A political warning

The Democrats face a fundamental problem which the ideological left is determined to avoid addressing -- and has succeeded in not addressing, largely because Republicans make it easy for them to evade and deny the issues.  But the problem will not go away.

In brief, the ideological left, to which the Democratic party is largely beholden, has embraced a world-view and a set of beliefs and positions which are fundamentally repulsive to the great majority of American voters.  This ideology would, under normal conditions, reduce the Democrats to a permanent minor party on the fringes of politics.  However, the current conditions are not normal.  Since 2016, Donald Trump has been the dominant figure on the US right wing -- a figure often so repulsive and frightening as to make many mainstream voters feel they must vote for the Democrats because they are the only available alternative.

This means the Democrats keep winning elections much of the time, which enables them to avoid confronting the problems caused by their fringe ideology.  But the Republicans won't keep playing this role forever.  Given his obvious health issues, Trump seems unlikely to be around beyond a few more months (and even if I'm wrong about that, he will leave the presidency in January 2029 at the latest), and after he is gone, his influence on the right will fade as more election-savvy figures take over.  Once the Republicans scrub their image of Trump's corruption and lunacy and menace, the Democrats are doomed, unless they have reformed by then.

This NYT article details some major facets of the problem, and is worth reading by anyone who cares about the country's political future.  It quotes a range of other thinkers who are coming to grips with various aspects of the problem, starting with Yascha Mounk:

Democrats would be extremely foolish to think that the temporary advantage given to them by Trump's unpopularity amounts to a permanent fix of their deeply rooted image problem.  The party's favorability ratings remain at record lows.  And while Democrats may temporarily be de-emphasizing some of the rhetoric that made them so unpopular, most voters do not believe that they have had a real change of heart about wokeness or D.E.I. -- much less that they have a coherent set of political ideas to fill the resulting vacuum.

This reflects the trends I've documented with numerous links on this blog over the years.  The ideological left continues to try to defend "wokeness" (often by re-defining it in innocuous-sounding ways which ignore what everybody knows are the objections to it) and identity politics, while name-calling all opposition as racist -- and they cannot get out of their echo chamber to perceive how horribly toxic such efforts are.  The article next cites a study by a Democratic PAC on word frequency in party platforms:

The authors tracked key word usage in Democratic platforms from 2012 to 2024 and found the frequency of the word "hate" increasing by 1,323 percent; "white/Black/Latino/Latina" by 1,137 percent; "L.G.B.T./L.G.B.T.Q.I.+" by 1,044 percent; and "equity" by 766 percent.  Over the same period, usage of "father/fathers" fell 100 percent; "crime/criminal" by 30 percent; "responsibility" by 83 percent; "middle class" by 79 percent; and "veteran" by 31 percent.

That is, there was a huge growth in emphasis on identity politics, groupism, and collectivist concepts of society and justice, but a loss of interest in the kinds of social issues that actually concern mainstream voters.

This part, I think, gets down to the core problem:

.....what Yglesias argued are the fundamental tenets of liberalism..... the view that the basic unit of moral concern is the individual; that institutions should be governed by general, neutral rules; and that rights and due process are core to justice.  The illiberal ideas I'm critiquing, on the other hand, treat groups -- particularly racial, gender and sexual identities -- as the real subjects of politics, see "neutral" rules as a cover for domination by whites and men, and redefine justice as rebalancing power between groups rather than protecting the freedoms and rights of all individuals.

It is utterly inconceivable that a society embracing those "illiberal ideas" could remain free, tolerable to live in, or democratic in any meaningful sense.  Normal people viscerally understand that.  Yet the fixation on such ideas is real.  Most left-ideological sites obsess about identity groups, incessantly describing people as white, black (often capitalized), "brown", "native American" (referring to a specific race, not just everybody who was born in the US), etc, whether those identities are relevant to the actual topic or not.  It's part of the broader problem of clunky, ideological language ("birthing parent", "undocumented", "LGBTQ", "Islamophobic", "social construct", all those preferred pronouns, etc) which makes them sound robotic and 1984-ish -- but worse, it reflects a genuine habit of seeing people mainly as members of identity groups rather than as individuals.

(Trump himself, ironically, is also an exponent of identity politics.  He seeks to whip up and exploit white grievance, not non-white, but the principle at work is the same.)

Next, Noah Smith:

I watched with concern as the quest to end discrimination against Black Americans evolved into a desire to institutionalize discrimination against white Americans in universities, nonprofits, government agencies and many corporations -- something the liberals of the 1990s swore they would never countenance..... I watched as the gay rights movement gave way to a trans movement that was deeply out of step with both America's beliefs and civil rights law.....

The rest of the article discusses academia, giving much more space to it  than its relative importance warrants.  But I strongly recommend reading it.  This is a serious problem, and it's not going to go away unless either the ideological left gets out of its echo chamber and faces reality, or the party decisively repudiates the ideological left.  So long as the party clings to ideas that are repulsive to mainstream voters, it can win only when Republicans insist on being so utterly horrible and terrifying that people have no choice but to hold their noses and vote Democrat.  And the Republicans won't keep on doing that forever.

This year's election is actually a potential trap.  The party not holding the presidency usually makes gains in mid-terms, and lately Trump has been driving the Republicans' "horrible and terrifying" quotient to new heights.  It is very possible that Democrats will win a crushing victory, gaining a huge House majority and even taking the Senate -- and will thus conclude that there is no need to clean up their own act and purge all the nonsense.  And that will set them up for disaster in 2028, when Trump will no longer be on the ballot and the Republicans may well be moving back to normality.

A winning platform is available:  economic populism.  For years surveys have shown massive majorities in favor of a stronger social safety net and higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy.  But the Democrats flat-out refuse to embrace it.  Everyone knows that Republicans stand for more and more tax cuts for billionaires for ever and ever.  But the Democrats have given voters no reason to believe that they stand for restoration of sane tax rates on the rich -- indeed, they have explicitly opposed any steps in that direction.  They are just as captured by billionaire donors as the Republicans are.  Become the party of economic populism and redistribution of wealth back to the workers who create it, instead of the party of identity politics and coddling Islam and men in women's sports and prisons, and they will easily become the overwhelmingly dominant party.  But not otherwise.