They used to say that life imitates art. Today, it is probably more likely to imitate a meme. And no meme is more relevant today, more searingly real, than “Democrats are in disarray,” which, during President Donald Trump’s first term, became shorthand for the party’s struggles to find a coherent message.
Considering that they turned the House blue in 2018 and won the presidency two years later, you could fairly ask how much disarray Democrats were truly in back then.
Now, the Democrats really are in disarray. Just how do you go after the “unelected billionaire” Elon Musk, now slashing away at the federal government like it’s so much dry brush? And how seriously are you supposed to take Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into a “Riviera”? What to do about Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? How to convince former Vice President Kamala Harris not to run in 2028? What to make of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) new podcast?
“I think they’re like a deer frozen in the headlights,” Ruy Teixeira of the must-read Liberal Patriot newsletter told me.
It doesn’t help that the party does not have a leader. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is facing a revolt because he refused to shut down the government earlier this month. A new poll suggests that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who blasted Schumer for making a deal to keep the government working without getting anything in exchange from the GOP, is the party’s new leader. And though she has been inching toward the center, she remains far too left for the establishment to welcome her in its embrace. Caught between Ocasio-Cortez on the left and MAGA, Schumer has been skulking through the U.S. Capitol mired in an aura of defeat.
In part, Democrats remain confused about why they lost in November. Was it because they embraced progressive cultural issues or didn’t embrace those issues loudly enough? Should they appeal to lower-middle-class whites or, assuming those onetime Reagan Democrats have mostly gone to Trump, focus on urban elites and identity-based interest groups?
“I have never heard Democrats so confused: about who they are, aside from their opposition to Donald Trump, as well as how and why they lost,” Ezra Klein recently said in the opening segment of his New York Times podcast, which became a staple for Democrats in the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency as disaffection and discord mounted within the party.
And it’s not like Trump is waiting for them to find out. After the Trump administration shut down the United States Agency for International Development and proceeded to make similar cuts across huge swathes of the executive branch, Schumer showed up to a rally outside USAID headquarters, and he led a crowd of outraged Democrats in chants of “we will win” outside the Treasury Department.
It was cringey stuff, and everyone knew it. “I am completely uninspired by these losers,” a friend on the House side of Capitol Hill wrote in a text message of his party’s leaders. And he works for a liberal Democrat.
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“I see the Democratic Party in a greater level of crisis than I previously thought,” said Mark Halperin, a veteran political journalist. He sees Trump “sprinting down the middle of the field” with no linebackers or safeties within 10 yards.
At least in 2017, the Democrats knew who they were. They were the Resistance, in their telling, the party that wasn’t in thrall to the Kremlin. Eight years later, Democrats have devolved into nostrums about appealing to the middle class, ditching academic language, and finding a uniting message. It’s all good and well, except there is no sign that the party is going to do any of those things.
At the Democratic Party conclave earlier this year, Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC and the Washington Post moderated a panel with the eight candidates to head the Democratic National Committee. Capehart asked, “How many of you believe that racism and misogyny played a role in VP Harris’s defeat?” All of the candidates raised their hands.
“That’s good, you all pass,” Capehart said.
A clip also went viral of outgoing DNC head Jaime Harrison explaining the procedures regarding “a gender nonbinary candidate or officer” for party leadership positions. The derision from the Right was predictable enough, but there was also open dismay from Democrats who would have kept silent at the same clip only a year ago. There was no reason to hold back now. We’re still doing this? Really?
The New York Times’s dispatch from the proceedings was uncharacteristically brutal: “In private meetings and at public events, elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided. They disagree over how often and how stridently to oppose Mr. Trump. They have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.”
I have long maintained that, in a two-party system, you should want both parties to be healthy, whichever one you belong to — or even if, like me, you don’t belong to either. Democrats and Republicans should act like checks and balances on each other, much in the way the three branches of government do. But that is impossible if one of the parties is in the middle of a complete breakdown.
“You have to have a clear understanding of how deep the hole is for the Democrats right now,” Teixeira said, “just how bad their brand is.”
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“The GOP’s Breakdown Is Only Just Beginning,” went the headline in Politico. The date was Nov. 1, 2016. Nine years later, the Republicans are united behind Trump. It is not clear what the party will stand for in a post-Trump world, but the GOP has three years to answer that question.
Democrats don’t have that luxury.
To understand why the Democratic Party is so profoundly broken today, you need to go to a few months before the above headline, to a pivotal moment in American politics when, in the waning days of Barack Obama’s presidency, the party he had led along a centrist path suddenly shifted sharply to the left.
Throughout 2015 and early 2016, several developments pushed the party to the left on cultural and economic issues:
- In June 2015, the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, a major goal of liberals and some centrist Republicans. But with that major accomplishment, another already loomed on the horizon. Obergefell “may also be a big win for the rights of transgender individuals and their loved ones,” Slate wrote. Groups that had spent decades fighting for gay rights reoriented around an issue that was still not familiar to most Americans.
- Black Lives Matter, which had burst into the national consciousness the previous year after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, continued to gain cultural relevance. In particular, the group hounded presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, protesting her support of her husband Bill’s pro-police, pro-incarceration 1994 crime bill.
- Clinton’s primary campaign was also blinded by the surging popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who assailed her for a series of paid speeches she’d given to Goldman Sachs throughout the Democratic presidential campaign.
- In the summer of 2015, Iran and the U.S. struck a deal that would see the Islamic Republic halt the development of nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of some sanctions. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unsuccessfully campaigned against the deal with a speech to Congress that was blasted by many Democrats. Israel became a fissure issue between the Left and center. Pro-Palestinian activists started to show up at BLM protests, suggesting a new fusion of interests.
- After the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, Obama nominated District of Columbia Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, only to have Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), then the chamber’s Republican majority leader, refuse to hold a hearing. Democrats were outraged by the break in procedure, all but promising they would treat future Republican nominees in a similar manner. “It was a new kind of hardball,” Emily Bazelon wrote in the New York Times.
Taken together, these developments helped shape a new Democratic Party, one that was increasingly strident when it came to social issues. There was now a strong populist strain. “Socialism” was no longer a dirty word. But after the Garland debacle, “bipartisanship” was. Tellingly, the Oxford English Dictionary added “intersectionality” to its roster in 2015. The fight for climate change was the fight for Palestinian statehood was the fight to raise the minimum wage.
For many liberals, the Trump presidency confirmed that they were right. Obama had called Ronald Reagan his role model during the 2008 campaign, and there were moments in his first term when he expressed a similarly hopeful vision. Now, that was all ancient history. Trump’s election confirmed, to some on the Left, that the country really was as bad as some of their harshest rhetoric suggested.
“White America elected Donald Trump,” the president of the liberal group Demos told NBC News.
Those convictions were only deepened in the spring and summer of 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic and post-George Floyd protests. Intersectionality hardened. To wear a mask was not only good health practice but a show of racial solidarity. On the other hand, calling for shuttered schools to reopen was white supremacy: “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny,” the Chicago Teachers Union wrote in an infamous tweet. The defeat of Trump seemed to validate these tactics, even if Biden was hardly a progressive warrior.
“American liberalism clearly experienced dramatic changes in the 2010s, and these changes are specific and comprehensible,” Freddie deBoer wrote in his newsletter. “Liberals in 2010 weren’t the same as liberals in 2020. They just weren’t. They changed in comprehensible and expressible ways. And this absolutely dogged insistence that no such change occurred is one of the weirdest, most obviously dishonest political claims of my lifetime.”
DeBoer uses the word “woke” for the change — a word he admits he hates (as do I). It doesn’t really matter what we call it. Democrats under Trump, and then again under Biden, were becoming more radical on social issues while in good part rejecting the economic populism that made Sanders so popular in 2015. If anything, they were more beholden to billionaires than ever.
In sum, the party that nominated Biden in 2020 was nothing like the party that had nominated Biden’s boss in 2008.
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Harrison, the former DNC head, said in an interview that he thinks Harris could win in 2028. I don’t know the guy, but I do know he is too smart to believe this. All too many Democrats held back their anxieties about Harris over the summer, such was their desperation over the Biden campaign. Now, they have the luxury of time — and should use that time to find a candidate unburdened by what has been.
Before that, though, they need to figure out what they stand for.
A recent Axios focus group found that “every Arizona swing voter … said they approve of President Trump’s actions since taking office — and most also support Elon Musk’s efforts to slash government.” I don’t know how much more of a wake-up call you could possibly need. Whatever the Democrats are doing isn’t working. They may be acting out of principles, but people aren’t buying their act, and that isn’t good politics.
Donna Brazile, the veteran Democratic strategist, sent me a list of proposals she was presenting to party officials. They include raising the minimum wage, immigration reform, and a Manhattan Project-style push for affordable housing, which is emerging as a national, bipartisan crisis. There are also things to avoid in her bullet points, none more important than this: “Talk to voters in clear and compelling language, not like professors in graduate seminars.”
That tracks with what Colin Reed, a smart Republican strategist who understands Democrats, told me the Democrats should do: “Get off Blue Sky and other online venting platforms, get out of D.C. and New York City, stop lecturing people on why they are so ill-informed and start meeting actual voters where they are at,” he wrote to me in a text message. “Stop listening to the loud voices on social media who relentlessly complain and bellyache about every perceived injustice and go talk to regular people about what’s on their mind and how they can help.”
Now that Schumer has been effectively deposed as the de facto party leader, Democrats have to figure out urgently who is going to be their spokesperson and leader in the fight against Trump and Musk as they take apart the federal bureaucracy. Some of these efforts are more controversial than others. It has been almost impossible to know just where Democrats on the whole stand. The majority seem to be panicking, though a few exceptions, such as Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), have argued that worries about a “constitutional crisis” are wildly overstated (as of this writing, Trump has not countermanded any judicial orders, though his deportation flights to El Salvador seemed to come close).
DEMOCRATS REVOLT AGAINST SCHUMER AS THEY SPOIL FOR FIGHTS WITH TRUMP
Teixeira has a three-point plan for the Democrats on the Liberal Patriot. That plan, in his words, goes as follows: “1. Democrats Must Move to the Center on Cultural Issues; 2. Democrats Must Promote an Abundance Agenda; 3. Democrats Must Embrace Patriotism and Liberal Nationalism.”
For all the confusion in the Democratic ranks right now, the advice of seasoned pros such as Teixeira and Brazile and many of their counterparts is remarkably consistent: Put aside divisive identity politics, find a unifying message that speaks to struggling Americans of all creeds and backgrounds, invest in green energy while tempering alarmist climate rhetoric, and signal that you understand that immigration has become a crisis, even if you don’t agree with the Trump administration’s enforcement-heavy approach.
So far, however, Democrats have seemed too frazzled to take that counsel. Lately, they have all looked like they could use a vacation. But a long spell in the political wilderness is much more likely. I hope someone remembered to pack the bear spray.
Alexander Nazaryan writes about politics and culture.
