When Democrats Became the Old Republicans

—and Why We Can’t Keep Doing This

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

There’s a hard truth that Democrats still struggle to say out loud, even as the country edges closer to outright authoritarianism: for the last thirty years, the dominant wing of the Democratic Party has governed like the sane, pre-gutted Republican Party, not like the heirs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That isn’t a slur. It’s a diagnosis.

Before the Republican Party hollowed itself out—before it became a grievance machine powered by culture war, conspiracy, and strongman fantasies—it had a center-right governing tradition. It believed in markets, institutional stability, cautious foreign policy, and incremental reform. It distrusted mass movements. It distrusted labor. It distrusted anything that smelled like redistribution. It believed the system basically worked, with some tuning around the edges.

That is the political DNA of neoliberal Democrats.

This shift didn’t happen by accident. It happened deliberately, starting in the wreckage of the 1970s and accelerating after Reagan. Democrats didn’t defeat Reaganism; they accommodated it. By the time Bill Clinton arrived, the strategy was explicit. “Triangulation” wasn’t just a campaign tactic—it was an ideology. The party would occupy the space Republicans used to hold, betting that voters wanted calm management rather than structural change.

Clinton governed as a center-right technocrat. Financial deregulation. Welfare reform that punished the poor for being poor. Free trade agreements that enriched capital while hollowing out labor. He didn’t dismantle the New Deal, but he stopped expanding it. He normalized the idea that government’s role was to manage market outcomes, not challenge market power.

This wasn’t cruelty. It was confidence. Confidence that the system, if smoothed and stabilized, would eventually deliver for everyone. That belief once belonged to moderate Republicans. Democrats picked it up and ran with it.

Barack Obama continued the pattern, though under far harsher conditions. The financial collapse of 2008 presented a once-in-a-generation choice: restructure capitalism, or rescue it as-is. Obama chose rescue. The banks were stabilized. The system was preserved. Accountability was minimal. Homeowners were largely left to fend for themselves.

Again, this wasn’t malice. Obama believed in institutions. He believed in norms. He believed that stability itself was a moral good. Those beliefs would have fit comfortably in the Republican Party of Eisenhower or even George H.W. Bush. They were not progressive beliefs in the post-FDR sense. They were managerial ones.

Joe Biden represents the culmination of this tradition: what might be called “grandpa centrism.” A deep attachment to the Senate. A belief in bipartisan legitimacy even after one party abandoned democracy. An instinct to steady the ship rather than rebuild it. To his credit, Biden has made modest moves toward industrial policy and labor support—but always cautiously, always constrained by a worldview that treats radical change as inherently dangerous.

None of this makes these men villains.

They are not bad men. They never were.

Bill Clinton’s personal failings are real, but they are not the point. Many men have poor judgment in their personal lives. That’s a moral issue, not a political one, and confusing the two only muddies the analysis. Barack Obama is decent, thoughtful, and sincere. Joe Biden is empathetic, humane, and genuinely concerned about suffering.

Intent is not the issue.

Structure is.

Neoliberal governance assumes that democracy can survive permanent inequality as long as growth continues. It assumes that social peace can be maintained without shared prosperity. It assumes that legitimacy flows from expertise rather than material security. Those assumptions are wrong—and history keeps proving they’re wrong.

When people feel locked out of the future, they don’t become patient centrists. They become angry. They become desperate. And eventually, they become available to authoritarians who promise order, identity, and revenge.

That is how neoliberalism leads back to fascism—not because its architects want fascism, but because they refuse to confront the economic forces that make fascism attractive.

Post-FDR progressivism understood this. Roosevelt didn’t save capitalism by trusting it. He saved democracy by constraining capital. He built labor power. He normalized redistribution. He made government an active counterweight to concentrated wealth. He didn’t fear mass politics—he harnessed it.

Neoliberal Democrats abandoned that tradition. They treated the New Deal as a historical artifact rather than a living framework. They governed as if the postwar consensus still existed, long after capital had gone global and labor had been crushed.

We cannot afford that anymore.

The current era is not a return to “normal politics.” It is a stress test of democracy itself. And managerial centrism fails that test every time. You cannot negotiate with a movement that rejects democratic outcomes. You cannot stabilize a system that systematically produces losers. You cannot technocrat your way out of structural collapse.

This is not a call for vengeance. It is not a call for purity tests. It is a call for clarity.

Neoliberalism had its moment. It promised stability. It delivered precarity. It promised moderation. It delivered polarization. It promised that history had ended. History came roaring back.

If Democrats continue to govern as the old Republicans—cautious, deferential to capital, allergic to transformation—they will keep losing the ground that authoritarians are eager to occupy. Not because they are evil, but because they are insufficient.

We don’t need better intentions. We need a different governing philosophy.

One rooted not in market confidence, but in democratic power. Not in stability for its own sake, but in shared security. Not in fear of disruption, but in fear of injustice.

Say it plainly. Say it now. We cannot keep doing this.