Kazin’s early chapters are populated by white men of relatively modest means who were anti-Black, anti-Indian, anti-immigrant, and hostile to urban elites. They deeply mistrusted the federal government, because they were sure it would inevitably serve the interests of rich bankers of the kind that Jackson battled on their behalf. Most saw politics as a struggle to get the government to meet their economic needs, not as a moral or reformist crusade. They were indifferent to what the better sort of people thought of as vote stealing and other forms of corruption, as long as the party was on their side. Bucktails, Know-Nothings, Copperheads, anti-abolitionists, slavery expanders, Confederates, murderous New York City draft rioters, Tammany Hall crooks, Klansmen, evangelicals—all of these were loyal Democrats. One of the virtues of Kazin’s book is that it makes the current framing of the Democrats’ future in terms of a struggle between progressives and moderates seem stale and beside the point. It would be more useful to say that any successful majority party in the United States must necessarily bring together widely disparate elements into a workable, and necessarily unstable, common cause. Anyone who thinks that an essentially Mugwumpish majority party—clean, high-minded, and broadly humanitarian—is possible is longing for something the Democrats, in their sustained periods of electoral success, have never been.
Kazin argues that throughout American history, the most successful periods for the Democrats have been when the party was a champion of “moral capitalism”—that is, when it advocated for a politics that would serve as a counterweight to the injuries inflicted by a pure market system. Moral capitalism, in his account, has taken different forms at different times. During the early 19th century, the Democrats saw themselves as a party of farmers and other smallholders, highly interested in issues of land, credit, and currency. As industrialization and urbanization got under way and began attracting a mass immigration of the poor, these new Americans joined the party’s base through urban ethnic machines that were built on the same fundamental principles of patronage that Jackson and Martin Van Buren had established in the 1830s. Somehow, the urban, mainly Catholic working class coexisted with the party’s previous rural, nativist, and xenophobic base, centered around a unifying promise that, as Kazin puts it, the Democrats would deliver “economic security and political power to [the] plebeian majority.” Being a party of the somewhat downtrodden in no way made the Democrats a party of the truly oppressed; they were always dominant in the South and were never opposed to slavery—nor, after the Civil War, were they supportive of Reconstruction. High-minded, educated reformers and people attuned to racial justice were usually Republicans. The Nation, founded in 1865, was generally Republican during its early decades.