Not A Democrat

The Party Left Me

In the days after the election, Sanity Goddess and I wandered down to DC for a few days. We visited Diplomat Son and his fabulous family, and attended the 45th wedding anniversary of Sam Brown and Alison Teal, great friends; Sam, who organized the massive anti-war moratoriums back in the day, has been a long-time hero of mine. There were lots of old friends, and a few old antagonists, at the party—and, curiously, not much talk of Trump. The election seemed too raw and ginormous to even contemplate. I drank too much. Ahh, Tito’s, you subtle temptress.

I also had lunch with two old friends, fellow New Democrats from the 1990s…and we did talk about what happened and I asked, what do we do now? “The same thing we did 35 years ago, we rebuild the party,” said one. I shuddered.

I’ve been thinking about those post-Dukakis days a lot since the election. And how hard it was, how much flak we—and the Democratic Leadership Council, and the Progressive Policy Institute, and other sources of Sanity—took from the left. I remember attending a DLC meeting where Bill Clinton spoke in 1991. Afterward, I listened to a mainstream newspaper reporter opining about how Clinton could never be nominated because he was “so right-wing.”

Clinton talked about things that Democrats weren’t allowed to talk about back then—crime, the broken welfare system, free trade (especially NAFTA). We were in the midst of the crack epidemic, which made the current street crime problem seem a croquet match. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had accurately described the state and consequences of black family disintegration in 1965, was just beginning to emerge from pariahdom (although it was still very hard for most Democrats to acknowledge the sociological disaster he identified—I considered it a step forward when Hillary Clinton acknowledged to me, on the record, that two parents were usually better than one.) We had just won the first Gulf War, which most Democrats had opposed (and Clinton, as was his occasional habit, had been both for and against, sort of).

Clinton was maddening, at times. He was a politician. He was, in fact, the best stand-up politician of his generation. So, as President, he tacked left and right, as the winds demanded. He balanced the budget, with help from a Republican Congress. He replaced an amoral welfare system with one that placed more emphasis on work and responsibility. He passed a great big crime bill, putting 100,000 more police officers on the street. He lost a great deal of political capital attempting to foment an unwieldy government health care system, and ignoring possible compromises that would become inherent in the Affordable Care Act twenty years later. He lost even more political capital feeding his id. He deregulated Wall Street too much. He didn’t pay enough attention to the rising tide of terrorism, but he also didn’t lead us into stupid, futile wars. He was a damn good President. America prospered; indeed, it boomed.

And the New Democrats couldn’t have “rebuilt” the party without him. First thing in politics, you need a candidate. And if you want to accomplish something more than business as usual, especially within the party, you need a great candidate. You need a candidate who accurately describes the state of the union and more, is willing to say “unpopular” things—it’s the surest path to credibility, just ask Donald Trump. You need a politician who sounds like he or she is speaking English that hasn’t been strained through the consultant-pollster Cuisinart. You need a candidate who answers questions directly, as Kamala Harris never seemed to do. (I’m aware that Clinton was heavily, and rather brilliantly, consulted—but his crew, led by James Carville, understood the power of the spontaneous.)

Now, such a candidate might be available to the Democrats in 2028. But I don’t see any obvious choices right now. One may well emerge—but only if he or she has world-class politics chops, a stubborn intelligence, courage, and a sophisticated sense of the changes necessary to salvage the party. Successful politics is a combination of gestures and substance and strength. Even outrageous futile gestures—like Matt Gaetz for Attorney General—have their uses for master players (No doubt, Trump had Pam Bondi stashed for the inevitability and hopes that Gaetz, as sacrificial lamb, might bring smoother sailing for his remaining passel of ridiculous nominees.) These days, far more than in Clinton’s time, you need a sense of showbiz.

But the Democrats have a deeper problem, deeper now than any that confronted the party in the 1990s. It is not merely wokery, although there’s plenty wrong with that. It is also not merely the subtle and relentless feminization of the party, though that has been a quiet, gathering calamity over time. It is also not only the cultural signposts—Bill Clinton became a Vegan, for god’s sake! (I suspect a President must be willing to eat steak, for the foreseeable future)—and the disdain for superheroes and cleavage and cops and tattooed men in tank tops. It is not only the willingness to denigrate our glorious if flawed history and prosyletize the foolishly overdrawn 1619 Project, or the anti-military thread that runs through the party. It is not even that the Democratic coalition—not even its fantasy “emerging” majority—is insufficient and waning. As Nellie Bowles points out in The Free Press:

“Majority-Asian precincts in New York City, for instance, saw a rightward shift of 31 percentage points. Precincts in Dallas and Fort Bend counties in Texas both saw rightward shifts between 17 and 20 points. And precincts in Chicago saw a 23-point shift to the right.” These are huge swings, and also not surprising. In San Francisco, the moderate movement—which saw the district attorney and school board members recalled in 2022 and then the mayor ousted this year—began as a revolt by Asian parents who were sick of the crime and sick of being accused of “white supremacist thinking” for wanting good public schools. The movement to save schools started on the Bay Area’s Mandarin-language airwaves. At the pro-recall booths set up at the city’s farmers markets, it was always Asian parents asking for signatures. 

The new multiracial MAGA coalition does not want to exist. No. These are not natural allies; rather, they were thrust together under a big camo tent. Unfortunately for the Dems, unlike the Ivy League, even demographics with bad personality scores get to vote. 

Ruy Teixeira is one of the smartest Democratic thinkers out there, even if he was wrong about the emerging majority twenty-five years ago. He just wrote an essay arguing that it’s time to throw the Democratic interest groups under the bus. I agree, but there’s a problem: they are the bus. Not just the flagrant race-obsessed anti-racists, “queer” activists, Latinx losers and women who argue that men are a form of toxicity. And not just the campus radicals, allowing their protests to lapse into Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism; and not just their professors, lost in a miasma of simplistic illiberal idealism; and not just the disastrous DEI superstructure that has had so much influence promoting sensitivity as opposed to standards, equity as opposed to equality—and whose existence weakens the status of every qualified non-white candidate for a job. They’re all suspected, sadly, of being DEI hires.

No, it’s worse than that: There are two Democratic bus “drivers” that are inimical to the cause of good government, which supposedly is the root project of the party. They are lawyers and public employees unions, especially the teachers.

I’m here because of the inspiration of great teachers; they are invaluable. Growing up, lawyers like Clarence Darrow, were my heroes. Teachers and lawyers are people like me, people of the word, people of the book. But the agglomeration of teachers and lawyers into special interest lobbying groups has not be good for education or law. And it has been a slow-burning disaster for the Democratic Party.

The litigious DNA of the Party deserves a great deal of responsibility for the Trump Revival—the pursuit of impeachment rather than censure for Trump’s Ukraine disgrace, the pursuit of suit after suit against Trump by low-rent partisan hacks in New York and Georgia, when one sleek federal case, promptly brought, would have sufficed (he did try to overthrow the government). The pursuit of Russian collusion rather than obvious, blatant scandal of Russian interference in our election; the police raid at Mar A Lago for the top secret document boxes—in the absence of evidence that the information in those boxes had been delivered to our international enemies; a slap on the wrist would have been enough. Perhaps not lawfare, but it was overkill, certainly. And Trump raised lots of money, and regained support, off it.

On top of that, there are the dusty mountains of codicils that lawyers have inserted into our regulatory structure, making even the simplest public construction projects a Rubik’s cube of litigation. Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania nearly became a national hero when he tossed the law books, ignored the regulations, and rebuilt I-95 in 12 days. Kamala Harris mentioned in passing that we need to get things done more quickly—but that was only in passing. There were no solid proposals, not even a Department of Government Efficiency. That was too often the case with Harris.

Thirty years ago, Bill Clinton tasked Vice President Al Gore with Reinventing Government, slimming down the federal bureaucracy. The effort was led by Sanity Sister Elaine Kamarck, now of Brookings, who describes its results here:

…426,000 cuts to the federal workforce. We conducted a thorough review agency by agency, something the DOGE program would be wise to repeat. That resulted in hundreds of recommendations, two-thirds of which were enacted with $136 billion in savings. We enacted customer service standards and performance metrics (under the Government Performance and Results Act passed in 1993). We closed superfluous offices, cut 16,000 pages of regulations, passed a major procurement reform bill, and fixed longstanding challenges in agencies from FEMA to the FAA.

That was far more than Ronald “government is the problem” Reagan ever did. More could have and should have been done, but Reinventing Government ran into a reinforced concrete barrier: the federal public employees unions. Now, I’d be grateful if someone could explain to me why federal employees, many of whom are over-protected as it is by the civil service system, need unions too. And then, there’s this eternal question: If industrial unions—which I favor—are organized against the power of capital, what are public employees unions organized against? The public?

The teachers are a particular problem. Their profession is admirable; they are, for the most part, admirable people doing very hard work. But too many don’t like to work hard, or with any accountability. They are a persistent force against educational reform or progress, not just here but in other countries, too. “I almost lost because the damn teachers kept the schools closed [during the pandemic],” a Democratic member of Congress told me several years ago. “My constituents hated that..”

There is no effective counter to the power of teachers. It is growing worse. Ask Chris Christie about how the teachers union bought a Republican legislature in New Jersey when he was governor. In a Night Owls podcast a few months ago, Paul Vallas—the former Chicago School Superintendent and failed candidate for mayor—said the union had become the Democratic Party machine in Chicago. The New York Times affirmed this in so many words:

Chicago is in the midst of a radically different experiment: What would happen if one of the nation’s feistiest teachers’ unions was able to elevate the mayor of its choice, who then embraced the union’s agenda almost unequivocally?

Some the academic results have been okay, a mild bounce-back after the pandemic losses—but public education is in a long-term state of defining mediocrity down. I have described the depredations of the teachers often in the past and will keep a close eye on them in the future—education is one area where Trump might have a positive impact, even if he chose a wrestling executive for DOE Secretary. (Why not Michelle Rhee?)

But my point is more political than policy-driven: There is no counter-vailing force to the power of the public unions in the Democratic Party. They represent the largest faction of delegates at any given Democratic Convention. They elect an estimated 70% of their chosen school board candidates in big union states. If they have actually seized control of the Chicago government, as Vallas asserts, can other cities be far behind? (Only the excellence of the charter schools in the Harlem Children’s Zone and the unrelenting support of black and Latino parents prevent the AFT from destroying those schools.)

The point is, these are the people driving the Democratic bus. They are forces of reaction, of profound sclerosis. And no one wants to talk about it.

Now, I’m not saying the Dems should, first, kill all the lawyers and then cut loose the teachers. That’s not going to happen. But if the Republicans have become the party of populist extremism, the Democrats can’t be the party of an equal and opposite extremism—especially an extremism of identity politics, the fumes of socialism and Jacobin unionistas. No, the alternative to extremism is moderation. I mean, how many left-wing Democrats have been elected President since….well, ever? (FDR—the usual left-citation—was a reluctant and only occasional liberal, driven by uniquely disastrous circumstances. He was also vehemently opposed to public employees unions.)

In the coming months and years, I’ll be rooting for the moderates to recapture the Democratic Party. But not from the inside. I could not be a member of a party that is run by these self-interest-obsessed factions any more than I could join a party that coddles the Proud Boys.

Years ago, Andrew Sullivan and I decided we were members of the same political party—which doesn’t exist. I suspect Sully still has his membership. I sometimes lived with the delusion that the Democrats could be that party. No more.