What happened to my party?
July 31, 2016 Updated 12:00 a.m.
By JOEL KOTKIN / STAFF COLUMNIST
The nomination of Hillary Clinton has been secured, but the future of the Democratic Party is far from certain. Despite the patina of unity at the end, the Democrats, like their GOP adversaries, seem divided as to their future direction. Each party is being pulled to the extremes by an increasingly unruly base which regards its own establishment as a cesspool of corruption, influence-peddling and naked opportunism.
The devolution of the parties is reflected generally in the record distaste among the electorate toward the two nominees. Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse recently remarked, “There are dumpster fires in my town more popular than these awful candidates.” Count me among those looking for some smoldering garbage.
For virtually all of my adult life, I have been a registered Democrat. But as the party has abandoned critical commitments to color-blind racial equality, upward mobility and economic growth, I have moved on to become a registered independent. This makes me part of the fastest-growing “party” in America – the politically homeless.
From economic growth to cronyism and socialism
Historian Michael Lind suggests in his magisterial “Land of Promise” that, generally, all political parties have embraced the gospel of economic growth. Jacksonians in the early 19th century focused heavily on “producerism,” seeking to help those who actually created goods. The original progressives, in both parties, adopted policies favoring modern industry, from infrastructure to education and training. Herbert Croly, the influential early 20th century progressive journalist, described these as “economic agents” leading to greater prosperity.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its panoply of price supports and infrastructure projects, was, if nothing else, aimed at restoring prosperity. These policies may have had debatable impact, but certainly by the 1940s – in large part due to World War II – the economy was fully stoked. Later, Democrats from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton generally embraced growth as a means to improve the conditions of most Americans, including the working- and middle-class families with whom the party identified itself.
Today, this is changing. Liberals now constitute roughly three in five Democrats, a share twice as large as in 1992, when we elected the first Clinton. Increasingly, liberals, or progressives, are at best ambivalent about economic growth, particularly in such blue-collar fields as fossil fuel energy, manufacturing, agribusiness and suburban homebuilding. Bill Galston, a former close advisor to Bill Clinton, notes that party platform “is truly remarkable – for example, its near-silence on economic growth.” In 2012, for example, Democrats touted the environmental and economic benefits of natural gas. This year’s party platform endorses ever-stricter regulation of the industry, while Sen. Bernie Sanders’ faction demands a quickly decarbonized economy.
Ironically, such steps will hurt precisely the blue-collar workers Sanders and his minions allegedly care most about. But the Vermont socialist’s base is not blue-collar production workers, but rather millennials, low-paid service workers and academics with few ties to tangible industries. Suspicious of broad-based economic growth’s impact on the environment, they logically favor redistribution of wealth over seriously growing the pie – in effect, contradicting nearly a half-century of mainstream Democratic thinking. The Bernie Bros and Gals think that higher taxes and more generous welfare benefits can turn America into a kind of mega-Scandinavia. They ignore the fact that, as author Nima Sanandaji has pointed out, the Nordic welfare state drew from generations of rapid growth built on small government, free markets and cultural factors, and that, in more recent years, countries such as Sweden have embraced a stronger free-market stance in order to pay for their generous welfare systems.
The Sanders campaign has been right about one thing: the nature of the Clinton coalition. Due in part to the awful candidacy of Donald Trump, Hillary is likely to be the most Big Business-backed candidate in American history – five of the world’s 10 richest people favor Clinton. Long the belle of Wall Street, she has secured overwhelming support from increasingly powerful tech, entertainment and media oligarchies. These may acquiesce to the Left on social and environmental issues, but the new oligarchs will be happy to see the back of Bernie’s “soak the rich” platform. They can feel confident that Hillary will not threaten the tax and regulatory regime favorable to them, and some cronies, like Elon Musk or Google, can expect another flood of energy-related subsidies to enhance their already massive wealth.
The class divide
Bernie Sanders and his supporters long have argued that the Clintons, even as they denounced greed, got rich themselves, largely by prostituting themselves to some of the most powerful and disreputable moguls on the planet. Of course, there have always been ultra-rich Democrats, as historian G. William Domhoff documented in his 1972 “Fat Cats and Democrats.” These tended to come from outside the old Eastern WASP establishment – notably, Jews on Wall Street and in Hollywood, as well as Texas entrepreneurs like George Brown. Some pro-Democratic Wall Streeters were also involved in municipal finance, which benefited from the expansion of government.
Yet even then, the rich did not dominate “the party of the people,” particularly in comparison with the big business shills of the Republican Party. The party coalition included everyone from small farmers, including those from the South, to Main Street businesses to industrial workers to highly educated professionals. Today, only the professionals remain as a reliable segment of the party base, as Thomas Frank and others have noted.
The white working class is now the bulwark of the GOP, along with small-scale entrepreneurs. Both have struggled under the Obama administration. Indeed, Trump’s only real hope to win in November is to mobilize millions of these voters – many of them traditional Democrats – in swing states like Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. These voters have little reason to trust the Democrats, notes former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, since Democrats, increasingly dependent on the same donor base as the mainstream GOP, have done little to help them.
The inherent contradiction between the Bernie faction’s populism and Hillary’s crony capitalism could rile party politics in the coming years. The growth delivered by Obama’s economic policies has been wonderful for the investor class but not very good for a rapidly proleterianized middle and working class. How Hillary tries to appease the Left populists while maintaining her financial backers may provide a true test of her political skills.
Race and identity
The Democratic Party’s embrace of racial equality in the 1960s represented an enormous step forward for both the country and the party, whose past was mired in slavery and segregation. Yet the Democrats leading the civil rights charge, like Hubert Humphrey, did not endorse the institutionalization of racial quotas. Old-line liberals preferred the notion, advanced by Martin Luther King, that discrimination on the basis of race is always wrong, and that people should instead be judged primarily on “the content of their character.”
Yet as the party has alienated its old white working- and middle-class base, racial and gender identity politics have become more important to Democrats. Older white women and minorities essentially saved Hillary’s campaign as she lost badly to Sanders among both the young and the remnants of white Democratic working- and middle-class voters. Now Hillary and the Democrats are likely to double down on racial identity politics. This can be seen in the courting of the Black Lives Matter activists and Latino nationalists and the stepping away from Bill Clinton’s embrace of tough policies on crime.
Hillary’s campaign website, as Oren Cass recently pointed out in a City Journal column, expends many more words talking about racial redress than about the economy. Clinton’s policy agenda, he notes, focuses more on “framing issues as who instead of what” in a way that divides people by gender, race, age and sexuality. This applies also to feminist politics that are intrinsic to her appeal. She has already talked about having a cabinet that is half female. Women certainly deserve more seats at the table, as they now outperform men in many areas, but chromosomes should not trump character in a democratic society.
But this kind of categorical imperative seems to have won over the Democratic Party, so much so as to render it unrecognizable to some of its old adherents. Similarly, it’s hard to see how more regulations, concessions to well-connected cronies and ever-higher taxes will revive the middle class. Since the awful alternative of Donald Trump makes the GOP even more noxious, can someone please point me to the closest dumpster fire?
Joel Kotkin is an R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston. His newest book is “The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.”
