“It’s Party Time”: The New Party and Progressive Politics in the 1990s

This paper traces the history of the New Party, an effort to build an electorally competitive progressive political party in the 1990s, and argues that local politics remained a crucial site of opportunity for progressive politics and policymaking in the late twentieth century. As the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) solidified its control over the Democratic Party in the late 1980s/early 1990s, activists from various movements looked for alternative mechanisms for pursuing their policy agendas, including state-level electoral coalitions (as promoted by Citizen Action) and independent party building. One of the more successful party-building efforts, the New Party pursued both a legal strategy - challenging state-level bans on cross-endorsement or “fusion” - and local party-building in more than a dozen metropolitan areas across the United States.

This paper focuses on two of its most successful projects. In Chicago and in central Arkansas, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) staff and members worked with union locals and various issue organizations to build the New Party through grassroots engagement of a multiracial working class, practicing what George Derek Musgrove and Hasan Kwame Jeffries call “freedom politics.” Despite prodigious institutional barriers and inevitable internal tensions, these New Party projects achieved significant local victories and offered an important model for progressive political success that continued to shape local progressive politics into the twenty-first century.