American socialist Bill Crane – in an article first published at RS21 – provides a brief history of the Democratic Party from its inception to the present, and asks how revolutionaries might relate to the movement behind presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

The US Democratic Party is the oldest surviving modern political party.^[1] In its longer than two centuries’ history, it has survived multiple political crises, including one genuine social revolution, transforming itself accordingly each time. What was once the political operation of the slave-owners of the US South, the closest thing the country has had to an aristocracy, in the mid-twentieth century presented itself as the party of Keynesian state management, economic populism and establishment anti-racism. Toward the end of that century it transformed itself yet again to be ‘history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party’ under the neoliberal order.

American socialism, since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, have always had a somewhat schizophrenic attitude toward the Democrats. If Eugene Debs, godfather of the US Socialist Party in its heyday and its perennial presidential candidate (running once from a prison cell) could say that the conflict between Democrats and Republicans had ‘no issue, no principle in which the working class have any interest,’ this did not stop his comrade Upton Sinclair from running as the Democratic candidate for governor of California on a social-democratic platformseveral decades later. [Read more…]