Okay Democrats, It’s Your Turn in the Barrel

Readers of this column might ask why I haven’t spent as much time on the Democrats as I have on the Republicans. The answer, in brief, is that there is simply nothing interesting or substantive about the Democrats currently. I’ve heard many longtime Democrats ask, where is the Democratic Party?

At first thought, one might say that the Democrats really aren’t in such bad shape. Since the start of the Reagan administration in 1981 to 2029, we can count four Republican presidents over seven terms (28 years) and three Democratic presidents over five terms (20 years). While trailing Republicans, therefore, the Democrats have remained competitive.

In the current Congress, the Republicans control the House with 220 Republicans, 212 Democrats, and 3 Democratic vacancies; and the Senate with 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats, and 2 Independents (who caucus with Democrats). Ignoring small complications, from 1981 to 2027 Democrats controlled the House 11 times and the Republicans 12, while Democrats controlled the Senate 10 times and the Republicans 12 (and one split).

At the federal level, therefore, the Democrats don’t look in such bad shape. But consider the state level. Leaving aside unicameral Nebraska, Republicans currently control 28 of the 49 state legislatures, Democrats 18, and 3 are divided. There are 23 Republican trifectas (state house, senate, governor), 15 Democratic trifectas, and 11 divided states.

The Democrats, then, are in a deep hole, and it’s not just a matter of candidate quality. The problem is much more fundamental. It’s not that voters listen carefully and respectfully to both major parties but decide that the Republicans represent their views better.

Instead, even before Donald Trump successfully inflamed and weaponized these divisions, many voters wouldn’t even give Democrats a hearing at all. With the aid of Democratic incompetence, Republicans have succeeded in making the case with many Americans that the Democratic Party is un- if not anti-American and therefore not a legitimate American political party at all. That case has two elements: socialism and identity politics.

Consider the 2025 New York Democratic mayoral primary. Winner Zohran Mamdani calls himself a Democratic Socialist, garnering endorsements from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and progressive Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Now, the merits or demerits of Mamdani’s substantive positions aside, it is simply an undeniable fact of national American politics that “socialism” is a dirty word. You may think that socialism is a good thing, or you may think that it’s a bad thing, but the objective truth is that “socialism” is electoral poison in American politics. Why do you think the constant Republican go-to is to cry “socialist” or “communist”? The issue goes back at least as far as Werner Sombart’s Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? in 1906.

A central fact of political life in the United States is that, like it or not, citizens of this country find the very idea of socialism threatening and profoundly un-American. Republicans have long made excellent use of this attitude to undermine the legitimacy of the Democratic party. Republicans don’t say simply that Democratic policy positions and proposals are wrong or unworkable; they have argued for years that Democrats are profoundly un-American.

Per the New Republic New York Representative Elise Stefanik has already derided Mamdani as a “radical, Defund-the-Police, Communist, raging Antisemite,” arguing that New York Governor Kathy Hochul and state Democrats had “fully embraced Marxism, antisemitism, anti-capitalism, and sheer insanity.” Trump has already called Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic.”

The problem for Democrats Is that they have proven themselves simply incapable of finding a way to respond to this strategy. Liberalism and even progressivism are not socialism, let alone communism, but Democrats cannot make this case. Indeed, when Democrats go on and on about the wealthy and “billionaires,” they contradict part of the American dream. However unrealistically, most if not all people dream of becoming wealthy.

This mention of the American dream, though, links us directly to the second issue of identity politics. Whatever your exposure to physics taught you, remember Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The electoral version of this might be, for every political action, there is an equal and opposite political action.

Whatever its good intentions might have been, progressive identity politics gave rise to conservative identity politics. Since the 1960s the Democrats have lost a truly universalist conception of what it is to be an American.

I explained in a previous column that the motto, e pluribus unum—"out of many, one”—contains a persistent tension. On the one hand, the unum should not swallow up the pluribus (our differences); on the other, the pluribus should not dissolve the unum into nothing more than our differences.

Yes, one can argue that conservatives have defined “American” with a white, (Protestant) Christian, male, heterosexual tinge—in effect a non-inclusive, non-universalist conception that dissolves the pluribus into the unum, giving the unum a particularist rather than universalist character.

But progressives have done the reverse—rather than redefine the unum to be more universalist and inclusive, they have rejected the unum completely. They have denied that there is any general, universalist conception of American identity, dissolving the unum into the pluribus—our unity into our diversity—defined in terms of factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion.

The problem for contemporary Democrats, then, is that they must recreate a universalist conception of American identity if voters are to give them a respectful hearing. Politics is certainly about economics, but above all it is about respect. Many voters, certainly aided by Republican efforts, have come to believe that the Democratic Party does not respect them as Americans.

Democrats, remember the Whigs—they couldn’t cope with the major divisions in the country in the 1850s, and they disappeared then even before today’s acid of cable tv, talk radio, and social media.

And now?

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