Lily Geismer is an assistant professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party.
National electoral campaigns are mainly staffed by political junkies from elite universities — exactly the opposite of much of the US public. No wonder they’re so bad at reaching working-class voters.
In the 1988 Democratic presidential primary, the pro-business centrism of Michael Dukakis faced off against the pro-worker populism of Jesse Jackson. Dukakis won — and set the stage for the Democrats’ decades-long race to the middle.
In the ’80s and ’90s, the Democrats took a jackhammer to education, housing, and social welfare. This isn’t the story of a weak party unable to defend its earlier gains, but a transformed party demolishing them in service of a new neoliberal ideology.
The Democratic establishment’s obsession with courting affluent suburbanites imperils progressive policies and overlooks the changing composition of US suburbs. A progressive strategy must look to mobilize the increasingly diverse, increasingly working-class parts of American suburbia.
Before Bernie Bros vs. the DNC, there was Jesse Jackson vs. the Atari Democrats.
Bill Clinton’s New Markets initiative tried to fight poverty by showering incentives on the private sector. And now Hillary has embraced it.
As organized labor lost strength, the Democratic Party turned to professional-class voters to shore up its base.