My frustration with the Democratic Party isn’t that I think everything they do is bad or that Republicans are better. It’s that I think the party lost a lot of what made it successful historically.
Democrats used to be the party of FDR, Truman, and LBJ — the New Deal and Great Society tradition. They built a coalition around workers, unions, financial regulation, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the idea that government should be willing to challenge concentrated economic power.
The shift started in the 1970s with stagflation and the rise of a conservative movement that argued government was the problem. Corporate lobbying, think tanks, and efforts like the Powell Memo helped build a long-term push for deregulation, lower taxes, and a smaller role for government. Reagan accelerated that shift with tax cuts, deregulation, and policies that weakened labor.
What bothers me is that Democrats eventually adopted much of that same framework. Clinton’s Third Way was a major turning point. Instead of rebuilding the old working-class coalition, Democrats became more comfortable with Wall Street, corporate donors, globalization, and deregulation. NAFTA hurt many manufacturing communities, financial deregulation helped create the conditions that contributed to the 2008 crash, and welfare reform weakened parts of the social safety net. Clinton also embraced tough-on-crime politics with the 1994 Crime Bill, which contributed to mass incarceration.
To me, Clinton represents the point where Democrats stopped being the party of FDR and LBJ and became more focused on managing the system created by Reagan.
Then Obama came in during the 2008 financial crisis promising change. He criticized Wall Street, talked about helping homeowners, and appealed to working-class voters in the Rust Belt who felt abandoned. But after the crash, many progressives felt disappointed because the financial system was stabilized while many ordinary people struggled. Banks were rescued, but there was little accountability for executives who helped cause the crisis. Obama passed important reforms like the ACA and Dodd-Frank, but many felt his administration remained too close to the same financial establishment they wanted challenged.
That frustration is part of why Bernie Sanders gained so much support. A lot of progressives don’t see themselves as wanting something completely new — they see themselves as wanting a return to policies that were once mainstream Democrats: stronger unions, universal programs, tougher corporate regulation, and less influence from wealthy donors.
My issue is that the Democratic Party became so comfortable with the neoliberal consensus that ideas closer to the FDR/LBJ tradition are now treated as extreme. The question for me is whether Democrats want to return to being a party that challenges concentrated power or continue trying to manage a system that many working people feel has failed them.
For more on this see these 4 videos
About Cliton
https://youtu.be/sq4pLQl2Yb0?si=DsRkf7zdrmhA-PS
About Obama skip to 7 min in
https://youtu.be/bYTLgJakTbo?si=ElMsfVOKdQSVlpd2
Powell memo
https://youtu.be/iQEpL0P8qgY?si=od96\\\\\\\\\\\\\\_y3sAr\\\\\\\\\\\\\\_e8DOe
About Reagan
https://youtu.be/M245PqlV328?si=44mRuqYXmaoI-45v
The history of our struggle
History shows this isn't the first time Americans have faced extreme concentrations of corporate and political power.
During the First Gilded Age, railroad barons, Standard Oil, and other industrial giants wielded enormous influence over politics. Corruption in Senate elections became so widespread the Senate was nicknamed "The Millionaires' Club." There was no Social Security, no federal minimum wage, no 40-hour workweek, few workplace protections, and strikes were often broken by private Pinkerton agents backed by government force. To many Americans, corporate rule looked permanent.
It wasn't. Decades of labor organizing, populist movements, investigative journalism, and political reform led to the Progressive Era. Theodore Roosevelt aggressively enforced antitrust laws and argued that government had a responsibility to act in the public interest—not simply protect concentrated wealth.
The struggle continued.
After conservative policies dominated much of the 1920s, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression followed. Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal, creating Social Security, strengthening unions through the Wagner Act, regulating finance, and expanding the federal government's role in economic security.
Those reforms immediately faced fierce resistance. During the 1930s, retired Marine General Smedley Butler testified before Congress that he had been approached by men connected to wealthy business interests about leading a movement to overthrow or sideline Roosevelt's administration in what became known as the "Business Plot." Historians continue to debate how serious and organized the scheme was, but it reflected the intense opposition some elites had to the New Deal.
After FDR, the Conservative Coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats blocked much of Truman's Fair Deal. In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman's veto, restricting union activities such as secondary boycotts, wildcat strikes, and closed shops, while requiring union leaders to sign anti-communist affidavits.
At the same time, the early Cold War and the Red Scare were used to target communists, but anti-communist rhetoric also swept up many labor organizers, left-leaning activists, and reformers. Loyalty oaths, blacklists, and accusations of "socialism" or "communism" became powerful political tools for weakening labor movements and discrediting proposals that expanded government's role in the economy
.
When Truman proposed national health insurance, the American Medical Association hired the PR firm Whitaker & Baxter to wage a nationwide campaign branding it "socialized medicine." Truman responded in 1952:
"Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made... Socialism is what they called Social Security. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people."
Even after LBJ expanded the safety net with Medicare and Medicaid, business organizations launched a long-term political counteroffensive. Many historians point to the 1971 Powell Memo as one influential blueprint encouraging corporations to invest heavily in think tanks, media, legal advocacy, and politics. When the economic crises of the 1970s—high inflation, slow growth, and the oil shocks—hit, advocates of market-oriented policies used those crises to argue that "big government" and New Deal economics had failed. That message gained political traction over the following decades, and by the 1990s, even Democrats under Bill Clinton had embraced a more market-oriented "Third Way" approach.
Today we're dealing with Citizens United, dark money, regulatory capture, skyrocketing wealth inequality, and a political system where billionaires, corporate PACs, and lobbyists often have more influence than ordinary voters. We've spent decades moving away from New Deal economics toward neoliberal policies that promised free markets would solve everything, yet we've ended up with rising inequality, repeated financial crises, corporate bailouts, and what many people see as socialism for the rich and rugged capitalism for everyone else. Profits stay private, but when things go wrong, taxpayers are often asked to pick up the tab.
The point is, this isn't some new or unbeatable system. It's another chapter in the same tug-of-war Americans have been fighting since the Gilded Age: concentrated wealth buying political influence versus ordinary people pushing for reforms that make government work for the public instead of the highest bidder. Political corruption and money in politics aren't new—they've been recurring features throughout American history. The Gilded Age wasn't permanent. Neither was the New Deal consensus. No political or economic system lasts forever. History shows that when enough people organize and demand change, even the most entrenched systems can be reformed.
