the Democratic Party was assigned a particular function. Its task was to defend the basic interests of capital by posing as a party of the “common man” against the Republicans, who unapologetically championed big business.
Every mass social movement—beginning with the Populist movement of farmers in the 1880s and 1890s, to the anti-monopoly Progressive movement of the early 1900s, to the revolt of industrial workers of the 1930s out of which the UAW was born, to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, to the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s—was channeled behind the Democratic Party to be smothered, declawed and defeated.
There is historical irony in the Democratic Party playing this role. In the 19th century, it was first the party of the southern slavocracy, and, after the Civil War, the party of Jim Crow white supremacy. It was its lesser northern wing, controlled by sections of capital and operating big city “machines” such as New York’s Tammany Hall, that prefigured the party’s 20th century incarnation.
Pro-slavery ideologues and propagandists linked to the Democratic Party attacked the brutality of emerging industrial capitalism in the North and posed as critics of wage slavery, while portraying Southern chattel slavery as a natural and beneficent system. They sought to inspire fear among northern workers that the liberation of the blacks in the South would undermine their own wages and living standards.
The Democratic city machines solicited the support of northern workers, including immigrant populations such as the Irish, and doled out patronage, while engaging in demagogic attacks against “privilege.”