I’ve been observing the ongoing debates about which of the several “reckonings” Democrats need to have to improve their fortunes with what I can only describe as a mounting frustration and disgust. There’s the one over Joe Biden being old. There’s the one about Democrats becoming too “woke” and speech police-y. There’s the one about having betrayed or fallen short about this or that left-leaning cause. On the merits I agree with some of these more than others. Some I think are genuinely important. But as things Democrats should be focusing on now, taking accountability for, repositioning, whatever(!) they all, taking together, strike me as different sorts of pathetic, out-of-touch and myopic distractions.
Parties succeed and gain traction by doing far more than by self-analyzing. And my own theory of the case is that core driver and cause of the low standing of the Democratic Party right now is not wokeness or immigration or Joe Biden’s age but the fact that Democrats are simply not effective at advancing the policies they claim to support or protecting the constituencies they claim to defend. Put simply, they are some mix of unable and unwilling to wield power to achieve specific ends.
We’ve discussed many times how this deficiency has specific roots. The Democratic Party is a coalition of many disparate factions and no single dominant one. That makes it fissiparous, difficult to unite behind specific goals. But these observations can only be aides to improvement and not excuses for inaction.
The way for Democrats to raise their standing is to demonstrate that they can be effective at addressing the challenges and dangers of today, as in stuff that’s happening right now: massive cuts to Medicaid; pervasive worry and insecurity tied to erratic tariff policy and the fear of inflation and recession; massive cuts to basic disease cure research. If I didn’t mention the issue that matters most to you, by all means add it. Very little of what Trump is doing is popular. It’s true that Democrats in Washington have very little effective power. But they can certainly use it more effectively than they have over the last four months. And where they can’t directly disrupt present policies, they can make the case against them publicly, build opposition, build arguments for electing Democrats next year.
It seems like the most obvious and elemental thing: if your goal is to show that you can address the needs and fears of ordinary citizens, the best way to do that is to try to address those needs and fears, and do so as they exist in this moment. It might not be so clear if Trump were moving from success to success and his policies were broadly popular. But they’re demonstrably not. The opportunity is there in the most vivid and stark way. As is so often the case, the best plan is to show by doing. Every defeat contains lessons and this doesn’t mean ignoring them. You keep them in mind, put them to use addressing the demands of the now. To re-litigate things that happened a year ago or five years ago, having reckonings or soul-searchings — well … those things are really about figuring out the needs of the Democratic Party, things that are very literally not anything to do with anything happening right now. That seems like the best way to keep people thinking that Democrats are wishy-washy, uncertain what they believe and more or less irrelevant to addressing the needs of ordinary voters and especially those only loosely tethered to the political system.
