After being sunk for a year in the slough of despond, Democrats were positively giddy when their candidates took the governorship in New Jersey and retained it in Virginia where they may even recapture the House of Delegates. But pride goeth before next fall.
Yes, the elections of this week might be seen as repudiation of Trumpism. He endorsed divisive losers, as is his wont, while the winners included a transgender candidate who beat the self-proclaimed king of homophobes, a proud immigrant beat an enemy of immigrants, and a woman beat a man known for his belittling of women.
Sweet. But Democrats will overplay their hand if they begin to think Red States are suddenly going to become Sweden.
After all, this was also the week that Donna Brazile published “Hacks,” her expose of the 2016 Democratic campaign. The title refers not just to the Russian meddling with the election, but to the fact that the Hillary Clinton operation was run by hacks, including the candidate.
The candidate was not just distant, arrogant, unlikable, entitled, tainted, and ultimately incompetent, but her campaign and many Democrats were out of touch with the mood of the voters and their desire for reform. They didn’t seem to notice people weren’t buying what they were selling, nor the fact that the easy answers of two septuagenarians, a socialist and a vulgar TV huckster and demagogue, were more popular than Clinton’s position papers.
My 34-year-old son is probably a bit more economically liberal than I am. Also, more likely to believe in the possibility of rapid rather than incremental change than those of us who have lived through decades of disappointment. But he and I are as one when it comes to the smug, self-righteous, culture warfare favored by many on the left. It sets our teeth on edge, and is obviously counter-productive if the goal is to get to 51% in races across the country.
The party of freedom of thought and enlightenment liberalism has begun to sound as intolerant as Steve Bannon, Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter. For these extremists, being a values voter doesn’t mean you value people, but that you despise those who don’t agree with you. They are more concerned about micro-agressions against their self-love than in full scale assaults on international order, economic comity, and constitutional democracy.
Democrats have lost the lunch pail blue collar vote in part by becoming the party of effete snobs who need trigger warnings if scary topics are going to be discussed. The party of science now includes those who also fall for vaccine conspiracy theories. And surely not everyone who believes our borders need to be policed is therefore an intolerant Trump who thinks anyone aspiring to become an American is an alien rapist, murderer or terrorist.
Going to the other extreme every time the lunatic right passes a bathroom bill or objects to laws banning gluten is playing their polarizing game. Surely a cure for what ails us is more likely to be found in the mushy middle than in proposing, as some Californians do, seceding from the Union. As old political hands keep repeating, the game is about addition not subtraction, the big messy tent, not the pure but shrinking tribe.
If Democrats want to recapture state legislatures and governor’s mansions across the country, win back House and Senate majorities and become competitive in the electoral college, they need to quit practicing identity politics and their own band of extremism. Instead of aspiring to be the party of Vermont socialism, holier-than-thou academe, extreme greens or of militant racial and religious minorities, they need to begin speaking to all Americans about issues that concern all Americans. Tellingly, the transgender victor in Virginia didn’t run on her identity, but on her constituents’ needs. She talked about roads, schools, jobs.
Instead of a family feud between center left, left and crazy left, Democrats had better concentrate on policies that can attract all the members of their family, as well as Independents and center right voters who are repulsed by the turn the Republicans have taken to divisive dysfunction. They need to run for, not just against.
In favor of a justice system that delivers for everyone the product advertised on the Supreme Court building — Equal Justice Under Law. A tax system that strives to fund agreed upon government tasks by equitable treatment of taxpayers, not favoritism for those with the best paid lobbyists. Healthcare that is as accessible, affordable and efficient as in most other developed countries.
Our citizens ought to be able to feel safe from foreign and domestic threats without our becoming a police state or a colonial power. They should be protected from economic insecurity without the government running the hospitals and the nursing homes and means of production. They ought to be able to count on a safety net, a social contract that includes all Americans, rather than a survival of the fittest economic regime, sensible regulation rather than either repression or the Wild West.
The government also needs to lead the way in adapting to rapidly changing times in order to minimize instability or decline, but instead to promote adaptation and competitive success. And since a well-educated populous will be essential to the task, the party of education rather than superstition should draw the contrast.
We face big challenges, and on many of them Democrats have workable proposals, while Republicans little to offer other than the rich getting richer and everyone else being left behind. Yet Democrats have too often failed to win the argument, because their opponents have changed the subject to hot button non-issues and imaginary enemies. They have set one group of citizens against another, and have promised pie in the sky, like spending that magically saves money, tax cuts that cause no pain, the free lunch, the simple solution of the flimflam artist.
Time to take back the middle from the extremists, the debate from the irrational, free speech from the thought police, decency from the unscrupulous.