Or, sinking while the music plays
Getting Democrats to think outside the box is one helluva challenge. Unless you are selling some silver-bullet campaign tech. The wise ones on the Hill are still convinced kitchen table issues are what motivate voters. What you regularly see on the ground is Democrats’ attachment for doing what they’ve always done no matter how many times they lose doing it. Among the elite, there is a fixed way of thinking about politics that has not kept up with reality.
Brian Beutler addressed that problem this week as a difference between how Dempcrats and Republicans conceive of their roles, writing, “At bottom, I think the explanation is that the right has imagined itself as an insurgent force in American politics and the center-left has accepted its incumbency, or the inevitability of progress on a long-enough time scale.” It’s why Democrats sometimes seem so slow to respond to crisis:
Since the New Deal, through eras of ascendency and retreat, Democrats have sought political power almost exclusively as a means of modifying and expanding the terms of a social contract for Americans. They are driven by the pursuit of ideological goals and interest group demands, nearly all of which entail passing significant pieces of legislation. Their presidents view their own legacies as synonymous with how much they can get done on that front, and how well it stacks up to what FDR managed to achieve. If not FDR, then LBJ; if not LBJ, then Barack Obama. Be like them, and not only will history remember you fondly, but your party will thrive as the public rallies to the side of solidary leaders.
They have also, rightly and wrongly, projected mirror-image ambitions on to their opponents, imagining the great pendulum swings of politics as a tit-for-tat between common-good liberals and libertarian-minded conservatives; a world where the Republican ideal of political greatness runs through the Reaganesque devolution of the welfare state and other institutions of collective power.
It’s a pleasingly symmetrical model, and there have been times when it resembled reality, but I think it’s mostly wrong, and completely outmoded today. FDR was a rare leader, but it’s reductionist in the extreme to attribute the durability of Democratic power after he died entirely to the way he governed, rather than, say, to the fact that the Democratic coalition included segregationists who rigged elections for themselves. Reagan really did preside over a hollowing-out of the New Deal, but the New-Deal coalition was already in tatters by the 1980s, and it’s incorrect to think of Reagan’s “success” in purely fiscal terms. Even then, Republicans viewed fleeting control over the federal government as an opportunity to undermine Democratic power centers, to structurally weaken their opponents.
If anything’s changed it’s the level of GOP zest for frontal attacks on the welfare state. Through the 2010s, Republicans used power principally to sever the connection between popular Democratic majorities and their ability to claim and wield power for themselves. They still cut taxes for the rich and sabotaged social programs when the opportunity arose. But the first thing they did after the 2010 midterms was gerrymander Democrats into semi-permanent minority status anywhere they could. Then they came for labor rights and public-sector unions and campaign-finance regulations and voting rights and the Census. When they’ve lost, they’ve used their expiring trifectas to strip incoming Democrats of the authorities they had wielded gleefully. They use power not just to remake the social contract, but as a means of power accretion in itself. In the Trump and post-Trump era, the core Republican aspiration is to torment and persecute liberals and their purported allies; to wield power from the minority through nullification and judicial fiat; to own the libs.
The Democratic Party’s ambitions haven’t changed to counter this rogue turn.
Democrats’ conviction that their adversaries hold symmetrical but opposing policy stances is failing the country. Anyone needing further confirmation of that analysis should read Jonathan Swan’s chilling account of Republican plans to reclassify a large swath of mid-level public servants as Schedule F employees the next time they hold the White House. Then eliminate them. Perhaps as early as Jan. 20, 2025, they could begin replacing people who’ve dedicated themselves to public service with reactionary, misogynistic “Christians” like this guy:
Right-wing groups have already drawn up lists of candidates for positions to be re-filled (those they don’t plan to eliminate). Think Trump 1.0 was chaos? Just wait. Even if Trump 2.0 is not named Trump, Trumpism will live on. As Digby noted Friday:
If you don’t think this could literally destroy the country you are unaware of how much our nation relies on the federal government to make everything we take for granted on a daily basis function. These people are nihilists and they do not care about that.
Democrats do. But they won’t counter it any better than they did the overturn of Roe if they don’t reconceptualize how they think about politics. Policy and program design is fun and all that, but for Republicans more than for Democrats, personnel is policy.
Beutler again:
The broad left has effectively redoubled its conviction that the best way to deal with the right’s politics of rule or ruin is to pull the policy lever ever harder. Different Democrats have different intuitions about how the policy lever is supposed to work. Progressives imagine transformational, redistributive policies will generate working-class solidarity and an unbeatable rainbow coalition. Moderates believe competent management, along with popular but incremental new reforms will capture the political center, without which Republicans can’t win.
But both believe that good policy, and good execution, are destiny, and that consensus is visible in the party’s vast technocratic class, the army of Mr. Fix-its who ride to the rescue after Republicans leave everything in a smoldering heap.
They two parties are not even playing the same game. Democrats are playing one their opponents have long abandoned, and by rules Republicans think are for suckers.
Anymore, when I see more-progressive-than-thou wonks debating the weakneeses of policy proposals that won’t pass anyway, I’m out. They are playing Risk in a bomb shelter while shells explode around them.
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