Ghosts of Democrats past
by Tom Sullivan
Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah, GA.
The presidential race has not much interested me since before the Bernie v. Hillary internecine conflict of 2016. That recent unpleasantness has the potential to color politics among Democrats the way the Civil War haunts the South and Vietnam colored American foreign policy for decades. Let’s hope not.
My disinterest is a product of residing in a political Petri dish of a state where Republican lawmakers from Koch Brothers Labs South breed nasty legislative bugs no president can cure from the Oval Office. So, for reasons made clear often in this morning space, the left’s unsinkable faith that a liberal savior in the White House (or a Robert Mueller report) will set all things right seems daft.
Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir sees another unhealthy reflex among Democrats that leaves him cynical about their prospects for 2020: a yearning for a return to normalcy when there is no “normal” to go back to.
“We stand at an inflection point in history, with the future shrouded in darkness,” he writes. “Revolution, tyranny or collapse may lie ahead, and in all likelihood some combination of the three.”
Rather than grapple with that uncertain future, Democrats as a party reach for the comfortable and familiar. Joe Biden, a candidate “dramatically out of step with both his own party and the nation,” sits atop many candidate polls. How like Democrats it would be to nominate Biden in an “attempt to rebuild the Bill Clinton administration atop the smoldering ruins left by Trump, and unconvincingly claim that the republic has been saved.”
O’Hehir’s key graf is this:
As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently explored, this perceived pragmatism and desire for “electability” tends to favor certain kinds of candidates who are understood as moderate, unthreatening and not overtly ideological: Michael Dukakis in 1988, Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Clinton in 2016. What else do those four nominees have in common? I doubt I need to spell it out.
Then again, maybe O’Hehir does. Just as the South still grapples with its past, Democrats haunted by George McGovern’s singular thrashing in 1972 seem blind to multiple losses by some of their more electable-seeming choices since. They went long with Obama in 2008 and won, albeit winning much less than progressives hoped.
For fifty years, Democrats have appeared “fearful, defensive and endlessly apologetic,” O’Hehir believes. The times demand boldness, not a retreat to safety when there is no safety.
Younger and from different factions of the party, Rep. Ilhan Omar and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke represent a changing of the old guard for one unburdened by the party’s ghosts. Add to them the fresh perspectives brought by Democrats’ large class of freshman women in Congress. What is less clear is whether the party as a whole — actual voters tending to be older — has sufficiently moved past its past to meet the challenges ahead.
But even entertaining O’Hehir’s anaylsis reinforces the horse race politics that has made the presidency a largely ceremonial sinecure while, as Charlie Pierce observes weekly, “the real work of governmentin’ gets done” in state-level laboratories of democracy.
The republic won’t be saved from the Oval Office or even from Capitol Hill. The shift in consciousness that needs to take root among Democrats and progressives is not treating the quadrennial presidential contest like some kind of political Super Bowl and presidential candidates like superheroes. Real change, real boldness has to come from us.