It's Not Just Biden

The Democrats are Senescent, too.

On Monday, January 15, the day that Donald Trump trampled the opposition in Iowa, Joe Biden gave an interview to Reverend Al Sharpton. Curious, that. Biden doles out interviews about as often as squirrels give away acorns. Sharpton, though more acceptable than he once was—especially on issues like crime—is still regarded as a dangerous, militant figure by most Americans. So why, I asked a prominent democrat, did the President sit with the Rev on Iowa Day? “Because no one was watching,” this person said, “and you have to tend to the base.”

This is the essential condition of American political life in 2024:

Trump exhilarates his Republican base. Biden exasperates his Democrats.

Why?

Because the Republican base is about ideology and the Democratic base is about identity. The Republicans are coherent, even if the ideology is a repulsive right-wing populism. The Democrats are an amalgam of identity groups, with varying agendas and beliefs. You can aim a message at black activists—on say, reparations, as the ever-foolish Jamaal Bowman did this week—and a fair number of Latinos will be turned off. You can try to stroke Latino activists on immigration, and a fair number of blacks—to say nothing of middle-class Latinos (and the rest of us, for that matter)—will wonder why on earth you can’t act to shut down the southern border. You can piss off women if you don’t have the suitable quota of Ms.’s in your administration…and that number is never quite enough. You can piss off gay activists if you question, even just a little, the current, faddish obsession with gender fluidity. About the only thing Democrats have in common is abortion and even there, the activists are so extreme that rational discussion is impossible. Democrats can not say when a late-term abortion is too late. That is disgraceful.

The Democrats’ ethnicity problems have multiplied in recent years as the identity groups have become more complicated. There is a black middle and professional class now; it holds different views from academic blackdom and from the black underclass. It was middle- and working-class blacks, angry about crime, who elected Eric Adams over the lawyerly MSNBC darling Maya Wiley for mayor of New York. (Adams turns out to be a rather sketchy character, but that’s another story.) Latinos are profoundly different from blacks: they’re not interested in government jobs. As Michael Barone once noted, blacks and the 19th century Irish are similar in that way. Latinos—like the Italian immigrants 100 years ago—figure most of the government jobs have been taken. They want to start businesses; they work construction jobs; they’re religiously conservative; they favor legal immigration, but not the mayhem we’re seeing on television. (Oh, and to complete the Barone trifecta, Asians are assimilating the same way Jews did, through an insane fixation on meritocracy.)

This has been a disaster for Democrats. They made a terrible mistake emphasizing identity over community fifty years ago. It was one of the great flubs in American political history. And now the coalition is fraying, for the very best of reasons. The “protected” groups are assimilating into the American mainstream (often to the dismay of the activists like Ibram X. Kendi, who would be forced to look for honest work absent his imagined apocalypse of grievance). There are multiple black and Latino agendas now; the most important have nothing to do with identity—but with education, crime and inflation. Women and gay people have achieved acceptance and functional equality, historically, in the blink of an eye. Women have, arguably, achieved superiority. Just look at college graduation rates. There was a simple answer that Nikki Haley could have offered when asked if America was a racist country. She could have said: “Well, it sure used to be, by law—but slavery and all those Jim Crow statutes—the ones that made distinctions according to race—are gone now. Sure, racists still exist. They always will…in, I hope, ever-declining numbers. But by law, we are no longer a racist country. And we should celebrate the progress we’ve made.”

We should celebrate the progress we’ve made.

Funny how you never hear politicians say that. This is understandable, if reprehensible, among Republicans: their white-wing populist base believes the assimilation of the past 50 years is the very opposite of progress. But what about Democrats? The Great Assimilation has been one of the triumphs of democratic governance. But you don’t hear them bragging on it because…well, because, if they don’t have all those ethnic and gender identity agendas, what do the Democrats have left?

I suspect that 100 years from now, this period will be seen as a time of fundamental political change to meet a new technological reality. The Republicans have already made their transformation, from the party of Main Street business to the party of blue-collar white-nationalists. That’s a losing, hateful bet in the long run. If America is to succeed, assimilation is our fate and cafe-au-lait is our color.

And, the democrats?

Their future is their past, sadly. It is personified by Joe Biden. He should be walloping Trump—a corrupt, authoritarian wannabe with a potty mouth who tried to overthrow our democracy (the fake electors scheme was the real offense, not cheerleading the mob on January 6). But the opposite seems to be the case. Look at this poll, courtesy of my podcast mate John Ellis:

Agnus Reid Institute:

Yikes.

Some of Biden’s problems are well known. He is too old for the job (so is Trump, but Biden looks it). He has to deal with the inflation hangover, even though the government’s actions to achieve a soft landing have been admirable. His excellent foreign policy has been too subtle to be appreciated. He is powerless to deal with the number one issue in the campaign to come, the Southern border—because a combination of left-wing Dems and right-wing Republicans don’t want the problem to be solved.

But there is another problem, too: Biden has nothing to say about the future. The future is beyond his imagining. If the Democrats’ record has been the human rights triumphs of the past 50 years—achieved with great honor and at great political cost—Biden’s job is to declare victory over identity politics and tell us what happens next. If the Republicans are offering right-wing populism, the Democrats can’t just continue to offer grievance agendas, especially since most of those grievances have been dramatically meliorated. The dirty little secret of Diversity, Equity and Identity (DEI) programs is that they’re indicative of past-thinking, not the future. Indeed, when someone like former Harvard President Claudine Gay—a product of the DEI-industrial complex—blames her firing on racism, not lunkheaded Congressional testimony and plagiarism, the traditional Democrat identity-rhetoric begins to seem laughable. She remained in office as long as she did—she was appointed to the office—only because she was black. The vast majority of Americans understand this.

At this point, the Dems need to offer an anti-identity agenda, an American unity agenda. It would be foolish, and arrogant in the extreme, for someone like me to suggest what that might be. I’m as clueless as Joe Biden. We’re going to need someone younger, some fresh young genius who plays video games and knows what all these alternative-intelligence hustlers are talking about—while also understanding the grand, slow movements of history and trade—to figure out where the Dems go next. We’re going to need someone you just have to watch on TV. Someone who can offer a thrilling, inclusive defense of democracy based on common goals, not a riot of identities.

The sadness of 2024 is that’s not going to happen this year. One can only hope that we will merit the chance to have another election in 2028.