What’s Wrong With the Democrats?
The strategy was simple. A demographic wave—long-building, still-building—would carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage. The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losses—losses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities. Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.
But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher. The strategy was simple. The presidency was everything.
Anyone who examined the strategy that the Democratic Party has embraced ever more tightly in recent years could see its essential precariousness. And anyone could see that investing such grave hopes in the person of Hillary Clinton—who had lost the party’s nomination to a little-known senator in 2008; who had struggled to win it against a little-known socialist eight years later—was particularly risky.
But liberals’ fears were softened in 2016 by a widely shared belief: that the candidacy of Donald Trump would shatter the Republican Party, at least in the form in which we had long known it. His trail of wreckage would force a painful reckoning with the party’s shortcomings—the narrowness of its coalition, the cloistered cluelessness of its elites, its intramural disagreements about the future of the nation. After a season of Trump’s destruction, the party would lie in rubble.
On November 8, that prophecy was realized, true in every regard, except that it described the Democrats. On Inauguration Day, the party’s power ebbed to its lowest level since the 1920s.
If there’s any consolation to the realization of terrible fears, of worst-case scenarios springing to life, it’s that they are invigorating. Donald Trump’s presidency has rocked a long-complacent Democratic Party like nothing in recent history. Liberals, with their confidence that the trajectory of the country points in their direction, never had quite as much practice as conservatives in expressing their anger. That’s what makes the “Resistance”—the many marches, the seething hostility at town-hall meetings, the anti-Trump placards shouting at passersby from bungalow windows—a transformational break in the pattern.
Leaderless and loud, the Resistance has become the motive power of the Democratic Party. Presidential hopefuls already strive to anticipate its wishes. Elected officials have restructured their political calculus to avoid getting on its wrong side. The feistiness and agitation of the moment are propelling the party to a new place.
But where? The question unnerves Democrats, because the party has no scaffolding. All the dominant leaders of the last two generations—the Clintons, Barack Obama—have receded. Defeat discredited the party’s foundational strategy—or, at the very least, exposed it as a wishful description of a more distant future, rather than a clear plan for victory in the present. Resistance has given the Democrats the illusion of unity, but the reality is deeply conflicted. Two of the party’s largest concerns—race and class—reside in an increasing state of tension, a tension that will grow as the party turns toward the next presidential election.
To produce a governing majority, the party will need to survive an unsettling reckoning with itself. Donald Trump didn’t just prevail over the Democrats; he called into doubt their old truths.
A year before his wife lost, Bill Clinton had a premonition of how things could go very wrong. He revealed his foreboding—perhaps fittingly—at fund-raising events. He would hint at what he considered his wife’s glaring vulnerability: the roiling discontent of the white working class. The travails of the group—44 percent of eligible voters—preoccupied him. He could recite one grim statistic after another. Even at this early date in the campaign, he knew that their cultural alienation might place them beyond the reach of a Democrat. And while most pundits at that point still considered Trump the second coming of Herman Cain, a circus act rather than a serious candidate, Clinton feared Trump’s ability to channel white-working-class rage. “He’s a master brander and he[’s] sensing sort of the emotional landscape of people he’s selling to,” Clinton told donors gathered in Atlanta in October 2015.
Hillary Clinton always had trouble getting right with the zeitgeist, and her aides worried about that flaw. She began her first presidential bid as her party exploded in anger over the Iraq War, an adventure she had sanctified in the Senate. The specter of that vote and the campaign that followed, the fear that the political moment might again turn against her, continued to haunt her closest aides, especially Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress and one of her
