Democrats may need a radical overhaul

But history tells us it's not likely to happen

David Brooks’s recent column on the pickle Democrats find themselves in is provocative. In a message to his Democratic friends, he wrote:

The problem is not the party leaders. The problem is you. You don’t understand how big a shift we’re in the middle of. You think the Democrats can solve their problems with a new message and a new leader. But the Democrats’ challenge is that they have to adapt to a new historical era. That’s not something done by working politicians who are focused on fund-raising and the next election. That’s only accomplished by visionaries and people willing to shift their entire worldview. That’s up to you, my friends, not Chuck Schumer. 

If you’re thinking the Democrats’ job now is to come up with some new policies that appeal to the working class, you are thinking too small. This is not about policies. Democrats have to do what Trump did: create a new party identity, come up with a clear answer to the question: What is the central problem of our time? Come up with a new grand narrative.

He concludes that if Democrats come out of the Trump-led regime shift the same as they were going in, they will keep losing and become irrelevant.

When does a paradigm shift happen?
In the last 60 years there have been three party makeovers — one on the Democratic side and two on the Republican.

George McGovern, the candidate of the cultural left in the Democratic party managed, as a plurality candidate, to win the 1972 nomination for president against the old guard labor wing (Hubert Humphrey was their candidate) and the southern conservative populist wing (George Wallace was theirs). The candidates split the primaries three ways, with McGovern squeezing out a convention victory on the basis of the newly-opened up caucuses held in about 20 states. The cultural left has been ascendant in the party ever since.

Ronald Reagan’s hard line cultural conservatism and deregulatory/small government message first made a big splash against the establishment GOP in 1976 when he almost wrested the nomination from sitting president Gerald Ford. That old guard, which was moderate (some were even liberal) on social issues while looking only to limit government’s growth instead of rolling it back, was represented by multiple candidates in the 1980 race, most prominently George H.W. Bush. Reagan of course won the day, and his version of down-the-line conservatism reigned supreme in the party for decades.

Bush, for his part, underwent a conversion experience to hardline conservatism at the 1980 convention in order to gain Reagan’s blessing for the VP nomination.

While Reagan heirs including the two Bushes and Robert Dole prevailed relatively easily in GOP nomination contests from 1988 to 2004, major strains in the party coalition began to show in 2008. It was evident by then that there was no longer a consensus within the party.

John McCain was essentially a plurality candidate that year, winning the nomination in large part because several other contenders (Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Huckabee) split the populist-leaning vote. The establishment coalesced around McCain as Santorum, et al, fell by the wayside due to their individual weaknesses and insufficient funding.

Romney’s rise to the top in 2012 was the same story. His early plurality primary victories were facilitated by splits on the far right, even as he tacked to the right on immigration and renounced his previous embrace of Obamacare-like health reform.

In 2016 Donald Trump was simply a better candidate with more lasting power than his populist predecessors. The establishment’s best — Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, John Kasich, and others — were running, but none could compete with Trump and his populist supporters when it came down to it. Make no mistake about it: the Republican party at that time was split down the middle; the convention was ugly and many establishment figures refused to support the nominee.

These three cases all involved parties in turmoil. There were irreconcilable divisions, and the old guard didn’t hold on against popular growing movements.

Democrats are not in turmoil; there’s a precedent for that
Today the Democratic establishment still reigns unchallenged because the party faithful agree on pretty much everything — the differences between the Ro Khanna/Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes progressives and the Kamala Harris/Chris Murphy/Chuck Schumer liberals being matters of degree. Do we pursue a Green New Deal or something similar but more modest? Expand Obamacare or gradually make Medicare universal? Soak the rich big time versus a gradual increase in tax progressivity? These are not fundamental differences, and there certainly isn’t much space between the factions on cultural questions like abortion, crime, and immigration.

Today’s Democrats resemble Republicans from the 1930s into the 1970s. A moderately conservative GOP establishment was able to paper over relatively minor differences on economic and social policy, almost always selecting from the establishment for their presidential nominees. And here’s the thing: it wasn’t a particularly successful strategy. They managed to win a few times for president, but almost never for Congress. There weren’t nomination fights and convention donnybrooks, with the notable exception of the 1964 race which was both the exception that proved the rule and a harbinger of things to come.

You can’t create a movement out of whole cloth
You simply can’t wave a magic wand and come up with a new grand narrative, as Brooks says needs to be done, when there is no substantive oppositional movement in the party. Keep in mind that Trump didn’t so much “create a new party identity,” as Brooks suggested he did, as he represented a viable vehicle for a rightist populist movement that was already a force and had roots as far back as Patrick Buchanan’s campaign in 1992. The same story pertained with the McGovern takeover in 1972 and the Reagan realignment in 1980, both presaged by brutal intra-party battles driven by insurgent movements.

Today, alas, the Democrats all get along.

What’s ahead for Democrats
The most likely scenario for Democrats is that they muddle along with their progressive/liberal alliance, gaining new hope with the election of attractive (but establishment) gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia this year, and with a possible takeover of the House in 2026.

But these successes, if they happen, would only mask the inability of the party to compete effectively against the populist right in a political landscape that tilts in favor of the GOP, with that party’s electoral college advantage, the red state-dominated Senate landscape, and a red-tilting reapportionment in the House coming after the 2030 census. If there is really to be a Democratic party makeover, it will have to come out of nowhere. Something that hasn’t happened before.