The Democratic Party's Only Path Forward
Joe Biden has the right idea, but we have to acknowledge that it's a departure from the party's recent history.
Jonathan Chait has written a very interesting deep dive for New York Magazine on what's ailing the Democratic Party. I think he gets a lot of the dynamic right, but he botches the role that party leadership has played in creating the mess. Today's Democratic Party is the Democratic Party that its leaders have consistently pursued for decades, and it just isn't competitive at the national level absent a horror show on the right (and even then … they lose a lot). The good news is that President Joe Biden actually wants to change that tradition. The bad news is that a handful of elected Democrats do not.
The whole piece is worth your time, but here's a snapshot of Chait’s argument: Biden is caught between two wings of his party that are each obsessed with a different set of extremely unpopular stuff. These warring factions -- most egregiously, the clique of Senators who jump at every opportunity to help the super rich and large corporations -- are damaging the party's brand and preventing Biden from passing a slate of sensible, popular stuff to help heal the country, get Democrats re-elected and fend off the authoritarian right.
That bit strikes me as mostly correct. Chait's story of how we got here, however, is wrong. In his telling, the trouble began in 2012 when Democrats overreacted to some bad exit polling that suggested President Barack Obama had prevailed over Mitt Romney by turning out new, young voters of color, even as Obama lost ground with older white voters. The entire Democratic superstructure, Chait contends, seized on this new theory of change and suddenly lurched left, hoping to activate young voters of color. But the polling was bad, and it turns out that Obama had actually done really well with older white voters, and all of this lefty base-boosting alienated those same older white voters. Trump's victory in 2016 couldn't make Democrats change their radical new ways, and a massive apparatus of Big Foundations is still perpetuating the mess, financing campaigns on criminal justice and immigration that killed Democrats at the polls. All of this got supercharged by the George Floyd protests and slogans like Defund the Police, which left helpless, practical Joe Biden with a razor-thin margin of victory in an election that should have been a knockout.
The trouble with this story is not just that it's wrong, but that it's irrelevant to Chait's argument about what is actually holding up Biden's agenda on Capitol Hill. There he targets exactly the right villains: a handful of Democratic lawmakers who for whatever reason really, really like doing favors for rich people. There are of course plenty of activists and celebrities out there advocating for unpopular things, but that really has nothing to do with Kyrsten Sinema trying to kill prescription drug price reform. Sinema is doing that because she is weird and corrupt, not because progressive activists have left her with no choice.
Sinema, unfortunately, is the living embodiment of the Democratic Party leadership's efforts over the past 20 years. She was recruited by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to run for an open Senate seat, hand-picked over more progressive alternatives. She has a 100 percent career rating from Planned Parenthood, is openly bisexual, and votes consistently to help big banks rip people off. On economic policy, she veers right, on social issues, she often tacks left. That is not a novel combination in Democratic politics inspired by a wacky exit poll. It’s what the party has been doing my entire life. It's Hillary Clinton asking a crowd sarcastically in 2016: "If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?" It's Barack Obama cribbing his health care reform plan from the Heritage Foundation and keeping 82 percent of the George W. Bush tax cuts. It's 16 Senate Democrats voting for Trump's bank deregulation bill, and Nancy Pelosi spending 16 years railing against the insanity of U.S. prescription drug price policy without doing anything about it (but making time to kneel in a kente cloth stole to honor George Floyd).
In short, what Chait describes as a push and pull between silly, ultrawoke activists and stupid, corrupt jerks is really a single political strategy. For a long time, Democrats tried to keep rich people hanging around with economic policy while trying to keep lefties in line with social policy and appeals to identity. Democratic leadership has not, as Chait claims, focused exclusively on turning out ultra-liberal voters of color in a battle of the bases. It has instead focused on expanding its footprint with affluent suburban voters.
Targeting those voters was not entirely a mistake. Democrats need a formula that works with both liberals and moderates, and suburban votes count just as much as any others. The problem, which Chait recognizes, is that Democrats have been consistently broadcasting the party's least popular material. For better and for worse, most voters are more socially conservative than progressive activists, and most voters are more economically liberal than Chuck Schumer, let alone Kyrsten Sinema. The polling has been consistent for years.
Joe Biden figured this out after his party's disappointing performance in 2020, and adjusted his strategy accordingly. He's now pushing a big, bold economic program aimed at helping 99 percent of the country (sound familiar?) and generally avoiding explicit discussions of race and gender.
But that isn't really what he ran on in 2020. Go back and watch the speeches at the Democratic National Convention. Barack Obama admonished voters for thinking that democracy implied a "transactional" relationship with politicians ("you give me your vote, I make everything better"). Biden went on and on about "character" and "decency." "Compassion is on the ballot," he said. "Decency, science, democracy -- they're all on the ballot." This was not a campaign that went out of its way to highlight the economic needs of ordinary Americans. Its dominant features were appeals to the moral excellence of people who were already planning to vote Democrat.
The important point here is that as president, Biden has changed the Democratic Party for the better. He isn’t repeating the same mistakes of the last 20 years. Chait is right to maintain that Biden remains a centrist, but what it means to be a centrist today is not what it meant a few years ago. Groups like Third Way -- once the neoliberal scourge of Democratic Party politics -- are now emphasizing the need for robust investment in public goods and family support.
Chait spends a lot of time making fun of Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign, but he neglects to mention that she and Bernie Sanders are playing important roles crafting Biden's agenda and selecting his nominees. The party is finally figuring out what Warren and Sanders understood from the outset of the 2008 financial crisis: Everyone in the Democrats' pool of persuadable voters wants a more liberal economic agenda -- Black, white, Latino, Asian, suburban, urban, rural, whatever. This is one reason why "more liberal" economic ideas don't code as liberal priorities with moderate voters -- they're the popular consensus of the country at large.
And the good news is that almost everyone in the party is on board with Biden’s economic project. Even the left is generally keeping quiet about its complaints with Biden's immigration policy and criminal justice agenda to focus on getting some economic wins.
But that truce won't last forever. If a handful of corporate cranks in the Senate dictate (or just destroy) Biden's economic program, the left will return to organizing around other issues, concluding that the Democratic Party is not an effective vehicle for its ideas. That may or may not be a smart strategy for activists, but there will always be people trying to change the world whose priorities do not align with the short-term interests of a particular political party. If Democrats can't deliver the economic goods before 2024, they'll lose. If they can, then American democracy has a fighting chance. There is no path forward for the party that doesn't involve the reinvigoration of New Deal economics.