Dem Blindness

The False Gloss of Optimism

There is a specter haunting the Democratic Party. It is the fantasy of economic determinism. It is the notion that if the Dems focus on “affordability,” they can get away with ignoring everything else. But by ignoring everything else—especially the identity issues that elected Trump—they are avoiding some of the most essential questions in American history. They are crippling their credibility.

And so you’ve had a series of “whither the Dems” essays and conversations in recent months, with a strong hint of optimism after the 2025 elections. David Plouffe offers a roadmap in the New York Times—without mentioning issues of identity. Elizabeth Warren, as is her wont, offers an entirely myopic remedy where all of America’s problems vanish—poof!—if we successfully make war on the oligarchs. And Zohran Mamdani, more poetic but no less clueless than Warren says, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Which is simply another way of saying that we will replace excellence and the rigor needed for prosperity with the Industial Age chimera of socialism, a failed effort to impose mediocrity by allowing creativity only in those activities delimited by the state. (I give you Mamdani’s efforts to eliminate gifted and talented programs in the schools…And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blocking a new Amazon facility that offered hundreds of jobs for her community.)

Even the brightest lights in the Democratic Party are ostriching reality. How is it that John Heileman can have a big conversation with Ezra Klein about the state of the Democrats and not talk about identity? Now, I do think it’s valuable that the Liz Warren and Ezra Klein wings of the party have an argument about thinning out the regulatory vise that has made energy and housing development near impossible—and I hope Ezra’s Abundance side wins.

But that victory, should it occur—it will be difficult—won’t change the public image of the Democratic Party. Which is the ACLU defending boys in girls sports at the Supreme Court. Which is the nation’s largest teachers union announcing identitarian gobbleygook—and supporting “xeopronouns” like “xe/xem/xyr,”—don’t even ask—at a recent meeting. And there’s this:

The NEA is not entirely sure this whole “America” thing is going to stick, so they refer to it as “what we know as the United States of America” and “what we now call the United States of America” in multiple slides.

Apparently xeopronouns are rock-solid but a 249-year-old country might just be a fad.

Also, sorry, gay people, but “homosexual” is a no-no term now, according to the NEA.

Why?

Because “this term comes across as clinical and dog whistle-y.”

Taken together, the National Education Association and the slightly less insane American Federation of Teachers represent the largest single block of delegates at any recent Democratic Convention. Identity extremists constitute another significant bloc.

Of course, it’s easy to spot excesses on both the left and right. The biases of the right—anti-semitism, racism, homophobia, nativism—are based in ignorance. The biases of the left—antisemitism, antiracism, homophilia, anti-law enforcement—carry the fake patina of civilized, usually academic, discourse. And that patina has allowed the national conversation, led by the mainstream media, to pursue a heavily redacted and often downright bogus conversation about race, crime and poverty.

Exhibit A? I give you CBS News and Tony Dokoupil, who I think have been doing a pretty good job presenting a more substantive nightly broadcast. But not last night: There was a segment on why life expectancy is higher in an affluent Chicago neighborhood than a poor one. Well, okay…but duh. Dokoupil asks a local minister whether crime and drugs are limiting economic development in his poor community…or vice versa. The minister can’t really say, but he blames the federal government for not giving more money. Dokoupil does not ask the next, absolutely crucial question: Why is there so much crime and drug abuse in your neighborhood?

There is a traditional leftish answer: poverty. These poor people are victims of racism and the capitalist system. There is also a traditional right-wing answer, which has to do with race. There are elements of truth to both sides (although the racial component is far more complicated than the right usually acknowledges).

Indeed, Dokoupil—and his staff—seemed totally unaware of 60 years of sociology, starting with The Moynihan Report in 1965. There is a culture of poverty festering among the black underclass. Some of it goes all the way back to the brutal nature of American slavery—all too often male field slaves were encouraged to breed without constraint; enslaved children had commercial value. Other aspects of it have to do with wanton commercialism of our hyper-marketed culture, the irresponsible expansion of welfare benefits in the 1960s, the change in sexual mores that came with the birth control pill, more powerful and accessible (and cheap) illegal narcotics. Moynihan noticed that all these were leading to a higher out-of-wedlock birth rate in the black community, and that in turn, was leading to higher crime, imprisonment, drug addition, school dropout rates—and yes, CBS, earlier death rates.

We have since learned something important: these patterns are not limited to the black community. The white underclass behaves pretty much the same—-indeed, its out-of-wedlock birth rate (about 30%, last I looked) is higher than the black rate was when Moynihan did his study. Democrats are not allowed to talk about this—and neither, apparently, are the mainstream media. Republicans are allowed to get away with ignoring it—or simply resorting to “they’re just a bunch of animals” or “just lock them up.”

But there is also research by Brookings scholars, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, culminating in their book Creating an Opportunity Society that found if you do three things—graduate high school, hold a steady job and refrain from parenting until you’re married—your chances of winding up in poverty are minuscule: about 3%

Now Brookings is as establishment-liberal an institution as you can find, so it shouldn’t be hard for Democrats to turn that basic matrix of cultural facts into party doctrine. But they haven’t. They’ve been intimidated into silence by interest extremists and their own misplaced sense of propriety. Back in 1993, Hillary Clinton admitted to me that the data showed, pretty conclusively, that two parents were better than one. She added caveats, as one must: there are an awful lot of heroic single moms out there, trying to do their best for their kids. But, as the party has sidled left, there are precious few elected Democrats who will admit that any more.

Why is it so hard for Democrats to acknowledge this simple moral truth, which has had so much to do with the evolution of America’s essential problem—race—over the past sixty years? To make things worse, Dems are also loath to acknowledge that, despite this daunting sociology (the black out of wedlock rate stands at about 70%), there has been an enormous growth of a black middle and upper class, and significant increases in college graduation rates during that time.

The fact is, most people—including an awful lot of black people—watching Doukopil’s piece sensed the bias and avoidance of difficult truths inherent in it. The fact is, most Americans—including an awful lot of black people—think the Democrats, at their core, are all about denying the true causes of underclass poverty.

The fact is, “affordability” is a nice—if somewhat misleading—issue, and Donald Trump is a dangerous thug who may be losing electoral altitude, and that history favors the out party in bi-elections. But. If Democrats don’t, finally, come to terms with the essential issue they’ve been avoiding for 60 years, they will remain a minority party.