In his Washington Post column E. J. Dionne says the Democratic Party is trying to cope with a “generational crisis”:
The chaotic frenzy of the Democrats’ South Carolina debate dramatized a generational crisis and a divisive conflict over how damaging the word “socialist†will be in a general election.
There was also this: No candidate other than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has assembled a coherent and sustainable coalition.
These problems are related because whether Sanders can defeat President Trump — the preoccupation of a large majority of Democratic voters — depends on whether he can rally a large new pool of younger voters to the polls in November.
The evidence so far is not encouraging. Yes, Sanders is the overwhelming favorite among the young, but a huge wave of new voters under 35 has yet to materialize in the first contests.
James Carville has pointed out that there’s a mountain of studies which prove that such a “huge wave” will not materialize—he characterizes Sanders’s view as “science denial”.
He continues:
There are good reasons why young Americans have a far more favorable view of socialism and a more skeptical view of capitalism than their elders. Those under 35 came of age in the wake of the economic system’s near-implosion in the Great Recession, and capitalism simply doesn’t look as good to them in 2020 as it did to the younger generation of, say, 1998.
And polling makes clear that the young are far more likely to associate socialism with Denmark (a happy and prosperous nation that played a supporting role in Tuesday’s debate) than with the long-dead Soviet Union.
But absent the voter surge Sanders is promising, older Americans will vote in a larger proportion in November than the young. And it is among older voters where deep skepticism about socialism rules.
I agree that the Democratic Party has a generational crisis but not in the sense he means. Its gravest problem is the substantial deficit of members of the Baby Boom and Generation X cohorts in the Democratic leadership. That points to a problem with more complexity than just that young people don’t have a negative view of socialism.
I would say that Democrats face at least four problems: the alliance of the Democratic Party with the financial sector crafted by the Clinton Administration, the political response to the financialization of the American economy which, in vastly simplified terms, created the income inequality we see now, the recrafting of the Democratic leadership to ensure that the Clintons retained control of the party after Bill’s term of office, Barack Obama’s disinterest in so many of the tedious chores of the presidency including crafting a durable political coalition, and a cultural crisis created by mass immigration.
If it were merely a generation gap, young people would have turned to socialism fifty years ago when the Baby Boomers became politically active. But it’s also a gap in experience, competence, and a cultural gap.
