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.

The Voting Rights Decision

 Last August, thanks to a column by Linda Greenhouse, I anticipated the voting rights decision that the Supreme Court just handed down, and said that I thought that it would in fact do some good--a rare, but not unheard of, position on the left side of the political fence.  The decision has come down as expected.  The logic of Justice Alito's opinion is at times quite depressing.  The Supreme Court has already ruled, tragically in my opinion, that politically motivated gerrymandering does not contravene the Constitution, and Scalia's decision rests on the idea that the Louisiana Republicans stuck with one black (and therefore Democratic) district for political rather than racial reasons.  I think that is probably true, but it doesn't make me feel better about the logic.  I don't think states should have the right to devalue the votes of perhaps 45 percent of their voters because they will vote against the candidates that the other 55 percent want.  I would like to ask you all to read (or reread) the post I wrote last August.  I will highlight two points.  First of all, the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights act, which many now accuse the court of eviscerating, specifically denied any right of any racial group to be represented proportionally.  Secondly, as I pointed out at length in the post, I don't think we'll have any meaningful progress towards economic equality as long as poor black Americans vote for one party and poor white Americans (a larger number) vote for the other one.  The creation of black majority districts has contributed to that result, and removed any incentive for either party to build interracial coalitions, especially in the South.  The black vote in the US was solidly Republican until 1936 and has been solidly Democratic since 1964.  It was no accident that the 1936-64 period saw by far the greatest progress towards racial equality that we have ever experienced.  The parties were competing for black votes.

Higher education

   The crisis in higher education is much in the news.  I have been too busy to write much myself for awhile, but anyone interested in this topic will benefit from reading the following two articles.  The first, by the venerable Nicholas Lemann, deals with the Trump administration's confrontation with elite higher ed, and is well researched. The second, by an art professor at Purchase College, really calls a spade a spade, rather than referring to it metaphorically as a shovel, with respect to the decline of education within higher ed.  I disagree with the author on two points. I've never liked the phrase "the production of knowledge" and I think education should stimulate individual creativity, not help form a collective. But it's a great piece all the same.

Our Broken Government

 Regarding the crisis in the Persian Gulf, nothing has happened in the last eleven days to alter the opinions that I expressed eleven days ago.  The same drama continues in slow motion, and the result--a resounding declaration of an historic victory after the US has abandoned many of its proclaimed goals--seems to me as likely as ever.  Cuba will be the next contestant on the reality show.

Just a few minutes ago I read through a long front-page story in today's New York Times, about the 2016 origins of Supreme Court emergency review.  Someone has leaked court documents to the Times, and they tell an amazing story of how Justice Roberts insisted on acting so as to prevent the implementation of President Obama's plan to move away from coal and towards natural gas, wind, and solar. (The story doesn't mention oil, oddly.  I tried to copy the share link for it--the free one--but apparently the Times won't allow that for this story, at least now. I'll check later.)  Remarkable enough in itself, the story also brought home to me what a wretched state our constitutional republic is in--and no, that is not merely the fault of Donald J. Trump.

When the Clean Air and Clean Water acts passed by huge bipartisan majorities in 1970 and 1972, Americans worried about poison in the air and water, but only a few scientists were voicing concerns about global warming.  The 1970 act defined pollutants very broadly and gave the new EPA the authority to regulate any pollutant that could "cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare."  The same act defined welfare as "effects on soils, water, crops, vegetation, manmade materials, animals, wildlife, weather, visibility, and climate, damage to and deterioration of property, and hazards to transportation, as well as effects on economic values and on personal comfort and well-being, whether caused by transformation, conversion, or combination with other air pollutants."  The Congress that passed those acts, let it be noted, was still dominated by members of the GI generation, whose young adult years had revolved around sacrifice for the common good, and who had had to learn to respect established procedures.  They were, for the time being, the last such American generation.  The inclusion of "climate" did reflect emerging concerns about the long-term effect of greenhouse gases on the earth's temperature, of which both Democratic Senator Ed Muskie, a major architect of the bill, and the Nixon White House were well aware. 

In 2007 the state of Massachusetts had sued the EPA arguing that the agency's obligation to protect the public welfare extended to regulating greenhouse gases, and the Supreme Court held, by a 5-4 vote, that greenhouse gases did fit the definition of a pollutant.  By this time, of course, climate change had become a very heated and partisan issue.  The financial crisis diverted attention elsewhere, and Barack Obama, elected the next year, quickly abandoned a proposed cap-and-trade system to regulate carbon emissions after Congress failed to act on it and he lost control of the House in 2010.  In 2016, however, with his second term winding down, his EPA issued sweeping regulations designed to change the shape of our power grid under the authority granted by the act as interpreted by Justice John Paul Stevens (the last GI to serve on the Supreme Court) in 2007.  The state of West Virginia and four other plaintiffs made an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to stay the implementation of the regulation as on overreach of authority.  Justice Roberts on February 5, 2016, wrote an extraordinary memo to members of the court advocating granting the rehearsal.  It reads like a brief for the plaintiffs, arguing that the Court would probably rule against the EPA (as indeed it eventually did, with somewhat changed membership) and that the affected industries would suffer irreparable harm in the meantime if the court didn't act now.  As the Times explains in its story, five members, including the incumbent swing justice Anthony Kennedy, went along with him.  

The Times story focuses on this case as a procedural innovation, because the Supreme Court has decided an increasing number of cases in this emergency fashion, short-circuiting not only the role of the lower courts, but also the whole process of briefing and arguments by the two sides.  I will focus on the broader constitutional implications of the whole controversy.

I certainly would support drastic measures to change the shape of the power grid and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  That opinion is reinforced by an experience I have just had--adding a heat pump system to the two floors of an old Victorian house in which I live.  This has allowed my wife and me to heat only the individual rooms we have to be occupying, rather than having to heat at least one whole floor at a time with oil.  It turns out that this is going to save us a substantial amount of money during the winter months.  The electric bills during the winter will approximately double, but that doesn't come close to the amount of money that we have been spending on oil, which has been reduced to a trifle (the oil has to kick in when the temperature is really low, well below freezing.) In other words, yes, our electric company burns fossil fuels to generate our electric power, but it evidently burns far less to generate the heat that our house needs than our oil heating system does.  

As it happens, however, the whole controversy over regulating greenhouse gases raises the question of how our democracy is supposed to work.  Most of the people I know, presented with the evidence that climate change is a serious danger and moving away from fossil fuels--or from how we use fossil fuels--could reduce it, would immediately conclude that yes, obviously the EPA should regulate them.  It would not in the least disturb them that the EPA in 2016 was relying on one word in the Clean Air Act of 1970, when no one was activating this kind of full-scale regulation, or that powerful economic interests continue to oppose this change. This is right, therefore it should happen, has been the mantra of liberal activists--and, for that matter, of conservative activists too--for decades now.  And that, in my opinion, is why our democracy is in such a mess.

Democracy can only work if we respect certain procedures, regardless of whether they always produce our preferred outcome or not.  I do not believe, sadly, that there has ever been a moment when the Congress would have passed a new piece of legislation or new amendments to the 1970 act that would have authorized the EPA effectively to make it impossible for coal-fired plants to operate any longer.  President Biden did pass significant incentives for increasing renewable energy production, although he had to couple them with other measures that would increase fossil fuel production, as well, but they passed with no bipartisan support.  That has allowed the Republican Party, which now controls both the Executive and Judicial branches of our government, to undermine them.

In fact--and this is the other point to be drawn from the Times story--the Congress, designed as the most powerful branch of our government, has become a bystander with respect to all the great domestic questions of our time.  Issues of race preference, of climate regulation, and of immigration are all fought out between the Executive, which decrees policy in various ways, and the Judiciary, which in turn rules on the constitutional propriety of what the Executive has done.  What shocked me about the Roberts memo (see above) was how completely it seemed to focus on the wisdom of the Obama administration's action, rather than its legality.  Both parties champion the power of the courts when they do not control the White House, and attack it when they do.  The Executive and the Judiciary are both staffed with highly educated Americans (I include the judicial law clerks as well as the judges themselves) who emerge from the educational system with strongly held views, either progressive or conservative.  The bulk of the American people play little or no role in all this.  It is not what the constitution intended.  Perhaps nothing can fix this except some new and terrible crises that requires genuine sacrifice by all of us to surmount--a test which we have failed repeatedly since 2001, as I have noted--or until a new generation grows up with respect for procedures and institutions, a recognition that we have to respect something more than our own preferences.   Meanwhile, this is where we are.