Michael Kazin’s immediately indispensable new history of the Democratic Party succeeds on every imaginable front. A compelling blow-by-blow institutional biography of the country’s oldest mass political entity, What It Took to Win offers thoughtful and persuasive insights into the party’s social and political culture. Simultaneously portraying major figures and everyday people, Kazin describes in detail the ways in which the party has failed, major and minor, recently and in the distant past. Just as compellingly, he prescribes a historically rooted path forward for a party that has been treading electoral water for half a century. Most significantly, Kazin writes in the voice of that rare contemporary historian who believes institutions genuinely shape events. Few institutions, Kazin demonstrates, have formed the country more than the Democratic Party.
Kazin synthesizes two generations’ worth of scholarship to interrogate the White supremacy baked into the party’s 19th-century origins. The anti-monopolism of the party of Jefferson and Jackson clearly coexisted with a vision of racial hegemony that pitted the party’s original contingent of White farmers and artisans against potential allies among African American workers. In the book’s most compelling chapter, “Cosmopolitans in Search of a New Majority,” Kazin shows how slight, electorally and legislatively, the dividends of the Democrats’ chumminess with Silicon Valley types have been. The Democrats have won over many new Americans or previously marginalized groups, but the party’s reach exceeds its grip, particularly on White working- and middle-class Americans, especially men. The result has been a party with an educated elite and several smaller bases but lacking a broad vision articulable to voters who were neither professionals nor members of the “ethnocultural mélange” that has become so strongly
