The emerging Democratic majority was a perfectly reasonable thesis had Democrats had the self-discipline to stick with their early 2000s-era platform, and I don't think even the most ardent Republican of that era would have expected Democrats to go as far off the deep end as they have. In my experience it was their surprisingly comfortable reelection in 2012 that really supercharged the feeling that the permanent majority had arrived and caused all voices of caution to be cast aside.
There's a feeling of inevitability to the collapse of the Obama coalition now, but had things gone ever so slightly differently in Butler, Pennsylvania we might be looking at President Harris expanding the censorship apparatus, dismantling voter integrity procedures, and seeking to give voting rights to so many more millions of illegal immigrants that there really would be a permanent Democratic majority. They came very, very close to succeeding in their goal of creating a one-party state.
The Republican Party collapsed completely in 2008, and deserved it. Trump came along and put a competitive GOP product on the table, including, at least relatively, with Hispanics.
Obama quite frankly went up against a weak GOP, his success wasn’t tested.
Further, the two big changes under Obama, the ACA and gay marriage (which he opposed until the Supreme Court did it for him), left the coalition with literally no reason to exist anymore. What was Hillary running on in 2016, beyond it being “her turn.” How was she planning to change the country?
Biden (or his handlers) sort of gave the left purpose with his New Deal larping, but it turned out the “meritocratic technocrats” didn’t actually know what they were doing when it came to the economy. Now we are out of money.
I blame gay marriage. Sorry to put it so bluntly. In retrospect, that was the moment that things turned politically. The Obama coalition had solidified itself and looked dominant. Gay marriage was a significant capitulation of one of the key pillars of the opposition. It looked like in the culture wars, one side was routing its enemy and simply cleaning up, looting and pillaging what was left. This gave the Obama coalition an incredible, but ultimately unwarranted, confidence. And the tone changed around this time too. I remember being at a campus event where an opponent of gay marriage was giving a talk. The tone was, “we can and probably should hang this person right here and now, but some minority of us think we should indulge him a bit first, so let’s do that.” There was a palpable sense that we had a choice of being charitable to the defeated enemy … and no, we weren’t gonna do that.
The Obama coalition achieved significant advances in feminism, racial equality, and gay rights. Rather than accepting victory, the groups decided it was too early to break up the band. This is when we entered the phase of transgenderism and “antiracism” as the premier rights issues of our time. The organizations had been formed; the money had been accumulated. But this was a fatal mistake. They doubled and tripled down on ideas that went way too far.
And it all coincided with the time when social media became a weapon.
I think the experience of the gay marriage victory flushed the Obama coalition into a state of hubris it would ride all the way to its current demise.
I've heard it argued that gay marriage might have come along a decade or two earlier if not for AIDS re-increasing the stigma during the 1980s. Gay marriage may well have been a net plus for Democrats electorally when it was a live issue, by the mid-2000s with the popularity of Will & Grace, Queer Eye, Brokeback Mountain etc. gay acceptance was on the upswing and it gave a lot of people the opportunity to feel magnanimous and principled. Perhaps in their epistemic closure progressive activists thought they could reproduce that dynamic indefinitely. Even today after all the LGBTQ backlash gay marriage still has over 50% public support.
I'd agree that gay marriage helped supercharge the sense that Dems were on the right side of history and helped feed unwarranted hubris. I remember Dems being awfully spooked by the magnitude of the Tea Party victory in 2010, though, and many assuming that Obama would lose after the Benghazi incident and that after a magical four-year interlude gravity had reasserted itself and we were returning to small-bore politics as usual. But when Obama didn't just win but won comfortably, all sense of caution and proportion went out the window. It's hard to know how much of that sense of marauding triumphalism was from social media polarization and how much was ideologues drunk on the fantasy of never needing to compromise again.
Oh, sure, because white supremacist autocracy and fascism are just the absolute best, right? Nothing like maintaining white male dominance to really make the world a better place!
My sense is that the Obama coalition always had the progressive white college-educated class in the drivers seat of determining policy with the various minority groups being given money, jobs and symbolic support via DEI and social programs. Racial minorities were always just told what to believe and had little real influence within the party.
This made the Obama coalition far more narrow than it appeared. Once blacks, Hispanics, and Asians realized how far to the Left the party had become, then they started leaving the coalition in droves. This is more or less what happened to the white working class in previous generations.
What kept the whole thing going was partisan identification. I know so many older Democrats who are loyal to the party and seem oblivious to the fact that the party they are loyal to no longer exists.
My guess is that the Democratic Party will become more class based on increasingly lose support from working-class voters of all races. This will work fine in the 12-15 Blue states, but it will make them uncompetitive in federal elections and 25 Red states. Democrats need a fundamental rethink, but my guess is that it will take a decade out of power for them to have the courage to do it.
I'm actually bearing on the Democrats becoming class based again. They absolutely are going to want to be giving policies they think will benefit working people to buy them off. What they won't want to do for a host of complex reasons is give working class populists seats at the table and control. They will therefore operate more like the historical Progressive Movement, which sought to help working people while the working people politically supported Democratic populists and Tammany Hall.
Frank, in reading your article about the Democrats, I couldn't help but realize that there IS a working model of Democratic one party rule... California.
That's where the Obama coalition was taking America.
And the NEXT stage beyond that shithole is Canada, where I'm living. You would not believe the news blackouts up here on sooo many topics.
The Democrats may try, but I really do not think that they will succeed unless they radically change their policies. I just do not see them being willing to fundamentally change until they lose three straight Presidential elections like in the 1980s.
As for "becoming class based again." I think that is a myth. American politics has always been about ethno-religious groups and regions.
The quasi-religious self-righteousness of Democratic Party agenda is repulsive. It’s almost Calvinistic in its premises. No one wants to be told they are “going to Hell” if they don’t confess to sins they are not guilty for. Especially egregious is the public behavior of the leaders of this movement. Eventually, the lesson in “The Emperor has no clothes” came to be seen as the reality of the Left. It’s still playing out, fortunately.
I tend to agree with folks who think the New England Puritans are the true ancestors of todays' progressives (which is why the heart of both is in New England). The religion is quite different, but otherwise they're similar movements in structure, form, and goals.
Oh sure, because nothing screams "modern politics" quite like a bunch of right-wingers with a pedigree tracing back to German or Italian fascism. You know, like Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo—just your everyday, run-of-the-mill, democracy-loving folks! What a charming little lineage they've got going on!
This is my favourite article of yours from this Substack so far Frank, because it answers something that has been bothering me for a few years.
Since I began as a student in political thought in 2016, conferences have been obsessed with populism. At first I didn't pay much mind to it, but as I began reading about farmer populism and early trustbusting movements, a few claims that are taken as premises of academia's anti-populist project started rubbing me the wrong way. Particularly, the claim that populism=racism. This never made any sense to me, because the question of whether a populist movement is racist is particular to the movement, not inherent in the nature of it being a populist movement. At first I just chalked this up to "well this cohort of people calls anything they don't like racist" and they think the average person is racist.
The framing of it as a consequence of the ad-hoc coalition of technocratic governance and identity groups makes it make a lot more sense. The technocrats and the groups are one, and so populism, which by definition attacks technocratic governance, so by default they are also attacking the groups.
Major political realignments were initially driven by one particular issue that sent one group from one party to another. Slavery created the Republican Party in the 1850s and railroad shipping rates created the Populist Party of the late nineteenth century. However, these were only the catalysts for more fundamental ideological and socioeconomic shifts in American politics. Republicans represented the rising influence of the Northern business elite over the Southern plantation aristocracy. The avarice of railroad robber barons led to a broader revolt against Gilded Age corruption and the advent of the Progressive era.
As I have written before in my New Nationalism Substack, I believe we are in the midst of a realignment to a political divide based on globalism vs. nationalism. Immigration was the catalyst issue of this realignment and Trump took full advantage of it. If the Democrats are to survive, they must adopt a progressive form of nationalism.
I roughly agree with that, although that's not exactly the framework I would apply! I've spent a lot of time thinking and writing about and studying American political realignments, and I therefore have my own (I believe correct!) take on how this all works.
I would say realignments are triggered by great a crisis of legitimacy caused by the decline of the old issues holding our parties together and their failure to address the new ones under the existing framework.
I definitely believe we're in the middle of a realignment. I'm not entirely committed yet to the true nature of the crisis, and am still working on it for (hopefully) a future book. I think globalism is part of it, but I suspect it's a second order affect or symptom or contributing factor of a greater trigger. I think there are some big issues and changes (economic, social, ideological) undercutting some baseline foundations of the American republic.
If you want a quick take on my view of the realignment process, this article I wrote a while back in American Interest is a good summary.
I apologize for taking so long to respond and appreciate your kind words about New Nationalism. For a “quick take”, your post on historical realignments was a fascinating and comprehensive analysis of an important aspect of American history. In particular, your theory that realignments are tied to moral and religious Great Awakenings is very interesting. As you write your book, you may want to consult V.O. Key’s 1965 article “A Theory of Critical Elections” and his book “The American Voter” if you haven’t already done so. Key and his colleagues proposed that American politics has regularly realigned in 36-year cycles since the adoption of the Constitution. Recent history appears to disprove that thesis, though I believe a more likely explanation is that the increasing politicization of our society has reduced the term of the cycle to a generation; i.e, 24 years.
Thanks again for your perceptive analysis. I learn from all your posts and look forward to continuing to do so.
Good essay. The ferocious tenacity of the technocratic elite is splendidly illustrated in four years of trying to pull the wool over the collective eyes about who’s actually running the country. Media and government in lockstep. A more dramatic example would be hard to find.
I need to book about a 1/2 hour to your articles, they're so good.
Here's something I realized and just chatted w/my wife about...
Let's fast forward to '28 primaries and keep everything going on today as being equal at that time. Specifically, the primaries...
I'm looking back at the '20 Dem primaries... 'I was that girl', but Haris. 'Latinx' by Warren. Overall, it was a freaking clown show then, and I'm taking bets that it will even be worse in 4 years b/c I think AOC will take a run at it...
Now compare that to the possible runners on the Republican side...
Oh boy... Vivek, Tulsi, Gov Desantis, JD... and I could go on and on. If I was presented w/ just the aforementioned, I would probably just write in "All Of The Above!" if I were in a voting booth. My point is that the Republican bench is sooo deep.
A perfect example for ME is Tulsi's turn around re that Patriot Act law or subsection people are calling her 'turncoat' for this past week or so.
My take?
I trust that woman. Period. She saw stuff I didn't, and I respect her integrity enough that her decision is enough for me.
That TRUST on my part towards the New Republican elite is pretty strong on my part (of course seasoned w/ skepticism, but the Trust is stronger right now).
How much trust do I have in the Democrats?
ZERO.
And if a guy like me feels this way... oh man, you're so right Frank. This is a generational shift I think. I mean, OK, I'm elderly (66); but I believe my rebuke of Democrats goes deeper and wider than just me.
It's not going to be pretty, man. The assholes won't go away quietly.
But what was the alternative? Bill Clinton necessarily followed the politics of premption, as did Eisenhower and Wilson, achieving only what the dominant party's dispensation would permit them. Obama was the second opposition party president, like FDR and Nixon. The reigning Republican dispensation had been totally discredited under Hoover and FDR took advantage of the big electoral victory this gained him to establish a new dispensation as I describe here:
Nixon did not see himself in a position to do the same, so he abandoned the fiscal conservatism his party long stood for, but labeled it as "Keynesian". Reagan later took this ball, added tax cuts and voila transformed "Keynesian" into "supply side" economics, but they really are the same thing (we plan to run deficits indefinitely). Otherwise he governed as a moderate preemptive.
Obama did pretty much the same thing as Nixon. What would Clinton have done that was different?
Granted I critique Obama in my post for failing to prevent the TARP from being passed and letting the financial system collapse. But I myself *supported* the TARP as a right thing to do in 2008, so I can I condemn Obama for doing what I would have done in his shoes?
I think you’re getting hot. But I think you’re probably underplaying the role of underlying material forces. The Obama coalition seemed like it would work because of the way the world was trending—the high water mark of globalization, or what right-wingers call “globalism.” The global economy was shifting power to an educated professional/managerial elite. At the same time it was producing diversity within the liberal democratic states and within their educated professional classes. Then, probably these went hand in hand with a third element, American global hegemony and neocon adventurism. These were the dominant trends of the post-Cold War era. And they all favored (or became associated with) the Obama coalition.
Then, this whole political regime started collapsing. America proved increasingly unable to maintain unilateral dominance as other powers caught up with it and competing power centers emerged. Then, for various reasons, the country began to sour on the dominance of the educated professional elite. This is the part of the story I still don’t completely get. And I think there can be no complete answer without an attempt to say what this new formation is that’s coming into being. But I would call it the 20 percent vs the 0.1 percent. I think the sheer extent of the dominance of the professional elite started terrifying the rest of society, both the proles (sorry) and the owner class. Evidence of their potentially tyrannical power mounted. I don’t think it ever really got there. But there was enough of a lack of trust, and enough organic disconnect between the educated elite and the rest of society, that the proles and the owner class decided to team up and commit a pincer move.
The owner class resented the professional elite’s power, as demonstrated by its resentment for “woke” politics within corporations and for “work from home” policies they see as evidence of their loss of power. They also see AI as an opportunity to disembowel the educated elite (I think this is wish fulfillment, which is part of why AI is so massively overhyped. They want to believe this will finally free them from the need for professionals/managers.)
The owner class is now engaged in a vicious total war to simply destroy every social institution it sees as supporting the power of the educated professional class. Universities, the federal workforce, law firms, the scientific enterprise, everything. It is total class warfare. It is a little more sophisticated than Pol Pot going around Cambodia and simply shooting everyone wearing glasses, but not by much.
I guess to add a couple more points, no one has an incentive to be honest about this contest between the 20 percent and the 0.1 percent. Both sides pitch their claims to legitimacy in terms of “the people,” as they must. But the people have little to do with this, except as an audience for the competing bids of these two classes.
Second, the greatest mystery to me is what caused the loss of power of the educated elite. They had a basis for dominance over most of the post-Cold War period; so what has changed? I’m not sure but at least one part of the story is the change in the economy, especially the tech sector. People like Mark Zuckerberg were once the vanguard of the educated elite—they identified as engineers, entrepreneurs. Now they are merely rent-seeking oligarchs controlling vast monopolies. That has become true of the whole sector. And that’s a dramatic loss of power and opportunity for the educated class. Antitrust has thus been a focal point in the contest between the classes. Preserving monopoly power and their ability to continue rent-seeking is essential to maintaining the 0.1 percent. Destroying Lina Khan has been a top priority for them. And that’s an important part of why they swung behind Trump and hated Biden (and his VP).
One crucial reason why Democrats cannot move forward is that they cannot be honest about who they really represent. You now hear a lot of economic populist noise, as their best guess of how to move forward. But this pseudo-Marxism is simply confused, as it has been for decades. There is no working class movement because there isn’t really a working class. Certainly not one that could power a majority coalition on its own.
Missing in this analysis, in my opinion, are two things:
1. The Republican Party is in the process of enshittifying the country, and the world, at warp speed. Democrats, as the only alternative, will be returned to power--at least the House, possibly the Senate, probably state legislatures and governors' mansions--in 2026.
I know that "deliverism" now has a bad name. The idea that doing successful governing doesn't seem to pay off in elections. People don't get excited when government just works. But they will get really mad when it stops working, which is now inevitable under Trump. Wait till the SS checks don't arrive, and Medicaid coverage stops, and planes start hitting each other. "Antideliverism" will be a. VERY failing strategy.
2. The problem with bashing technocracy is that reality has become very complicated. Sure, experts are fallible, no doubt about it. However, uneducated morons are pretty much guaranteed to get everything wrong. Technocrats got school closures during COVID wrong. But they got mRNA vaccines right and saved millions of lives. RFK Jr. and his anti-technocratic ilk are in the process of enabling a measles epidemic and the return of measles deaths.
I believe that a lot of culture war issues have been causing Democrats problems and losing them voters. But flip flopping on them probably won’t work, because it won’t seem believable and will alienate a lot of people. I think that their best bet would be to have freedom and tolerance as bedrock principles; very frequently voters prefer whichever side seems more in favor of a live and let live approach. And it also is something that I think most supporters of the Democratic Party can genuinely support, as opposed to trying to adopt some popular, but conservative limits on freedom.
Question: is it not also true that, in their proposed legislation and NLRB appointments, the Dems remained quite pro-labor, a stark contrast to Republicans? I don't see how, when you combine that with the attempt (however watered down Obamacare was) to expand health care to millions more, you don't have the spiritual continuation of the New Deal. What more would you have had them do, plausibly, in the economic sphere, especially given Mitch McConnell's obstructionism?
Do you mean the Obama Administration specifically, or the post-Obama Democratic Party?
Obama specifically could (and should) have taken an entirely different tack on the financial crisis, which was engineered to benefit professionals over the workers who were harmed. Then there could have been some effort to actually backstop the declining position of working people and the middle class instead of cheering it on as the cost of progress. Plus the cultural stuff intended to flatter upper middle class professionals and alienate rural people (clingers, etc.)
I hear you on the cultural stuff--for sure, no argument there. I mean, we agree about 80%, give or take, on the whole picture. I think you are probably right on the financial crisis. But given the Republican obstructionism--the new refusal, in the post-Contract With America era in the House, and McConnell era in the Senate, to give Dems any votes at all, I am not sure what that backstop would have looked like, or could have looked like, legislatively. I'd love to hear about legislation that could have passed, realistically, that would have been more pro-worker. It seems to me that, given the gridlock in Congress, Obama (and Biden) worked with executive action in their appointments and exec. orders, which were quite progressive.
The issue is I don't think about party coalitions and directions as merely matters of specific policy "deliverables." I care about that stuff, but having been a DC policy guy at one time and having worked in Congress and on a presidential campaign in a policy position, I don't have a lot of belief that most "policies" do much, or are meant to do much more than signal. They're more political marketing than government. I'm thinking about something bigger than a few bills, but a directional change in how the party believes government should work, who it serves, and how.
For example Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, or Reagan changed the direction of the ship of government but not because of some specific tax policy. They brought a holistic change in perspective that filtered everywhere, and changed the way the electorate responded to them. It's similar to how drunk driving was stopped not because of new laws but new attitudes MAD drove that then filtered into how drunk driving was policed (from "go on your way, sir" to roadblocks and zero tolerance). Its also how woke policies changed everything, without anyone having to ever pass a bill.
I hear all that. But then I am not sure what you'd have had the Dems do--what the road not taken would have looked like, on the ground (other than the avoidance of the various poison pills of woke-ism, about which I agree with you). I guess part of the problem is we don't know; nobody tried it!
The single most important thing the Democrats could have done in 2009 to reinforce a level of popular support that was already formidable was: Abolish The Filibuster. Or reduce it to, say, 55 votes, with a sunset clause dated right before the election. Then the Democrats could have done something similar to what Trump is doing now, only with Congressional legislation. And after two years of passing bills that would actually have effect by 2010 (i.e., not the ACA), they could have put their track record of successes to the test in the midterms.
But they didn't do it.
So they got stonewalled by filibuster threats, and then put so far in check in the midterms that it was all that Obama could do to use executive orders over the next six years to accomplish a very circumscribed agenda. He didn't even control his own budget. In the era of 0% Fed interest rates, the Dems could have put a comprehensive national infrastructure upgrade (which we still need) in place as a bargain front-end loaded investment. Instead, it was all about the Fed doing quantitative easing, and wrapping up the bailouts that had begun in the previous administration, and having the budget run by the dictates of "the sequester."
So I don't buy that the possibility of an enduring Democratic Party majority was foredoomed. It was squandered because of indecision, inaction, and inability to envision lasting improvements in public works and job stimulus for any constituency that didn't partake of the obsessions of the top 10% of bien pensant liberals (and the select beneficiaries of that patronage.) The Dems evidently still can't tell effective and innovative spending on the public commons from the pork barrel, as is becoming increasingly clear. The only difference is that the pork barrel got postmodernized, in partnership with lifestyle liberal nonprofits and NGOs.
The Obama coalition gave Democrats their only popular vote victories since the start of the Reagan political order. Economic appeals died with the end of the New Deal economy in 1973. Between them and Obama, Democrats won the popular vote only once due to an unforced error by Nixon.
To say that was an error would be to acknowledge Democrats would never be competitive again.
Actually none of this matters. Democrats were always going to win in 2008 and lose in 2016 no matter what they did it who they ran.
I’m not sure the collapse of this coalition was inevitable. It came awfully close to enduring control of the country. That it DID fail, this time around, was good for the country, but I don’t think it’s dead forever. And believe me - I wish it WAS.
BY DEFINITION, elites are smart and ambitious. I should know - I went to college with a lot of them. The elites will figure out a way to regain control. They just need a little more institutional capture - a little more control of the media and school boards, maybe. I think they probably have maxed out their control of universities and the federal government.
The emerging Democratic majority was a perfectly reasonable thesis had Democrats had the self-discipline to stick with their early 2000s-era platform, and I don't think even the most ardent Republican of that era would have expected Democrats to go as far off the deep end as they have. In my experience it was their surprisingly comfortable reelection in 2012 that really supercharged the feeling that the permanent majority had arrived and caused all voices of caution to be cast aside.
There's a feeling of inevitability to the collapse of the Obama coalition now, but had things gone ever so slightly differently in Butler, Pennsylvania we might be looking at President Harris expanding the censorship apparatus, dismantling voter integrity procedures, and seeking to give voting rights to so many more millions of illegal immigrants that there really would be a permanent Democratic majority. They came very, very close to succeeding in their goal of creating a one-party state.
+1
The Republican Party collapsed completely in 2008, and deserved it. Trump came along and put a competitive GOP product on the table, including, at least relatively, with Hispanics.
Obama quite frankly went up against a weak GOP, his success wasn’t tested.
Further, the two big changes under Obama, the ACA and gay marriage (which he opposed until the Supreme Court did it for him), left the coalition with literally no reason to exist anymore. What was Hillary running on in 2016, beyond it being “her turn.” How was she planning to change the country?
Biden (or his handlers) sort of gave the left purpose with his New Deal larping, but it turned out the “meritocratic technocrats” didn’t actually know what they were doing when it came to the economy. Now we are out of money.
I blame gay marriage. Sorry to put it so bluntly. In retrospect, that was the moment that things turned politically. The Obama coalition had solidified itself and looked dominant. Gay marriage was a significant capitulation of one of the key pillars of the opposition. It looked like in the culture wars, one side was routing its enemy and simply cleaning up, looting and pillaging what was left. This gave the Obama coalition an incredible, but ultimately unwarranted, confidence. And the tone changed around this time too. I remember being at a campus event where an opponent of gay marriage was giving a talk. The tone was, “we can and probably should hang this person right here and now, but some minority of us think we should indulge him a bit first, so let’s do that.” There was a palpable sense that we had a choice of being charitable to the defeated enemy … and no, we weren’t gonna do that.
The Obama coalition achieved significant advances in feminism, racial equality, and gay rights. Rather than accepting victory, the groups decided it was too early to break up the band. This is when we entered the phase of transgenderism and “antiracism” as the premier rights issues of our time. The organizations had been formed; the money had been accumulated. But this was a fatal mistake. They doubled and tripled down on ideas that went way too far.
And it all coincided with the time when social media became a weapon.
I think the experience of the gay marriage victory flushed the Obama coalition into a state of hubris it would ride all the way to its current demise.
You might be interested in this take:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-152507921
I've heard it argued that gay marriage might have come along a decade or two earlier if not for AIDS re-increasing the stigma during the 1980s. Gay marriage may well have been a net plus for Democrats electorally when it was a live issue, by the mid-2000s with the popularity of Will & Grace, Queer Eye, Brokeback Mountain etc. gay acceptance was on the upswing and it gave a lot of people the opportunity to feel magnanimous and principled. Perhaps in their epistemic closure progressive activists thought they could reproduce that dynamic indefinitely. Even today after all the LGBTQ backlash gay marriage still has over 50% public support.
I'd agree that gay marriage helped supercharge the sense that Dems were on the right side of history and helped feed unwarranted hubris. I remember Dems being awfully spooked by the magnitude of the Tea Party victory in 2010, though, and many assuming that Obama would lose after the Benghazi incident and that after a magical four-year interlude gravity had reasserted itself and we were returning to small-bore politics as usual. But when Obama didn't just win but won comfortably, all sense of caution and proportion went out the window. It's hard to know how much of that sense of marauding triumphalism was from social media polarization and how much was ideologues drunk on the fantasy of never needing to compromise again.
Oh, sure, because white supremacist autocracy and fascism are just the absolute best, right? Nothing like maintaining white male dominance to really make the world a better place!
Very interesting article.
My sense is that the Obama coalition always had the progressive white college-educated class in the drivers seat of determining policy with the various minority groups being given money, jobs and symbolic support via DEI and social programs. Racial minorities were always just told what to believe and had little real influence within the party.
This made the Obama coalition far more narrow than it appeared. Once blacks, Hispanics, and Asians realized how far to the Left the party had become, then they started leaving the coalition in droves. This is more or less what happened to the white working class in previous generations.
What kept the whole thing going was partisan identification. I know so many older Democrats who are loyal to the party and seem oblivious to the fact that the party they are loyal to no longer exists.
My guess is that the Democratic Party will become more class based on increasingly lose support from working-class voters of all races. This will work fine in the 12-15 Blue states, but it will make them uncompetitive in federal elections and 25 Red states. Democrats need a fundamental rethink, but my guess is that it will take a decade out of power for them to have the courage to do it.
I'm actually bearing on the Democrats becoming class based again. They absolutely are going to want to be giving policies they think will benefit working people to buy them off. What they won't want to do for a host of complex reasons is give working class populists seats at the table and control. They will therefore operate more like the historical Progressive Movement, which sought to help working people while the working people politically supported Democratic populists and Tammany Hall.
Frank, in reading your article about the Democrats, I couldn't help but realize that there IS a working model of Democratic one party rule... California.
That's where the Obama coalition was taking America.
And the NEXT stage beyond that shithole is Canada, where I'm living. You would not believe the news blackouts up here on sooo many topics.
The Democrats may try, but I really do not think that they will succeed unless they radically change their policies. I just do not see them being willing to fundamentally change until they lose three straight Presidential elections like in the 1980s.
As for "becoming class based again." I think that is a myth. American politics has always been about ethno-religious groups and regions.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-american-political
I do think American politics will become more class-based, but the Democrats are far more likely to continue representing the professional class.
You're giving them the benefit of assuming they are anything other than subversive Marxist filth
The quasi-religious self-righteousness of Democratic Party agenda is repulsive. It’s almost Calvinistic in its premises. No one wants to be told they are “going to Hell” if they don’t confess to sins they are not guilty for. Especially egregious is the public behavior of the leaders of this movement. Eventually, the lesson in “The Emperor has no clothes” came to be seen as the reality of the Left. It’s still playing out, fortunately.
I tend to agree with folks who think the New England Puritans are the true ancestors of todays' progressives (which is why the heart of both is in New England). The religion is quite different, but otherwise they're similar movements in structure, form, and goals.
Oh sure, because nothing screams "modern politics" quite like a bunch of right-wingers with a pedigree tracing back to German or Italian fascism. You know, like Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo—just your everyday, run-of-the-mill, democracy-loving folks! What a charming little lineage they've got going on!
This is my favourite article of yours from this Substack so far Frank, because it answers something that has been bothering me for a few years.
Since I began as a student in political thought in 2016, conferences have been obsessed with populism. At first I didn't pay much mind to it, but as I began reading about farmer populism and early trustbusting movements, a few claims that are taken as premises of academia's anti-populist project started rubbing me the wrong way. Particularly, the claim that populism=racism. This never made any sense to me, because the question of whether a populist movement is racist is particular to the movement, not inherent in the nature of it being a populist movement. At first I just chalked this up to "well this cohort of people calls anything they don't like racist" and they think the average person is racist.
The framing of it as a consequence of the ad-hoc coalition of technocratic governance and identity groups makes it make a lot more sense. The technocrats and the groups are one, and so populism, which by definition attacks technocratic governance, so by default they are also attacking the groups.
Major political realignments were initially driven by one particular issue that sent one group from one party to another. Slavery created the Republican Party in the 1850s and railroad shipping rates created the Populist Party of the late nineteenth century. However, these were only the catalysts for more fundamental ideological and socioeconomic shifts in American politics. Republicans represented the rising influence of the Northern business elite over the Southern plantation aristocracy. The avarice of railroad robber barons led to a broader revolt against Gilded Age corruption and the advent of the Progressive era.
As I have written before in my New Nationalism Substack, I believe we are in the midst of a realignment to a political divide based on globalism vs. nationalism. Immigration was the catalyst issue of this realignment and Trump took full advantage of it. If the Democrats are to survive, they must adopt a progressive form of nationalism.
I roughly agree with that, although that's not exactly the framework I would apply! I've spent a lot of time thinking and writing about and studying American political realignments, and I therefore have my own (I believe correct!) take on how this all works.
https://www.amazon.com/Next-Realignment-Americas-Parties-Crumbling/dp/1633885089
I would say realignments are triggered by great a crisis of legitimacy caused by the decline of the old issues holding our parties together and their failure to address the new ones under the existing framework.
I definitely believe we're in the middle of a realignment. I'm not entirely committed yet to the true nature of the crisis, and am still working on it for (hopefully) a future book. I think globalism is part of it, but I suspect it's a second order affect or symptom or contributing factor of a greater trigger. I think there are some big issues and changes (economic, social, ideological) undercutting some baseline foundations of the American republic.
If you want a quick take on my view of the realignment process, this article I wrote a while back in American Interest is a good summary.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/03/27/the-end-of-the-new-deal-era-and-the-coming-realignment/
(And I like your stuff at New Nationalism!)
I apologize for taking so long to respond and appreciate your kind words about New Nationalism. For a “quick take”, your post on historical realignments was a fascinating and comprehensive analysis of an important aspect of American history. In particular, your theory that realignments are tied to moral and religious Great Awakenings is very interesting. As you write your book, you may want to consult V.O. Key’s 1965 article “A Theory of Critical Elections” and his book “The American Voter” if you haven’t already done so. Key and his colleagues proposed that American politics has regularly realigned in 36-year cycles since the adoption of the Constitution. Recent history appears to disprove that thesis, though I believe a more likely explanation is that the increasing politicization of our society has reduced the term of the cycle to a generation; i.e, 24 years.
Thanks again for your perceptive analysis. I learn from all your posts and look forward to continuing to do so.
Good essay. The ferocious tenacity of the technocratic elite is splendidly illustrated in four years of trying to pull the wool over the collective eyes about who’s actually running the country. Media and government in lockstep. A more dramatic example would be hard to find.
OK already! Just call me a 'DiStefano-stan!' LOL
I need to book about a 1/2 hour to your articles, they're so good.
Here's something I realized and just chatted w/my wife about...
Let's fast forward to '28 primaries and keep everything going on today as being equal at that time. Specifically, the primaries...
I'm looking back at the '20 Dem primaries... 'I was that girl', but Haris. 'Latinx' by Warren. Overall, it was a freaking clown show then, and I'm taking bets that it will even be worse in 4 years b/c I think AOC will take a run at it...
Now compare that to the possible runners on the Republican side...
Oh boy... Vivek, Tulsi, Gov Desantis, JD... and I could go on and on. If I was presented w/ just the aforementioned, I would probably just write in "All Of The Above!" if I were in a voting booth. My point is that the Republican bench is sooo deep.
A perfect example for ME is Tulsi's turn around re that Patriot Act law or subsection people are calling her 'turncoat' for this past week or so.
My take?
I trust that woman. Period. She saw stuff I didn't, and I respect her integrity enough that her decision is enough for me.
That TRUST on my part towards the New Republican elite is pretty strong on my part (of course seasoned w/ skepticism, but the Trust is stronger right now).
How much trust do I have in the Democrats?
ZERO.
And if a guy like me feels this way... oh man, you're so right Frank. This is a generational shift I think. I mean, OK, I'm elderly (66); but I believe my rebuke of Democrats goes deeper and wider than just me.
It's not going to be pretty, man. The assholes won't go away quietly.
Too kind. (But I’ll take it!)
obama was a terrible mistake
But what was the alternative? Bill Clinton necessarily followed the politics of premption, as did Eisenhower and Wilson, achieving only what the dominant party's dispensation would permit them. Obama was the second opposition party president, like FDR and Nixon. The reigning Republican dispensation had been totally discredited under Hoover and FDR took advantage of the big electoral victory this gained him to establish a new dispensation as I describe here:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-dealers-gained-the-ability
Nixon did not see himself in a position to do the same, so he abandoned the fiscal conservatism his party long stood for, but labeled it as "Keynesian". Reagan later took this ball, added tax cuts and voila transformed "Keynesian" into "supply side" economics, but they really are the same thing (we plan to run deficits indefinitely). Otherwise he governed as a moderate preemptive.
Obama did pretty much the same thing as Nixon. What would Clinton have done that was different?
Granted I critique Obama in my post for failing to prevent the TARP from being passed and letting the financial system collapse. But I myself *supported* the TARP as a right thing to do in 2008, so I can I condemn Obama for doing what I would have done in his shoes?
So what would you have seen done?
I think you’re getting hot. But I think you’re probably underplaying the role of underlying material forces. The Obama coalition seemed like it would work because of the way the world was trending—the high water mark of globalization, or what right-wingers call “globalism.” The global economy was shifting power to an educated professional/managerial elite. At the same time it was producing diversity within the liberal democratic states and within their educated professional classes. Then, probably these went hand in hand with a third element, American global hegemony and neocon adventurism. These were the dominant trends of the post-Cold War era. And they all favored (or became associated with) the Obama coalition.
Then, this whole political regime started collapsing. America proved increasingly unable to maintain unilateral dominance as other powers caught up with it and competing power centers emerged. Then, for various reasons, the country began to sour on the dominance of the educated professional elite. This is the part of the story I still don’t completely get. And I think there can be no complete answer without an attempt to say what this new formation is that’s coming into being. But I would call it the 20 percent vs the 0.1 percent. I think the sheer extent of the dominance of the professional elite started terrifying the rest of society, both the proles (sorry) and the owner class. Evidence of their potentially tyrannical power mounted. I don’t think it ever really got there. But there was enough of a lack of trust, and enough organic disconnect between the educated elite and the rest of society, that the proles and the owner class decided to team up and commit a pincer move.
The owner class resented the professional elite’s power, as demonstrated by its resentment for “woke” politics within corporations and for “work from home” policies they see as evidence of their loss of power. They also see AI as an opportunity to disembowel the educated elite (I think this is wish fulfillment, which is part of why AI is so massively overhyped. They want to believe this will finally free them from the need for professionals/managers.)
The owner class is now engaged in a vicious total war to simply destroy every social institution it sees as supporting the power of the educated professional class. Universities, the federal workforce, law firms, the scientific enterprise, everything. It is total class warfare. It is a little more sophisticated than Pol Pot going around Cambodia and simply shooting everyone wearing glasses, but not by much.
I guess to add a couple more points, no one has an incentive to be honest about this contest between the 20 percent and the 0.1 percent. Both sides pitch their claims to legitimacy in terms of “the people,” as they must. But the people have little to do with this, except as an audience for the competing bids of these two classes.
Second, the greatest mystery to me is what caused the loss of power of the educated elite. They had a basis for dominance over most of the post-Cold War period; so what has changed? I’m not sure but at least one part of the story is the change in the economy, especially the tech sector. People like Mark Zuckerberg were once the vanguard of the educated elite—they identified as engineers, entrepreneurs. Now they are merely rent-seeking oligarchs controlling vast monopolies. That has become true of the whole sector. And that’s a dramatic loss of power and opportunity for the educated class. Antitrust has thus been a focal point in the contest between the classes. Preserving monopoly power and their ability to continue rent-seeking is essential to maintaining the 0.1 percent. Destroying Lina Khan has been a top priority for them. And that’s an important part of why they swung behind Trump and hated Biden (and his VP).
One crucial reason why Democrats cannot move forward is that they cannot be honest about who they really represent. You now hear a lot of economic populist noise, as their best guess of how to move forward. But this pseudo-Marxism is simply confused, as it has been for decades. There is no working class movement because there isn’t really a working class. Certainly not one that could power a majority coalition on its own.
Missing in this analysis, in my opinion, are two things:
1. The Republican Party is in the process of enshittifying the country, and the world, at warp speed. Democrats, as the only alternative, will be returned to power--at least the House, possibly the Senate, probably state legislatures and governors' mansions--in 2026.
I know that "deliverism" now has a bad name. The idea that doing successful governing doesn't seem to pay off in elections. People don't get excited when government just works. But they will get really mad when it stops working, which is now inevitable under Trump. Wait till the SS checks don't arrive, and Medicaid coverage stops, and planes start hitting each other. "Antideliverism" will be a. VERY failing strategy.
2. The problem with bashing technocracy is that reality has become very complicated. Sure, experts are fallible, no doubt about it. However, uneducated morons are pretty much guaranteed to get everything wrong. Technocrats got school closures during COVID wrong. But they got mRNA vaccines right and saved millions of lives. RFK Jr. and his anti-technocratic ilk are in the process of enabling a measles epidemic and the return of measles deaths.
I believe that a lot of culture war issues have been causing Democrats problems and losing them voters. But flip flopping on them probably won’t work, because it won’t seem believable and will alienate a lot of people. I think that their best bet would be to have freedom and tolerance as bedrock principles; very frequently voters prefer whichever side seems more in favor of a live and let live approach. And it also is something that I think most supporters of the Democratic Party can genuinely support, as opposed to trying to adopt some popular, but conservative limits on freedom.
Question: is it not also true that, in their proposed legislation and NLRB appointments, the Dems remained quite pro-labor, a stark contrast to Republicans? I don't see how, when you combine that with the attempt (however watered down Obamacare was) to expand health care to millions more, you don't have the spiritual continuation of the New Deal. What more would you have had them do, plausibly, in the economic sphere, especially given Mitch McConnell's obstructionism?
Do you mean the Obama Administration specifically, or the post-Obama Democratic Party?
Obama specifically could (and should) have taken an entirely different tack on the financial crisis, which was engineered to benefit professionals over the workers who were harmed. Then there could have been some effort to actually backstop the declining position of working people and the middle class instead of cheering it on as the cost of progress. Plus the cultural stuff intended to flatter upper middle class professionals and alienate rural people (clingers, etc.)
The party in general after Obama? A lot.
I hear you on the cultural stuff--for sure, no argument there. I mean, we agree about 80%, give or take, on the whole picture. I think you are probably right on the financial crisis. But given the Republican obstructionism--the new refusal, in the post-Contract With America era in the House, and McConnell era in the Senate, to give Dems any votes at all, I am not sure what that backstop would have looked like, or could have looked like, legislatively. I'd love to hear about legislation that could have passed, realistically, that would have been more pro-worker. It seems to me that, given the gridlock in Congress, Obama (and Biden) worked with executive action in their appointments and exec. orders, which were quite progressive.
The issue is I don't think about party coalitions and directions as merely matters of specific policy "deliverables." I care about that stuff, but having been a DC policy guy at one time and having worked in Congress and on a presidential campaign in a policy position, I don't have a lot of belief that most "policies" do much, or are meant to do much more than signal. They're more political marketing than government. I'm thinking about something bigger than a few bills, but a directional change in how the party believes government should work, who it serves, and how.
For example Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, or Reagan changed the direction of the ship of government but not because of some specific tax policy. They brought a holistic change in perspective that filtered everywhere, and changed the way the electorate responded to them. It's similar to how drunk driving was stopped not because of new laws but new attitudes MAD drove that then filtered into how drunk driving was policed (from "go on your way, sir" to roadblocks and zero tolerance). Its also how woke policies changed everything, without anyone having to ever pass a bill.
I hear all that. But then I am not sure what you'd have had the Dems do--what the road not taken would have looked like, on the ground (other than the avoidance of the various poison pills of woke-ism, about which I agree with you). I guess part of the problem is we don't know; nobody tried it!
The single most important thing the Democrats could have done in 2009 to reinforce a level of popular support that was already formidable was: Abolish The Filibuster. Or reduce it to, say, 55 votes, with a sunset clause dated right before the election. Then the Democrats could have done something similar to what Trump is doing now, only with Congressional legislation. And after two years of passing bills that would actually have effect by 2010 (i.e., not the ACA), they could have put their track record of successes to the test in the midterms.
But they didn't do it.
So they got stonewalled by filibuster threats, and then put so far in check in the midterms that it was all that Obama could do to use executive orders over the next six years to accomplish a very circumscribed agenda. He didn't even control his own budget. In the era of 0% Fed interest rates, the Dems could have put a comprehensive national infrastructure upgrade (which we still need) in place as a bargain front-end loaded investment. Instead, it was all about the Fed doing quantitative easing, and wrapping up the bailouts that had begun in the previous administration, and having the budget run by the dictates of "the sequester."
So I don't buy that the possibility of an enduring Democratic Party majority was foredoomed. It was squandered because of indecision, inaction, and inability to envision lasting improvements in public works and job stimulus for any constituency that didn't partake of the obsessions of the top 10% of bien pensant liberals (and the select beneficiaries of that patronage.) The Dems evidently still can't tell effective and innovative spending on the public commons from the pork barrel, as is becoming increasingly clear. The only difference is that the pork barrel got postmodernized, in partnership with lifestyle liberal nonprofits and NGOs.
The Obama coalition gave Democrats their only popular vote victories since the start of the Reagan political order. Economic appeals died with the end of the New Deal economy in 1973. Between them and Obama, Democrats won the popular vote only once due to an unforced error by Nixon.
To say that was an error would be to acknowledge Democrats would never be competitive again.
Actually none of this matters. Democrats were always going to win in 2008 and lose in 2016 no matter what they did it who they ran.
I’m not sure the collapse of this coalition was inevitable. It came awfully close to enduring control of the country. That it DID fail, this time around, was good for the country, but I don’t think it’s dead forever. And believe me - I wish it WAS.
BY DEFINITION, elites are smart and ambitious. I should know - I went to college with a lot of them. The elites will figure out a way to regain control. They just need a little more institutional capture - a little more control of the media and school boards, maybe. I think they probably have maxed out their control of universities and the federal government.
Rejection of incompetents is always a possibility