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meustrus writes:

When trying to understand the two bad choices we have now, it can help to look into the past at where they came from. In this article, Matt Stoller at The Atlantic provides a deep dive into a transformation the Democratic party underwent in the late 1960s onward. In it we see how the Democrats morphed the anti-big-business politics that had powered it for over a century into the big-government politics that define the political conversation today.

Modern liberals tend to confuse a broad social-welfare state and redistribution of resources in the form of tax-and-spend policies with the New Deal. In fact, the central tenet of New Deal competition policy was not big or small government; it was distrust of concentrations of power and conflicts of interest in the economy. The New Deal divided power, pitting faction against other faction, a classic Jefferson-Madison approach to controlling power (think Federalist Paper No. 10). Competition policy meant preserving democracy within the commercial sphere, by keeping markets open. Again, for New Deal populists like Brandeis and Patman [ed: links mine], it was democracy or concentrated wealth—but not both.

[...] The story of why the Watergate Babies spurned populism is its own intellectual journey. It started with a generation of politicians who cut their teeth on college-campus politics. In their youth, they saw, up close, not the perils of robber barons, but the failure of the New Deal state, most profoundly through the war in Vietnam. "We were the '60s generation that didn't drop out," Bob Edgar, a U.S. representative from the class of 1975, told me. The war in Vietnam shaped their generation in two profound ways. First, it disillusioned them toward the New Deal. It was, after all, many New Dealers, including union insiders, who nominated Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and who supported a war that killed millions, including 50,000 Americans their age. And second, higher education—the province of the affluent—exempted one from military service, which was an explicit distinction among classes.

[...] By quietly cutting back the influence of unions, [Democratic strategist Fred] Dutton sought to eject the white working class from the Democratic Party, which he saw as "a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the antinegro, antiyouth vote." The future, he argued, lay in a coalition of African Americans, feminists, and affluent, young, college-educated whites.

[...] By 2008, the ideas that took hold in the 1970s had been Democratic orthodoxy for two generations. "Left-wing" meant opposing war, supporting social tolerance, advocating environmentalism, and accepting corporatism and big finance while also seeking redistribution via taxes.

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