Introduction
HAS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY LOST ITS SOUL?
Here—in the answer to this single question—lies the master key that opens the way for Democrats to return to power.
If the Democrats find the answers to all their other questions, about what the details of their policy proposals should be, about how to find the candidates and raise the money and get the voters to the polls—even about who the Republicans are—and yet cannot locate their soul, they will fail themselves, and fail the country.
To get back to power, the Democrats first have to get back to their own soul.
The Democratic Soul: Deep politics is my theme. I am interested in the civic faiths that remain and underpin everything else, the everything-else that is the stuff of temporary political maneuver. I am talking about beliefs so elementary and vital that they have defined the Democrats—have answered the questions of who the Democrats really are, and why, and how and why they differ from their opponents—down the generations through all the cycles of American history, from Thomas Jefferson reading alone in his study at Monticello right up to the moment you hold this book in your hands. I am talking about how to achieve perspective on today’s political struggle. I am talking about the roots and anchors of the Democratic Party.
This, therefore, is a book about the fundamentals of politics, and the fundamentals do not go away. Yet the truth is that today, these fundamentals are the very things that too many Democrats have lost sight of. Has the Democratic Party lost its soul? It is a question of groundwork politics, and it contains many other profound questions about the meaning of democracy in America today. These turn out to be serious questions, and very tough ones. Democrats have had trouble answering the questions this book will raise. These are questions, in fact, that they have ceased even to ask of themselves.
And this is the reason why, in 2016, when the Democrats could no longer tell their fellow citizens—in emotional and simple and coherent and blunt and honest words—what their own meaning was for today’s politics, these unanswered questions finally, after some five decades of drift, sank the Democrats—at all levels of our national life—and opened the door not only to a Donald Trump presidency, but also to the prospect of a fundamental realignment of America’s two great political parties, with the Democratic Party in permanent opposition, and in permanent minority.
This worries me a great deal, and it is the reason why I wrote this book. I am a Democrat. I have been a Democrat all my life. I have never voted for a Republican. I am a Democrat today, and I shall remain a Democrat. I am not about to leave, and I do not claim that my party has left me. I like my party and the people in it. I wrote this book because I want to see Democrats succeed. Rather than offering specific campaign advice, this book presents the perennial themes and values of our party that individual candidates may apply in different ways, at different times, in different parts of the country.
IN SEARCH OF THE DEMOCRATIC SOUL
When the voters visited calamity upon the Democrats on the night of November 8, 2016, and we had been thrown out of the White House, checked in the House of Representatives, staggered in the Senate, a majority on the Supreme Court was suddenly and frighteningly placed in play, and, catastrophically, we had been expelled en masse from the statehouses and governors’ mansions so that we remained in control of only six out of fifty state governments in the entire nation, I thought, surely, now, Democrats will pause to consider who we are and where we’ve gone wrong; surely we will mount a searching re-examination of what our party really stands for, down deep; and maybe if the self-assessment is honest enough, we will find new ways to recapture the trust of our countrymen.
It never happened.
Instead, after the election was over, Democrats returned to exactly the same strategy that had brought us defeat in November. We focused exclusively on the man who had beat us. He became, for us, a monomania. It was an easy way to unite the Party, for there were very few Democrats who liked Trump, but it was too easy. It was important, of course, to take into account the meaning of Trump’s election as president. It is the duty of an opposition to oppose, so yes, the Democrats needed to mobilize in order to bring ourselves back; yes, the Democrats needed to resist. I, too, am a resister.
But in fact, the result of all this is that the political conversation of the nation has coarsened way beyond the experience or comprehension of any generation of living Americans, and it has hurt the country. It is the political conversation itself that is important. The conversation is the measure of the civic health of our country. The passions of our times have become intense because of Donald Trump’s enormities. We are all now partakers in the conversation that he engineered, and regrettably, this includes Democrats as well as Republicans. He framed the conversation. We argued it on his terms. The alarming thing is that in the period after the Republicans took control of the federal government in January 2017, Democrats often succumbed to the temptation to sink to the level of the pronouncements emanating from the Trump White House. And so, sometimes, it seemed as if any argument, any means, any last-chance bitter epithet could get the green light from us, as well as from him. In our rush to naked partisanship, we could cast aside our deeper instincts, our higher principles, and our own broader hopes for the country. Too often, we allowed ourselves to become corrupted by the discourse. Our own sometimes eager and acrid and repetitive contributions helped to debase a conversation so unworthy of, and so insulting to, the American people. There was a different way—a better and more effective way—open to us, and we didn’t take it.
Somehow, the Republic will survive President Trump, no matter the length of his tenure in office. This, too, shall pass. My argument here is about something more lasting, more difficult, and more important than Donald Trump. My argument is about the meaning of the Democratic Party. This is the question that can no longer be put off. This question has to be faced up to, right now. And to answer this question, we must look to ourselves. The first thing we need to do is pick up the mirror.
In thinking so obsessively about Trump and the Republicans, the Democrats missed the opportunity to think seriously about themselves. What truly matters is this: the problems that are fundamental for the Democrats lie within the Democratic Party itself. These problems were there long before Trump. They will remain long after Trump. They cannot be magically erased, even should the Democrats score a landslide victory in a single set of off-year elections. They are problems that could prove life-threatening for the Democratic Party, philosophically as well as numerically, unless the Democrats come to terms with them. And as opposed to the doings of Trump and the Grand Old Party, these are questions that Democrats have absolute control over. Yet these were the very problems the Democrats chose to ignore. All of this was a major failure of Democratic imagination. The consequences for our party—and for our country—are ominous.
The search for the Democratic soul begins with the obvious question: Is there even such a thing as the Democratic soul? My answer is an emphatic yes, and this whole book is a meditation on the different, and often conflicting, parts of our soul, and what has happened to it, and what the implications are for our politics today.
The first thing to say is that the soul of the Democratic Party is not to be found in the passing policies of the Democrats, the things that come and go, like low tariffs or Free Silver or Obamacare. Our policies are important—yes, we should fight for a higher minimum wage, and yes, a lot of Democrats believe we should have fought harder for single-payer healthcare—but our policies do not define our soul. Our soul is different, qualitatively distinct, and this is critical. Our soul runs infinitely deeper than our policies. It lasts longer. It is more difficult to budge. There is a mystery to it. It is more powerful. But it has precious little to do with the footnotes of policies, or the effectiveness of public administration, or efficiency in government, or any of the how-tos of politics—themes Democrats seem to have emphasized a lot in recent times.
Instead, soul dwells in instinct. And instinct is directly and crucially related to the concept of political purpose. In politics, the purpose of what you are trying to do is more important than how you try to accomplish it. There’s going to be a lot more in this book about this idea, but let me tell a couple of stories right here in the beginning to illustrate the kind of thing I mean.
Probably the most valuable political asset the Democratic Party has ever held in its hands can be summed up in just four words: “for the little guy.” We took resolute and even defiant possession of these four words almost two hundred years ago. Andrew Jackson’s ascent to power in 1829 fixes more than just the foundation date of the modern Democratic Party. The very instant of his administration’s birth reveals what allowed us to solidify our domination of America during the first half of the nineteenth century and, even more important, marked the Democratic Party for all time thereafter with its innate political character. Here is a story about political soul.
Tellingly, Democrats used to recount the tale of Andrew Jackson’s inauguration night with more relish and pride than they seem to muster today. This is the old yarn about how mobs of backwoods ruffians, high on triumph and corn whiskey, overran the White House, smashing the crockery and punch bowls—but smashing, also, theretofore unquestioned assumptions about power, and who was to have it. It was a new day, for Jackson had brought the New West to power, setting the old high-and-mighty eastern establishment firmly aside. And—critically—he had linked the westerners in political harness to those who were laboring in the burgeoning industries of urban America. Everywhere, albeit within the understandings of his own times, he worked implacably to expand the franchise, thereby earning the devoted political loyalty of the Common Man.
This is the coalition that has sustained the Democratic Party throughout American history. The people at work in the big cities and on the land and in the small towns; the people standing up for themselves, coming out of the labor union movement; the immigrants who uprooted their lives and came from abroad looking for the main chance, or for any chance; the people in their millions who fueled the urban machines that piled up our massive majorities; the people who gave it to you straight from the shoulder, who were bored by the fancy arguments, and who were determined to find out, instead, whether you were on their side, or whether you were not. These are the people who saved the Democrats even when we were going under—when, in all justice, we probably deserved to go under—amidst our post–Civil War disgrace. They are the ones who delivered us our victories—and, even more important, they are the ones who imprinted the Democratic Party with its abiding purposes and philosophical meanings.
It is this coalition that the Jacksonian Democracy first forged, of urban and rural working people—and that Democrats have continued to expand since that long-ago time—which has allowed us to outlast all of our rivals throughout American history: the Federalists, the Whigs, the Know Nothings, the Populists, the Dixiecrats, the Progressives—all gone now.
This Jacksonian coalition of ours largely accounts for the name Americans of past generations so often applied to us, sometimes with affection, and sometimes in rue: Old Indestructible.
Another story in political soul: John Nance Garner of Texas was Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president during FDR’s first two terms. Garner was a salty, archconservative, states’-rights man, profoundly skeptical of big, centralized government programs. During the early months of the New Deal, the cabinet was meeting to discuss the emergency and what to do about it. The department heads were calculating the intricate and immediate political pros and cons of some policy proposal, debating whether to move or not to move, and finally, from the end of the table, the vice president spoke up: “Mr. President,” Garner said, “I think that when we were campaigning we sort of made promises that we would do something for the poorer kind of people, and I think we have to do something for them. We have to remember them. We have to take account of that.” Garner then went on to endorse immediate federal relief aid for the desperate and suffering.
FDR took note and was impressed. Something more profound than political calculation or keeping promises was moving his temperamentally conservative vice president. It was deep Jacksonian political instinct that was reaching up from somewhere underneath to guide his political course and overcome his traditional reluctance to act.
You heard it all the time on the street, a generation ago, when people wanted to explain why they supported us: “The Democrats—they’re for the little guy. The Common Man.” When was the last time you heard this said?
There are other bedrock Democratic credos beyond the little guy and the Common Man, and this book is going to go into them all. But for the moment, the point is this: because the American people felt instincts like these to be powerfully at work in us, they felt that we would be dependable, that they could rely on us, that we would try very hard, somehow and despite all the difficulties and day-to-day pressures, to remain true to our fundamental purposes. That’s why they took us to their hearts. Our party was about something. It meant something. We were not just a political party; we were the party. We were America’s political party.
We didn’t talk publicly about having a soul, of course, but somehow, that’s what it was about; that’s what we had. We had a soul. And we’ve lost some of that now, in the eyes of our fellow citizens. All of it? No. We still understand and act on parts of our soul. But major parts of it? Yes. We’ve neglected or turned our face from important parts of our heritage, parts that once played decisive and honorable roles in establishing our political dominance of the nation. This doesn’t mean that the Democratic soul has disappeared forever. I believe that our soul, in its entirety, remains. But it remains for us to uncover it, and then to recover it.
So, this book is about big politics, the things that matter the most in the political struggle. And as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said: “It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.”
THE EDUCATION OF A DEMOCRAT
My own political education began in the American South. In fact, I was only a boy on the day I decided to give myself to the political struggle. It happened in Front Royal, Virginia, out in the Shenandoah Valley, in late September 1958. Virginia had closed the public high school there to avoid the racial integration that federal courts had ordered. I watched it happen. I didn’t understand it, but I knew it was wrong. And I never forgave the men who did it. Eight years later, I would come back to Virginia to fight the people who had closed the public schools. Those people were Democrats, and by then, I was a Democrat too.
I spent a decade battling through Virginia politics, along the way getting elected in convention as Secretary of the State Democratic Party. As I organized and stumped my way across the Old Dominion in those days, down the country roads, inside the courthouses, in the heart of the cities, and across the endless suburbs, the whole political culture of the state was unraveling. What I was watching was a Democratic Party coming to recognize that its old ways of believing and doing things were played out, a party caught between yesterday and tomorrow, without a sure and guiding philosophy. The Party wasn’t hanging together, with conservatives and liberals both streaming for the exits.
There weren’t a lot of us who stuck by the Party, and among those who remained, there were plenty of Democrats whom I disagreed with, but I learned that it was not my business to demand perfect motives from my fellow partisans. We needed their votes. In time, I would change, but I became, for a while, a live-and-let-live Democrat, that’s all, without giving it much more thought than that. It was in Virginia that I developed the basic instinct for practical politics that I have carried with me ever since. I’m operational: I like to win, and I’m interested in how to do that. But even so, underneath my operational veneer, the thing I mostly took away from that decade was that our lack of workable, reliable, fundamental bearings back then made for tough politics in Virginia. It makes for tough politics again today, nationally.
My political world began to get bigger. I went to work for a time for the governor of Maryland in the old State House in Annapolis. There I watched him create a modern state government with a streamlined bureaucracy, and he got it done by pulling together his legislature. The Maryland General Assembly included some of the same kinds of Democrats that I recognized from my experience across the river in Virginia: Democrats out of the small towns and faraway counties, Democrats from the smart and sophisticated suburbs, but now different Democrats, too, from the big and sometimes ugly machine that ran Baltimore—gaudy and extravagant politicians who were loads of fun, but who were utterly serious about getting the things they needed for their people. The legislature was filled with officeholders who stayed loyal to the essence of who they were and what they came out of, and a lot of the time they didn’t understand each other very well, but they spoke their minds freely and bluntly, and then cut the deals that made things work. I liked them, and I liked this bigger party of mine, even though it was plenty hard for me to make sense of it.
The Democratic Party, I was coming to learn, is like a civics laboratory, an elementary-school classroom in how the larger politics of our country functions. We are not a liberal party that opposes a conservative party. We are a party that contains a multiplicity of interests that opposes a party that, traditionally at least, has been dominated by a single interest. To learn how to maneuver inside the Democratic Party, therefore, is to learn how to operate beyond the Party as well, in the broader public realm—even to learn how to govern. Our government is a system of checks and balances among three branches. The Democratic Party is a system of checks and balances that must accommodate an almost endless series of power centers. It offers everyday lessons in how to get along with different kinds of people. It is the manifold diversity of our coalition—diversities of ideals, ideas, values, ethnicities, geographies, religions, interests—that is our glory, and our chief problem.
And then, for me, came the national presidential campaigns, eight of them in all, with whole geographies in play, and the calculations were much more complex: Could we hold the Upper Midwest? What did we have to do to have a chance in the Border States? Some of these drives were winners, some losers; some rolled out in placid days, and some—like our desperate struggle in 1968—unfolded amidst bitter divisions in the nation: that year, civil rights and Vietnam. I sailed under three flags during the presidential primaries in 1968: first, for Robert Kennedy, who was shot; then, for Eugene McCarthy, who went down in the most chaotic Democratic convention of the past hundred years; and finally, for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who lost by a hair. September 1968 was gruesome for Humphrey and his loyalist Democrats, with angry union workers bolting to Governor George Wallace of Alabama, running as an independent, and with proud and prickly antiwar crusaders sitting unapproachably on the sidelines.
For the last several weeks of that ’68 fight, I traveled with Humphrey as he vaulted the nation. I was a baggage-smasher on his campaign plane. I got to watch him in front of every conceivable sort of crowd, in private as well as public, all different kinds of Americans—Americans of every color and accent, from every part of the country, insiders and outsiders, people who liked him and people who most assuredly did not, hawks and doves, earnest good-government types. Late one night, just before the election, we rolled into Hudson County, New Jersey, where 180 we’ve-seen-it-all machine types sat silently on the platform waiting for him to arrive (many of them, I was told, from the County Mosquito Control Board). One of them whispered to me: “Don’t worry. He’ll do all right here. We’re sticking with him.”
The thing that impressed me back then during those frenetic weeks, but impresses me even more now, was the way Humphrey dealt with the crowds that swelled and swelled as his fight caught fire with Election Day approaching. His rallies were like revival meetings. He preached the old-time gospel of the New Deal to them. Nobody had to tell him who he was or what he should say. He hardly ever read a speech or even read from notes. He spoke from the heart. He knew what he was about.
And he dealt with all the crowds in exactly the same way. He told them all the same thing, no matter who they were. He didn’t try to slice and dice his various constituencies with tailor-made special pleading, thereby isolating his supporters one from another. No. He insisted on making one argument for everyone—an argument that could unite his wildly disparate following and hold them together. In the end, of course, it was Nixon who won, but not by much: Humphrey damn near pulled it off.
For a young man standing in the crowd, watching him and listening to him doggedly and joyously pleading the cause for which he stood, the Democratic campaign of 1968 carried profound lessons about ideas and their influence over the destiny of politics. I began to think: Could there be a politics that would celebrate, instead of smother, the rough-and-tumble of genuinely opposed instincts and interests inside our broad and fractious coalition, and yet bring it together within a framework of American idealisms that were honorably homegrown by the Democrats themselves?
Later, things got even more complicated for me. Eight years on, I went into the federal government as a political appointee, into the Foreign Service at the State Department, and without, at first, really thinking it through, I carried my Democratic politics out into the world. My job was to explain in public what the United States was doing abroad amidst the endless complexities of diplomatic, military, and political maneuver. I made it my constant endeavor to place the details of our foreign-policy tactics into the framework of American interests—and values—and a lot of those values I had learned at the knee of my political party here at home.
I have been at this for a long time now—long enough to have seen my political life get cut in two. For the first half of my life, the political story that the Democratic Party told the country—essentially, it was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—was able to set the boundary lines of the national debate, and by doing so, we were able to organize and even to dominate the power struggle. Ronald Reagan challenged our political paradigm outright in 1980, and he changed the country’s conversation. This one act made the starkest difference to Democratic prospects, and not for the better, because since 1980, the Republicans have controlled the underlying story line of American politics. And thus, no matter which party held the White House, the Republican Party has dominated the second half of my life.
What Reagan did in 1980 did not change my political views, but he changed the way I thought about politics. I realized I had to look for deeper reasons to explain why we were having so much trouble gaining traction. This political truth is stabbingly on point once again today, after the election of 2016—for we may now be facing a new inflection point in American politics, like the one Reagan and the Republicans engineered with so much zeal and tenacity, and with so much success, in 1980.
All these lessons from my past formed the political instincts I hold today, and I have poured them into this book, which is really a guidebook for the path that leads through the Democratic soul and the Democratic mind and toward the future—and a new Democratic Party.
THE GREAT WANDERING OF THE MODERN DEMOCRATS
At the end of the Second World War, Democrats instinctively understood each other and the country, and the nation understood us. Everyone recognizes that this is no longer true today. The Party has gone astray. After 1948, the Democrats began their great wandering of the modern age. We have yet to emerge. We set forth in clarity and vigor. We arrive in confusion. Democrats have wandered because we have allowed our minds to wander. To find our way home, and back to power, we must refocus our minds and consider our soul. That is the first and fundamental problem of our politics today.
There has been a decades-long decoupling of the presidential candidates of the Democratic Party and the party that gave them its nomination, but even more ominously, there has been a decoupling of the Democratic Party and its essential meanings for the life of the nation. And if you let go of your own purpose and meaning in politics, you have handed your opponents the most valuable advantage there is in the political struggle. You have invited them to seize control of the terms of the political debate. They will then control the rules of the game, and their fundamental ideas will decide its outcome. Or maybe they will seize control of your own originating ideals that you’ve lost sight of and impose their updated interpretation on them, and make them theirs instead of yours. When this happens, you are at a permanent disadvantage until you can figure out how to change the basic philosophical terms of the contest. You have arrived at the exact spot where the Democrats find themselves today. You are living in the aftermath of the 2016 elections.
John F. Kennedy was the last Democratic presidential nominee to actually campaign for the office as a Democrat. He printed the Party’s name all over his literature, and he talked about it constantly in his speeches throughout 1960. Not a single one of our subsequent nominees has followed JFK’s lead. For the Party’s rank and file, that’s well over half a century of being stashed out of sight on the back shelf.
Yet even with Jack Kennedy, there was a studied calculation and a cool design to the relations he had with his political party. His election had been a near thing, and afterward, he faced an entrenched southern bloc in Congress, so he saw that he needed the Party and such party discipline as was available to him. But he did only enough to keep his side of the bargain, because politics for him was not about party. It was about power and getting things done and doing what you had to do, and if the Party helped, fine, and if the Party didn’t help, well, that was fine too; it was all the same to him. He was not a sentimentalist.
And when he became president, Kennedy’s principal reliance and loyalty could sometimes seem to run more to the intellectual elite than it did to the Democratic Party itself. He was at ease with bright, highly refined, educated people, and it was their company he sought out more than the raw, less-refined, street-smart barons of his gritty political coalition. Rank-and-file Democrats put a lot of emotion behind him—they felt the electromagnetic field surrounding him—but they felt the distance, too. He kept to himself, by inclination and temperament. Many modern Democrats, including Presidents Clinton and Obama, revere him, yet his legacy is a tapestry of ironies. He remains a study in personality, not in ideas, despite the historical turn of his mind and his intellectual curiosity. Thus, he is the classic exemplar of why so many today repeat the blasé mantra of “I vote for the candidate, not the party.”
Lyndon Johnson was a throwback. He started out as a New Dealer when rural Texas sent him to Congress at age twenty-nine, and that’s what he remained until the day he left the White House three decades later. He was a grandiose man, and his incredible political mind governed amidst grandiosities: more programs, more agencies, more acronyms, more money. At bedrock, he believed profoundly in the good that government could do for people. Johnson was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, to be sure, but his greediness for the big win always caused him to downplay his party affiliation. He did not portray himself officially as a Democrat when he campaigned for election in 1964. He suppressed partisanship in his dealings with Congress. His oozing legislative incantation of “come, let us reason together” was at once sincere and cynical—not to mention brilliantly successful—as he manhandled Republicans as well as Democrats to produce his lopsided victories on the Hill. The spotlight was on LBJ as legislative sorcerer bringing his Great Society to life. The star of the show was larger than life. But the Democratic Party was largely absent. He served the tangible Great Society. He discarded the Party. It was Lyndon Baines Johnson who took the credit.
With Johnson, you always had the sense that he knew what he wanted, but with his successor, Jimmy Carter, you had the sense that he was never quite sure. People said he was a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, but it was hard to figure out when he would favor one side or the other, should they collide, as inevitably they did. In the hands of a master politician like Franklin Roosevelt, this capacity for unpredictability can be an advantage. It has been remarked of Napoleon, for instance, that when he ceased to astonish, he began to decline.
Carter was not a master politician. In deciding how to govern, he explicitly ruled out politics as usual. He decided to take each problem as it came, consider it substantively and deliberately on its own merits, and finally do the right thing. In a way, the president organized his first administration as if it had been a second administration. But this searching for each new right answer began to unsettle the public. There was a sense that his policies weren’t really hanging together. This can be a problem in politics, and it became a problem for President Carter. He made people uneasy. He made even people who respected him uneasy. People weren’t sure where he was coming from, or where he was going. And often he seemed to be operating on his own.
Carter had been denied the undoubted benefits of a divisive election based on substance. His overriding campaign theme in 1976, in the wake of Nixon’s Watergate scandal, was basic, decent, clean government. He delivered on that promise, but somehow, he could never find refuge in the Democratic Party’s own traditional wisdom as a homing beacon for his administration’s policies. Whereas Jack Kennedy’s view of the Party had been unsentimental, twenty years later Jimmy Carter’s stance could sometimes seem to verge on disdain. When he stepped down from office and began to do oral histories, he used phrases like “the biggest handicap I had,” which “pulled us down a good bit in the polls,” when referring to his party. The former president was quite objective about himself in all this, volunteering that his relationship with the Democratic Party was “not particularly good,” and then adding, almost curtly, that changing that relationship was “not a burning commitment or interest of mine.”
One result of this political wandering was that the American public became more confused about the Democratic Party and what its purposes really were. Indeed, the political jujitsu that Ronald Reagan performed on the Democrats in 1980—an intellectual whipping that produced the most profound paradigm shift in American politics in half a century—represented the triumph of clarity over confusion. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” Reagan announced on taking office, “government is the problem.” This childish turn of phrase would have appalled Thomas Jefferson, not to mention FDR, but it did provide the public with a clear standard by which to judge the actions Reagan’s administration would take. People understood what he was setting out to do. He brought millions of disenchanted Democrats into the Republican Party.
A dozen years of the exceptionally clear-minded Reagan critique of New Deal Democratic politics left our partisans scattered and demoralized. When Bill Clinton arrived in 1992, he figured that the solution was to pull the Democratic Party as far back as he could into the moderate center. His instinct was defensive, but it succeeded, in a limited sense. Clinton was a realist. He moved carefully, marginally. He did not approach his political problems as a matter of strategy. There was no grand design of fundamental political principle. There was no deep consideration or reconsideration of fundamental Democratic Party philosophy as an independently standing positive force in the life of the country. Instead, there were tactics. Indeed, this is what Bill Clinton seemed to be all about: the tactics of policy.
He took the world as he found it. He charted out rival political compass points—Reagan and Thatcher on the right, European socialists on the left—and the course he would plot in foreign policy was “the third way”: right in the center. At home, in domestic policy, it was called “triangulation,” as he steered precisely down the center between the extremes of the Democratic and Republican parties. He was in no way passive, but he finessed his way between other people’s big ideas.
When it was all over, we seemed better positioned for the day at hand, ready for the next necessary pirouette, but without a sure sense of our own rootedness, and somehow it seemed fair to raise the question of just how serious the Democrats were being about all this. Had we developed a new, genuine, instinctive moderation, or were we merely adrift amidst the pressures of the moment? With a completely different political temperament from Jimmy Carter’s, Bill Clinton may have raised the very same specter before the public that Carter had: Democratic undependability.
Barack Obama began with a different instinct. More so than Kennedy, Carter, or Clinton, he understood the pulling power of deep, emotional ideas in politics, and he understood quite well how to tap into them, and he did just that when he first ran for president in 2008. He may be the greatest orator the Democrats have produced since Woodrow Wilson, but after he won his election, he seemed to change. The language he used virtually all of the time as a governing official was not rhetorical at all; instead, it was marked through and through with the language of the professoriate: intelligent, lucid, hedged, cautious, multisyllabic, detailed, didactic. As president, Obama made the case for his programs, but it was a case in the footnotes, in the details. The details he had down, cold. But the relationship between the details of his policies and their political or philosophical context was unclear or simply absent altogether. What Obama failed to do—perhaps even failed to try to do—was to connect his policies to the deep wellsprings of his party’s mission, and to offer a plausible story line as to how they could be made to fit together in principle, and work together as a matter of practical governing.
If Jimmy Carter was the one who seemed to puzzle his party the most among the post–World War II Democratic presidents, surely Barack Obama ran him a close second. Endless was the private speculation among Democrats as to who the “real” Obama was, and what his true governing instinct was. His supporters sensed that he had the ability to put things into perspective for them and for the larger national community, yet the president rarely seemed to come through. More and more, he returned to what he thought he was best at: the details of his work governing the nation.
Obama is interesting because of the genuine, palpable excitement he generated in the very beginning. He showed that there was something deep inside the Democrats, longing to be touched again, something they had not felt in their bones since Truman in 1948. Every once in a while, President Obama spoke to the yearning of the nation, but ultimately he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, mobilize the political potential of that yearning. Barack Obama became a kind of false dawn to the Democrats, but he did show that there was a real dawn out there, waiting to be captured—and worth the prize.
THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRATIC ILLUSION
“Old Indestructible”—today? Somehow today, our party doesn’t seem so stable, sure of itself, instinctive for its mission, or confident of its permanence so as to justify a moniker like Old Indestructible. Today, Old Indestructible, which Americans once took almost as a cliché, has become a question mark.
This book is written out of a profound conviction and a very real fear. The conviction is that we have disregarded and devalued the power that ideas and ideals can exert over the destiny of the political struggle; the fear is that we cannot recover and break out unless we clear the Democratic mind of those illusions that block our ability to imagine a new Democratic Party that can bring us back to power.
This book is an argument. It is an argument against people who claim that the Democratic Party doesn’t matter anymore; people who look only to the 2016 presidential campaign for the cause of our troubles; people who say that our own failings are always somebody else’s fault; people who believe that all we need is to get back to normal; people who try to convince us that our real enemies are other Democrats who don’t agree 100 percent with their own views; people who think that our experts and consultants will save us; people who act as if policies equal politics; people who imagine that we can understand and encompass and govern the nation by focusing only on ourselves; people who look at the fading Democratic working-class base as a numbers problem; and finally, most destructively of all, people who have the illusion that we are powerless to do anything to get ourselves out of the mess we’re in. All of these people are trapped in today’s politics of Democratic illusion. They need a way out.
The illusion that the Democratic Party doesn’t matter anymore. The opposite is true. The Democratic Party matters more than ever. Its withering as an independently standing, palpable institutional presence is in large measure responsible for the climate that has encouraged the selfish, for-me-alone ambition that marks too many of our leaders and elected officials at the moment. The Party can help bring these people to heel. It has often operated this way in the past; it can do so again. The people who, in their presumption, imagine that they are on top need to be reminded who sent them into politics in the first place. It was the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party does stand for something, and has the power to insist on accountability. The Party’s very feebleness today represents an opportunity: the leadership is weak, and Democrats concerned about their party’s slide—and, indeed, the nation’s uncertain fate—should pour into the Democratic Party’s structure now, at all levels, as they did in the 1950s and early 1970s, and reinvigorate a politics that has gone stale.
The illusion that the 2016 election is the problem that we must remedy. It isn’t. “What went wrong in 2016?” is the wrong question to ask, and yields the wrong answers. Our problems go deeper than the Trump election. The problems of the Democratic Party did not arise overnight on November 8, 2016. They have been building at least since 1968, and in order to understand the problem of the Democratic future, one must see 2016 in the context of the long evolution that led up to it. Finger-pointing over the details of the 2016 calamity is not a reassessment. It’s a distraction and a cop-out.
The illusion that it’s always somebody else’s fault. The sum and substance of the re-evaluation the Democrats began shortly after November 8, 2016, had precious little to do with the Democratic Party itself. It had to do with Donald Trump and the Republicans and the disgraceful campaign they waged. It focused on the dictator in the Kremlin and his leak-seeking confederates. It concerned the unwise and possibly even sinister decisions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It pointed to other people’s racism and other people’s sexism. It mired itself amidst the technicalities of computer servers and email accounts. It wondered why the pollsters were wrong. Yet the rank and file of the Democratic Party had no ability to control or even influence any of these issues. Of course Donald Trump’s campaign amounted to political serpentry, but that should not have been surprising, and, more to the point, that was beyond our power. Our problem was to figure out who we were and how to win, and we showed ourselves incapable of either task. Democrats need to concentrate on what we can control, on our own jobs at hand. We need to put in the hard work to fashion our own future instead of rendering so many cost-free opinions about other people’s actions and flaws.
The illusion that all we need to do is get back to normal. There was a time, of course, long ago, when Democrats held the loyalty of a clear majority of America’s voters. Forget it: it’s nowhere near true now. We are not living through some tiny time-blip that momentarily interrupts a long-stretching era when our party commands the political heights. In reality, the Democratic candidacies of 2016 represented the final intensification of an intellectual line in the Party’s history that had already run into deep trouble. Our fellow citizens rejected what we were offering and withdrew the mandates they had given us, virtually across the board, from the White House on down. Nationwide, the 2016 election results brought our party just about to its lowest point in a century. The way back to Democratic dominance does not lead through the very recent past or some imagined land of political normalcy. The way back to power lies through a new approach that can heal the lacerations that have breached our traditionally dominant coalition, and make us whole and strong again.
The illusion that we are our own worst enemy. The truest of all the truisms of Democratic Party history is that not all Democrats agree about why they should be Democrats in the first place. Calls for party unity are persistent, but they have never been taken seriously in any precise sense, since everyone has always tacitly understood that to demand unity of conscience and instinct from Democrats is to believe in illusion. Oddly, this has begun to change recently, and some of the current rhetoric and backroom maneuver, aimed at enforcing a true unity, have reached alarming proportions. This is a gift to the Republicans. To denounce the senator from West Virginia for voting in favor of the interests of out-of-work coal miners serves no purpose, and shows no understanding of the larger ethos of the Democratic Party. All Democrats should find it natural that Massachusetts Democrats and Wyoming Democrats should be different. To deplore those differences is beside the point, merely too easy. The hard work is to invent the frameworks that can hold Democrats together, and thereby help each other, even in the face of interests and values that may seem, at first blush, to clash.
The illusion that our experts and consultants will save us. This is perhaps the most galling Democratic illusion of them all. We live today with a Democratic Party whose leadership has handed over our most important powers and functions to outside hirelings and paymasters. It was the outside experts and consultants who concocted the 2016 strategies they promised would bring us through, but took us down instead. They have sunk us in a “scientific” politics of focus groups, special-interest questionnaires, money, algorithms, big data, and predictable pettinesses. They have digitized The People. The rank and file of the Party have taken too much advice of late from freelancers who are completely unfamiliar with local people and local conditions of life. The homegrown Party now needs to reassert control, and that means rank-and-file Democrats. Outside consultants need to be put firmly in their place. Local Democrats from the precincts need to be deciding what the Party is and who it will run for office.
The illusion that policies are politics. Policies are critical, of course; ultimately, government expresses itself through policies. And clearly, policies and politics are mutually dependent on each other. But the two are not the same thing. And the trouble is that a lot of Democrats today believe that they are, and conduct themselves accordingly. The code of Democratic politics has become encrusted with policy prescriptions. The policy lingo isn’t working with the public anymore. The public is demanding something sturdier. It now behooves the Democrats to examine themselves closely: If the policy-equals-politics paradigm isn’t working, why not? And what should we replace it with? The history of this particular illusion runs back for a hundred years through American history, and the heart of the Democratic Party is where this struggle has played itself out. It’s time for Democrats to resolve it.
The illusion that we can govern or even begin to understand the nation by focusing only on ourselves. The reality is that the country is evenly divided. The illusion is that we can control the destiny of the country by making sure we are better at turning out our voters than they are at turning out theirs. This is not strategic politics; this is a hit-or-miss crapshoot where you have only a random chance of winning the close ones, which is what most of them are; and sometimes, even when you win the popular vote (2000, 2016), you still lose the election. Going back to our base is not enough. We need to get beyond our base. We need a strategy that can produce big, structural strides forward with the national electorate. We must seek a clearly enduring and stable majority of Americans that can consistently win for us and support what we do when in office.
Because politics is about more than getting to 50 percent plus one. Of course the people who voted Democratic recently are critical to us, and we must stay close to them and their interests. But big politics is about understanding our country and the people who live here, regardless of whether they agree with us or not. It’s about getting to know people who are different from us, and being willing to listen and take into account their interests and values. We’ve been led into a trap. Our consultants may have brought us into this let’s-get-to-fifty dead end, but it is now our responsibility to extricate ourselves by opening our minds, not only to the current instincts of our fellow citizens, but indeed to our own past. It’s a big country. We need to get bigger in order to encompass it. “We are all Republicans [i.e., Democrats]; we are all Federalists,” Jefferson said in his first inaugural address, after overturning the Federalist reign in the bitter contest of 1800.
The illusion that the problem of the fading Democratic working-class base amounts to a numbers problem of electoral politics. There is now an active and deadly serious Republican attempt to solidify a permanent alliance between big business and the white working class within the Grand Old Party. This attempt predates—and will survive—Donald Trump’s election and tenure in the White House. It will be no illusion for the Democrats if this Republican attempt to seal a working alliance between business and the working class should succeed—a conservative populism would prove devastating for us. Yet the problem could have even broader implications; it is more than a question of electoral viability. What’s really at stake is our very nature, the very soul of the Democratic Party, and the ends to which we apply our power in the political struggle.
The illusion that we’re powerless to do anything to get ourselves out of the mess we’re in. This, of course, would be the final surrender, the saying of the last rites over the promise of American democracy, which we ourselves have done so much to expand for the last two and a quarter centuries. Defiance is the answer. Rank-and-file Democrats are the Democratic Party. They hold in their hands the raw power to change both the Democratic Party and the nation. They must reassert themselves now and take command, once again, of the Party of The People, and use it for the highest purposes of the Republic. Emphatically, it is possible.
How are we to do this?
THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRATIC MYTH
The master key to understanding our modern story is political myth. And there is a rule that goes with that key: there is no politics without myth.
Political myth is the gene that will recur throughout this book. A political myth is not an illusion and it’s not a fantasy. It’s the opposite. Indeed, political myth is the most powerful reality there is in politics. Political myth is the organizer of political thought. An ideal is a myth. A bedrock principle of political faith is a myth. In this sense, “The Party of The People” is a myth. Myths are big, simple, and ambiguous yet bluntly understandable. They are the fuel of our passion. They are what lie beneath all the rest. There is no meaning to political maneuver unless there is an understanding of the ultimate purposes that lie behind the political maneuver. Myths are the purposes of politics.
A political myth has the quality of both a beginning and an end. A political myth is the beginning because it’s where you start your consideration of a problem of power or governance. You apply the philosophical lens first, before you do anything else. “All men are created equal.” This is not sufficient, but it is the critical foundation. Of course, you look to the facts before you as well: this is the way myth gets translated into policy. To arrive at a practical governing approach, a political party must develop an appreciation for the new realities it faces, in light of the old wisdom it has accumulated.
A political myth is also the end, because it is where we are going, where we are headed. It is the ultimate goal and the purpose of our efforts. This is what lends myth its dynamic character. “The supremacy of the individual.” It isn’t true. But if you believe in it, you have to keep working at it, even as you understand that you will never cross the finish line, that you will never actually succeed in bringing the myth to fruition. But you can get closer.
The generality of a myth helps because everyone understands that there can be various ways to go about making the myth into reality. This is the difference between political myth and political ideology, and it is critical. Ideology is rigid, and demands fealty to every last jot and tittle in the details. This is why ideology is fundamentally un-American. By contrast, myth overarches all else, including governing methods. It is flexible, and invites discussion and experimentation, asking only serious progress toward an agreed-upon goal.
Democrats today need to apply an informing instinct to our political problems. Thomas Jefferson understood this crucial organizing principle from the beginning. In his great first inaugural address, at the head of his new political party, he plumbed the meaning of his election after thirteen years of Federalist rule. Immediately, he listed “the essential principles of our Government,” because, he said, the People had a right to know, at the outset, what he deemed those principles to be, since he intended to apply them in the administration of the country. Those principles, he emphasized, “should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and”—now the lesson for his descendants today—“should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.”
To ignore or discard this profound wisdom from the founder of the Democratic Party is to fashion a political shambles. In its feckless distraction, a political party obsessed with operational maneuver can simply get lost in the details, forgetting what is most important, forgetting why it is in business in the first place. That’s when the Party has approached the moment of true danger: when it has forgotten or abandoned the things that might hold it together (its myths) and has replaced them with a preoccupation with the things that can tear it apart (the minutiae of details invested with an overweening supposed importance).
No two Democrats are ever going to buy into every strand of the Democratic myth in precisely the same way, with precisely the same fervor, and there is no need for that. But just as surely as there is not one political prescription that must be made mandatory for all Democrats—just as surely as the Party must encourage each individual Democrat to reach his or her own judgments in matters of political faith and fervor—nevertheless, there is, as a historical fact, an understandable body of Democratic ideals and principles that all Democrats must somehow come to terms with.
Democrats share seven political myths. They are our root ideas, our primal faiths, our organizing principles. And they are the building blocks for a new Democratic creed. Democrats must produce a politics of ideas before they can put into practice a politics of action. What we need first is to understand ourselves, so that we know where we want to be going before we start moving. So, first things first. We need to understand what the political myths and intellectual traditions of the Party actually are. We must look to the foundational and primal myths of the Democratic Party in order to restore our sense of ourselves and what we wish to achieve for America in this day and age. But how?
We can’t just pull these most basic instincts of our politics out of thin air. They come from somewhere. They are in the fiber of the Democratic Party today because of actual struggles Democrats had with their opponents in the past over the meaning of the nation and its people. When those original struggles took place, they set up a conversation that continued down through the generations and exerted a critical influence over future Democrats, informing their instincts for how to approach the political problems of their own day. The key to the future rests in these past struggles.
Many of today’s Democrats have forgotten these past struggles and the great political myths that came out of them. Without its founding myths, the Party wanders. There is a crisis of Democratic memory.
Yet even as we find the origins of our political myths in the past, we know that today’s political conversation is and must be different from yesterday’s. Therefore, when we look to the past, we need to do so with the firm recognition that we are dealing with the present and the future, not bygone eras. The future is our political problem, not the past.
Here is the master key that we need to turn in the lock of today’s political stalemates. Today’s Democrats are the bearers of a very specific intellectual tradition, of fabulous and fertile inner contradictions, of mighty ideals and profound, nation-shaping myths. This book is not so much about messaging or how we say things. It is about how we think. It is about the lens we use to view the world and our country and our fellow citizens. It is about why our lens got ground the way it did, and what that lens means for our struggles today. It is about who we are, as Democrats, and how we can prepare for the future.
We have all too often taken the easy way, and for too long a time.
Now, we must take the hard way.
The key to winning in politics lies in the ideals we carry in our hearts, and the ideas we carry in our minds.
We must search our hearts, and organize our minds, anew.
OUR TRUMAN—FOR TODAY
July 15, 1948: Harry S. Truman, accepting his nomination. We see him now in the old films, mounting the podium in the Philadelphia convention hall, dressed in a white linen suit. It is running on toward two o’clock in the morning. He is the man without a chance, deserted by Democrats on all sides. He is looking out on the humidity-soaked, bedraggled, and demoralized delegates on the floor. He doesn’t even have a written-out speech in front of him. He fumbles with the microphones and there is a pause that seems to go on a little too long—and then the big smile comes, and, right off, he puts it to them: “I will win this election—and make these Republicans like it!”
The voters were tired of the Democrats after sixteen years in the White House. Truman took them on. The farm belt was fed up with the Democrats, but, he said, “Never in the world were the farmers of any republic or any kingdom or any other country as prosperous as the farmers of the United States; and if they don’t do their duty by the Democratic Party, they are the most ungrateful people in the world.” And labor—by then bitter and resentful of the Democrats—“labor never had but one friend in politics, and that is the Democratic Party and Franklin D. Roosevelt. And I say to labor what I have said to the farmers; they are the most ungrateful people in the world if they pass the Democratic Party by this year.”
He demanded that the voters make a choice not between himself and Thomas Dewey, but rather between the Democrats and the Republicans. Truman reveled in his Democratic Party affiliation. There was an authentic, almost animalistic naturalness to his embrace of his party, and he made his foes seem natural to him as well. He made the Congress of the United States his plaything, the merest political prop. This was the Congress he had lost control of to the Republicans two years earlier—the godsent “Do-Nothing” Eightieth Congress—the whipping boy he made infamous in American political history, the one he said “stuck a pitchfork in the farmer’s back.”
Like every other Democrat, I love this story. I love it that everyone, including the Democrats, counted Truman out from the very beginning. I love it that he beat the odds and made all the smart alecks look like fools. I love his blunt, barnyard rhetoric. I love how he mortified the stuck-up and self-satisfied Republicans. And I love the picture of him the morning after the election, the one of him raising above his head that wonderful Chicago Daily Tribune headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
The ’48 campaign is just about the greatest of our modern political hero sagas. And yet our retelling of it these days somehow misses the point, because it leaves out what is most useful to us Democrats for our own political conundrums of the present day. The significance of Harry Truman’s magnificent 1948 presidential campaign for us now is not that he beat the odds. Instead, it’s how he won. Truman’s campaign remains today the baseline example of a lucid political mind practicing perfectly coherent Democratic politics amidst all the complexities of modern America.
That long-ago summer night when he accepted his party’s nomination in Philadelphia, he told the delegates right off and flat out that he was going to win the election—“don’t you forget that!”—but more to the point, he told them why. For instance: “The reason is that the people know that the Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.” He decided to make his argument about the ultimate ideals that lay behind and beneath the details of the controversies of the day. Truman explained the purpose behind the divide. Over and over, he hit it again and again: the Grand Old Party “favors the privileged few and not the common everyday man. Ever since its inception, that party has been under the control of special privilege.”
The election that fall, he told the country, amounted to what all the other elections before it had amounted to. “In 1932, we were attacking the citadel of special privilege and greed. We were fighting to drive the money changers from the temple. Today, in 1948, we are now the defenders of the stronghold of democracy and of equal opportunity, the haven of the ordinary people of this land and not of the favored classes or the powerful few.” The Democrats under the New Deal had brought great prosperity to the nation, but more than this, he said, “These benefits have been spread to all the people, because it’s the business of the Democratic Party to see that the people get a fair share of these things.” And taxes? “Everybody likes to have low taxes,” but “when tax relief can be given, it ought to go to those who need it most, and not go to those who need it least.” The “Republican rich man’s tax bill” that the GOP-controlled Congress had just sent him “sticks the knife into the back of the poor.”
In ’48, Truman hammered away at smugness and privilege with a good-natured vengeance. The choice was The People versus the Special Interests. That’s how he won. It was that simple. But Harry Truman was not the simpleton his detractors believed him to be. He was about as sophisticated and shrewd and tough as they come. He built his election victory that year on the big, simple, emotional foundation stones of the Democratic Party’s most basic ideals—all our ideals, and not just the wellspring Democratic myth of The People versus the Special Interests, or even the Democratic myth of FDR’s New Deal.
All summer long and into the fall, he hurled these various Democratic political ideals into his dogfight with the Republicans. They were not necessarily ideals of the Democratic left; the left had bolted to Henry Wallace and the Progressives. They were not necessarily ideals of the Democratic right, either; the right had walked out and gone off with the Dixiecrats. They were not even so much myths of the moderate center. Instead, they were the ideals that the Democratic Party itself had created, and believed in, close to the bone.
And by the end of it all, Americans came to realize that this was how Harry Truman actually thought about their world. His world lens was the lens of political myth. This was how he organized his political mind and then set his strategy for governing the nation. Understanding this root truth, the citizenry brought him home, and his party with him. Harry Truman’s strategic solution to the seemingly overwhelming political problems he faced was to merge the Democratic Party with its own political myths, outright and completely, and he went to the country on that basis. Not a single Democratic president or presidential nominee since 1948 has attempted such an absolute union.
Myth and Party—fused. There stood Truman. Our guy.
Copyright © 2018 by Thomas B. Reston