Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 25 books, including the New York Times best-seller, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past” (Basic Books). Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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There was good reason for Democrats to cheer President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. The president embraced the kind of economic populism that Democrats have traditionally championed and provided a welcome antidote to the cultural red meat that the GOP likes to throw at working and middle class America as a way to soft-pedal the fact that their supply-side economic agenda actually tends to disproportionately benefit higher income Americans.
On Tuesday, Biden empathized with workers struggling to make ends meet, spoke about restoring “pride in what we do,” and touted his vision of building “an economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down.”
Democrats have a long tradition of deploying this agenda effectively. President Franklin Roosevelt remade American politics and built a durable New Deal coalition around economic programs and agencies, which included unemployment insurance, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought jobs and electricity to rural areas in the South, and public works spending that bolstered a vibrant middle-class even after he was gone.
His Democratic successors continued this tradition, with great political success. President Harry Truman built on Roosevelt’s programs as part of his Fair Deal and ended up defying the polls in his dramatic reelection campaign in 1948 against New York Governor Thomas Dewey.
President Lyndon Johnson offered a full menu of economic support to working Americans, including Medicare and federal spending on education, as part of his Great Society. His landslide victory against the Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona in 1964 revolved around eviscerating his opponent’s opposition to core programs like Social Security that working families counted on. In his superb history of the Democratic Party, Georgetown historian Michael Kazin documented how the…
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