Why Democrats Are Lost in the Political Wilderness
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Donald Trump’s shock troops are bro fist-bumping, having used their online influence to browbeat GOP senators into confirming most of the president’s nominees. They might be careful of the political conformity they wish for.
Democrats are wandering somewhere between the desert and the wilderness. Their Trump thumping left them without power, a leader or a message, and their current, near total irrelevance is one result. Mr. Trump blazes his way through Washington while Democrats—a day late, and two topics short—stage stand-ins outside the Treasury building, Chuck Schumer shout-gasping “We will win!”
Win what? The Democratic Party can’t effectively oppose Mr. Trump’s worldview if it doesn’t formulate a coherent one of its own. Many Democrats rolled out of the election acknowledging the urgent need for a change in direction—for moderation, an end to cultural radicalism, a reconnect with working-class Americans. They immediately crashed into the left-wing base, threatening political death to heretics. Even if the party had the spine to push back, who exactly on the Democratic bench even remembers how to be a moderate?
What looks like a rapid collapse was years in the making. The left’s takeover of the Democratic Party began with the rise of Barack Obama and it steadily eradicated dissenting voices. Nancy Pelosi’s “majority makers”—the Blue Dogs and moderates who won her the speakership in 2006—were made to support unpopular legislation and paid for it in lost elections. Progressives targeted and polarized other holdouts, picked them off in primaries, or drove them to resignation. It was Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”
The Squad’s wild proposals for the Green New Deal, open borders, Medicare for all—a program of socialism that traditional Democrats initially rejected—is now mainstream thinking, the policy litmus test for party entry. Who even remembers the politics of Sens. Mark Pryor, Evan Bayh and Mary Landrieu, much less those of John Breaux, Sam Nunn and Fritz Hollings? Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema tried imposing a smidgen of fiscal sanity and energy reality on Joe Biden’s agenda. Their reward was to be hounded in their homes, chased into bathrooms by activists, and discouraged from seeking re-election.
What looks like a rapid collapse was years in the making. The left’s takeover of the Democratic Party began with the rise of Barack Obama, and it steadily eradicated dissenting voices. Progressives targeted and polarized holdouts, picked them off in primaries, or drove them to resignation. It was Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
The problem isn’t so much that Democrats won’t embrace moderation as they no longer know how. Today’s Democratic “moderate” is a lawmaker who ventures the occasional criticism of Hamas or of men in women’s sports while hurrying to flag his support for gun control, climate absolutism, racial “equity” and the “human rights” of government-provided health, housing, education and daycare. To agree with Bernie Sanders only 95% of the time is, in today’s Democratic Party, iconoclastic.
A few Democrats are feeling their way toward a new model of economic populism, deep-sixing the wokeism, carving out sensible positions here and there on the border or Israel while doubling down on redistributive goodies for the working class. The most prominent example is Pennsylvania’s Sen. John Fetterman. This isn’t being met with open arms. At a recent anti-Trump protest, Pennsylvanians lumped Mr. Fetterman into their tirade, while Fetterman staffers keep resigning in protest. One recent ex-employee derided him as “a useful idiot for Republicans.”
If Democrats didn’t already know the progressive agenda was a political loser (and Kamala Harris’s campaign subterfuge proves they did), they do now. What to do with an ash heap of a political platform, one nonetheless rigidly enforced by liberal shock troops, and no charismatic figure with the spine or know-how to lead a change of direction? Engage muscle memory and do the easy: fight, fight, fight. Thus the bizarre sight of Democrats rallying fervently in favor of government waste, fraud and inefficiency. Expect this to continue.
This could be the MAGA future. The GOP is a party of many factions, and their policy disagreements frequently produce stalemates and governing heartache. Influential Trump supporters are honing their own methods for stamping out even mild disagreement with the president’s approach: rally online supporters to pile on, label the target a member of the “uniparty” or the “establishment,” threaten a primary. This exact playbook was exercised numerous times over the past few weeks of nomination votes. “Rules for Radicals.”
It’s a recipe for intellectual stagnation. It’s a departure from the modern conservative movement, which has been defined by its innovative ideas, from school choice to civil-service reform. It sits unnaturally in a movement that has long prized individualism and entrepreneurship and condemned the left’s collectivism. It mistakes the goal of party unity (the act of members compromising on strongly held positions for a legislative victory) with the tyranny of party conformity (think like we do, or get the boot).
And look how it worked out for Democrats.
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