The weakened condition of the Democratic Party leaves it ill-prepared to defend itself against a Republican Party determined to eviscerate liberalism and the left.
Evidence of the fraught state of the party can be found everywhere.
Pew Research asked Democrats and Republicans whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about the future of their party after the five presidential and midterm elections from 2016 to 2024. Republicans in 2024 were more optimistic, 86-13, than after any of the previous four contests, including Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. Among Democrats, optimism fell to 51 percent, while pessimism rose to 49 percent, well below the 61-38 for Democrats after the 2016 election.
Ken Martin, the chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a leading candidate to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, acknowledged this erosion of political clout in a memo to party leaders:
For the first time in modern history, the perception that Americans have of the two major political parties switched. The majority of Americans now believes that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and that the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites. It’s a damning indictment on our party brand.
Polling suggests that Trump is ideologically closer to the median voter than Harris. Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, conducted a post-election survey asking voters to place themselves, Harris and Trump on a scale ranging from zero (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative). The mean response for Harris was 2.45, for Trump 7.78 and for all voters 5.63.
Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, voiced serious doubts by email about the ability of the Democratic Party to compete successfully with the Republican Party:
A party whose base consists of culturally liberal, largely well-educated white Americans and a shrinking share of voters of color, is almost by definition going to find it impossible to defend American democracy. Every Democratic President from Franklin Roosevelt to Joe Biden won the White House by voicing the fears and defending the interests of the working- and middle-classes. Democrats cannot credibly claim to represent the ideals of American democracy and peel support away from Trump’s anti-elite, populist G.O.P., without reimagining what it stands for and who is in its coalition.
The Democratic Party is perhaps more rudderless than at any time since Bill Clinton’s presidency. Its leadership is aging. The party seems culturally out of touch to many Americans. Its brand is associated with championing niche interests, and the party — despite some crucial electoral victories — has ultimately failed its overarching mission since 2015 of defeating and defanging the MAGA movement.
In addition, Dallek went on to say, the centrality of anti-establishment themes in the MAGA movement makes opposition to it all the more difficult:
The Democratic Party faces a heavy burden: it has to defend democratic institutions in a time when these institutions are reviled by a large majority of the American electorate. Its message to the public that it is a bulwark of democracy failed to resonate with voters in November. In order to defend democracy, then, it must find ways to appeal to a majority of the American people on the bread-and-butter issues foremost in people’s lives.
When Franklin Roosevelt called on the United States, “to become the ‘arsenal of democracy,’ ” Dallek wrote,
he persuaded citizens that protecting democracy was in their own self-interest: it was key to Americans’ prosperity, freedoms, and their children’s future. He helped explain to the public how anti-democratic threats imperiled their livelihoods. Today’s Democratic Party has not yet found a way to make this case stick.
The pressure on the Democratic Party to assume the role of democracy’s defender has arrived at a difficult moment. Not only was the outcome of the 2024 election supremely deflating, but many of the party’s institutional allies are struggling to deal with setbacks.
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Controversies over pro-Palestinian demonstrations and expressions of anti-Semitism, have forced the resignation of presidents of some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. From 2015 to 2024, the share of adults with a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell from 57 to 36 percent, while those with “very little” or “none” rose from 10 to 32 percent, according to Gallup.
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The two liberal cable networks, CNN and MSNBC, have experienced sharp post-election declines in viewership. Forbes reported on Nov. 29 that: “MSNBC’s prime time audience has dipped 53 percent since the week before the election,” closely followed “by a 47 percent drop by CNN — while Fox News has largely held onto its audience since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory.”
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In city after city, voters have ousted liberal district attorneys, many whose campaigns were backed by George Soros. Many if not most of those prosecutors pressed for no-bail policies and for the abandonment of prosecuting selected misdemeanors.
What’s more, these cracks emerging in the institutional pillars of the left now accompany weakening Democratic support in three of its crucial constituencies: minorities, the young and urban voters.
Trump and his allies are more than willing to kick an adversary when he (or she) is down. Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, described by email the probable Republican agenda:
Authoritarians tend to target certain institutions to cement their control: typically the media, higher education, the bureaucracy, the legal system and the military. To varying degrees, Trump has promised to control, purge or punish all of these groups. He has pledged to remove woke bureaucrats and generals, and to protect free speech in the media and on campus by punishing organizations deemed to be outliers.
Moynihan stressed that “that this is not about wokeness, or free speech; it is about Trump using government powers to engage in selective punishments and purges on a scale we really have not seen before.”
Perhaps most striking is Trump’s plan to excise a broad swath of the top ranks in the military, the crucial arm of government constraining or allowing authoritarian methods by the president.
“I would fire them. You can’t have a woke military,” Trump said in a Fox News interview last June. And in a post-election podcast in November, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice to become secretary of defense, said, “Any general that was involved — general, admiral, whatever — that was involved in any of the D.E.I. woke” stuff has “got to go.”
The Trump transition team, The Wall Street Journal reported, is exploring the possibility of having Trump issue an executive order creating a “warrior board” of former ranking military personnel empowered to recommend removal of any three- or four-star generals found to be unfit for leadership.
Moynihan wrote that he has
taught and been impressed by a good number of military officers. The idea that the armed services is overrun with wokeness is simply not grounded in reality. “Wokeness” is really just an excuse to purge officials who might be expected to be less loyal to Trump.
Along similar lines, the American Accountability Foundation, a conservative group funded in part by the Heritage Foundation, was established in 2022 for the explicit purpose of “identifying and shining a spotlight on the high-ranking civil servants within the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Justice (DOJ) who are likely to thwart an incoming conservative administration’s immigration agenda.”
On Oct. 23, the Accountability Foundation announced publication of the “first tranche” of names and photos — the “Ten Top Targets”— of what it called “subversive, leftist bureaucrats serving in the Federal government who cannot be trusted to enforce our immigration laws under a future administration intent on securing our border.”
William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, warned in an email that “substantial portions of the Republican electoral base are so angry with ‘liberal elites’ that they will stop at nothing to destroy them, by whatever means Trump chooses to use.”
At the same time, Galston continued, the Republican Party “contains many elected officials who believe in the constitution and the rule of law but who are unwilling to risk their careers to defend them, especially if doing so requires them to break with or oppose Trump.”
If Trump chooses “to arouse rather than tame the darkest passions of his base supporters, he and his followers will threaten constitutional democracy,” Galston wrote. In those circumstances, “it will fall to the Democratic Party to defend constitutional democracy.”
There are many hurdles the Democrats will have to overcome in order to be effective in that role.
First and foremost, according to Galston, will be regaining majority power “in at least one national institution. Democrats are currently consigned to minority status in all four — White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Supreme Court — and the trends revealed in the 2024 election are not encouraging.”
“The Democratic Party as now constituted,” Galston added, “is not headed toward a durable majority.”
The second hurdle is avoiding past strategic errors:
Even when Democrats do enjoy majorities, they have proved unwilling to give (or incapable of giving) priority to defending constitutional democracy. In the most recent congress, for example, they failed to join bipartisan efforts to reform the dangerously broad Insurrection Act, reportedly because the Congressional Black Caucus refused to limit a tool used in the past to implement desegregation and civil rights laws against Southern opposition.
A political party, as Galston put it, echoing Justice Robert Jackson, “is not a suicide pact, and advocacy groups should stop pressuring elected officials to take positions that they cannot defend during elections.”
How does that translate in practical terms?
Galston emailed his suggestions. For one, “Democrats must agree on an approach to immigration that can command majority support, even if left-leaning immigration lawyers denounce it.”
And more generally, “without changes that subordinate moral posturing to the task of building a new majority, Democrats’ efforts to protect constitutional institutions and democratic norms against populist ire may well fall short.”
Robert Erickson, a political scientist at Columbia, pointed out in an email that the 2024 election presents a unique situation for the defeated party. He wrote by email:
Normally the task of the party that just lost the presidential election is for its members to leisurely lick their wounds, take an audit of their failings, and wait patiently for the eventual rebound. The losing party is otherwise irrelevant for the moment.
Trump’s return presents a more urgent situation for the Democrats. Trump seeks to overturn the narrative about Jan. 6 and even jail some opponents. If he is allowed a clear runway, he can severely damage the rule of law. So the Democrats need to show that they will stand in his way and make him pause. For instance, Senate Democrats should challenge confirmation of political appointees who are J6 sympathizers or who would willingly facilitate retribution. Of course they would need at least a few Republican allies for any successful resistance.
Some analysts argue that a top priority for Democrats in 2025 should be building alliances with the few Republicans in Congress who have at least partially distanced themselves from Trump, including the Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.
Without at least a semblance of bipartisanship, Democratic efforts to block Trump’s anti-democratic initiatives will risk losing political legitimacy, their actions reduced in the minds of a deeply polarized electorate to political posturing, according to this line of thinking.
Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, elaborated on these themes in an email:
If there is a burden on the Democratic Party to be the protector of democracy, that burden entails genuine bipartisanship with democracy-supporting members of the Republican Party. It requires a flexible Democratic Party platform that is willing to compromise on various social and economic issues (immigration, trans rights, tax policies) in the short run to protect democracy in the long run. It requires an ideological pivot toward more moderate voters who may not always agree with socially and culturally liberal whites.
Trump and the Republican Party, Wronski continued,
are not synonymous. Trump poses a threat to democracy. But the Republican Party is not just Trump, and there is variation within members of the Republican Party regarding support for upholding American democratic norms.
In that context, Wronski noted,
The threat posed by the Republican Party to American democracy will be their complacency in the face of Trump’s behavior. Keep in mind, Republicans in the Senate could have convicted Trump for impeachable offenses following the Jan. 6 attack, but they chose not to.
One theme that repeatedly emerges in the comments of political analysts is the need for the Democratic Party and its candidates to regain the center and to avoid the adoption of more extreme cultural and social policies that alienate the middle and working classes.
At the same time, the conscious adoption of less controversial positions on cultural issues threatens to drive more radical constituencies “into abstention and sectarian party politics,” Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke who has studied the rise of populism in Europe, wrote by email.
But, Kitschelt continued,
the sustained pressure of an authoritarian Republican president, and a Republican Party bending to that president’s will could make it more likely for Democrats to coordinate and converge around political positions that promise electoral success with moderate voters while also preventing a retreat of more radical supporters into abstention, given how high the stakes are of the political game.
In other words, according to Kitschelt, the prospect of sustained defeat will be the mother of moderation:
Progressives in the Democratic Party have intolerantly preached distinctive conceptions of (group) tolerance that a majority of Americans have found to produce new forms of authoritarian intolerance — intolerance both at the level of individual, personal social interactions as well as at the level of group relations and political representation.
The apostles of an ethics of pure conviction — the uncompromising pursuit of intolerant moral postulates, no matter what may be the sacrifices, trade-offs, and prospects — will have to give way to an ethics of responsibility that weighs the opportunities to create political majorities, even if more far-reaching objectives of Democratic politics, as interpreted by this or that party wing, have to be put on the back burner, and probably permanently.
Losing political parties always go through a period of recrimination, blame and introspection, but this time the grieving among Democrats has taken on a tone of remorse and futility, a sense that Trump has tapped into a deepening well of anger and frustration that has the potential to become the dominant force in American politics for years to come.
Will America turn into an authoritarian one-party state as Trump seizes power and resources? Or will the United States once again — as it did during the American Revolution, the Civil War, and two World Wars — demonstrate the resilience and creativity that carried it through crises in the past?
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