Democrats Need a New Clinton
A shattered Democratic incumbent. A rambunctious Republican outsider. An election marred by economic turmoil and the usual destabilising violence in the Middle East. A campaign of contrasts, of relentlessly negative liberals, dismissing their rival as extremist, and conservatives pushing forward with buoyant optimism. And then, the results: a dramatic realignment, of traditional constituencies abandoning the Democrats and moving firmly towards the GOP, and a nation revived by a resurgent, reforming Right.
I’m talking, of course, about the 1980 election. Though I could mean 2024. For in their Republican triumph and desolate Democratic failure, the contests are remarkably similar. That’s clear wherever you look, from the focus on hostages, variously in Iran or Gaza, to how Trump and Reagan tapped into the concerns of young people and the middle class while Harris, like Carter, relied on exhausted (and exhausting) invective while offering nothing more substantive themselves.
Not, of course, that smart historical dovetail is merely a matter for historians. On the contrary, it offers hints about how the defeated Left-wing of American politics may yet revive. For just as the Democrats absorbed the lessons of 1980, readjusting their message, returning to the White House, and ultimately dominating the political scene until Trump’s first victory in 2016 — so too must their modern successors relearn the practical policies that made their forebears so potent.
That earlier Democratic revival, culminating in the liberal dominance of the Nineties, wasn’t really about any single policy. Rather, to quote former party activist Ted Van Dyke, it was about “being more in tune with the voters’ thinking”. Unlike the miserable Harris campaign, or indeed those waged by Carter, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale, what became the New Democrats focused not on vague appeals to “values” or “joy”, but on winning. With brilliant communicators like Bill Clinton, as well as the early Al Gore or Gary Hart providing youthful energy, they spoke both common sense and empathy, managing to reach New York liberals and hard-nosed Southern bubbas.
What a contrast with today’s Democratic Party, led by a senile old man, and stalked by progressive mediocrities such as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Living in their own universe, they have little idea of what Main Street thinks, drawing instead on the progressive culture increasingly dominant in classrooms, offices, the media, and indeed the government bureaucracy itself. Their outreach to the masses consisted largely of tapping hyper-partisan celebrities. It’s a message that fell on fallow ground everywhere from suburbs and exurbs to smaller cities — basically anywhere in America that looks set to grow over the coming decades.
Far more even than Obama, in short, people like Clinton understood Americans in ways reminiscent of Truman and Reagan. That, in turn, was reflected in the post-Eighties policy agenda. Turning away from Carter’s missives about national malaise or arguments for green austerity, they instead embraced economic growth, personal responsibility and colourblind racial policies. Rather than back the policies of green lobbies or civil rights activists, they embraced a kind of Fabian liberalism. As a fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute, I witnessed this approach first-hand, as we attacked Democratic Party bromides on issues such as racial quotas, criminal sentencing, trade and education, often to the consternation of traditional party constituencies.
What of Democratic policy in more recent times? Biden’s huge expansion of government did boost some special interests, notably green and race grifters, as well as wealthy stock and property owners. But Bidenomics failed to lift up the bulk of the working and middle class, even as inflation hit hardest among the least affluent. One-in-four Americans fears losing their job over the next year, even as roughly half now think the vaunted “American Dream” of home ownership has become unattainable, particularly in coastal cities.
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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.
