A cen­tury of new rules — from the ad­vent of dir­ect pres­id­en­tial primar­ies, to the end of the seni­or­ity sys­tem in Con­gress, to con­ser­vat­ive Su­preme Court de­cisions on cam­paign fin­ance — has dra­mat­ic­ally eroded the power that of­fi­cial party struc­tures once ex­er­cised over politi­cians and their plat­forms. Today, an in­form­al net­work of donors, policy and polit­ic­al groups, me­dia out­lets, con­sult­ants, labor uni­ons, and star politi­cians de­term­ine in what broad dir­ec­tions both sides of the spec­trum will evolve over the long term. Many of these play­ers don’t ac­tu­ally identi­fy them­selves by party but rather by ideo­logy.

After the Demo­crats’ drub­bing in last Novem­ber’s elec­tion, the in­form­al net­work of lead­ers and in­sti­tu­tions that loosely guides the Left began the task of re­group­ing. The net­work has shif­ted polit­ic­ally from the days of Bill Clin­ton and the cent­rist Demo­crat­ic Lead­er­ship Coun­cil. Today, many groups look to Sen. Eliza­beth War­ren of Mas­sachu­setts and to New York May­or Bill de Bla­sio for in­spir­a­tion; the key think tanks are places like the Cen­ter for Amer­ic­an Pro­gress in Wash­ing­ton and the smal­ler New York”“based Roosevelt In­sti­tute; and be­hind many of the or­gan­iz­a­tions is a net­work of mega-rich donors called the Demo­cracy Al­li­ance.

As these lib­er­al strategists took stock, most ac­know­ledged that the Demo­crat­ic side had genu­ine un­der­ly­ing prob­lems that needed to be fixed. And while the pre­scrip­tions they offered var­ied, one of the com­mon themes that gained mo­mentum was that the Demo­crat­ic Party needed to strongly identi­fy it­self with the fight against eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity. For many pro­gress­ives, the ar­gu­ment was not simply that end­ing eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity was the right thing to do; it was that a pop­u­list cam­paign built around this theme would mo­bil­ize what strategists call a “new Amer­ic­an ma­jor­ity” or a “rising Amer­ic­an elect­or­ate” — al­low­ing Demo­crats to take back the coun­try that they thought they had won in Novem­ber 2008.

Can this ac­tu­ally work? I would like to think so; the goal of re­du­cing eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity is cer­tainly worth­while. And many of the policies that pro­gress­ives are pro­mot­ing un­der the um­brella of their de­vel­op­ing anti-in­equal­ity cru­sade — from rais­ing the min­im­um wage to re­quir­ing paid sick leave to strength­en­ing bank reg­u­la­tion to in­creas­ing spend­ing on sci­ence, edu­ca­tion, roads, and bridges — have mer­it. But after talk­ing to lead­ers of this net­work in re­cent weeks, and read­ing care­fully the pa­pers and es­says that pro­mote the new strategy, I have my doubts about wheth­er a polit­ic­al cam­paign built around these kinds of pro­pos­als will, in fact, cre­ate a new Demo­crat­ic ma­jor­ity.

THERE IS NO SINGLE group that dom­in­ates the Demo­crats’ in­form­al net­work, but the one that has the greatest reach, due to the power of its purse, is the Demo­cracy Al­li­ance. It was foun­ded in 2005 by Rob Stein, a ven­ture cap­it­al­ist who had worked for mas­ter polit­ic­al op­er­at­ive Ron Brown at the Demo­crat­ic Na­tion­al Com­mit­tee and the Com­merce De­part­ment. The his­tory of the Demo­cracy Al­li­ance says a lot about how the Demo­crats’ in­form­al lead­er­ship net­work has evolved over the last dec­ade.

Start­ing in the 1970s, ac­cord­ing to the pro­gress­ive nar­rat­ive, a sort of polit­ic­al dark age set in.

Stein had stud­ied the way con­ser­vat­ives con­struc­ted a power­ful polit­ic­al and in­tel­lec­tu­al in­fra­struc­ture with­in the Re­pub­lic­an Party. After George W. Bush de­feated John Kerry in Novem­ber 2004, he per­suaded fin­an­ci­er George Sor­os, Pro­gress­ive In­sur­ance CEO Peter Lewis, and oth­er wealthy donors to join forces in an or­gan­iz­a­tion that would build a pro­gress­ive in­fra­struc­ture to counter that of con­ser­vat­ives. “You can’t pro­mote ideas without an in­fra­struc­ture,” Stein told them. “Quit com­plain­ing about George Bush and Karl Rove. They’re not the prob­lem. We are.”

He re­cruited more than 75 in­di­vidu­al donors, and, with the back­ing of former Ser­vice Em­ploy­ees In­ter­na­tion­al Uni­on Pres­id­ent Andy Stern, also got a hand­ful of uni­ons and oth­er in­sti­tu­tions to sign on. The new group held its first meet­ing in April 2005. About a third of the donors were heirs and heir­esses and about half were 1960s lib­er­als; the rest were mod­er­ates, in­clud­ing a few Re­pub­lic­ans, whom Bush’s policies had ali­en­ated. Most of the act­ive busi­ness people came from fin­ance or high tech­no­logy — fields where they wouldn’t have had to cross swords with uni­ons or the En­vir­on­ment­al Pro­tec­tion Agency.

The al­li­ance didn’t con­trib­ute money dir­ectly to pro­gress­ive groups; in­stead, based on care­ful screen­ing, it re­com­men­ded about 25 groups for its donors to fund. Us­ing this pro­cess, the donors would, over the next dec­ade, pump about $500 mil­lion in­to vari­ous lib­er­al or­gan­iz­a­tions. Al­li­ance funds turned former Clin­ton Chief of Staff John Podesta’s Cen­ter for Amer­ic­an Pro­gress from a small policy group in­to a com­pet­it­or with the con­ser­vat­ive Her­it­age Found­a­tion. They fun­ded Dav­id Brock’s Me­dia Mat­ters for Amer­ica and backed ven­tures like Ca­tal­ist and Amer­ica Votes, which were de­signed to help Demo­crats take polit­ic­al ad­vant­age of new di­git­al tech­no­lo­gies.

Sen. Eliza­beth War­ren speaks dur­ing a Roosevelt In­sti­tute event at the Na­tion­al Press Club in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. (An­drew Har­rer/Bloomberg via Getty Im­ages)Over the years, the al­li­ance has shif­ted left­ward. The Re­pub­lic­ans have de­par­ted, and the ranks of mod­er­ates have thinned; two mod­er­ate groups, Third Way and the New Demo­crat Net­work, were dropped from its in­vest­ment port­fo­lio. The al­li­ance’s changed out­look be­came abund­antly clear after the Novem­ber 2014 elec­tions. At a meet­ing the next month in Wash­ing­ton, the group’s mem­bers gave a rous­ing re­cep­tion to War­ren, whom some mem­bers urged to run for pres­id­ent. Then, at an April meet­ing in San Fran­cisco, it ad­op­ted a form­al strategy that placed it squarely with­in the cam­paign against eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity.

The strategy was con­tained in a doc­u­ment titled “2020 Vis­ion Frame­work,” which made a num­ber of re­com­mend­a­tions. For one thing, it called for an in­crease in the al­li­ance’s ef­forts at the state level, where Re­pub­lic­ans have re­cently been ham­mer­ing Demo­crats. “In or­der to avoid a re­peat of the cur­rent dec­ade, and giv­en the stale­mate in Wash­ing­ton,” the doc­u­ment said, “we must fo­cus even more heav­ily on build­ing power in the states.” It also laid out three policy pri­or­it­ies that would guide the group’s fund­ing re­com­mend­a­tions: eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity, cam­paign-fin­ance re­form, and cli­mate change. Of these three, it was the first that ap­peared to be the most im­port­ant. “The cent­ral is­sue is the eco­nomy,” the group’s pres­id­ent, former Sor­os aide Gara LaMarche, told me.

While the al­li­ance con­tin­ued to re­com­mend fund­ing many of its older main­stays, such as the Cen­ter on Budget and Policy Pri­or­it­ies, it also in­cluded three or­gan­iz­a­tions — the Cen­ter for Pop­u­lar Demo­cracy, the Work­ing Fam­il­ies Party, and Na­tion­al People’s Ac­tion — that come out of the pop­u­list Left. It had re­com­men­ded fund­ing a few groups like this be­fore, but, taken to­geth­er, these groups sug­gest a left­ward turn. The Cen­ter for Pop­u­lar Demo­cracy is a fed­er­a­tion of groups that in­cludes some of the old chapters of the much-at­tacked com­munity-or­gan­iz­ing group ACORN. The Work­ing Fam­il­ies Party is a New York”“based ally of de Bla­sio that was foun­ded in 1998 and has af­fil­i­ates in six states and the Dis­trict of Columbia. And Na­tion­al People’s Ac­tion is a left-wing, Chica­go-based group that was star­ted by dis­ciples of Saul Al­in­sky and has af­fil­i­ates in 17 states.

The goal of the Work­ing Fam­il­ies Party, its ex­ec­ut­ive dir­ect­or Dan Can­tor told me, is “win­ning Demo­crat­ic primar­ies with pop­u­list Demo­crats” and “run­ning pro­gress­ive Demo­crats against bad Demo­crats.” The ex­ec­ut­ive dir­ect­or of Na­tion­al People’s Ac­tion, George Goehl, wants to pres­sure Demo­crats to take the is­sue of in­equal­ity ser­i­ously. The group, he ex­plains, “sees the Demo­crat­ic Party as an act­ive field of struggle.” A Work­ing Fam­il­ies af­fil­i­ate and Na­tion­al People’s Ac­tion both en­thu­si­ast­ic­ally backed Chuy Gar­cia’s pop­u­list chal­lenge to Chica­go May­or Rahm Emanuel earli­er this year.

The Demo­cracy Al­li­ance’s out­reach to the Left re­flects, and has con­trib­uted to, a grow­ing con­ver­gence with­in the in­form­al net­work of groups that are try­ing to de­vel­op a strategy for the Demo­crat­ic Party. While there may be dif­fer­ences between the think tanks and the net­roots, as well as between those who proudly call them­selves “pop­u­lists” and those who prefer the terms “pro­gress­ive” or “lib­er­al,” there is, in­creas­ingly, a com­mon com­mit­ment to cre­ate what de Bla­sio has called “a grand pro­gress­ive co­ali­tion” that will achieve “a hol­ist­ic solu­tion to eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity.” There is also sur­pris­ing un­an­im­ity about what such an ef­fort means his­tor­ic­ally and about the kind of re­forms it should de­mand.

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JUST AS TEA-PARTY con­ser­vat­ives look back on the era of Amer­ica’s found­ing as their polit­ic­al mod­el, the new pro­gress­ives and pop­u­lists also have a his­tor­ic­al era that is their touch­stone: Frank­lin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its post­war af­ter­math. “Our eco­nomy was more bal­anced in the dec­ades pri­or to 1980 and func­tioned re­mark­ably well dur­ing the middle of the 20th cen­tury,” writes eco­nom­ist Joe Stiglitz in “Re­writ­ing the Rules,” a re­port the Demo­cracy Al­li­ance”“backed Roosevelt In­sti­tute pub­lished in May. Paul Krug­man calls these years “the golden age of eco­nom­ic equal­ity.” Those who look back fondly to this era praise the New Deal’s bank­ing rules, its sup­port for col­lect­ive bar­gain­ing, its pro­gress­ive tax struc­ture, and its use of gov­ern­ment spend­ing to boost em­ploy­ment and spur eco­nom­ic growth. “In the 1930s, poli­cy­makers stepped in and made new rules,” War­ren said at a din­ner on May 5 in Wash­ing­ton. “For half a cen­tury, those rules worked.”

Be­gin­ning in the 1970s, ac­cord­ing to this nar­rat­ive, a sort of polit­ic­al dark age set in, as the demo­crat­ic plur­al­ism and re­l­at­ive eco­nom­ic equal­ity cre­ated by the New Deal came un­der at­tack — first by busi­ness, then by con­ser­vat­ives al­lied with busi­ness. “Busi­ness in­terests mo­bil­ized,” Paul Starr writes in the lib­er­al Amer­ic­an Pro­spect, lead­ing to a “long de­cline of uni­ons” that “has prob­ably been the single most im­port­ant factor in the slide to­ward great­er in­equal­ity in power and eco­nom­ic re­wards.” When Ron­ald Re­agan took of­fice after the 1980 elec­tion, War­ren said, “Wash­ing­ton took fin­an­cial cops off the beat by slash­ing fund­ing of our reg­u­lat­ors, let­ting big banks load up on risk and tar­get fam­il­ies with dan­ger­ous cred­it cards and mort­gages. Wash­ing­ton also worked fe­ver­ishly to cut taxes for those at the top, open­ing huge loop­holes for big cor­por­a­tions and bil­lion­aires.”

The pop­u­lists and pro­gress­ives ar­gue that this of­fens­ive of the last three dec­ades has evis­cer­ated the middle class. “Sup­ply-side eco­nom­ics hol­lowed out the middle class,” Dav­id Mad­land of the Cen­ter for Amer­ic­an Pro­gress wrote in Salon. As a res­ult, they see an Amer­ica in­creas­ingly di­vided between the very rich and every­one else. In a May 12 speech in Wash­ing­ton in­tro­du­cing “Re­writ­ing the Rules,” War­ren asked, “What kind of in­come growth did the 90 per­cent get? Noth­ing. Zero. One hun­dred per­cent went to the top 10 per­cent.” In its “2020 Vis­ion Frame­work,” the Demo­cracy Al­li­ance writes, “For dec­ades our eco­nomy has pro­duced fall­ing in­comes and grow­ing eco­nom­ic in­sec­ur­ity for most Amer­ic­ans,” as well as “a down­ward spir­al of fall­ing wages.”

These pro­gress­ives aim to re­store the golden age: to re­turn to the New Deal ap­proach of reg­u­lat­ing fin­ance, tax­ing the rich, en­cour­aging uni­ons, and in­vest­ing in in­fra­struc­ture. Such meas­ures, they say, will re­duce in­equal­ity and pro­mote eco­nom­ic growth by provid­ing a needed boost in con­sumer de­mand. The pro­pos­als put forth by the Roosevelt In­sti­tute in “Re­writ­ing the Rules” and those in the plat­form of a re­cent “Pop­u­lism 2015” con­fer­ence — sponsored by US­Ac­tion, Na­tion­al People’s Ac­tion, and the Cam­paign for Amer­ica’s Fu­ture — were re­mark­ably con­sist­ent. The Roosevelt re­port called for high­er taxes on the 1 per­cent, a tax on fin­an­cial trans­ac­tions, the break­up of banks that were too large to fail, the ex­pan­sion of Medi­care in­to a uni­ver­sal pro­gram for all ages, labor-law re­form to aid uni­ons, the cre­ation of banks run by the postal sys­tem, paid sick leave, a $15 min­im­um wage, and “large in­fra­struc­ture in­vest­ment to stim­u­late growth.”

A re­cent CAP re­port on “In­clus­ive Prosper­ity,” au­thored by former Obama eco­nom­ic ad­viser Lawrence Sum­mers and Brit­ish politi­cian Ed Balls, was less spe­cif­ic be­cause it was aimed at Europe as well as the United States, but its ap­proach was con­sist­ent with the oth­er pro­pos­als for re­du­cing in­equal­ity. Point­ing to the sim­il­ar­ity between Sum­mers’s CAP re­port and the re­port by Stiglitz — who had been crit­ic­al of Obama’s eco­nom­ic policies when Sum­mers headed the Na­tion­al Eco­nom­ic Coun­cil — LaMarche told me, “Every­body is now go­ing in one dir­ec­tion.”

POLIT­IC­AL ACT­IV­ISTS AND aca­dem­ics of­ten ad­vance pro­pos­als that in their eyes would be­ne­fit hu­man­ity but have no chance of win­ning pub­lic ac­cept­ance or be­ing ac­ted upon. But many of the groups and in­di­vidu­als who make up the cur­rent pro­gress­ive in­fra­struc­ture be­lieve that, by con­duct­ing a broad cam­paign against in­equal­ity based on ag­gress­ive gov­ern­ment ac­tion, they are cre­at­ing a new pro­gress­ive ma­jor­ity. In a re­cent in­ter­view with The Na­tion, de Bla­sio sug­ges­ted that, on eco­nom­ic is­sues, the “un­der­stand­ing amongst the popu­lace is much more ad­vanced than among a lot of the polit­ic­al lead­er­ship.”

When I asked Fe­li­cia Wong, the pres­id­ent of the Roosevelt In­sti­tute, and LaMarche’s pre­de­cessor at the Demo­cracy Al­li­ance, how she ex­pec­ted the in­sti­tute’s ideas would fuel a new ma­jor­ity, she re­ferred me to the work of poll­ster Stan­ley Green­berg. In a re­cent is­sue of The Amer­ic­an Pro­spect, Green­berg de­scribes a “Rising Amer­ic­an Elect­or­ate” that is a “new ma­jor­ity” and that con­sists of “blacks, His­pan­ics and new im­mig­rants, mil­len­ni­als, un­mar­ried wo­men, and sec­u­lars.” The Demo­cracy Al­li­ance and the groups it funds use sim­il­ar lan­guage. In its “2020 Vis­ion,” the al­li­ance de­scribes the “Rising Amer­ic­an Elect­or­ate” as “voters of col­or, young people, and single wo­men.” Pop­u­lism 2015’s con­fer­ence plat­form re­ferred to a “new ma­jor­ity of people of col­or, young people and work­ing wo­men.”

Green­berg ar­gues that this Rising Amer­ic­an Elect­or­ate already ac­counts for a ma­jor­ity of the elect­or­ate and is grow­ing. “The Rising Amer­ic­an Elect­or­ate of Afric­an Amer­ic­ans, His­pan­ics, mil­len­ni­als, and un­mar­ried wo­men will con­sti­tute 54 per­cent of the elect­or­ate in 2016,” he writes. “If you also in­clude the sec­u­lars with no re­li­gious af­fil­i­ation, this rising share of the elect­or­ate will in­crease to 63 per­cent. Each of these groups is stead­ily grow­ing and, as of early 2015, nearly two-thirds of them in­tend to vote for Hil­lary Clin­ton, as­sum­ing she is the nom­in­ee.”

The way to reach these voters, Green­berg and oth­ers ar­gue, is with an agenda that tar­gets eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity. Green­berg writes that ad­voc­ates of “‘cent­rism’ could not be more wrong. The key to both win­ning today’s white work­ing-class voters and build­ing over­whelm­ing ma­jor­it­ies with the Rising Amer­ic­an Elect­or­ate is a ro­bust agenda of pro­gress­ive re­form and gov­ern­ment act­iv­ism.” Green­berg as­sures his read­ers that the “new Amer­ic­an ma­jor­ity … is call­ing for drastic im­prove­ments in wages and em­ploy­ment rights,” that Amer­ic­ans “are ready to tax the richest,” that they have “a spe­cial dis­dain for over­paid CEOs,” and that they “are ready to see deep in­vest­ments to re­build Amer­ic­an in­fra­struc­ture.”

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BUT IS THIS RIGHT? Is a new ma­jor­ity in fact ready to sup­port a polit­ic­al agenda based on end­ing or re­du­cing eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity through gov­ern­ment act­iv­ism? There are cir­cum­stances like those of the early 1930s when a ma­jor­ity of Amer­ic­ans have backed pro­gress­ive eco­nom­ic re­form and gov­ern­ment in­ter­ven­tion and even the kind of rad­ic­al re­forms en­vis­aged by the Roosevelt In­sti­tute — but are we in fact liv­ing in such a peri­od?

I fear that the new pop­u­list ap­proach is based on sev­er­al as­sump­tions — about the eco­nomy and the elect­or­ate — that are feed­ing false hopes of suc­cess. The first flaw has to do with the status of the middle class. The pop­u­lists as­sume that the rich are cur­rently get­ting rich­er and that every­one else is suf­fer­ing; that the middle class is van­ish­ing and that the in­come of the great ma­jor­ity of Amer­ic­ans — 90 per­cent, ac­cord­ing to a CAP re­port — has stag­nated over the last 30 years. This sug­gests a polit­ics that could unite the bot­tom 90 per­cent against the very top. “The most im­port­ant polit­ic­al com­pet­i­tion over the next dec­ades will not be between the right and left, or between Re­pub­lic­ans and Demo­crats,” writes Robert Reich in The Amer­ic­an Pro­spect. “It will be between a ma­jor­ity of Amer­ic­ans who have been los­ing ground, and an eco­nom­ic elite that re­fuses to re­cog­nize or re­spond to its grow­ing dis­tress.”

But this pic­ture of Amer­ic­an class struc­ture may be mis­taken. While in­comes and wealth at the very top have soared, and while people at the bot­tom of the eco­nom­ic lad­der — many of whom have only high school de­grees or less — are in­deed threatened with fall­ing in­comes and job­less­ness, middle Amer­ica is not dy­ing or dis­ap­pear­ing. Middle-class jobs in factor­ies are van­ish­ing, but there is reas­on to be­lieve they will be re­placed by white-col­lar work­ers in edu­ca­tion, health care, and all the vari­ous oc­cu­pa­tions that re­quire fa­mili­ar­ity with and use of com­puters. MIT eco­nom­ist Dav­id Autor, who pop­ular­ized the idea that tech­no­logy was hol­low­ing out the middle class, has changed his views. In a present­a­tion last sum­mer to the Kan­sas City Fed­er­al Re­serve, Autor por­trayed low-skilled, low-wage oc­cu­pa­tions as most sus­cept­ible to be­ing auto­mated out of ex­ist­ence, while say­ing that middle-skilled oc­cu­pa­tions in­volving “in­ter­per­son­al in­ter­ac­tion, flex­ib­il­ity, ad­apt­ab­il­ity, and prob­lem-solv­ing” are “likely to per­sist and, po­ten­tially, to grow.”

Middle-class in­come has also not stag­nated or fallen. Over the last three dec­ades, it has ris­en (al­though not nearly as fast as that of the top 1 per­cent). From 1979 to 2007, on the eve of the Great Re­ces­sion, me­di­an in­come rose 50 per­cent, ac­cord­ing to eco­nom­ist Steph­en Rose. Us­ing fig­ures from the Con­gres­sion­al Budget Of­fice, Rose also found that in­come for the bot­tom 90 per­cent rose 42 per­cent dur­ing the same peri­od. Dur­ing the Great Re­ces­sion, from 2007 to 2011, the middle class — defined as the third in­come quin­tile — lost pretax in­come, but when post-tax and trans­fer pay­ments are in­cluded, its in­come did not de­cline at all and is now rising again. Rose’s views are con­tro­ver­sial, but in my ex­per­i­ence, they more ac­cur­ately re­flect the Amer­ica that I have seen while trav­el­ing as a journ­al­ist.

Bids to fight in­equal­ity can pro­voke con­ser­vat­ive re­ac­tions among the vot­ing pub­lic.

The pop­u­lists pro­ject a view of the eco­nomy that looks like a mar­tini glass, with the very rich con­cen­trated at the top and a nar­row neck that ex­tends to a large base where most Amer­ic­ans are con­cen­trated. Some politi­cians have con­veyed this im­age as well. In the re­cent Chica­go may­or­al elec­tion, Gar­cia por­trayed Chica­go as “a city of the very rich and the very poor, with few­er and few­er people in between. We are be­com­ing a city of glit­ter­ing build­ings sur­roun­ded by crum­bling neigh­bor­hoods.”

This is a por­tray­al that even a brief tour of the city’s neigh­bor­hoods would con­tra­dict. The real di­vi­sion in Chica­go — and, I would sus­pect, in oth­er cit­ies and states — is not so much between the very rich and every­one else, but between thriv­ing middle- and up­per-middle-class neigh­bor­hoods and those boarded-up neigh­bor­hoods in­hab­ited by the very poor. As Gar­cia and his pop­u­list fol­low­ers should have learned, this is not a class di­vi­sion that is con­du­cive to a pro­gress­ive pop­u­lism that seeks to unite the 90 per­cent against the very rich. In fact, out­side of a Demo­crat­ic town like Chica­go, it may be more con­du­cive to a right-wing pop­u­lism than a left-wing pop­u­lism.

To see why, it helps to un­der­stand the his­tory of both lib­er­al and con­ser­vat­ive pop­u­lism. Since the Civil War, there have two ma­jor left-wing pop­u­list move­ments against eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity. The first was the pop­u­list move­ment of the 1890s and the second was the re­dis­tri­bu­tion­ist move­ment of the early 1930s, typ­i­fied by Huey Long’s Share the Wealth move­ment. Both these pop­u­list epis­odes oc­curred dur­ing de­pres­sions and at a time when there was no safety net — no So­cial Se­cur­ity, un­em­ploy­ment com­pens­a­tion, Medi­care, or Medi­caid — to cush­ion the blow of massive un­em­ploy­ment. Dur­ing the 1930s, the middle class felt in danger, his­tor­i­an Alan Brinkley has writ­ten, “of be­ing plunged back in­to what they viewed as an abyss of power­less­ness and de­pend­ence. It was that fear that made the middle class, even more than those who were truly root­less and in­di­gent, a polit­ic­ally volat­ile group.” The res­ult was a left-wing pop­u­lism dir­ec­ted mainly against the wealthy and power­ful.

But after the pas­sage of Medi­care and Medi­caid, as well as the ex­pan­sion of So­cial Se­cur­ity, the polit­ics of middle-class fear changed. Pro­tec­ted by gov­ern­ment so­cial pro­grams, the middle class didn’t have to worry for its sheer sur­viv­al dur­ing eco­nom­ic down­turns. In­stead, dur­ing down­turns, some middle-class voters be­came sus­cept­ible to fears that they would have to pay high­er taxes in or­der to aid those be­low them. As a res­ult, they em­braced a right-wing pop­u­lism that sought to rally the middle class against the lower class (of­ten iden­ti­fied by ra­cial or na­tion­al ori­gin) and also against the in­fam­ous lib­er­al elite, who were deemed to be al­lies of the lower class. This kind of pop­u­list polit­ics flour­ished dur­ing the tax re­volt of the late 1970s. And it once again found a re­cept­ive audi­ence dur­ing the re­ces­sion that began six years ago.

The tea party arose in the winter of 2009, in­spired by a CN­BC pun­dit’s com­plaints that the middle class was hav­ing to pay for the mort­gages that ir­re­spons­ible homeown­ers, who didn’t pos­sess the re­quired in­come, had signed. It is true, as lib­er­als of­ten point out, that the move­ment is fun­ded partly by the Koch broth­ers. But as any­one who in­ter­views loc­al con­ser­vat­ive act­iv­ists dis­cov­ers, the tea party is a genu­ine grass­roots move­ment with chapters across the coun­try and nu­mer­ous fol­low­ers who see them­selves as ag­grieved mem­bers of the Amer­ic­an middle class.

New York City May­or Bill de Bla­sio speaks out­side the Cap­it­ol on May 12, 2015. (Win Mc­Namee/Getty Im­ages)By con­trast, at­tempts to found a left-wing coun­ter­part to the tea party have fallen flat. The Cof­fee Party (with the omin­ous ini­tials CPUSA) nev­er really got off the ground. The Oc­cupy move­ment las­ted through the fall of 2011 and then fizzled. In New York, de Bla­sio was able to win of­fice us­ing pop­u­list ap­peals, but it re­mains to be seen wheth­er a polit­ics that suc­ceeded in one of the coun­try’s most lib­er­al cit­ies can be ap­plied in Mid­west­ern or South­ern swing states. In­deed, there is little sign na­tion­ally that a left-wing re­bel­lion against in­equal­ity is gain­ing act­ive con­verts in the way that the tea party gained sup­port­ers dur­ing the Great Re­ces­sion. The grass­roots groups the Demo­cracy Al­li­ance funds seem to have the most im­pact in Demo­crat­ic states or metro areas and of­ten are little known to the gen­er­al pub­lic. And the labor move­ment, which was once the main­stay of the Demo­crat­ic Party’s grass­roots and of a pro­gress­ive eco­nom­ic agenda, con­tin­ues to lose mem­bers.

In earli­er peri­ods, left-wing or pro­gress­ive ap­peals to re­duce eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity have even pro­voked con­ser­vat­ive re­sponses with­in the gen­er­al vot­ing pub­lic. After the 1984 elec­tion, in which Demo­crat­ic can­did­ate Wal­ter Mondale made an ap­peal to eco­nom­ic fair­ness cent­ral to his cam­paign, Green­berg ran fo­cus groups in Michigan’s Ma­comb County to dis­cov­er why these white work­ing-class voters had backed Re­agan rather than Mondale. Green­berg found that these voters un­der­stood ap­peals to fair­ness as ap­peals to use their tax money for gov­ern­ment pro­grams to aid minor­it­ies. Out­side of very blue areas, today’s pop­u­list ap­peals to re­duce eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity could well be un­der­stood in the same man­ner.

Rob Stein, who no longer dir­ects but con­tin­ues to ad­vise the Demo­cracy Al­li­ance, wor­ries about the ef­fect on voters of a cam­paign against eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity. “The fact of eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity is now fairly widely ac­cep­ted and res­on­ates with voters across the polit­ic­al spec­trum and throughout the coun­try. The chal­lenge for na­tion­al can­did­ates is to ad­dress the mul­ti­fa­ceted prob­lems of in­equal­ity without pro­pos­ing that the only solu­tions are sub­stan­tially great­er taxes, per­vas­ive reg­u­la­tion, and more in­trus­ive gov­ern­ment bur­eau­cracy,” Stein told me. (He em­phas­ized that he was speak­ing for him­self, not the Demo­cracy Al­li­ance or its part­ners.) “While eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity is gen­er­ally ac­cep­ted as a real and per­vas­ive prob­lem, sig­ni­fic­antly more in­trus­ive gov­ern­ment is not yet a pop­u­lar solu­tion among all con­stitu­en­cies in every re­gion. It may be one day, but we are not there yet.”

Those who con­tend that a cam­paign for eco­nom­ic equal­ity will pro­duce, or is already pro­du­cing, a new ma­jor­ity cite chan­ging demo­graph­ics as a corner­stone of their ar­gu­ment. “[I]ncreas­ing ra­cial di­versity, rising im­mig­ra­tion, grow­ing sec­u­lar­ism, evolving fam­ily struc­tures, and swell­ing met­ro­pol­it­an cen­ters … are tied to re­volu­tions in Amer­ica’s val­ues,” Green­berg writes. Trans­pos­ing an old Marx­ist ad­age to the new pop­u­lism, he pre­dicts that “[h]is­tory is on the side of the as­cend­ant re­volu­tions.”

I’m not sure this con­fid­ence in demo­graph­ics is mer­ited. Ruy Teixeira and I pre­dicted in 2002 that a new Demo­crat­ic ma­jor­ity would emerge be­fore end of the dec­ade, and it did — but it has proved short-lived. One prob­lem with pre­dict­ing more last­ing ma­jor­it­ies based on demo­graph­ics is that op­pos­i­tion parties can ad­just. Re­pub­lic­an suc­cesses in 2014 were not just the res­ult of low turnout among young voters and minor­it­ies. They were also the res­ult of GOP can­did­ates mov­ing to the cen­ter to de­fuse cri­ti­cism from their Demo­crat­ic op­pon­ents. Col­or­ado Sen­ate can­did­ate Cory Gard­ner, Mary­land gubernat­ori­al can­did­ate Larry Hogan, and even Wis­con­sin Gov­ernor Scott Walk­er all took the edge off their stances on abor­tion and, in Gard­ner’s case, con­tra­cep­tion.

Moreover, it is dif­fi­cult to say how the grow­ing His­pan­ic pop­u­la­tion, upon which the cal­cu­la­tions of a new ma­jor­ity rely, will vote in the years to come. Like most oth­er eth­nic im­mig­rant groups, His­pan­ics tend to be­come less lib­er­al as they move up the lad­der in in­come and status. If Re­pub­lic­ans at some point mod­er­ate their views on im­mig­ra­tion, it’s en­tirely pos­sible that Lati­nos could be­come a less re­li­able Demo­crat­ic con­stitu­ency.

Chan­ging polit­ic­al cir­cum­stances also make it tough to pre­dict how the views of age groups will evolve. Mil­len­ni­als have backed Demo­crats, but their sup­port for Demo­crats in 2006 and 2008 was largely in re­ac­tion to George W. Bush’s ill-fated in­va­sion of Ir­aq, the on­set of the re­ces­sion, and the Re­pub­lic­an com­mit­ment to so­cial con­ser­vat­ism. It may not last. As a group, they are sus­cept­ible to Re­pub­lic­an ar­gu­ments against “big gov­ern­ment.” A re­cent, ex­tens­ive poll of 18- to 29-year-olds by Har­vard’s In­sti­tute of Polit­ics showed sup­port for cut­ting taxes, op­pos­i­tion to gov­ern­ment spend­ing, and dis­trust of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. If “gov­ern­ment act­iv­ism” is an es­sen­tial part of the new pro­gress­ive ma­jor­ity, as Green­berg sug­gests, then mil­len­ni­als may soon jump ship.

An Oc­cupy Wall Street demon­strat­or dis­plays a sign be­fore march­ing on the Up­per East Side neigh­bor­hood of New York. (Jin Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Im­ages)SOME OF THE eco­nom­ic pro­pos­als that the pro­gress­ives and pop­u­lists fa­vor could use fur­ther elab­or­a­tion. Medi­care for all? As it stands, some doc­tors re­fuse to take Medi­care be­cause they think its re­im­burse­ment rates are too low, and those seni­ors who can af­ford to do so pur­chase “medigap” in­sur­ance. Ex­pand­ing the pro­gram could po­ten­tially cre­ate a very ex­pens­ive two-tier sys­tem of health in­sur­ance. Oth­er pro­pos­als seem a little daffy. Dur­ing the Chica­go may­or­al elec­tion, a Roosevelt In­sti­tute re­port re­com­men­ded slap­ping trans­ac­tion taxes on Chica­go’s stocks and com­mod­it­ies traders — a pro­pos­al that, if en­acted, could dam­age one of the city’s most im­port­ant in­dus­tries.

Still, most of the new pop­u­lists’ pro­pos­als are far from daffy. On the con­trary, they are worthy of ser­i­ous dis­cus­sion. The policies them­selves are not the prob­lem. The prob­lem is me­di­ation — how to me­di­ate between a com­mit­ment to achiev­ing equal­ity through gov­ern­ment ac­tion and the real­ity of Amer­ic­an polit­ics. How would an elect­or­ate — which has demon­strated over two cen­tur­ies (with the ex­cep­tions of FDR’s first term and the coun­try’s years at war) its dis­trust of fed­er­al eco­nom­ic in­ter­ven­tion — come around to sup­port­ing pro­pos­als that en­tail “gov­ern­ment act­iv­ism”? And how could a cam­paign against eco­nom­ic in­equal­ity be con­duc­ted in a way that didn’t sug­gest that a lib­er­al elite, in­su­lated from eco­nom­ic stress, was try­ing to get the middle class to fund pro­grams for the poor?

Demo­crats have faced this di­lemma be­fore: In the 1980s, the party es­poused prin­ciples and pro­grams that put it at odds with a ma­jor­ity of voters. Demo­crats wanted gov­ern­ment eco­nom­ic plan­ning and in­creased spend­ing on cit­ies; they favored rais­ing taxes; they em­braced the coun­ter­cul­ture and so­cial move­ments of the ‘60s at a time when those move­ments were not widely ac­cep­ted. To rem­edy this situ­ation, some mod­er­ate and lib­er­al Demo­crats got to­geth­er in 1985, after an­oth­er Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial land­slide, to form the Demo­crat­ic Lead­er­ship Coun­cil.

The DLC was, as its many de­tract­ors on the Left will cer­tainly re­mem­ber, far from per­fect. It can be faul­ted, for in­stance, for pres­sur­ing Demo­crats to re­con­cile them­selves with a con­ser­vat­ive eco­nom­ic and de­fense agenda. But it also played an im­port­ant me­di­at­ing role in get­ting Demo­crats to in­ocu­late them­selves against charges that they were at odds with the Amer­ic­an elect­or­ate. It ad­dressed the pub­lic’s fear that Demo­crats in­dis­crim­in­ately favored big gov­ern­ment by launch­ing a cam­paign to “re­in­vent gov­ern­ment.” It nul­li­fied charges that the Demo­crats favored the poor over the middle class by sup­port­ing wel­fare re­form. And it in­sisted that Demo­crats stress eco­nom­ic growth. As a res­ult, Bill Clin­ton could cam­paign and win in 1992 on a plat­form of “put­ting people first” that united much of the middle and lower rungs of the eco­nom­ic lad­der. Clin­ton, of course, promptly for­got what he had learned and ran afoul of the elect­or­ate in Novem­ber 1994; but after that, he mastered the art of polit­ic­al me­di­ation.

Pro­gress­ives don’t have to aban­don their at­tempt to re­duce in­equal­ity or re­nounce the pro­grams that would ac­com­plish this. But rather than as­sum­ing that the elect­or­ate will be nat­ur­ally re­cept­ive to a brash pop­u­list mes­sage, they need to as­sume the op­pos­ite: that win­ning the de­bate on eco­nom­ic equal­ity will re­quire me­di­at­ing between one’s pre­ferred policies and a fun­da­ment­ally wary elect­or­ate.

Pro­gress­ives can’t as­sume that the elect­or­ate will be nat­ur­ally re­cept­ive to brash pop­u­lism.

Polit­ic­al con­sult­ants can do this for in­di­vidu­al can­did­ates. For in­stance, once the gen­er­al elec­tion be­gins, it would be sur­pris­ing if Podesta, who is in charge of Hil­lary Clin­ton’s cam­paign, didn’t ad­vise her to fol­low the ex­ample of Bill Clin­ton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 by of­fer­ing a middle-class tax cut and per­haps, too, some tax in­cent­ives for busi­ness. That may not be great eco­nom­ics, but it’s es­sen­tial to over­com­ing voters’ qualms about gov­ern­ment.

However, the donors who make up the Demo­cracy Al­li­ance and the groups they fund as­pire to more than win­ning the pres­id­ency in 2016. They want to put the party on a long-term path to re­tak­ing con­trol of state­houses and Con­gress. And the poli­cy­makers at the Roosevelt In­sti­tute or Cen­ter for Amer­ic­an Pro­gress don’t just fa­vor a min­im­um-wage boost, which, after all, was en­dorsed by con­ser­vat­ive Sen­ate can­did­ate Tom Cot­ton dur­ing his suc­cess­ful bid last fall to un­seat Arkan­sas’s Mark Pry­or. They want labor-law re­form, much tough­er bank reg­u­la­tions, a pro­gress­ive re­write of the tax code, and a raft of pub­lic ex­pendit­ures — all long-term pro­pos­i­tions.

To get to that point, they will have to de­vel­op a soph­ist­ic­ated polit­ics, as the DLC did, to ac­com­pany their im­pas­sioned ad­vocacy of eco­nom­ic equal­ity as well as their views on cam­paign-fin­ance re­form and cli­mate change. The Demo­cracy Al­li­ance has played a use­ful role in get­ting fun­ders to move bey­ond their pet is­sues and causes, but in their strategy, they have largely rep­lic­ated the pre­vail­ing con­ven­tion­al wis­dom among the party’s pro­gress­ive and pop­u­list groups about how a new ma­jor­ity and a Rising Amer­ic­an Elect­or­ate will win power.

Demo­crats are not alone in fa­cing these chal­lenges. The Re­pub­lic­an Party also in­cludes ele­ments that are at odds with much of the Amer­ic­an elect­or­ate. The tea party is power­ful with­in the GOP, but when tea-party fa­vor­ites have ous­ted more mod­er­ate Re­pub­lic­an Sen­ate can­did­ates, they have gen­er­ally lost elec­tions. Re­pub­lic­an can­did­ates like Mitt Rom­ney who al­low them­selves to be iden­ti­fied too closely with the ideo­logy of the party’s 1 per­cen­t­ers can also risk de­feat. In oth­er words, Re­pub­lic­ans, like Demo­crats, have to find ways to me­di­ate between their ideals and polit­ic­al real­ity. And whichever party is able to do that stands a good chance of win­ning ma­jor­it­ies.