Democrats Must make peace with themselves
Democrats can drive you crazy.
Joe Biden won the presidency by a decisive majority, ousting a dangerous incumbent loathed across his party. In the streets of Democratic cities, there was jubilation. Yet just two days after the election, House Democrats fell into angry recriminations. Moderates blamed lefties for ideas and slogans that Republicans deployed against them.
“We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., told her colleagues during an angry conference call.
“We lost good members because of that.” Lefties, meanwhile, criticized moderates for running bad campaigns and failing to appreciate the energy the left generates. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told the New York Times that “not a single one of these [moderate] campaigns were firing on all cylinders.”
Compare that with the Republican Party, which was almost entirely complicit with President Donald Trump’s insane and democracy-wrecking claim that he won the election.
After a masterful presidential campaign that brought together every wing of Biden’s party, our politics seemed to snap back instantly to old habits and an old rule: Republicans fight Democrats while Democrats battle each other. These contrasting behaviors reflect a simple fact: Democrats are a big-tent party, while Republicans are a closed circle. For more than a half- century, Republicans have purged dissenters and turned themselves into a rigid, radical, unified bloc — ideologically, racially, religiously. As the Republicans cast off free-thinkers, Democrats took them in.
This makes Democrats the larger party with better longterm prospects. But it also means that Biden’s party is at risk of either pushing away the middle- of-the-road voters it needs to hold its majority or disillusioning the progressives who often power its apparatus, especially in urban centers. And Democrats must also struggle in a political system that - especially through the Senate and the electoral college — artificially tilts the playing field toward the GOP.
Although Democrats ruefully invoke the old Will Rogers joke (“I am not a member of any organized political party — I am a Democrat”), their struggles are not a product of some psychological peculiarity. History has made them what they are, and they have to learn to live with it if they want to win and govern.
The conundrum goes back to the 1960s, and not just the ‘60s of the counterculture, civil rights and antiwar protests. The movements for Black, women’s and LGBTQ rights had a decisive impact on our country socially, and they continue to play an important role in the Democratic Party. But there was another 1960s, embodied in the rise of the conservative intellectual movement, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, the backlash against civil rights and a
New Right. The revolt on the right had a decisive impact on our party system
The 2020 election perfectly captured the distinction between Democratic diversity and Republican homogeneity. Biden’s coalition was a little bit of everybody — self- described liberals (they constituted 42% of his voters), moderates (48%) and conservatives (10%), according to the network exit poll conducted by Edison Research. In other words, contrary to Trump’s claim that Biden is a tool for raging leftists, a majority of his electorate was non-liberal. By contrast, Trump voters were 68% conservative, 27% moderate and 5% liberal.
Racially, 53% of Biden’s voters were White, but 82% of Trump’s were; 21% of Biden’s were Black, but only 3% of Trump’s were. And for all the focus on Trump’s gains among Latinos in South Florida and South Texas, the Hispanic vote is still crucial for Democrats: 16% of Biden’s voters were Latino, compared with 9% of Trump’s. The contrast is especially striking when race and religion are looked at in tandem: 67% of Trump’s voters were White Christians; only 30% of Biden’s were.
Still, 2020 did not bring about the larger-scale realignment that the Democrats hoped for (and that was mistakenly forecast by many polls).
Georgia’s impending Senate runoffs will provide the ultimate test of strength between the mobilizing power of the Democrats’ big tent and the solidarity of the Republicans’ closed circle. The politics of diversity and a whole lot of voter registration helped Democrats convert Georgia from a Republican bastion into a battleground. So did the Biden’s carefully calibrated appeal to all wings of the party’s coalition.
Control of the Senate and Biden’s ability to enact his larger program depend on his party’s ability to hang together and make Will Rogers’s quip a quaintly amusing piece of history.