Can the Democratic Party Really Move Left?

Another presidential election, another appallingly blundered campaign, another debacle for the Democratic Party--and now calls for the party to reform itself, to be more mindful of the working class, to in a word move leftwards in its stance.

Can the Democratic Party reform do so? Certainly the historical record is unpromising that way--the party leadership having consistently treated the calls to move left that are not at all novel now but a constant since the '80s with complete contempt, as they blamed the many defeats they suffered in taking this course on anything and everything else for the outcome, including not just the Electoral College system, the luring away of Democratic Party voters by the siren songs of candidates outside the two-party system, the politics of gender and race, "foreign interference," etc., but their party supposedly having gone too far left in its appeals as it was, suggesting that they should in fact tack right as they promise that "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia" et. al.. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that their reaction to 2024 has been identical to their behavior of the past four decades.

Given such a record any intelligent observer must wonder as to why the party's leaders have been so resistant for so long to any such tacking, and if they are serious about an answer easily get one because so many, many, persons, a number of whom even had decent access to the mainstream, have explained the matter over and over again in terms that the most simple-minded should be able to understand if they are at all sincere about doing so. Consider, for example, Gore Vidal's quip about the two-party system in the U.S.: that "[t]here is only one party in the United States, the Property Party" with the Democratic Party one of its "two right wings," with the difference between them that the Republicans were "more rigid and doctrinaire" in regard to "laissez-faire" economic pieties and historically less "willing . . . to make [the] small adjustments" required "when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand."

If one takes this view of the Democratic Party then one cannot hope for very much from it in this way--the more in as Vidal's much-quoted remark, which appeared in an Esquire article in 1975, describes the Democratic Party in a time in which even a relatively conservative Democratic candidate for the Presidency could promise universal health care and a jobs guarantee and still land his party's nomination, then in office embark on an ambitious government program of intervention in the energy sector, including state-owned enterprise. One can rather less credit the Democratic Party with being "less rigid and doctrinaire" about "laissez-faire" or more "willing . . . to make small adjustments" to accommodate the marginalized or dissenting today than it was then, but rather the opposite in an age in which they have embraced neoliberalism and neoconservatism in economic, social, foreign policy (which leaves only a Bernie Sanders-type talking of such things as universal health care and jobs guarantees, and as a result the party leaders determined to do whatever it takes to stop his getting anywhere near the nomination).

Indeed, taking up the view of the Democratic Party as "one of the right wings of the Property Party" with an eye to its place on the political spectrum then one is apt to find it situated not in the portion identified with "liberalism", and certainly not on "the left," but rather in the position we identify with the "center," with centrism understood as a deep conservatism distinguished from that of "the other right wing" by that greater willingness to make small adjustments lest assorted "malcontent" elements "get out of hand", and a greater concern with blocking the left than anything else (with what would not so long ago have been thought center-left included here). That is to say that if winning elections requires the Democratic Party to move left its centrist commitment means that it would rather lose elections than do so--at least, so long as it makes sure that the left does not win them--and indeed see it as its ideological mission to suffer the defeat if that is the price of keeping the left and indeed even those who might actually rate the label "liberal" marginalized. All this implies that the defeat of 2024, just like all the past defeats by the Republicans cannot be expected to budge it leftward from its Clinton-Obama-Biden-era position toward even the "small adjustment"-minded centrism of the mid-century period (never mind the fuller realization of the social democratic policies that many Democratic voters would like to see, like actual universal health care instead of just promises of such care). But of course anyone remotely approaching the standing of an official spokesperson for the party is not going to spell it out for the public, while the media's own political orientation, and what may be least offensively described as its courtier-like attitude toward people "in high places," are such that it does not even try to explain the truth behind the bland palaver they so delight in retailing to the people they demand turn off their ad blockers and buy subscriptions for what they have the gall to call "good journalism."