US President Joe Biden greets former President Barack Obama during an event on the Affordable Care Act, the former president's top legislative accomplishment, as Vice President Kamala Harris reacts in the East Room at the White House in Washington, US.
Credit: Reuters Photo
By Clive Crook
If you think that their second shocking defeat at the hands of Donald Trump – Donald Trump, for heaven’s sake – will lead Democrats to change their offer to voters, you’re likely to be disappointed.
Obvious as the need for such an adjustment might seem to casual observers and other low-information types, the party’s experts are unlikely to get the message just yet. One or two more shattering setbacks might be required.
To be sure, the party is wrestling to make sense of what happened. The trouble is, when voters are closely divided, as they are in the US, election defeats are generally over-determined: Analysts can plausibly blame any number of contingent factors for the result.
Joe Biden hung on too long; there was no time to choose the best candidate; Kamala Harris ran a poor campaign. Such matters can be put right next time. Bigger, harder questions about what the party actually believes can therefore be set aside.
Trump’s taste for chaos and controversy will feed the complacency. His bizarre cabinet nominations have already reassured his enemies: As ever, the man seems determined to screw things up. And his plans on fiscal and economic policy are sure to go badly.
Democrats will tell themselves they’ve been dealt a temporary setback. Come the midterms, they can expect to recover, no deeper reckoning required.
Yet the fact is, with a second dose of President Trump on offer, the contest should not have been as close as it was. A Democratic Party fit for purpose would have won in a landslide.
The question isn’t why Democrats lost with 48 per cent of the popular vote rather than winning, as they hoped, with a sliver over 50 per cent; it’s why they didn’t completely crush the other side.
If they could bring themselves to ponder this, Democrats might also ask how badly they would have lost if the Republicans hadn’t been so clueless as to let themselves be led by Trump. Are Democrats expecting to face somebody as bad, or worse, next time?
I’d say a deeper reckoning is needed.
The starting point is what the party stands for. Unfortunately, except that it despises Trump and loves to spend money, it doesn’t seem sure. Its most energetic activists and many of its leading thinkers, allies and enablers have embraced a radical form of postmodern identity politics.
This point of view isn’t a minor distinction from the pragmatic, incremental centrism championed by leaders such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; it’s an explicit repudiation. Yet most Democrats in Congress, and I don’t doubt most actual or would-be Democratic voters, are still more attached to that earlier common-sense, center-left tradition.
The clash between these two worldviews is fundamental – enlightenment liberalism on one side, “deconstruction” and the “myth of objectivity” on the other. But the Democratic Party’s elders have chosen to manage this fundamental division rather than resolve it.
A fight would split the anti-Republican alliance. Instead, the factions have come to an accommodation.
The activists, foundations and academics do their thing – biological sex is socially constructed, colour-blindness is racism, white supremacy is immovable and irredeemable, silence is violence, equality isn’t equity, curriculums should be decolonized, and so forth – while most of the politicians and ordinary Democratic voters politely go along.
Sometimes old-fashioned Democrats defer (as in taking a knee, adopting DEI statements and saying “critical race theory offers valuable insights”) and sometimes they deny (as in “how many schools are actually encouraging children to switch gender?” or “nobody literally means defund the police”). What they almost never do, however, is confront.
Submission to identity politics is deeply harmful to the Democratic cause. This is partly because deference toward its toxic illiberal ideas isn’t just performative.
The DEI movement, for instance, has moved beyond the righteous cause of fighting actual discrimination against minorities and is shaping new rules and practices that entrench racism and fuel resentment, thereby defeating their stated purpose.
But even when obeisance to identity politics is confined to mere status-seeking and has no great substantive effects, it cripples the Democrats politically by undermining voters’ trust.
The importance of this second point is hard to overstate. An abiding challenge everywhere for left-leaning parties is to command public confidence in their competence and honesty.
This is harder for progressives than it is for conservatives because the left’s agendas are more ambitious.
The challenge of selling “governments need to do more” rather than “governments ought to do less” is especially great in the US, where suspicion of bureaucrats with big ideas is embedded in the culture.
As Clinton and Obama understood, overcoming this suspicion demands limiting principles: bounded ambitions, credible promises of restraint, acknowledgement of trade-offs, a judicious measure of ordinary common sense.
The great majority of Democrats doubtless agree. But postmodern identity politics has no truck with such ideas. In fact, it sees what’s called “ordinary common sense” (a social construction, needless to say) as the underlying problem. Its worldview has no limiting principles and is necessarily incapable of compromise. It’s political poison for the left.
This dogmatic rigidity sheds light on an issue that analysts have been debating post-election. Was it economics or culture? Were voters skeptical about Harris’s economic-policy competence or concerned about her ideas on race and gender?
Both, I expect. But Democrats need to grasp that, for many voters, these issues are not separate. To put it bluntly, the cultural commitments of the Democrats’ guiding intellectuals mean the party is not to be trusted with the economy, or indeed with policy of any kind.
If you’re triggered by the term “illegal immigrant” and would rather say “birthing person” than “mother,” don’t ask me to put you in charge of the clean-energy transition.
Confronting the cultural left is not a small ask, I understand. Postmodern pieties are now remarkably entrenched in the US. Universities, think tanks, many corporations and most of the mainstream media all bow down, and defection is risky.
In addition, these bubble-dwelling institutions are caught in the same bind as the Democratic Party: Attacking the excesses of identity politics would divide the anti-Trump opposition, and Resistance has to come first.
Perhaps that was once a plausible calculation. Next time, remember how it worked out.