhat less enthusiasm than the Republicans.

Maybe hope, maybe change

These compromises didn’t come easily. On the contrary, Azari’s argument is that racially transformative moments led to the enormously disruptive and painful backlash presidencies of Andrew Johnson and Nixon—and, of course, of Trump.

In many ways, Obama’s presidency seems less transformative than those of Reconstruction or Lyndon Johnson. Obama passed no major civil rights legislation and did not in general center racial issues during his presidency, though his signature legislation, the ACA, did help working people across the board. But existing as a Black man in the White House, and existing as the visible vanguard of a multi-racial coalition, was seen as a mortal insult to white supremacy.

The white people on the right reacted to their brief decentering with a massive paroxysm of rage, throwing the country into its most thoroughgoing Constitutional crisis since the Civil War. We’re still in that crisis, obviously, and it’s difficult to know where we’ll come out.

Still, at least in some respects, the Democratic response to the racist backlash this time looks different. There have certainly been many Rahms and Yglesiases in the Democratic coalition urging the party to respond to the politics of white supremacy as it has in the past—with surrender, compromise and appeasement. Throw trans people under wheeled conveyances, get tougher on immigrants than Trump, kick Palestinians, nominate white men and more white men. Find members of the multi-racial coalition to abandon.

But, as Toby Buckle writes in the Prospect, this approach has not been winning out. Instead, as he writes, “ordinary US liberals have rallied.” The Democratic base believes in a “pluralistic society” and “individual rights” and they believe those virtues “can only be saved through a knockdown, dragout fight across all levels of society and that the opportunity for an easy compromise has come and gone.”

This mass, bottom-up rejection of compromise is key. Biden’s presidency, which backed away from accountability and procedural radicalism, can be seen as an effort to return to a less divisive status quo of slow and perhaps wavering progress. Early in Trump’s term, it was clear that elite institutions—media, education, tech—wanted to abandon justice, and even democracy, and get back to the business of white supremacy, as they had after Reconstruction and after the CRM.

These equivocating impulses, however, have been steamrolled by the righteous rage of a Democratic base passionately committed not just to working-class politics, but to multi-racial politics. The stunning, courageous, mass, ongoing resistance in Minneapolis is a resistance, specifically, to a fascist attack on non-white people. The election of Mamdani in New York was an embrace of a vision of New York as a multi-racial democracy which includes and embraces, crucially, Muslims and Palestinians.

There’s no better party to go back to

This is not to say that the Democratic party is perfect, nor am I arguing that victory is assured. On the contrary, the Democratic party is very often dogshit and—in part as a result—fascism may well win. Like the title of the newsletter says, everything is horrible and there’s every reason to believe that, even in the best possible scenario, we are going to see numerous nightmarish atrocities and further destruction of our democracy before we manage any change for the better.

It’s important to recognize, though, that while the current Democrats are an imperfect vessel for working class politics, they are as good a vessel as we have ever had in this country by a significant margin. For most of Amerian history, political parties have put the interests of white people first—which means that the most oppressed workers, who were not white, were ignored when they weren’t actively targeted. In rare instances when a party did align itself with multi-racial workers, it quickly retreated in the face of backlash.

The current sustained antifascist multi-racial coalition, with its demands for justice and equality for all, its support for rights for immigrants and Palestinians and all people, is virtually unprecedented in the breadth of its solidarity, its rejection of compromise, and its ability to sustain itself in the face of determined backlash and opposition. Again, that doesn’t mean it will win. It doesn’t mean its adequate, and it doesn’t mean that it will be able to stiffen the spines of feckless and timid party leaders.

But it does mean that the only way forward is forward. Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, LBJ—there is no moment in history when a political party was as committed to the entirety of the working-class the way that the current Democratic party is committed to the entirety of the working-class.

That is in part because of Bernie Sanders himself. And yet, for all of Sanders’ valiant and righteous efforts, he’s wrong when he suggests that there was at one point a better working-class party. When people say that the Democrats have abandoned the working class, what they mean, whether they know it or not, is that the Democrats have abandoned white people. The dream of a working-class party past is always a dream of a white party past, because within mainstream political parties, working-class politics of the past were only ever white.

It isn’t true that Democrats have abandoned white people either, of course. The core of our current antifascist liberal/left coalition—a core which the Democrats, with much whining and shirking, fitfully embody—is the idea that all working people, and all people, benefit when the multi-racial working class topples tyrants and seizes equality and liberty.

That’s a radical idea in politics, not least because no party has truly embraced it. Getting the Democrats there is one of the most important tasks of our moment. There is no blueprint for it, and nostalgia will not help us. Again, the only way forward is forward.