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The unity that once held the Democratic Party together has given way to ideological meandering, oscillating between “woke” moralistic left-wing populism and technocratic managerialism. These two impulses now define its fractured identity: the former emerging from the Occupy movement and the momentum of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, the latter from the evolution of the Clinton-era “New Democrat” consensus.
The 2025 elections crystallized the divide through two major victories—socialist outsider Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who’s more in line with the neoliberal wing. Each has been called the party’s “future,” though their wins more clearly reveal how ideologically hollow the party’s core has become.
Both models come with glaring weaknesses. Mamdani’s democratic socialism—state planning, rent control, punitive taxation, and the belief that “no problem is too large for government to solve”—risks collapsing into familiar 20th-century contradictions. Spanberger’s approach, while more viable, offers not innovation but a refined status quo: moderation as technique rather than vision.
Today’s Democratic Party is perhaps best understood as a form of managerial politics defined by technocratic drift—what political theorist and National Review editor James Burnham once described as liberalism’s postwar move away from core principles toward an administered status quo, bent solely on its own continuation, and a quasi-mystical faith in progress for its own sake. In his 1964 book Suicide of the West, Burnham posited, through a blend of Spenglerian insight and fusionist inclination, that liberalism had surrendered any substantive vision of the good for a belief in a self-perpetuating system of technocratic institutionalism—a system of managed decline that served to rationalize the breakdown of the West’s social, political, and economic order through bureaucratic inertia and elite “expert” consensus.
Seen this way, the Democratic Party’s factional divide becomes far easier to grasp. The uneasy coexistence of its two camps highlights the vacuum at the party’s center: both wings reproduce the twin failures Burnham diagnosed—the abandonment of the West’s liberal tradition and the rise of a managerial class devoted less to freedom than to its own survival & a philosophical ethos of cultural self-loathing. And it is because of this phenomenon that, perhaps the answer to the party’s present identity crisis lies not in embracing the socialism of Mamdani, nor in doubling down on the status quo of Spanberger, but in its 19th-century historical roots.
As difficult as it might be to conceptualize, the Democratic Party was, for the better part of its early existence, the party of classical liberalism, initially established to carry on the legacy and vision of Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. Although it expressed itself in various ideological manifestations—from Jacksonian populism, to the decentralist constitutionalism of John C. Calhoun, to more traditional strains of classical liberalism—the identity that the early Democratic Party cultivated for itself harkened back to the principles of the founding.
The Civil War era witnessed a major rupture in the Democratic vision of limited government, largely abandoned due to hyper-fractionalization along state lines, dereliction of principle, and the sacrifice of high-mindedness for pragmatism. In the North, the party split between business Democrats who reluctantly backed Abraham Lincoln’s effort to preserve the Union and Copperheads who opposed his wartime measures. In the South, Democrats—claiming the legacies of either Andrew Jackson or Calhoun—reframed their identity around defending the slave economy, rationalizing it with the language of localism and limited government, despite its clear contradiction with the party’s stated principles of individual liberty.
By the time of Reconstruction, many Democrats—including some in the North—went on to resist civil rights legislation, positioning themselves not as defenders of classical liberalism but as agents of autarkic localism. However, as Reconstruction waned and the excesses of both its reforms and residual wartime centralization became more apparent, the Democratic Party steadily shifted back toward its earlier constitutional commitments. It was in this realignment that the preconditions for classical liberalism’s resurgence began to take shape, laying the groundwork for a new movement within the party’s fractured ranks.
Colloquially dubbed the “Bourbon Democrats” by their detractors—an allusion to the term used to describe conservative and monarchist political factions in Europe—the Democratic Party’s burgeoning classical liberal wing was characterized by its commitment to constitutional restraint, free trade, noninterventionism abroad, and a deep suspicion of state power, believing that the centralization of federal authority, even in the service of benevolent aims, would lead to the inevitable erosion of individual liberty.
The biggest Bourbon victory came with Grover Cleveland’s win in the 1884 presidential election, which made the faction the party’s dominant force. His 1887 veto of the Texas Seed Bill became its defining manifesto; while acknowledging the plight of drought-stricken farmers, Cleveland refused to make redistribution a federal duty. He declared that “though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people,” and warned that such aid “encourages the expectation of paternal care” and “weakens the sturdiness of our national character,” arguing that charity must remain a private moral duty. Far from callousness, this reflected his conviction that compassion is strongest when voluntary—and that a state powerful enough to dispense benevolence is powerful enough to erode self-reliance.
Yet the Bourbon coalition—like all political movements—was not without flaws. Southern Bourbons often paired economic liberalism with policies rooted in racial paternalism and disenfranchisement, helping lay the groundwork for segregation. Even Northern Bourbons, including those morally opposed, conceded to Southern demands, prioritizing coalition unity above all else.
But the Bourbons were a diverse coalition—it included veterans who had fought on both sides of the Civil War—and possessed a clear grasp of the political realities of their time. For them, preserving the Union came first; and in their view, the survival of the body politic—and American liberalism—depended on their electoral success and the implementation of their broader objectives. The results spoke for themselves.
Under Bourbon leadership, Democrats championed sound money, low taxation, and opposition to tariffs, while embracing anti-imperialism, industrialization, immigration expansion, and civil service reform. These policies helped usher in unprecedented economic growth and national reconciliation. In this sense, they remained more faithful to the founding ideals of limited government than any other major U.S. faction of the era. But like all political movements, their dominance would not last.
The final decade of the Bourbon era brought major internal upheaval. Despite the prosperity of the 1880s and early 1890s, working-class and rural Americans grew disillusioned. Farmers saw the Bourbons’ sound-money austerity as suffocating—driving down crop prices and making debt costlier. Working-class voters viewed the party’s banker-aligned elites as detached. The Panic of 1893 amplified this, as Cleveland’s repeal of silver purchases and reliance on Wall Street fueled charges of abandonment. Bourbon hostility to labor, opposition to antitrust laws, and refusal to adopt immigration restrictions deepened the divide. By 1896, these frustrations ignited a populist revolt, culminating in the rise of William Jennings Bryan, whose “Cross of Gold” crusade broke the Bourbons’ hold on the party.
While the Bourbon faction retained some influence—even securing the 1904 presidential nomination—the classical liberal wing soon entered terminal decline as Bryan’s populism became the party’s dominant ideology. This shift deepened under Woodrow Wilson, who, despite early Bourbon alignment, developed an agenda opposed to their aims that blended technocratic impulses with Progressive policies and parts of Bryan’s economic agenda. By World War I, Wilsonian progressivism—marked by central planning, censorship, and liberal internationalism—had redefined the party as a bureaucratic engine of centralized authority, replacing Jeffersonian restraint with managerial ambition. Classical liberalism briefly resurfaced in Republican circles under President Calvin Coolidge, but within the Democratic Party, it had been effectively expunged.
This shift finally solidified with the passing of the New Deal in 1934. Where Democrats like Cleveland had opposed similar relief bills in the past, FDR recast freedom as “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.” He used the language of liberty to justify a permanent federal apparatus and reforms that weakened the old business elite, transferring power to a new managerial class of executives and bureaucrats who increasingly directed American industry—a transformation Burnham termed the “Managerial Revolution” in his 1941 book of the same name.
While FDR’s reforms quickly became Democratic orthodoxy, some old-school Democrats resisted his top-down agenda. Former New York Gov. Al Smith, a Bourbon holdover and the party nominee for the 1928 presidential election, denounced the New Deal as a betrayal of the market-friendly platform that had won in 1932. Former U.S. Solicitor General and Ambassador to the United Kingdom John W. Davis, who was ironically once a close ally of Wilson, similarly emerged as a major internal critic, challenging New Deal programs in court and helping organize the Liberty League—a brief anti-New Deal alliance of classical liberals and the Republican Old Right. World War II, which centralized federal power, expanded bureaucracy, and muted dissent, ended this resistance. Postwar prosperity entrenched an administrative state embraced by both parties.
The trajectory set by Wilson and later FDR only accelerated—through Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, Jimmy Carter’s bureaucratic expansion, Bill Clinton’s technocratic makeover, Barack Obama’s federally engineered health care state, and Joe Biden’s revival of industrial policy. While the faces might have changed, the managerial impulse did not.
Today, the Democratic Party’s divisions are stark. The left preaches a puritanical moralism of collective virtue through coercion—compulsory redistribution, counterintuitive regulations, and democracy for its own sake—driven by progressive populists and a performative Red Guard pushing “cultural re-education.” The center clings to proceduralism, expertise, and technocratic management that promises stability but delivers competence without conviction. One turns democracy into civic purification; the other into a service industry for the professional class. Yet both arise from the same philosophical amnesia—a belief that big government is benevolent if run by the “right people,” rooted in the Bryanite–Wilsonian neutering of liberalism, and a fight for a party soul that vanished long ago.
Yet outside this noise lies a longing for a political order that is more limited, restrained, and less messianic. The Republican Party, which once appealed to such concerns, has traded small-government consensus for national populism that serves mainly as a vehicle for MAGA grievance. With the principles of limited government now pushed to the GOP’s margins, skepticism of centralized power need not remain a conservative possession. The vacuum created by the Democrats’ own drift may offer an opening for those seeking a more restrained politics—to reclaim an older instinct in the party’s DNA: distrust of centralized authority, constitutional restraint, and a commitment to civil liberties and progress through markets.
Though no longer an organized force, Bourbon sensibilities never fully vanished from the Democratic Party. Even as the faction dissolved, its residues—skepticism of centralized power, constitutional modesty, and confidence in markets—quietly persisted. By the late 20th century, faint echoes of this tradition appeared in figures as different as Larry McDonald on the right and Mike Gravel on the party’s left flank, each reflecting a distinct derivative of the old Bourbon ethos. McDonald—who was a close ally and mentor to Ron Paul in Congress—championed constitutionalism, Austrian economics, and rolling back the administrative state, while Gravel embodied anti-expansionism, decentralization, civil liberties, and fiscal restraint. Even Murray Rothbard, though he ultimately abandoned the party, believed for a time that the Democrats might one day rediscover their classical roots. As for today, national figures such as Gov. Jared Polis (D–Colo.), and even heterodox liberals like Andrew Yang, still carry that thread—marked by support for civil liberties, market-friendly instincts, and wariness of bureaucratic intrusion.
Despite the party’s broad shift toward expansive government and technocratic management, elements of this older ethos linger in scattered corners of the Democratic thought-ecosystem. Civil libertarians resist surveillance and executive overreach; localist reformers and the remaining Blue Dogs press for decentralization and fiscal restraint; the Abundance movement’s supply-side liberalism challenges regulatory sclerosis; and then there are the politically homeless centrists, libertarians, and fusionists—coming not from within the Democratic institutional or ideological apparatus, but from without—who have become alienated by the national populism of the contemporary GOP; they now find themselves in search for a new home that they might help shape. And for outsiders like them, the party’s ongoing dissolution—driven in part by those who once professed alignment with their commitments—has turned what was once among the most hostile political terrains for them to navigate into not merely fertile ground for cultivation, but an open invitation for entryism.
Individually, these ideological strands are small. But together they show that the party’s older liberal DNA still flickers—never gone, only dispersed. While it’s unlikely that the U.S. will ever see the Democrats embrace wholesale libertarianism or traditional laissez faire governance, their identity crisis and fears of authoritarian populism may nudge them to remember that their very party’s tradition was built on skepticism of centralized power and the conviction that government must be restrained, not revered. Recognizing the party’s earlier successes—most fully realized under the Bourbons—could offer a coherent guiding ethos, not by reviving a bygone era but by adapting its most effective principles to modern realities.
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Jacob R. Swartz
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