A Brief History of the Democratic Party

Adam Hilton

There are a lot of things that we can point to that appear to be pretty significant continuities between the Biden administration and previous Democratic administrations, or even the two-party Washington consensus. We can look at Biden’s commitment to Israel through the war in Gaza. We can look at his foreign-policy views around the expansion of NATO. We can look at some of the privatization of Medicare and other aspects of the health system.But I think the discontinuities have been really incredible.

I would argue that, while continuing to pale in comparison to the ideal of what a Democratic administration could be, Biden is probably the most progressive president in modern history — certainly as progressive as Lyndon Johnson. although he achieved a little less than Johnson. He was more pro-labor in some ways than Franklin Roosevelt ever was, who accommodated (because he had to) an alliance of convenience with the labor movement and understood what they could give him depending on what he gave them.

Whereas here, you have Biden walking the picket line and proposing the most dramatic expansion of the American health care system that we’ve ever seen. The House passed the PRO Act; the House passed the Minimum Wage Act. All these things die in the Senate because Biden did not have the numbers that you need to get legislation through a de facto supermajority Senate chamber. But it’s all the more dramatic that, even with the razor-thin majorities he had through 2021 and 2022, he even tried to do such an ambitious thing.

This is a Democratic Party coalition that is itself changing.

You can’t just declare the end of neoliberalism, as Biden effectively did when he said, trickle-down economics is over, we’re moving away from that. You need to do more than just declare it. You need to follow through with durable substantive changes in…