Why Democrats Keep Losing

 The election of 2016 might have taught both parties something, but one of them didn't get the message.  On the Republican side, Donald Trump, a man with a highly checkered past  as a businessman and a man, swept a bevy of establishment Republican candidates aside to take the nomination--an episode without precedent in American politics.  On the Democratic side, an unknown professed socialist, Bernie Sanders, nearly won the Iowa caucuses, won the New Hampshire primary, and eventually won 23 primaries or caucuses while Clinton on 34.  Trump had the advantage of running against several establishment candidates, while Sanders was running against only one.  Despite her loss to Obama in 2008, Clinton had gone into the race as an overwhelming favorite, but Sanders gave her a serious scare. The Democratic National Committee pulled every possible string to help Clinton, and she got the nomination.  Then she lost the election, and the US will never be the same again.

Since then the Democratic establishment has lived in terror of the emergence of another Bernie Sanders.  The Democratic left itself, to be fair, did its cause enormous harm in 2020 by running two strong candidates, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and neither of them developed any real momentum.  Helped by Trump's unpopularity over COVID, the establishment's candidate Joe Biden won the nomination and the election comfortably.  Trump however maintained and strengthened his grip over the Republican Party.  When Biden in 2024 had to drop out of the race, he and most of the establishment immediately anointed Kamala Harris, who (like Biden) had failed disastrously in her attempts to get the Democratic nomination before she became Vice President.  She lost to Trump by a considerably larger margin than Clinton had.

This year another populist Democrat has come on the scene--Graham Platner of Maine.  Zohran Mamdani has become a national figure thanks to his victory in New York, but he can never run for president because he was not born a US citizen.  Platner, like Sanders, is from a small New England state.  He was born to a wealthy family and went to boarding school but his life went in a completely different direction after he joined the military.  He is a true economic liberal who wants to do something about the wealth gap and the health care crisis, and he now opposes our bipartisan forever war policy in the Middle East and our support for anything Israel chooses to do.  He made such an impression on the voters of Maine that his establishment primary opponent, Governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the race.  And that immediately sent the Democratic establishment, both in Washington and in the media, into a panic.

The attack on Platner initially focused on a skull and crossbones tattoo that he acquired while a Marine.  Platner is unreservedly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian in connection with the Gaza war, and advocates an end to US military aid to Israel.  (In the last few days, remarkably, Prime Minister Netanyahu has also suggested that Israel might be better off without that aid.)  That was enough for some elements in the Democratic coalition to regard him as a mortal threat--even though Biden's essentially unremitting support for the Gaza war probably cost him the state of Michigan last time out, where the significant Muslim-American voting bloc turned against him.  I must make one point about the tattoo.  Contrary to what at least one New York Times columnist has written, the skull and crossbones was not originated by the Nazi SS.  It dates from the Middle Ages and was adopted later by pirates, which is how I first saw it watching Disney movies in the 1950s.  In any case, the argument that the tattoo disqualifies him from holding public office typifies the new Democratic attitude towards certain kinds of sins.  Those who have committed them face immediate and permanent excommunication, regardless of any excuse the sinner can put forward, any contrition he (or she) shows, and no matter how much he or she is contributing to the Democratic cause.  That is why Al Franken, who had done essentially nothing, no longer sits in the US Senate.  We will return to this attitude in a moment.  Platner seemed initially to have survived the tattoo controversy.

Today, another titan of the Democratic establishment, the New York Times, leads with a very long story about Platner's relationships with women.  Like so many accomplished politicians from the past, he has had quite a few such relationships, although he is happily married now and his wife is standing with him.  The story focuses mainly on one woman with whom he had an unmarried affair in Washington, who has been a career Republican political operative.  She accuses him of grabbing her rather aggressively on several occasions, although she adds that he never hit or injured her, and of talking demeaningly at times about women, and says she suffered long-term emotional harm from their relationship.  She insists that politics has nothing to do with her coming forward.  Other former girlfriends, on the other hand, speak highly of him, clearly do not regret their involvement with him, and do not report anything similar.  In addition, it has leaked that Planter was sexting with other women in recent years while he was married. I could be wrong, but I read the Times every day and I think this is the longest story to have appeared this  year about any Democratic politician.  It is obviously designed to end his political career.  I do wonder whether the Times  now believes that any presidential candidate deserves such a long and carefully researched story about their romantic history.  I don't.

Political parties exist to win elections.  If the Democratic Party wants to go on winning enough elections to take power, it needs to face certain facts.

Donald Trump, needless to say, has been repeatedly accused of far worse behavior, behavior for which he has paid a legal price more than once, and bragged about it in a taped conversation.  When that tape broke in 2016 we thought it was the end of his candidacy--but it wasn't.  Trump has proven that--for better or for worse--a large portion of the electorate does not share the elite establishment's standards for the behavior of public officials and will not follow the instructions of the elite media when it comes time to vote on candidates.  Bill Clinton, a Democrat, had actually proved this already during his two campaigns for president, even though the Lewinsky affair, such as it was, did not break until after he had been re-elected.  Trump has broader and deeper popularity than any other politician of the 21st century, in my opinion, and one reason is that he has repeatedly defied the establishment and gotten away with it.  He has even appointed men like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel to some of the most important positions in government despite questionable episodes in their past that would probably have doomed any Democrat.  

I am not excusing Trump or Hegseth for what they have done in the past, nor am I arguing that Platner is a saint.  I am simply pointing out that leading Democrats, in an effort to maintain neoliberal orthodoxy in both economics (no Medicare for all) and foreign policy (continuing support for Israel, no matter what), and because of the power of feminist ideology in the Democratic party, are holding candidates to standards much higher than Republicans are  held to, and standards that the bulk of the voting population does not share.  Since Donald Trump came onto the scene, Democrats have run on not being, or not supporting, Donald Trump.  They have not offered any broad solutions to our most important economic problems--which as I have tried to point out many times are NOT directly related to race or gender--or admitted that our Middle Eastern policies might be wrong.  They are standing for the status quo, which the country rightly rejects.  I'm glad that there is room in the Democratic Party for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg, but we need room for Graham Platner as well.  If we can't make room for him we will continue to lose the votes of the majority of poorer Americans and uneducated Americans, as we do now.  The American people resent the assumption of our educated elite that we know what is best for everyone, and the educated elite has to give that idea up.  Rather than nominate a real economic populist like Sanders or Platner, the Democrats think they can prove their moral credentials by nominating someone other than a straight white male.  That strategy might work within the Democratic Party but it will not work in the electorate at large.

Fasten your seat belts, stock your liquor cabinet, make a list of good movies to watch

 The flood of deeply disturbing news from Washington never stops rising, no matter how badly we wish that the president and his administration could declare victory on all fronts and let us have some peace.  We had better face the facts: this is what we have to look forward to for at least the next 31 months.  Chaos reflects the nature the president and  his administration, and they will generate more and more of it because it is all that they know how to do.  Here, in no particular order, are some (and probably not all) of the key aspects of this problem.

In foreign affairs, President Trump has discovered a new role, the King of Regime Change.  And not for him the discreet, CIA-inspired coup--he favors the dramatic military kidnapping of the targeted foreign leader, or, when possible, the total economic blockade that will make life in the targeted country almost impossible.  His administration has no respect for international sovereignty or international law, and seems to be planning military strikes against drug cartels in foreign countries, as well as more attacks upon fishing boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  Regime change did not take place in Iran--not, at least, in the form that the US government intended--but it looks to me as if we shall have an endless series of crises, punctuated by military action, in our relations with that country.  Any agreement that the two sides reach will be vague on critical points, thereby allowing the president to discover new violations of it and threaten drastic action whenever it suits him.  For the president, any retreat is tactical and temporary, and evidence suggests that he has not given up his designs upon Greenland, either.  All this will destroy any credibility of the US government as a reliable partner in international affairs.

Similarly, despite ICE's retreat from its big operation in Minnesota, that agency will almost surely open up new big operations on other fronts.  They may be designed to provoke confrontations with the governments of blue states, many of which, including my own, have been passing laws forbidding various forms of cooperation with ICE.  And like the Communist insurgency in Vietnam, the immigration problem is too big to succumb to a series of operations like the Minnesota one.  The number of illegal immigrants in the US may drop during the next two and a half years, but there will still be millions of them, and we shall still lack any consensus about what to do about their status.  I doubt that any Democrat will run on legalizing it in 2024.

The president loves transforming landscapes, and seems to regard the city of Washington as his private royal domain.  Already a wing of the White House has been replaced by a large hole in the ground, and the administration is struggling with the courts to implement new plans for it.  In a separate case, a federal judge has just blocked Trump's plans for renovation (and renaming) of the Kennedy Center, and the administration will surely appeal that decision.  I suspect the president will undertake new transformation projects, in Washington and elsewhere.  He will also try to secure congressional authorization for the projected new $250 bill with his face on it.

The pursuit of new cases against former officials and US citizens who have opposed, criticized, or leveled accusations against Donald Trump will surely continue.  Trump's social media feed (available gratis at rollcall.com) suggests that a "grand conspiracy" case accusing most of the Obama administration of trying to bock his election is being studied, and I will not be surprised by a huge indictment along those lines.  The president also reposts stories from friendly media outlets detailing how his first impeachment was based on fraudulent evidence, and how the January 6 riot was the work of the FBI.  Those accusations could find their way into court, too.

And last, but hardly least, there is the matter of November's election.  It seems unlikely that Congress will pass the legislation the administration is pushing to end most mail-in balloting and require new proofs of citizenship for people to vote.  That very failure, however, will almost surely become the president's excuse to discredit the results of that election, especially if the Republicans do in fact lose one or both Houses to Democratic control.  Republican losers may be encouraged to dispute the election results--just as Trump and  his allies tried to do in 2020--and the House and Senate would have the power to rule on any contested elections, as they have many times in the past.  (I plan to do more research on this soon.)  When the House (for example) votes to decide the results of contested elections, representatives from contested districts are presumably not allowed to vote.  Challenges to a sufficient number of Democratic seats might maintain a working Republican majority in the debates over those seats, allowing it to decide contested elections in favor of Republican candidates.  This could lead to our worst crisis since the Civil War.  

All these potential disasters reflect the administration's total loss of respect for any established procedures, any guarantees of fairness in our political and legal systems, and any independent, impartial truths.  That loss of respect has been growing in the United States for decades, on both sides of the political fence, and this is the result.  For the many Americans who have drawn emotional sustenance from their belief in our institutions, this is a personal crisis as well as a political one.  We can all draw on other kinds of sustenance to try to keep things in perspective, as others have in other places and other times.

Memories of Barney Frank

 I met the late Barney Frank in the spring of 1966, when my older brother Bob visited me near the end of my freshman year at Harvard.  They had met at something called the National Student Congress, later the National Student Association, in 1961.  My brother was then living in London and Barney was a grad student in government, writing his dissertation, as he told me, on the conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats in Congress.  Like everyone else, I was immediately struck by his rapid-fire wit, and we always had a brief conversation when we ran into each other on campus.  My two best memories of him involve his humor, and I would like to share them now.

In the summer of 1968, I had stayed in Cambridge for the first time, and was hanging out with some friends at the newly formed Institute of Politics on Mount Auburn Street, whose living room had a television.  I found myself there on the August evening when Richard Nixon accepted the Republican nomination for President, which he had won against the more liberal Nelson Rockefeller and the more conservative Ronald Reagan.  During the convention a newspaper--I think it was the Miami Herald--had leaked the transcript of a meeting between Nixon and southern delegates, whose support was crucial.  Nixon had apologized, in effect, for supporting the fair housing bill that had passed Congress in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination that spring.  He argued that it was better to have "gotten the issue out of the way" then than to have it figure in the campaign.  His acceptance speech was an effective one, and it included the following sentence:

 "And we shall work toward the goal of an open world—open skies, open cities, open hearts, open minds."

As the audience erupted in cheers, Barney burst out:

"But not open housing!"

It was around this time, I see, that Barney went to work for Mayor Kevin White of Boston, although he was still theoretically working on his Ph.D. dissertation.  I ran into him in Harvard Square a year or two later and he explained to me that he had now changed its topic to the workings of the Massachusetts legislature.   Apparently Barney had the mind, but not the temperament, to become an academic, and the dissertation never materialized.  Instead he won election to the Massachusetts Legislature from the Back Bay in the early 1970s, and stunned that body with a series of libertarian proposals.  He earned a Harvard Law degree while serving.  And that leads me to the funniest thing I ever heard of him saying, reported in  a Boston Globe feature during those years that described an exchange he had in the Assembly with a more traditional colleague.

"Mr. President," said this colleague, addressing the man in the chair, "when is the gentleman from the Back Bay going to stop? He wants to legalize prostitution! He wants to legalize gambling! He wants to legalize homosexuality!  When is he going to stop?"

"Mr. President," Barney replied, "I apologize to the gentleman from ________.  I'm sorry that he is offended by prostitution. I'm sorry that he's offended by gambling. I'm sorry that he's offended by homosexuality.  I don't know when I will stop, but I promise him this: I won't stop until I find something that he likes to do!"

To advance his political career, Barney not only stayed in the closet, but carried on a well-publicized mock romance with Kathleen Sullivan, the daughter of an important Boston political family who was then serving on the Boston School Committee.  (She eventually married the mayor of San Francisco, Joseph Alioto.)  In 1980 he was elected to the House of Representatives to succeed Robert Drinan, a Jesuit who had to give up his seat in response to a decree from Pope Paul II banning priests from public office.  In the next election, after redistricting had forced a consolidation of districts, he defeated Republican Margaret Heckler, whom Reagan then appointed, and later fired, as Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Not long after that, while running a lecture series at Carnegie Mellon, I brought Barney to Pittsburgh for a debate with Cal Thomas of the Moral Majority on social issues.  

Eventually, of course, Barney became the first openly and voluntarily avowed gay member of Congress, and that became a very big part of his political persona.  He rose to prominence on the House Financial Services Committee and co-wrote the Dodd-Frank Act in the wake of the financial crisis.  That act, for better or for worse, essentially accepted the Obama Administration's view that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with our new financial system, and the trend towards deregulation has continued since then, with consequences that we cannot yet foresee.  He supported Hillary Clinton for president both in 2008 against Barack Obama and in 2016 against Bernie Sanders.  Now, as he informed the world during his last weeks, he has been writing a book arguing that the Democrats must downplay certain issue dear to the Left in order to win elections.  I will withhold judgment on that project until I can see exactly what issues he is referring to.  As I have made clear, I do think they have to change their positions on certain social issues, but I do not think they will return to effective power, or do much good when do, if they do not abandon the neoliberalism which Barney came to champion in favor of something closer to the principles of the New Deal.  Barney was one of the most remarkable of a certain group of 20th-century politicians, the children or grandchildren of ethnic immigrants who took advantage of an affordable educational system to embark on great political careers.  We need more people like him now.

Whither the Democratic Party?

Our national political crisis has been going on for at least 26 years, in my opinion, and Donald Trump remains as much a symptom of it as a cause.  Together my wife and I have just gone through my last book, States of the Union, and many problems within the Democratic Party emerge from my summaries of the state of the union addresses and other major speeches of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.  To begin with, the Democratic Party largely accepted the Reagan revolution and never fundamentally challenged it.  Both Clinton and Obama echoed Reagan's arguments that the federal government had grown too large and that the American people, not the government, had to solve their own problems.  Clinton, of course, pushed the work of deregulating the financial world, setting the stage for the subprime boom and the crisis of 2008.  Obama's response to that crisis worked too slowly and did not reflect a belief that there was anything fundamentally wrong with our new deregulated financial system.  In the same way, Obamacare did not challenge our disastrous for-profit health care system, but merely tried to integrate more Americans into it with the help of federal subsidies.   

The Democrats have also failed to offer much in the way of a different foreign policy.  Obama withdrew from Iraq, but increased our commitment to Afghanistan, and eventually had to go back into Iraq to deal with ISIS, as well.  He forced out Egyptian President Mubarak during the Arab spring, but didn't take long to conclude that his Muslim  Brotherhood successor--the victor in a democratic election--had to be forced out of office.  He did allow John Kerry to reach the nuclear deal with Iran, but he failed to build up any constituency on its behalf, and Donald Trump repudiated that agreement in his first term, turning the Iranian enrichment program loose, and has gone to war with Iran in his second. Similarly, an attempted rapprochement with Cuba has now given way to an effort to overthrow Cuba's communist government under Trump.  Biden did pass a big energy and infrastructure bills, extending large subsidies to renewable energy, but Trump immediately undid most their impact when he returned to power in 2025.  The Obama Administration also adopted the Bush II administration's regime change policy in Libya, creating more chaos, and the Biden administration allowed Israel to carry out the destruction of Gaza with hardly a whimper during its last  year in office.  And on the domestic front, Biden abandoned the traditional Democratic policy of reducing the deficits opened up by Republicans.  Every Democratic president from Kennedy through Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Obama had left office with a much smaller deficit than they had inherited, but the Biden deficit for fiscal 2024 was considerably larger than the Trump deficit for fiscal 2019, before the pandemic struck.

I have written many times that the election of 2016 showed that the American people had lost faith in their traditional political leadership.  Only that loss of faith allowed Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination in a romp and defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election.  Clinton had also faced an important populist challenge from Bernie Sanders, but the whole party establishment got behind her and managed to defeat him.  Joe Biden, who had failed in two earlier presidential bids, won the Democratic nomination in 2020 with help from key southern black votes, and soundly defeated Trump in the midst of the pandemic, but he ignored the inflationary spiral that the government's response to COVID had set off until it was too late.  After ignoring Trump for about a year, the administration went on a legal offensive against him, one which has now failed spectacularly.  When Biden finally left the race the party promptly anointed another establishment favorite, Kamala Harris,  who ran, as Clinton had, mainly on not being Donald Trump.  She refused to acknowledge that there was anything seriously wrong with the country, and the American electorate registered its dissatisfaction with the status quo once again.  Since Trump's victory the party leadership has once again focused upon opposing everything he does, without giving any indication of how a Democratic return to power would help the American people. No party leader has complained much about the abandonment of 70 years of traditional US foreign policy.

A prediction market now gives the Democrats a 46 percent chance of regaining control of both the House and Senate in November.  But what will happen if they do?  They will presumably start a new round of investigations of administration behavior, leading to repeated confrontations with the executive branch.  A new impeachment, trial and acquittal is quite likely.  The functioning of the government may come to a complete halt.  I am not confident that any of this will actually increase the  popularity of the Democratic Party.  And then there is the matter of the Democratic candidates for President in 2028.

Various polls ranking the possible Democratic candidates in 2028 are giving wildly differing results. They tend to show two Californians, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, in the lead with about 35 points between them, followed by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg with perhaps 10 percent each, and Governors Pritzker of Illinois, Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Beshear of Kentucky and Whitmer of Michigan, along with Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona,  with a few points each.  Harris has proven that she is not an effective national candidate, and I am not at all sure that Newsom would be either. He too would face ads about transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants and other related woke policies in California.  I don't think that either Ocasio-Cortez or Buttigieg is middle America's idea of a presidential candidate either.  Newsom is leading J. D. Vance in trial heats right now, but that may not hold up as the election nears.  Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment is once again in a panic over the emergence of younger, more independent voices such as Mayor Mamdani of New York City (who of course will never be able to run for President) and Graham Platner of Maine.  The old Democratic brand still rules the Northeast and the Far West, but it lost all the swing states last time around and appears to have no traction at all in much of the heartland.  It relies on corporate contributions just as heavily as the Republicans do.  And neither party seems to me very likely to be able to do much about the potentially enormous economic effects of the AI revolution.

Both the Democratic Party and the nation need to revive faith in government.  The genius of Trump is that his nonstop reality show, featuring new scandals and fiascos every week, makes that essentially impossible.  I think we are headed for changes to our economy, our world position, and our lives that older Americans will  not recognize.  It will fall to the younger generations to try to make some sense of them and their effects.

Can the US hold together?

 Last fall, the historian Jill Lepore gave an interview to the Chronicle of Higher Education about her career as an historian that sheds a great deal of light about what has happened to history in the last hafl century or so.  She described a key moment in her professional evolution.

"My passion as a historian came out of that impetus to tell the stories of people who were left out of the accounts of history that I grew up with. But what I increasingly saw as a young professor was how little of an impact that work had had. I saw how inward a lot of that work was. In the ‘90s, when I was in graduate school, if you walked into a bookstore, the history books would be David McCullough and Steven Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin — these doorstop biographies of presidents and generals. The Father’s Day book trade, as it’s sometimes called. Whether you like those books or don’t like those books, they do not offer Americans an understanding of their past that is useful for living in a pluralistic, multiracial, multiethnic democracy. That’s not what they’re trying to do."

Lepore is a Gen Xer who didn't reach college until the 1980s, by which time the prejudice against that kind of book in academia was well advanced.  The Silent and Boom generations had sold the idea that the mainstream story of American history was a fraud, designed to conceal centuries of oppression of black Americans, women, Indians, and homosexuals.  That is what Lepore was referring to when she mentioned a "pluralistic, multiracial, multiethnic democracy."  We cannot understand our place in American society, she is arguing, without paying attention to the particular status of groups to whom we belong and their place in various hierarchies.  Any "understanding of the past" that lacks that focus, she says, is not "useful" for living in our nation.

I would like to argue the opposite.

It is only after beginning work on the political history of the early 19th-century United States that I have come to appreciate what an extraordinary document the United States Constitution is.  Almost anyone on the Left  now dismisses it on the grounds that it did not guarantee Americans of different races and sexes equal rights.  Yet it now seems more significant to me that there is literally nothing in the original US Constitution that explicitly denies anyone equal rights.  It does not define the right to vote at all, leaving the qualifications of voters for the House of Representatives up to each individual state--which is why a number of states had allowed votes for black men or women well before the 15th or 19th Amendment was passed.  In some explicit ways it extends rights further than many states did.  It bans any religious test for federal office, even though some states did not allow adherents of certain religions to hold office.  Some states also had property qualifications for elected officials, but the Constitution had no such qualifications for Congressmen, Senators, or Presidents.  It carefully avoided using the word "slave," allowing some politicians to claim by the 1820s that there was no federal right to own slaves.  Most significantly of all, in my opinion, the Constitution does not include the words "men," "women," "white," or "black".  "Person" is the only word used to refer to inhabitants of the United States.  

To my mind, those aspects of the Constitution make it an ideal political charter for "a pluralistic, multiethnic, multiracial democracy."  Over the last half century our new left, so dominant in academia, has insisted that we must focus on the characteristics that divide us, and that in my opinion has contributed enormously to the polarization of our society and our inability to united behind a common goal.  We will not develop more healthy politics and government until we can focus once again, as we did in the middle decades of the last century, on what unites us and on the things that either benefit or threaten us all.  The books that Lepore dismissed--while they varied widely in quality--described attempts to create our Constitution and society and make them work.  Our biggest problem, I think, is our continually increasing economic inequality, and that problem cuts across racial and gender lines far more than we tend to recognize.  15 million white Americans, 8 million black Americans, and 14 million Hispanic Americans live in poverty, but the Democratic Party frequently talks as if poverty was primarily a racial problem--and while nearly all poor black people and most poor Hispanics vote Democratic, most poor whites now vote Republican.  The structure of our economy--so much changed over the last forty years or so--produces too many superrich people and too many poor ones, and that problem can't be solved by trying to favor some groups over others.  Our educational system, to judge from mandatory test scores, is failing children of all races at growing rates.  The AI revolution threatens the livelihoods of Americans of all kinds, and disastrous, inflationary wars affect us all as well.

Despite the Constitution, we have never treated each other completely equally--but that fault, dear Brutus, is not in our Constitution, but in ourselves.  We need to keep the idea of colorblindness alive because it is the only possible basis for generally fair treatment.  Affirmative action and DEI have done a lot to diversify our elite, but without doing anything for the tens of millions of Americans of all races who will never belong to the elite.   Meanwhile, we have to prove, for the first time since the early 1960s, that we all really can sacrifice for the common good and achieve things as a society that can inspire us all.  We failed to do that in response to 9/11, or the 2008 financial crisis, or the pandemic.  We may have to live for a long time without that kind of inspirational glue.