Democrats' Deep Problems Threaten Democracy Too

America needs at least one strong, popular, pro-democracy party

I don’t intend for Perilous Times to be about day-to-day partisan politics, (there are plenty of places to follow that). The health of our two dominant political parties, however has a significant bearing on the foundation of American democracy, so is certainly an appropriate topic of discussion. We need to understand the internal dynamics of these parties, how they are being perceived by the American people, and how their public perception is impacting their popularity.

Today, I am struck that both a long piece by Jason Zengerle in the NY Times magazine and David Brooks’ column focus on deep internal difficulties the Democratic Party is facing right now. For American democracy to survive, we need at least one popular, healthy party committed to liberal democratic principles. The anti-democratic fervor in the GOP has been well documented elsewhere, and while the Democrats are unshakably democratic, as both articles point out, Democrats are deeply divided and increasingly unpopular. If Democrats are in trouble, so is our republic.

The starting point for this discussion needs to be that, contrary to popular opinion, the Democrats performed very poorly in the 2020 election. Because of post-election stop the steal insanity, the media and commentators have been quite properly reiterating over and over that Joe Biden clearly won the presidency. But this civic imperative is obscuring how close we came to a second Trump term and the tenuous nature of the Democrats’ hold on power.

Yes, Biden won the popular vote handily, but if you take out California, his margin of victory in the other 49 states was only 2 million votes out of 138 million cast. If you exclude New York, the popular vote count in 48 states was dead even. Biden won three pivotal battleground states by a total of only 39,000 votes (.025% of all votes cast).

In one of those states, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has explained that 28,000 Georgia voters skipped the presidential race but voted for Republicans down ballot. This shows that Biden won Georgia not because of a groundswell of support for Democrats or their agenda, but because a small chunk of Republicans truly detested Trump. (This “undervote” for a presidential candidate is unusual. Usually, more people vote in the presidential race than the down ballot races (for example, Biden had about 99,000 more votes in Georgia than Democratic congressional candidates)).

The ambivalence (and perhaps hostility) of voters towards the Democratic message and agenda manifest in the loss of 13 seats in the House compared to 2018 and defeats in Senate races in Iowa, Maine and North Carolina that Democrats were favored to win (with two of those races not even close), all while the Democratic presidential candidate garnered a record number of votes nationwide. Democrats only gained control of the Senate by the narrowest of margins by happenstance when Trump’s misbehavior in the post-election period advantaged two Georgia Democrats in their January 5th run-off elections and depressed turnout among the disillusioned Republican base.

These quirks led to the ironic circumstance of Democrats taking unified control of the government in late January 2021 despite a highly mediocre electoral performance.

With the narrowest of margins in both chambers of Congress, Democrats took power under the most dire of circumstances. Over 4,000 Americans died of COVID on Biden’s inauguration day and vaccines were just beginning to become available. The economy had begun to recover from the pandemic, but continued to face huge challenges. The murder of George Floyd and COVID had laid bare glaring racial inequities in 21st century America that many were demanding be addressed. Wildfires and floods in the US and around the world had shown that the climate crisis was no longer a distant threat, but was upon us now. Trump had hollowed out American government and undercut US alliances around the globe, while China pressed for recasting the post-World War II liberal order and a nationalist Russia continued to wreak havoc in its opposition to the West.

In these unenviable circumstances to start governing, the hope for Democrats was that the combination of a mass vaccination campaign to curb COVID and the jump-starting of the American economy, plus Biden’s professional stewardship of the government, could enable them to overcome the historical trend that voters disfavor the incumbent party during mid-term elections. But this plan unraveled after six months when the Delta variant emerged in June 2021 to plunge the country back into pandemic malaise, the generally popular withdrawal from Afghanistan turned chaotic at the end (and deadly for 13 U.S. service members), and the economy recovered more quickly than global supply chains — leading to higher inflation than had been experienced in 40 years. Voter dissatisfaction has reached DEFCON 1 levels, and absent a dramatic turnaround, Democrats could face record electoral defeats in November putting the GOP in control of one or both chambers of the Congress.

Zengerle, Brooks, and much of the chattering class have put the blame for the Democrats’ woes on Biden’s leadership and the Democrats leftward drift on cultural issues. Biden was elected - the argument goes - because his moderation was attractive to independent and Trump-hostile Republicans, and therefore should have governed from the center in a way that signaled his disagreement with the far-left wing of his own party, especially on cultural issues. Moderate Democrats are facing electoral extinction in the House, they claim, because voters see Democrats as focused on identity-politics issues relating to race, transgender and immigration rather than things voters care more about like the economy and crime.

I think this narrative is just too simplistic and doesn’t fairly capture the challenges that the Democratic Party and its current leader is facing. Polarization within the Democratic Party is nowhere near as extreme as it is in the GOP — where many life-long Republicans have abandoned a party now dominated by Donald Trump and many anti-democratic, isolationist, and often white-supremacist politicians. But polarization within the Democrats is real, and cannot simply be addressed by aligning the party with the “moderate” position on every social, economic and national security policy issue in order to placate moderate Democrat and independent voters.

Those of us who identify with the moderate wing of the party - and I place myself in this camp as I was for Biden even as he came in 4th in Iowa caucuses - have to understand that a substantial chunk of the party only supported Biden, first in the primaries and then in the general election, because of the existential crisis to America presented by the Trump presidency.

These voters are deeply committed to their causes. Some see the climate crisis as an existential threat to their future enjoyment of life on this planet and are rightly demanding a prompt transition to a clean energy economy. Some are no longer willing to be patient for America to make good on its constitutional promise of equal treatment for all races and are rightly demanding genuine progress dismantling systemic racial oppression in America. Yet others believe that America has shortchanged poor and working class citizens for decades and are rightly demanding substantial investments in public services like health, education, and debt relief for young people.

We “moderates” have to understand that these voters held their nose to vote for Biden - but now that the presidency was delivered to him based at least partially on their votes - expect Biden to deliver on his promises to them. Biden’s absolutely horrific approval ratings are being caused not just by abandonment of independents and moderate voters, but also from the disappointment of young, socially liberal, and economically progressive voters. Thus, the claim in the Zengerle article that to save Democratic moderates in the House that Biden needs a Bill Clinton-like “Sister-Soulijah” moment to distance himself from the left is highly likely to backfire.

Moderates often claim that the left has nowhere else to go but the Democratic Party, so they just have to essentially shut up and get with the program - at least until though the midterms. This strategy would be playing with fire. Democrats have proven over and over again that we are much less cult-like than our Republican counterparts and there are elements of the party that would be willing to either sit out an election or promote a party schism, rather than to take a backseat on the entire progressive agenda. We need a better plan, but “my way or the highway” is just not going to work.

My message here is “Houston…we have a problem.” American democracy is being threatened because one of our major parties has abandoned its core principles to appeal to a set of angry, fearful, ideologically driven voters. We can’t let the Democratic Party suffer the same fate. We need to find a language, a message, and agenda that fuses our common goals sufficiently to keep us all united and fighting for a core set of values. Biden has certainly tried - but so far - much for reasons that are beyond his control, it isn’t working. More on this in future posts …