The Democrats and Democracy
Democracy is a central feature of Democrats' 2024 electoral campaign. President Joe Biden, in kicking off his ill-fated reelection efforts with a speech marking the third anniversary of the January 6th attack, extolled democracy as "America's sacred cause." He explained that a vote for him would mean "preserving and strengthening" democracy, whereas a vote for Donald Trump would contribute to its destruction. In his State of the Union speech two months later, the president claimed that the threat to American democracy is greater today than it has been at any time since the Civil War. Biden's explanation for his sudden withdrawal from the 2024 election was that his faltering campaign was not up to the task of protecting democracy.
While Biden did little to define democracy beyond calling it a core American value worth protecting, other Democrats — elected officials, candidates, activists, and affiliated groups — have fleshed out a more precise understanding that attempts to give meaning to a vague concept about which they wish to make the 2024 election a referendum. Many Americans may hear in these proposals a mere desire to reject Trump's authoritarian narcissism and to make government more responsive to the will of the people. But the Democrats have in mind a lengthy manifesto designed to transform American life should they take tighter control of the policy process.
THE ORIGINS OF THE NEW AGENDA
Over the past 50 years, the Democratic Party has undergone a dramatic transformation. Prior to the 1970s, its agenda was broadly coherent and intuitive. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society reconciled class-based economic policy, an emphasis on employment and wages, moderate redistribution efforts, and Keynesian countercyclical stimulus measures with Cold War hawkishness and cultural traditionalism.
Tens of millions of citizens — working- and middle-class whites and blacks, as well as many Latino and Asian immigrants in later decades — embraced this agenda. They thought of themselves primarily as inheritors of a storied if blemished past, and were uncomfortable with radical social change. They wanted better lives for themselves and their children, and saw the Democratic agenda as consistent with economic fairness and color-blind equality. That agenda rewarded work but also provided a safety net to those who, through no fault of their own, needed assistance. It made the Democrats a nationalist and constitutionalist party, one naturally constrained by America's founding documents and expressly reverential of their values.
This state of affairs began to change in the 1960s. The civil-rights movement that decade shattered the Democratic Party's loose racial consensus. The conservatism of small-town and white rural Democrats in the South now directly conflicted with the liberalism of the party's multi-racial Northern and industrial wing. The Vietnam War exposed intraparty tensions over foreign policy. Other nascent issues, like women's rights and the environment, strained relations within the coalition.
Though Richard Nixon appeared to accept the hegemony of the New Deal/Great Society economy as president in 1971, Republicans increasingly questioned Democrats' economic values. Within a half-dozen years, they were moving perceptibly toward a platform of across-the-board tax cuts and deep reductions in domestic spending. Ronald Reagan transformed these proposals into economic policy, and his victory in 1980 marked a dramatic end to Democratic dominance in Washington.
For a while, what political scientist Theodore Lowi called "interest-group liberalism" — the Democrats' practical approach to constructing national majorities — trumped doctrinal purity and steadied the party's ship. The strategy was cogent, but still flexible enough to justify electing Democrats and to satisfy a diverse constituency. The traditional agenda endured.
Indeed, parts of this agenda survive to this day. Democrats remain protective of entitlement programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The Obama-Biden countercyclical responses to the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic drew on the Keynesianism that animated the party's mid-20th-century economic agenda. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided support for the unemployed, the disabled, and the low income — to the tune of nearly $800 billion. And although much pandemic-relief legislation passed while Trump held office, Biden's $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 rivaled the cost of the emergency CARES Act of March 2020.
But by the late 1990s, the Democrats' pre-1970 agenda could not survive the party's dramatically shifting politics. Rather than simply redistributing resources, Democrats increasingly believed that government should police behavior. The party promoted regulations on matters like the environment and the rights of female, homosexual, and racial- and ethnic-minority employees. Traditional blue-collar workers — the type who benefitted from the economic growth that brought wage increases and robust unions — drifted to the periphery. Though the party maintained its traditional alliance with organized labor, it tended to focus on service- and public-sector unions, whose membership is largely made up of women, immigrants, and other minorities.
At the same time, much of the party's countercyclical fiscal policy gave way to industrial policy. Democrats drafted their legislative responses to the 2008 financial collapse and the 2020 pandemic not only to address those immediate crises, but to fund effectively permanent investments in industries like transportation, health-care administration, K-12 education, and alternative-energy programs.
The party has made no effort to raise taxes to pay for these initiatives. Democrats plan to tax the very rich, but they have ruled out new levies on couples making less than $400,000 a year. The party's leadership would also like to repeal the cap on state and local tax deductions for their well-off supporters in progressive states.
Economic redistribution has not been a priority for Democrats since Bill Clinton joined congressional Republicans in enacting the welfare overhaul of 1996. Although programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and Supplemental Security Income have received minor funding boosts under Democratic administrations, the party's elected officials are not keen to point out these measures. After flirting with trade liberalization, the party has returned to its traditional embrace of protectionism — more so to protect the environment and improve workplace conditions overseas than to create American manufacturing jobs. The party remains beholden to public-school teachers, but it appears more concerned with lawmakers' control of the curriculum than with teachers' salaries. Democrats used to oppose immigration as a threat to their core constituents' standard of living; now they support it as a way to increase their share of the electorate. On foreign policy, the party is souring on traditional allies like Israel.
As it emerged, the Democrats' new agenda had little coherence and certainly no pithy label. At the start of the 2010s, it also appeared to have limited appeal. The 2010 election was a disaster for Democrats. Republicans, driven by Tea Party outrage, flipped the House with a net gain of 63 seats. They also picked up six Senate seats, coming close to taking back control of that chamber as well. Meanwhile, Democrats lost governorships in important states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Matters stabilized for Democrats with Obama's reelection, but 2014 was almost as catastrophic as 2010. Democrats lost control of the Senate as Republicans gained nine seats in their best showing since 1980. Following the debacle, Republicans controlled 37 state governors' mansions and 68 of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers.
Democrats' defeats in the states especially stung. In 2011, legislatures across the country engaged in a round of redistricting that Princeton elections expert Sam Wang called the "Great Gerrymander." Many Democrats believed the GOP had unjustly — and possibly unconstitutionally — locked in majorities in the House of Representatives and state legislatures that would guarantee their ascendancy over the following decade. In doing so, they were subverting democracy and changing the rules to perpetuate their power.
The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 elicited another round of outrage on the left. By upholding a group's right to air a documentary about Hillary Clinton within 30 days of an election in which she was a candidate, the Court struck down as violations of the First Amendment all limits on corporate independent expenditures and electioneering communications. Democrats were hysterical, claiming the ruling would facilitate the release of billions of dollars from unknown entities to assist Republican campaigns from a distance. A week after the Court handed down the decision, Obama scolded the Court justices who attended his State of the Union address. Citizens United, the president claimed, would "open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections." American democracy was under attack.
Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election only intensified Democrats' concerns. Trump received almost 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, thereby reigniting Democrats' criticisms of the Electoral College that had flared up after George W. Bush's controversial win in 2000. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), which was established in 2006, provided a blueprint for reform: States collectively holding at least 270, or a majority of, electors would pledge to cast their votes for the winner of the national vote.
Though there are Republicans on its advisory board, the NPVIC works closely with Democrats. Eric Holder, the attorney general during the Obama administration and a leader of broader efforts to save American democracy, is a prominent member. Seventeen blue states and the District of Columbia have enacted the plan. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center poll, more than 80% of Democrats believe the presidential election system should change so that the winner of the plurality of national popular votes becomes president.
To many Democrats, Trump's presidency itself constituted an even greater threat to democracy. They viewed his policies as self-evidently hostile to their party's core constituents — especially women and ethnic minorities. But it was his philosophy of politics and governance that offered a real boost to the nascent democracy agenda.
When Donald Trump arrived on the scene, he personalized the presidency, freeing it from the encumbrances of custom and what he called the "deep state" — an elite unelected bureaucracy that enfeebled presidents and therefore the will of the American people. He fired cabinet secretaries, ignored the Washington press corps, humiliated other leaders (including fellow Republicans), and communicated directly with the American people through social media. He pushed through important changes in immigration and trade policy without consulting Congress. He withheld officially appropriated aid to a U.S. ally until its president agreed to investigate the son of his political rival — a move for which he was impeached for the first time. On January 6, 2021, Trump did not just contest the results of the 2020 election; he inspired the effort to overturn them.
On his way out of office, the Democratic-controlled House impeached Trump once again. The act, which was largely symbolic, provided Democrats with an opportunity to assess the Trump presidency and the political system that had brought him to power. They soon realized that they had a golden opportunity to unite disparate groups and policies together. The fight for democracy would itself be the agenda: It could make the Democrats coherent again.
EVANGELISTS OF THE NEW AGENDA
There has long existed a network of groups committed to preserving and promoting the health of American democracy. Several of them survive to this day: Among the most prominent are the National Endowment for Democracy, Protect Democracy, and the States United Democracy Center. These groups are broadly bipartisan, but there are also pro-democracy organizations like Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and Public Citizen that lean to the left.
These groups view democracy holistically, as a system of politics central to American life. They frequently choose sides, but they also understand that democracy works best when an informed public registers its choices at the ballot box, and when the parties compete with one another to implement a distinct, comprehensive, transparent program within the constitutional framework. They know that participating in democratic elections is neither transactional nor a convenience; they view it as a civic responsibility and a demanding act of citizenship. They believe democracy has nothing to do with policy: It is instead the process that gives winners the right, within constitutional parameters, to enact the program of their choice.
In response to the changes that took place between the 1970s and the early 21st century, the democracy space saw an explosion of new organizations during the 2010s. At the national level, these groups include American Promise, Civic Nation, Democracy Works, Fair Elections Center, I am a Voter, Indivisible, The People Votes, Vote.org, VoteRiders, the Voter Protection Project, the Voting Rights Lab, and When We All Vote. Some are explicitly ethnic or racial, such as Voto Latino. Groups like the Fund for the Public Interest and the ubiquitous Public Interest Research Groups have expanded their focus to include the preservation of democracy. Dozens of regional and state-level groups, like the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, are on board. Organizations prevalent on college campuses — including the Alliance for Youth Organizing, the Campus Vote Project, Every Vote Counts, New Voters, RISE, Rock the Vote, and Voters of Tomorrow — are too numerous to count. These groups are overwhelmingly left of center.
Participants in the democracy agenda don't end with political advocacy groups. Lawyers, policy experts, researchers, and communication specialists at organizations like Democracy Forward coordinate the democracy movement's legal strategy. Democratic law firms, such as the Elias Law Group, litigate the agenda. The Scholars Strategy Network and other groups of professors, along with their colleagues at left-of-center think tanks, provide attorneys with research and expert testimony. Through a series of print and electronic publications, ostensibly non-partisan media companies like Courier Newsroom and States Newsroom communicate the party's pro-democracy message at the state level. Many receive financing from groups like the Democracy Fund and George Soros's Open Society Foundations.
This is no mass grassroots movement; these groups' leaders all work, albeit often loosely, with the Democratic Party at the federal, state, and local levels. One of their overarching goals is to produce a coordinated program with internal coherence and public appeal, behind which the Democratic Party can unite. They have produced the core of the Democrats' new democracy agenda.
The novel understanding of democracy that lies at the heart of this agenda envelops matters both within the term's traditional definition and Democrats' core policy preferences. In the 21st century, this means supporting measures like same-day voter registration and early in-person and mail-in voting. It means pushing for reduced residency requirements, additional polling places in urban areas and on college campuses, ranked-choice voting, and ballot assistance to voters in languages other than English. Republican efforts to adopt voter-ID laws provide the perfect foil for the underlying message that the Democrats are the party of voting rights.
Many of the new groups mentioned above focus on the mechanics and technical details of elections. Their experts scour election rules and carry out research to see which ones are more likely to result in the election of progressive candidates. They road test legal strategies. They make explicit linkages between democratic processes and leftist policy outcomes.
The new democracy agenda also addresses campaign-finance laws. Though the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — often called McCain-Feingold after its Senate sponsors — reminds us that campaign-finance issues predate the Democrats' new agenda, the Citizens United decision, handed down in 2010, gave the subject greater urgency. In 2020, the Democratic Party platform called for increased public financing of elections. It also called for bans on "dark money" donations and corporate political-action committees.
Gerrymandering — the drawing of legislative-district plans to advance the interests of a particular party — has emerged as a key issue on the left's democracy agenda. The redistricting that followed the 2010 census led progressives to believe Republicans were restricting voter choice and circumventing the sort of party competition essential to a healthy democracy. They argued that Republicans, equipped with extensive data on citizen attitudes and software capable of drawing maps with surgical precision, had developed state legislative and congressional plans that would cement for them an unfair advantage throughout the ensuing decade.
The gerrymandering story polls well. Though most Americans do not follow the subject in their state, an April 2021 AP-NORC poll reported that 67% of respondents believe partisan bias in redistricting is a "major problem."
Another expression of Democrats' new democracy agenda can be found in the push for statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The Democratic House passed the Washington, D.C. Admission Act twice, in 2020 and 2021. In 2020, Puerto Rican residents narrowly approved a non-binding statehood referendum.
While much of this agenda focuses on elections, Congress itself has not escaped scrutiny. The U.S. Senate, designed as it is to counterbalance the more democratic House, has become a major target of new pro-democracy groups. Many on the left support Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's recommendation that Senate seats be distributed to the states more proportionately. Meanwhile, the Senate filibuster — which allows minorities to block votes on legislation unless the majority can come up with 60 votes — is on the chopping block. Filibuster-reform proposals include an exemption for legislation related to voting rights, a requirement for 41 senators to continue debate rather than 60 to end it, and a sliding scale that would permit simple majorities to curtail proceedings.
The executive and judicial branches are subject to the new democracy agenda. Efforts to centralize power by the Trump White House and governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida have led to a flurry of proposals to protect the rights and employment of teachers, health researchers, and other professionals in administrative agencies. As for the judicial branch, Take Back the Court supports a Democrat-backed bill in the House that would add four justices to the Supreme Court, while Fix the Court wants financial-disclosure rules and 18-year term limits for justices. President Biden and the Democrats' new presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, have voiced support for some of these reforms.
Proponents of Democrats' democracy agenda are resisting new laws governing public protest, which some states have enacted and others have proposed in response to increased rates of activism. These laws include greater liability for organizations that back protests, new penalties for blocking traffic, and restrictions of speech on college campuses.
This is an impressive list. But the democracy agenda does not stop there: It has expanded to embrace issues traditionally thought of solely in policy terms. This includes calls for passing gun-control measures and protecting abortion rights, which ramped up after a series of Supreme Court decisions adverse to progressive causes (notably Bruen on guns and Dobbs on abortion). It also includes calls for cuts to law-enforcement spending and reforms of sentencing laws.
The Democrats' new agenda includes a vision for a democratic economy. This is not necessarily the economy of greater redistribution and government involvement that Democratic policymakers traditionally advanced. According to the new agenda's proponents, a truly equal and just economy is a crucial component of democracy. It requires adopting measures like the Paycheck Fairness Act, which Democrats have introduced during the past two congresses to strengthen existing federal law on gender-pay equality and increase spending on race-based programs. Raising the minimum wage, a perennial goal of progressives, has taken on greater significance under the new agenda. Unions are a leading feature of this equal and just economy, and since organized labor now consists primarily of women, immigrants, and minorities, the agenda's most committed supporters — white-collar professionals — feel free to integrate them into their understanding of a democratic economy.
A final component of the democracy agenda is the notion of social justice. The Biden administration's National Climate Task Force deploys emissions-reduction policies and subsidies for clean-energy production not only to save the planet, but to advance "environmental justice." Likewise, its antitrust stance offers a gold mine for litigants and their lawyers seeking not prosperity, but "justice" for the American consumer.
This is a sprawling program. Democrats are temperamentally predisposed to lengthier wish lists than Republicans, but this case is different. In attempting to clarify their proposals to voters and manage a disparate coalition, Democratic leaders and activists have developed a novel, sweeping new conception of democracy.
INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS OF THE NEW AGENDA
However, several inconsistencies plague that agenda. To start, it is entirely at odds with the version of democracy articulated by the Democrats' philosophical forebear, Thomas Jefferson. Jeffersonian democracy built its understanding of politics on the foundation of a virtuous citizenry engaged in a project to prevent corruption and protect the rights of states and individuals. Jefferson also saw the merits in what James Madison called "pure democracy," or what we would call "direct democracy" — a system where, in place of representatives, the public decides policy through referenda or town meetings. As recent work by Daniel Biggers and Alexander Ross shows, Americans from all over the ideological spectrum find Jefferson's model appealing.
The new agenda, by contrast, views democracy as group-centric and transactional. It cherry picks the personal rights it aims to protect. Even with our enabling technology, there is no talk of greater rule by state referenda or national plebiscites; instead, the agenda embraces centralized, technocratic rule. It casts Jefferson's ideals not as democracy, but as a populist rule by the mob.
Many of the agenda's specifics are nakedly self-serving. The pushes for D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood are about Senate seats and electoral votes, not empowerment. Prior to the 2000s, Democrats viewed redistricting by state legislatures as the legitimate right of elected representatives, making their "discovery" of gerrymandering disingenuous. They "packed" and "cracked" Republicans in district plans across the country for decades, interpreting the outcomes of state legislative and congressional elections as a reflection of their superior support among the public. And although Democrats embraced campaign-finance reform immediately following the Citizens United decision, by the 2016 election cycle — when super PACs organized to elect Democrats were outspending those influencing elections to secure Republican victories — they no longer prioritized the issue.
The democracy agenda decries Trump's "strongman" politics and efforts to centralize federal power in a unitary executive under his direct control. It is silent on the massive expansion of the administrative state and the creation of agencies led by unelected bureaucrats granted power to promulgate policies controlling Americans' daily lives. In his book on the progressive illiberalism of the late 19th century, economist Thomas Leonard asks: "How could the progressives redeem the democratic system by an undemocratic substitution of their judgment for that of the people?" We might ask the same of today's democracy agenda.
According to proponents of that agenda, Republicans constitute an existential threat to American democracy. Red states are "backsliding" by placing restrictions on the act of voting: Political scientist Jacob Grumbach's State Democracy Index places the Southeast, the Great Lakes, and the Plains at the bottom of the standings. Yet several indicators of democracy suggest that blue states are not as electorally healthy as they would like to think. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Elections Performance Index ranks states based on metrics like voter turnout, registration rate, registration and ballot problems, and the availability of voting information online. Over the last 14 years, California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York have appeared near the bottom of the rankings. Many blue states also perform poorly on what many on the left consider key aspects of voting rights. Massachusetts, for instance, does not offer same-day voting registration and has a restrictive in-person early voting period.
Democrats are only democrats when it suits them. The party decries the lack of meaningful choice voters enjoy in elections fought on gerrymandered maps, but it wages war across the country on minor parties' efforts to secure a place on the ballot. This campaign has been particularly intense in 2024, as Democrats have thrown their full legal arsenal at the efforts of Robert Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, and the No Labels party to gain formal recognition in important states.
The new democracy agenda revolves around the protection of individual rights. Yet in these matters, it is again selective. On college campuses, the agenda looks past speech codes, bias-incidence response teams, and the de-platforming of objectionable visitors while calling for academic freedom when Republican policymakers attempt to dictate curricula and hiring practices. It decries "book bans" instigated by anxious parents but ignores the many librarians, publishers, and media elites who have strategically kept from the shelves authors who offend progressive sensibilities. It wishes to significantly restrict law-enforcement practices and funding at the expense of older people and families' freedom to work, play, and worship in urban neighborhoods without fear for their safety.
The new democracy agenda permits adherents to define the economic policies of their opponents as illegitimate. Cuts to taxes and immigration rates may be what the people want, but these views are populist as much as they are popular, and are therefore incompatible with the notion of social justice that defines their agenda.
To some extent, the Democrats are correct: Americans should look under the hood of their democracy. It could benefit from a tune up. Conservatives have developed blind spots, not least in their growing admiration for judicial power and ignorance of federalism and devolution. It is the Democrats, however, who claim to have the plan to fix our ailing democracy.
On their own, several of its components might improve the system. But fundamentally, the agenda is a politically convenient patchwork of disparate ideas in search of coherence. It reveals its adherents not as believers in democracy, but, as H. L. Mencken once said of Theodore Roosevelt, believers "simply in government."
