"The Democrats are in disarray." That was the first line of a classic Hendrik Hertzberg column in March 2006 in the New Yorker. Hertzberg didn't believe his own sentence; he made it clear that he was just parroting what many of the in-the-know political reporters and pundits were then saying.
He went on to explain that parties out of power, as the Democrats then were, are like driftwood, bobbing on the political seas, waiting for the right storm surge to bring them to shore.
"Without either a federal power center or an imminent presidential election--without a President, a Speaker of the House, a Senate Majority Leader, or a Presidential nominee--no institutional instrument or leader has the clout to impose a consensus. Democrats advocate a spectrum of more or less similar positions--an array, not a disarray...."
About eight months after he wrote that, with Republican President George W. Bush resorting to rope-a-dope against the battery of headlines from Iraq, Democrats took control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Two years after that, they gained still more seats in Congress and elected their most talented and improbable candidate--a young, cosmopolitan, mixed-race intellectual--to the White House.
The following two years, starting in 2009, produced a coordinated blitz of liberal legislation. It included the Affordable Care Act, that ginormous little engine that could and indeed still does, despite the distilled hatred of every Republican ostensibly in a position to dismantle it.
The era of hope and change is dead and gone. Democrats are once again shut out of power. And disarray demands an encore.
The 2016 Democratic nominee for president proved incapable of defeating a crude, media-savvy buffoon. Republicans dominate the statehouses. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported recently that the Democrats are so divided that a mayoral race in Omaha, Neb., provides sufficient stakes for a fratricidal brawl.
From the right, Noah Rothman writes in Commentary that the Democratic "brand is in crisis," with the party so disjointed and out to lunch it faces an existential threat with a shrug. "What are Democrats rallying around beside the disagreeable personality" of Trump? Rothman asks.
Matthew Continetti, writing in the Washington Free Beacon, likewise sees Democrats suffering "from the staleness, the remoteness of their policy message." The party is unable to shake its groggy, disgruntled base out of its Bernie Sanders stupor, Continetti said:
"But the crowds are there for Bernie. They are the left-wing version of the voters who brought us Trump: anti-establishment, anti-globalization, more interested in assembly-line security than in Silicon Valley disruption."
Continetti sees the Democratic Party as the next target to fall to political rage against elites. "The GOP was turned upside down by the revolt against the professions," he wrote, "and the Democrats are next."
Democrats must sustain their unwieldy feminist, multiracial, multiclass coalition in the face of a virulent cultural backlash at home and an ugly anti-liberal trend abroad. They must somehow chart a coherent political and policy course from a position of historic political weakness. Meanwhile, their marquee politician is a septuagenarian opportunist who refuses to label himself a Democrat and uses the party more as a foil than as a foundation on which to build a viable majority.
It's hard to look at this dead tide and conclude that the Democratic Party is ready to mount another electoral wave. Yet it very well may. As it did in 2006, the party mostly agrees on most of the big issues most of the time. Or as Democratic pollster Paul Maslin put it in an email responding to the notion of Dems in disarray: "Disarray about what?"
At present, Democrats are under no obligation to solve the world's problems, or calm the waters roiling so many democracies, including the U.S. "Trump is the story," Maslin said. "We simply have to be the strong opposition, recruit candidates, raise money and be prepared to exploit his weaknesses."
These are complex and uncertain times. Democrats lack the answers to many difficult questions. They haven't identified new leaders who can articulate new policies to address new (along with stubborn old) challenges.
For now, however, Democrats don't need the answer to every question. They need only convince voters, by November 2018, that they have the answer to one question: Who can replace these flailing, Trump-soiled Republicans?
Editorial on 04/30/2017