What’s Wrong With the Democrats?

If the party cares about winning, it needs to learn how to appeal to the white working class.

 

The strategy was simple. A demographic wave—long-building, still-building—would carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage. The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losses—losses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities. Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.

But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher. The strategy was simple. The presidency was everything.
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Anyone who examined the strategy that the Democratic Party has embraced ever more tightly in recent years could see its essential precariousness. And anyone could see that investing such grave hopes in the person of Hillary Clinton—who had lost the party’s nomination to a little-known senator in 2008; who had struggled to win it against a little-known socialist eight years later—was particularly risky.

But liberals’ fears were softened in 2016 by a widely shared belief: that the candidacy of Donald Trump would shatter the Republican Party, at least in the form in which we had long known it. His trail of wreckage would force a painful reckoning with the party’s shortcomings—the narrowness of its coalition, the cloistered cluelessness of its elites, its intramural disagreements about the future of the nation. After a season of Trump’s destruction, the party would lie in rubble.

On November 8, that prophecy was realized, true in every regard, except that it described the Democrats. On Inauguration Day, the party’s power ebbed to its lowest level since the 1920s.

A year before his wife lost, Bill Clinton had a premonition of how things could go wrong. He revealed his foreboding at fund-raisers.

If there’s any consolation to the realization of terrible fears, of worst-case scenarios springing to life, it’s that they are invigorating. Donald Trump’s presidency has rocked a long-complacent Democratic Party like nothing in recent history. Liberals, with their confidence that the trajectory of the country points in their direction, never had quite as much practice as conservatives in expressing their anger. That’s what makes the "Resistance"—the many marches, the seething hostility at town-hall meetings, the anti-Trump placards shouting at passersby from bungalow windows—a transformational break in the pattern.

　

Leaderless and loud, the Resistance has become the motive power of the Democratic Party. Presidential hopefuls already strive to anticipate its wishes. Elected officials have restructured their political calculus to avoid getting on its wrong side. The feistiness and agitation of the moment are propelling the party to a new place.



But where? The question unnerves Democrats, because the party has no scaffolding. All the dominant leaders of the last two generations—the Clintons, Barack Obama—have receded. Defeat discredited the party’s foundational strategy—or, at the very least, exposed it as a wishful description of a more distant future, rather than a clear plan for victory in the present. Resistance has given the Democrats the illusion of unity, but the reality is deeply conflicted. Two of the party’s largest concerns—race and class—reside in an increasing state of tension, a tension that will grow as the party turns toward the next presidential election.

To produce a governing majority, the party will need to survive an unsettling reckoning with itself. Donald Trump didn’t just prevail over the Democrats; he called into doubt their old truths.

A year before his wife lost, Bill Clinton had a premonition of how things could go very wrong. He revealed his foreboding—perhaps fittingly—at fund-raising events. He would hint at what he considered his wife’s glaring vulnerability: the roiling discontent of the white working class. The travails of the group—44 percent of eligible voters—preoccupied him. He could recite one grim statistic after another. Even at this early date in the campaign, he knew that their cultural alienation might place them beyond the reach of a Democrat. And while most pundits at that point still considered Trump the second coming of Herman Cain, a circus act rather than a serious candidate, Clinton feared Trump’s ability to channel white-working-class rage. "He’s a master brander and he[’s] sensing sort of the emotional landscape of people he’s selling to," Clinton told donors gathered in Atlanta in October 2015.

Hillary Clinton always had trouble getting right with the zeitgeist, and her aides worried about that flaw. She began her first presidential bid as her party exploded in anger over the Iraq War, an adventure she had sanctified in the Senate. The specter of that vote and the campaign that followed, the fear that the political moment might again turn against her, continued to haunt her closest aides, especially Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress and one of her longest-standing advisers. Five months before the 2016 Iowa caucus, Tanden warned that Clinton would be punished for supporting banking deregulation—"the closest thing to an Iraq vote we have to face," she wrote her fellow members of the campaign’s inner sanctum. Her analysis proved wrong in the particulars, but broadly captured a central tension of the campaign. Some in Clinton’s camp could clearly see that a large chunk of the country seethed against elites, yet the candidate could never quite understand the need to insulate herself from the ire, much less harness it.

At first, the challenge of Bernie Sanders looked like a gift. All of the Democrats with big benefactors and well-tended reputations sensed the futility of running against Clinton, because she had started with imposing poll numbers, a well-funded apparatus, and the goodwill of a party that felt her loyal service to Obama merited reward. That left her facing a cantankerous, aging democratic socialist with a small following. Even Sanders—a luftmensch who ran his operation with about the same attentiveness he brings to getting dressed—seemed to doubt the potential of his own candidacy. A year before the first primary, he told Elizabeth Warren that he would cease his campaign preparations if she wanted to run. "He would have given her a clear lane," one former Sanders adviser told me. But Warren demurred. She had only recently arrived in the Senate, and it wasn’t hard to imagine a fusillade of Clinton-campaign attacks, an opposition-research file disgorged, leaving her too damaged for future fights.

Sanders, however, would prove a flummoxing rival. To win the Democratic presidential nomination, it helps to secure the African American vote. But another path to victory involves rallying white voters with a populist bent. This can create an uncomfortable dynamic in presidential primaries, where race vies with class to become the defining concern of the party. Politicians rarely vocalize the tension. But the socialism of Bernie Sanders—which hindered his efforts to explain the centrality of race to American life—made this split less subterranean than usual.

Of course, Hillary Clinton would have preferred to avoid an argument about the primacy of race versus class. But African American voters provided her the surest path to primary victory. They gravitated to her, in no small measure out of loyalty to Obama. Where Clinton posed as the president’s anointed successor, Sanders questioned Obama’s legacy and called for revolutionary change. He never dedicated himself to making meaningful inroads with African American or Latino voters, and so Clinton doubled down. After she lost New Hampshire in February, she began traveling with the grieving mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and other African American casualties of violence. Criminal-justice issues became an elevated feature of her standard pitch.

Clinton never met her crucial challenge: to both celebrate multiculturalism and also cushion the backlash against the celebration.

This was an inversion of the 2008 primary campaign. Desperately attempting to forestall Barack Obama by collecting wins in Appalachia, Clinton posed then as the tribune of "hardworking Americans, white Americans." But her reinvention last year followed the party’s prevailing wisdom. The Democrats had slowly transformed themselves since the 1960s, when working-class voters of every ethnicity had been reliable constituents. As the party had shed white southerners, it had trodden less tentatively on issues of race. And the swell of immigration that had begun with the Johnson administration’s liberalization of quotas had finally yielded enough citizens to lay a foundation for a cosmopolitan party. That direction suited white urban professionals, who considered themselves tolerant members of a globalized world. Working-class whites hadn’t been lost completely, of course; they remained important to the party in places like the upper Midwest, and unions, however shrunken, continued to provide support. But it was the mélange of minorities, Millennials, and white professionals that provided the basis for the so-called Obama coalition. And if Clinton had carried over any lesson from the 2008 race, it was the necessity of mimicking Obama’s tactics and methods, even if she sometimes produced only ersatz copies of them.




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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/whats-wrong-with-the-democrats/528696/