Democrats of All Ages Agree on Nothing
If time travelers from a distant era—say, the 1992 presidential campaign—had dropped in on this summer’s Democratic debates, they’d be entitled to wonder just whose political party they’d stumbled upon. The same could be said for a visitor from 2008 or 2012.
Medicare for All? Decriminalization of illegal border crossings? Free health care for undocumented immigrants? Free college and forgiveness of existing student-loan debt? Once-radical notions like these are now at the heart of the major party’s dialogue.
In 1992, Bill Clinton won the White House by promising to fight for the people who “work hard and play by the rules,” a pointed appeal to the political center and an implicit rejection of the George McGovern–style liberalism on which he’d cut his teeth as a campaign operative in Texas 20 years earlier. In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned on the notion of “change we can believe in.”
But today, Donald Trump has blithely broken every rule in the conventional political playbook. He has changed the tenor of national
