Democratic Party workers watching the presidential election returns in shock on the night of November 8, 2016.
Political Issues

The Rot Goes Deep in the Democratic Party

C. B. Thorington

Democratic Party workers watching the presidential election returns in shock on the night of November 8, 2016.
Photo Credit: AP / Matt Rourke

One might expect such a lurid title  for a post from a neoliberal such as myself (also erroneously known as a “conservative”) . However, the reason why American progressives should take this judgement so very, very seriously is that it comes not just from from a neoliberal, but also from a progressive American journalist, an academic who is currently an adjunct faculty member of the Columbia University School of Journalism. Thomas B. Edsall comes to this same conclusion in a June 8 op-ed in the New York Times entitled The Democratic Party Is in Worse Shape Than You Thought.

The Alienation of a Traditional Democratic Party Base

The Democrats  were completely blind-sided by Donald Trump’s election, as evidenced by shock and dismay in the faces of the Democratic Party operatives on election night, displayed in the photo above. Yet that shock — and the subsequent rage that followed it — has blinded many if not most Democrats to the real reasons for their defeat. Edsall, along with a few other progressives, would like to awaken Democrats to their peril. In a nutshell, Edsall declares evidence found by “Democratic pollsters, strategists and sympathetic academics” shows the alienation of the working class to be far greater than has been generally supposed. Edsall asserts:

What the autopsy reveals is that Democratic losses among working class voters were not limited to whites; that crucial constituencies within the party see its leaders as alien; and that unity over economic populism may not be able to turn back the conservative tide.

Moreover, winning back those erstwhile Democratic voters might be extraordinarily difficult. These voters’ grievances on immigration, the economy, local security from crime, and on national security are no longer addressed by basic Democratic positions. While many of these aggrieved voters might unjustifiably conflate some of these problems, such as economic hardship and illegal immigrants, the actual existence of economic hardship and problems caused by illegal immigrants resulting from Democratic policies are undeniable. Accusing these suffering people of being racists because they oppose illegal immigrants will hardly endear the Democratic Party to these voters.

In fact, Democratic views about racism and how they believe it to be endemic in the United States is a big part of their problem with their defecting, one-time supporters. As Edsall notes in his essay,

Or, as I have written elsewhere, Democrats cannot simply argue in favor of redistributive government on economic matters because defecting whites are deeply hostile to a government they see as coercive on matters of race.

For decades, the perception that an intrusive federal government promotes policies favoring African-Americans and other minorities at the expense of whites has driven anti-government animosity.

Reciting a Public Religion Research Institute report, Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump, Edsall quotes,

More than half (52%) of white working-class Americans believe discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

However, another well-known Democratic pollster, Stan Greenberg, wrote on the American Prospect website that Democrats do not have just a “white working class problem.” Greenberg writes,

The Democrats don’t have a “white working-class problem.” They have a “working-class problem,” which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate, including the Rising American Electorate of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials. This decline contributed mightily to the Democrats’ losses in the states and Congress and to the election of Donald Trump.

Greenberg goes on to criticize severely prominent politicians of his own party, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, for this loss of working class allegiance. They lost this allegiance by increasing the problems of the working class to the breaking point. Greenberg explains the defecting working class

pulled back because of the Democrats’ seeming embrace of multinational trade agreements that have cost American jobs. The Democrats have moved from seeking to manage and champion the nation’s growing immigrant diversity to seeming to champion immigrant rights over American citizens’. Instinctively and not surprisingly, the Democrats embraced the liberal values of America’s dynamic and best-educated metropolitan areas, seeming not to respect the values or economic stress of older voters in small-town and rural America. Finally, the Democrats also missed the economic stress and social problems in the cities themselves and in working-class suburbs.

Another prominent Democratic analyst, Guy Molyneux, in an American Prospect post entitled A Tale of Two Populisms, writes that the Democratic Party has successfully driven the American working class into actually being anti-government, making them extremely wary of the pro-government progressives. Rather than seeing government policy successes, the erstwhile Democratic working class sees only mounting government failures. Shades of the Reagan Democrats! Concerning this, Molyneux writes,

White working-class voters’ negative view of government spending undermines their potential support for many progressive economic policies. While they want something done about jobs, wages, education, and health care, they are also fiscally conservative and deeply skeptical of government’s ability to make positive change. So political populism not only differs from economic populism, but also serves as a powerful barrier to it.

The loss of the political allegiance of a plurality and possibly a majority of the American working class was the foundation for all other Democratic Party losses in 2016.

Ignoring Economic and Political Reality

Unfortunately,  outside of a very few progressive analysts such as Thomas Edsall, Stan Greenberg, and Guy Molyneux, American progressives are engaging in very little introspection over the meaning of their losses. Instead, what we hear from the progressive media, activists, and Democratic politicians is total opposition, “total resistance”, to Trump and the Republicans. Beyond calls to impeach and remove Donald Trump from office, to sabotage any administration program, and to oppose any GOP legislative initiative, we see no other reactions to their immense defeats at the polls. The most to which they could point was the fact Hillary Clinton won a plurality of around three million votes in the popular vote over Donald Trump.

The rest of the election was a complete progressive disaster. At the risk of being accused of gloating, I will once again list the major consequences of the election, just for those readers who are new to this website.

  • The Democrats have lost all levers of power in the national government, both with the presidency and Congress.

  • The Republicans now control 69 of 99 state legislative chambers, 69.7% of the total. This includes flipping both the Iowa Senate and the Kentucky House for the first time in about a century.

  • In the last election Republicans picked up three new governors in Missouri, New Hampshire, and Vermont. This brings the tally of GOP governors to 33, which is 66% of the total.

  • In half the states the GOP holds both the governorship and both state chambers. The Democrats can claim to totally control four state governments in this fashion.

  • The Republicans can also claim more state attorneys general, 29, which is 58% of the total, than ever before.

Given such a complete rejection, not just in the national government, but in state governments as well, progressives can hardly ignore the bad economic and social effects of their beliefs and policies and expect to survive politically. To be so totally absorbed in tying Donald Trump to Russia’s U.S. electoral interventions (especially when so far there has been absolutely no evidence of Trump “colluding”), means they can give no time and effort to considering how to correct their past policy mistakes.

The rot goes very deep in the Democratic Party to some of their most basic ideas about the nature of reality. It is these ideological errors that have led to the economic, other domestic, and foreign policy disasters that have enveloped not just the United States, but Europe as well. And it is the impact of these disasters on electorates that has led to the various “populist” revolts against the dirigiste elites of the West. Even if by some means progressives are able to persuade electorates to hand them back the keys to government, their problems will not be solved. Without discovering how their ideas create the problems, they will just repeat the same basic errors, perhaps in a somewhat different configuration. The explanation of these errors would take too many words to comfortably fit within a single post, so I will content myself with giving a list of links to some of the posts where I have discussed them.

Logical Developments From Losing Elections

Until progressives align their basic ideology  to be more consistent with actual reality, they can expect even more rejections at the polls. Since their implacable enemies, the Republicans, have their own failings as mortal human beings, Democrats might temporarily reverse their electoral fortunes. However, if the Democratic Party does not correct its ideology, the same old economic and social disasters will arise to motivate the voters to oust them in the next election.

Continued and sustained losses at the polls generate their own logic, as the Democratic Party is now discovering to its own cost. State parties are like farm teams in major-league baseball to the national parties. If Democratic state office-holders are driven towards nonexistence, the national Democratic Party loses its candidates for the future. As I remarked in the last section, this is fast becoming the case. Already, the national leaders of the Democratic Party (Hillary Clinton, 70; Bernie Sanders, 75; Joseph Biden, 74; Elizabeth Warren, 68; Chuck Schumer, 66; Nancy Pelosi, 77) are becoming increasingly geriatric. Where are the back-benchers to succeed them to come from?

In the meantime, with the control of who is nominated to the federal bench firmly in the hands of the neoliberal Republicans, progressives can expect federal courts to become less willing to amend the Constitution via judicial fiat. Rather than consenting to changing a “living” Constitution through different interpretations arising from changing social conditions, “originalist” federal judges would require any changes to be produced by the formal mechanisms laid down by the Constitution itself.

It is extremely unfortunate for the nation that progressives and their intellectual brothers and sisters in most of the media refuse to reevaluate their ideology. Instead, they have become totally absorbed in a witch hunt against Donald Trump and his administration, which is increasingly seeming more and more wrong-headed. May God help us all, as we sure as Hell need it!

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