The Reality Sinks In

I strongly recommend Ruy Teixeira’s analysis of the fix in which the House progressives have placed the Democratic Party which he characterizes as “How Not to Build a Coalition”. Key points include

1. Increasing turnout hasn’t worked.
2. Clumping blacks, Hispanics, and Asians together as “people of color” hasn’t worked.
3. The majority of Americans reject “cultural leftism”.
4. Promoting the notion that there’s a “crisis of democracy” hasn’t worked.
5. Promoting the notion that the there’s a dire need for radical transformation in the United States hasn’t worked.

Here are a few important snippets:

In the 2020 election, running against Donald Trump (Donald Trump!) and in the wake of a social upheaval after George Floyd’s murder that associated the Democratic party closely with a left stance on the centrality of “systemic racism” to pretty much every policy issue…the Democrats actually lost ground among nonwhite voters. They lost 7 margin points from their 2016 margin among black voters and a stunning 16 points from their 2016 margin among Hispanics (Catalist two party vote) The black share of voters in 2020 was actually slightly smaller than the black share in 2016 because, while black turnout did go up, it did not go up as much as other groups. Overall, nonwhite voters contributed less to Biden’s margin over Trump in 2020 than they did to Clinton’s margin over Trump in 2016.

and

The left in the Democratic party insists that cultural leftism is central to consolidating the “rising American electorate” that will power the Democratic party to dominance in an increasingly multicultural, multiracial America. It is a feature they say, not a bug, of current Democratic practice.

But in the process, the left has managed to associate the Democratic party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, schooling, free speech and of course race and gender that are quite far from those of the median voter. That’s a success for the left but the hard reality is that it’s an electoral liability for the Democratic party.

What should be done? The party should focus on popularism—ideas that are popular with most Americans, without poison pills, “gotchas”, or extras. There are plenty of them like DACA, and voter ID. It’s been said that the Republicans are looking for converts while the Democrats are busy searching for heretics. Stop looking for heretics. Abandon vanguardism. That’s the path to becoming a boutique party.

The reason that Democrats have control of the cities is that historically they’ve “brought home the bacon”, i.e. people in those cities benefited. Increasingly, they’re voting Democrat through force of habit. That won’t persist forever. Without reinforcement habits are extinguished.

And for goodness sake don’t just write off getting Republican votes in Congress. Strategies that have been used successfully for 200 years haven’t been tried and found wanting. They’ve been found to violate the Marcusist principles of the Congressional progressives and not tried.