Fusionism Has Never Worked. Democrats Keep Trying Anyway

New York mayoral races have a way of dominating national politics like few other contests, but Zohran Mamdani’s upset win in the Democratic primary back in late June has truly taken center stage. Mamdani, just 33 years old, has had a short tenure as a Democratic Socialist state assemblyman for Queens. Since the Democratic candidate’s win, a four-way race has emerged: the incumbent Eric Adams is running as an independent, as is Andrew Cuomo, while perennial mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa is running on the Republican ticket. 

Cuomo has no clear path to victory. He and Adams will split votes between each other. Despite this, the disgraced former governor is still determined to beat Mamdani and get back into power. It recently emerged that Trump and Cuomo had spoken over the phone about the race. What the two men discussed is unknown, but Trump has publicly threatened to deport Mamdani if he wins. 

If true, it’s seriously ironic: Cuomo spent much of Trump’s first administration purporting to be the leader of the anti-Trump resistance. In a recent leaked recording, however, he admitted his belief that Trump will encourage Republicans to vote for him. Meanwhile, New York’s establishment Democrats Governor Kathy Hochul, Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have yet to endorse the young Democratic candidate.

What exactly is going on in the Democratic Party? In a race that has captured so much attention and which has generated popular, enthusiastic grassroots support for a candidate, elected Democrats appear intensely divided over a popular candidate who resoundingly won their party’s nomination. Much of that division comes from Mamdani’s support for Palestine, an issue where elected Democrats are out of step with their own constituents. Gaza is currently one major issue — not the only one, but certainly a big one — that is splitting the Democratic Party. Yet elected officials are acting as if they’re trying to pinpoint which issues are important to their voters, when in actuality they’re the ones struggling with the complicated fact that many of the policies important to their constituents are anathema to Democratic leadership. At its core, this is a battle over fusionism, a political strategy from the late 19th century that sought to unite various disenfranchised groups (in the mid-20th century, it would come to refer to the fusion of the libertarian right with the traditionalist right). Political outsiders such as Mamdani are trying to work with the Democratic Party even as many in the party leadership reject their views. One side wants to shift the party’s political priorities; the other side wants to keep them well away.

This isn’t the first fight over political fusionism the Democratic party has undergone. One of the best ways to understand this conflict over the party’s identity is to examine the Gilded Age and the 1890s. Just as now, many voters felt abandoned or ignored by both the Democrats and Republicans. The two big parties in turn were threatened by the rise of third parties, which offered different policies altogether. The choice of whether to work with and ultimately assimilate these third parties or to reject them in order to cling to power shaped that era’s politics — and can hint at what may happen today.

Political stalemate, which became so familiar for Americans beginning in the 2010s would have been very familiar to Americans during the Gilded Age. The Democratic and Republican parties were nearly equal in power from the 1870s through the 1890s, with the Republicans usually controlling the presidency and Senate, and the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives. Republicans’ chief issues were business oriented: They sought to impose a high tariff to protect manufacturers and use government to foster growth, mostly by giving away public lands. Democrats generally pursued lower taxation and smaller government, almost comically so: President Grover Cleveland used his veto to block an act that would have awarded a pension to one Civil War veteran.

In many ways, what the parties wanted is less significant than what they ignored. After the Compromise of 1877 which ended Reconstruction and withdrew federal troops from the South in exchange for Southern electors handing the presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes, neither party paid serious attention to civil rights, nor did either party offer meaningful support to labor unions. Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes called out the army on striking workers in 1877, and Democrat President Cleveland did the same in 1893. Running any kind of a deficit was seen as a moral failing by both parties. Republicans eschewed business regulation because they felt that it was unfair, while Democrats avoided taking on extra responsibilities for the federal government. And both parties supported the gold standard. 

Pegging the value of the dollar to gold was deflationary, which was great if you had capital but punishing if you had any kind of debt, like a mortgage. It also kept prices low, which was painful if you depended on selling things for a living. And of course, there was corruption and bad governance. Senators were still elected by state legislatures. But bribes paid directly to representatives could often purchase a senate seat.

Which meant that issues important to their constituents were often roundly ignored — and voters felt it. Because of this, third parties centered around specific issues that proliferated during the Gilded Age like the Prohibition Party, organized in 1869 to end the sale of alcohol. Bimetallism became the signature organizing issue, however: people wanted to end the gold standard and enlarge the money supply.  Farmers were the initial catalyst for change, initially organizing support movements like the Grange, a fraternal order organized in Minnesota in 1867, to help farmers form rural cooperatives. It became a national group within a decade. They also endorsed political objectives like electing senators and regulating the railroads. 

Forming political parties was the next step: The Greenback Party, named for the paper dollars used by the Union during the Civil War adopted many of the positions of the Grange movement, but their big issue was abandoning the gold standard. They wanted fiat currency that would raise prices and ease the burdens on those in debt, of whom many were farmers. Formally organized in 1874, it sent several people to Congress and was influential in state and local governments. Though their strength waned in the 1880s, they became an early voice for rural voters who felt ignored by Democrats and Republicans. The Farmers’ Alliance, while not a formal political party, also mobilized farmers in different parts of the country. Urban workers formed several different Workingman’s Parties and the Union Labor Party, the latter of which won a congressional seat in 1886. Their parties were small and comprised a mix of disaffected Democrats and Republicans, but they signaled a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo.

It took the Panic of 1893 to bring third parties to the forefront of politics. Hundreds of banks failed and railroad companies collapsed, and with no FDIC, people lost everything. And it drove unemployment as high as 19 percent nationally. The Democratic Party, recently returned to power in President Cleveland’s second term, found itself split over how to respond. Cleveland was a strong believer in the gold standard and refused to consider purchasing silver to increase the money supply. More than 100,000 railroad workers went on strike in 1894 to protest pay cuts. In response, Cleveland dispatched federal troops to brutally crush the strikes. Cleveland’s faction of Democrats, nicknamed “Bourbon Democrats,” became wildly unpopular.

This set the stage for the People’s Party, better known as the Populists. Many Greenbacks joined the Populists as did members of the Union Labor Party, among others. Formally organized in 1892, they did well in that year’s election, carrying electoral votes in Kansas, Colorado, and elsewhere. They were a wild mix of opinions and positions. Some of their positions, such as nationalization of the railroads, were radical and transformative. Many supported women’s suffrage. Kansas firebrand Mary Elizabeth Lease accused Wall Street of transforming the whole country into “wage slaves.” Some of them were deeply anti-urban, viewing rural America as the “true” America. Many Populists had conservative Protestant leanings, including supporting the prohibition of alcohol. 

The Panic of 1893 made the Populists particularly enticing just as the Democrats were foundering: The party lost 105 seats in the House in 1894, the single largest loss ever. This led the Populists into a moment of great opportunity but also of profound division: Should the party try to fuse with the Democrats, or remain separate? 

Ultimately, a majority of the party chose to unite with the Democrats for the 1896 election: William Jennings Bryan was selected as candidate, first by the Democrats and then nominated as the Populist candidate. Bryan was a fiery speaker who cast bi-metallism in moral terms, thundering in his acceptance speech at the convention that “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” He campaigned furiously against the Republican candidate, William McKinley, around whom the business community rallied. Business leaders promised doom should Bryan be elected.

In the end, the Democrat-Populist ticket was defeated. William Jennings Bryan avoided cities in favor of the countryside, capturing the rural Midwest and the South but failing to make inroads elsewhere. At a time when Catholics and Protestants were still deeply divided (and American anti-Catholicism was still strong), Bryan’s Protestantism and embrace of prohibitionism alienated European ethnic voters such as German-Americans.

This sounds like a disaster: The Democrats didn’t get what they wanted, the Republicans got their tariff and control of the presidency for the next 16 years. Bryan ran two more times  with even worse results. 

But was it a defeat? At a national level, Democrats basically adopted the positions of the Populists, who, as a party, never recovered from this, but the political objectives they had adopted entered the mainstream. The direct election of senators was made legal by the 17th Amendment; a federal income tax was ratified by the 16th Amendment. Unions eventually became a more significant constituency in the party, drawn by Democratic endorsements of eight-hour workdays. 

Even progressive politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, who disdained the anti-urban and anti-business attitudes of the Populists nevertheless endorsed many of their ideas. Mary Elizabeth Lease eventually forsook the Populists for fusionism but later felt that it had been a success: “In these later years I have seen, with gratification, that my work in the good old Populist days was not in vain … Note the list of reforms which we advocated which are coming into reality. Direct election of senators is assured. Public utilities are gradually being removed from the hands of the few and placed under the control of the people who use them. Women suffrage is now almost a national issue …”

In the South, a different dynamic played out, and it illustrates exactly how threatening fusionism can be to established status quos. In the South, the Democratic Party was dominant and its members were mostly Bourbon Democrats. The Populists, seeking a foothold and unable to align with these Democrats over issues such as bi-metallism or business regulation, instead tried forming an alliance with Republicans, who, in the South, were African Americans, many of whom had not yet been disenfranchised or subjected to Jim Crow. 

In 1896, Populist-Republican fusionists actually took control of the state government in North Carolina — and then the backlash began. The Solid South as it was known had been cracked open and the threat to the status quo had been made clear. Democrats recommitted themselves to white supremacy, and through violence, corruption, and aggressive campaigning drove Populists from government a few years later. 

What does this mean for Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Party today? Unlike William Jennings Bryan, Mamdani is almost assuredly going to win in November. But his success is due to proposing bold solutions to problems neither Democrats nor Republicans will face: a focus on housing, an issue that resonates throughout the country. 

At a time when elected Democrats are actually more unpopular than elected Republicans, Mamdani has captured the zeitgeist by zeroing in on the cost of living. Tackling it involves potentially uncomfortable solutions for establishment Democrats, like raising taxes and endorsing rent stabilization. And yet, there is a faction of Democrats who are bitterly determined to fight this. Unlike in 1896, today’s Democrats have not been discredited the way that Bourbon Democrats were, even as they alienate many of the most vocal members of the party — they still think that they can control the party’s overall orientation and leadership. Some, such as Cuomo, are doing it in an attempt to get back in office.

But for someone like political strategist James Carville, it’s about a refusal to abandon decades-old policies that no longer resonate. Cuomo and Carville are our present-day Bourbon Democrats whose time has passed. That may be the most dangerous thing here: Facing their own electoral irrelevance, will Democrats make create tacit alliances with Trump to try and game the system for their own advantage?

Cynics might scoff at what a mayor of New York can hope to do against an obviously fascist government. That misses the point. Meaningful opposition in this country has to gather around policies and platforms that will make people’s lives better. Mere opposition to Trump and an appeal to norms or “going back to normal” isn’t enough to get people off the sidelines. That is the real power of the mayor’s race in New York.