The Democratic party establishment has had its head in the sand

A party stuck in its ways as the nation faces the Trump challenge

Over the past several days we’ve shared a long form essay on how the Democrats ended up where they are today — as a party that has broken from FDR’s liberal experimentation and change, becoming the conservative party in the traditional sense of being averse to change and innovation.

We’ve made an “executive decision” to split Part VI, breaking out the “concluding thoughts” section (to be published next week). Today’s post will look at the enduring strength of the Democratic party establishment, which has been a mixed blessing at best.

Here’s the revised full outline with links to the five previous posts:

I. A brief review of party history up to 1964 (published 4/14)

II. The Democrats from 1964 to the new century (published 4/16)

III. The aughts were a hopeful time, but problems lurked under the surface (published 4/18)

IV. An electoral deadlock develops between the parties, to the Democrats’ disadvantage (published 4/21)

V. The Democrats in 2024: A case study of party dysfunction (published 4/23)

VI. The party establishment has its head in the sand

VII. Concluding thoughts on where the Democrats need to go from here

Democrats are strangely listless. The party with more to lose in the current electoral climate (as shown in part IV of this series) is complacent when it comes to doing something about it.

The establishment still reigns supreme
While the Democratic establishment is not the same as it was in the heyday of labor dominance in the mid-20^th century, for the most part it retains its hold on presidential and congressional politics. Witness the consensus that formed around Biden in 2020 — you can’t get any more establishment than him! — and in the 2024 primaries prior to his bowing out of the race. The powers-that-be showed their muscle after that by anointing Vice President Harris nominee.

We can also see the dominance of the party establishment in Congress. There have been few if any internal struggles for leadership positions for decades now. In the House the stability of leadership has been nothing short of amazing, even as the party has been out of power in 9 Congresses out of 13. While Republicans in the House have moved through general disorder and many leadership teams even as they saw some electoral success this century, Democrats settled on one team, win or lose. That vaunted team – Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn – did eventually step down in unison two years ago (they were all in their 80s), only to be replaced without dissent by their ideological carbon copies from the next generation. Leadership in the Senate has been similarly stable, run by people not quite in their 80s but getting there.

The party’s interior squabbles, which amount to nitpicking, continue, even as its prospects for taking over the Senate have practically disappeared, the Electoral College disadvantage in the perennially close presidential races persists, and the House is looking dicey at best going forward. There is something fundamentally wrong with a party that is at best competitive with an opposing party that coalesced around a serially-indicted presidential candidate and that might benefit from advice from the Keystone Cops in running the House of Representatives. It’s simply not clear the Democratic establishment recognizes it has a problem.

There’s been churn on the GOP side
For their part, Republicans look more like the party of policy entrepreneurship, with leading figures trying to achieve a new synthesis of populism and conservatism to break the 50-50 electoral deadlock. The ascendent populist right is about doubling down on cultural conservatism and taking what were once Labor left positions on trade — and sometimes even going after big business. Witness J.D. Vance teaming with Elizabeth Warren to crack down on banks, and Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz agreeing with then-President Biden in “opposing broad immunity for social media companies.” The GOP idea is not to find some elusive middle ground, but rather to identify a new platform that will break the stalemate by winning over large numbers of Democratic-leaning voters.

They’re doing all of this while they have the advantage; meanwhile Democrats have been AWOL when it comes to any serious rethinking of their approach.

Triangulation and the anti-establishment left
Even Clinton-era triangulation, which was a concerted strategy to establish middle ground positions on controversial issues, seems out of the question in the contemporary Democratic party. Its adherents are marginalized — case in point when Congressman Seth Moulton challenged the prevailing orthodoxy on transgender athletics and was criticized sharply by other Democrats and activists.

Recent anti-establishment movements, like the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-led Squad in the House, while popular, only amount to efforts to generate movement within the existing Democratic coalition — and possibly unreliable non-voters — instead of coming up with ways to attract Republican-leaners. The reigning theory seems to be that ginning up turnout among young voters is what will enable Democrats to have a shot at a stable majority. The results of the 2024 election were not encouraging.

Democrats: the conservative party
If conservatism is understood as an aversion to change and innovation, the term describes Democrats, not Republicans. The party has changed remarkably little over the last 50 years. While there have been occasional shifts in emphasis between moderate liberalism (represented by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) and elite liberalism (Obama, Kerry, and Dukakis), those two groups have sustained a relatively happy marriage through the years. Even in 2008 when the party split roughly evenly between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both candidates were endorsed by major establishment figures, there were few discernible policy disagreements, and the party rapidly fell in line behind the eventual nominee.

Compare that to the turmoil on the Republican side over roughly the same time period. The rise of cultural conservatives in the late 1970s led to the purge of the moderate Eastern Establishment as Reagan’s anti-government economic conservatives took control. Then, in the mid-2010s, came the MAGA movement that rejected Reagan’s descendants including the Bushes and the party’s 2012 ticket — Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. These one-time Republican heroes have now effectively been excommunicated.

Taking the long view, it’s been a roller coaster for the GOP.

To put it in simple terms, Democrats have been too stable, strangely unwilling to make adjustments based on changing times. Maybe they would benefit from some wisdom from one of their counterparts across the pond.

Starmer and the rise of Labour
Going into 2024 the Labour Party in the U.K. was in a very bad place – they’d been shut out of power for almost 15 years. Most recently they’d suffered a landslide defeat at the hands of the Conservatives in 2019. The party’s leader, Keir Starmer, was determined to change direction.

He made the following observation — no less important for being obvious: “When you lose that badly you don’t look to voters and say, ‘What on earth were you thinking?’ You look at your party and say, ‘We have to change.’”

He went on to justify the party’s move to the center this way: “We gave up being a party of protest five years ago. We want to be a party of power.” Labour succeeded, winningly convincingly in June of 2024.

Democrats, for their part, insisted for months leading up to the 2024 election that people just didn’t understand that the economy was strong and that Biden was on top of things — the thinking being that they just needed to remind people how great things actually were and they’d come around. Unfortunately many voters didn’t quite see it that way.

Surely, in 2025, the party could benefit from consulting Keir Starmer on political strategy. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

We’ll finish up next week with concluding thoughts on the direction Democrats need to go.