Perry Bacon: I’m joined by Paul Frymer. He’s a great political scientist. He’s written several really interesting articles and books, including Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America; Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party; and the most recent one is Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion.
Paul Frymer: Great, thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
And what I’ve been watching the last few weeks is various Democratic candidates distance themselves from transgender Americans, the transgender rights movement, on sports and on other issues too. You’ve seen this with Talarico. You’ve seen this with the candidates in Iowa and others too.
Frymer: Sure. Yeah, I think the parallel is there. And I should say first that with African Americans it is a historical, longstanding process, that the party system itself was in many ways constructed out of conflicts over slavery and over race and over racism. So when we look at current events and parallels, we find certain parallels, but obviously the same kind of systematic historicization of it is much different.
Bacon: Are African Americans still a captured minority in your view?
And that was historically, in the 19th century over slavery, the design of the two-party system was to focus on the median voter, right? And that median voter is historically a fairly moderate voter, if not conservative voter, on issues like civil rights. And so it leads the two parties to try to avoid the topic. When civil rights issues come up, the party system tends to struggle over that.
Bacon: Uneasy Alliances is written in the sort of Clinton era, right? Can you talk about—we’re talking about the book and when it was written, and so it’s describing the period of the Democratic Party post-civil rights era, of the 1970s and ‘80s mainly, right? That’s the time period for that book. And it’s describing, to be very reductive, the party breaking with Jesse Jackson in a certain way as the kind of framing, right?
It was thought that he was linked by Republicans with Michael Dukakis, who ran that year, was the candidate that year. And was seen by many Democratic elites as too powerful, as too much of a—again, to use the word toxic—symbol of the Democratic Party.
There’s a lot with President Obama as well. Certainly when he was running, he too distanced himself quite a bit from Jesse Jackson and the symbolic nature of Jackson. He made very clear over and over that he was running not as a raceless candidate, but certainly a de-emphasis on that, right?
Bacon: Let me stop you there, because I want to come back to that. Your book, you did a new edition in 2010, and it ends with Obama, and I want to come to the last 10 years. But let me just talk about, why for Black people is this approach to politics problematic? The sort of Clinton, Obama de-race, distance themselves from the Black electorate. Why is it a problem?
The Congressional Black Caucus in Congress rejected a more conservative version that Clinton was pushing. And it led to a controversial bill. It still was quite conservative in many ways, but it had important things that the Congressional Black Caucus fought for.
Bacon: Ranking memberships, chairmanships, ability to influence the president, media.
So being a majority is important. Everybody knows that. African American voters, among many others, they’re very pragmatic voters, and they recognize the importance of majorities. And African American voters are extremely loyal voters to the Democratic Party in a way that no other group is consistently the same since the 1960s.
But what it is not—and this is the kind of theoretical argument of a captured group—farmers can get subsidies that hypothetically could be controversial, but the public doesn’t pay attention to them, right? Farmers are represented, whether they’re a majority group or not. They’re just added into coalitions. There are lots of groups. They’re added into coalitions. They’re given different factors.
Bacon: And how did that change the agenda that Black groups pushed? Did it minimize their agenda? Did they pull back their agenda? Did they stop demanding things? How did that play out? So you have the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights era, so what happens in those 30 years after that?
Where you see the real dramatic impacts, and this is actually where I kind of first got the sense of this, is during the Clinton era, I was a voter registrar within the Democratic Party. And we were sent—I was still a college student—and we were sent consistently to focus on these moderate voters.
Bacon: Although we should emphasize, Black people play soccer. These are code words in a certain way. We’re avoiding saying white by saying these other words instead, right?
And then a group of us on our own went into the neighborhoods which were on our maps listed as unnecessary to go into, because these neighborhoods were thought to be already strongly Democrats. Where I was living, this is New Haven, Connecticut, these were neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly African American and partly Latino. And you walk into these neighborhoods on your own, very few people are registered to vote. Many people didn’t know the major issues of the moment.
It is reliant there on civil rights groups themselves, whether for Black interests or Latino interests, other immigrant interests and the like. They need to do this themselves. That puts obviously a huge weight on them, whereas the party is mobilizing other groups. You see this now, so much focus on the white working class voter, or the moderates of Michigan and Ohio and the like, right?
All those voters that Trump said were getting counted at 3:00 in the morning, those were largely Philadelphia, Atlanta, right, in those areas. But the Democratic Party doesn’t reward them, and reward that pivot, in the same way that it rewards the pivot around, again, the Wisconsin suburbs, right? Or Milwaukee.
Frymer: Yes, obviously.
Frymer: Sure. So, one reality there. Consultants to parties, first of all, they’re not there to be historically-minded. They’re not there to think about a 10-year goal of the Democratic Party, or social justice, or any of that, right? Or the health of democracy. They’re there to win an election.
Bacon: I asked about swing voters counting twice, because they pull one. And then the second is that there are more white people than Black people.
There is a sense that reaching out to Black voters, and especially in specific moments, is disruptive to a party that has often held together different coalitions that don’t always fit that well, especially when race is at the forefront, and that is seen as disruptive to this moderate median voter, again, in a different way.
Bacon: It’s an interesting question. In 1992, do we think that being for civil rights was toxic? And in 2024, or 2026, do we think being for transgender rights is toxic? Part of this is, I’m not sure about that.
Frymer: Yes, I absolutely agree with that. So there is a conventional wisdom that gets set out, and as we know, we don’t know why elections turn, ultimately at the end of the day.
Frymer: It’s very complicated. Everyone is trying to interpret. Everyone is saying, “Oh, the Democrats on transgender issues.” Democrats on Black Lives Matter. Democrats on COVID. Any of these things, right? So there’s this constant theme.
A quality of a lot of these candidates, you can include Donald Trump here, is you ignore the conventional wisdom. Because everyone told Trump he couldn’t win in 2016 either. Or ‘20, or ‘24. And so we get these conventional wisdoms, these truths, and we’re seeing that in the popularist movement now, among consultants.
Civil rights groups, progressives, other groups are not wrong to say there is a different form of politics that can address this. There is one that is also mobilized, right? Mobilized long-term. Change the politics. Focus with transgender rights as well. You don’t need to be scared of it. Focus on it. Or address it, right? I agree with all of that.
I will just add one point there, which is that the conventional wisdom does work to demobilize progressive arguments. Because if progressives lose once, they’re thrown out the window. The conventionalists can lose 15 times in a row.
Frymer: That’s right, and they’re still the convention.
Frymer: Yeah, so it’s pretty incredible that what was a third of the private workforce was unionized, right? Hugely Democratic Party. Major role in legislation, major role in voter mobilization, major role in society and organization. That under the Democratic Party watch, it declines dramatically. What is it, 6 percent now, the private workforce today.
And that is suggestive, again—the labor movement has been historically, certainly over this time period that we’re talking about, the ‘70s to the ‘20s, maybe changing a bit now, but has been in the shadows. You don’t see the Democratic Party, when they’re looking for a vice presidential candidate or anyone besides the Department of Labor, being a person from a union, right?
But I want to say one other thing there. Part of my interest in labor is that the labor movement, going back to the early 20th century, was an opportunity, right? If you really want to create the alternative—the people who argue that the Democratic Party should be colorblind, focused on class, right? The union movement was the way forward to that. To try to create a really diverse labor movement. And there were a lot of huge voices that wanted that, from a Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Cesar Chavez. You can go on and on, right?
Bacon: So let’s go to the 2010s now. You were hinting at it, and let’s come to that now. It felt like Black activists may have read your book or something like that, because there is this period where it seems like Black Lives Matter rises and makes an argument like, “We are currently captured and ignored by the current Democratic Party. Let’s do something different.”
Frymer: Yeah. Obama is important to it, certainly symbolically, right? He raises the stakes. He raises the hopes.
Frymer: He mobilized voters. So even though in some ways when he’s running, he’s playing a bit on the Clinton playbook, he’s not Bill Clinton. He is a different candidate. And again, he’s raising hopes and dreams of people that we can live in a different America. And a lot of that is not just him as a figure, it’s also a lot of what he’s saying. He makes the comment about Trayvon Martin. That’s not nothing, right? These are big comments.
Bacon: He made some generic comments encouraging the protests in 2020, but he’s not at the front lines of them. He’s following the public as opposed to leading it.
Even at its height, it had expressions of the Democratic Party, but not huge efforts by legislators to make any kind of meaningful changes. I think there was a constant sort of, “Where are we going here?” And here again, everybody is kind of trying to spin their wheels as to what is now publicly possible and what is not.
Frymer: And there are overreactions on multiple sides. When Obama was elected in 2008, it was the end of race in America. We had solved all problems. And so there’s some of that. But certainly the Black Lives Matter movement, those who are—I hesitate to use the word leaders, because part of the movement is that it’s supposed to be—
Frymer: Leaderless. But yeah, it sees itself certainly not as an arm of the Democratic Party in any way, shape, or form.
Frymer: Yeah. The other thing that’s going on right now that the Democratic Party’s been struggling with is Donald Trump. He raises the stakes.
Frymer: A loss is catastrophic. A loss in this midterm election is catastrophic. Now historically, Democrats have been saying that for a long time. Now it seems real, right?
Frymer: Although in 2005 or so, George Bush was pretty catastrophic.
Frymer: I don’t know if your memory is this, which I’ll say to my students, in 2000 when Al Gore and George Bush tied, this is the younger George Bush, it was almost like a shrug from the American public, right? Kind of like, “Oh, we got these two candidates.”
Frymer: Whereas if the ‘26 midterms, the Republicans win them, there’s a lot on the line here. And one of the interesting things actually that Trump has been doing—Trump throws so much out at you, right?—but one of the things that he has really done a lot, with less attention, is the civil rights agenda. He has dismantled so many pieces of that long-standing civil rights agenda, and it’s not the headlines, right?
They might have different views of the economic policies. One might be Medicare for All, say progressives, Medicare for those who want it, say the centrists. But both of them, defending the DOJ Civil Rights Division is a priority of neither one right now, right?
Bacon: Inequality, no matter what.
Bacon: When he was president the first time.
But would the Democratic Party focus on things like civil rights? Would it focus—there’s been more local focus on ICE, obviously, out of Minneapolis, Los Angeles. But yeah, where would the focus be? Affirmative action, I assume, is just dead in the water for the Democratic Party.
Frymer: Yeah. I think AOC I would see different than Bernie Sanders here. Even historically, Bernie has not been a huge person on that. Mamdani is another. It’s unclear whether that’s a huge concern for him. So yeah, you have also the issues over Gaza that are also a part of the party. There’s so much going on, right? And things to be sorted out. And it’s happening so fast and furious.
It’s obviously an earnest, meaningful goal. But there are things that are not being discussed, and it’s not clear as well, right? I know my colleague Jake Grumbach points a lot to youth voters among African American voters, Latino voters, being very supportive of a DSA agenda on all these types of fronts. But I think a lot of this still needs to be sorted out, as to the consequences of it.
Frymer: Yeah, so my work in general across these themes has been about the importance of whiteness, to use the woke term. But an identity of the United States as a white nation throughout, and the consequences that has had, whether it’s for partisan politics like captured groups, whether it is for unions, where race has also been central historically. And so that led me to be interested in empire, the ideas of the US empire and the ideas of expansion. And President Trump has brought a lot of this alive, obviously, in a lot of different dimensions.
And it exists really—I think the breaking point maybe is the New Deal. It might even be a bit after the New Deal. The civil rights movement isn’t just a moment of trying to eradicate discrimination and its policies. It changes the whole tenor of what America is, right? 1965 is also an immigration law that opens up the United States to much of the world. All this, of course, is part of the backlash that we’re seeing right now.
And part of expansion is you confront populations that are not your own. And so as the United States expanded and thought of itself as a white nation, thought of itself very broadly as a white nation, in the sense that pretty much all Europeans were included in that—but as it came into conflicts, whether it was with African slaves, whether it was with Native Americans, either within US borders or in Mexico and elsewhere, whether as we moved to the Pacific with Asian immigrants, there was this constant talk and fear among party leaders and among the populace of, “How do we keep America white?”
Bacon: Keep America white. This is not a Donald Trump invention. This has been the historic trend.
One of the things that has been lost in history is Abraham Lincoln’s efforts at colonization in the early Civil War years.
Frymer: Emancipated and sent off.
Frymer: And there are long conversations with lots of statistics of how, the number of people necessary to move via boats, and all this kind of stuff. So the kind of stuff that Trump is talking about, mass deportation, it goes back to Lincoln. It failed, fortunately, under Lincoln. It of course reappears in the Eisenhower years and the like. So we had Chinese exclusion in the late 1800s. It’s been a constant thematic.
Bacon: To keep America white.
Bacon: It would not fit. I’ll finish with this. I guess there are two theories competing in liberal Democratic politics, both kind of here and abroad, I think. One—I had Thomas Zimmer, he’s a historian, on. He was talking about how you need to have people who lean in and really defend the multiracial, pluralistic project.
Others say, and I think Mamdani might be in this group himself, that the way you defend that project is to talk about economics and class issues, and therefore you win more of the white majority, whether you’re in Britain or Germany and so on.
Frymer: Yeah, I agree with you. There are good faith arguments on both sides. They have meaningful supporters. There is the New Deal argument, right? The New Deal was the biggest success of the Democratic Party. It brought in the working class. It raised the working class, and in important ways it raised the living conditions of African Americans and everybody in the United States.
And so I agree with those who say we need to confront the divisions in our society. We need to confront the history of our society. And we need to have honest conversations about that. It’s hard to say that, for me, honestly, in this moment where we are having even the most basic mentions of that we were a slave nation taken out of our politics. So is this our moment?
Bacon: No, they’re not. Yes, that’s a good point.
Bacon: Tomorrow never comes.
But yeah, absolutely, for greater representation and equality and the health of our democracy, we need to have these conversations be transparent. But they’re not going to happen in national politics. I think that’s reality. And people like Trump recognize that some of the places that are having that are universities, so we’ve got to gut them as well.
Frymer: Or high schools, or go all the way on down. Or museums, parks.
I guess my concern is that they’re embracing things that are going backwards at times. That’s where I would say the pragmatism maybe is, try to stay even. Don’t embrace moving backwards, though. That would be my concern.
And I think from what I’ve seen, Jon Ossoff has been pretty good on that. Again, not emphasizing, but not stepping back, and often using half a sentence or a sentence. Not to be provocative, but to make clear it’s still part of our liberal agenda.
Bacon: No.
But is AOC ready to do that now? I think she’s incredibly skilled. That would be the interesting example. Could she pull that out? She would be able perhaps to do that, certainly in a way that Bernie would not emphasize or provide, both symbolically and articulating it.
Bacon: Also we’re in this partisan era where that number’s going to go down. But in talking to you, I’m thinking, if you’re Jon Ossoff, you’re a middle-aged white man, you might be able to—this is a tricky thing. His campaign can be, I’m appealing to civil rights issues in a subtle way, and people don’t see me that way because I’m a white man. AOC will have to spend the whole campaign saying, I’m not as civil rightsy as you think I am, even though I’m a young person of color.
Frymer: Yeah. I think Joe Biden will get his moment at some point in time. He has been attacked so thoroughly by the Democratic Party, among everything else.
Frymer: Yeah. But I think he actually—we forgot. He was trying, in some different ways. Not always successfully, but not always unsuccessfully either.
For people to envision what they mean. It’s funny, even my mom would always say in the Obama years, what’s happening, he’s becoming that moderate conservative, but he was so progressive when he ran. And I said, “All he kept saying was, ‘We’ve got to bring everyone together.’”
Frymer: No, yes. But everybody saw something in him. And so that’s the tough thing there. Ideally we have these huge conversations, but how do we do it, and where do we do it, and what forum do we have them take place? Certainly our national politics are nasty and all about the 15-second sound bite and the like.
Bacon: That’s what Trump did, yes. He really created and seized on a moment.
Bacon: No. But he managed to win anyway, and to change a lot of issues. Actually, if you look at the polls, there wasn’t huge anti-immigrant sentiment in March 2015. He created something. It was latent, but he mobilized it into a political force in a way that is a lesson.
Frymer: No, absolutely. I think a lot of the terrain that we’re fighting on is from their efforts. And from the reality of that. The billionaires are unheeded by any warnings. And they just keep going and going. Yeah, I think that agenda has been changed.
And I keep hoping and thinking, actually deep down, that moment is going to happen again post-Trump. Where he’s going to be Drake. I was never a Drake fan. Just because I do think there is a mass public that has not bought into Trump at any point in time. And they’re not mobilizing around it, and that’s depressing. The public has not done more about a lot of the egregious hatred that has been out there, and evil towards our fellow people. But I do think there’s a bigger public out there that doesn’t want this.
I think his approval ratings are the lowest for any modern president at the midterm. I think Bush fell to the high 20s at the very end, but Bush wasn’t this low this early. So obviously Hurricane Katrina, this huge event, and the Iraq War, huge events, and nothing like that has happened, fortunately, in a certain way.
Frymer: Yeah. I’ve been hearing that anecdotally from people who go to the Jersey Shore, which is Trump country. That the flags are gone.
Frymer: I have a neighbor, actually, even here in Princeton, New Jersey, who’s had big Trump signs up, and they’re all gone. And there was a moment where you didn’t have to just be a Trump voter, you could be a proud Trump voter.
Frymer: And I think some of that is dissipating. I think one difference between Trump and Bush: Bush deflated as a person, right? He was depressed even at the end of his term. He was saying he didn’t do a good job, and he hasn’t been seen much since. Trump isn’t going to do that, right? He’s going to triple down to the very end. But I do think that a lot of the public isn’t listening to him anymore.
Frymer: Yeah. When he’s coming up with these threats, when he’s saying, I just did the greatest deal ever, I’ve got this greatest economy ever, I do think a lot of the public is just tuning out.
Frymer: Yeah, and hopefully it stays so. It is, again, a long-term discussion the left needs to have, is, what if he did well on the economy, and didn’t go into Iran? Would we have just allowed all of this other stuff to happen?
Frymer: The authoritarianism, the racism, the xenophobia, just the cruelty, right? And we’ve seen incredibly brave people have lost their lives fighting against that on the streets. But as an American public—you probably as well, since the day Trump was elected in ‘25, I furiously click the polls looking for, when is it going to drop? When’s it going to drop, right? And throughout a lot of that early ICE period, it wasn’t dropping, or it was dropping very slowly.
Frymer: Yeah, it’s a pretty depressing statement about America.
Frymer: Yeah, it’s something we need to not forget. And obviously we want this economy to be our vehicle to get past it, but it does worry us long term. Would a smarter, less unhinged racist authoritarian—
Frymer: Yeah, I think that’s right. Again, overreaching was part of his whole thing. And a belief that they could proudly try to make America white again is a big part of who they are. And that coalition is still there, and it’s going to stay there.
But yeah, I think it’s concerning how much the left kind of sat back. Again, we were stunned. We had a lot of things to focus on. And a lot of the left’s still angry at Biden, and angry about all sorts of different matters. I’m not sympathetic to all this.
This is where I think on the left, there are some on the left who argue America is very left and just needs to be harnessed, and there are others on the left who are like, I’m not sure where America’s at and how we go here with.
Frymer: Yeah, I’m closer to the second. I just think historically, for so much of our nation, we have had features that are not great. We’ve also had features that are amazing, right? And that’s why we’re a complicated, fascinating nation, and a nation that I am proud still to call my own. I am an American, and I say this with my students. But I am an American who—the nation is a complicated nation, and it was from day one. And you can’t ignore—complicated is a nice word, right?
Bacon: Which ones? As you said, there’s a long history of Americans sounding like Trump. The idea that Lincoln wants Black people to be—what’s the phrase—ejected from the country is something I think people don’t know. I knew that, but it’s worth focusing on.
Bacon: The entire time.
Bacon: You can always find the antecedents of things Reagan did or so on, but Trump is doing it in a more forward, direct, aggressive, authoritarian way.
And I think the left, we also probably do need to have conversations. How do we address this? I can say as well, as a university professor, that the over-the-top, as AOC called it, Woke 1.0, it’s not always terribly successful either. It’s not completely as unsuccessful as some make it to believe either.
Bacon: Great, optimistic, so rare these times. Paul Frymer, thanks for joining me. Great to see you. Take care.
Frymer: Great. Thank you. Thanks.
Hence then, the article about transcript can democrats be both principled and pragmatic was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Can Democrats Be Both Principled and Pragmatic? )
Also on site :
- Run! I Spotted Ugg, Tory Burch and Levi's on Sale Before Amazon Prime Big Deal Days
- The Biggest Mistake People Make With Fall Mums Can Ruin the Blooms Fast—Here’s What a Gardener Says to Do Instead
- Hengrui Pharma and Novo Enter Exclusive License Agreement for Once-Weekly Oral GLP-1/GIP Dual Receptor Agonist HRS-1596