If the image of the Democratic Party is associated with the great progressive figures of the 20th century such as FD Roosevelt, JF Kennedy or Barack Obama, with the end of racial segregation and the welfare state, the long-term reality is much more complex. It refers to divisions that are sometimes surprising for those who would like to find strict equivalents with European politics.
A privilege undoubtedly of the oldest democracy in the world, even if very imperfect, at the time of its founding text, the Bill of Rights of 1787, the Democratic Party is also the oldest party still active. It was created between 1793 and 1798, at a time when the notion of party did not really exist elsewhere in the world. It is then called the Republican-Democratic Party, often shortened, ironically, to the Republican Party, and is opposed to the Federalist Party, a supporter of stronger centralized power.
His attachment to the particularities of States and to a conquering vision of the American West is in harmony with the ideal of a nation in the making. This anti-federalism is also what leads Democrats to refuse a global abolition ofslavery. The party thus built a solid foothold in the South, which would last for more than a century. A split took place in 1825 between the populist tendency of Andrew Jackson, who founded the Democratic Party, and a more elitist and puritanical tendency, which created the National Republican Party.
The party of minorities in the North and white slaveholders in the South
If they protect the racism of the electorate in the South, the Democrats paradoxically come to attract minorities in the North, notably Catholics, Irish or later Italian, thus opposing the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) who see themselves as the foundation of the American nation threatened by newcomers who do not conform to this primary identity. Through this, the Democratic Party is building a solid bloc of support among the working classes.
Andrew Jackson, president for two terms, from 1829 to 1837, also installed, and for half a century, a system in which the senior civil service was occupied by supporters of the party in power, with the consequence of encouraging corruption and to lower the level of skills. Facing it, the Federalist Party gave way to the Whig Party, liberal and modernist, united by fierce opposition to the Democratic Party. The two rivals entered into crisis at the end of the 1840s, particularly over slavery which was debated on both sides.
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The Democratic and Whig opponents ended up merging by founding the Republican Party in 1854. Their candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was elected president barely six years later. The Whig Party disappeared the same year, establishing the United States in an uninterrupted two-party system, despite dissidence which sometimes gave rise to triangular ones. This was already the case during the elections of 1860 where the Democrats arrived with two candidates, one from the South, the other from the North.
The Defeated Party of the Civil War
The Southern states, led by a Democrat, seceded and plunged the United States into a civil war from 1861 to 1865. After Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, his Democratic vice-president continued his second term barely initiated and promotes rapid reconciliation with the South.
He must face the first procedure ofimpeachment of American history, led by radical Republicans. She fails by one vote. During the so-called reconstruction period, which lasted until 1877, most of the rebel states were nevertheless deprived of the right to vote and placed under military administration, effectively removing the Democrats from federal power.
They are increasingly asserting themselves as the party of the excluded and minorities, even if it means bringing together pell-mell pioneers, Catholic or Jewish migrants and whites from the segregationist South, who replace slavery with a racist legal and societal apparatus. The African-American minority is thus the only one to line up behind the Republican Party.
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The Democrats returned to power briefly in 1885 and 1893, on the basis of internal reforms against corruption and a liberal economic program which pleased stock market circles, but alienated part of the popular electorate. The next Democratic presidents, Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and 1916, and especially Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1932, learned the lessons of this failure and now relied on the left turn of their party.
Of New Deal to the New Frontier and beyond, a progressive party protecting minorities
The latter, by imposing the New Deala welfare state policy inspired by the economist John Maynard Keynes, reveals the strength of the federal state, breaking with the history of his party. He also showed himself to be interventionist in the face of Nazism. His successor Harry S. Truman was hampered in his social ambitions and lost the support of the Southern states, who were concerned about his anti-segregationist positions.
However, it begins a real turning point for the Democratic Party which, with John Fitzgerald Kennedy – first Catholic president of the United States – extends it with the theme of the “New Frontier”, that of the poor wishing to access the “American dream”. It was under his successor Lyndon B. Johnson, also a Democrat, that the Supreme Court made “racial segregation” unconstitutional.
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Young people and African-Americans then massively joined the Democrats. Southern whites are turning to the Republican Party or following Democratic dissidents in the far-right American Independent Party. The Democratic Party pays dearly for its moral consistency. Only a refocusing on the social question allowed him to return to power sustainably, with the two mandates of Bill Clinton, from 1993 to 2001.
We had to wait until 2008 and the presidency of Barack Obamafirst black president of the United States, for the Democratic Party to successfully reaffirm both its social roots and the defense of minorities. He must nevertheless face a Republican Party which, with Donald J. Trumpreturns to power on extremely conservative and populist positions, a ticket which, for the moment, has not assured the Big Old Party only one mandate, concluded on an unprecedented crisis for American democracy. Facing him now is Kamala Harrisfirst female vice president of the United States in 2020.
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