Chronicle of a Death Foretold

A Pre-Mortem on the Democratic Party

I’ve now read two dozen post-mortems on the election, from Left to Right, in every publication I subscribe to, from The Economist, and the WaPo-Times to The Lever, on toward CounterPunch and Common Dreams—and then some. As far as I can tell, there is a uncanny consensus among writers of all political persuasions, and I do mean everybody agrees. This unanimity convinces me that the real fissure in the Democratic Party has become the advantage of the Republican Party, and that is the way capital figures (a) in the party’s concept of itself and (b) in its portrayal of the American future.

The conclusion I come to, having digested these post-mortems, is that every “move to the middle” that the Democrats have made since Bernie Sanders entered the presidential primaries in 2016—every attempt to be more “centrist,” which in practice means less programmatically socialist, like Kamala’s repudiation of M4A, or to be “tougher” in foreign policy, like Biden’s support of Israel’s war on Gaza —has torn away another layer of the fabled New Deal coalition, and left Democratic candidates with less to offer working people, or with blood on their hands.

That leads me back, to a pre-mortem. The Democrats relinquish their hopes of a realignment in their favor insofar as they compromise with the Wall Street/Silicon Valley wing of the party, and retreat from the social democracy that Sanders envisions—of whose programs an overwhelming majority of Americans still approve, across the board. Either the leadership convinces the big donors from those precincts that such a polity represents no threat to their standing (and their profits), and somehow amends or abolishes Citizens United to staunch the flow of dark money into elections, or they become a vestigial presence on the political scene, a ghost of the “Conscience Whigs” from the 1850s.

I would add just one thing, a remonsrance. Bernie’s campaigns and subsequent rhetoric never excluded the concerns of so-called identity politics. And why not? The decline of socially necessary labor—in manufacturing, in goods production more generally—was not a choice anybody made, as in, “hey, let’s specialize in pixels rather than building real, useful things!” It was an inevitable development, a stage in the evolution of capitalism that should validate our hopes for a social democratic future, not make us pine for the good old days of good jobs on the assembly line.

For that decline has permitted us a glimpse of a society in which our identities are not bound by our occupations, by what we do for a living as we buy the right not to suffer the mortal indignities of material deprivation. Marx himself said that the realization of true freedom lies beyond the realm of necessity. The evidence of our arrival at that destination is the new mobility and fluidity of identities, which have in turn made politics something more various and profuse—also interesting—than an enumeration of means to the ends of economic growth and full employment.

Here are the elements of that consensus I mentioned, as conveyed by pundits, activists, and others, then rephrased and reinterpreted by me:

(1) If identity politics did not doom the Democrats, it certainly distracted the campaign and the coalition as well as the electorate at large, distancing the party from its appointed constituency in the working class, and meanwhile alienating most voters, especially white (and, to a surprising degree, Hispanic) males.

(2) Harris was more hamstrung by her defense of existing institutions—and the politicians, bureaucrats, or experts who personify them—than by her late start or her attachment to the particular policies of the Biden administration.

(3) This may be the same thing: only Trump spoke to and for the overwhelming dissatisfaction with the status quo (“the direction of the country”) and its enablers which Americans have repeatedly expressed in poll after poll, for 20 + years—an animus that attached itself with viral intensity to Joe Biden, the man who came to symbolize the exhaustion of the not-so-great generation known as Boomers (full disclosure: Boomer R Us).

(4) The vote against abortion bans and for Trump was neither irrational nor hypocritical because it is consistent with (a) the depiction in ads of the bans’ victims, mainly married women who want to give birth to healthy children within families, and (b) the kind of individualism Americans cherish, which grants them local privileges—for men, access to sex with women without parental obligation, for women, convenient access to abortion—at the expense of larger populations (a.k.a. the “community”).

To come back to life, the Democratic Party must treat these elements of a post-mortem as if they’re open questions. The way to start is to acknowledge that old-fashioned social democracy—Bernie’s retort to Trump before he was elected the first time—is the best answer to each.