What Is the Democratic Party?

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-02-what-is-democratic-party/



The statistic that best defines our politics over the past 20 years is this: Nine of the past ten national elections have resulted in a change in power in at least one chamber of Congress or the White House. (The sole outlier is 2012.) Several of those elections were considered at the time to be realignments that would lead to a sustained majority for one of the major parties. After Republicans defeated John Kerry in 2004 and snatched five Senate seats across the South, commentators believed social issues like gay marriage would set an unwinnable trap for Democrats. Hugh Hewitt wrote a book called Painting the Map Red, imagining a permanent conservative majority. Democrats then took the House and Senate in the 2006 midterms. When Barack Obama crushed John McCain in post–financial crisis 2008, Democratic pundits decided they had an enduring majority. The Tea Party thrashed them in 2010. The conventional wisdom was that Obama was toast; he won in 2012. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory signaled a changed electorate, until Democrats won the House in 2018 and the presidency in 2020, only to lose both in 2022 and 2024.

In fact, only two other times in American history have there been as many as three consecutive one-term presidencies, like we’ve just witnessed with the Trump/Biden/Trump sequence: the intense pre–Civil War period from 1836 to 1860, and the post-Reconstruction Gilded Age from 1876 to 1896. Both of those eras felt the reverberations of slavery, racial strife, and disunion, with multiple national depressions (“panics,” in 19th-century parlance) thrown in. What accounts for today’s political ping-pong match? In my February feature about American democracy, I put it this way: “Voters keep electing a new party to fulfill promises that are blocked by the structure of the political system.” Whether due to constitutional gridlock or the paucity of ambition in our politics, voters are in a state of perpetual anger, ready to throw the bums out, throw out the bums who replaced those bums, and eject those new bums, too. Amid despair and recriminations on the left and unprecedented multiracial support on the right, many are talking yet again about a realignment. But the real paradigm shift will only come when one political party actually responds to the public’s needs.

MAGA has its own strategy to do that: mass deportation, tax cuts and deregulation to satiate business, and a neo-19th-century reprisal of high tariffs. Project 2025 shows that Trump and his allies have prioritized removing structural impediments to this agenda, skirting constitutional hurdles, firing disloyal bureaucrats. But Trump’s erratic record as president did not produce firm support. Even in this “realigning” election, four Republican Senate candidates running in states Trump carried lost, and the House barely budged. As president, Trump only has a short window to earn public trust, which has proven elusive for two decades. The much more mysterious question is this: Who leads the Democratic Party, and what do they offer America? One bad outcome of the election that could paradoxically prove useful for Democrats’ future is the uniformity of the swing away from Kamala Harris. Practically no section of the country, no demographic subgroup, nothing was spared; she lost vote share relative to Joe Biden in 2020 in all but two states.

This actually keeps Democrats, or at least it should, from playing their favorite parlor game: slicing and dicing the exit polls and county-level data until they find somebody to blame. This November’s failure has a thousand fathers. The demonstrated tendency of voters globally to reject incumbents who presided over post-pandemic inflation, regardless of the incumbent party’s ideology or the state of inflation at the time of the election, created a powerful undertow that nobody, least of all Harris, could combat. A simple model of Biden’s disapproval rating, plotted on a graph, would predict a three-point popular-vote loss; Harris lost by less than two. But a legion of other inadequacies stand out. Harris replacing Joe Biden at the last minute put her at a severe disadvantage, without the familiarity and trust of voters, and the command of her own ideas that get honed through an extended primary schedule. Harris’s shambolic 2019 bid for the White House produced numerous agenda items from the cultural left that Republicans made sure would haunt her attempt to run a conservative, pro-business, pro-military, tough-on-the-border campaign in 2024.

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[Passages]

3. Brutal yet accurate.

snip:
I recognize, as good politicians who don’t want the responsibility for making progress themselves sometimes say, that movements for change typically happen from the bottom up. But someone at the top has to acknowledge that outcry, and work to satisfy it. Two decades of voter behavior suggests that they wonder whether anyone is actually listening. Who will fashion an answer for them?


My greatest fear:
*Nobody should overreact to a single election. As I said at the top, historical trends strongly suggest Democrats will regain the House in 2026, because Republicans’ own internal contradictions, proclivities to corruption, and inability to govern will rapidly reveal themselves. That’s a tantalizing prospect, but also one that indulges Democratic conflict aversion. It lets them muddle through until the next election. Until people are satisfied that their concerns are heard in Washington, we’re just going to keep lunging from one broken party to the other.

[Uncle Joe]

4. Perhaps the one time that polio was beneficial to the nation

(snip)

"I think," Eleanor (Roosevelt) observed, "probably the thing that took most courage in his life was his mastery and his meeting of polio. I never heard him complain." And though anyone remembering how athletic and strong he had been as a young man could not fail to realize what a terrific battle must have gone on within him, "he just accepted it as one of those things that was given you as discipline in life." After his struggle with polio, he seemed less arrogant, less smug, less superficial, more focused, more complex, more interesting. "There had been a plowing up of his nature," Frances Perkins commented. "The man emerged completely warm-hearted, with new humility of spirit and a firmer understanding of philosophical concepts." He had always taken great pleasure in people, but now they become what one historian has called "his vital links to life." Far more intensely than before, he reached out to know them, to understand them, to pick up their emotions, to put himself into their shoes. No longer belonging to his old world in the same way, he came to empathize with the poor and the underprivileged, with people to whom fate had dealt a difficult hand.

(snip)

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/spc/character/essays/roosevelt.html

Thanks for the thread Celerity