Political media has a bias toward covering the powerful and, at the moment, Democrats are anything but powerful. The intramural debate over how Democrats should navigate the post-Obama environment is, however, far livelier than the press’s utter indifference would suggest.
The partisan liberals engaged in deliberations over how the Democratic Party will evolve in the age of Trump have settled into two camps: those who think the party has to change and those who don’t. This observation can only be made from the proper remove, it seems. Both the progressive wing and its triangulating centrists are dead certain that the other guy is in full control of the party they call home.
In the opinion pages of the New York Times, Democratic strategist Mark Penn and Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein offer up a rallying cry for those in the “change” camp. They argue that the party must adapt to a political environment in which their voters are being poached by a GOP that is no longer a monolithically conservative party. The authors claim that this mission will only succeed if Democrats abandon the hardline progressivism that typified the party in the Obama years.
Their argument takes aim at identity liberalism and the leftist activists who dominate the caucus process. They contend that Democrats need to combat campus speech policing, shun free trade, demonstrate renewed respect for Christians, and embrace fiscal responsibility over profligacy. Only by resurrecting the spirit of the Democratic Leadership Council can Democrats wash the stink off their party’s brand.
This salvo was aimed squarely at modern liberal orthodoxy, and progressivism’s patriarchs recognize heresy when they see it. “Papa needs a new contract!” mocked MSNBC host Joy Reid. “Rolling out Mark Penn to voice the last dying screeches of the Clintonite center-left is fitting,” said The Young Turks correspondent Mark Tracey. “Thank you, Mark Penn, for giving liberals [and] leftists something to unite over,” wrote liberal author Jill Filipovic. “That Dems should do none of this.”
It is hardly surprising that progressives would resist a total repudiation of the progressive program. They believe themselves to be the perpetual opposition within a party that already thinks like Penn and Stein suggest it should. “The current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure,” declared Bernie Sanders. The irony of this coming from the Democratic Party’s chief attraction—a septuagenarian who pointedly refuses to call himself a Democrat—is under-appreciated.
Sanders’s model appeals to what the New York Times dubbed the party’s “ascendant militant wing.” That is not an agenda for the middle of the country but for the coasts and urban enclaves, which can theoretically overwhelm the GOP’s suburban vote. That agenda can be summed up in one word: spending. Universal, state-funded health care; free college tuition; tax “speculation” on Wall Street; expand access to Social Security; cure diseases like HIV/AIDS; and “climate justice toward a sustainable economy,” whatever that means.
This tension between the party’s two halves has been out in the open for months. It led to real and sustained conflict in battles ranging from the fight over the next chair of the Democratic National Committee to special election primaries. It was evident in the party’s efforts to mimic the GOP, from former Governor Steve Beshear’s folksy response to Donald Trump’s address to Congress to Democrats unprecedented and reflexive hostility toward even innocuous Trump appointments.
Following a dispiriting loss in Georgia, Democratic elected officials briefly resolved to do something—anything—to demonstrate that their party was receptive to the electorates’ repeated votes of no confidence. That sentiment was short lived. The Democratic Party’s approach to the Trump environment was perhaps best summarized by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s latest attempt at a slogan: “I mean, have you seen the other guys?”
America’s two political parties have endured feast and famine before and emerged stronger for it. The Democrats present identity crisis isn’t exactly unknown territory, but that should be cold comfort.
In October of 1982, the Democratic Party appeared hollow and its program stale. “Of a sudden,” wrote Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1980, “the GOP has become the party of ideas.” That year, the GOP won the White House, 34 seats in the House, and 12 in the Senate. With a month to go before Reagan’s first midterm and despite a stalled economic recovery and mounting unemployment, Democrats were still anxious about their failure to meet the moment.
“We’re still the party of Tip O’Neill and Jimmy Carter,” said the depressed Democratic consultant Joe Rothstein. Washington Post editor Robert Kaiser observed that the Democratic Party, once the party of the little guy, had become captured by lawyers, corporatists, and “activist minorities.” Democrats rebounded some in November of that year, but they did not fully recover in Congress until Reagan’s second midterm election.
The early 1980s represented a period of political realignment, but that was only obvious in retrospect. And Democrats did eventually meet that moment, but it took a decade and the emergence of a Southern, centrist governor to do it.
Were the GOP’s victories in the Obama years merely a reaction to his presidency, or has the earth shifted under Democratic feet? Democrats haven’t even asked the question. Perhaps they don’t want to know the answer.
