Democratic Party 
-
SOURCE: The Nation
1/24/2023
Why Can't the Democrats Build a Governing Majority? (Review of Timothy Shenk)
by Kim Phillips-Fein
In an implicit response to Richard Hofstadter's finding of the continuity of a narrow "American Political Tradition," Timothy Shenk examines the ways that activists have occasionally disrupted the political order and convinced people to "take a leap into an unknown future."
-
SOURCE: Slate
1/21/2023
Why do Republicans Keep Calling it the "Democrat Party"?
by Lawrence B. Glickman
The odd rhetorical device isn't just trolling—it reflects 70 years of the Republican Party seeking to define itself against the opposition even as terms like "liberal" and "conservatism" had not yet taken on stable meaning.
-
SOURCE: 19th News
1/12/2023
Anastasia Curwood on New Shirley Chisholm Bio
By framing Chisholm as a person with a life history, Curwood elevates knowledge of the New York congresswoman from a "first major party candidate" to a political theorist and visionary.
-
SOURCE: Substack
10/29/2022
Michigan Gubernatorial Candidate Steeped in Disinformation About Parties' Roles
by Heather Cox Richardson
Focusing on the tension between hierarchy and equality rather than party affiliation helps to clarify why a candidate of the "Party of Lincoln" can make white power rants on public media.
-
SOURCE: The Baffler
10/4/2022
Review Essay: How the Biggest Party Started Thinking Small
Books by Michael Kazin and Lily Geismer trace the rise and fall of the Democratic Party's reign as a party of big ideas and big initiatives.
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
9/1/2022
Labor Day is a Chance for Unions and the Democrats to Renew Their Shared History
by Michael Kazin
The Democrats and American labor unions have enjoyed success proportionally to the strength of their partnership. Pro-labor rhetoric by President Biden and the upsurge of grassroots union organizing are a sign to renew a formal partnership, says a historian of the Democratic Party.
-
SOURCE: Substack
8/28/2022
The Democrats, Not the "Party of Lincoln," are the Best Hope to Protect Abe's Legacy
by Eli Merritt
Abraham Lincoln went to Washington as president-elect animated by the commitments to justice and liberty defined in the first Republican Party convention. If the Republicans won't honor these commitments, the Democrats must do it.
-
SOURCE: The American Prospect
8/4/2022
Review: Two Books on the Recent History of Polarization
by Paul Starr
Historian Michael Kazin and journalist Dana Milbank approach the nation's dire politics from the perspective of the two respective parties, Kazin examining the long conflicts within the Democratic party to create a broad and stable populist coalition, and Milbank examining the GOP's increasingly nihilistic efforts to break it up.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
8/1/2022
Fed Up with Emails from Democratic Pols? You're Not Alone
by Lara Putnam and Micah Sifry
The Democratic Party's strategy of electronic communications to raise fear and money is backfiring, as voters see little change despite their contributions. The party must reach people at their doorsteps, not through their inboxes.
-
7/31/2022
Will Progressive Dems Realize Elections Have Consequences?
by Clyde W. Ford
Progressives need to begin “holding their noses” and voting based on a transactional rather than moral understanding of politics.
-
SOURCE: The Forum
7/18/2022
Stuck on the Rufo Road
by Jennifer Berkshire
As conservative activists mount a multi-front campaign to discredit and defund public education, too many leading Democrats seem unaware that the popularity of public education means they have a winning issue right in front of their faces, says an education historian and policy analyst.
-
SOURCE: TomDispatch
7/5/2022
Forget the Metaphorical Heat – The Literal Temperatures are the Problem
by Tom Engelhardt
"Somehow, in this country, climate change has yet to become a significant part of the national debate or mainstream politics."
-
SOURCE: The Intercept
6/13/2022
Robert Kuttner: If Dems Don't Go Big, Country May Go Fascist
If the United States was lucky to avoid a fascist takeover in the 1930s, the country made much of its own luck through the New Deal.
-
6/5/2022
Is the Republican Party Willing to Purge its Extremists?
by Jeff Kolnick
Beginning in the 1920s, the Democratic Party began the long, difficult, and politically costly process of dissociation from white supremacy. Do today's Republicans who claim to reject extremism have the courage to do the same?
-
SOURCE: Black Perspectives
6/1/2022
Rescuing Shirley Chisholm's Life from Symbolism
by Anastasia Curwood
Writing a biography of the Congresswoman and presidential candidate required working through the distinction between Shirley Chisholm the symbol and the much more complex reality of Shirley Chisholm the woman, to see how big trends in Black history unfolded at a human scale.
-
SOURCE: CNN
5/20/2022
Are the Dems Doomed?
by Julian Zelizer
The Democrats are leaving themselves open to taking the blame at the polls for the war in Ukraine and high gas prices and the inevitable next wave of the COVID pandemic.
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
5/20/2022
Nicole Hemmer Reviews Martin and Burns's "This Will Not Pass"
by Nicole Hemmer
The book by two political reporters portrays the dire contrast between a Republican Party willing to do anything to hold power between November 2020 and January 2021 and a Democratic Party enmeshed in business-as-usual.
-
SOURCE: Salon
5/14/2022
We're Facing the Results of the Dems' Retreat from Secularism
by Jacques Berlinerblau
By trying to match the Republicans on bringing Christian faith into policy, Democrats abandoned the difficult but necessary struggles to define how a diverse society protects religious freedom for majority and minority faiths – and those of no faith.
-
SOURCE: The New Republic
5/16/2022
Lily Geismer on the Dismal Legacy of the "New Democrats"
A reviewer calls a new book on the 1990s a sobering look at the effects of tying social policy to the market.
-
SOURCE: The New Republic
5/5/2022
Why the End of Roe Isn't Likely to Energize the Democrats
by Natalie Shure
Until the Democratic Party and its pro-choice supporters decide to take action to fix the fact that abortion restrictions are already harming poor and working-class women, they are unlikely to win elections based on their nominal support for abortion rights.
News
- Chair of Florida Charter School Board on Firing of Principal: About Policy, Not David Statue
- Graduate Student Strikes Fight Back Against Decades of Austerity, Seek to Revive Opportunity
- When Right Wingers Struggle with Defining "Woke" it Shows they Oppose Pursuing Equality
- Strangelove on the Square: Secret USAF Films Showed Airmen What to Expect if Nuclear War Broke Out
- The Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
- New Books Force Consideration of Reconstruction's End from Black Perspective
- Excerpt: How Apartheid South Africa Tried to Create a Libertarian Utopia
- Historian's Book on 1970s NBA Shows Racial Politics around Basketball Have Always Been Ugly
- Kendi: "Anti-woke" Part of Backlash Against Antiracist Protest Movements
- Monica Muñoz Martinez Honored for Truth-Telling in Texas History