Ever since the May release of their long-delayed postmortem, the sense that Democrats still lack a convincing explanation for their 2024 election losses and continued unfavorable polling has only grown. So much so, the progressive Guardian recently observed, that Democrat candidates “are far from united on how the party should align itself and move forward [toward the mid-terms].” The recent victory of three Democratic Socialist candidates in New York City’s congressional primaries, defeating two incumbents, seems only to have only added to their confusion.
Interestingly for a political camp which frames its policies as remedies for longstanding social injustices — racial and sexual discrimination, Western colonialism, capitalist exploitation — its official reasons for the 2024 defeat were remarkably shortsighted: messaging errors, a disorganized voter‑mobilization effort, and a lack of coordination between the DNC, major super PACs, and the Kamala Harris’s campaign.
Were they alive today, President Trumam, Sen. Humphrey, and all the other founders of the post-War Democrat Party would very likely endorse Elon Musk’s effort to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Perhaps Democrats would have a better understanding of their current unpopularity if they stepped backed and reflected on the historic reorientation of their party in the late 1940s and early 1950s. That was when left-wing politicians and thinkers in both England and Sweden developed what they called a “third way” between a market-based economy and state-planned socialism or communism.
Their basic idea, which came to be called “social democracy” (not to be confused with today’s democratic socialism), was to take advantage of capitalism by taxing enough of its fruits to provide all citizens with a decent education, adequate medical care, and other basic services. And to make sure that the resulting government programs remain as efficient and effective as possible, each would be thoroughly evaluated at regular intervals using the most advanced sociological methods. As Michael Young, the head of the UK Labor Party’s Research Department from 1945–1951, constantly reminded his colleagues, “No social plan can succeed unless it is continuously tested by research into its actual effects.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that this concept of tapping the market economy to guarantee all citizens a minimum quality of life fundamentally transformed the U.S. Democratic Party, which after World War II had been trying to build on Roosevelt’s New Deal without seeming overly statist. In the words of the late Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley, those on the left clearly saw social democracy as the best way to “strengthen the welfare state while reassuring Americans that liberal reform had nothing in common with the collectivism of the Soviet system.”
Prominent Democrat politicians of the early 1950’s, including Sen. Hubert Humphry (MN) and Sen. Paul Douglas (IL), were especially taken with the scientific aspect of social democracy, which they felt protected their agenda from predictable Republican accusations of wasteful spending and vote buying. President Harry Truman himself stressed this point during a 1950 message to Congress in which he declared that every federal program must be subject to “modern management and scientific methods.”
Nothing better demonstrated the appeal of the Democrats’ case for a larger but more competent government than the passage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation in the early-to-mid 1960s. Originally budgeted at $10-12 billion in its first full year of operation (1965-1966), but accelerating to $35 billion by 1970, it included such still familiar programs as Head Start, the Food Stamp Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Local governments around the country also expanded during this period, in part because so many of the new federal programs had to be administered at a city or state level. But their growth was also due to a provision of the Great Society known as the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) which facilitated the creation of community action groups that, in turn, pressured municipalities to establish even more public services.
What was unfortunately missing from all these new federal, state, and city programs was any rigorous mechanism for measuring and improving their performance. Even before President Johnson, his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, had issued an executive order (#10988) granting collective bargaining rights to federal employees — effectively giving government unions the ability to control (through sizeable campaign contributions) the politicians who were supposed to controlling them. By the mid‑1970s, most states had granted similar rights to teachers, police, firefighters, and other public workers.
The one monitoring system the Great Society managed to establish was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), budgeted at around $25 million annually and tasked with evaluating anti‑poverty programs in formal reports to Congress. But there was never a strategy for measuring effectiveness across government agencies, nor a requirement that programs had to pass some kind of regular review to continue. Indeed, even when respected liberals like Martin Luther King Jr.’s chief strategist Wyatt Tee Walker, Harvard School of Education dean Ted Sizer, and Senate icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D, NY) called on the Democrat Party to make up for these deficiencies, they were largely ignored.
Some in the late sixties had hoped that university social science departments would take on the role of government watchdog envisioned by the first social democrats, objectively measuring the effectiveness of various agencies and recommending needed improvements. But most produced questionably researched studies whose only criticism of existing programs was that they were not big enough. The reason, as Berkeley sociologist Robert A. Nisbet would later explain, was that academia had quickly figured out just how much it stood to gain from the demand for an ever-larger number of credentialed public sector and nonprofit workers.
More recently, as it became hard to ignore the disappointing performance of all the social workers, bureaucrats, and other public servants they had trained, professors increasingly took to measuring government programs by criteria which ignored, minimized, and even denigrated their original purpose. Judging welfare systems by the number of beneficiaries, for example, rather than by the number becoming more self-sufficient. Or giving more praise to school districts which emphasize progressive ideology than to those with high student math and reading scores. Unsurprisingly such relatively lax standards — the heart of what has euphemistically come to be called the “social justice” movement — were eagerly embraced by many public sector workers.
If the Democrat Party really wants to understand why it is not more popular, it only needs to reflect on the extent to which the quality of the social services it once promised voters has been sacrificed to the priorities and preferences of service providers. Especially since Covid, when it became clear that the Biden administration was far more interested in giving public school employees the paid leave they wanted than in making sure K-12 students were being adequately educated during the crisis. Today’s Democrat Party even supports taxpayer funding of services which most Americans staunchly oppose, such as gender‑affirming care for minors and defending transgender women in women’s sports.
Were they alive today, President Trumam, Sen. Humphrey, and all the other founders of the post-War Democrat Party would very likely endorse Elon Musk’s effort to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Just as they would view the growing migration from blue states to red ones as sufficient reason to immediately analyze and correct the government dysfunctions causing it.
Almost certainly, they would celebrate the current administration’s formation of a National Fraud Enforcement Division within the Department of Justice to root out the abuse of programs like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance. Unlike the modern Democrat Party, which has no notable enthusiasm for holding government agencies and government funded nonprofits more accountable.
All this is not to suggest that the Democrat Party should ignore the interests of those who work in the public sector, any more than Republicans should be expected to ignore the business community. The very idea of a democracy presupposes that all factions have political representation.
But as Republicans demonstrated in 1890 when they backed President Benjamin Harrison to restrict Standard Oil and other monopolies with anti-trust legislation, there is a difference between representing a constituency and allowing that constituency’s desires to subvert what the party ultimately stands for.
Similarly on the left, Sweden’s Social Democrat Party — the co-inventor of social democracy — finally realized in the early 1990s that it had gone too far in appeasing its government unions and allied factions, allowing the country’s voters to fall from the richest in G7 to the poorest. Social Democrat Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson rightly rallied his party to accept the privatization of many state functions, tightened the eligibility for social benefits, and set limits on state subsidies.
Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, each of the two major U.S. political parties has stood for a worthy ideal; the Republicans for individual freedom and the Democrats for helping the less advantaged. But in recent years the GOP has been in the position of trying to make government and its academic and nonprofit allies more accountable for both goals while the left side of the aisle has operated more like a temple guard for public unions. Even to the point of turning a blind eye to their support of far-left and coyly antisemitic candidates like New York Congresswoman-elect Claire Valdez and DC Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George.
Whether the Democrat Party can muster the courage to once again be responsible to the wider public it has always claimed to represent is the great domestic political question of our time.
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Dr. Andrews is former executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy. His latest book is Living Spiritually in the Material World (Post Hill Press).
