This is not superstitious perversity. Since the debacle of 2016, Democratic politicians and their supporters have been publicly debating the way forward, with good reason. American democracy is in crisis. The health of the political system (never good) and the integrity of the federal government stand in need of restoration without delay. The tide is running in the Democrats’ favor, but an ill-judged strategy for seizing it could leave them becalmed in shallows and in miseries for a long time. Should they tack to the left? to the right? On which coordinate should they move: cultural, or economic? Whom should they take on board?
Before proceeding to the now-inevitable metaphors of weighing anchor and setting sail, let’s clear away some clumps of Sargassum.
Zero Tolerance
This rash and opportunistic position on sexual misconduct could very easily blow up in Democrats' faces. No doubt you're 'way ahead of me, if you remember the vogue of Zero Tolerance that burst upon the American scene about twenty years ago. School administrators seized on it as the ultimate commitment to keeping weapons out of classrooms. The word draconian inspired hope in one set of law-abiding citizens and horror in another. Sure enough, it was only a matter of time till we had a ten-year-old girl being taken away by the police -- actually in handcuffs -- for having brought an unauthorized pair of scissors to school for a project.
Zero Tolerance is the refuge of exhausted minds and stampeded personalities. The open aim of the Democratic Party's internal stance of Zero Tolerance is to be above reproach when taxing the Republicans with their laxity, but there's no credit to be had for running roughshod over people and principles to gain political advantage. On the contrary, that purge-like spectacle and the uncritical embrace of a freewheeling #MeToo movement are liable to recall displays of blinkered missionary zeal that have made liberal politics anathema to many Americans in the past. Come election day, Democrats may find that they own a notoriously oppressive phenomenon in the midst of a broad backlash against it.
Socialism
Bernie Sanders got away with being an avowed democratic socialist in 2016 to the extent that he ran pretty well against Hillary Clinton while losing to her. The Republicans let it go because he was attacking the flank of their inevitable adversary. If he had become the nominee, it would have been a different story.
Democrats have an opportunity to win broad support among middle-class and working-poor Americans for policies that aim to bring economic security within the reach of all, but not for any project to repeal the national tenet of individual responsibility. Each policy must satisfy more circumspect notions of practicality and justice than would animate "the masses" in the America of socialists' dreams. However, people who stand to benefit from social programs, or who already do so, must be made aware of their stake so that there's nothing like the scorning of "Obamacare" which Republicans managed to induce last time in beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act.
Personally, I think I could take a lot of democratic socialism before I got tired of it. I only regret that I have but one vote to cast for my country.
Secularism
The devil is in the "ism". There's no need for secular Democrats to feign religiosity or for religious ones to flaunt it. All that’s required is the thinking person’s urbane appreciation of multiple belief systems and the recognition that materialism, too, is such a system. This makes the difference between a self-righteous, amoral, wholly political liberalism that must bend society to its will and a liberalism that can help society find its way along the moral turnings of issues like abortion.
Identity-first politics
In 2008, the American people elected an African-American president for the first time. However, Barack Obama was not propelled by any movement to change the political game and create the First Black President. He had the personal attributes to take game-changing in his stride on the way to victory. Next time, would I vote for a Latino? a woman? a Muslim? an LGBTQ person? With all my heart, but not on account of such categories. I'll be looking for an outstanding candidate, first. The Democratic Party must take back both Congress and the White House without fail.
Disruptive demonstrators
Even as demonstrators made the White House too hot to hold Lyndon Johnson, they rubbed much of the American public the wrong way. When progressives have subsequently rumbled in the streets, whether to trash Starbucks at the 1999 WTO conference or to rage at the lamentable but legitimate election of Donald Trump, they've only stigmatized themselves as tantrum-throwing children of privilege. If the student activist-hystericists who have been silencing discourse on their own campuses obtrude themselves on the national scene, they'll pose one of the greatest obstacles to the political work that must be done now in defense of democracy. They are to be regarded as nothing less than agents of the Right.
Supportive entertainers
Public support from entertainers, no matter how sincere, is unprofitable to a liberal candidate. The experience of the late Clinton campaign set the seal on that lesson. Conservatives can benefit from such support if they choose to do so, because any show-business people in their camp can be portrayed as rebels against a decadent cabal. When the beneficiaries are liberals, and especially when they bring entertainers onstage for hugs and handshakes, the opposition will deride it as the irrelevant shilling it is and will mine it for barbs about the vanity of coastal elites. That response will carry the day. The votes of actors and singers are of course welcome along with those of film editors, recording engineers, and other Americans.
Hothouse liberals
It does no good that one's heart goes out to the People, if it's a type of heart they'd rather you kept. This is the classic paradox of leftist politics: the temperamental mismatch between Platonist intellectuals and the objects of their affection. Rarefied atmospheres and sheltered habitats breed poor political emissaries -- for the liberal cause. In America today, conservatives can be thoroughly isolated from the workaday world and yet win acceptance there by contrasting themselves with condescending eggheads and fragile bleeding hearts. Liberals could hardly disavow the compassion and thoughtfulness that inform their politics, even if they wanted to. However, they can be sturdy souls. They can be critical thinkers, not didactic obsessives. They can be frank speakers, not canting or calculating ones. They can be worthy listeners. On occasion, they can forget politics and be warm human beings.
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Very well. Soon, Democrats in their many vessels must weigh anchor and set sail. May they steer by such beacons as these:
Sanity
It seems little enough for a nation to ask of its leaders, but it's at a premium now. Whether the President of the United States has a mental disorder or not, the fact that reasonable people debate the question is telling. Donald Trump's behavior does bring the word abnormal to the tip of the lay tongue. He makes it necessary for psychiatric authorities to insist on the distinction between mental illness and mental instability. Leading Republicans who once viewed Trump's mentality with disgust, and who reportedly continue to do so, offer no escape from it.
America is thirsting for steady, mature, civilized conduct in government. Democratic candidates in 2018 and beyond must satisfy that thirst by personal example even more than by the political visions they describe. It's to be hoped and expected that many young people will run for public office in this hour of national distress. Let them put their elders to shame with their sanity and their temperate language. They might, for example, save words like Armageddon and “the end of the world” for nuclear war and — the end of the world.
Competence
One can have a brain that is sound and a personality that is free of disorders, and yet have a mind that is stunted or atrophied. Incompetence will result. This is where we stand with Donald Trump and the administration he has gathered around him as an extension of himself.
It's often observed that Trump's incompetence at least keeps him from working his will to more disastrous effect. However, any such negative virtue hardly compensates for the governmental deterioration that is taking place. Most Americans are capable of recognizing this as no sensible return to small government, but the falling to ruin of their national estate under poor caretakers. Democratic candidates should not only talk about the deficiencies and demoralization that are occurring, but also make voters aware of the consequences to be expected. Diplomacy, justice, public health, the environment, the still-neglected infrastructure: in these areas and others, Trump and his Republican protectors are letting America rot.
The true story, calmly told in facts
Even before Donald Trump, Republicans too often got by on the sound of their words. Now the impudent emptiness of Trump's slogans, claims, and insults presents Democrats with the best chance they'll ever have to meet spieling with straight talk and to test words against meanings.
Many Americans should be receptive. They've heard, for example, that climate change is a hoax; that they don't need the Affordable Care Act; that the new tax law hurts Donald Trump but he gave it to them for their benefit; that he has saved manufacturing jobs, including 1,000 at Carrier Corp. They're noticing some divergences, and they're ready to listen to informed talk about what's really happening. In many regions, the subject of climate change will be a good place to start, especially if Democrats augment their leadership in preventive policy with leadership in managing those consequences that are already inevitable and increasingly palpable. There's little to gain by having been right years ago, and less by rubbing it in.
Constituency reform
White working people as a voting bloc have become Trumpist Republicans. No doubt there’s truth in the observation that those people’s view of their own interests varies with the part of their class identity that is addressed: white or working. However, it’s hard to see what can be made of that. Democrats may address the working part more than before, but they can’t keep the opposition from bearing down on the white part. The potential for winning this tug-of-war will depend heavily on external factors such as demographic shift, which must increasingly exercise the white part of white working people’s identity. Some personalities that responded to white nationalist agitation in 2016 may remain in a balanced state of flux between different interests, but others have been pulled into the vortex of racial politics for the rest of their lives.
Instead of trying to reconstruct the old alliance of liberal intellectuals and white blue-collar workers (with African-Americans regarded as a bloc defined entirely by race), Democrats should build a new alliance along lines suggested by two opinion pieces that appeared in The New York Times last summer: Thomas B. Edsall’s “Where Democrats Can Find New Voters” (June 15, 2017) and Steve Phillips’s “The Democratic Party’s Billion-Dollar Mistake” (July 20, 2017).
Edsall’s thesis, backed up as always by a wealth of data coherently analyzed, is that Democrats ought to turn their attention from the white working class to “a much larger bloc of voters, the roughly 65 million service sector workers whose partisan loyalty is up for grabs.” He explains:
The category of service class employment — as distinct from the goods producing or manufacturing sector — encompasses an exceptionally broad range of workers, from home care aides ($23,490 mean annual income) and fast food cooks ($20,510) to teachers ($54,341), loan officers ($75,170), real estate brokers ($79,140), accountants ($81,850) and securities and commodities brokers ($102,240).
Edsall cites detailed analysis by Richard Florida of the University of Toronto showing that this category comprises “about 45 percent of the work force” and has a varied makeup: “Majority women, multiracial, multiethnic.” As for its political tendencies, “Florida finds that this population currently splits its vote evenly between the two parties….” Talking about economic interests makes more sense with this set of working Americans than with one that is implicitly susceptible to white nationalism and that might, anyway, find a discussion of economic opportunity less than uplifting.
The costly mistake to which Phillips refers in his essay is the use of funds in 2016 to chase the votes of “wavering whites” and not to maximize the turnout of African-Americans. Further on, after noting the movement of many past Obama voters to the minor-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, Phillips writes,
The Democratic Party and its allies are likely to spend more than $750 million on the 2018 midterms. Will they spend it fruitlessly trying to lure Trump voters, or will they give uninspired black Democrats a reason to vote and offer disaffected Obama-Johnstein voters a reason to return to the fold?
Black Democrats showed abundant inspiration on their own initiative in Alabama’s special senatorial election of 2017, with black women playing an especially crucial role in the victory of the liberal Doug Jones over the deplorable Roy Moore. Nationally as well, African-Americans form a core Democratic constituency that deserves the party’s full attention and close cooperation. This is not only a question of considering the interests of African-Americans in framing issues or fielding candidates, but also of putting resources into voter registration, turnout, and prevention of voter suppression.
Phillips’s and Edsall’s theses reinforce each other. As we have seen, service sector workers comprise a set of people that is multiracial and majority female. It makes better politics as well as better morality to engage that set than a conspicuously patriarchal set that is defined from the start as "white" something. The white working people who applaud Donald Trump's mischief are lost in every sense. Courting them will only feed their spite. They hate liberals as a type; they resent unsubmissive women; they persecute homosexuals; they fear and loathe other races. Let them keep their votes and gorge on their malice.
A sense of proportion
This is inseparable from a sense of humor in the most fundamental sense, but it's emphatically different from a tendency to crack jokes. In politics, few blunders do more harm in proportion to their triviality than an ill-considered joke. Something similar holds true of figurative speech. Even venturing beyond the first dictionary definition of a word can be a mistake, as John Kerry found with sensitive. Plain talk is best.
What is needed is a mind that doesn't take itself too seriously. This can be a challenge in liberal politics. Airless solemnity and overbearing self-righteousness are primarily pitfalls of people who see an urgent need to change the world. The kind of liberal most likely to succeed is one who, while appreciating the urgency of the need, inspires people to strive together with high hearts, good-natured resilience, and a mysteriously persistent love of life. It requires the kind of intelligence that sees life essentially as comedy and not as tragedy -- but don't say so, or you'll be venturing well beyond the first dictionary definition of comedy.
Community
The Republican metaphor for America is a gold field suited to fortune-hunters. Let the Democratic metaphor be a community suited to good neighbors. Yes, the community will be inclusive and nurturing. It will be a community of many parts, and it will be supportive where support is needed. But the main electoral appeal should be made to core interests that unite the parts and sustain the vitality of the whole.
The messengers making the appeal — both candidates and activists — should be clearly reliable partners: vigorous, competent, far-seeing, approachable. Essentially self-reliant people make the most reliable partners. For the liberal cause to win the competition for new adherents, the distinction between the conservative ideal and the liberal one should not be contrastive, but pivotal: a distinction between rugged individualism (whether real or phony) and robust individuality with fellow-feeling.
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Even more than for most undertakings, a seafaring voyage does make a good rough-and-ready metaphor for the campaigning that lies ahead. It takes much more than the ability to conceive a destination and plot a course. It demands resourcefulness, fortitude, and the cohesion of reliable individuals. A sense of proportion, not to say humor, helps all hands keep their spirits up and increases the chance of success. Whether you'll catch fair winds or not, Heaven only knows. After everything has been done that can be done by skillful navigation and steadfast seamanship, and thoughts turn to all that's riding on the final tide, even the secular will grant that a prayer can't do any harm.
