More than 20 years after Bill Clinton left office, Democrats remain in the grips of his New Democrat politics. That’s a serious problem.
The Democratic Party responded to the trauma of Donald Trump’s reelection this past November in precisely the same way it did to his shocking win in 2016: by dismissing the notion that it needs to rethink its core assumptions about politics, the economy, foreign policy, or any other element of its intellectual and governing legacy. In 2024, as in 2016, there were stern disavowals of the excesses of “identity politics” (though in the 2024 version of this lament, the preferred term of art was “wokeness”); there were allied calls to rediscover the plight of ordinary working Americans, besieged by narrowing life chances and, in recent years, spiraling inflation—yet without much in the way of specific plans to provide relief. And tellingly, there were morale-boosting appeals to disregard the verdict of the electorate; both elections were decided by close-enough margins for Democratic leaders and strategists to continue cleaving to the beguiling fantasy that this or that messaging tweak—a more fulsome callout to the white working class here, a better framing of reproductive rights slogans there—can spare the party any serious bout of soul-searching.
For students of recent political history, this mainstream Democratic approach has a familiar, and deeply frustrating, ring. It’s a worldview steeped in sclerotic economic policy prescriptions and the courtship of fickle suburban voters. And while the full measure of its bankruptcy has become broadly visible only in recent election cycles, its deficiencies have been evident to those who cared to look for more than three decades, since the rise of Bill Clinton and his particular brand of neoliberal politics.
Clintonism fundamentally changed the Democratic Party. With its determined rejection of old liberal commitments, it established a new paradigm for the party’s politics and, with it, a new way of doing business that has persisted even as Clinton himself has faded into the background—a hoarsened voice issuing occasional pronouncements from the sidelines. It saturated the Obama years, seeping into both policy and electoral strategy through the coterie of Clintonites who shaped so much of his administration’s ethos; it underpinned Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid; and it reasserted itself in 2020 through the party insiders who were so fixated on resisting challenges from within their ranks that they abruptly shut down the Democratic primary field in order to guarantee that Joe Biden would be the nominee—thereby quashing a class-based insurgency in the party—and then propped up a cognitively challenged Biden long past any conceivable electoral viability. Most recently, the dead hand of Clintonism forged the foundations of Kamala Harris’s difference-trimming campaign pitch, which targeted the same elusive moderate suburban voters in swing states.
Now, as the Democrats face a second brutal MAGA reckoning, the question confronting them is whether they will stubbornly continue down the same path that has left them stranded once again in the political wilderness, or whether they will heed the calls of dissenters—within their ranks as well as without—to take a different one. To do that, however, they’ll need to look hard at the twists and turns of their recent past, and the choices they’ve made along the way, and come to terms with precisely how they arrived here.
The story begins almost exactly 40 years ago, at a moment that’s strikingly similar to the one Democrats find themselves in now. It was early 1985, and the party was struggling to come to terms with a blowout election that confirmed, with no ambiguity, that the long decades of Democratic dominance were over and a new era had begun. Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor turned anti-communist crusader turned trickle-down economics zealot, had just been reelected in a landslide victory over Walter Mondale, 525 Electoral College votes to 13, as a new breed of voter—the Reagan Democrat—migrated to the GOP. (The only state Mondale won was his own, Minnesota.) The New Deal coalition that had buoyed Democrats for decades had finally fractured; the Reagan juggernaut had taken its place.
As the Democrats set about clawing their way back toward political relevance, a faction that had been trying since the 1970s to shift the party’s political and ideological direction formed an organization with the explicit goal of reinventing both. They called themselves the New Democrats and named their organization the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). At the helm was Al From, a journalism school graduate who had done stints in the Johnson and Carter administrations before turning himself into a “policy entrepreneur” for the party’s disenchanted centrist flank. Alongside him was a cadre of overwhelmingly white Southern men who shared his critique of the party’s longtime embrace of industrial manufacturing, labor unions, civil rights, and social welfare. In their place, the faction embraced market competition, entrepreneurship, deregulation, and public-private collaboration—all while supplementing it with gentle modulations to create incremental gains in racial and gender equality.
“The political ideas and passions of the 1930s and 1960s cannot guide us in the 1990s!” they declared. To translate many of these ideas into concrete policy proposals, the DLC established the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank run by the veteran Washington insider Will Marshall.
In tandem with this new policy agenda, the DLC also began cultivating an electoral strategy that rested on the twin notions that white middle-class professionals were key to capturing the presidency, and that capturing the presidency was key to the party’s future viability. After yet another Republican victory in the 1988 election, in which George H.W. Bush handily defeated Michael Dukakis, From commissioned two political scientists and seasoned presidential campaign advisers, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck (both of whom would later hold posts in the Clinton administration), to draft a now-famous report that would offer a blunt diagnosis for why the Democrats kept losing presidential elections. Titled “The Politics of Evasion,” the report, published in September 1989, accused the Democratic establishment of failing to reckon with the political realignment reshaping the country, preferring to remain stubbornly attached to their old beliefs, even if it condemned the party to repeated election losses. “In place of reality they have offered wishful thinking; in place of analysis, myth,” Galston and Kamarck charged.
The authors summarized that wishful thinking in a single phrase: “liberal fundamentalism.” “Whether the issue is the working poor, racial justice, educational excellence, or national defense, the liberal fundamentalist prescription is always the same; pursue the politics of the past,” they wrote. The DLC’s mission, therefore, was to come up with something new. Instead of stressing outcomes, the Democrats would tout “opportunity”; instead of promoting New Deal–style master plans to alleviate entrenched inequalities in income, housing, and education, the Democrats would romance Wall Street while sending traditional allies, such as teachers’ unions and displaced industrial workers, to the back of the line.
Galston and Kamarck didn’t stop there. In a frontal assault on what they called the “myth of mobilization,” the authors rejected the idea that the Democrats could win elections by relying on the labor movement for meaningful turnout. They were especially dismissive of the theory, which was at the heart of Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaigns, that the party could make gains by encouraging disaffected and marginalized Americans to vote. Instead, they argued, the Democrats needed to lure back the white moderate professionals and lower-middle-class workers who had been migrating to the Republicans with a message that emphasized social issues and moral principles.
Galston and Kamarck’s final piece of advice was that the Democrats had to focus on the presidency rather than congressional or state-level politics. After all, the party had maintained a majority in Congress since the Eisenhower era. The authors suggested cultivating a candidate who “squarely reflects the moral sentiments of average Americans” and offers an “economic message, based on the values of upward mobility and individual effort that can unite the interests of those already in the middle class with those struggling to get there.” The report’s basic premise was that the American electorate had lurched rightward and that the party needed to create an agenda to match in order to remain electorally competitive.
With a hostile incoming administration, a massive infrastructure of courts and judges waiting to turn “freedom of speech” into a nostalgic memory, and legacy newsrooms rapidly abandoning their responsibility to produce accurate, fact-based reporting, independent media has its work cut out for itself.
At The Nation, we’re steeling ourselves for an uphill battle as we fight to uphold truth, transparency, and intellectual freedom—and we can’t do it alone.
This month, every gift The Nation receives through December 31 will be doubled, up to $75,000. If we hit the full match, we start 2025 with $150,000 in the bank to fund political commentary and analysis, deep-diving reporting, incisive media criticism, and the team that makes it all possible.
As other news organizations muffle their dissent or soften their approach, The Nation remains dedicated to speaking truth to power, engaging in patriotic dissent, and empowering our readers to fight for justice and equality. As an independent publication, we’re not beholden to stakeholders, corporate investors, or government influence. Our allegiance is to facts and transparency, to honoring our abolitionist roots, to the principles of justice and equality—and to you, our readers.
In the weeks and months ahead, the work of free and independent journalists will matter more than ever before. People will need access to accurate reporting, critical analysis, and deepened understanding of the issues they care about, from climate change and immigration to reproductive justice and political authoritarianism.
By standing with The Nation now, you’re investing not just in independent journalism grounded in truth, but also in the possibilities that truth will create.
The possibility of a galvanized public. Of a more just society. Of meaningful change, and a more radical, liberated tomorrow.
In solidarity and in action,
The Editors, The Nation
The DLC got a chance to test these theories in 1992, when a candidate of unusual political talents emerged—from within its own ranks. Bill Clinton, who was one of the founding members of the DLC and served as its chair in the early 1990s, proved the ideal candidate to deliver the group’s message and vision. Ambitious and charismatic, he had used his years in the Arkansas governor’s mansion to cultivate a national platform by implementing programs to foster postindustrial growth while experimenting with new forms of fiscal austerity, including an early welfare-to-work program. His 1992 campaign for president, which was carefully crafted by members of the DLC, followed the prescriptions outlined in “The Politics of Evasion” almost to a T. In addition to his famous call to “end welfare as we know it,” he offered a series of proposals to prove that he believed in “family values,” was tough on crime and supported the death penalty, and was not beholden to “special interests.” His denunciation of the rapper and activist Sister Souljah at one of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition events was such a transparent attempt to distance himself from the more progressive factions of the party that the phrase “Sister Souljah moment” became a synonym, in the words of the Political Dictionary website, for signaling to centrist voters that a politician “is not beholden to traditional, and sometimes unpopular, interest groups associated with the party.”
And yet, even as he pivoted and denounced, what made Clinton particularly adept as a politician was his ability to connect with voters, especially through their economic anxieties, drawing on his own childhood in an economically precarious household in small-town Arkansas. When he told Americans “I feel your pain,” many of them believed him. In a three-way race, Clinton captured 43 percent of the popular vote and won over moderate Republicans in places like Southern California and Philadelphia’s Main Line as well as narrowly besting George H.W. Bush among white working-class voters.
In office, Clinton showed whose economic pain he really empathized with. He quickly rejected the notion, advocated by his longtime friend and labor secretary, Robert Reich, that the best way to achieve economic growth was through fiscal stimulus and investment in infrastructure. Instead, he followed the advice of Robert Rubin, a former Goldman Sachs executive who served as the director of Clinton’s National Economic Council and then as his secretary of treasury, as well as other finance-friendly deficit hawks who argued that balancing the federal budget by reducing the deficit would be a way to win back the trust of Wall Street, especially bond traders. Clinton also fulfilled some key campaign promises: He implemented the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), much to the chagrin of many fellow Democrats, and he got tough on crime by signing into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in September 1994.
As Clinton swerved right in key areas, he also remained loyal to a number of liberal commitments. He spent a great deal of his first two years in office on a quixotic attempt to pass a version of universal healthcare (albeit one that leaned heavily on the private sector) while also promoting so-called social issues, many of which, in the coming years, would remain some of the party’s few defining principles. He supported affirmative action, defended reproductive rights, and created one of the most diverse cabinets in history—the latter of which, in particular, displeased the DLC. Anticipating the anti-woke sentiment that has come to permeate elite liberal politics, its leaders were deeply concerned about Clinton’s decision to give prominent cabinet posts and other high-level positions to people of color. Marshall, the head of the DLC’s think tank, wrote in a May 1993 memo to From that he feared Clinton’s “placement of ‘PC’ activists in key policy positions” would “drive white moderates out of the party, not to mention alienating swing voters.”
For all his moderation, Clinton was a lightning rod for the right, and his agenda received a drubbing in the 1994 midterm elections as Newt Gingrich united Republican congressional candidates around a 10-point program called the Contract With America. Its goals included a balanced budget amendment, an even harsher crackdown on crime, a stiff reduction in the capital gains tax, and a stringent welfare-to-work plan. The strategy worked: Republicans won big, picking up eight seats in the Senate and more than 50 in the House, giving the GOP control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. It was an early portent of the pitfalls of following the DLC directive to focus on the presidency.
While most Democrats bemoaned Gingrich’s victory, the heads of the DLC saw it as an opportunity. They believed that during his first two years in office, Clinton had deviated from his New Democrat roots and instead tailored his agenda to placate traditional Democratic constituencies. Now they had an opening to push their own agenda. “The 1994 elections have wiped the slate clean and liberated Democrats from special-interest liberalism,” From and Marshall wrote to other DLC members.
Dick Morris, Clinton’s main campaign strategist, agreed. Morris, who had advised Clinton since his first run for governor in 1978, had a reputation for ruthless if not unethical tactics (his most recent major advisee is Donald Trump). Building on the principles set forth in “The Politics of Evasion,” Morris helped Clinton develop a reelection campaign that was obsessively focused on winning the support of white suburban “soccer moms,” who seemed like the most persuadable swing voters. This focus showed that all vestiges of the faint populism or progressivism that had appeared in Clinton’s presidential bid and first term had to go when there were any signs of trouble. Nevertheless, Morris added his own twist on Galston and Kamarck’s thesis, persuading Clinton to co-opt features of the conservative agenda, a strategy he called “triangulation.” The Clinton campaign duly rolled out a series of easily satirized “family values” proposals, including mandatory school uniforms, curfews for teens, and the V-chip, a device that would block TV programs deemed to be obscene.
Other aspects of the 1996 campaign agenda of triangulation made for less of a late-night punch line. Clinton’s effort to fulfill his 1992 campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it” had failed just before the midterm elections. Gingrich’s Contract With America made welfare reform a major priority. Following their 1994 victory, House and Senate Republicans offered various versions of welfare reform, all of which were far more stringent than what Clinton had envisioned. Although he vetoed the first two bills, a third one landed on his desk at the height of his reelection race in the summer of 1996. It included far stricter time limits than Clinton was then proposing, while also advocating marriage and abstinence counseling and cutting $24 billion in funding for food stamps; it also barred most new immigrants—including those with authorized status—from receiving even basic welfare assistance.
Civil rights, anti-poverty, religious, feminist, and labor groups—many of the Democratic Party’s core constituencies—publicly urged Clinton to veto the bill and tried to inundate the White House with telephone calls and letters. The National Organization for Women held daily demonstrations and nightly candlelight vigils, and Patricia Ireland, the organization’s president, went on a hunger strike, vowing to continue it until Clinton vetoed the bill. The Nation published a scathing editorial charging Clinton with “seeking reelection by further afflicting this nation’s most defenseless citizens.”
Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.
Most of Clinton’s cabinet—including Robert Reich, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, and even Robert Rubin—advised him not to sign it. Morris and the DLC took a different stance. Even though Clinton had a double-digit lead over Bob Dole, the Republican nominee, Morris argued that the bill offered insurance for his reelection. Clinton ultimately capitulated, putting his pen to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in August 1996. The name was a direct callback to the New Democrats’ core notion that the best way to help struggling Americans was by creating “opportunity” through the private sector, not by maintaining a strong government safety net. The act also clearly illustrated the New Democrats’ belief that soccer moms and their husbands were a more valuable constituency than poor and working-class voters—a belief that rested on the assumption that these traditional Democratic constituencies would still show up for Clinton at the ballot box. It was a calculation that would pan out: On Election Day, Clinton carried every income group except the very wealthiest.
The 1996 election was interpreted as a giant green light for the New Democrat agenda. The results provided Clinton with a powerful mandate to pursue his vision of a “New Economy”—one that the New Democrats had been promoting for years. He signed a series of trade deals, deregulated financial services, and offered incentives to bolster the tech sector. These efforts earned the full support of the DLC.
The aggregate results of these policies contributed to a rosy picture of the economy when Clinton left office. By 1999, the GDP was growing at an average rate of 3.5 percent annually; there were more than 18 million new private-sector jobs; the unemployment rate was 4.2 percent (the lowest in 29 years); the inflation rate was 2.1 percent; and there was a budget surplus for the first time since 1969. The Clinton administration and the DLC proudly celebrated all this data as proof that their vision had been correct. Many of the benefits, however, were disproportionately enjoyed by those in the top economic strata. A large portion of the new jobs required a bachelor’s or associate’s degree, and those that didn’t tended not to pay a living wage or offered little chance for advancement.
While NAFTA would later get the lion’s share of the blame, it was only one of the many important free-trade policies established in the 1990s. Many economists now view the decision to expand trade with China and advocate for its admission to the World Trade Organization, along with the administration’s deregulation of finance, as even greater sources of harm. At the end of his presidency, Clinton made an effort to reach out to the communities that the New Economy had left behind, but the promises of worker retraining and investment from the private sector never materialized—even as the gutting of welfare and food stamp programs tore large holes in the social safety net.
Clinton’s success in the 1996 election, nevertheless, created a virtual orthodoxy on the best ways for Democrats to win presidential elections. While not every candidate went as far as pushing V-chips, every successive Democratic presidential nominee crafted their campaign to appeal to suburban professionals. Barack Obama’s campaign is remembered for its multicultural narrative of hope and change, but much of that message was carefully calibrated to appeal to affluent white suburbanites in swing states like Virginia and Colorado rather than to those Americans who were most acutely experiencing the fallout of the 2008 recession.
Once in office, Obama also adopted elements of the New Democrats’ focus on economic growth through free trade, finance, and tech entrepreneurship, even bringing back many Clinton alums to fill key posts in his administration. As the 2008 recession wrought a very uneven recovery, many working-class Americans began connecting the dots and concluded that the culprit for their economic pain was the Democratic Party. In turn, the party consistently failed to offer a meaningful alternative vision, instead doubling down on its Clinton-era strategy of appealing to the affluent and middle-class center—most clearly articulated by Senator Chuck Schumer when he predicted during the 2016 election: “For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western PA, we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
One of the major flaws in this strategy is that it failed to address the ways in which the Republican Party had changed since the 1990s. While some of the Democrats’ tactics and policies might have worked against a classic free-market conservative like Bob Dole or Mitt Romney (whose company was directly responsible for substantial job losses), it has proved far less effective at countering Trump and the MAGA right, who have leaned hard into nationalist populism. And, as demonstrated in the exit polls from 2024, there aren’t enough moderate suburbanites to balance out the other groups who have migrated toward the GOP. It is practically Galston and Kamarck’s “myth of mobilization” in reverse.
This isn’t to suggest that there hasn’t been any movement away from the New Democrat playbook. While Biden was an early member of the DLC, he did not govern like one—a result, in large part, of pressure from the far more visible and potent left that has emerged in recent years. During the general election, nevertheless, Kamala Harris’s campaign fell back on the New Democrats’ familiar tactics. In addition to her optimistic messages about family togetherness, her promises to crack down on immigration and crime and her campaign appearances with old-line Republicans like Liz Cheney were a warmed-over version of triangulation.
In a sign of just how backward-looking the Democrats’ strategy had become, Al From, who has remained a vigorous defender of the DLC’s legacy, told the journalist Eleanor Clift this summer, “We set an agenda for the 1990s. It wasn’t an agenda for 2020.”
As much as Clintonism has defined Democratic Party politics over these past several decades, it’s crucial to remember that it wasn’t inevitable. At the same time that the DLC was crafting its grand plans for a more corporate and conservative Democratic Party, Jesse Jackson was mapping out an alternative vision of what the party could be. He built his campaign messages and strategy around the recognition that the Reagan revolution had hurt large swaths of Americans of all races. Jackson firmly believed that the Democratic Party could channel the aspirations and demands of historically oppressed and marginalized groups. His campaigns sought to bring those constituencies together in a unified Rainbow Coalition, comprising Black voters in the urban North and rural South, white farmers in the upper Midwest, labor unionists, peace activists, feminists, gay and lesbian groups, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. He also sought to bring new voters into the electorate—and, with the help of a committed cadre of grassroots organizers, inspired hundreds of thousands of people from marginalized groups, especially African Americans, to register to vote. And Jackson himself had no illusions about the New Democrats of the DLC, mocking its initials as actually standing for “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”
Four decades later, the Democrats are once again facing a reckoning, with a choice to make about how they intend to forge their way out of the wilderness. While powerful factions of the party remain wedded to the spirit of Clintonism Past—that victories by the right necessitate rightward shifts by the Democrats, that vulnerable communities should be sacrificed to such efforts, and that the working class is an interest group whose needs can be overlooked—the results of the 2024 election make all too clear that the party needs to retire its 1990s ways.
This will mean more than giving Bill and Hillary Clinton less prominent speaking roles at the Democratic National Convention or refusing to tap Clinton administration alums to man key administration and campaign posts. It will also mean more than mere rhetorical populism—that is, more than talking about feeling voters’ economic pain. It will mean fundamentally reimagining the ethos of the party and allowing new generations of politicians and policymakers to emerge. Most of all, it will mean creating an agenda that meets the realities of both the present and the future by, among other things, addressing the profound inequalities at the heart of our economy, the climate crisis, and the country’s threadbare social safety net.
In the coming months, the story of the Clinton era should serve as a warning to Democrats that they must be clear-eyed about the past. Still, amid the wreckage, there is at least one lesson they can take from the party’s New Democrat days: It is possible to fundamentally change the direction of the party—and they must.
Lily GeismerLily Geismer is a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and the author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.