A history of the Democratic Party offers lessons for leaders today

What It Took to Win. By Michael Kazin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 416 pages; $35

EVEN MORE than those in most other democracies, America’s political parties must cater to a daunting range of people and priorities. With just two big ones competing for around 170m votes, rafts of unrelated policies are inevitably bound together. These days, for Republicans, touchstone issues include abortion and low taxes; for Democrats, gun control and squeezing the rich. In the latter case, the tensions that always arise in such eclectic coalitions are exacerbated by the history of the party—one of the world’s oldest. The trouble goes back to the beginning. Tracing their intellectual roots to Thomas Jefferson, Democrats now venerate Alexander Hamilton, his arch-rival.

In his fine new book, Michael Kazin, a left-leaning historian at Georgetown University, makes an ambitious attempt to hone a unified theory of the Democratic Party’s 194-year record. Its fortunes have followed a simple formula, he argues. Democrats have succeeded by appealing to the economic interests of a broad majority of the American people, developing and offering a philosophy that Mr Kazin calls “moral capitalism”. When they have neglected to do so, concentrating instead on cultural issues, they have failed. As he charts the party’s ideological twists and turns, the author stretches his concept of moral capitalism to take in disparate ideas—much as politicians themselves do with their slogans. Nevertheless, his account holds lessons for politics today.