If they ever want to win again, Democrats must focus on reversing America's decline
Democrats must focus on real change, not attacking their own irrelevant fringe
Since the election, a torrent of Democratic voices have blamed the woke left for Kamala Harris’s loss. Yes, the woke left is weird and unpopular. But no, it is not what enabled the Trump revolution. That honor goes to Democratic and progressive elites, thanks to their failure to imagine, communicate, and enact policies that would noticeably improve most Americans’ lives. Their compulsive habit of shining a light on and attacking their own fringe — instead of the other side’s — didn’t help.
It’s right to call for a return to majoritarianism. But mainstream Democrats are just as bad as their left counterparts at imagining what that might mean. The vision that’s currently winning on the opinion pages seems to be this: exactly what Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton all ran on — just minus support for trans girls in sports.
Forget that none of those candidates ever uttered a word about it. Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton was so mad about that one issue sinking Democrats’ chances that he made an official statement opposing trans kids in sports days after the election. It was a perfect demonstration of the self-defeating reflexes of the Democratic Party.
Let’s do a thought experiment: How many Democrats would have to join Moutlon in speaking out against trans kids in sports before Republicans would stop attacking them about it? Of course, they would never stop. And even when Republicans lose this one line of attack, like they did with gay marriage, they will still have communism, fascism, baby killing, open borders, crime, fentanyl, forced child sex changes, child sex trafficking, and more — all of which Democrats are guilty of championing according to billions of dollars worth of Republican robocalls, attack ads, social media fodder, and countless full length documentaries and hours-long podcasts.
It’s true that the left fringe of the Democratic party and progressive movement are out of step with most Americans on some issues. More importantly, they’re annoying and rude. It’s the way they righteously scold anyone with questions even as the state, mass media, and giant corporations transform people’s communities and overturn traditional ways of doing business, living and thinking that have been in place for centuries or even millennia.
None of this would matter, however, if the mainstream of the Democratic Party would simply ignore their own fringe and focus their attacks on the weirdos on the other side of the aisle.
Tim Walz had exactly the right idea when he lambasted Republicans for being “weird” — for example, for pushing laws that would authorize coaches to inspect student athletes’ genitals before games. A week into Walz’s time on the campaign trail, however, I heard Democratic strategists were shutting down that line of attack because, “it didn’t play well in focus groups.” I assume that’s why it disappeared as soon as Walz was fully absorbed into the official campaign. In my experience, this is perfectly consistent with the design-by-committee-of-consultants culture that rules most mainstream Democratic campaigns.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats have weird fringes. But not only is the Republican fringe weirder, more dangerous and, let’s just say it, evil, it has completely taken over the party. Countless Republicans in Congress, heads of major conservative organizations, and famous MAGA megachurch pastors proudly espouse blatantly misogynist, white supremacist, anti-semitic, and anti-democratic views. They push outrageous conspiracy theories. And they’re saying this stuff on Fox News every night and in the chambers of Congress every day.
But even before the MAGA takeover, Republican leaders almost never denounced their own fringe. That’s because they knew their job as politicians who want to win elections was to attack the other side, not their own. Today, it’s a moot point because the fringe is now the party, the party is an authoritarian cult, and if you oppose it, you’re out. This in itself is super weird, and Democrats should be attacking Republicans for it every day.
It always baffled me that centrists blamed fringe Democrats for their losses when Republicans kept winning elections by elevating their fringe higher and higher. Now that Democrats just got beat by the fully ascendent MAGA movement, you’d think maybe they’d be ready to rethink their convocation that moderation is always the answer. The Democrats should not hand their party over to their fringe too. Just because moderation isn’t the answer doesn’t mean that the Democratic Socialists of America is. Republicans are not increasing their vote share by going crazy — they’re picking up a few million angry and reckless voters while losing a few million others who may be angry but can’t stomach Trump and MAGA. The Democratic fringe is not the reason Harris lost, but neither is it a path to electoral dominance and real change.
The vast majority of Americans agree with the Democratic mainstream positions on just about every issue that voters care about. If they hold these positions, while adding on a credible, well-crafted program of real change to match MAGA’s symbolic and shambolic version — Democrats would win all those swing states that Harris lost and retake the popular vote with a comfortable margin.
This should be obvious because it’s exactly what allowed a Black man named Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 to beat a revered and well-known white war hero by margins like 16% in Michigan, 14% in Wisconsin, 12% in Nevada, 10% in Pennsylvania, and 5% in Ohio.
Unfortunately, Obama’s audacious betrayal of his promises to reform the economy, champion Main Street over Wall Street, and make health care affordable contributed to the reddening of those swing states. Nominating Hillary Clinton — a walking lecture on why the middle class should learn to love gradual decline — was a bridge too far, and a critical mass of swing state voters cast their disproportionately powerful votes in protest for Donald Trump.
It doesn’t take much to defeat a guy as crazy as Trump and a movement as un-American as MAGA. Joe Biden went to the pos-industrial swing states and mumbled something about jobs and electric Corvettes. People could barely even hear him, but it was enough.
But then, as far as voters were able to gather, Biden did not even try to deliver the sweeping change that voters had dramatically demanded. Companies gouged prices. Biden did nothing to stop them. Biden did do a bunch of exciting industrial policy stuff, but it didn’t approach and wasn’t meant to be sweeping, noticeable change. And anyways, he almost never talked about it. The few times he did, due to his age, people couldn’t hear him or understand what he was saying.
That brings us to the position Democrats are in today. If they want to consistently win national elections, they need to do more than campaign on “hope and change” or wonky industrial policy pledges. They need to convince Americans that they will carry out a sweeping program of reform and action that will actually work to:
build an economy with prosperity for all,
make healthcare, housing, and education affordable,
fix ailing schools,
fix policing and public security,
and make immigration orderly, safe and just for immigrants and communities receiving them.
That plus the current mainstream Democratic promise to promote unity and tolerance, and to secure basic human and civil rights for all Americans would win Democrats a super majority. After the mess Trump is about to make of the economy, Americans will be dying for this — including and especially the left-behind voters in key swing states.
The real problem blocking mainstream Democrats — and, by the way, most of the left — is that they simply don’t believe that such a program of sweeping change is possible. Trump doesn’t think it’s possible either — but as a con man he’s perfectly comfortable selling his vision of a Great America just like he sold disgusting Trump steaks and fake degrees from Trump University.
The truth is, it is possible for America to achieve all of those sweeping changes to our economy and society. The United States has made equivalently huge leaps in the past and so have many other countries. We don’t need a social or political revolution to do this — all the tools we need are already built into our society and economy. Sadly mainstream economic education for decades has been devoted to making us forget about those tools and how to use them. That’s why at New Consensus, we’re developing a comprehensive and detailed model program to help leaders imagine how the sweeping changes we need can be accomplished.
If Democrats continue to obsess over the positions of their own party’s fringe instead of getting to work developing a program to deliver the progress that voters are demanding, America has no defense against MAGA and the even worse movements that will follow it.