The Obama Coalition Was a Mistake

Everyone should have realized from the start it was never going to work.

The Obama Coalition was a terrible mistake. Everyone should have realized it was never going to work.

I wouldn’t have said that six months ago. Like most people, I thought the Obama Coalition was simply a tweak to the usual Democratic formula that, at a minimum, was an electoral success. It won the presidency three times. It gave the Democrats a viable theory for winning elections. I accepted the conventional wisdom that the Obama Coalition was a savvy tactical strategy that hadn’t changed anything of substance about the Democrats.

In the wake of the last election and the new political vibe in America, I now increasingly believe our current realigning era didn’t start when Trump came down the escalator in 2015. It started when the Democrats in 2008 decided to chase a permanent majority. The result wasn’t the permanent majority they dreamed. It was the disintegration of our old political world without creating anything viable to replace it.

This was the inevitable result.

HOW WE BUILD POLITICAL PARTIES AND REALIGNMENTS

If you’ve followed my work on political realignments, you know the building block of political parties and party realignments are political ideologies and ideas.

When most people think about parties and realignments, they start with the result—the demographics of identifiable voters aligned with each party, and the switches of allegiance. The question that matters actually isn’t who is going to vote for who. The foundational question is why someone is going to vote for who.

You can’t build a political party top down, cobbling together favored demographic groups and offering each a slice of pie. You also can’t build a party starting with an agenda of ideal policies you favor, and then selling it to the electorate with great marketing. Many have tried these routes and it always goes down about as well as anyone trying to sell America a product it didn’t ask for and doesn’t want. As it turns out, people’s political identities run deeper than a handful of tax credits or farm programs put into a speech. In reality, political parties are constructed around their ideology and ideas.

Ideologies attract the demographics and policies, not the other way around. Too many people have the cause and effect entirely backwards.

People become Republicans or Democrats (or Democratic Socialists or Libertarians or whatever) because of what those identities represent. People don’t say “I support Democrats” or “I support Republicans.” They say “I am a Democrat” or “I am a Republican.” When they say this, people aren’t endorsing a disconnected sheet of policies. They’re identifying with an worldview and ideology for solving America’s problems. A party’s ideology is the magnet that draws its mix of demographics toward it, as well as the glue that binds them together around an identity.

When you’re looking to build a majority party, you have to start with its ideas consolidated into a coherent ideology that’s sufficient to crate a coalition attracting half the national vote. The idea behind the “Obama Coalition” was tragically backward.

THE FAILURE OF THE EMERGING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY

In 2002, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote the influential The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book observed trends in America that were increasing the size of groups that voted Democratic, while Republican groups were gradually in decline. Essentially, America was browning and older white American gradually shrinking. The book argued, if Democrats simply leaned into these demographic trends with a mix of elite technocratic management and policies helping emerging groups, they were on the cusp of locking in a permanent governing majority.

Democratic Party leaders enthusiastically embraced the ideas of The Emerging Democratic Majority as a blueprint for endless political victory, much like Kevin Philips’ The Emerging Republican Majority did for Republicans in 1969. It offered a tantalizing vision of an America in which Democrats could rule for decades with minimal pushback, implementing all their ideas without substantial opposition. This plan therefore became the heart of what we now call the Obama Coalition.

Given more recent Democratic losses, many have attacked The Emerging Democratic Majority in recent years as discredited. In fact, it’s an excellent book. Like other prescient books that people with power misunderstood and used to do dumb things—Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man comes to mind—the analysis wasn’t the problem. It was the application.

Teixeira and Fukuyama both write here on now Substack, and you should be reading both.

THE REAL PROBLEM WITH THE OBAMA COALITION

The real problem with the Obama Coalition wasn’t the demographics it sought to attract. It was the ideas necessary to make this specific demographic alignment work.

It was obviously impossible to lean into this new proposed coalition using the traditional Democratic Party ideology. You couldn’t just replace economically struggling rural and working people with the various identity groups Democrats were bringing to the fore in a simple one-to-one substitution. The old Democratic ideology, built during the New Deal Era to combine progressive managers with rural and working people,¹ naturally results in the coalition Democrats were casting off.

Democrats would instead marry knowledge-working technocrats with the growing demographics they hoped to elevate by casting off New Deal ideology for one linking technocracy with identity. Knowledge workers would get control of the wheels of government and society. Identity groups would get access to more opportunity, while select members got boosted into the knowledge-working elite. Substantively, this meant handing power to a meritocratic-technocratic ruling class. (In the previous Democratic Party, technocrats worked in a coalition to implement everybody’s needs and ideas.) The focus of this new ideology would be to administer society as a ruling class, while adopting into the technocracy the agendas of various identity factions that Democrats call “The Groups.”

To everyone inside the leadership of the Democratic Party, this looked like an amazing deal. Meritocratic technocrats would get control of policy, outside the agendas of The Groups. The Groups got to impose ideas that were deeply important to them, but unpopular in the mainstream. Everyone got to retain the moral validation of claiming to be the “good guys” saving the world, without having to make any sacrifices. Everyone also got moral license—that delicious moral treat—to batter their enemies, since they were cast as bad people who were selfish, backward, and opponents of the weak. This all naturally led to where Democrats ended up: an ideology of social justice, elite technocratic control, public-private cooperation among elites, and cancel culture.

The cynical version is this alliance also allowed Democrats to finally break away from their increasingly embarrassing claim to represent economic class. Tension had grown throughout the democratic West between the wealthy, highly-educated, knowledge-working technocrats who ran left parties and the rural and working people who once did, but in recent years technocracy left behind. They wanted more of a share of opportunity, resources, and control that technocrats now possessed. Casting off economic populism freed technocrats from this uncomfortable alliance, allowing them to maintain their status, wealth, and control by simply allowing some new faces into their ranks, instead of collectively having to share resources or power with an increasingly angry working class.

This was all a terrible mistake, and not just because the party was adopting bad ideas. It was never going to work for Democrats.

AN IDEOLOGICAL FAILURE

It should have been obvious from the start that the Obama coalition would be an ideological failure. So much of what it required was directly at odds with America’s core ideals.

Meritocratic technocracy is anti-democratic and conflicts with America’s freewheeling culture of social equality and economic opportunity. Identity politics is anti-universalist. The Groups passionately held many unpopular ideas hostile to the Enlightenment. Imposing them on half of America would be so unpopular in a democracy it would requires some authoritarian methods. Moral posturing and canceling are gross, and a bad look for any political movement. Most of all, denigrating working people and the working middle-class grates against America’s culture of social mobility. This entire ideological project was inherently at odds with foundational ideas of the American republic.

It should have stood out as an obvious failure from the get go.

For about decade, however, it actually seemed like this new version of the Democratic might work. Democrats had great success pushing the project—but to do it they had to downplay the ideology holding it together. This, I think, is why Democratic leaders spent the last decade diligently playing hide-the-ball, angrily insisting this was the same liberalism they had always supported and not something new. It’s also why, I think, many outside the Democratic Party looked at the project so conspiratorially. On the surface, it was obviously insane. Since there was no way it was ever going to be accepted by a majority of America, the inclination was to see some subversive agenda pushed by an invisible hand. Over the last four years, however, the disconnect between what Democrats claimed they were doing and what they were actually doing became too obvious to ignore. The Democratic Party and the progressive institutions supporting its agenda simply held too much power, and they had implemented too many ideas, to continue playing hide-the-ball.

In this last election, America—including a lot of left America—revolted. Now that the project is collapsing, the inevitability of its collapse seems obvious.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

I don’t see how Democrats get out of this gently. Democrats are now stuck with a new coalition that doesn’t work. It doesn’t work politically. It doesn’t work ideologically. It can’t win elections and it can’t govern. The party has broken its old coalition and there’s no easy way to get it back.

It’s new ideology is entrenched. Those profiting from it will fight any attempt to root it out. To complicate matters, when Democrats sought to build this new party and decided who would be inside it, they by extension decided who would form the opposition. In a two-party system, every faction and interest must align with one party or the other, so, when you create one great alliance, everyone left out eventually winds up in the other. The opposition Democrats created is now triumphant and holds the initiative, which means Democrats must now do more than alter course. They must break with their own recent past so completely, and offer something so compelling, it reorders a winning and energetic opposition as well.

Even more dangerous, this failed ideology and coalition might have discredited America’s ruling elite for a generation or more. The discrediting of this project sticks not just to Democrats, but all who endorsed it—meaning the bulk of America’s meritocratic-technocratic leadership class. This is why, I suspect, first movers like Mark Zuckerberg are already starting to flee, but I doubt the entire leadership of America can flee far or fast enough.

It’s starting to look like the Obama Coalition was essentially a failed attempt at leading an impossible and foolish realignment. Democrats—in part intentionally, but a lot by accident—sought to realign America around new ideas that failed. Our closest historical analogy is the forgotten interregnum in which the Know Nothing Party sought to become America’s second party after the Whigs collapsed. America tried this new two-party alignment for the better part of a decade before the Know Nothings discredited themselves and the Republicans emerged to lead the real realignment that would come.

A few months ago, I wasn’t sure things would turn out this way. Only now that it’s unraveling does the result seem entirely inevitable. The Obama Coalition once felt like America’s future. It now appears a tragic mistake. There are still many ways this all eventually could play out, but in any version Democrats must give up this failed experiment. If I were leading the Democrats, I would say: it’s time to look at America again with fresher eyes. Cast off the failed attempt and try again. This time do better. Find new ideas that are broadly popular, effective, sustainable, and in harmony with America’s foundational ideals. Discover the new ideology that will make most Americans’ lives better and restore the American Dream.

If you don’t, eventually somebody will.

Do you think the Obama Coalition was a mistake? Join the conversation in the comments.

1. I’ve written about the emergence and ideological basis of the New Deal Democratic coalition in my book The Next Realignment.