The Party Without a People: How Democrats Lost Their Base

A party without civil society is a cartel.

When Axios reported that Democratic Party elites were "pissed" at grassroots organizations for demanding a stronger response to Trump’s onslaught, it confirmed what many progressives had long suspected: the Party cares nothing for its base.

This perception is not unfounded. As Peter Mair argued, we are confronted with a "Cartel Party"—a blob largely disconnected from civil society, with no clear ideological commitment beyond winning the next election (and, if they are Democrats, losing the one after that).

But the Party’s severance from civil society is not simply the fault of political consultants or Clintonian triangulation, as many progressives believe. Rather, the erosion of civil society—the institutions that mediate between citizens and the party system—has been a goal of liberal statecraft since at least the Progressive Era. State and corporate bureaucracies have taken up many of the material tasks once reserved for communities and their institutions. Community life and institutions have withered as a result. The result: political parties have little presence in communities, and citizens lack the intermediary institutions needed to press their collective demands upon parties.

If the Democratic Party is to be revitalized, it will not happen through appealing to the mythical median voter ("popularism") or by passing popular economic policies alone ("deliverism"). Instead, it requires rebuilding the local institutions—and the economic conditions that sustain them—which once helped citizens identify their political needs and forge mass parties in the first place.

The Hollowing Out of Party Politics

The absence of popular involvement in politics is the defining story of our time. And, as Mair detailed, it is not a problem for most political parties—rather it is their preferred state of affairs.

This was not always the case. In the nineteenth century, before the rise of the administrative state, political parties were deeply embedded in everyday life, delivering material "spoils" to their constituents. The stakes of these distributional conflicts ensured accountability: parties that failed to serve their electorate faced dire consequences.

The Progressive Era changed this, as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld have noted. On one hand, liberal reformers deliberately removed parties from the ordinary political life of voters. Politics, they argued, was best conducted by rational, individual citizens—not through messy, interest-based party machines. Concurrently, the Federal government—particularly the national executive—was hailed as the primary vehicle for enacting the people's will, sidelining the party as a local forum and aggregator of interests.¹

Simultaneously, the growth of the regulatory state made elections seem less critical. As bureaucracies assumed greater control over economic and social policy, political participation became less about collective decision-making and more about year-round lobbying by specialized interests.. As many of these policies were located in Washington, the stakes of political mobilization in “intermediary” political scales - particularly the local and state level - atrophied.

The Party as Bureaucratic Conduit

With these shifts came a transformation in the role of parties. No longer primarily representative institutions, they became governing institutions—or, more accurately, conduits to the bureaucracy, where real policymaking occurs. Their focus shifted from maintaining long-term electoral bases and policy programs to assembling short-term coalitions for the next election. Policy is now often formulated post-election, through private negotiations among well-connected "stakeholders" and government staff.

What is the result of this? Intermediary civic institutions have no major material role to play in people’s lives, that function having been taken up by the state and the market. They have no major electoral role to play, with the content of elections (and particularly local elections) largely irrelevant to the lives of their members. And parties themselves have no interest in reviving such institutions, preferring the more direct path towards electoral “success” (i.e. micro targeting of individuals with desired demographics).

What’s left is the individual citizen, left to their own devices (literally), whose scope of political reference is entirely within their corporate-mediated silos.

This is particularly troubling for progressives. Since 2016 many of us have believed in the political strategy of deliverism: rather than build our coalition through running on policies that are already “popular,” we should pass bold policies that deliver material benefits to people and expand our constituencies.

The problem is that many people today lack the civic infrastructure - the publics - needed to deliberate on how, or whether, a policy is benefitting them. The result: our politics is becoming not a product of collective reasoning over shared experience, but of general “vibes” as shared through social media. And progressives, I assure you, will not win on “vibes” alone.

Rebuilding Civil Society as a Political Strategy

Progressive policies, without building up local publics, do not generate political constituencies. And neither do political parties. Fortunately, a growing number of progressives are recognizing the need for parties to re-engage civil society. Pete Davis has explored this in The Nation, as has Ned Reskinoff on his substack.

I heartily agree with this, with the caveat that a strategy for party-led development of civil society is complete without a strategy for rebuilding the economic condition needed for robust community life: a strategy I call “Civic Materialism.”

But here lies the rub: today’s Democratic establishment is not interested in such a transformation. For all the Party pays lip service to "community," it often treats local institutions as vehicles for outsourcing expensive and unpopular policies (such as welfare administration) rather than as an alternative base of political power. As many observers have noted, the professional consultant class that dominates party strategy has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Federal bureaucrats have little interest at seeing their functions substantively allocated to community institutions. Neither do the leaders of the nonprofit/corporate complex to which the Democratic leadership pledge fealty.

Yet change is coming. The same professional class that dismantled community life during the 20th century in the name of technocratic governance now faces its own obsolescence in the age of automation and AI-driven politics. For their own survival, if not for the world’s, they will need to return to community. And so too must the party they once reformed, that they have recently burned to the ground, and which must now be rebuilt up from it.

1. This might have helped set the stage up for modern leader-based populist movements, but that’s the subject of another post.