Yet here I am — still a loyal Democrat. Why is that?

I don’t love modern progressivism. I reject its yearning to reform not just institutions, but people’s souls. Indeed, Marc Dunkelman’s recent book Why Nothing Works has all but convinced me that modern progressivism has turned into a cannibalistic movement chewing to death any attempts at meaningful reform. And with every breath that brings me closer to age 40, I become more and more skeptical of the notion that public policy can right the crooked timber of humankind or alter the fundamentals of human nature.

Given all that, could it be that my loyalty to Democrats has to do with mere tribal identity? I hail from deep-blue New York, which codes entirely Democratic on cultural issues. To a great extent, my Democratic sensibilities can’t help but be shaped by the fact that everybody I knew growing up was Democrat. But tribal identity and teenage gut feelings aren’t solid guides to thoughtful, grownup political participation.

Luckily, there is a better answer, and it has to do with the historical role of the Democrats in America’s modern party system: the fact that in the 20th century, the party has stood for mature governance, warts and all, while the other, the GOP, has been and remains a party too often averse to government as such. When we support political parties, we choose people to govern us. It’s one thing to reject the progressive dream. It’s another to insist upon good governance. 

The Democratic Party was founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren as a vehicle for disaffected farmers and workers. If these groups’ interests didn’t always align, they shared a hostility to the Northeastern establishment, embodied in the Second Bank of the United States, against which Jackson waged war as fiercely as he carried out Indian Removal. As the young republic developed, and sectional tensions over slavery intensified, Democrats found themselves divided in a way that simply wasn’t true of the Republicans, a party explicitly founded in favor of “free labor” and in opposition to the South’s Peculiar Institution. 

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It wasn’t until the 1890s, then, that the modern party system in America really took shape. At that point, the US basically was a single-party state. Having supported secession, pro-slavery Democrats had discredited themselves, and the party as a whole, gifting Republicans with a 30-year run of near-total electoral dominance. The reconstituted Democrats emerged first out of a kind of a yearning for a splinter movement. Attempting to be cutting, a Republican surrogate in 1884 accused the Dems of being the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” but there were enough Catholics and rum drinkers around that the label stuck and became a rallying cry. The Democrats became once more, as in their Jacksonian roots, the party of the underdog and particularly of the urban disenfranchised. 

But that left the Democrats as merely a party of sentiment, not of ideas. The tossing-and-turning of the Grover Cleveland administration — a rare Democratic break in the GOP dominance of the Gilded Age — showed the need for a coherent political philosophy. Cleveland, a man of impeccable integrity, conceived of himself as a mountain of obstruction in the executive branch, scrupulously following the Constitution and vetoing everything that seemed out of bounds. And yet Cleveland was compelled, over the course of his presidency (especially in his second term), to abandon his entire political philosophy.

He sent the feds into Chicago to break a strike — with a number of strikers killed in the chaos. He laid groundwork for the annexation of Hawaii as much as he disliked territorial expansion. And he found himself turning the government into a kind of cash-for-gold program, stocking up gold reserves as much as possible and eventually turning to JP Morgan to bail out the Treasury. As Cleveland said of his reliance on the plutocrats, in a stinging rebuke of the populist wing of his party: “It never occurred to any of us to consult in this emergency farmers, doctors, lawyers, shoemakers, or even statesmen.… The prospect of what we needed might be somewhat improved by making application to those whose business and surroundings qualified them to intelligently respond.”

Every one of Cleveland’s decisions was almost certainly correct under the circumstances, but he left office as a pariah to his own party, at that time undergoing its Populist renovation. His GOP successor, William McKinley, planned to govern with traditional Republican values — above all, a protective tariff — but he, like Cleveland, found himself playing cards from a completely different part of the deck. He committed himself to massive territorial expansion, annexing Hawaii and eventually Puerto Rico, turning Cuba into a protectorate, and extending the US imperium as far as the Philippines. A president who had arrived in office anticipating enclosed continental borders was, by 1898, telling his staff, “it is evident that I must learn a great deal of geography in this [Spanish-American] war.” And protective tariffs — the cornerstone of McKinley’s governing vision — were all but forgotten as expansionism spurred free trade.

If the 1890s showed the incoherence of the governing philosophies of both parties, the 1900s helped to smooth them out. The United States came to terms with its expansionary role in the world — abandoning George Washington’s counsel against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address — recognizing it as a necessary adaptation to the era of high-seas navies, in which overseas territory not picked up by America would tend to fall to a rival. The new power of the executive branch was accepted in an era of heightened international exposure — and charismatically embodied in the almost universally popular Theodore Roosevelt. And the government could conceive of a new domestic role for itself: enforcing nascent antitrust legislation and curbing the monopolistic control of the trusts.

Having entertained William Jennings Bryan’s idiotic silver-standard movement, the Democrats straightened themselves through the Progressive Era, so that, as Dunkelman writes, the 1912 election would come down to “which version of Progressivism … would define the movement going forward.” Government was understood as what John Kenneth Galbraith would call a “countervailing power” checking big business, and an income tax was instituted to overcome the deeply unreliable revenue system of relying on tariffs (which, as often as not, had meant turning to Wall Street whenever there was a crisis).

This, then, is the heart of what the Democratic Party means to me: a robust conception of government, in which government, without ever sacrificing popular legitimacy, carries out executive functions, above all in exercising countervailing power to curb monopolistic practices and in running a coherent, far-sighted foreign policy.

Neither one of these is exactly enshrined in the Constitution, but what everybody in power in the early 20th century discovered was that the Constitution couldn’t solve all problems — that it was necessary to develop a more robust government to deal with new crises: global power politics, predatory business practices, and then the Jim Crow regime that protected itself in appeals to local government and separation of powers.

Republicans would gradually forget all this. In the Twenties, the Republican Party rebranded itself —  very far away from the party of Theodore Roosevelt — as isolationist, strictly laissez-faire in business, but with stultifyingly high tariffs and immigration barriers. That turned out to be exactly the wrong approach to an era of interconnected global crises, whether economic or political, and the result was not only a well-deserved 20-year loss of power for the Republicans starting in 1932, but the dominance of New Deal Democrats through the Sixties. 

The making of the midcentury Democrats involved a transformation arguably more dramatic than Trump’s remaking of the Reagan GOP. Going back to its Jacksonian roots, the Democrats were beholden to a Jeffersonian vision of independent yeomen which saw the Hamiltonian state as, at best, an evil to be minimized and tolerated — barely. There was virtue to this vision, but it failed to answer the problems of the industrial age, when American craftsmen and yeomen became wage-earning employees, who owned neither their own tools nor land, and who were lorded over by enormous oligopolies controlling their respective markets. Prices were no longer a pristine index of supply and demand or marginal productivity, as in the pre-industrial world — but an expression of sheer market power.

Against this backdrop, the Democratic Party managed to refound itself. It adopted a Hamiltonian vision that accepted the rational need for larger institutions. As Dunkelman writes, “these [Hamiltonian progressives] came to believe that the [Jeffersonian] vilification of ‘bigness’ was fundamentally off base. In their view, the salve wouldn’t be in eroding concentrations of power, but in establishing new nodes of public power to hold vast concentrations in check.” In other words, to protect the ideal of republican independence and dignity, it was necessary to wield the apparatus of the federal government: “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends,” in the famous formula of the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

And it was that basic conception that drove the recovery from the Depression, the successful execution of World War II, and the phenomenal achievements of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years. 

The tragedy of the 20th century is that at some point, the Democrats gave up on that political conception. In the Sixties, a progressivism emerged that was essentially nihilist, that believed in tearing-down all concentrated power, that mistrusted the very soul of America. I’m speaking, of course, of the decline of New Deal Democrats and the rise of the McGovernites and their ilk: the cohort that LBJ, the last New Deal Democrat, derided as “Harvard kids.” 

In a way, the acme of this shift was the progressive historian Robert Caro’s ferocious attacks against the legacy of New York’s legendary urban planner, Robert Moses. In his 1974 book, The Power Broker, Caro painted Moses as a liberal autocrat who tore through Gotham’s organic fabric in pursuit of large, rationalized infrastructure. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, representing a similar tendency as Caro, mounted a parallel attack. The enduring result was to delegitimize the Hamiltonian impulse in Democratic government. As Dunkelman puts it, the party’s “previous inclination to build power up had been replaced by an almost insatiable impulse to tear things down.”

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The result was paralysis and red tape everywhere. The Republican Party, having made its own peace with good government under Eisenhower and Nixon, had turned cannibalistic and libertarian by the end of the Seventies, demolishing everything in the American state that wasn’t the military. For their part, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party produced nothing but snarl. Anybody critical of Robert Moses’s excesses might pause to consider the 40 years it took, after Moses’s death, to build a meager extension to the Second Avenue Subway or the city’s utter inability to reconstruct Penn Station. Moses, by contrast, built up several enormous projects in far less time.

Which brings us to today’s Democratic Party. The party today still suffers from the damage wrought by its turn in the Sixties and Seventies. For example, the party’s 2020 assault on policing, now blessedly abandoned, was an echo of the same destructive tendencies that saw Democrats abandon New Deal models and New Deal patriotism in favor of McGovernite suspicion and Leftist excess.

Still, the Democratic Party retains enough muscle memory to be able — maybe, just maybe — to become once more the party of sound government. The movement for so-called abundance, spearheaded by the likes of Ezra Klein, promises to coordinate government and business in order to clear supply bottlenecks, lower prices, and promote the mass, middle-class prosperity that used to be the Democrats’ calling card. Some of this work is deregulatory and involves cutting the kinds of boutique environmental red tape that hinders development in the United States. Some of it, however, would involve — yes — proactive government where the market has failed: industrial policy, workforce training, and the like. 

Compare this to the chaos wrought by DOGE Republicans, as they slash through not just things that need to be slashed — but also funding for the sorts of basic research in the health sciences that form the foundations of US prosperity. This policy can’t but have long-lasting, and destructive, ramifications: researchers and academics leaving the United States in the kind of “brain drain” associated with Third World countries; economic uncertainty prompting other nations to look for new trading partners. 

Allies are caught in the lurch, not sure if they can rely on the United States to maintain its security commitments or even conduct a cogent foreign policy. The United States, whether it likes it or not, is an empire and a hegemon, and the nation owes it to the world to fulfill the imperial obligations it has accrued. That’s what both parties, actually, discovered in the crucial period when the modern party system developed, but the Republicans managed to forget all that and the Democrats almost have. But not quite as badly as the GOP.

So, yes, as much as Democrats drive me to distraction, I remain a Democrat. The party is flawed — deeply flawed — but the job of government, fundamentally, is to govern, and the Democrats are the only party of the two that still takes that task seriously.  

I wrote two of them, both hugely optimistic about the place. One is literally called Have A Nice Day. I hailed Americans’ sobriety and the gentle virtues of their system of government. It was published in 2009. How was I to know they were about to get high on Fentanyl and elect Donald Trump?

Anyway, it is with some annoyance that I have to tell you my friend Nick Bryant, the BBC’s New York correspondent, has written the antidote to all these vapid takes, mine included. Nick comes across on the news as a bit of a lad — actually he is a bit of a lad — but he is also a historian with a deep understanding of what makes America tick. And When America Stopped Being Great is an absolutely belting achievement for a hack, and an Englishman to boot. It is, as the title suggests, an elegy for a lost nation and a lost cause. The Washington Post gave the book a long and favourable review, calling it, “riveting, often revelatory, crammed with facts, occasionally personal, and almost always depressing”.

It is also wrong.

Not in its description of modern-day America, which Bryant knows well and captures superbly. The inequality, the intellectual poverty, the extremism, the mass shootings, the end of civility in debates on abortion or guns or anything. But he is wrong about the constitution. He points out — rightly — that it’s under pressure from modernity. A good example: Democrats can win the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but the Republicans have nominated 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court justices. “That is why,” Bryant writes, “talk of a reboot or a reset of the current obsolete operating system is so misplaced.”

Really? Tinkering could sort things for another hundred years or so. Fixing the Senate to reduce the impact of the rural minority won’t be decorous or easy, but is it impossible? Might an America that conquered the empty(ish) spaces in the first place not manage to reinvigorate them, repopulate them with businesses no longer tethered to coasts — or physical places at all — and so rebalance political power?

Others have also thought the place was going to the dogs. I mean properly believing the system to be broken. So perhaps the answer to the current crisis, as Dennis Rasmussen suggests in his thought-provoking book Fears of a Setting Sun, can be found in the fears of her founders. The men who invented America mostly thought their invention a disaster, a mess from the start. As Rasmussen points out, even in George Washington’s time hatred poisoned everything: “The two main parties saw and treated each other not just as opponents who advocated the wrong policies, but rather as enemies of the Constitution who actively sought to subvert the basic principles of the Revolution… Newspaper polemics included ‘some of the ripest vituperation in American literary history’, in the words of one scholar. Cries of treason entered virtually every political debate, fears of foreign plots abounded, and physical violence was lamentably commonplace.”

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Perhaps we became too used to the idea, in the post-Watergate era, of America as stable. A nation always there, indispensable, wise, mostly well run. But it was not in its early years and it has not been oftentimes in its history. Nevertheless: hey, it survives. And, with a few twists and turns, it prospers.

Rasmussen’s book is important because it reminds us not only that the founding fathers were disappointed with their creation but that they had reason to be. It really was a basket case (a “shithole country”, to use Trump’s terminology). With the notable exception of James Madison, Rasmussen writes, all of America’s early leaders, including Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, were pessimistic that the American experiment in republican democracy would endure. They thought that Americans were too venal or stupid to cope with politics. They thought the federal system would buckle. They thought factions would bring the whole edifice down.

“The founders,” Rasmussen tells us, “frequently predicted that the republic that they had established would not last beyond their own generation — that the union would soon be sundered, that a new constitutional convention would have be to called, or that the government would gradually lapse into a hereditary monarchy.”

They also thought foreigners would interfere with American elections and affect the results. Ok, not Russia, but still, the idea of “intrigue” from abroad is not new. Nor is the idea of hereditary rule — of the kind that pits Trump children against Biden children or Clinton children or perhaps even Obama children into the distant decades. Adams predicted it; he thought it inevitable. He would not be delighted by the news that Rudy Giuliani’s son Andrew wants to be New York state’s next Governor, but he would not be surprised.

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And on and on the jeremiads go; down the ages they echo. Even Jefferson, the most optimistic of the founders, succumbs to disillusion in old age. Only Madison stands up for America and thinks it might work out alright, and he does so because, Rasmussen says, he compares the place to other regimes, not to some idealised perfect system of government.

Perhaps that is the key.

So how are they doing now, the Americans, post Trump? Better or worse than China on freedom; than Russia on state sponsored crime; than the EU on technological achievement? America is indeed badly governed and horribly divided, but is it moribund, as Nick Bryant argues, or merely troubled? Bryant suggests that if his young daughter wanted to see the most thrusting nation in the world, China might be the place to visit — though he hopes she would recognise the cruel authoritarianism of its system. Otherwise she could go to Australia for its lifestyle, an Asian mega-city for a glimpse of the future.

These places all have their strengths — though China will strike many as a pretty unconvincing role model — but none is anything like as vibrant as America, where everyone has come to play. America, where anything might happen — from a school shooting to the conquest of cancer. A nation that can combust with coronavirus but then invent and manufacture multiple vaccines and distribute them in huge numbers. A nation that can delegitimise government and then (perhaps, under Biden) rediscover its importance. A nation often deranged, but seldom stumped for long.

Madison’s other gift to modernity was a belief that politics could be a constant, unending argument without any shared understanding of the common good — but still work. He saw all America’s bipartisan talk as nice to have but unnecessary. Perhaps America was never meant to be united, free from factions, common in purpose. Perhaps it was always best seen as a herding of political cats, hissing and fissiparous from the start.

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Seen through that lens, Donald Trump looks less frightening. As Rasmussen suggests of the modern era: “We no longer face repeated, serious threats of secession and civil war. Political violence is far less common today … No contemporary election can compare with the presidential election of 1800 — a contest between Jefferson and Adams, two of our most revered founders — in terms of sheer viciousness. Today’s much-maligned ‘mainstream media’ is in reality far more responsible and fact based than the newspapers of the 1790s.”

America’s problems are more intractable but less existentially threatening than many suppose. They were there from the start. They are there today. And tomorrow?

I am not betting against the place. Nick Bryant says he fears more American Carnage, to use Donald Trump’s memorable phrase from his inaugural speech. It is true that some on the American Right have given up on their fellow citizens — particularly those with darker skin who have more recently arrived. It is also true that plenty on the Left have done the same thing, with rural white folk, whose “deaths of despair” can feel rooted more in lost status than lost life chances. It is true, too, that too many people are shot — or shoot themselves — though you have to be careful here. Most American lives are free of violence and the number of households with guns — around 42% — is not much changed from decades ago: they just have more of them.

Neither Rasmussen nor Bryant reach firm conclusions. This is wise. There is no American denouement in the offing. Any properly terminal decline, or reset towards revivification, will be imperceptible at first, and argued over forever. That’s always been the point of the place. The argument about the best path to political progress is not always edifying but is always, and forever, worth having. And America, forever, will be the place to have it.