In an op-ed in the New York Times Michael Tomasky wonders why the leading Democrats aren’t articulating a vision of the future of the United States:
The Democrats are undergoing a historic transformation, from being the party that embraced neoliberalism in the early 1990s to one that is rejecting that centrist posture and moving left. There’s plenty about this to cheer — the neoliberal Democratic Party didn’t do nearly enough to try to arrest growing income inequality, among other shortcomings.
There will be necessary internecine fights, and they boil down to loyalty tests on particular positions demanded by the vanguard. Consider the debate within the party on Senator Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All†bill, which most (though not all) 2020 contenders rushed to attach themselves to. To fail to sign on to that legislation is to open oneself to criticism, even abuse, although it’s less a piece of legislation than a goal.
Forget about who’s right and wrong in these debates. Time will sort that out. My point is that they tend to consume a party experiencing a shift. The Democratic Party, because it is an amalgam of interest groups in a way the Republican Party is not, has always had a tendency to elevate the candidate who can check the most boxes. The current internal dynamics exacerbate that. It’s also worth remembering that no one besides party activists cares.
So when the party’s leaders tussle over this or that policy, they also need to take a step back, to see the direction the country — the West itself — is heading, and take a stand on it. This isn’t just a matter of high-minded idealism; it’s what separates great politicians from merely good ones.
The answer to the question is that they don’t have one. They don’t want to “make America great again”; they think it’s fine as it is. The Obama Administration made it eminently clear that Democrats believe what we’re experiencing is the new normal—slow to nonexistent growth. They don’t want to make things better. They want to manage the decline and divide the spoils.
I really wish that Democrats were paying a lot more attention to good governance and a lot less to political pandering. If they think we can have open borders and maintain a workable society, they should articulate that vision. If they think that higher corporate and personal income taxes will make this a better society, that’s a vision they should articulate as well. I’d like to explain the high homicide rates in Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis and the low homicide rates in New York and Los Angeles without referencing race.
I recently read something, articulated by a progressive, that we should figure out how to return to the conditions of income equality of a half century ago. I don’t think he realized what he was saying.
I still wonder why Democrats don’t focus any effort on improving the effectiveness of government. When I ask Democrat friends about this they either shrug their shoulders or say that any reform effort would be hijacked by Republicans. I get the sense that a lot of them believe that government reform is just a euphemism for starving the beast.
Most people are not interested in the nuts and bolts of government. They want to “make our Army powerful” or to “end poverty in America,” and they want somebody else to do the actual work. They do not want to be county commissioners in El Centro county, New Mexico, making a living by deciding on whether the Sanitation Department deserves another dump truck.