These are dismal times for Democrats and raucous times for Republicans. Our main political parties are simultaneously suffering from severe identity crises. They are fractured, fragmented, and feckless.
Democrats are torn between pragmatic, Clinton-style triangulation and an aggressive, radical left agenda espoused by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Republicans are, theoretically, led by Donald Trump, who has belonged to both parties but more often than not listened to the beat of his own, narcissistic, unprincipled, and unfocused drummer. Trump is the quintessential “Republican in name only.”
Like the Democrats, Republicans are having difficulty uniting their vastly divergent interests: Wall Street, Main Street, free traders, Tea Partiers, Freedom Caucusers, anti-abortion activists, and evangelical Christians. Democrats are defined mostly by identity-related, movement-focused factions: minorities (mainly African-Americans and Hispanics), environmentalists, ethnic Americans, LGBT supporters, university faculties, and pro-abortion activists.
Both parties lack a coherent election and governing message. In the Reagan days, six words described the GOP: lower taxes, less government, stronger defense. Try doing that today. For Democrats, it’s worse. They are out of power and are desperately trying to cobble together positions that will restore their power.
Politicians must get elected before they can govern. And that’s the problem now for the Democrats: their bench is exceptionally thin. Barack Obama’s political legacy has left them decimated. There are 15 Democratic governorships (versus 34 Republican and one Independent). Almost 1,000 Democratic state legislative seats disappeared during the Obama years. In 24 states, Republicans control the governor’s office and both legislative chambers. Democrats enjoy such control in only five states. Republicans now control 67 out of 98 partisan legislative chambers.
With control of the U.S House and Senate, governorships, state houses, the White House, and the Supreme Court, Republicans have not enjoyed such national dominance since the 1920s. Given the party’s internal differences, however, Republicans are botching their governing prospects. Democrats hope that Trump will self-destruct, tilting the House of Representatives (and the Senate) in their direction in 2018. But waiting for Trump’s demise is not a good future strategy: Democrats, after all, did precisely that in 2015 and 2016.
Republicans hold all of the important governing institutions but cannot devise a coherent message or use their power effectively. Democrats cannot determine what they stand for and are seeking ways back in. In practical terms, how do they do this?
To their rescue comes Mark Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia University and the author of “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.” Lilla contends that Democrats need more institutional politics, not movement politics. They must start winning elections. As Lilla puts it, Democrats need “more mayors than marchers.” Democrats also need to place less reliance on promoting change through unelected judges and more emphasis on the legislative process.
Lilla salutes the governing coalition established by Franklin Roosevelt that lasted until Ronald Reagan’s 1980 landslide victory over Jimmy Carter. The Roosevelt post-war consensus emphasized civic participation, a “We the people …” reaffirmation of long-held American values, plus a strong sense of national unity, the belief that we’re all in this great democracy experiment together.
This framework began to unravel with the rise of what Lilla calls the “identity liberalism” that has culminated in today’s identity consciousness, campus and media political correctness, and interest-group dominance. FDR’s unity has given way to too much individualism -- a focus on “self” at the expense of community. Lilla describes “a crisis of imagination and ambition” for American liberalism.
According to Lilla, Republicans face a similar problem. Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s efforts to deregulate much of the economy and unleash free-market forces, they too suffer from a vitriolic form of individualism represented in slavish devotion to free-market capitalism and the triumph of individual wealth-creators over everybody else.
Lilla states the distinction simply: Republicans have Joe Sixpack; Democrats have Jessica Yogamat.
Lilla’s book is a quick read, and that may be its problem: it is short on history and practical recommendations. He favors a renewed sense of “civic liberalism” to counter our “hyperindividualistic” culture. But he says virtually nothing about how Democrats should accomplish his suggestions. Moreover, some liberals have already dismissed Lilla because of his disparaging comments about groups such as Black Lives Matter.
There are no details about how a party actually rebuilds its base and its bench. There is no discussion about the importance of strengthening national political parties which have grown weaker as continued gerrymandering has led to capture by each party’s ideological extreme. There is no discussion about the need to address the corrosive (and corrupt) ways that money enters our political system and creates a dynamic in which elected officials often spend more time raising money than legislating.
It is also remarkable that there is not a substantive discussion in Lilla’s book of two pivotal figures in American history, two political figures whose personal skirmishes in the late 1700s and early 1800s presaged similar battles today: Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson favored agrarian interests and states’ rights over a strong central government. Hamilton was more urban and favored a national bank, a standing military, and an energetic executive. In today’s terms, think Fly-over America versus both coasts. Both men drew starkly different policy conclusions from the same Declaration of Independence and the same Constitution.
A more nuanced, historical discussion by Lilla might have acknowledged that today’s hyperpartisanship -- the deep ideological and policy divides -- is nothing new in our history. Faced with such circumstances, American political parties have often reinvented themselves. (In Europe they tend to self-destruct, recombine, or change names.)
A party’s political vision -- its running narrative -- over time can lose vibrancy and need refreshing. But visions don’t realize themselves. They require thoughtful architects and determined builders. Mark Lilla has written an important book explaining today’s political identity crisis. Others must roll up their sleeves and determine how to build the new structures.
Charles Kolb is president & CEO of DisruptDC, a new business coalition for better government and elections. From 1990-1992, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy in the George H.W. Bush White House, and from 1997-2012, he was president of the business-led Committee for Economic Development.