1992-2024: The Democratic Party at the End of the Neoliberal Rope

The Democratic Party of the United States has a long and contradictory history. In fact, these are several stories united by a common brand, the content of which has changed as the eras changed, along with which the party reinvented itself: in the 21st century, it is synonymous with liberalism, support for minorities and opposition to racist Republicans; but in the 19th century, the Democratic Party was the party of slave owners who fought for the preservation of slavery in the Civil War against more progressive Republicans. And between these two extremes, in the 20th century, for 60 years from Roosevelt to Reagan, the Democratic Party was, in fact, the American social democratic party — “far left” by today’s Democrat standards.

1968-1992: From FDR's Party to Clinton's Party

1. The New Deal for the Democrats ended with Lyndon Johnson's presidency.

2. Under the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, the party pivoted to roll back New Deal reforms, introducing a neoliberal revenge of capitalism.

3. The Democratic Party of Bill Clinton, elected in 1992, became a fully fledged neoliberal party.

Clinton's Democratic Party is today's Democratic Party, in which the pro-Roosevelt, pro-labor tendencies have been marginalized, in order to limit progressiveness only to the moral progressiveness of cultural policy, while economically the modus operandi of the party became "triangulation" - a constant movement to the right, toward the Republican position, in pursuit of an elusive imaginary political "center." A pursuit that reached its logical conclusion in 2024, when the Democratic Party platform caught up with the Republican Party so much that it lost its voters in the pursuit.

Clinton prescribed the same economic course for the USA that the Americans then advised post-Soviet Russia: a course for the restoration of pre-reform (for Russia — pre-revolutionary) capitalism, and with the same political results: as for Yeltsin’s “young reformers”, Clinton’s economy turned into a political catastrophe for the Democratic Party: the midterm elections of Bill Clinton's first term in 1994 resulted in the so-called Republican Revolution:

• Having won an additional 54 seats, the Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952 (before that, the Democrats had controlled the House continuously since 1955, and with two two-year breaks since 1931),

• regained control of the Senate, which they had lost in 1986,

• increased by 10 (to 30) the number of states with Republican governors (the Democrats lost 10, to 19).

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