Matt and Sam are joined by Georgetown University historian and co-editor emeritus of Dissent, Michael Kazin, to discuss his new book, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. They discuss the origins of the Democratic Party, the alliance between its urban North and segregationist South, the party's turn toward using government to help ordinary people, and the eventual crack-up of the New Deal coalition—and the rise of the right, and the Republican Party, that followed. Why did people whose relative comfort and prosperity had been made possible by policies championed by Democrats turn against them? How did Democrats respond to Ronald Reagan winning 49 states in 1984? Did it have to turn out the way it did?
Sources:
Michael Kazin, What It Took To Win: A History of the Democratic Party (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022)
A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Anchor, 2007)
Michael Kazin, "Whatever Happened to Moral Capitalism?" New York Times, June 24, 2019
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Earth's Holocaust" (1844)
Sam Rosenfeld, "What Defines the Democratic Party?" New Republic, February 15, 2022
Matthew Sitman, "Tribute to Michael Kazin," Dissent, October 6, 2020
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