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.