The Democrats’ Long Love Affair With “Opportunity”

The idea of promoting “opportunity” is deeply embedded in the history of the Democratic Party, especially the efforts by Bill Clinton and the New Democrats of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to reorient the base and priorities of the party toward professional-class liberals and Wall Street and Silicon Valley donors. There is a longer history, however, of Democratic politicians and policymakers embracing the term as a way to avoid adopting programs and policies that promote significant redistribution, class consciousness, and comprehensive racial justice. Opportunity was a core principle of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which is remembered now as redistributive — but in fact, it instead famously promised a “hand up, not a hand out.” The program aimed to empower the poor through training programs rather than offer cash assistance, and the Johnson administration accompanied it with tax cuts rather than tax increases.

Yet the term was more widely adopted by subsequent generations of Democrats as a means to signal a new direction for the party, away from its emphasis on government intervention to improve the lives of working people and its base of working-class union members and people of color. In the early 1980s, a group of “Atari Democrats” in Congress who were part of the Committee on Party Effectiveness released a document called The Road to Opportunity: A Democratic Direction for the 1980s, which laid out a plan for creating long-term economic policy focused on private sector growth, especially in postindustrial sectors like tech and finance. The authors, led by then Colorado representative Tim Wirth, selected the title to signal their aim of moving the party away from the language of fairness, which they felt intimated generous redistribution, and toward a focus on opportunity, which signaled merely the ideal that everyone would have an equal chance to advance. It also marked a deliberate effort to evade the long-standing demands of the civil rights and welfare rights movements for racial and economic justice, including a racially conscious reallocation of resources.

The vision for the future outlined in The Road to Opportunity directly informed the DLC, which was founded just a few years later, and counted Wirth along with Bill Clinton and Al Gore as inaugural members. The explicit goal of the DLC was reinventing the party through a new electoral strategy and policy agenda. Calling themselves “New Democrats,” the DLC declared in its 1990 mission statement that the fundamental mission of the Democratic Party was to “expand economic opportunity, not government,” and that “economic growth is the prerequisite to expanding opportunity for everyone.”