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Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 169-73 169
No, Your Other Left! The Fight for the Soul
of the Democratic Party
Aysuda Kölemen
In 1964, a charismatic Ronald Reagan gave what came later to be
known as “the speech” for Barry Goldwater’s campaign that turned him
into a political star. His unwavering defense of those big ideas trans-
formed the American political discourse after he was elected president
in 1980. While the Democratic Party opposed many of Reagan’s poli-
cies, they seemed to increasingly embrace the premises upon which they
were built. Bill Clinton, the rst Democratic president after Reagan,
promised to end the culture of welfare dependency and declared the era
of big government over, while proposing individual solutions such as
educational attainment and hard work as cures to poverty and inequal-
ity. e hegemony of Reaganism in America seemed to be complete by
the end of Clinton’s two terms and went largely unchallenged during
the Barack Obama years. However, during the 2008 crisis, the disap-
pointment over the meager response of the Obama administration to
the devastation of the masses, which contrasted sharply with its swift
and massive eort to save big companies, propelled parts of the party
base to join the ranks of its historically marginal left wing. After the
unexpected success of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 presiden-
tial primaries and the traumatic impact of the Trump presidency on
its base, the liberal and the socialist wings of the Democratic Party are
currently in a erce struggle over the future direction of the party. Such
soul searching is to be expected after losses. at it is occurring after an
election in which the Democrats handily won the presidency is a testi-
mony to how deep the controversy runs.
e sustained and increasingly more popular self-proclaimed social-
ist economic discourse by the small but vocal left wing of the Demo-
cratic Party is the re behind this moment of reckoning. Despite being
unpopular among the party establishment, socialist Democrats have an
Aysuda Kölemen
170 Amst 66.1 (2021): 169-73
inuence beyond their rank and numbers in American politics. eir
ideas have already spilled into the larger societal discourse and caused
a leftward shift in party policy proposals regarding education, climate,
and health care. I argue that the fundamental reason for this is the power
of their transformative discourse, which seeks to replace the Reaganite
discourse that has reigned supreme since the 1980s. Here, I will elabo-
rate on their arguments that aim to undermine the Reaganite premises
of individual responsibility for poverty, the win-win view of inequality,
and the undesirability of government intervention.
Structuralism
Franklin D. Roosevelt had made the case that poverty was a result of
structural forces beyond the reach of individuals and, therefore, ghting
poverty required a collective and concerted eort that could only be led
by the government. In a brilliant reversal, Reagan shifted the perceived
responsibility for poverty from structural to individual factors through
the Malthusian “perversity thesis” (Somers and Block 265). According to
omas R. Malthus, poverty relief eorts paradoxically increase poverty
by divorcing sustenance from work and increasing reproduction rates
among those who cannot aord to have children (Malthus ch.V). Ap-
plying Malthus’s theory to the twentieth-century American context,
Reagan argued that the assistance to the poor created a permanent un-
derclass by encouraging laziness and poor family planning, which led
to intergenerational poverty and continued dependence on assistance.
He contended that the Democratic Party was conscious of this paradox
and intentionally designed welfare programs to create a group of people
dependent on benets who would continue to vote for the party that
promised to maintain and extend government assistance to the needy.
Malthusian tough love requires denying help to those in need and forc-
ing them to work harder and have fewer children. us, government
intervention only perpetuates and exacerbates the problem of poverty. In
one swoop, this line of argument resolves the tension between the moral
desire to end poverty and the economic desire to decrease government
spending: If poverty can only be ended by refusing to help the poor, it
is morally justied to deny assistance to the needy because of its larger
long-term benets to the poor and to society, even when it causes dis-
tress and suering to the people who are deprived of help.
e contemporary socialist discursive strategy is to shift the respon-
sibility for poverty from individual to structural factors on utilitarian and
moral grounds. From a utilitarian angle, emphasizing that an increasing
number of people work hard, hold jobs, take responsibility, and nonethe-
less fail to lift themselves up from poverty illustrates why it is not individ-
ual actions but the economic system that breeds and perpetuates poverty.
From a moral perspective, arguing that human suering should not be
the subject of utilitarian calculations presents human dignity and welfare
No, Your Other Le ft! The Fight f or the Soul of the Dem ocratic Par ty
Amst 66.1 (2021): 169-73 171
as non-negotiable rights that should be guaranteed by the government.
erefore, individualist and meritocratic approaches such as improving
educational attainment cannot and should not be expected to solve struc-
tural problems such as poverty. e emphasis on the structurality of pov-
erty also aligns with the framing of the other large-scale crises that the
socialist left desires to tackle, such as climate change and racism.
Power Competition
e perversity thesis arrived at the political scene bundled with Mil-
ton Friedman’s libertarian economic theory, which formed the basis of
Reagan’s economic policy. Friedman argues that government interven-
tion in the functioning of the economy—with a few exceptions—creates
more problems than it solves and results in the loss of political free-
doms along with economic freedoms. A preoccupation with economic
inequality is unnecessary because inequality is not only due to the dier-
ences in individual ability and eort but also desirable due to the posi-
tive externalities that it creates in the economic and political domain.
From a classical liberal perspective, it is not a problem that the poor
get a smaller share of the pie as long as the pie keeps growing and ev-
erybody’s slice of the pie grows in absolute terms. If everybody is richer
than they were a decade ago in real terms, then the distribution does not
matter. Democrats generally seem to have accepted this premise as they
defended economic prosperity at the expense of distributive justice in
the post-Reagan era. It was only after the 2008 crisis, with the grassroots
protests that identied the “one percent” as the enemy of the people, that
the conversation shifted back to the perils of inequality.
e socialist left adheres to what I label as the power-competition view
of inequality. According to this view, the relative share of a pie someone
acquires is more important than the size of their slice because the rich
who increase their share of wealth can buy more power in the political
system and employ this power to reshape the system according to their
interests. Wealth may be an absolute good, but power is a relative concept,
and therefore when wealth is used to gain power, it should also be treated
as a relational resource. Even if the poor get richer in absolute terms, they
are left in a weaker and more precarious situation with less political re-
sources to defend what is left of their political and economic power when
wealth inequality increases. In the contemporary American context, this
perspective necessitates the defense of steeply progressive taxation and a
reversal of deregulation in many areas such as nance, health care, and the
media to enable the government to limit the political power of the rich.
is zero-sum perspective on wealth and politics applies to other areas
as well. Achieving equality for disadvantaged groups necessarily comes
at the expense of historically privileged groups. Hence, equality cannot
be achieved without a struggle against the privileged. Having accepted
the maxim that “power concedes nothing without a demand” (Douglass
Aysuda Kölemen
172 Amst 66.1 (2021): 169-73
22), the movement views conict as a necessary and inevitable aspect of
politics. In that regard, it is closer to Reagan’s spirit than it is to that of
the liberal Democratic Party leadership, which has long defended that
progress can be achieved through dialogue, compromise, and patience.
is divergence gains particular signicance when it comes to the issue
of race. e popularity of Reagan was a result of many factors, one of
which was his ability to position himself as the defender of the American
ethos of self-reliance by wrapping arguments about the causes of poverty
in coded language that evoked long-standing stereotypes and prejudices
against Black Americans. He is only one in a long line of American politi-
cians to use anti-Black rhetoric to harness votes, but he was exceptionally
gifted in hiding racist arguments in plain daylight. He implied that those
who were dependent on government assistance were predominantly Black
men who were prone to criminality and promiscuous Black women who
gave birth to many children without marrying, condent that they could
lead a comfortable life on the government dole. According to this line of
thinking, if poverty was an individual failure, then Black poverty was the
result of Black culture and the cure was to cut o government help so that
Black communities could learn to stand on their own feet. erefore, it
was the obligation of the government to weed out those who abused the
system for life from the people that really deserved help, those who fell on
hard times and would need assistance temporarily.
e socialists strike back at racism from various angles. First, hav-
ing studied decades of academic research suggesting that targeted poli-
cies lead to demonization of target groups and defunding of government
programs, socialists propose universalist policies such as Medicare for
All, student loan forgiveness, and Universal Basic Income that do not
target any needy group. ey move away from the language of assisting
the poor to the language of rights: housing rights, education rights, labor
rights, health care rights, and a high minimum income. Second, social-
ists distance themselves from the liberal argument that racial and other
forms of equality can be achieved in time by changing attitudes and
decreasing prejudices through education and communication. A power
competition perspective reasons that racial inequalities were instituted
by structural design to serve the interests of some powerful groups and
can only be dismantled by ghting the contemporary holders of those
interests. From this perspective, racism is not merely an attitude but a
structure with many vested interests that requires drastic policy solu-
tions such as defunding the police. ese demands also communicate a
sense of urgency against incrementalism.
Government Works
American socialists usually serve their arguments piecemeal around
specic policy proposals, demands, and issue areas. However, these ar-
guments revolve around a central theme: that the market economy is
No, Your Other Le ft! The Fight f or the Soul of the Dem ocratic Par ty
Amst 66.1 (2021): 169-73 173
an unnatural construct and serves the people that hold power—be it
economic, social, or political. Socialists arrive at three related conclu-
sions: that the market economy is unjust, unfree, undemocratic, ine-
cient, and most importantly lethal for humankind; that the government
is more ecient than the markets at delivering public goods; and that
it is the obligation of democratic governments to reign in the market
forces to protect the people by providing public goods when possible
and regulating and taxing the markets when not. is desire to regulate
and weaken the role of the market means war for them. If Reaganites
wanted to drown the government in a bathtub, the socialists want to put
the market in a straitjacket. Whereas Reaganism emphasized freedom
as the ultimate American value, the socialists focus on another value:
justice.
ese ideas are not new or specically American. However, they
must be interwoven to arrive at a specically American and contem-
porary discourse that speaks to the American populace today. is is
a challenge the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has not had to
contend with because it did not develop in opposition but as an append-
age to Reaganism. e socialists have not settled on their champion or a
unied discourse so far; the movement is still in its infancy. ere is no
“the speech” yet, but as their arguments reveal, socialists already have an
overarching theory of politics that focuses on structures, power compe-
tition, and the desirability of government intervention. If they can com-
municate these big ideas behind and beyond specic policy proposals to
the voters, they just may be able to swing the Democratic Party and the
American political pendulum to the left.
Works Cite d
Douglass, Frederick. Two Speeches, by Frederick Douglass: One on West India
Emancipation, Delivered at Canandaigua, Aug. 4th, and the Other on the
Dred Scott Decision, Delivered in New York, on the Occasion of the Anni-
versary of the American Abolition Society, May, 1857. C. P. Dewey, printer,
American Ofce, 1857. Print.
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2002.
Print.
Malthus, Thomas Robert. “An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).” The
Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. Ed. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden. Lon-
don: Pickering & Chatto, 1986. Vol. 1: 1-139. Print.
Somers, Margaret R., and Fred Block . “From Pover ty to Per versit y: Ideas, Mar-
kets, and Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate.” American Socio-
logical Review 70.2 (2005): 260-87. Print.
