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What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
One of Kirkus Reviews ' ten best US history books of 2022
A leading historian tells the story of the United States’ most enduring political party and its long, imperfect and newly invigorated quest for “moral capitalism,” from Andrew Jackson to Joseph Biden.
One of Kirkus Reviews ' 40 most anticipated books of 2022
One of Vulture 's "49 books we can't wait to read in 2022"
The Democratic Party is the world’s oldest mass political organization. Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, it has played a central role in defining American society, whether it was exercising power or contesting it. But what has the party stood for through the centuries, and how has it managed to succeed in elections and govern?
In What It Took to Win , the eminent historian Michael Kazin identifies and assesses the party’s long-running commitment to creating “moral capitalism”―a system that mixed entrepreneurial freedom with the welfare of workers and consumers. And yet the same party that championed the rights of the white working man also vigorously protected or advanced the causes of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal. As the party evolved towards a more inclusive egalitarian vision, it won durable victories for Americans of all backgrounds. But it also struggled to hold together a majority coalition and advance a persuasive agenda for the use of government.
Kazin traces the party’s fortunes through vivid character sketches of its key thinkers and doers, from Martin Van Buren and William Jennings Bryan to the financier August Belmont and reformers such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Sidney Hillman, and Jesse Jackson. He also explores the records of presidents from Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Throughout, Kazin reveals the rich interplay of personality, belief, strategy, and policy that define the life of the party―and outlines the core components of a political endeavor that may allow President Biden and his co-partisans to renew the American experiment.
One of Kirkus Reviews ' ten best US history books of 2022
A leading historian tells the story of the United States’ most enduring political party and its long, imperfect and newly invigorated quest for “moral capitalism,” from Andrew Jackson to Joseph Biden.
One of Kirkus Reviews ' 40 most anticipated books of 2022
One of Vulture 's "49 books we can't wait to read in 2022"
The Democratic Party is the world’s oldest mass political organization. Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, it has played a central role in defining American society, whether it was exercising power or contesting it. But what has the party stood for through the centuries, and how has it managed to succeed in elections and govern?
In What It Took to Win , the eminent historian Michael Kazin identifies and assesses the party’s long-running commitment to creating “moral capitalism”―a system that mixed entrepreneurial freedom with the welfare of workers and consumers. And yet the same party that championed the rights of the white working man also vigorously protected or advanced the causes of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal. As the party evolved towards a more inclusive egalitarian vision, it won durable victories for Americans of all backgrounds. But it also struggled to hold together a majority coalition and advance a persuasive agenda for the use of government.
Kazin traces the party’s fortunes through vivid character sketches of its key thinkers and doers, from Martin Van Buren and William Jennings Bryan to the financier August Belmont and reformers such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Sidney Hillman, and Jesse Jackson. He also explores the records of presidents from Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Throughout, Kazin reveals the rich interplay of personality, belief, strategy, and policy that define the life of the party―and outlines the core components of a political endeavor that may allow President Biden and his co-partisans to renew the American experiment.
416 pages, Hardcover
Published March 1, 2022
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About the author
Michael Kazin
52 books66 followersMichael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is co-editor of Dissent magazine.
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April 4, 2022
The history of the Democratic party is not a history to be proud of. Until relatively recently, it was the party of white supremacy, the party that tolerated and even promoted the expansion of slavery and fought only for the rights and advancement of working white men. Early Democrats, especially from the south, didn’t try to hide this, and in What It Took to Win, Michael Kazin doesn’t try to hide it either.
But the point of the book is not simply to rehash the party’s shameful past; it is to show that, despite its faults, it remains the only party capable of solving the problems unique to the 21st century, problems that cannot be solved by cutting taxes and rolling back regulation—the only “solutions” offered by the party of the rich. Whether we like it or not, the government is the only countervailing force to protect against corporate greed and predation, and when one political party is actively hostile to the act of governing—serving only the interests of business and the wealthy while pretending otherwise—the ordinary person has only one place to turn: The Democratic Party.
Kazin correctly points out that the Democratic Party has been most successful during the “eras when the Democrats argued persuasively about their commitments to make the economy serve ordinary people,” specifically from the late 1820s to the mid-1850s and again from the 1930s to the late 1960s. After the 60s, things started to go downhill as the Democrats lost sight of their primary identity by drifting right economically, and continue to hurt themselves by labeling as “radical” the capable leaders—most prominently Bernie Sanders—who are trying to reestablish the party as the party willing to fight for the interests of the ordinary worker.
In a sense, the book is a depressing reminder that the party most capable of advancing the common good is a party that made and continues to make so many mistakes and missteps. When it was committed to the economic interests of the average person, it was a party filled with white supremacists. Then, when it dropped its white supremacy—it stopped working for the average person and adopted the same conservative economic policies as the right. What we really need now is a bold, inspiring leader in the vein of FDR that can speak to the average person across geographies and political persuasions and not the uninspiring, timid moderates we seem to be stuck with.
In any case, this book represents a thorough history of the party and lays the groundwork for what it should strive to become—if the party wants to reestablish the electoral dominance it enjoyed in the past.
But the point of the book is not simply to rehash the party’s shameful past; it is to show that, despite its faults, it remains the only party capable of solving the problems unique to the 21st century, problems that cannot be solved by cutting taxes and rolling back regulation—the only “solutions” offered by the party of the rich. Whether we like it or not, the government is the only countervailing force to protect against corporate greed and predation, and when one political party is actively hostile to the act of governing—serving only the interests of business and the wealthy while pretending otherwise—the ordinary person has only one place to turn: The Democratic Party.
Kazin correctly points out that the Democratic Party has been most successful during the “eras when the Democrats argued persuasively about their commitments to make the economy serve ordinary people,” specifically from the late 1820s to the mid-1850s and again from the 1930s to the late 1960s. After the 60s, things started to go downhill as the Democrats lost sight of their primary identity by drifting right economically, and continue to hurt themselves by labeling as “radical” the capable leaders—most prominently Bernie Sanders—who are trying to reestablish the party as the party willing to fight for the interests of the ordinary worker.
In a sense, the book is a depressing reminder that the party most capable of advancing the common good is a party that made and continues to make so many mistakes and missteps. When it was committed to the economic interests of the average person, it was a party filled with white supremacists. Then, when it dropped its white supremacy—it stopped working for the average person and adopted the same conservative economic policies as the right. What we really need now is a bold, inspiring leader in the vein of FDR that can speak to the average person across geographies and political persuasions and not the uninspiring, timid moderates we seem to be stuck with.
In any case, this book represents a thorough history of the party and lays the groundwork for what it should strive to become—if the party wants to reestablish the electoral dominance it enjoyed in the past.
May 11, 2022
In his sweeping new history of the Democratic Party, historian Michael Kazin finds that “what it took” for Democrats to win historically was an outspoken commitment to moral capitalism. The term, coined in 1990 by another historian, connotes “a form of political economy . . . that promised everyone, owner or worker, a fair share.” It was this commitment, Kazin asserts, that led to the iconic victories of Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. To put it in the simplest terms, “[w]hen Democrats made a convincing appeal to the economic interests of the many, they usually celebrated victory at the polls.”
TWO COMPETING TENDENCIES IN MORAL CAPITALISM
Kazin sees “two different and, at times, competing tendencies” in moral capitalism. “The first,” he writes, “is a harsh critique of concentrated elite power—’monopoly.'” The second “attacks the oppression of Americans in the workplace, whether by poor working conditions, bad wages, insecure employment, a ban on union organizing, or other indignities.” The tension between these two tendencies has, at times, weakened the Democratic Party and contributed to its losses at the polls.
THE EVOLVING HISTORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
IN THE 19TH CENTURY
In the charged rhetoric of political campaigns, Democratic candidates traditionally paid homage to Thomas Jefferson as the leading light of their party. Somewhat closer to the truth, many historians instead credit Andrew Jackson as the party’s founder. Kazin sets them all straight. It was the country’s eighth president, Martin Van Buren, who assembled the pieces of the coalition that became the Democratic Party. As Jackson’s Secretary of State and then Vice President, Van Buren was the nuts-and-bolts politician who made the general’s victories possible and set the course for the Democratic Party during much of the 19th century. Later, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas and New York financier August Belmont built on the foundation Van Buren had laid.
Although Kazin cites the efforts of numerous individual officeholders and backroom operatives, he focuses his history on a handful of people who were most instrumental in building the Democratic Party as we know it today. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the most influential was three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. “Woodrow Wilson would erect his New Freedom, Franklin D. Roosevelt his New Deal, and Harry Truman his Fair Deal on the foundation of alliances and policies Bryan had laid.”
IN THE 20TH CENTURY
THE EMERGENCE OF ORGANIZED LABOR
In the 1920s, as Democrats languished under a succession of three lackluster Republican Presidents, four Democratic activists took up the task of rebuilding the party. Four-term New York Governor and 1928 Presidential candidate Al Smith was the best-known. Behind the scenes, three standout women activists, Belle Moskowitz, Frances Perkins, and Eleanor Roosevelt, helped institutionalize the party and focus its commitment on the principles of moral capitalism. The groundwork they laid bore fruit in the 12-year span of Franklin Roosevelt’s transformative Presidency.
Under FDR, the most instrumental role in the Democratic Party passed to organized labor and its champions in Congress and the White House. The emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) set the course for labor’s pivotal role in the Democratic victories of the 1930s and beyond. (“No major piece of domestic legislation that Democrats enacted from the New Deal through the 1960s succeeded without the backing of labor officialdom,” Kazin asserts.) Two individuals were central figures in these developments: New York Senator Robert F. Wagner and Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
In Kazin’s telling, the outstanding contributors to Democratic success in the 1950s and 60s were Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Texas Senator and later President Lyndon B. Johnson. Their work to enact civil rights legislation brought the Democratic Party into line with its values, cementing an enduring commitment to multi-racial, multi-ethnic policies that have lasted to the present day.
TWO STEPS BACKWARD: THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL
Sadly, the resurgence of the Republican Right in the 1970s, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan, dramatically undermined Democrats’ self-confidence. Established by activist Al From in 1985, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) led a sharp turn to the right to accommodate the Republican wave by appealing to the “middle class.” Republican success in decimating organized labor in the 1970s and 80s sharply reduced the opposition to the DLC within the Democratic Party.
Then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and Senators Joe Biden and Al Gore were the DLC’s leading lights. Their efforts led to Clinton’s election as President in 1992—and to disastrous policies such as mass incarceration, “welfare reform,” financial deregulation, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Republicans could not have done a better job of shifting the country to the right. These policies played a large role in causing the Great Recession of 2007 to 2010 and further moving the Democratic Party away from moral capitalism. Attempts by Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. and others to shift the party back toward a commitment to social and economic justice foundered.
IN THE 21ST CENTURY
In the deeply polarized politics of the past two decades, Democrats have fared reasonably well electorally. The Presidency has shifted from one party to the other with regularity. But, even when controlling the White House, the party has failed to enact major legislation (other than the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare) that would persuade a large majority of voters the Democratic Party is on their side.
Much of what has been accomplished, including Obamacare, has been a result of Nancy Pelosi‘s skill at shepherding legislation through the shoals of opposition in Congress. Alienated by the meager accomplishments of the Democratic Party since 1979, a new wave of progressive activists, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has emerged to press for more forward-looking policies. Unfortunately, despite outspoken support for many of these policies by President Joe Biden, wafer-thin Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have stymied their efforts.
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF THE PAST HALF-CENTURY
Kazin focuses tightly on the Democratic Party as an institution, which is understandable and appropriate given the history he set out to tell. But it’s a story that veers out of context. In lamenting the failure of the party to champion the moral capitalism he values over the past half-century, he largely ignores the conservative counter-revolution against the liberal order of 1933-68. Beginning early in the 1970s, Big Business and the men who profited so handsomely from it bankrolled what in time became a massive Right-Wing infrastructure of think tanks, lobbying firms, consulting agencies, and conservative law schools.
Together, these institutions elected Ronald Reagan and his ideological successors (George W. Bush and Donald Trump), stuffed the court system with hordes of Right-Wing judges, and forced the Democratic Party onto the defensive. Today, well into the 21st century, we can see their handiwork exposed in vivid relief in the rulings of a reactionary and highly politicized Supreme Court.
The impact on the Democratic Party of this political sea change was immense. As Kazin notes, “the opportunity was lost to forge a new coalition of working- and lower-middle-class people of all races who shared, despite their mutual suspicions, a desire for a more egalitarian order. It has yet to be regained.”
TODAY, THERE IS NO “DEMOCRATIC PARTY”
To some degree, every modern mass political party is a coalition. Historically, both the major American parties have necessarily followed this pattern, with right and left wings pulling in opposite directions and disparate forces demanding a focus on their special interests. Today, as the Republican Party drifts ever more tightly into uniformity, with its liberal wing forced out of power, the Democratic Party has devolved into chaos. T0 my mind, there is, properly speaking, no “Democratic Party.” The phrase has become a term of art. What passes for a party is a congeries of single-issue and identity-based interest groups with links of varying durability to the party’s traditional core values championing social democracy.
Republicans can easily sum up what they’re about in a single sentence. (“We believe in small government, local control, the power of free markets, and Christian authority.”) Democrats cannot, because the numerous factions that make up the Democratic coalition agree on only one thing: they don’t like Republicans or the policies Republicans impose when they’re in power. Despite its impressive infrastructure (DNC, DSCC, DCCC, DLCC, and state party organizations), the oldest mass party in the world has become a shadow of its former self.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Kazin is a Professor of History at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is the author of seven nonfiction books and co-editor of Dissent magazine. He holds a BA from Harvard, an MA from Portland State University, and a PhD in History from Stanford. As a Harvard student he was a leader in Students for a Democratic Society.
TWO COMPETING TENDENCIES IN MORAL CAPITALISM
Kazin sees “two different and, at times, competing tendencies” in moral capitalism. “The first,” he writes, “is a harsh critique of concentrated elite power—’monopoly.'” The second “attacks the oppression of Americans in the workplace, whether by poor working conditions, bad wages, insecure employment, a ban on union organizing, or other indignities.” The tension between these two tendencies has, at times, weakened the Democratic Party and contributed to its losses at the polls.
THE EVOLVING HISTORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
IN THE 19TH CENTURY
In the charged rhetoric of political campaigns, Democratic candidates traditionally paid homage to Thomas Jefferson as the leading light of their party. Somewhat closer to the truth, many historians instead credit Andrew Jackson as the party’s founder. Kazin sets them all straight. It was the country’s eighth president, Martin Van Buren, who assembled the pieces of the coalition that became the Democratic Party. As Jackson’s Secretary of State and then Vice President, Van Buren was the nuts-and-bolts politician who made the general’s victories possible and set the course for the Democratic Party during much of the 19th century. Later, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas and New York financier August Belmont built on the foundation Van Buren had laid.
Although Kazin cites the efforts of numerous individual officeholders and backroom operatives, he focuses his history on a handful of people who were most instrumental in building the Democratic Party as we know it today. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the most influential was three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. “Woodrow Wilson would erect his New Freedom, Franklin D. Roosevelt his New Deal, and Harry Truman his Fair Deal on the foundation of alliances and policies Bryan had laid.”
IN THE 20TH CENTURY
THE EMERGENCE OF ORGANIZED LABOR
In the 1920s, as Democrats languished under a succession of three lackluster Republican Presidents, four Democratic activists took up the task of rebuilding the party. Four-term New York Governor and 1928 Presidential candidate Al Smith was the best-known. Behind the scenes, three standout women activists, Belle Moskowitz, Frances Perkins, and Eleanor Roosevelt, helped institutionalize the party and focus its commitment on the principles of moral capitalism. The groundwork they laid bore fruit in the 12-year span of Franklin Roosevelt’s transformative Presidency.
Under FDR, the most instrumental role in the Democratic Party passed to organized labor and its champions in Congress and the White House. The emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) set the course for labor’s pivotal role in the Democratic victories of the 1930s and beyond. (“No major piece of domestic legislation that Democrats enacted from the New Deal through the 1960s succeeded without the backing of labor officialdom,” Kazin asserts.) Two individuals were central figures in these developments: New York Senator Robert F. Wagner and Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
In Kazin’s telling, the outstanding contributors to Democratic success in the 1950s and 60s were Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Texas Senator and later President Lyndon B. Johnson. Their work to enact civil rights legislation brought the Democratic Party into line with its values, cementing an enduring commitment to multi-racial, multi-ethnic policies that have lasted to the present day.
TWO STEPS BACKWARD: THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL
Sadly, the resurgence of the Republican Right in the 1970s, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan, dramatically undermined Democrats’ self-confidence. Established by activist Al From in 1985, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) led a sharp turn to the right to accommodate the Republican wave by appealing to the “middle class.” Republican success in decimating organized labor in the 1970s and 80s sharply reduced the opposition to the DLC within the Democratic Party.
Then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and Senators Joe Biden and Al Gore were the DLC’s leading lights. Their efforts led to Clinton’s election as President in 1992—and to disastrous policies such as mass incarceration, “welfare reform,” financial deregulation, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Republicans could not have done a better job of shifting the country to the right. These policies played a large role in causing the Great Recession of 2007 to 2010 and further moving the Democratic Party away from moral capitalism. Attempts by Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. and others to shift the party back toward a commitment to social and economic justice foundered.
IN THE 21ST CENTURY
In the deeply polarized politics of the past two decades, Democrats have fared reasonably well electorally. The Presidency has shifted from one party to the other with regularity. But, even when controlling the White House, the party has failed to enact major legislation (other than the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare) that would persuade a large majority of voters the Democratic Party is on their side.
Much of what has been accomplished, including Obamacare, has been a result of Nancy Pelosi‘s skill at shepherding legislation through the shoals of opposition in Congress. Alienated by the meager accomplishments of the Democratic Party since 1979, a new wave of progressive activists, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has emerged to press for more forward-looking policies. Unfortunately, despite outspoken support for many of these policies by President Joe Biden, wafer-thin Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have stymied their efforts.
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF THE PAST HALF-CENTURY
Kazin focuses tightly on the Democratic Party as an institution, which is understandable and appropriate given the history he set out to tell. But it’s a story that veers out of context. In lamenting the failure of the party to champion the moral capitalism he values over the past half-century, he largely ignores the conservative counter-revolution against the liberal order of 1933-68. Beginning early in the 1970s, Big Business and the men who profited so handsomely from it bankrolled what in time became a massive Right-Wing infrastructure of think tanks, lobbying firms, consulting agencies, and conservative law schools.
Together, these institutions elected Ronald Reagan and his ideological successors (George W. Bush and Donald Trump), stuffed the court system with hordes of Right-Wing judges, and forced the Democratic Party onto the defensive. Today, well into the 21st century, we can see their handiwork exposed in vivid relief in the rulings of a reactionary and highly politicized Supreme Court.
The impact on the Democratic Party of this political sea change was immense. As Kazin notes, “the opportunity was lost to forge a new coalition of working- and lower-middle-class people of all races who shared, despite their mutual suspicions, a desire for a more egalitarian order. It has yet to be regained.”
TODAY, THERE IS NO “DEMOCRATIC PARTY”
To some degree, every modern mass political party is a coalition. Historically, both the major American parties have necessarily followed this pattern, with right and left wings pulling in opposite directions and disparate forces demanding a focus on their special interests. Today, as the Republican Party drifts ever more tightly into uniformity, with its liberal wing forced out of power, the Democratic Party has devolved into chaos. T0 my mind, there is, properly speaking, no “Democratic Party.” The phrase has become a term of art. What passes for a party is a congeries of single-issue and identity-based interest groups with links of varying durability to the party’s traditional core values championing social democracy.
Republicans can easily sum up what they’re about in a single sentence. (“We believe in small government, local control, the power of free markets, and Christian authority.”) Democrats cannot, because the numerous factions that make up the Democratic coalition agree on only one thing: they don’t like Republicans or the policies Republicans impose when they’re in power. Despite its impressive infrastructure (DNC, DSCC, DCCC, DLCC, and state party organizations), the oldest mass party in the world has become a shadow of its former self.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Kazin is a Professor of History at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is the author of seven nonfiction books and co-editor of Dissent magazine. He holds a BA from Harvard, an MA from Portland State University, and a PhD in History from Stanford. As a Harvard student he was a leader in Students for a Democratic Society.
March 27, 2022
A full review can be found on my blog.
If you're looking for an unfiltered, unpretty history of the Democratic Party, look no further because Kazin has got the book for you. I listened to the audiobook version of What It Took to Win, and it's a dense, insightful listen. While I think What It Took to Win does a phenomenal job of covering the Democratic Party history in its entirety, it did gloss over key modern events/figures like Carter's appointment of Volker, the 2016 and 2020 elections, Madeleine Albright, and the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Overall I liked What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. So if you're interested in political history, I would highly reading this book.
If you're looking for an unfiltered, unpretty history of the Democratic Party, look no further because Kazin has got the book for you. I listened to the audiobook version of What It Took to Win, and it's a dense, insightful listen. While I think What It Took to Win does a phenomenal job of covering the Democratic Party history in its entirety, it did gloss over key modern events/figures like Carter's appointment of Volker, the 2016 and 2020 elections, Madeleine Albright, and the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Overall I liked What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. So if you're interested in political history, I would highly reading this book.
May 21, 2024
Very insightful read into the history of the Democratic Party, from the mid-19th century beginnings up to present day. I appreciated that it kept its focus squarely through the lens of the party itself, passing by major historical events (such as the Civil War and Great Depression) like a sightseeing expedition. Kazin would briefly touch on these events as to how they affected the party, but deep historical context can be found in other writings and I was relieved to not hear the same old history stories here.
I was also glad that Kazin did not gush about the usual liberal icons and popular Democratic presidents. The likes of FDR and JFK are mentioned, of course, but more attention is given to party organizers, insurgent candidates, and intra-party conflicts that helped re-shape the party and push it forward time and time again. He spotlights women from the early 20th century who helped boost the party's base and platform (Eleanor Roosevelt is given more time than her husband,) and dedicates pages to forgotten black leaders like Adam Clayton Powell Jr. who challenged segregationist policies within the party.
This was not a starry-eyed biography of the Democratic Party. At every turn Kazin criticizes the party's repeated failures to live up to its ideals, particularly regarding racial equality, gender equality and supporting labor unions that gave the party its political power. There is an abundance of analysis and criticism for elections where Democrats got smacked (and rightfully so.) He makes no secret of the party's racist roots, its stark North/South divide with racial grievances from representatives and constituents alike, and how the neoliberalism of the 1980's enabled many of the issues we are still dealing with today like the wealth gap and the military industrial complex.
What It Took to Win is a niche book. I would only recommend it to people who are into history and party politics, and who are at least tepid supporters of the Democratic Party. But if you fall into that narrow demographic, this will be an enjoyable read for you.
I was also glad that Kazin did not gush about the usual liberal icons and popular Democratic presidents. The likes of FDR and JFK are mentioned, of course, but more attention is given to party organizers, insurgent candidates, and intra-party conflicts that helped re-shape the party and push it forward time and time again. He spotlights women from the early 20th century who helped boost the party's base and platform (Eleanor Roosevelt is given more time than her husband,) and dedicates pages to forgotten black leaders like Adam Clayton Powell Jr. who challenged segregationist policies within the party.
This was not a starry-eyed biography of the Democratic Party. At every turn Kazin criticizes the party's repeated failures to live up to its ideals, particularly regarding racial equality, gender equality and supporting labor unions that gave the party its political power. There is an abundance of analysis and criticism for elections where Democrats got smacked (and rightfully so.) He makes no secret of the party's racist roots, its stark North/South divide with racial grievances from representatives and constituents alike, and how the neoliberalism of the 1980's enabled many of the issues we are still dealing with today like the wealth gap and the military industrial complex.
What It Took to Win is a niche book. I would only recommend it to people who are into history and party politics, and who are at least tepid supporters of the Democratic Party. But if you fall into that narrow demographic, this will be an enjoyable read for you.
June 20, 2022
This book will explain why they can’t win elections at times and why at other times they remain a great hope for America. If you enjoy politics and history you will enjoy Kazin’s historical ride of the Democratic Party and all its leaders with their faults and strengths over the years.
April 28, 2022
Thank you, NetGalley, for granting me a free copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.
"There's nothing more useless than a dead liberal." ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party traces the history of the self-declared "people's party" from the early years of Andrew Jackson all the way up to the election of Joe Biden. Kazin is surprisingly fair in his assessment of the party, refusing to shy away from the Democrats' long association with slavery and white supremacy, while also applauding their twentieth-century pursuit of civil and equal rights. He covers Jackson's influence at length before delving into Wilson's mixed legacy, FDR's triumphs, the realignment under LBJ, Jimmy Carter's short, befuddled tenure as Commander-in-Chief, and the ongoing debate over just how progressive Obama really was. (What It Took to Win is noticeably light on the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, possibly because of their growing unpopularity in the post-MeToo world). There is an obligatory anti-Trump declaration towards the end, but Kazin is able to stay on track, preferring to discuss the Democrats rather than indulge in the national Trump obsession.
But while What It Took to Win is fair, it's also fairly boring. There are a few paragraphs about how the party needs to unify to remain victorious, and how they cannot continue to be the people's party without the support of the working class, but otherwise, this book lacks much of a thesis. It's merely an overview of the party's history, without the argument that makes a persuasive work or the little-known secrets of a scandalous tell-all. What It Took to Win will undoubtedly be a valuable resource for research, but it's less compelling as recreational reading.
"There's nothing more useless than a dead liberal." ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party traces the history of the self-declared "people's party" from the early years of Andrew Jackson all the way up to the election of Joe Biden. Kazin is surprisingly fair in his assessment of the party, refusing to shy away from the Democrats' long association with slavery and white supremacy, while also applauding their twentieth-century pursuit of civil and equal rights. He covers Jackson's influence at length before delving into Wilson's mixed legacy, FDR's triumphs, the realignment under LBJ, Jimmy Carter's short, befuddled tenure as Commander-in-Chief, and the ongoing debate over just how progressive Obama really was. (What It Took to Win is noticeably light on the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, possibly because of their growing unpopularity in the post-MeToo world). There is an obligatory anti-Trump declaration towards the end, but Kazin is able to stay on track, preferring to discuss the Democrats rather than indulge in the national Trump obsession.
But while What It Took to Win is fair, it's also fairly boring. There are a few paragraphs about how the party needs to unify to remain victorious, and how they cannot continue to be the people's party without the support of the working class, but otherwise, this book lacks much of a thesis. It's merely an overview of the party's history, without the argument that makes a persuasive work or the little-known secrets of a scandalous tell-all. What It Took to Win will undoubtedly be a valuable resource for research, but it's less compelling as recreational reading.
April 24, 2022
Kazin hasn’t shied away from the history of racism and bigotry in the Democratic Party when analysing it’s actions but there’s sections of policy and historic moments missed as even the author states that giving a full historic retelling of the party would take way too long to fit into one book. This has led to moments of reductionist takes and very brief ahistorical leanings that don’t fully put into context some of the more recent moments in the actions of the party.
February 17, 2024
This is a fascinating history. For a non-American, US party politics has always been difficult to understand, and never more so than the last ten years. The left/right polarity of Democrats/Republicans once seemed to be fairly straight-forward, although it did not match comfortably with the early years of the two parties.
I suppose the first confusion we foreigners encountered is the realisation that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican when he sought the abolition of slavery and opposed the south’s secessionist moves, thus leading to the Civil War. So, anti-slavery Republicans.
In the early post-revolutionary days, there were two “parties” (the concept of party was distrusted as leading to sectional rather than universal interest) , the Federalists under Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republicans (frequently shortened to Republicans), led by Thomas Jefferson. As Jefferson “declared in his 1801 Inaugural Address, they believed in a ‘wise and frugal’ government that would allow ‘the middling sort (whose whiteness was assumed) to ‘regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.’” From 1801 to 1825, all three presidents, including Jefferson, were wealthy slave-owning southerners.
The early Democrats were the creation in the 1820s of Martin Van Buren to be a “vigilant watchman over the conduct of those in power”, seeking small government and protecting the little man. He opposed interventionist government as benefiting the wealthy. Van Buren was the self-made son of an inn-keeper. His party was for low tariffs and free immigration, and against prison for debtors. In the north-east it comprised primarily artisans, shopkeepers and radicals; in the south, its members were mainly wealthy landowners – slave-owners. They argued that abolition was interventionism against rural land-owners, and would endanger white jobs, and that non-whites were incapable of taking part in democracy. They were of structural importance because they represented much of the party’s wealth.
The Democrats opposed both the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments which gave equal rights and franchise to all (men).
Neither party occupied much moral high ground, although the author of What it Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party , Michael Kazin, himself a liberal, argues the Democrats were the more egregious: “When they deemed it necessary, both parties engaged in such venal tactics as vote buying, ballot stuffing, and even closing down precincts that favoured their rivals. Secret ballots were not introduced until the 1890s and took a decade or more to be adopted in many places but only the Democrats gained power by terrorising one race of people before enacting new state constitutions in the 1890s that disenfranchised most African Americans altogether.”
It seems that the start of a new Democrat direction began in the 1880s with the presidency of Grover Cleveland who set himself in obstinate opposition to the demagogic Tammany Hall party-bosses, but is, Kazin claims, usually dismissed by modern historians as a “hardworking plodder with little imagination and no charisma.” Kazin notes, though, that Cleveland was popular with the voters, at least until he opposed the working man’s strikes for decent wages.
In the 1890s, the Democrats moved from opposing government intervention to seeking regulation of private and corporate wealth, and to supporting unionism. However, it remained a white man’s party. By the end of the nineteenth century, just a few decades after the civil war, “nearly every Southern state had completed the disenfranchisement of Black people.” Isolated moves for female franchise were broadly unpopular.
Interestingly, a third candidate stood for the presidency as a Socialist in 1912, and gained 6% of the vote.
The Democrats were now using modern PR and advertising techniques. A new direction emerged with the election to the presidency of Dr Woodrow Wilson, a former academic. Kazin argues that Wilson did little to help either workers or blacks, although the disparity in wealth throughout the country was highlighted, and the party platform included the abolition of child labour, an eight-hour day and “living wage” for government employees, action on industrial safety. He was responsible for many leftist intellectuals joining the party, a “drastic departure from the Gilded Age, when the party had a lowbrow, disreputable image among the Northern learned elite.” Significantly, he appointed Louis Brandeis, Jewish and with a reputation as “the people’s lawyer” to the Supreme Court. This was the start of the process, Kazin argues, where “intellectuals view themselves as altruists and view working in the state apparatus, particularly at a high level, as a fine way to put that impulse into practice…Democrats have consistently been the National party identified with expanding the public sphere, and the one that welcomed men – and soon women – who made a career of studying and then advancing the ends government might serve.”
Wilson, an ambiguous figure, campaigned on keeping the US out of World War I, but then entered it, and established conscription. In 1920, the 19th amendment gave women the vote. But newly acquired liberal membership was significantly alienated by mass indictments under espionage and sedition acts. Then striking steelworkers were attacked by police and thousands of radicals were jailed or deported, and racial warfare broke out in Chicago.
Kazin argues that “the Republicans of the Jazz Age had become, in contrast, staunch defenders of the liberty of corporations to operate pretty much as they wished.”
The 1920s development of a Democrat Women’s Club is presented by Kazin as the next impetus to party policy, focusing on issues of child-labour, free schools and child-care. And this saw the emergence of numbers of powerful and energetic women activists. However, the 1924 Democrat convention faced an impassable block on condemnation of the KKK, and on prohibition.
Then the real steps forward were taken with the 1936 FDR win with New Deal jobs giving relief in the Depression. Union membership doubled. FDR showed he was not opposed to big business, but to exploitative business. A Democrat senator introduced a bill in 1934, making lynching a federal crime, and it was passed despite southern Democrats filibustering. FDR matched the women’s division with structures for Labour; Youths; Hispanics; and Coloureds. Blacks were given government jobs; and unions supported blacks. A new breed of race-pluralist professors appeared – a swelling number who came from working-class Jewish families
The next Democrat policy re-orientation identified by Kazin is in social welfare. He writes, betraying his own bias: “In much of Western and Central Europe, democracy proved entirely compatible with policies that socialists had long advocated. Under centre-left governments, their citizens enjoyed universal health insurance, abundant and affordable public housing, and a free college education. It was the triumph of what one historian has dubbed ‘social capitalism.’/But in the United States, conservatives in both parties blasted such programs as steps down a slope to tyranny and stymied attempts by liberal Democrats to push even a semblance of them through Congress.”
The Democrats still found it necessary to prove their abhorrence of Russia and Communism. And they were susceptible to moral attack: Adam Clayton Powell was voted by Harlem into Congress, the second African American Representative. He became an eloquent voice for civil rights, including on discrimination within Congress and an activist, but he was a target for adultery, tax-avoidance, financial mismanagement and nepotism charges. He defended himself by arguing, not without some substance, that his misdemeanours were shared by many others in Congress.
In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled against segregated schools in the ground-breaking Brown vs Board of Education, but the Democrats still would not commit to desegregation, intimidated by the southern lobby which “attacked the members of the high court for ‘a clear abuse of judicial power’.” Even the patron saint of the Democrats, JFK, “was largely a bystander in the burgeoning struggle against Jim Crow.” “Kennedy finally took action when the clash between Black insurgents and their sworn enemies made it impossible for him to turn away. Finally, in the spring of 1963, Bull Connor’s all-white Birmingham, Alabama police force and Governor George C Wallace pushed JFK, five months before his assassination, into “the most far-reaching civil rights law in the nation’s history.”
In the second half of the sixties,“each of the Democrats’ key constituencies snarled its discontent, with increasing vehemence, toward one or more of the others.” Vietnam, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and Black Power, adherents were in no mood to compromise on anything “White radicals began to articulate a critique of ‘corporate liberalism’ – a system that did the bidding of business while mouthing empty rhetoric about justice for the poor.” At the 1968 Chicago Democrat Convention, later graphically described by Norman Mailer, Governor George Daley, under some criticism for police strategies with protesters, eloquently responded, “‘Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy mother-fucker, go home.’”
Watergate gave the Democrats a free pass but Kazin describes Jimmy Carter as an “absolutely wretched politician.” His amnesty for draft resisters; and energy-conservation and wilderness protection policies made ethical sense to him but not to the poor working-class with job insecurity and high inflation. And he was not interested in political dealing to persuade others to join him.
From time to time, Kazin’s partisan passion gets the better of him, but this is often to the delight of the reader: He quotes a Democrat leader during Reagan’s presidency, “‘This is a single party, not a collection of squabbling interests,’ claimed DNC chairman Charles T Manatt in 1981. It must have been lovely to think so.”
In 1992, another liberal intellectual, Bill Clinton won the election, but tried to allow homosexuals in the military and failed; and the “ambitious health-care initiative failed quite utterly” when “Business groups teamed up with conservatives to damn it as a ‘Soviet-style scheme to bring a seventh of the economy under government control.’”
In a reflection of some of the problems modern Democrats face, Kazin reports that ”In search of solace and guidance, many residents flocked to evangelical churches. In the pews, they learned that Republicans stalwartly defended ‘family values’ and the right to life, while Democrats were a cabal of environmentalists who wanted to ban coalmining and conspired to substitute the false gospel of multiculturalism for the word of God.” In that context, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was, as it were, exposed. Once again, Kazin displays his partisan frustration: “Besides stamping Clinton as a sexual idiot and getting him impeached, the scandal prevented the president from advancing any substantial initiatives during what remained of his second term
Kazin writes as a liberal academic supporter of Barrack Obama’s campaign: “As Cosmopolitan academics, our zeal was certainly enhanced by knowing that, if elected, Obama would not only be the first Black president; he would also be the first one with two parents who had earned graduate degrees and, like their son, pursued professional and politically conscious careers. That this man might launch another New Deal, this time a firmly anti-racist one, was an audacious hope indeed./That it did not come to pass was due both to Obama’s flaws as a politician and to the resistance he had to overcome. “On the one hand, this exponent of bridging partisan divisions believed too much in his ability to win over Republican officeholders and too little in their ideological desire and electoral need to humble and defeat him and his party.”
Normally, I would be wary of a history written by a partisan player. Michael Kazin is that, but his partisanship does not lead him to overlook Democrat flaws nor to blunt his criticisms of the Party. On the contrary, it results in eruptions of frustration about members’ folly and questionable ethics. That makes for a lively and engaging political history.
It would seem that the Democrats have still not resolved problems which were present at their inception: the mantra of helping the working man, and the ethical consequences of reliance on southern financial support. Mixed in with those is a racial conflict which has still not been resolved. And a latter-day involvement of liberal academics and radical intellectuals.
This is a magnificent history of what has been, at least until now, a major force in the United States political environment.
I suppose the first confusion we foreigners encountered is the realisation that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican when he sought the abolition of slavery and opposed the south’s secessionist moves, thus leading to the Civil War. So, anti-slavery Republicans.
In the early post-revolutionary days, there were two “parties” (the concept of party was distrusted as leading to sectional rather than universal interest) , the Federalists under Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republicans (frequently shortened to Republicans), led by Thomas Jefferson. As Jefferson “declared in his 1801 Inaugural Address, they believed in a ‘wise and frugal’ government that would allow ‘the middling sort (whose whiteness was assumed) to ‘regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.’” From 1801 to 1825, all three presidents, including Jefferson, were wealthy slave-owning southerners.
The early Democrats were the creation in the 1820s of Martin Van Buren to be a “vigilant watchman over the conduct of those in power”, seeking small government and protecting the little man. He opposed interventionist government as benefiting the wealthy. Van Buren was the self-made son of an inn-keeper. His party was for low tariffs and free immigration, and against prison for debtors. In the north-east it comprised primarily artisans, shopkeepers and radicals; in the south, its members were mainly wealthy landowners – slave-owners. They argued that abolition was interventionism against rural land-owners, and would endanger white jobs, and that non-whites were incapable of taking part in democracy. They were of structural importance because they represented much of the party’s wealth.
The Democrats opposed both the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments which gave equal rights and franchise to all (men).
Neither party occupied much moral high ground, although the author of What it Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party , Michael Kazin, himself a liberal, argues the Democrats were the more egregious: “When they deemed it necessary, both parties engaged in such venal tactics as vote buying, ballot stuffing, and even closing down precincts that favoured their rivals. Secret ballots were not introduced until the 1890s and took a decade or more to be adopted in many places but only the Democrats gained power by terrorising one race of people before enacting new state constitutions in the 1890s that disenfranchised most African Americans altogether.”
It seems that the start of a new Democrat direction began in the 1880s with the presidency of Grover Cleveland who set himself in obstinate opposition to the demagogic Tammany Hall party-bosses, but is, Kazin claims, usually dismissed by modern historians as a “hardworking plodder with little imagination and no charisma.” Kazin notes, though, that Cleveland was popular with the voters, at least until he opposed the working man’s strikes for decent wages.
In the 1890s, the Democrats moved from opposing government intervention to seeking regulation of private and corporate wealth, and to supporting unionism. However, it remained a white man’s party. By the end of the nineteenth century, just a few decades after the civil war, “nearly every Southern state had completed the disenfranchisement of Black people.” Isolated moves for female franchise were broadly unpopular.
Interestingly, a third candidate stood for the presidency as a Socialist in 1912, and gained 6% of the vote.
The Democrats were now using modern PR and advertising techniques. A new direction emerged with the election to the presidency of Dr Woodrow Wilson, a former academic. Kazin argues that Wilson did little to help either workers or blacks, although the disparity in wealth throughout the country was highlighted, and the party platform included the abolition of child labour, an eight-hour day and “living wage” for government employees, action on industrial safety. He was responsible for many leftist intellectuals joining the party, a “drastic departure from the Gilded Age, when the party had a lowbrow, disreputable image among the Northern learned elite.” Significantly, he appointed Louis Brandeis, Jewish and with a reputation as “the people’s lawyer” to the Supreme Court. This was the start of the process, Kazin argues, where “intellectuals view themselves as altruists and view working in the state apparatus, particularly at a high level, as a fine way to put that impulse into practice…Democrats have consistently been the National party identified with expanding the public sphere, and the one that welcomed men – and soon women – who made a career of studying and then advancing the ends government might serve.”
Wilson, an ambiguous figure, campaigned on keeping the US out of World War I, but then entered it, and established conscription. In 1920, the 19th amendment gave women the vote. But newly acquired liberal membership was significantly alienated by mass indictments under espionage and sedition acts. Then striking steelworkers were attacked by police and thousands of radicals were jailed or deported, and racial warfare broke out in Chicago.
Kazin argues that “the Republicans of the Jazz Age had become, in contrast, staunch defenders of the liberty of corporations to operate pretty much as they wished.”
The 1920s development of a Democrat Women’s Club is presented by Kazin as the next impetus to party policy, focusing on issues of child-labour, free schools and child-care. And this saw the emergence of numbers of powerful and energetic women activists. However, the 1924 Democrat convention faced an impassable block on condemnation of the KKK, and on prohibition.
Then the real steps forward were taken with the 1936 FDR win with New Deal jobs giving relief in the Depression. Union membership doubled. FDR showed he was not opposed to big business, but to exploitative business. A Democrat senator introduced a bill in 1934, making lynching a federal crime, and it was passed despite southern Democrats filibustering. FDR matched the women’s division with structures for Labour; Youths; Hispanics; and Coloureds. Blacks were given government jobs; and unions supported blacks. A new breed of race-pluralist professors appeared – a swelling number who came from working-class Jewish families
The next Democrat policy re-orientation identified by Kazin is in social welfare. He writes, betraying his own bias: “In much of Western and Central Europe, democracy proved entirely compatible with policies that socialists had long advocated. Under centre-left governments, their citizens enjoyed universal health insurance, abundant and affordable public housing, and a free college education. It was the triumph of what one historian has dubbed ‘social capitalism.’/But in the United States, conservatives in both parties blasted such programs as steps down a slope to tyranny and stymied attempts by liberal Democrats to push even a semblance of them through Congress.”
The Democrats still found it necessary to prove their abhorrence of Russia and Communism. And they were susceptible to moral attack: Adam Clayton Powell was voted by Harlem into Congress, the second African American Representative. He became an eloquent voice for civil rights, including on discrimination within Congress and an activist, but he was a target for adultery, tax-avoidance, financial mismanagement and nepotism charges. He defended himself by arguing, not without some substance, that his misdemeanours were shared by many others in Congress.
In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled against segregated schools in the ground-breaking Brown vs Board of Education, but the Democrats still would not commit to desegregation, intimidated by the southern lobby which “attacked the members of the high court for ‘a clear abuse of judicial power’.” Even the patron saint of the Democrats, JFK, “was largely a bystander in the burgeoning struggle against Jim Crow.” “Kennedy finally took action when the clash between Black insurgents and their sworn enemies made it impossible for him to turn away. Finally, in the spring of 1963, Bull Connor’s all-white Birmingham, Alabama police force and Governor George C Wallace pushed JFK, five months before his assassination, into “the most far-reaching civil rights law in the nation’s history.”
In the second half of the sixties,“each of the Democrats’ key constituencies snarled its discontent, with increasing vehemence, toward one or more of the others.” Vietnam, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and Black Power, adherents were in no mood to compromise on anything “White radicals began to articulate a critique of ‘corporate liberalism’ – a system that did the bidding of business while mouthing empty rhetoric about justice for the poor.” At the 1968 Chicago Democrat Convention, later graphically described by Norman Mailer, Governor George Daley, under some criticism for police strategies with protesters, eloquently responded, “‘Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy mother-fucker, go home.’”
Watergate gave the Democrats a free pass but Kazin describes Jimmy Carter as an “absolutely wretched politician.” His amnesty for draft resisters; and energy-conservation and wilderness protection policies made ethical sense to him but not to the poor working-class with job insecurity and high inflation. And he was not interested in political dealing to persuade others to join him.
From time to time, Kazin’s partisan passion gets the better of him, but this is often to the delight of the reader: He quotes a Democrat leader during Reagan’s presidency, “‘This is a single party, not a collection of squabbling interests,’ claimed DNC chairman Charles T Manatt in 1981. It must have been lovely to think so.”
In 1992, another liberal intellectual, Bill Clinton won the election, but tried to allow homosexuals in the military and failed; and the “ambitious health-care initiative failed quite utterly” when “Business groups teamed up with conservatives to damn it as a ‘Soviet-style scheme to bring a seventh of the economy under government control.’”
In a reflection of some of the problems modern Democrats face, Kazin reports that ”In search of solace and guidance, many residents flocked to evangelical churches. In the pews, they learned that Republicans stalwartly defended ‘family values’ and the right to life, while Democrats were a cabal of environmentalists who wanted to ban coalmining and conspired to substitute the false gospel of multiculturalism for the word of God.” In that context, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was, as it were, exposed. Once again, Kazin displays his partisan frustration: “Besides stamping Clinton as a sexual idiot and getting him impeached, the scandal prevented the president from advancing any substantial initiatives during what remained of his second term
Kazin writes as a liberal academic supporter of Barrack Obama’s campaign: “As Cosmopolitan academics, our zeal was certainly enhanced by knowing that, if elected, Obama would not only be the first Black president; he would also be the first one with two parents who had earned graduate degrees and, like their son, pursued professional and politically conscious careers. That this man might launch another New Deal, this time a firmly anti-racist one, was an audacious hope indeed./That it did not come to pass was due both to Obama’s flaws as a politician and to the resistance he had to overcome. “On the one hand, this exponent of bridging partisan divisions believed too much in his ability to win over Republican officeholders and too little in their ideological desire and electoral need to humble and defeat him and his party.”
Normally, I would be wary of a history written by a partisan player. Michael Kazin is that, but his partisanship does not lead him to overlook Democrat flaws nor to blunt his criticisms of the Party. On the contrary, it results in eruptions of frustration about members’ folly and questionable ethics. That makes for a lively and engaging political history.
It would seem that the Democrats have still not resolved problems which were present at their inception: the mantra of helping the working man, and the ethical consequences of reliance on southern financial support. Mixed in with those is a racial conflict which has still not been resolved. And a latter-day involvement of liberal academics and radical intellectuals.
This is a magnificent history of what has been, at least until now, a major force in the United States political environment.
January 14, 2022
Michael Kazin, What It Took To Win A History of the Democratic Party, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2022
Thank you, NetGalley for providing me with this uncorrected digital proof in exchange for an honest review.
Michael Kazin has written a book that I have been longing for since becoming increasingly interested in American politics since the election of Barack Obama as President. Long term involvement in the Australian Labor Party and five years’ experience as an active ‘rank and file’ member of the British Labour Party has had me constantly trying to find links, comparisons, similarities between the Democratic Party and my Labor/Labour experience. However, not only do I have to change my red allegiance associated with those parties, to the blue of the Democratic Party when watching American elections, but I must put aside many of my preconceptions.
This book makes clear that, although there are similarities, what makes the Democratic Party is rather different from the history of the Labor/Labour Parties. Significantly the chapter of this book that resonated with me is Chapter 6, An American Labor Party? 1933 – 1948. Here is the discussion of the labour movement, the role of unions that provide the beginning of the Australian Labor Party. The articulation of the importance of unions and unionised work is a strong point of Joe Biden’s presidency, and one that resonates with this Labor supporter. However, the history as written by Michael Kazin makes it abundantly clear that this is but part of the background that makes the Democratic Party what it is, and as Kazan reflects, works towards what it takes for the Party to win. There is much to learn: some of the history is abhorrent; some is about magnificent ideas and their supporters; and some lays out the difficulties that thwart every political party that wants to pursue a fair and just society.
The other chapters of the book are: Creating the Democracy, 1820-1848; To conserve the White Man’s Republic, 1848 – 1874; Bosses North and South, 1874 – 1894; The progressive Turn, 1894 – 1920; Its Up to the Women, 1920 – 1933; Freedom and Fragmentation, 1948 – 1968; Whose Party is It? 1968 – 1994; Cosmopolitans in Search of a New Majority, 1994 -2020. There is an Appendix (graphs, but not in this proof), detailed notes on each chapter, a list of reading ‘Good Reading’, and an index (not in this proof). The Preface provides an instructive introduction to the book and the writer. The Prologue: A Useful Myth, establishes an understanding of the complexity that historical Democratic support for Jeffersonion democracy, that excluded Black Americans, impacted the early years, including assisting the Democratic Party to win elections; the moves towards more contemporary figures without the associated stigma of racism; and the remaining ‘paradoxes in the legacy of a man who did not want to lead a party but did shape, in vital ways, the political future of a nation quite different from the one he had known’.
Kazan’s book is packed with information and so dense at times that to speed read (without returning to reflect upon the arguments he makes) is a mistake. However, an approach which combines getting to know names and themes that are unfamiliar to someone without a knowledge of American history, that worked for me was to read the book quickly; check some of the material, using other sources; think about the way in which Kazan seemed to want a reader to approach the work (he acknowledges his involvement with the Democratic Party from early in his life, has voted other than Democrat at times, and makes some unflattering comments about some current political figures) and then reread.
I found that What It Took To Win A History of the Democratic Party fulfilled my expectations – it is the book that ‘I have been longing for since becoming increasingly interested in American politics’. Acknowledging the racist past, and the way in which the Democratic party has dealt with that, is a story of hope, and for me one of the most important that the book has to tell. However, the way in which the difficulties of winning elections so as to put into place new ideals as well as workable policies is also an important feature Kazan highlights. Like all political parties with policies that reflect a social conscience winning is not easy. Kazan’s book is an illuminating contribution to the debate about how it might be achieved.
Thank you, NetGalley for providing me with this uncorrected digital proof in exchange for an honest review.
Michael Kazin has written a book that I have been longing for since becoming increasingly interested in American politics since the election of Barack Obama as President. Long term involvement in the Australian Labor Party and five years’ experience as an active ‘rank and file’ member of the British Labour Party has had me constantly trying to find links, comparisons, similarities between the Democratic Party and my Labor/Labour experience. However, not only do I have to change my red allegiance associated with those parties, to the blue of the Democratic Party when watching American elections, but I must put aside many of my preconceptions.
This book makes clear that, although there are similarities, what makes the Democratic Party is rather different from the history of the Labor/Labour Parties. Significantly the chapter of this book that resonated with me is Chapter 6, An American Labor Party? 1933 – 1948. Here is the discussion of the labour movement, the role of unions that provide the beginning of the Australian Labor Party. The articulation of the importance of unions and unionised work is a strong point of Joe Biden’s presidency, and one that resonates with this Labor supporter. However, the history as written by Michael Kazin makes it abundantly clear that this is but part of the background that makes the Democratic Party what it is, and as Kazan reflects, works towards what it takes for the Party to win. There is much to learn: some of the history is abhorrent; some is about magnificent ideas and their supporters; and some lays out the difficulties that thwart every political party that wants to pursue a fair and just society.
The other chapters of the book are: Creating the Democracy, 1820-1848; To conserve the White Man’s Republic, 1848 – 1874; Bosses North and South, 1874 – 1894; The progressive Turn, 1894 – 1920; Its Up to the Women, 1920 – 1933; Freedom and Fragmentation, 1948 – 1968; Whose Party is It? 1968 – 1994; Cosmopolitans in Search of a New Majority, 1994 -2020. There is an Appendix (graphs, but not in this proof), detailed notes on each chapter, a list of reading ‘Good Reading’, and an index (not in this proof). The Preface provides an instructive introduction to the book and the writer. The Prologue: A Useful Myth, establishes an understanding of the complexity that historical Democratic support for Jeffersonion democracy, that excluded Black Americans, impacted the early years, including assisting the Democratic Party to win elections; the moves towards more contemporary figures without the associated stigma of racism; and the remaining ‘paradoxes in the legacy of a man who did not want to lead a party but did shape, in vital ways, the political future of a nation quite different from the one he had known’.
Kazan’s book is packed with information and so dense at times that to speed read (without returning to reflect upon the arguments he makes) is a mistake. However, an approach which combines getting to know names and themes that are unfamiliar to someone without a knowledge of American history, that worked for me was to read the book quickly; check some of the material, using other sources; think about the way in which Kazan seemed to want a reader to approach the work (he acknowledges his involvement with the Democratic Party from early in his life, has voted other than Democrat at times, and makes some unflattering comments about some current political figures) and then reread.
I found that What It Took To Win A History of the Democratic Party fulfilled my expectations – it is the book that ‘I have been longing for since becoming increasingly interested in American politics’. Acknowledging the racist past, and the way in which the Democratic party has dealt with that, is a story of hope, and for me one of the most important that the book has to tell. However, the way in which the difficulties of winning elections so as to put into place new ideals as well as workable policies is also an important feature Kazan highlights. Like all political parties with policies that reflect a social conscience winning is not easy. Kazan’s book is an illuminating contribution to the debate about how it might be achieved.
February 6, 2023
Kazin has a clear thesis: the Democratic Party succeeds when it can sell itself authentically and convincingly as advocating for working people and it fails when it cannot. It's easy to be critical of Andrew Jackson for all sorts of things. The Democrats' love affair with Old Hickory has certainly waned in recent years. That said, Kazin at least points out the good things that Jackson was able to achieve, namely the creation of a party that advocated for the devolution of power from elites to average people. We can be rightly critical of the fact that "average people" excluded women, blacks, and natives, but Jackson can be seen as having both positive and negative qualities. Along with Van Buren, he created the party system and, as Kazin points out, started the oldest active political party in the world.
Kazin is especially strong when talking about William Jennings Bryan, who comes across as the Democratic version of Barry Goldwater: a political leader who failed decisively in running for President (multiple times, in the case of Bryan), but who took his party in a specific political direction that laid the seeds for later success. In Goldwater's case, he led the GOP first to Nixon and then the apotheosis of movement conservatism in Reagan. In Bryan's case, his advocacy for progressive goals led first to Wilson (very different from Bryan in that he was a reserved, pedantic professor and not a charismatic agitator) and then to FDR (for Kazin, the height of Democratic success). FDR defined his age, as the next big Republican to come along (Ike) did not challenge the place of the New Deal. Kazin does a good job of describing the coalition that FDR built (blacks, organized labor, intellectuals, and Southern Democrats) and that dominated American politics until it started coming apart in LBJ's second term when his legislative accomplishments were set against the backdrop of urban unrest and the disaster in Vietnam. Kazin is somewhat critical of the Great Society for being less focused on the working man generally (the New Deal's great success) and more focused on the poor and racial minorities, which allowed Nixon to profit from a backlash with his Silent Majority rhetoric.
Kazin can't stand Jimmy Carter for doing nothing to help unions. Kazin discloses at the start of the book that he campaigned for every Democrat starting in 1960, but he could not be bothered to vote for Carter. Kazin is also critical of the present direction of the Party towards college educated voters, as he contends that an elite voter base will have a hard time credibly articulating support for the working class that he believes is the key to Democratic successes. That said, Kazin is surprisingly positive about Bill Clinton (he acknowledges that Clinton was in power in a fundamentally conservative era) and he takes a relatively balanced view of Obama, covering both the legislative success with the ACA against the missed opportunity to do more legislatively and also the huge blunder of dismantling a giant political movement that could have been mobilized in the aftermath of 2008.
As might be expected, Kazin (a labor historian) focuses heavily on which Democrats were good for unions and less on other subjects. There's not much in the way of coverage of environmental issues, for example, and not nearly enough on foreign affairs, which is the place in which a President has the greatest power. I would have liked more discussion about the fine line that Democrats had to toe during the Cold War between containment of the USSR (and later China) while avoiding excesses.
Kazin is especially strong when talking about William Jennings Bryan, who comes across as the Democratic version of Barry Goldwater: a political leader who failed decisively in running for President (multiple times, in the case of Bryan), but who took his party in a specific political direction that laid the seeds for later success. In Goldwater's case, he led the GOP first to Nixon and then the apotheosis of movement conservatism in Reagan. In Bryan's case, his advocacy for progressive goals led first to Wilson (very different from Bryan in that he was a reserved, pedantic professor and not a charismatic agitator) and then to FDR (for Kazin, the height of Democratic success). FDR defined his age, as the next big Republican to come along (Ike) did not challenge the place of the New Deal. Kazin does a good job of describing the coalition that FDR built (blacks, organized labor, intellectuals, and Southern Democrats) and that dominated American politics until it started coming apart in LBJ's second term when his legislative accomplishments were set against the backdrop of urban unrest and the disaster in Vietnam. Kazin is somewhat critical of the Great Society for being less focused on the working man generally (the New Deal's great success) and more focused on the poor and racial minorities, which allowed Nixon to profit from a backlash with his Silent Majority rhetoric.
Kazin can't stand Jimmy Carter for doing nothing to help unions. Kazin discloses at the start of the book that he campaigned for every Democrat starting in 1960, but he could not be bothered to vote for Carter. Kazin is also critical of the present direction of the Party towards college educated voters, as he contends that an elite voter base will have a hard time credibly articulating support for the working class that he believes is the key to Democratic successes. That said, Kazin is surprisingly positive about Bill Clinton (he acknowledges that Clinton was in power in a fundamentally conservative era) and he takes a relatively balanced view of Obama, covering both the legislative success with the ACA against the missed opportunity to do more legislatively and also the huge blunder of dismantling a giant political movement that could have been mobilized in the aftermath of 2008.
As might be expected, Kazin (a labor historian) focuses heavily on which Democrats were good for unions and less on other subjects. There's not much in the way of coverage of environmental issues, for example, and not nearly enough on foreign affairs, which is the place in which a President has the greatest power. I would have liked more discussion about the fine line that Democrats had to toe during the Cold War between containment of the USSR (and later China) while avoiding excesses.
April 3, 2023
A concise, accessible and interesting history of the Democratic Party that helps readers see major continuities, tensions, and changes in "the Democracy." Kazin is somewhat personally invested in the history here as a progressive leaning intellectual who has always had a somewhat conflicted relationship to the Dems. He argues that 2 principles unite the Democratic Party: moral capitalism, or the idea that the economy should work for and create fair outcomes for ordinary Americans (defined quite differently over time), and anti-monopoly, or a tendency to break up and criticize concentrated corporate power (and, on occasions, elite power in general, as in Jackson's original crusade against the National Bank). He also argues that the Democratic Party has been most successful when it has played up these themes and opened the doors to new groups (first white immigrants, then labor, then people of color).
This is a really useful way of thinking about the Democratic Party over the long historical haul. The book helped me structure my overall understanding of the oldest party in America. Originally it was a the party of the white common man against the more elite Jeffersonian Republicans, but it became torn by slavery. It then became the party of white supremacy post-Civil War, but also a hodge-podge of boss-led systems that incorporated new immigrant groups and provided almost a proto-welfare state for them. In the early 20th century, it took a Progressive term and allied with labor, women, and the intellectual class. Republicans remained the party of big business and middle class respectability while the Dems built the dominant New Deal Coalition under FDR. But this coalition was highly tenuous and broke under the stresses of civil rights and the rise of the conservative movement in mid-century. It then remade itself as a multi-racial, women-centric, educated party that now faces the problem of alienation from the white working class (and white suburbia, to some extent), which are critical demographics for winning pretty much anything.
Kazin argues that presidents like Carter and Obama essentially failed to fight and tried to carve out middle grounds that didn't really work. He has one of the better critiques of Obama that I've seen: while he ran as someone who would hold big banks and business to account, he was very conciliatory as president, failed to explain why bailouts actually benefitted ordinary people (however indirectly), and never did much to rally or build a base that could be sustained over the next several decades. If I were a Democratic pol, I would definitely check out this book because it highlights repeated errors this party has made and stresses that they are at their best when they champion the economic interests of working people.
My main critique of the book is that I would have liked to see Kazin pop out from the historical narrative more often and provide more commentary and analysis. This is not a dispassionate academic history but a clear attempt to shape how the Democratic Party thinks and operates, and I think Kazin should have just run with that more. Still, it's a useful and interesting book even if you already know a lot about US political history.
This is a really useful way of thinking about the Democratic Party over the long historical haul. The book helped me structure my overall understanding of the oldest party in America. Originally it was a the party of the white common man against the more elite Jeffersonian Republicans, but it became torn by slavery. It then became the party of white supremacy post-Civil War, but also a hodge-podge of boss-led systems that incorporated new immigrant groups and provided almost a proto-welfare state for them. In the early 20th century, it took a Progressive term and allied with labor, women, and the intellectual class. Republicans remained the party of big business and middle class respectability while the Dems built the dominant New Deal Coalition under FDR. But this coalition was highly tenuous and broke under the stresses of civil rights and the rise of the conservative movement in mid-century. It then remade itself as a multi-racial, women-centric, educated party that now faces the problem of alienation from the white working class (and white suburbia, to some extent), which are critical demographics for winning pretty much anything.
Kazin argues that presidents like Carter and Obama essentially failed to fight and tried to carve out middle grounds that didn't really work. He has one of the better critiques of Obama that I've seen: while he ran as someone who would hold big banks and business to account, he was very conciliatory as president, failed to explain why bailouts actually benefitted ordinary people (however indirectly), and never did much to rally or build a base that could be sustained over the next several decades. If I were a Democratic pol, I would definitely check out this book because it highlights repeated errors this party has made and stresses that they are at their best when they champion the economic interests of working people.
My main critique of the book is that I would have liked to see Kazin pop out from the historical narrative more often and provide more commentary and analysis. This is not a dispassionate academic history but a clear attempt to shape how the Democratic Party thinks and operates, and I think Kazin should have just run with that more. Still, it's a useful and interesting book even if you already know a lot about US political history.
June 24, 2023
This is an interesting and well-written history of the Democratic Party in the United States. I come from a long line of Democrats: all of my grandparents were Northeastern, Catholic FDR-JFK Democrats, some of whom--along with their kids--became "Reagan Democrats" in the 1980s. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where I live, tends to be deep blue in national elections, but we do tend to support pragmatic Republican governors about half of the time.
Much like Joan Walsh's excellent What′s the Matter with White People? Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was, this book is the story of the Democratic Party (although Walsh, as I recall, mostly sticks to the 20th century). From the beginning, it was the business of Democrats to call for a 'moral capitalism' that did not leave the working class behind. The white working class, that is: until the 1960s, the Democratic Party was the party of the South, and all that went along with it, like slavery and Jim Crow. Thomas Jefferson, Copperheads, Mugwumps, Know-Nothings, Martin Van Buren, Tammany Hall, William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Truman, JFK, Adam Clayton Powell, LBJ, George McGovern (who I watched a documentary about, years ago, and loved), Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Obama, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and Joe Biden...there all here in highly readable prose. It's quite a story!
Many people--myself included--have become exhausted by, and cynical about, American national politics. I started paying attention to all of this in 2001, and have made politics a part of my daily consumption of news and information. It can be very dispiriting, especially since the media tends to focus on conflict and hurry through successes. We are currently in a period when both our President and his likely challenger are deeply unpopular. Our nation, in a phrase that has become increasingly cliche', is deeply divided by region, by culture, and by class. The Democrats of my grandparents generation had big ideas and weren't afraid to call out the excesses of the wealthy and powerful. Now? There are glimmers of change--Occupy Wall Street, BLM, the Green New Deal, the Fight for $15--but the scholertic realities of the gerontocracy in which we live tends to choke the life out of any real, radical ideas. So we shall see.
I liked this book.
Much like Joan Walsh's excellent What′s the Matter with White People? Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was, this book is the story of the Democratic Party (although Walsh, as I recall, mostly sticks to the 20th century). From the beginning, it was the business of Democrats to call for a 'moral capitalism' that did not leave the working class behind. The white working class, that is: until the 1960s, the Democratic Party was the party of the South, and all that went along with it, like slavery and Jim Crow. Thomas Jefferson, Copperheads, Mugwumps, Know-Nothings, Martin Van Buren, Tammany Hall, William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Truman, JFK, Adam Clayton Powell, LBJ, George McGovern (who I watched a documentary about, years ago, and loved), Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Obama, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and Joe Biden...there all here in highly readable prose. It's quite a story!
Many people--myself included--have become exhausted by, and cynical about, American national politics. I started paying attention to all of this in 2001, and have made politics a part of my daily consumption of news and information. It can be very dispiriting, especially since the media tends to focus on conflict and hurry through successes. We are currently in a period when both our President and his likely challenger are deeply unpopular. Our nation, in a phrase that has become increasingly cliche', is deeply divided by region, by culture, and by class. The Democrats of my grandparents generation had big ideas and weren't afraid to call out the excesses of the wealthy and powerful. Now? There are glimmers of change--Occupy Wall Street, BLM, the Green New Deal, the Fight for $15--but the scholertic realities of the gerontocracy in which we live tends to choke the life out of any real, radical ideas. So we shall see.
I liked this book.
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April 9, 2022ever since i became politically-minded as a teenager, i have been consuming books on conservativsm – rick perlstein’s masterful quadrology spanning goldwater go reagan, lassister, kruse and mcgirr’s monographs on the sun belt, tim alberta’s magnum opus on how the tea party became trump, and so much more. but as i read more about the history of American conservatives, i found myself wanting to learn more about the other side. my side. i knew the basic outline – from jacksonian democracy to wilsonian progressivism, with fdr building the new deal off the back of that and that order eventually falling to the neoliberal movement we have today. but i wanted something more. something to explain a throughline from the, quite frankly, racist party of the 19th and early 20th centuries to the woke multiculturalism of today. from the relatively antistatist party from before the civil war to today’s willingness to spend trillions of dollars.
and, boy, with tone of a mildly disappointed dad who just wants to see his kid get back on track, does michael kazin deliver. going back to the very beginning with martin van buren (who i had no idea was that important?) and tracing the history of the democratic party all the way to biden and bernie, kazin explains the through-line of the democratic party well – it has always been the party of the people against the elites, even if “the people” has been just the whites for large portions of its history. but it’s that through-line which unites jacksonian farmers, irish immigrants of new york, prairie populists, industrial trade unionists, and racial minorities trying win their civil rights. much like any good left-liberal, kazin argues that democrats have lost their way a bit when it comes to being the party of the people, and the way back to being america’s dominant party again is to reclaim that heritage. in the classic way of a social democrat, he says that trade unions are the way to go in doing so.
if have two critiques of the book, they’re (1) i wish it was longer and (2) i would’ve preferred if the 19th and early 20th century parts were a bit less nyc-centric. i say this as a resident of and major partisan for the greatest city in the world, but even i have a hard time believing it was so central. but anyway, if you’re a democrat, a liberal, or really just someone interested in american political history, this book is a must-read.
and, boy, with tone of a mildly disappointed dad who just wants to see his kid get back on track, does michael kazin deliver. going back to the very beginning with martin van buren (who i had no idea was that important?) and tracing the history of the democratic party all the way to biden and bernie, kazin explains the through-line of the democratic party well – it has always been the party of the people against the elites, even if “the people” has been just the whites for large portions of its history. but it’s that through-line which unites jacksonian farmers, irish immigrants of new york, prairie populists, industrial trade unionists, and racial minorities trying win their civil rights. much like any good left-liberal, kazin argues that democrats have lost their way a bit when it comes to being the party of the people, and the way back to being america’s dominant party again is to reclaim that heritage. in the classic way of a social democrat, he says that trade unions are the way to go in doing so.
if have two critiques of the book, they’re (1) i wish it was longer and (2) i would’ve preferred if the 19th and early 20th century parts were a bit less nyc-centric. i say this as a resident of and major partisan for the greatest city in the world, but even i have a hard time believing it was so central. but anyway, if you’re a democrat, a liberal, or really just someone interested in american political history, this book is a must-read.
August 15, 2023
This was a concise and readable, if somewhat disappointing light, history of the Democratic Party. Kazin covers a lot of ground in here, starting with the post-Jackson party and finishing ~320 pages later in 2020. As one might expect from a leading intellectual at the intersection of left-liberalism and democratic socialism, Kazin does a good job of balancing criticism of the historical and contemporary party with a description of the constraints under which it is operating. His fundamental thesis is that Democrats are pretty much working people's only game in town, and that Democrats typically win when aligned with labor. At the same time, he doesn't pull any punches about Democratic ideology and strategy, especially in the early parts of the book, carefully balancing the discussion of the transformative nature of post-Jackson mass democracy with reminders that all of it was built on white supremacy. There is a lot of interesting leaders, particularly in this part, that the average reader of history would not know about - from the impact of Martin Van Buren's philosophy and Belmont's big money on the early party to the influence of women activists during the Progressive Era. But at times, the book felt too much like a superficial U.S. history than a history of the party per se. I would have liked more analysis of party tactics and strategy rather than the rundown of various presidential elections we get in some parts. The book differentiates itself from others in its discussion of the actual sausage-making of the party (for example, its analysis of urban machines or national unions and their relationship with the national party), and it's a shame that at times, this seems missing. The focus on the relationship between the Democrats and labor sometimes feels stifling, too, and detracts from the other influences on the party - for example, we get very little on foreign affairs and the Cold War beyond a cursory discussion of Vietnam backlash and the Red Scare. Still, the book covers a ton of ground and the fundamental thesis seems sound.
October 18, 2024
On September 8th and September 12th, I drove to and from North Carolina, and for various reasons, this was my backup travel book. The book I originally was trying to read (The Hollow Parties) was not a good fit for this and was also painful and difficult to follow. I really enjoyed the simplicity, clarity, and narrative structure of this book. It tells how the democratic party came into existence. How various interest groups fought, sometimes bitterly, for party control. Most importantly it explored the internal divisions among the party faithful and how they resolved their issues at various conventions to agree on a national agenda and which candidates should lead them nationally.
The book does explain how the democratic party (aka The Democracy) went from being a party of white supremacists to a more liberal party that champions the rights of various minority groups. How it went from Jeffersonian/madisonian ideals to Bryans' progressivism to modern liberal values. the only reservation I would have about the book is that Michael Kazin on rare occasions shows himself to a Bernie bro who believes that more base-boosting populist pro-union working class agenda would be more effective than a coalition of reasonable, pragmatic moderates, who can bring in moderates and independent voters, without scaring them off with big structural change ideas.
Some dems had squandered there momentum from time to time, and it is also true that liberal branding has often hurt democrats with the more culturally conservative working poor. But this excellent history book doesn't necessarily know how the democrats could or should brand themselves. and also doesn't do enough to explain the present coalition and how it can build on itself without falling apart. a hard thing to do, so I don't fault him. enjoyed all the history and all the minor and major figures that comprised the party. that a book that was a little more zoomed out would not get to cover.
The book does explain how the democratic party (aka The Democracy) went from being a party of white supremacists to a more liberal party that champions the rights of various minority groups. How it went from Jeffersonian/madisonian ideals to Bryans' progressivism to modern liberal values. the only reservation I would have about the book is that Michael Kazin on rare occasions shows himself to a Bernie bro who believes that more base-boosting populist pro-union working class agenda would be more effective than a coalition of reasonable, pragmatic moderates, who can bring in moderates and independent voters, without scaring them off with big structural change ideas.
Some dems had squandered there momentum from time to time, and it is also true that liberal branding has often hurt democrats with the more culturally conservative working poor. But this excellent history book doesn't necessarily know how the democrats could or should brand themselves. and also doesn't do enough to explain the present coalition and how it can build on itself without falling apart. a hard thing to do, so I don't fault him. enjoyed all the history and all the minor and major figures that comprised the party. that a book that was a little more zoomed out would not get to cover.
April 18, 2022
While reading To Make Men Free, Heather Cox Richardson’s history of the Republican Party, I hoped that someone had penned a similarly well-written and accessible history of the Democratic Party. Well, voilà! Michael Kazin has produced the goods.
Kazin is not an impartial bystander. The author of books on populism, the impact of the left on American society, and William Jennings Bryan is upfront about his political leanings, telling anecdotes about wearing a Kennedy button before he was of voting age and playing poker with George Stephanopoulos.
This does not mean that What It Took To Win is hagiography or a love letter to the Democratic Party. Far from it. Kazin gives a clear-eyed accounting of the party’s long history as the party of white supremacy. The party of Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, and Stacey Abrams has also been the party of Jefferson Davis and George Wallace.
Kazin excels at explaining how the Democrats in the 20th century worked to keep all their constituencies - industrial labor in the North, poor whites in the South, liberals in academia and other professions, and, increasingly as the century wore on, African Americans - in the fold. As we know, the party has not always been successful in forging a coalition of these groups. With a sure hand, Kazin analyzes why.
I could quibble about some of the omissions in this book - surprisingly, Huey Long didn’t rate a mention - but overall I found this examination of the Democratic Party from Martin Van Buren to Joe Biden to be informative and utterly absorbing.
Kazin is not an impartial bystander. The author of books on populism, the impact of the left on American society, and William Jennings Bryan is upfront about his political leanings, telling anecdotes about wearing a Kennedy button before he was of voting age and playing poker with George Stephanopoulos.
This does not mean that What It Took To Win is hagiography or a love letter to the Democratic Party. Far from it. Kazin gives a clear-eyed accounting of the party’s long history as the party of white supremacy. The party of Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, and Stacey Abrams has also been the party of Jefferson Davis and George Wallace.
Kazin excels at explaining how the Democrats in the 20th century worked to keep all their constituencies - industrial labor in the North, poor whites in the South, liberals in academia and other professions, and, increasingly as the century wore on, African Americans - in the fold. As we know, the party has not always been successful in forging a coalition of these groups. With a sure hand, Kazin analyzes why.
I could quibble about some of the omissions in this book - surprisingly, Huey Long didn’t rate a mention - but overall I found this examination of the Democratic Party from Martin Van Buren to Joe Biden to be informative and utterly absorbing.
August 30, 2022
This is an interesting and readable overview of the founding of the Democratic Party from its Jackson-era days up to the present. Kazin manages to grapple with the party's deeply problematic and long-running affair with white supremacy while finding threads binding the current multiracial party to its lily white ancestor by focusing on what he terms 'moral capitalism', a theme of making America's economic system work better for wage earners and protecting them from the caprices of unfettered capitalism and the robber barons it has repeatedly created. He breaks down moral capitalism into two buckets - breaking up monopolies and leveling the field between bosses and workers, and the party's gradual movement into leveling the field and accepting large corporations, as long as they negotiated with labor. His campaign-by-campaign histories are a little uneven - certain presidencies are elected with little explanation, and Congressional elections are almost always explained as being on the president's coattails, and only the most notable mid-term elections are analyzed at length. Another small issue I have is that it generalizes the party's creation and the work that Van Buren put into building the party. I would have enjoyed a greater sense of what it meant at micro-level to build the party, and what role the Albany Regency played (as well as how the Regency formed). I know it's a survey work, but I would have liked to get really granular at the beginning. This is still a solid, clear-eyed account of The Democracy's creation and its rises and falls, and its missed opportunities along the way (e.g., Carter's entire presidency, Humphrey's cheerleading the Vietnam War, Clinton's acquiescence to neoliberalism).
October 27, 2022
WHAT IT TOOK TO WIN, is a summation of the history of the Democratic party. I would highly recommend this for anyone interested in a more in depth look of the party rather than just relying on what you were taught in school.
My big take away is that since it's conception, the party has been practicing the same tactics and from the beginning, and that corruption and the lust for power being a major motivator is not a thing of the past, nor is it unique to modern times.
We often have tunnel vision when it comes to our lived experiences, and this book really illustrates how humans repeat the same behavior over and over again.
I appreciated the final 3rd of the book which explored how the support of labor/unions/workers is where the modern democratic party has found it's power, and that if they continue to turn their backs on that they will continue to lose the support of the people.
***Thank you to Tantor Audio for providing me with the audiobook for free via NetGalley for an unbiased review.
My big take away is that since it's conception, the party has been practicing the same tactics and from the beginning, and that corruption and the lust for power being a major motivator is not a thing of the past, nor is it unique to modern times.
We often have tunnel vision when it comes to our lived experiences, and this book really illustrates how humans repeat the same behavior over and over again.
I appreciated the final 3rd of the book which explored how the support of labor/unions/workers is where the modern democratic party has found it's power, and that if they continue to turn their backs on that they will continue to lose the support of the people.
***Thank you to Tantor Audio for providing me with the audiobook for free via NetGalley for an unbiased review.
December 24, 2023
Kazin's work is an excellent summary of the current state of the literature on the Democratic Party, but its weaknesses lay in that fact. The current state of political history in academia is currently in decline, and so the faults can be evident if it is a field you work in.
A few quick thoughts:
1. The moral capitalism argument is compelling - I think it needs to be anchored in the fact that the Democratic Party was successful when it balanced an evolution in liberalism from the principles of liberty of contract to recognizing the need for a more proactive liberty to balance competing interests rather than negative government. Fitting this in a Rawlsian framework is more helpful.
2. There is a lot of emphasis on Bryan, which may be fair or overstated. That's part of Kazin's expertise, and partially because Bryan dominated the party for two and a half decades.
3. The 1920s chapter is really weak because that's where the historiography itself is extremely weak.
3* Because it is an adequate book that is an excellent presentation of a weaker vein of study.
A few quick thoughts:
1. The moral capitalism argument is compelling - I think it needs to be anchored in the fact that the Democratic Party was successful when it balanced an evolution in liberalism from the principles of liberty of contract to recognizing the need for a more proactive liberty to balance competing interests rather than negative government. Fitting this in a Rawlsian framework is more helpful.
2. There is a lot of emphasis on Bryan, which may be fair or overstated. That's part of Kazin's expertise, and partially because Bryan dominated the party for two and a half decades.
3. The 1920s chapter is really weak because that's where the historiography itself is extremely weak.
3* Because it is an adequate book that is an excellent presentation of a weaker vein of study.
March 4, 2022
Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. A rich and fascinating biography of the Democratic Party that glides through the years with an informative clear eyed gaze. All the big named candidates are given their time on the stage with gossip free stories that move the history forward, but it’s the behind the scenes figures that really shine in this book. The people with the ideas for real change that have the passion, organizational skills and the real world drive to see their ideas become the law of the land. A great story told with unforgettable characters.
April 16, 2022
This is a fast-paced history of the Democratic Party from Marten Van Buren to AOC, tracking the changes in social pressures, coalitions, and institutions. I'm a fan of Kazin's work and think he really delivers on the promise here, explaining why Democrats won when they won and why they didn't when they didn't.
There are stretches where he asserts more than he shows, which is disappointing, but overall this is a really solid contribution to the history of the American left and a great intervention into the debates over victory and failure that seem to continually roil Democratic voters.
There are stretches where he asserts more than he shows, which is disappointing, but overall this is a really solid contribution to the history of the American left and a great intervention into the debates over victory and failure that seem to continually roil Democratic voters.
August 21, 2022
Michael Kazin’s history of the Democratic Party offers pretty much everything that you might need to know or analyze about Democratic Party history from the early republic through the twenty-first century. chapter that ends in 1932 develops feminists Frances Perkins and Belle Moskowitz as real change makers within the Party. though Kazin narrows his aims in the introduction, readers might feel like this book covers all. Kazin irons out how the party of enslavers changed slowly, yet dramatically over time.
July 26, 2024
Interesting and detailed. For me personally almost a little overwhelming, but that just shows my own deficits in US history. This book definitely helped to learn a lot more about the democratic party and its history.
Towards the end of the book, when the last 50 years of history are portrayed, the author voices a lot of his own partisan views. There is nothing wrong with that, but 80% of the book seemed more neutral and based on facts, which makes the last part feel not in sync with the rest of the book.
Towards the end of the book, when the last 50 years of history are portrayed, the author voices a lot of his own partisan views. There is nothing wrong with that, but 80% of the book seemed more neutral and based on facts, which makes the last part feel not in sync with the rest of the book.
August 7, 2024
I like Kazin, and the central thesis about how Democrats succeed when embracing ethical capitalism was interesting enough to carry me through. I think he's correct. But the argument gets lost in the rambling chapters, and there's an awful lot of basic historical context that slows down the narrative.
I also find that Kazin devotes too much time to the Party's rhetoric and ideological stances and not enough to the underlying economic interests that shape those stances. I didn't come away with much new insight from this one, unfortunately!
I also find that Kazin devotes too much time to the Party's rhetoric and ideological stances and not enough to the underlying economic interests that shape those stances. I didn't come away with much new insight from this one, unfortunately!
November 21, 2022
This was rough. A lot harder to glean from and feel informed by than I had hoped. I feel like I learned very little about the Democratic Party from this book. I’m not sure what the target audience is.
My least favorite aspect was the author’s proclivity for nicknames. It felt like he just could not bring himself to call anyone or anything by their given name. It was always “Old Hickory” or “the Windy City” or “the Sunshine State” or “Old Abe Lincoln.” A very distracting practice in my opinion.
My least favorite aspect was the author’s proclivity for nicknames. It felt like he just could not bring himself to call anyone or anything by their given name. It was always “Old Hickory” or “the Windy City” or “the Sunshine State” or “Old Abe Lincoln.” A very distracting practice in my opinion.
January 17, 2023
I've long been fascinated by the history of 20th century American conservatism, so I wanted to read this book to contrast the history that I already know. The scope of this book is very broad and I would love to dive deeper into many of the periods (particular the Democrats between 1968 and 1992). Overall, I was impressed by the detail on the early Democratic Party and disappointed by the hesitation in which Kazin approached more contemporary questions. I did, however, love his characterization of the post-Clinton DNC as... I believe the term was "cosmopolitans in search of a majority"? It struck me. The book pretty clearly prescribes a return to labor as the future of the DNC and makes that point persuasively. Overall, a very impressive book that is going to send me down many future rabbit holes.
June 1, 2022
While I give this book three stars it was somewhat a close thing. It ought to serve well as a political science primer, but that likely ignores the shifts over time that make the political party of today look somewhat different, or totally different, than that same party yesterday or tomorrow. It does seem to me to assume that we all value progressivism.
June 3, 2022
كتاب جيد و مفيد للمهتمين بالتاريخ السياسي لأمريكا.
هذا الكتاب يروي قصة الحزب الاقدم و هو الحزب الديمقراطي و هي قصة مثيرة بالنظر الى التحولات الكبرى التي رافقت تاريخ الحزب و ابرزها هو تحوله من حزب عنصري سيطر عليه الى منتصف القرن العشرين سياسيون عنصريون الى حزب جامع
يركز الكتاب على شخصيات تاريخية كان لها دور كبير في رسم سياسة و تحولات الحزب كالرؤساء اندرو جاكسون و ويلسون و روزفلت و جونسون
هذا الكتاب يروي قصة الحزب الاقدم و هو الحزب الديمقراطي و هي قصة مثيرة بالنظر الى التحولات الكبرى التي رافقت تاريخ الحزب و ابرزها هو تحوله من حزب عنصري سيطر عليه الى منتصف القرن العشرين سياسيون عنصريون الى حزب جامع
يركز الكتاب على شخصيات تاريخية كان لها دور كبير في رسم سياسة و تحولات الحزب كالرؤساء اندرو جاكسون و ويلسون و روزفلت و جونسون
August 6, 2022
A great writing and chronicle of the Democratic Party, but the anti-Jimmy Carter tone is stark. The author even admits to voting against him in 1980. The portion of the book that takes place during the author’s lifetime takes a much less objective turn, substituting instead personal beliefs for historical statements. A great work nonetheless
November 22, 2024
A good history of the Democratic Party. Solidly written although the later chapters/periods are a bit distracting as the author insists on adding, almost memoir-like, comments about his own experience as a politically engaged person. The narrative thus tends to be a bit less arms-length analysis in spots.
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