Adaptation of the American Democratic Party in an Era of Globalization

Abstract

The Democratic Party in the United States is fundamentally different from European social democratic parties because it never espoused socialism and its flirtation with social democracy a hundred years ago was relatively brief. The exigencies of American electoral politics instead demanded that the Democratic Party build an electoral base wider than the working class, though it is a base that has always included a large fraction of the working class. The economic transformation of the late twentieth century is now changing the composition of the Democratic Party and its policy orientation. This essay is an exploration of these changes in the Democratic Party's base of support and in its program. There have been two defining moments in the Democratic Party over the past one hundred years. These are the party realignments that involved the populist movement in the 1880s and 1890s, and the construction of the New Deal coalition in the 1930s. In the late nineteenth century, the populist movement created a far-reaching coalition between small farmers still prominent despite several decades of rapid industrialization and the emerging urban working class. A few decades later in such countries as Sweden, worker-farmer alliances would be the impetus behind the development of extensive welfare states. But the issues of the American populist movement were not those of social insurance or the redistribution of wealth. Rather, the primary concern was the