Not popularism. Not deliverism. Partyism

Perhaps Democrats should consider becoming a political party?

Photo by Marek Studzinski at Unsplash

Dave Dayen has gotten his hands on a memo written by Seth London, a politically moderate consultant, which advocates empowering “Common Sense Democrats” to get the party back to where it ought to be. The idea (from the bits that Dave has shared) is to move Democrats away from a leftist orthodoxy that is losing them elections, and to rebuild on the model of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a moderate, business-friendly non-profit/quasi-caucus that was prominent in the 1990s. The diagnosis is that just as back then, the Democratic party has been taken over by activists and interest groups. What we need instead is a return to sensible leadership and common-sense based centrism. Or in short: let’s get the old band together again for the Neoliberalism Worked Dammit 2025 American Tour!

As you can likely tell, I’m not hugely impressed by this proposal, but my principal objections are more organizational rather than ideological. London’s proposal is overtly ideological - it is designed to bolster one side in the internal fight over who lost the presidential election. Moderates argue that Harris was too obviously in hock to frothing left ideologues, who wanted to press a variety of unpopular causes. Lefties argue that she was too friendly to business-as-usual quasi-corruption, and should have embraced the kind of economic populism that could have won back voters.

The moderates’ theory of political success is ‘popularism’ - you go after the median voter to win! The lefties’ theory is ‘deliverism’ - give people economic goodies and they will reward you! But behind these theories are the usual ideological fights, which I have my druthers about, but am not going to get into.

Instead, I want to talk about the memo’s organizational arguments. Again, I haven’t seen the whole thing, but presuming that the public bits are representative, the memo’s analysis is as follows. The problem is that the current party elevates “donors, activists and interest groups” over “elected leaders,” who are in fact the brand of the party. To solve this structural problem, people (implicitly donors - intellectual consistency is typically not a strong point of documents like this) should stop focusing their money and resources on primaries, and instead focus on what happens between elections, building up a group that “leverages the organizational model” of the DLC by building a “membership organization of and for aligned Democratic party leaders.”

This group would draft a clear statement of purpose, work together with London’s PAC to “provide direct financial and tactical assistance” to likeminded politicians looking for election, and generate ideas through convenings and such. At the state level, there’d be support (modeled on an existing fund in Texas) for “in-state political networks that cut against the dominant orthodoxy of their state’s Democratic culture.”

What is notable about all of this is that there is a lot of talk about Democratic ‘leaders’ (yay!) and ‘interest groups’* and ‘activists’ (hiss) but nothing about the actual voters who are defecting from the Democratic party. Again, while there may be more discussion in the unpublished bits, what we can see suggests the theory is that once the Democratic party comes to its senses again, and embraces sensible moderation, the voters will come flooding back. That seems like an extremely brave assumption to me, and one that ignores a third diagnosis of what is wrong with the Democratic party, which gets less attention because it doesn’t fit cleanly into the prevailing ideological battle.

What if the Democratic party’s problem is not that it is too left-leaning, or for that matter, too moderate, but instead is too disconnected from the lives of the people whom it wants to appeal to? If that is the case, then top-down efforts like the one that London proposes are likely doomed, regardless of ideology.

There is a body of work and thinking that suggests that instead of pulling policy towards left or right, we want to build more organic connections between leaders and voters, which will allow voters to pull leaders in their direction, and, for that matter, vice versa. According to this diagnosis, the answer to the Democrats’ problems is to do something they haven’t consistently done in decades - work with ordinary members and voters to actually build up a party that makes connections between politicians and the people between elections.

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There are two standard positions in the Democratic party’s argument over how to win elections - popularism and deliverism. Popularists – like David Shor and Matt Yglesias – argue that Obama, and Bill Clinton before him, showed the way to electoral success. In Ezra Klein’s pithy summary, popularism suggests that to get reelected, politicians “should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” According to this view, leftists’ vociferous defense of unpopular measures and groups regularly dooms the Democratic party to defeat. What Democrats need is a combination of technocratic competence and close attention to opinion polls, which allows us to keep the median voter (a TLDR term for the voter at the middle of the distribution of a single-peaked one dimensional mapping of ideological opinions) happy.

This implies, more or less by definition, that political centrism is good, actually. Unsurprisingly, leftists disagree, arguing that the technocratic Obama approach was a disaster for the Democratic party over the longer term. Dave Dayen has laid out the case for what he calls “deliverism,” the argument that successful policy measures will generate partisan support for Democrats. This ties into the claim by some political scientists who study “American Political Development” (APD) that big ambitious policies can generate their own support. Measures such as Social Security may be controversial when introduced – but over time these policies can become incredibly popular, generating support for the party that introduced them. Under this diagnosis, when Obama tacked to the center or hid potentially popular policies to make them more effective, he paved the way for Hillary Clinton’s election loss.

Again, I’m not going to get into that ideological fight, or into the vexed question of which did more to contribute to Harris’s more recent loss. Instead, I want to highlight a different approach, which is most developed in the arguments of a small group of political scientists, but that has recently started getting more public traction. Instead of popularism or deliverism, they argue for what might be dubbed “partyism”: the notion that Democrats’ difficulties stem from the weaknesses of the Democratic party, which has become increasingly incapable of mediating between voters and leaders.

Most political scientists who study U.S. political parties think of them as coalitions of interests looking to get their hands on the goodies that the policy making process can provide. But there is a smaller clique of scholars who are interested in parties as organizations. The Democratic party has been organizationally weak for a long time. Why is this so?

Partyism, as I understand it, begins with two books.** One isn’t about U.S. political parties at all, but their European counterparts. Peter Mair’s classic book, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, is a history of how the “age of party democracy had passed” in Europe. European political parties were once dense social organizations which connected voters to leaders (albeit with lashings of small-scale corruption, back-room deals and domination by aging white dudes), but had largely withered away by the early 2000s. At the top, leaders had figured out that they didn’t need to rely on party members any more, instead getting the resources they needed to win elections from rich backers and interest groups. At the bottom, voters had moved away from the sharply demarcated class and religious identities that linked them to particular parties. The result, according to Mair, was the hollowing out of democracy. And that was a problem, since we need effective parties for democracy to work well.

The other, Presidential Party Building, by Dan Galvin (summarized here), was about America. It argued that Democratic presidents had historically been terrible at building up party organization. As Galvin summarized it later:

there was little incentive for Democratic presidents and party leaders to think long-term about building their party organization and equipping it to expand its reach. Their top priority was to make use of their majority now, not to build a new one for later. They were content to outsource critical electoral and financial activities to organized labor, urban party machines, and affiliated interest groups rather than to duplicate these activities in-house. Their approach was rational, at least for a time.

Obama built up an extraordinary grassroots machine to get elected - but nearly completely neglected it after his election, so that it withered away. Other Democratic politicians haven’t been any better.

As Trump began to surge in 2016, these arguments became more urgently relevant to U.S. politics. Trump was clearly remaking the Republican party (which had its own pathologies) in highly malign ways, while also breaking up the social coalitions of race and class that Democrats had thought to be enduring structures. Democrats did not seem capable of responding. So what was going on?

Two political scientists - Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman - argued in a paper in October 2016, that Trump’s success signaled the weaknesses of existing party organizations. The Republican party was unable to resist Trump, and as it turned out, the Democratic party was unable to defeat him in the presidential election.

Like Mair, they believed that strong democracy called for strong parties: “formal institutions that effectively and continually engage with voters, activists, and politicians to formulate and then implement party programs.” They didn’t find such parties in American politics, and, like Galvin noted that:

Obama for America emphasized building capacity among grassroots volunteers. It trained its Captains and Neighborhood Team Leaders extensively—but after Election Day in 2008 and again in 2012, let its organization wither on the vine.

Eight years later, they turned the paper into a book, a detailed and extended history of American political parties, which is as close to a bible of partyism as there is right now. Its diagnosis is that America’s parties are “hollow”:

Hollow parties are parties that, for all their array of activities, demonstrate fundamental incapacities in organizing democracy. This distinctive combination of activity and incapacity manifests itself across multiple dimensions. As a civic presence in an era of nationalized politics, hollow parties are unrooted in communities and unfelt in ordinary people’s day-to-day lives. Organizationally, they tilt toward national entities at the expense of state and local ones. Swarming networks of unattached paraparty groups, without popular accountability, overshadow formal party organizations at all levels. Finally, hollow parties lack legitimacy. The mass public and engaged political actors alike share neither positive loyalty to their allied party nor deference to the preferences of its leaders.

Parties today aren’t real organizations but ‘blobs’:

The party blobs contain multitudes: single- and multi-issue ideological groups, many of them with paper members or no members at all; media figures, from talk-show hosts to online personalities, guided by profit and celebrity at least as much as by substantive or electoral goals; think tank policy wonks generating party programs by proxy; traditional Political Action Committees (PACs), run by interest groups and politicians, trading favors with their colleagues; nominally uncoordinated Super PACs and dark-money 501(c)s; billionaire megadonors with varied and often idiosyncratic agendas; and an ever-changing array of consultancies peddling technical services in electioneering, digital politics, and political finance in hopes of grabbing a share of all the money sloshing through the system. The defining feature of the party blob is precisely this amorphousness—a jumble of principals and incentives that contradict scholarly depictions of “party networks” seamlessly coordinating in the pursuit of shared goals.

Since such parties themselves lack coherence, they aren’t capable of connecting voters to politicians in any coherent way. And that is a particular problem for the Democratic party, which Rosenfeld and Schlozman explicitly identify with. The Republicans have been captured; the Democrats are ineffectual, and party democracy in the U.S. is all screwed up.

This approach has a certain amount of shared intellectual DNA with deliverism - both are embroiled in the big arguments of APD. But it differs sharply in its diagnosis of what to do, and of the problems of Obama and Clinton’s approach to politics. Galvin argues in a 2016 article that both were effectively deliverists.

The problem was that neither Obama nor Clinton did enough [party building] to make much of a difference in the near-term … both treated policy successes as tantamount to political successes. Both … argued that successful health-care reform would create supportive constituencies that would reward the party at the voting booth in the long run. But policies don’t always generate their own political supports, which is the main difficulty Obama is confronting now.

Galvin and Chloe Thurston (another great political scientist) quote Obama as recognizing this later.

Partly because my docket was really full … I couldn’t be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as … President …. We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.

Rosenfeld and Schlozman, and Galvin and Thurston provide a mutually reinforcing diagnosis of American party politics. What is wrong with the Democratic party is not that it is too far to the left or too far to the right, but that it is not a party in a meaningful sense. It is too far from the people whom it wants to engage. Not popularism then, nor deliverism, but partyism is the answer. If Democrats want to succeed, they need to do what Obama self-admittedly did not, and build up the Democratic party as a coherent organization that connects leaders to ordinary people.

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What would partyism involve in practice? In a post election piece, Rosenfeld and Schlozman say that it won’t be easy. Their analysis leads to:

a daunting conclusion about the task to reforge the frayed bonds between working people and the party that governs in their name: to focus, instead, on long-term organizational renewal in the local centers of civic life—union halls and party headquarters among them—that have in the past joined people together across class and educational divides. Parties in their organizational heyday, at the apogee in the nineteenth century and continuing long into the twentieth, did not merely draw electorally from that thick civic life; they embodied it directly.

One reason why this will be hard is that the withering of parties is just one aspect of a more general withering of organizational life (most eloquently documented by Theda Skocpol), in which a whole host of civic activities have been professionalized, so that they no longer much involve ordinary people. Another (described at length by Schlozman’s colleague Adam Sheingate) is that the professional consultant classes that have emerged around this disordered party structure have a strong self interest in keeping the game as it is.

It is, however, notable that a few people have seized on similar diagnoses in the immediate wake of the election. Ned Resnikoff has two posts arguing that the Democratic party should revive civic structure as a way of building a real relationship with voters.

To the Democratic Party, person-to-person outreach almost always means “ground game” or get-out-the-vote efforts. But GOTV isn’t intended to reconstruct or strengthen social attachments … There is another model for direct outreach … but converting them into active political agents. Call this the organizing model. Organized individuals become members of a team: they vote, but they also march, advocate, engage in direct action, and participate in collective decision-making. They also usually do more organizing, so as to keep growing the team. … Any organization that seeks to replace the Democratic-leaning Elks Lodge in American public life needs to look more like an Elks Lodge than a DSA meeting.

With that in mind, my proposal is that the Democratic Party, along with other liberal and left-leaning organizations, should fund the creation of community centers in priority voting precincts. These centers would be managed by a combination of local volunteers and paid staff who are hired directly from the surrounding community. … While the community centers would be forthright about their general political orientation, none of these events should have explicitly political ends. … all the work at these community centers would serve a very simple goal: establishing a cordial, mutually beneficial relationship between normie voters and America’s left-liberal political coalition.

Like Resnikoff, Pete Davis at The Nation starts from Skocpol’s work to criticize how Democrats organize.

Today, the party focuses almost exclusively on election campaign sprints optimized (to use terms popularized by civic theorists like Jane McAlevey and Hahrie Han) for short-term mobilizing (squeezing donations and volunteer hours out of current members) rather than for long-term organizing (fostering the stewardship, growth, and leadership development of the party’s membership). Instead of funding itself primarily through membership dues, the party offers fancy events for the wealthy and ceaseless, disrespectful texts for the rest of us. Parasocial relationships with celebrities and famous politicians are emphasized over real relationships with fellow neighbors and local chapter leaders. When you go to Democrats.org, clicking “Take Action” does not direct you to a page with your local Democratic committee’s meeting times and locations. The bolded call-to-action button on the party homepage is “DONATE,” not “JOIN.” …

Membership Cards. It should mean something to join the Democrats. … Maps. There should be an accountable Democratic captain for every neighborhood in the country. … Meeting Halls. … lively community centers not just for party activities, but also for the party’s broader local coalition of unions and progressive groups. Mutual Aid. The party should directly care for members and for the broader community. Democrats should do disaster relief, take on homeless-shelter shifts, cook food when members have a baby, welcome new immigrants to town, and host block parties throughout the year.

Davis mentions the work of my colleague, Hahrie Han, whose new book on evangelicism makes a case, quietly and patiently and around the edges of her narrative, that evangelical churches provide a kind of space that U.S. political parties do not. They allow different groups with different interests to coalesce and organize in the space of a broader sense of shared mission and purpose. Evangelical churches are not just good at building community, but building on community structures that are already there. Democrats could learn a lot from this.

All these are partyist arguments. They suggest that the road to renewing the Democrats (and remaking the Republicans into an organization that is not actively malevolent) begins with changing party organization from the blob-like congelation of chaos and self-interest that Rosenfeld and Schlozman identify, into organizational forms that actively connect political leaders and ordinary people. This is not a call for idealism - parties pursue narrow self-interested goals, and their internal politics often leave a lot to be desired, but for a better alignment of interest and social purpose. That is what political parties are supposed to do. They are doing it very badly now, in the U.S. (and elsewhere). Hence, we should figure out organizational forms, connections and two way relations of responsibility between leaders and ordinary people, that will make them do their job better.

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It should be clear from the above that I’m highly sympathetic with the partyist diagnosis. Still, I don’t think that there is strong empirical evidence demonstrating that it is innately superior to either deliverism or popularism. The fundamental problem for analysis is that there are few national elections in U.S. politics, many causal factors that influence them, and a whole lot of unobservable variation over time. Put more succinctly: there is no very good evidence based way to tell which plausible broad approaches are better in explaining electoral success over time, and which are worse.

I still think that a strong case can be made that partyism is more generative than either of the two approaches that dominate the internal debate. Specifically, it identifies relationships that the other two do not. Both popularism and deliverism are unidirectional theories about the relationship between policy and the public. The crude notion behind popularism is that you give the people what they want. Public preferences determine policy making. The crude notion behind deliverism is if you build it, they will come. Policy making determines public preferences.

The half-formed theory behind partyism - as I understand it - is different. NB that here I am putting words in people’s mouths - and not even my own words, but garbled half articulated notions that are repurposed from discussions that I’ve had with Hahrie and other people at the SNF Agora Institute where I work. In other words - if there is anything good here, it is probably not my idea, but if there are terrible notions, they’re surely mine.

Partyism suggests that instead of arguing that policy making shapes public preferences, or that public preferences shape policy making, we should ask how publics shape preferences and policy. Early twentieth century pragmatists like John Dewey argued that we needed publics - cohesive groups with a sense of shared interest and shared problems - to make democracy work. Jane Addams not only laid down theory but ample practice for how to do this, working with groups of women, immigrants and others to help them articulate their interests and work together.

Political parties - on this account - ought to be publics. That is, they ought to involve ordinary people and leaders in a two way dialogue, where policy goals aren’t handed down from elites, or determined by them on the basis of opinion polls and consultants’ reports, but shaped in back-and-forth. Such back and forth is, in practice, a massive pain in the arse; messy, contentious and difficult. But it not only provides information, but builds connection and trust. As John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi would put it, it builds communities of fate, which are more robust than the fickle, shifting coalitions that polling and social media platforms can temporarily assemble around this or that set of vibes.

You can see how versions of partyism might emerge that are more flavored by popularism or deliverism depending, that are more centrist or left leaning (or, for that matter, conservative). Ned Resnikoff is a card-carrying member of the abundance faction, which is often identified with popularism. My own history, and Sam Rosenfeld’s, is on the American Prospect left. Daniel Schlozman is a normie Democrat. Hahrie Han and Margaret Levi and Chloe Thurston and Dan Galvin, I wouldn’t dare to classify. What all of us share, I think is a commitment to the notion that actually-existing political organizations are not doing their job of mediating between people and leaders, and that getting them to do their job is the first step towards better politics.

Maybe you could go further. I think that partyism has legs because it is one way of getting at the basic problem of U.S. democracy as I see it - that there is something wrong with the publics that we have. They are deformed or deranged - either inchoate blobs or concentrations of malevolence. Rebuilding democracy so that it works will involve rebuilding publics so that they work. And parties - as the most central kind of public that we have in actually existing democracies - are the place where we need most urgently to start.

Clearly, this is my spin on other people’s ideas, rather than anything original, or even, necessarily useful. And it is at the best, the beginnings of an argument, rather than a coherent well developed case for what we ought to do. That’s all I’ve got right now, but I think it’s still a lot better than London’s memo.

* ‘interest groups’ in such memos is a term of art that implicitly includes ‘unions’ and excludes ‘business and business associations.’

** The “as I understand it” is a deliberate fudge. My potted history here is open to contradiction from better informed people - I’m a political scientist, but not one who studies U.S. politics, let alone U.S. political parties.

[A few sentences of this post are taken from a more political-sciencey piece I wrote for Good Authority right after the election.]