Whistling Past a Policy Graveyard

In another op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Rahm Emanuel exhorts Democrats to pursue a “positive agenda” when they gain control of the House next year:

Nearly every data point suggests that Democrats will ride to victory this November, making it very likely that we’ll take control of the House and possibly the Senate. While we shouldn’t take anything for granted, we need to think through how to maximize our opportunity, both politically and in enacting a substantive agenda.

Here are some of the measures he has in mind:

What is that agenda? It should begin with raising the minimum wage, which hasn’t been changed since 2009. We should pass a ratepayers’ bill of rights. We should fight to lower healthcare costs. We should end the scourge of social media on children. And we should pass an ethics-reform package that cleans up Washington and bans insiders from betting on prediction markets. That should be our focus in 2027: forcing Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress to veto and vote against bills that unite us, divide them and lay the foundation for our electoral and substantive victories in 2028 and beyond. As with the tax hike in 1990 and work on children’s healthcare in 2007, we need to highlight issues that exploit the GOP’s fissures to our strategic advantage.

I think that Mr. Emanuel’s advice is both tactically and strategically sound, much what I would expect from him. The question I have for Mr. Emanuel is what makes him think the new Congress will heed his advice?

Illinois is often described as a “blue state” but that obscures more than it reveals. It is not a progressive state in the mold of California or New York; it is a machine state. “Democrat” here has traditionally meant a particular sort of organization-driven, patronage-oriented politics rather than ideological progressivism. Think Dick Durbin not Bernie Sanders.

That is precisely what makes the recent primaries noteworthy. Even within that environment, nearly every successful candidate ran on themes like “Fight Trump,” “Defund ICE,” and “Medicare for All.” In most of these districts the primary is dispositive. The general election is a formality so those are the incentives that actually matter.

There is a simple, nearly iron law of political behavior: politicians tend to keep doing what worked. Expecting a Congress elected on those incentives to pivot toward a disciplined, incremental “positive agenda” for strategic reasons strikes me as unrealistic.

Which raises the question for Mr. Emanuel: if, as he himself warns, the political energy of the moment inclines toward “retribution and vindictiveness,” what makes him think it will be channeled into the sort of program he proposes?

Much as I might agree with him, I think he’s dreaming of a Clintonesque Democratic Party that was rather than the one that exists today.