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“Why did it take them so long?” ask Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld today in the NYR Online. With low approval ratings and rumors “of afternoon naps and vacant stares” dogging the elderly President Biden for months, why did Democratic party leaders wait until late July to make a concerted push for a new candidate?

Schlozman and Rosenfeld argue that for more than a hundred years, starting with Martin Van Buren’s Albany machine, the national political parties were the kingmakers, selecting candidates and swapping out unpopular incumbents. But over the course of the twentieth century, two developments—“the presidentialization of American politics” and “the hollowing out of the Democratic Party’s organizing capacity”—have often left the Democrats rudderless. “The whole episode,” Schlozman and Rosenfeld ruefully observe of the 2020 nomination contest, “was marked by tardiness, contingency, and a seat-of-the-pants frenzy that belies any notion of strong party control.”

Below, alongside Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about the party of Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, Hubert Humphrey, Franklin Roosevelt, James Buchanan, and Andrew Jackson.

Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld
Late to the Party

In the aftermath of this summer’s scramble to replace Joe Biden, Democrats will have to confront why they have such trouble thinking and acting as a party—even when it matters most.

Russell Baker
The Heights of Charm

“Though all his medical advice indicated the job might kill him, he had grown into it. It was what he did and who he was. His love for it was so obvious that millions would have cried out in disbelief if told that he was quitting. That Roosevelt would still be president after eternity ended had become a national joke. He couldn’t resist just one more campaign, could he? Especially when he had persuaded himself that he was the party’s only plausible candidate.”

—September 29, 2016

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
The Ages of Jackson

“If the frontier was the force driving the Jacksonian upheaval, how to account for the preoccupation in the pamphlet literature by Jackson’s supporters with problems of a commercial society—with monopoly, with banking, with the business cycle, with the unequal distribution of the fruits of labor, with workingmen, with trade unions, with class conflict? How to account for the hatred the business community showed for Jackson and his works?”

—December 7, 1989

Garry Wills
The Party Isn’t Over

“In 1968 Senator Thurmond saw his Dixiecrat threat of 1948 finally vindicated. In 1976, not even Jimmy Carter could win a majority of white votes in the South. And remember that Carter was not some study-group liberal planted in the South, like Terry Sanford or Reuben Askew. He was a rural reborn authentic Southerner in all ways but one—racism. If he can’t carry the white South, what Democrat can? Jerry Brown? And if the party does not carry the South, the anomaly persists.”

—June 15, 1978

Irvin Ehrenpreis
Buchanan Redux

“Buchanan’s great accomplishment as president was to relieve Lincoln of the burden of provoking the Civil War. He preserved the union just long enough for it to dissolve the month after Lincoln’s inauguration, but he never discovered policies that would inch the government away from a bestial trial by fury. At a moment when this country wanted the most exalted leadership, Buchanan offered a reasoned submission to the will of Congress, a pious adherence to the Constitution (strictly interpreted), and a determination to shoulder as little blame as possible for the violence about to erupt.”

—August 8, 1974

I. F. Stone
Who Are the Democrats?

“Harry Truman was an unsuccessful haberdasher while Humphrey has been stigmatized, somewhat snobbishly, because of his family business, as ‘a drugstore liberal.’ On the eve of a new nominating convention, it may be useful to recall that the great heroes of the party of the common man have not been of lowly origin…. All the Democratic revolutionaries—as their fond followers hailed them—were men of comfortable fortune and privileged position. Jefferson and Roosevelt were landed aristocrats; Jackson—the only one of them born in poverty—amassed a fortune in land and slaves, in shrewd alliance with the haves against the have-nots of the frontier.”

—August 22, 1968

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