AP PHOTO
Franklin Roosevelt at his “I welcome their hatred” speech at Madison Square Garden in 1936
This article appears in the December 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The next time Democratic primary candidates debate one another, they should have to answer one straightforward question: Whose hatred do you welcome?
That question derives from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s nationally broadcast 1936 speech in Madison Square Garden, delivered just before voters went to the polls three days later. Roosevelt provided a list of the “old enemies” who attacked him during his first term: monopolists, speculators, bankers, oligarchs. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
The following day, a few of Roosevelt’s more centrist supporters suggested he moderate his words. Roosevelt rebuffed them. Three days later, he won what is still the most overwhelming victory in American political history, not only taking the Electoral College by a 523-to-8 margin, but also winning 61 percent of the popular vote, and carrying his fellow Democrats to what are still the nation’s most lopsided congressional majorities.
That kind of sweep is not at all possible for either of today’s parties. But I recount this history because Roosevelt understood better than almost all Democrats who succeeded him the importance of identifying public enemies at a time when the nation is troubled and divided. This understanding is the sine qua non of any Democratic effort to win back enough working-class voters to reclaim a popular majority in future elections.
We live, after all, in an angry nation where government bends over to meet the needs of various elites rather than ordinary people—precisely how Roosevelt characterized big business’s goals in his time. It’s been the genius of the Republicans to create a counter-elite to the economic powers that actually dominate the nation. Their Frankenstein monster consists of deep-state government bureaucrats, academia, the socially liberal sectors of the wealthy and upper middle class, and those corporate leaders who are influenced in some degree by those constituencies.
This counter-elite long predates Donald Trump. Alabama segregationist Gov. George Wallace ran for president against the specter of Blacks gaining equal rights, but quickly and effectively enlarged his target list to the egalitarian policymakers who imposed these affronts on the Northern working class, too. Wallace had his own version of the deep state; he termed them “pointy-headed bureaucrats,” a more acceptable target to Northern whites who didn’t back the Jim Crow laws of the South but feared Black advancement nonetheless. This approach pulled down enough Northern votes in the 1964 Democratic primaries and the 1968 general election (running as a third-party candidate) that Republicans began echoing Wallace’s attacks.
Democrats have yet to call out the elite that’s really responsible for the shrinkage of the middle class.
By 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president by running against government in a time of inflation, and while he quickly realized there was scant support for cutting Social Security and Medicare, he gleefully targeted most everything else (except the Pentagon). But Reagan proved powerless to stop the sociocultural movement toward greater tolerance.
By 1992, Pat Buchanan ran for president, proclaiming the nation to be in a “cultural war” and urging his fellow Republicans to focus their attacks on feminists, gays, abortionists, and racial minorities. Indeed, with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, Republicans had lost their number one enemy, and subsequently their number one attack on Democrats: that they were “soft on Communism.”
Buchanan was the culture war’s prophet, but Newt Gingrich really cemented this line of attack on Democrats. Elected House Speaker following the 1994 Republican midterm sweep, Gingrich convinced his colleagues, and almost all subsequent Republican pols, that Democrats should be dealt with as soft on deviants, if not deviants themselves. If overt signs of abnormality were hard to discern, Gingrich made clear, Republicans should magnify what was available and invent the rest. Rush Limbaugh and the newly founded Fox News were enlisted into this effort.
Republicans ran against gay marriage in 2004 and against transgender people this year. In Michigan, which Trump narrowly carried, there are 170,000 high school students on their schools’ sports teams, exactly two of whom are transgender and playing girls’ sports. No matter.
The Democrats’ number one problem in 2024 had nothing to do with this fearmongering. An uncommonly high percentage of voters believed they were left behind by an economy in which the price of some basics—housing and food most especially—was often beyond reach. For this, Republicans held the Biden administration and its vice president responsible. But Republicans also conducted their culture war on the Democrats with unrelenting ferocity. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump’s most notable ad against Harris concluded with the words: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”
IT SHOULD NOT BE THAT HARD FOR DEMOCRATS to associate Donald Trump and the Republicans with the elite that actually is responsible for the shrinkage of the middle class and the abandonment of investment in rural and small-town America, regions of the country that have become most heavily Republican. The Biden administration’s resurrection of industrial policy was specifically targeted to such regions, and much of the factory construction boom that it engendered has been located in the very areas where corporations shuttered factories and moved the work to China or Mexico. Thus far, this has had little or no appreciable electoral effect, but factory construction takes some time. Preventing Republicans from taking credit for a Democratic program will be critical.
In Nevada, prompted by the hotel workers union’s survey data on the lack of affordable housing, the Harris campaign ran one ad that mentioned how a lot of homes had been purchased by financial institutions and converted to rentals, thereby pushing up the price for would-be homebuyers. But one mild-mannered ad against a sea of right-wing media wasn’t up to the challenge of changing public opinion.
And yet: In recent decades, with the decline in the share of unionized workers, the steadily growing power of major investors who’ve demanded and received share buybacks and the like, the growth in price-setting corporate concentration, the reclassification of full-time workers as independent contractors rather than employees, and more, the share of national income going to wages has declined, just as the share of working-class anger has soared. Public polling shows low approval ratings for corporations and high approval ratings for unions.
You wouldn’t know this from the tone and substance of Harris’s campaign and most of her fellow Democrats’. Despite such notable exceptions as Bernie Sanders, Democrats have yet to call out the elite that’s really responsible for these epochal changes.
In the post-election miasma, discussion of how Democrats can regain enough working-class support to arrest America’s plunge into neofascism dominates our discourse. Happily, virtually no one is suggesting Democrats revert to the Rubinomics that dominated economic policy in the Carter, Clinton, and Obama administrations. If there are any cases being made by Democrats for corporate free trade and financial deregulation, I haven’t heard them.
As for a pro–working class to-do list, one can begin with the paid sick leave and higher minimum-wage laws that voters in red states enacted by ballot measure this November, and move on to expanding Medicare coverage to dental and home health care, making community college and trade schools tuition-free, and providing massive investments in affordable housing and infrastructure. Democrats should also target our malefactors of great wealth by proposing to prohibit private equity’s gutting of businesses they purchase, to end price-fixing in rental and other markets, to institute windfall profits taxes when the profit share of revenues increases at the expense of wages and investment, to scale corporate tax rates to the ratio between CEO and median worker pay (the higher the ratio, the higher the tax rate), and so on.
But none of this, I fear, will really put a dent in the working class’s support for Republicans. Democrats need to go after financial and corporate elites at least as much as Republicans go after cultural elites. Democrats don’t have to say that Carl Icahn and Paul Singer are Satanists, which is a term the right applies to any number of stray liberals; but they do need to call them out in public and make that message heard. Candidates alone cannot change the public discourse. Liberals have not made investments in media the way the right has, and if Democrats are to reawaken the public’s awareness of the real elites, investments in media are what liberal’s monied components—in which I include major unions—need to make.
In a divided nation, Franklin Roosevelt made crystal clear which side he was on, and whose hatred he welcomed. If Democrats are to regain the American working class, they need to state whose hatred they welcome, too.
