What exactly is going on in the Democratic Party? In a race that has captured so much attention and which has generated popular, enthusiastic grassroots support for a candidate, elected Democrats appear intensely divided over a popular candidate who resoundingly won their party’s nomination. Much of that division comes from Mamdani’s support for Palestine, an issue where elected Democrats are out of step with their own constituents. Gaza is currently one major issue — not the only one, but certainly a big one — that is splitting the Democratic Party. Yet elected officials are acting as if they’re trying to pinpoint which issues are important to their voters, when in actuality they’re the ones struggling with the complicated fact that many of the policies important to their constituents are anathema to Democratic leadership. At its core, this is a battle over fusionism, a political strategy from the late 19th century that sought to unite various disenfranchised groups (in the mid-20th century, it would come to refer to the fusion of the libertarian right with the traditionalist right). Political outsiders such as Mamdani are trying to work with the Democratic Party even as many in the party leadership reject their views. One side wants to shift the party’s political priorities; the other side wants to keep them well away.
This isn’t the first fight over political fusionism the Democratic party has undergone. One of the best ways to understand this conflict over the party’s identity is to examine the Gilded Age and the 1890s. Just as now, many voters felt abandoned or ignored by both the Democrats and Republicans. The two big parties in turn were threatened by the rise of third parties, which offered different policies altogether. The choice of whether to work with and ultimately assimilate these third parties or to reject them in order to cling to power shaped that era’s politics — and can hint at what may happen today.
Political stalemate, which became so familiar for Americans beginning in the 2010s would have been very familiar to Americans during the Gilded Age. The Democratic and Republican parties were nearly equal in power from the 1870s through the 1890s, with the Republicans usually controlling the presidency and Senate, and the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives. Republicans’ chief issues were business oriented: They sought to impose a high tariff to protect manufacturers and use government to foster growth, mostly by giving away public lands. Democrats generally pursued lower taxation and smaller government, almost comically so: President Grover Cleveland used his veto to block an act that would have awarded a pension to one Civil War veteran.