The Elephant in the Room

Reintermediation is the only path forward for Democrats

Facing recent disappointments, elite Democratic strategists and thinkers have coalesced around three buzzword-laden prescriptions for the party’s renewal: the “abundance agenda,” the creed of “popularism,” and an ethos of “deliverism.” Each diagnosis a different problem and proposes a cure. Abundance, championed by figures like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, starts from the observation that America has lost its capacity to build – from housing to transit to energy infrastructure – with dire social consequences. The “abundance agenda” argues that an “anti-growth” mentality (stringent zoning, endless regulatory veto-points, NIMBYism) is strangling housing supply and infrastructure, leaving even liberal cities unaffordable and inert. Klein and Thompson fault decades of neoliberal disinvestment in public capacity and a surfeit of bureaucratic hurdles; they call for a new focus on “making government better at building and doing” – simplifying permits, speeding up projects, unleashing innovation – to deliver tangible benefits like cheaper housing, cleaner energy, and modern transport. In short, abundance proponents want Democrats to prove that liberal governance can get big things done again. It’s an implicitly technocratic, optimism-forward message: that America can overcome scarcity by “tak[ing] innovation as seriously as… affordability” and pruning the rules that “get in the way of the common good”. Critics on the left, however, worry that this focus, while worthy, may be mis-timed and mis-framed. Some ask whether touting “dynamism” and streamlined growth really addresses voters’ core anxieties in 2025 – especially with an authoritarian threat looming. As one observer noted, making government work better is not an “automatic salve” for Democrats’ woes with disaffected heartland voters. An ambitious building agenda might yield results only in the long run, and if voters don’t feel a party is on their side culturally or economically, they may not care which technocrat cut the red tape on a solar farm. In fact, progressive populists suspect that centrist insiders tout “abundance” partly to sideline egalitarian populism; they note that powerful donors prefer a debate about efficient infrastructure over one about redistributing power from oligarchs. Thus, while the abundance agenda addresses important policy failures, its political effectiveness hinges on deeper issues of trust and inclusion – themes to which we will return.

Popularism, by contrast, is all about political messaging and platform calibration. The term is closely associated with Democratic data analyst David Shor and echoed by strategists like Ruy Teixeira. It starts from a blunt electoral calculus: Democrats, they argue, hurt themselves by embracing unpopular positions (especially on cultural issues) that alienate middle America. The “popularism” prescription is simple: speak only to what’s popular. In practice, that means poll-test your policies, highlight the ones with broad support, and keep mum about the rest. Don’t talk about abolishing ICE or defunding police (even if some in the base urge it); do talk about lowering drug prices, protecting Medicare, bringing back manufacturing jobs – whatever polls well across the spectrum. Popularism is an implicit critique of Democratic elites who, in Shor’s view, spend too much time on Twitter and cater to highly educated progressives’ pet issues, rather than the more moderate preferences of working-class and non-college voters. Teixeira, a longtime Democratic analyst, has made a similar case: he notes the party’s eroding support among working-class voters of all races and argues Democrats must “return to the politics that used to win them working-class… support, white as well as minority.” That means toning down “cultural radicalism” and refocusing on bread-and-butter economics. Indeed, Teixeira and John Judis – who once heralded an “Emerging Democratic Majority” based on demographics – now warn that neoliberal economic policies (which disempowered the industrial working class) combined with left cultural stances palatable mainly to educated elites have made Democrats a much smaller tent than they imagine. Their new mantra: move left on economics (be unabashedly pro-worker) but “declare a truce” in the culture wars to stop driving culturally moderate working people into the arms of Republicans.

There is logic in popularism: a democracy responsive to majority opinion should prioritize popular measures. And clearly, Democrats cannot sustain majorities if they hemorrhage working-class voters every cycle. Yet popularism faces sharp critique as well. Progressives object that it can become pandering or cowardice – a recipe to ignore pressing issues of justice merely because they poll poorly. (Civil rights, after all, weren’t “popular” everywhere when Democrats embraced them in the 1960s.) Moreover, popularism may misdiagnose why voters distrust Democrats. It assumes the problem is primarily issue positioning, not credibility. But if voters believe a party won’t actually deliver on what it promises, hearing only popular promises may not sway them. In fact, as journalist David Dayen argues, Democrats have been running on poll-tested popular ideas for decades – and often failing to implement them in practice. From the 1990s through today, campaign after campaign has featured Democrats touting things like letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, raising the minimum wage, etc., only to see those promises falter in Washington. “You cannot talk about the same popular items, fail to deliver on them, and expect the voting public to keep listening,” Dayen warns. Voters have heard the music of popular proposals; what’s missing is trust that the party will fight and follow through. In that sense, popularism by itself might be necessary but not sufficient – it could help avoid unforced errors (like emphasizing an unpopular slogan), but it won’t rebuild broken faith.

Enter deliverism, which tries to solve the credibility gap that popularism identifies but cannot fix. The term “deliverism,” coined cheekily by pundits as a play on popularism, holds that actually governing well and tangibly improving people’s lives is the only way for Democrats to revive their fortunes. Instead of just messaging differently, prove your worth through results. Deliverism sees recent electoral swings as essentially verdicts on performance. When parties solve problems they ran on, they win; when they don’t, they lose . Proponents point to examples like Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election: Obama didn’t just campaign on vague hope; he ran ads boasting “Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” reminding midwestern voters that he had saved the auto industry in 2009. That concrete deliverable (the auto bailout) made a difference. Likewise, in 2018 Democrats won by promising to protect healthcare – a promise made credible by Republicans’ failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Deliverism thus urges Democrats in power to maximize accomplishments that people feel directly (jobs created, roads built, stimulus checks delivered) and then run hard on that record. It is, in a sense, a call to restore a performance-based trust: if you do what you said you would, voters will stick with you.

Deliverism has intuitive appeal – who wouldn’t want parties to actually do what they promise? – and it serves as a corrective to the purely poll-driven approach. But it, too, faces challenges. One is the time lag: major policies can take years to yield felt benefits, and impatient electorates may not reward good governance unless it’s paired with effective communication. Another issue is that in today’s hyper-polarized environment, even effective policy delivery might not penetrate partisan skepticism. (If a bridge is built in a GOP-leaning county with Democratic votes in Congress, will Fox News give Democrats credit? Or will many voters assume it “just happened” or was thanks to their GOP representative?) Deliverism alone doesn’t ensure that achievements are recognized or attributed correctly – that still requires messaging and narrative. Furthermore, deliverism presumes Democrats can get enough power to deliver in the first place. But if distrustful voters won’t elect them, they have little chance to prove themselves via policy – a chicken-and-egg dilemma. In practice, the 2022–2024 period illustrated this tension: Joe Biden’s administration pursued a deliverist strategy (passing a large infrastructure law, major climate and tech investments, etc.), yet if that translated into only modest political benefit, it might be because many Americans either didn’t feel the effects yet or weren’t convinced these accomplishments aligned with their own lives and identities. In short, deliverism, popularism, and abundance each highlight a different facet of political success – governing competence, appealing platform, and policy ambition – and Democrats increasingly talk about all three. But strikingly, all three debates have unfolded largely among party elites, on podcasts and op-ed pages, with relatively little direct input from the ordinary voters these ideas are meant to win back. This points to a deeper problem: a growing gap between political elites and the masses. Indeed, one might suspect that the common element of Democrats’ struggles – the reason good policies, poll-approved talking points, or even delivered programs don’t seem to secure durable loyalty – is a collapse of trust and connection between the party and large swaths of the public. To understand that, we must zoom out to the broader evolution (or devolution) of America’s party system.

The Hollowing of American Parties and the Breakdown of Trust

Beneath the debates over messaging and policy lies an elephant in the room: the breakdown of elite-mass relations in American politics. The United States today has strong partisanship in one sense – elections and news are highly polarized, and many voters reliably vote against the other party – but weak parties in an organizational sense. Political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld describe today’s Democrats and Republicans as “hollow parties,” possessing hardened electoral shells but brittle, disordered cores. They note that parties are scarcely felt as real presences in citizens’ lives anymore: “Today’s parties are hollow parties, neither organizationally robust beyond their roles raising money nor meaningfully felt as a real, tangible presence in the lives of voters or in the work of engaged activists.”. Instead of being rooted in communities through membership clubs, local meetings, and civic activity, modern parties surface mainly during campaign season – on TV, in funding appeals, in social media wars. The public tends to associate parties with the ugliest aspects of polarization (constant negativity, big-money influence) and thus mistrusts them. As Schlozman and Rosenfeld put it, voters now fuel politics more out of “fear and loathing of the other side” than positive loyalty to their own party. Party identification still exists, but party loyalty in the older, solid sense has atrophied. Even many activists now operate outside the party structure – gravitating to “para-party” groups, like MoveOn or the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity, rather than traditional party committees. The result is that parties offer stark choices at election time, yet they get little credit or goodwill from the public for representing anything beyond tribal conflict. In short, the intermediary link that parties are supposed to provide – connecting citizen interests to government in a trusted way – has eroded badly.

This phenomenon is not unique to the U.S. but part of a broader trend across Western democracies. In Europe, traditional mass-membership parties (think of mid-20th-century Christian Democrats or Labour parties rooted in unions, churches, civic associations) have steadily lost members and social anchorage. Political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair observed as early as the 1990s that parties, faced with declining grassroots participation, adapted by turning to state resources and colluding with each other to maintain their position – a model they famously dubbed the “cartel party.” In the cartel-party era, politics becomes more professionalized and self-referential: party leaders focus on managing the system rather than mobilizing new voters, and parties rely on government funding and media spin more than on armies of volunteers. The boundaries between party and state blur, and between party members and non-members blur as well – for example, via primaries or direct communication, parties try to engage supporters as consumers, but without giving them real influence. The net effect, Katz and Mair warned, is a depoliticization of politics: citizens feel less agency, politics turns into a sterile contest of marketing, and anti-system resentment grows. Peter Mair later put it starkly: we are drifting toward “democracy without a demos,” a system emptied of popular participation. He described an ongoing process where party failings lead democracy itself to “adapt” by lowering popular expectations – a vicious cycle in which “parties become steadily weaker, and democracy becomes even more stripped down”. In such a system, voters may still periodically vote, but they no longer feel part of a collective democratic people driving the country’s course.

Empirical data on trust bear out these concerns. A comprehensive global analysis published in British Journal of Political Science found that over the past few decades, trust in representative institutions – legislatures, governments, political parties – has been declining in democracies worldwide. Tellingly, trust in non-political institutions (courts, police, civil service) often remained stable or even rose, indicating a particular crisis of confidence in elected representatives and parties. The United States exemplifies this: surveys show trust in the federal government near historic lows, and only a tiny fraction of Americans express strong confidence in either political party as an institution. Researchers note this decline in trust correlates with the rise of populist movements: when people lose faith in mainstream parties, they become more receptive to anti-establishment leaders who rail against “corrupt elites.” Indeed, the U.S. saw precisely that dynamic: plummeting trust preceded the emergence of a Trump-style insurgency that promised to “dismantle” a failing establishment. Low trust also undermines governance itself, as citizens reluctant to trust authorities might refuse vaccines, ignore public appeals, or embrace conspiracy theories. In sum, a citizenry that doesn’t trust parties or government is a powder keg – it can explode in support for demagogues or simply smolder in apathy, making any kind of collective progress difficult.

What caused the hollowing of parties and this breakdown in social trust? It’s a long story of social and institutional changes. A few key factors stand out:

• The decline of mass organization. Mid-20th-century America featured strong intermediary organizations: not just political parties, but labor unions, ethnic associations, churches, and local civic clubs, many of which tied into party networks. The Democrats in the New Deal era through the 1960s, for example, were bolstered by union halls and urban party machines that actively engaged working-class communities. Over the last few generations, those structures atrophied. Union membership fell dramatically; local party clubs dwindled; machines died out or lost influence. Meanwhile, the new era of television and now the internet made campaigning more about mass media than door-to-door engagement. Campaigns became consultant-driven and capital-intensive, favoring 30-second ads and national messaging over ward-level retail politics. As one analysis of contemporary parties observes, high-cost, professionalized campaigns have “placed parties at a disadvantage” by shifting power to unaccountable campaign committees and consultants. In this environment, party organizations were hollowed from within – they ceded voter contact to paid canvassers and third-party groups, and ceded policy discussion to think tanks and donors. The party “brand” remained, but the living community around it disintegrated in many places.

• Rise of the “para-party” and donor class. Especially from the 1990s onward, big donors and independent political organizations gained clout at the expense of formal party organs. Issue-focused advocacy nonprofits, Super PACs, and billionaire-funded networks stepped in to perform tasks once done by parties: candidate recruitment, voter mobilization, policy development. Schlozman and Rosenfeld call this nebulous complex the “party blob” – a swarm of groups adjacent to parties but not of the party members. These groups often pursue agendas with little input from regular voters and “operate without accountability to public opinion”, even as they claim to speak for the party’s cause. For instance, within the Democratic ecosystem, professional advocacy groups and foundations (what Judis and Teixeira dub the “shadow party”) have pushed the party’s issue focus in directions that sometimes conflict with working-class priorities. Liberal think tanks and donors might champion, say, particular climate or diversity initiatives that, however worthy, get framed in ways that alienate some constituencies – yet because these actors hold the purse strings, their agenda carries weight in Democratic messaging. On the Republican side, donor-driven groups (e.g. the Koch network, Club for Growth) have relentlessly focused the party on tax cuts and deregulation, even when the GOP’s voters might favor more protectionism or welfare benefits. The net effect is that both parties often behave as coalitions of powerful interest groups rather than bottom-up popular coalitions. Notably, this para-party influence erodes parties’ legitimacy in the public eye: people see policies emerging that don’t seem to have broad support, feeding the sense that “special interests” or elites are controlling things behind the scenes. “Hollow parties do not merely enfeeble governments, they endanger democracy,” Schlozman and Rosenfeld warn, precisely because this dynamic breeds public cynicism.

• Hyper-polarization without representation. American politics since the 1990s has grown intensely polarized along party lines – but this polarization is largely elite-led and media-driven, not arising from deeply rooted popular alignment on each side. We have what scholar Julia Azari aptly called “weak parties and strong partisanship.” Voters have sorted into hostile camps (fueled by negative perceptions of the other party), yet the parties themselves are weak vehicles for positive representation. They are “everywhere and nowhere at the same time,” as Schlozman and Rosenfeld put it – omnipresent in national news as brands, but absent on the ground in solving local problems or mediating conflicts. This mismatch leads to a paradox: many Americans feel fiercely loyal to their party identity in a tribal sense, but at the same time feel disconnected from the party organization or leadership. Party leaders are seen as distant talking heads or symbols, not as people one can influence or even trust. The two-party system, by its nature, is supposed to aggregate interests into two broad camps that then compromise internally and respond to public needs. But with hollow parties, we instead see rigid partisan trench warfare at the elite level and fragmented, largely voiceless publics at the base. Congress gridlocks, policies often reflect what donor lobbies want when legislation does move, and ordinary citizens mostly watch this spectacle with frustration. The danger here is that polarization provides an illusion of democratic vitality (“people are passionate!”) while the substance – meaningful participation and responsiveness – fades away. It’s conflict without mediation, heat without light.

• Working-class exclusion and realignment. Perhaps the most consequential facet of elite-mass breakdown is the estrangement of the working class from the Democratic Party, historically the major party that claimed to represent working people. From Franklin D. Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats were broadly seen (with notable exceptions and contradictions, especially around race) as a party of workers – bolstered by unionized industrial labor, urban ethnic working-class communities, etc. That changed in the late 20th century. The civil rights revolution and cultural upheavals of the 1960s–70s initially drove a wedge between Northern Democrats and many white working-class voters (leading to “Reagan Democrats”). Then, in the 1980s and ’90s, the party’s own leadership pivoted in ways that further marginalized working-class influence. As historian Michael Kazin observes, the Democratic elite – epitomized by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) faction – explicitly sought to “free the party from the influence of ‘special interests’—unions, civil rights, women’s, and LGBTQ organizations” in the late 1980s. In DLC parlance, those core New Deal constituencies were rebranded as narrow interest groups, and the party embraced a new identity as pro-business, cosmopolitan, and fiscally “responsible.” Bill Clinton personified this shift: courting Wall Street and Silicon Valley donors, championing NAFTA and financial deregulation, and agreeing to welfare cuts and tough-on-crime measures. The DLC strategy did help win some suburban moderates, but at the cost of severing ties with many working-class communities. Union leaders and activists found themselves sidelined in party decision-making. As the party downplayed labor and pursued “free trade” and globalization, many blue-collar workers felt betrayed – a sentiment Republicans exploited. The Brooklyn Rail’s review of Kazin’s work sums it up: by embracing free trade and deregulation, Democrats “fed growing working-class electoral abstention”, and the party’s voter base narrowed to “urban professionals and managers and the majority of voters of color” – a coalition insufficient for sustained majority power.

The numbers bear out this class realignment. Since the 1990s, Democrats have steadily lost non-college-educated voters to the GOP, and not just in among whites. In 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump (a billionaire populist who at least sounded anti-establishment) made surprising inroads with Latino voters in heavily working-class areas (South Texas, South Florida) and even gained marginally among Black men without college degrees. By 2020, commentators like Ruy Teixeira were warning that the Democrats’ overall working-class vote (all races) was shrinking – a trend confirmed in 2022 and 2024 results. The point is not that Democrats have lost the working class entirely – President Biden, for instance, still won a majority of non-white working-class voters – but that the margin has eroded across the board. As Paul Starr observes, “the erosion Democrats now face in working-class support is not just among whites—it’s across racial and ethnic lines”. This is a sea change from the Obama elections, when Democrats could count on overwhelming margins with non-white working classes to offset losses among white workers. If that multiethnic working-class base frays, Democrats are left primarily with college-educated liberals as their core – a recipe for permanent minority status given the electoral system’s bias toward geographically dispersed non-college voters.

Importantly, working-class people have not only drifted to the GOP; many have drifted out of consistent voting altogether. Decades of neoliberal economic policy (under both parties) devastated industrial regions, and neither party’s establishment effectively rallied to offer a new social contract. Democrats talked about helping the middle class but often prioritized the professional class’s cultural outlook and the donor class’s economic preferences. The result was a lot of disillusionment and “abstention,” as Kazin notes. Large numbers of lower-income Americans simply do not vote in most elections, a stark symptom of exclusion. In practical terms, working-class people have been “reduced to spectators” in the political arena – their role is mostly to watch a television spectacle of red vs. blue and choose the lesser evil every four years (if they bother to vote at all). This passivity is a far cry from the mid-20th century when, say, union members might spend weekends canvassing their neighborhoods for the Democrats, or when local party ward bosses knew families by name and helped them navigate government services in exchange for support. Those intimate links – sometimes machine-clientelism, sometimes altruistic civic organization, but effective at forging loyalty – have vanished. A barren landscape of top-down campaigning remains.

Thus, by the mid-2010s, both major parties had become “elites-only” systems in many respects. The Republicans retained more nominal working-class support (especially among whites) but offered them mostly symbolism and culture-war red meat while pursuing plutocratic economic policies. The Democrats increasingly became the party of urban educated professionals, supplemented by minority voters whose turnout could not always be taken for granted. Social trust in both parties evaporated beyond their hardcore partisans. In 2016, this manifested in a kind of regime crisis: an outsider (Trump) hijacked the GOP apparatus against the will of much of its establishment, and a left-wing insurgent (Bernie Sanders) came shockingly close to upending the Democrats’ frontrunner. Both were signs that many voters – in the GOP base, in the Democratic base – felt no loyalty to or trust in the party hierarchies and were ready to bolt if given an alternative. Trump’s victory in particular highlighted how hollow the Republican Party was: its vaunted discipline and establishment (think Jeb Bush with $100 million in backing) proved no match for a candidate who directly tapped voter anger at “the swamp,” including anger at GOP elites. Meanwhile, Sanders’ strong run showed the depth of discontent among Democratic working-class and young voters with a party seen as too technocratic and status-quo.

To summarize, the devolution of the U.S. party system in the post-FDR era – especially after the 1970s – has featured the collapse of traditional intermediaries, the concentration of political influence in a narrow elite, and the detachment (or exclusion) of the working class from active political power. We see a vicious circle: as parties became less representative and more dominated by money and consultants, they delivered less concretely for average people; as they delivered less and seemed more aloof, trust in parties cratered; as trust fell, parties found it harder to mobilize people except through negative partisanship; and negative partisanship without positive vision only deepens cynicism in the long run. Political scientists have pointed out that “hollow parties… endanger democracy”, and indeed we now confront a democratic crisis – with one party flirting with authoritarianism and the other struggling to command majority support – rooted in this hollowing.

Why Strategy Tweaks Aren’t Enough Without Structural Reform

Given this diagnosis, we can better see why the well-intentioned strategies of abundance, popularism, and deliverism, taken in isolation, might fall short. It’s not that these ideas are bad – in fact each addresses real issues. But they are largely surface-level fixes if the deeper rot of disintermediation isn’t addressed.

Start with the abundance agenda. Its focus is on improving government’s capacity to solve problems (like building more housing or infrastructure faster). That’s undeniably important – effective governance is a public good. However, ask: Who is advocating the abundance agenda, and to whom is it being pitched? Largely, it’s an elite discourse (journalists, think-tankers, some politicians) trying to convince other politically attentive elites that we should loosen regulations and invest in growth. The people most alienated from the Democratic Party – say, a non-college homeowner in a deindustrialized Midwestern town – are not part of this conversation, except perhaps as skeptical onlookers. In fact, some of those voters might hear “deregulate zoning and environmental rules” and think: that sounds like helping developers, not me. The messaging of abundance could easily be co-opted by the GOP (“Democrats want to sidestep environmental protections to ram through solar farms and apartments in your suburban neighborhood”). Without an underlying trust and relationship with communities, a pro-growth agenda might breed backlash rather than enthusiasm. Even Ross Barkan’s sympathetic assessment in New York Magazine flagged that “making government better at building and doing” “isn’t an automatic salve for [Democrats’] woes in the heartland”. In other words, efficiency doesn’t equal emotional connection. The abundance agenda might make policy wonks cheer, but it doesn’t inherently resolve identity and trust gaps. For policies to earn political credit, voters must believe that the party pushing them has their interests at heart. If Democrats are seen as only belatedly trying to build housing after presiding over decades of decline (or if they’re seen as doing it mainly in blue metros for tech workers), the suspicious voter may shrug: “Okay, they built some stuff – probably for someone else, and they probably lined some donors’ pockets in the process.” This cynical lens is hard to break through without a rebuilding of human relationships, not just better policy ideas.

Next, popularism. The idea of aligning the party platform with popular opinion sounds like a straightforward way to win back “middle America.” But consider why Democrats’ image soured with many middle-American voters in the first place. It wasn’t solely because Democrats took a stance on this or that issue. It was also because of a long-term narrative that Democrats care about “someone else” – minorities, immigrants, coastal elites, what have you – and not “people like me.” This narrative was aggressively sold by the right, but Democrats often abetted it by neglecting the symbolic and organizational politics of inclusion. Popularism might tell Democrats to avoid, say, loudly supporting immigration reform since it’s polarizing. Yet if they simply go quiet on it without convincing skeptical voters that they now care about them, it could look manipulative – as if the party is hiding its true intentions. A purely poll-driven approach can feed the very distrust that is the real problem, reinforcing the sense that politicians are inauthentic. Moreover, popularism typically focuses on policy stances and rhetoric, but trust is also about consistency and principle. Voters might not agree with every position of a party, but if they sense that party has core principles and isn’t constantly trimming sails, they may respect it. Democrats in the Clinton era, for instance, won some elections by triangulating, but arguably at the cost of appearing unprincipled – dampening the enthusiasm of their base and feeding the stereotype of politicians who “talk out of both sides of their mouth.”

There’s a concrete example here: Democrats (and many Republicans too) spent years telling voters a balanced budget was a top priority (Clinton even achieved a surplus). Then they pivoted to saying deficits don’t matter when new priorities arose. Or another: Democratic candidates long promised universal health care then settled for a complex market-based half-measure (ACA) that, while policy-popular, confused and disappointed some voters. These zig-zags erode credibility. If popularism leads to a cherry-picking of issues without a coherent values framework, the party may come across as lacking a soul – which is fatal for trust. After all, voters without strong party loyalty often vote on gut feeling about which party “really cares about people like me.” That gut feeling can’t be won by a checklist of popular policies alone.

Deliverism, at face value, goes deeper: it says “earn trust by doing good things people notice.” That addresses a key piece – performance legitimacy. A government that visibly works for citizens can rebuild faith. But deliverism confronts a distribution problem: Who feels the delivery? If the party’s governing successes are not communicated through trusted networks, many voters might not perceive them. Decades ago, if Democrats passed a new Social Security benefit, local party ward leaders and union stewards would spread the word, ensuring seniors in their community knew which party “put money in your pocket.” Today, those intermediaries are weaker. Relying on cable news or presidential tweets to convey achievements is hit-or-miss, given media silos. Reintermediation (rebuilding local party networks) is needed for deliverism to truly register. Dayen’s critique of popularism actually dovetails with this: he pointed out Democrats kept promising but not delivering on things like lower drug prices. Now imagine they finally deliver – say, through a new law letting Medicare negotiate prices. That’s a real win. But will seniors automatically know their insulin is cheaper because of Democrats? Possibly not, unless someone they trust connects those dots. In an era of fragmented media, mere governance results can be unsung. Furthermore, if trust is extremely low, even real accomplishments can be met with disbelief (“They say they did X, but I don’t see it…probably a lie or not for me”).

Consider the recent example of the infrastructure bill of 2021. It funds hundreds of projects across red and blue states alike. Yet polling after its passage showed many Americans either unaware of the law’s benefits or not crediting the administration for them. This isn’t to argue deliverism fails – rather that deliverism must be coupled with a strategy to engage communities. Otherwise, it’s like producing good medicine that patients never end up taking. Without trusted local messengers and a sense of shared purpose, policy successes may not translate into political gain.

Ultimately, all three strategies operate within the existing paradigm of a mostly top-down party trying to persuade voters periodically. They tweak what the party says or does from the top, but not how the party connects with people at the ground level. None of them directly tackles the party’s structural legitimacy problem. Indeed, it’s telling that these debates are largely internal to elite circles – evidence of the very gap we’ve highlighted. As Waleed Shahid observed, Democrats have become “trapped in an increasingly bitter internal fight” between camps (populists vs. abundance advocates) instead of uniting to face outward challenges. And that fight is not purely ideological; it’s powered by insider interests (big donors and party operatives) who find the “abundance” framework a convenient way to dismiss the populist left’s critiques of corporate power. In other words, factional struggles within a hollowed party can become divorced from what ordinary voters actually desire. The risk is that Democrats could adopt an “abundance” message or a “popularist” tempering of language and declare the issue solved – while the average working-class voter out in the Rust Belt still perceives the party as aloof and untrustworthy.

If the elephant in the room – the decades-long decay of social trust and party-community linkage – remains unaddressed, then any new agenda, however cleverly framed, will rest on brittle foundations. To truly “salvage their party’s grip on power” in a sustainable way (to quote Dayen), Democrats will have to do more than adjust policy dials; they will have to rebuild the machine that connects those policies to people. In the final analysis, prescriptions like abundance, popularism, and deliverism are best seen as partial remedies that need to be integrated into a larger project of party renewal and democratic re-engagement. The last part of this essay sketches what that project might look like – essentially, how to reintermediate American politics so that a mass of ordinary citizens, especially the working class, are once again active participants in and owners of their political party, rather than passive spectators of elite debates.

Rebuilding Party-Mass Relations: A Path Forward for Democrats

If hollow parties and a breakdown in elite-mass trust are the root of the malaise, then the cure must be to rebuild robust intermediary institutions – first and foremost, the political party itself as a vehicle of mass participation. For the Democratic Party, this means undertaking intentional reforms and cultural changes to re-include the working class in the party apparatus at all levels. It’s about transforming the party from an electoral machine back into a membership-based coalition of ordinary people. The task is daunting – akin to repairing an airplane mid-flight – but history suggests it’s possible, and increasingly necessary. Political scientists warn that declining trust isn’t inevitable; it correlates with how politics is practiced, and “if it is something about the way democratic politics is practiced that citizens distrust, perhaps those politics need to change” towards “more democratic governance”. In other words, to rebuild trust, make politics more participatory and responsive. Below are several interlocking strategies Democrats could pursue to “reintermediate” and renew their party, thereby enabling the success of agendas (be it abundance or populist economics) that require public buy-in.

1. Embrace a Membership Ethos and Strengthen Grassroots Organization. Nothing will change overnight until the Democratic Party once again has real presence in communities. This means funding and empowering state and county parties to operate year-round, not just as election GOTV machines but as hubs of civic engagement. For example, Democrats could revive Howard Dean’s idea of a 50-state strategy, committing resources even to rural and red areas to maintain a foothold. The Nevada Democratic Party under the late Senator Harry Reid offers an illustrative model: it built a strong party organization with professional staff and extensive volunteer mobilization (often through union partnerships) that persisted beyond individual campaign cycles. That apparatus helped register and turn out voters and respond to local concerns, making Nevada a blue-trending state even when national tides were unfavorable. Democrats should aim to replicate such models. A strong party organization would recruit volunteers from working-class neighborhoods, train them, and support them in doing local outreach – effectively rebuilding social capital under the party’s banner.

To formalize this membership focus, Democrats might consider instituting party membership rolls with nominal dues, as is common in many democracies. Members could then have official roles – for instance, electing local party leaders or delegates to a state convention, voting on platform resolutions, etc. This would give ordinary folks a sense of ownership. As it stands, many Americans who vote Democrat don’t feel they are Democrats in any meaningful way beyond a label on a voter registration card. Changing that means going from a party-as-brand to a party-as-community. It’s notable that even the authors of Hollow Parties, after dissecting the problem, come out unapologetically pro-party – they argue parties can be “democracy’s savior” if revitalized, and explicitly call for reviving “the core functions of parties: grassroots organizing and crafting a positive policy agenda”, rather than abandoning parties or doubling down on purely elite control. In practice, this could involve the DNC reallocating funds: spending less on high-priced TV ads (often run by outside Super PACs anyway) and more on field organizers who recruit local volunteers. It might also require modernizing party structures – for example, using social media and communication tech not just for broadcasting messages, but for facilitating local discussions and feedback loops (imagine moderated online forums for local Democrats to discuss issues with their party officials). The more people feel personally connected to party activity, the more trust can grow.

2. Re-center Labor and Working-Class Voices in Party Decision-Making. To truly include the working class, Democrats must go beyond lip service and give workers institutional power in the party. One straightforward way: formally reconnect with labor unions. Unions remain the largest organized segment of the working class, and although their membership is diminished, they still represent millions of workers. Once, labor leaders held significant sway in Democratic conventions and platforms – the party should invite that back. For instance, state Democratic parties could reserve a certain percentage of DNC seats or committee positions for union representatives, ensuring worker input on party rules and platforms. The party could also incorporate leaders from non-traditional worker organizations (like the Fight for $15 movement, or domestic workers’ alliances) into its councils. The point is to institutionalize a labor presence, so that decisions aren’t made solely by career politicians and donors. In their new book, Judis and Teixeira essentially argue for this kind of reorientation – calling on Democrats to decisively reject the neoliberal posture and become unabashedly pro-worker again. They note, for example, how Wall Street and Silicon Valley came to dominate Democratic economic thinking, crowding out the voices of industrial unions and manufacturing communities. Reversing that means actually listening to those on the shop floor about trade, job creation, wage policy, etc. A concrete move might be reviving something akin to the old Labor Advisory Council at the DNC and giving it teeth to influence policy.

Beyond formal structures, candidate recruitment needs to proactively lift up working-class leaders. Instead of another Ivy League lawyer for Congress, why not back a union assembly line worker or a public school teacher with deep roots in their town? This is not idle fantasy – such candidates can win. (For example, in 2018 a number of public school teachers and labor activists won state legislative seats as Democrats in states like Kentucky and West Virginia, often in districts Democrats hadn’t won in years.) A pipeline program could be created to identify and train working-class candidates, providing them the resources normally available only to those with wealthy networks. When working-class voters see one of their own on the ballot, it builds faith that the party actually values their experience. At a minimum, it undercuts the image of Democrats as a party of technocratic elites.

3. Democratize the Party’s Internal Processes. Part of re-including the base is letting them decide key questions. One historical critique is that Democratic elites often ignore their voters’ wishes – for instance, making backroom decisions that frustrate primary voters (as some felt happened in 2016 with DNC favoritism). To counter that, the party could implement more bottom-up decision-making mechanisms. This could include things like participatory platform development: soliciting input from local party meetings on what issues to prioritize, then actually incorporating that input at the national level. It could also mean reforming the primary process – for example, reducing the influence of unaccountable “superdelegates” (a sore point for the Sanders wing) or conversely, empowering local party caucuses to pre-endorse candidates so that those with genuine grassroots support have an edge. Schlozman and Rosenfeld, in reviewing how to fix hollow parties, caution against purely centrist, top-down solutions like having party bosses retake control of nominations. That could just swap one elite for another. Instead, they, like many party reformers, would advocate changes that encourage more voter engagement in nominations but through the party (rather than via outside influence). For instance, a closed primary system (where only registered party members vote in primaries) might encourage more people to formally register and identify with the party, strengthening the membership concept. It’s a trade-off (open primaries invite independents in, but closed primaries build party identity), and different states may choose different paths, but the key is aligning incentives so that candidates and officials feel accountable to rank-and-file Democrats, not just big donors or media narratives.

Greater transparency can aid this democratization. If people see how decisions are made and can participate, they’re less likely to assume smoke-filled-room conspiracies that breed distrust. The party might hold annual conventions or town halls that are widely accessible (streamed online, interactive) for members to question leaders. Such forums used to be common at the local level; reviving them would signal humility and openness.

4. Curtail the Outsized Role of Big Donors and Consultants. As discussed, one of the causes of disintermediation is the party’s reliance on wealthy donors and external consultants who often shape strategy with minimal input from voters. Addressing this is tough in a system awash in money, but Democrats can take steps. They could, for example, pledge to limit Super PAC interference in their primaries – publicly discouraging those groups from drowning out grassroots candidates. They might also expand the use of small-donor matching funds in primary campaigns (some states have public financing that could be utilized). On the consultant side, the party could invest in building in-house expertise (say, a data operation within the DNC) rather than outsourcing everything to private firms that have their own profit motives. This is admittedly wonky, but it matters: a party that has its own robust voter contact operation, instead of hiring an expensive consulting firm for canvassing, can then redirect funds to field organizers who are accountable to the party’s local chapters. Also, by ending the revolving door where consultants take a huge cut of ad spending (because they get commissions), the party can free up resources for grassroots uses. Schlozman and Rosenfeld note how high-cost campaigning and the rise of “the party blob” handicapped parties; reversing that means intentionally shifting spending priorities and breaking some habits. In effect, Democrats may need an internal movement of reform that says: we will prioritize building a people-powered party over catering to the highest bidder. Some Democratic candidates in recent years have run explicitly anti-big-money campaigns (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren at the presidential level, for instance, or many Justice Democrats at congressional level) – the party as a whole could learn from that playbook by championing campaign finance reform and modeling it internally. If rank-and-file Democrats see their party fighting the influence of billionaires (even left-leaning ones), it could rebuild confidence that this is their instrument, not a plaything of the rich.

5. Synthesize Populism and Abundance – A People’s Program with Results. Reintermediation doesn’t mean abandoning the content of abundance, popularism, or deliverism; rather, it means grounding those ideas in a politics of mass participation and trust. In practice, Democrats should combine the best of the populist and abundance worldviews, as some have suggested, into a compelling narrative – but ensure it’s developed with input from below. Waleed Shahid calls this vision “populist abundance,” which pairs the left’s critique of concentrated economic power with the centrists’ focus on competent governance. Imagine Democrats campaigning on breaking up oligopolies and taxing billionaires (a populist appeal), and using that revenue and reform to build a great abundance of public goods – housing, health clinics, green energy, broadband – that tangibly improve communities (an abundance appeal). This could be very powerful if communicated through trusted community voices. The key is, such a platform must not seem like it’s parachuted from think-tank land; it should emerge from dialogue with the communities affected. For example, if housing affordability is a crisis, a Democratic governor shouldn’t just announce a YIMBY (Yes-In-My-Backyard) law cutting zoning – they should convene town halls in working-class neighborhoods, talk about how high rents hurt everyone except big landlords, and build a coalition including local renters, construction unions (for building more homes), etc. Then the push for more housing construction becomes seen as a pro-working-class campaign, not an edict for developers. This on-the-ground coalition-building is exactly what a reinvigorated party apparatus could facilitate.

Likewise on deliverism: the party could involve citizens in determining what “deliverables” they most want. Instead of assuming from polling that, say, a new bridge is what will win votes, ask communities what projects they desperately need – and involve them in planning and rollout. When people have a hand in shaping a policy, they are far more likely to notice it and appreciate its success. This turns deliverism into a two-way street: government not just dropping gifts from above, but responding to demands from below. In effect, it recreates something akin to the New Deal era, when government works programs were often done in consultation with local officials and groups, and thus communities took pride in the post office or park built in their town. It’s also reminiscent of the Great Society’s early community action programs (though those had mixed results, the idea of engaging communities in their own uplift remains sound).

6. Reframe the Narrative – from “We’ll save you” to “We’ll empower you.” Ultimately, reintermediation requires a shift in how Democrats conceive of politics. Instead of positioning themselves merely as policy experts who will deliver for a passive public, they need to present themselves as organizers and partners of the public. That means using language of empowerment: “We want you to have power – in your workplace, in your community, and in our party.” When was the last time a Democratic leader said something like that? Often the plea is “vote for us and we’ll take care of the rest.” But given the trust deficit, that sounds like “give us power and maybe we’ll get around to you.” What if, instead, Democrats said, “Join us. Be part of us. Let’s build something together.” This almost verges on movement politics, which is what parties used to be at their best. For example, Franklin D. Roosevelt, scion of the elite though he was, spoke the language of empowering the “forgotten man” and welcomed the animosity of economic oligarchs – signaling that the masses mattered more. A modern Democrat could analogously say, “I welcome the anger of Big Tech billionaires if we’re cutting their monopoly power – because I’d rather have the gratitude of the people whose rents and prices will go down.” The party’s messaging could stress democratic participation itself: encouraging voting, yes, but also attendance at local meetings, union drives, protests for just causes – making it clear the party doesn’t want to co-opt or dampen grassroots energy, but channel it. This would contrast sharply with the current image of party leaders often scolding or sidelining activists. To be sure, it requires managing tensions (activists can be too uncompromising at times, and not every protest slogan is electorally helpful), but respect and dialogue can go a long way. If activists and working people feel the party listens, they will also be more open to moderating positions for broader appeal when needed. Right now, factional distrust internally mirrors the public’s distrust externally. A house united – or at least constructively debating – stands a better chance of inviting erstwhile members back in.

7. Patience and Persistence. Finally, Democrats should recognize that rebuilding trust is a long game, one that will likely extend beyond a single election cycle or presidential term. After forty years of what one might call “neoliberal disintermediation,” a few years of re-focusing on the working class won’t instantly restore the Roosevelt coalition. But it’s crucial to start. There may be setbacks – e.g. initial outreach to disaffected communities might not bear fruit immediately, or empowering the base might lead to messy internal fights. Yet the alternative is the continued slide into a hollow, cartelized party system that satisfies no one and yields periodic backlashes. As Steven Michels wrote in his review of Hollow Parties, the 2024 election results (presumably a disappointment or crisis for Democrats, given context) “only reinforce the urgency” of the argument to revitalize parties, showing it is a “timely and compelling call to action for revitalizing American democracy.” The stakes are high: without change, we risk an ever more unstable democracy where large chunks of the populace feel unrepresented and are prone to support authoritarian “outsiders” or conspiracy-laden extremism. Reintermediation is not just a partisan task; it’s a democratic one.

In concrete terms, if Democrats succeed in re-engaging the working class, we would expect to see increased turnout among low-propensity voters, closer margins or even gains in once-solid Republican working-class areas, and a dampening of appeal for demagogic GOP messages (since Democrats would be competing for cultural narratives and local pride, not conceding those). We’d also see a Democratic Party that, when in power, can pass more daring programs – because it has a grassroots base ready to defend and push for them, countering corporate lobbies. This hearkens back to a point often made by historians: major progressive reforms in U.S. history, from the New Deal to civil rights, succeeded not simply because wise leaders in Washington wanted them, but because “insurgent mass movements” demanded them and created the conditions for them. Reforms were then locked in (for a time) by integrating those movements into the party system – though as Kazin and others warn, co-optation without continued mobilization later led to rollback. The lesson is that a party truly aligned with a mobilized working class can achieve great things (e.g. Social Security, labor rights), but if the mobilization dies and the party drifts into elite brokerage, progress stalls or reverses. We are living the latter scenario; the way out is to spark a new mobilization and make the party its ally, not adversary.

Conclusion

Abundance, popularism, and deliverism each offer useful insights for Democratic strategy – highlighting the need for competence, electoral appeal, and credibility respectively. Yet, as we have seen, none of them by itself grapples with the fundamental crisis of our time: the hollowing out of the party system and the collapse of trust between governed and governors. It is this crisis that underlies many of the Democrats’ woes (and indeed, America’s broader democratic malaise). A policy program of “abundance” will flounder if bureaucratic streamlining doesn’t address who benefits and who decides; a “popularist” messaging pivot will ring hollow if people doubt the party’s sincerity or still feel invisible; a record of things delivered may go unappreciated if no trusted messenger connects the dots to citizens’ lived experiences. In short, without rebuilding the intermediary tissue of democracy – the local parties, the participatory channels, the feeling of belonging and voice – these strategies are likely to be smaller bandaids on a deeper wound.

The encouraging news is that recognizing this elephant in the room is the first step to addressing it. If Democrats (and their intellectual allies) turn their attention to party reform and reengagement of the working class, they might find that abundance, popularism, and deliverism can work in synergy. A reintermediated Democratic Party – one with a vibrant grassroots base – would be more capable of formulating an agenda that truly speaks to majority needs (because it’s crafted with input from those people), implementing it effectively (because it has local networks to implement and advertise it), and winning elections on its merits (because people trust the source). It would also help counteract the dangerous trend of anti-system politics. When people are stakeholders in a party, they are less likely to cheer its destruction. Conversely, as one study found, when citizens support democratic ideals but lose faith in institutions, they may back leaders who promise to blow up the system. The way to prevent that is to renew faith by making institutions (like parties) more responsive and inclusive.

In focusing on the United States, we shouldn’t forget the global dimension: many Western democracies face similar predicaments of party dealignment and populist upheaval. The solutions likely involve a similar re-grounding of politics in civic engagement. However, each country’s context differs. In the U.S., the two-party system adds unique challenges – there’s no new labor party emerging to replace a faltering center-left; the task is to reform from within. The U.S. also has the legacy of racism intertwined with class issues, meaning reincluding the working class must be a multi-racial project. The future Democratic coalition, if it is to be both moral and majoritarian, has to unite working people of all races around common material and democratic goals. That’s achievable if the party can demonstrate that identity politics and economic justice aren’t mutually exclusive – by focusing on universal programs and rights that lift all groups while still addressing inequalities. Such a focus, coupled with respect for cultural diversity, could help avoid the pitfalls of both an exclusionary class politics and a divisive identity politics. It’s essentially what Kazin calls a program of universal social reform anchored in moral capitalism, reminiscent of the New Deal coalition (but minus its racist Dixiecrat element). The Democratic Party at its strongest “built broad alliances of working people, across racial/ethnic and gender lines,” Kazin writes of the 1930s and 1960s, achieving great reforms. That is the model to aspire to – updated for today.

Rebuilding that kind of coalition is a tall order, but the alternative is bleak. As Katz and Mair might remind us, if parties do not serve as viable intermediaries, democracy becomes a shell – and into that void, authoritarians and demagogues are happy to step. We have seen warning signs of this in America. The Democratic Party, currently the only major party committed (in rhetoric at least) to inclusive democracy, has a special responsibility to lead by example in reversing the hollowing-out. By reinviting the working class into the halls of power – not as supplicants, but as participants – Democrats can regain the moral and political high ground. They might also restore a modicum of cross-partisan trust: a Republican voter who sees a Democrat out knocking on doors in a hard-hat, talking about jobs, is perhaps less likely to demonize that Democrat than if they only see an attack ad on TV. Bit by bit, humanizing and localizing politics can reduce the “screaming antagonism” that hollow parties have come to symbolize.

To conclude, abundance, popularism, and deliverism all have something to contribute, but the foundation of any successful strategy is trust and inclusion. The Democrats cannot technocrat or sloganize their way out of a social legitimacy crisis. They must do the harder work of institution-building and movement-building. It is heartening that some thinkers within the party’s orbit are reaching this conclusion – that the party’s “disordered present” can only be fixed by learning from the “many pasts” when parties did function as instruments of democracy. The Democratic Party has reinvented itself before (from the machine-ridden party of the Gilded Age, to the progressive reforms of Wilson and FDR, to the civil rights turn of the 1960s). Each reinvention involved responding to social demands and broadening its base of support (even if temporarily). Today’s challenge is similar: it requires an intervention to shock the party out of its consultant-complacency and rebuild its alliance with America’s working majority. The stakes could not be higher: the “continued appeal of Trumpism” and the victories of right-populists abroad, as Kazin observes, show that if the left/center-left cannot reconnect with workers, others will fill that void – often to the detriment of democracy. Reinclusion of the working class in the party is not just a nice-to-have; it is the sine qua non for defeating anti-democratic extremism.

In the end, a party that truly intermediates – that links leaders and citizens in a shared project – can harness both expertise and energy to govern better. It can formulate bold policies (an abundance of goods, a crackdown on plutocracy, etc.) and actually implement them with public support. It can, to paraphrase a famous union slogan, “build back better” together with those it represents. That, more than any clever messaging tweak or policy white paper, is what will “chart the path out of our present catastrophe.” By confronting the hollowing of American democracy head-on and making the hard changes to become a mass-based party once again, the Democratic Party can renew itself – and with it, help renew the promise of American democracy for a new generation. As one party scholar put it decades ago, “Democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties”. If that’s true, then reviving democracy requires reviving parties as instruments of the people. For the Democrats, that means embracing the working class not just in rhetoric but in the very structure and soul of the party. Anything less will leave the elephant in the room unaddressed – and the party’s well-laid plans likely trampled once again by the harsh realities of mistrust and alienation.

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Sources:

• Schlozman, D., & Rosenfeld, S. (2019). Can America Govern Itself? – Chapter “The Hollow Parties” (summary), as discussed in Michels, S. (2025) VoegelinView review.

• Mair, P. (2005). “Democracy Beyond Parties” – Center for the Study of Democracy, UC Irvine (working paper).

• University of Southampton (2025). “Trust in democratic institutions declining around the world” – summarizing Valgarðsson, V. et al., British J. of Political Science.

• Katz, R. S., & Mair, P. (1995; 2018). “The Cartel Party” – theory summarized on Wikipedia .

• Dayen, D. (2021). “The Case for Deliverism” – The American Prospect.

• Shahid, W. (2025). “The Abundance Debate Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.” – The Nation.

• Barkan, R. (2025). “There’s a New War Among the Liberal Intelligentsia” – New York Magazine (Intelligencer).

• Starr, P. (2024). “It’s the Working Class, Stupid” – The American Prospect (reviewing Judis & Teixeira).

• Kazin, M. (2022). What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party – discussed in Brooklyn Rail review by C. Maisano.

• Abbott, J. (2024). “Class Dealignment Is the Defining Political Challenge of Our Time” – Jacobin (Catalyst journal) (noting multi-racial working-class erosion).

• Additional supporting data from Pew Research, election analyses, and historical accounts as cited in the above sources.