A Reckoning Is Coming for the Democrats

What small towns taught me.

(Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via Getty Images.)

For about ten years I was working in documentaries. The production companies were, naturally, in either Los Angeles or New York. The documentary community seemed to be clustered in a few neighborhoods in Brooklyn—enough so that I could confidently expect to run into someone I knew from work anytime I was around Prospect Park. 

But the shoots tended, by some iron law, always to be in small towns in the middle of the country.

There was a very pleasurable commando feel about the whole endeavor. I would meet somebody I didn’t know before—but who shared exactly the same professional ethos I did—in a departures lounge or maybe in the rental car garage on the other side. We could immediately fall into a deeply-understood series of operations: jenga-ing our gear into the back of a crew van; loading up the cart of our budget hotel; seeking out the best coffee in town; and, most importantly, plotting out how quickly we could be in and out of the shoot location (rates were by the day and any excess time in a place was wasted money). 

We were eager to get back to our coastal enclaves for other reasons—the hotels were always miserable, the coffee never matched up to our Brooklyn coffee shops, and there really was a pronounced culture clash between the crews and the small towns we were trying to document. But, for me, the travel (specifically the travel into small towns) was the best part of the exercise. I always felt a lot wiser every time I returned to my Brooklyn coffee shop or neighborhood bookstore; I always felt like I wanted to start getting into arguments with everyone around me. It wasn’t that my politics were so different from my coastal brethren, but after even a few days in Decatur or Lubbock or Clovis or wherever I was, it would be clear to me that there was a great deal about the country that liberals and progressives—however well-intentioned they might be—were just missing. 

Politics would almost never come up on these shoots, but it would just be screamingly obvious that the people I talked to would have had no chance of voting Democratic. The cultural markers were all off. People liked to drive and to shoot. People liked their chain stores. People hated the feeling of being scolded, which was above all what they associated with the Dems. On one of the very first shoots I ever did, a rancher in Clovis, New Mexico, told me, “People like to have a real independent lifestyle around here” shortly before he urinated right off of the bed of his truck. But that general attitude could have stood in for just about any of the shoots I did. People were friendly and interesting, they were eager to form cultural bridges—those same ranchers really wanted to let me know that they knew every word of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Rolling Stones songs, maybe thinking that I assumed they listened to Gene Autry or something—but I strongly felt myself having to shed anything “Democratic,” anything “liberal,” in order to fit in. 

In the places I was visiting, the Democratic Party meant, above all, taxes. It really wasn’t much more complicated than that. Dems always seemed to be pushing taxes for benefits that would never particularly materialize, while Republicans advocated for tax cuts—and that was strike one against the Dems. Strike two was regulations. The sense was that opening or running a small business involved mountains of paperwork and regulations—which made it prohibitively difficult. Those regulations were associated with Democrats, and environmental regulations drew particular ire. In the coastal enclaves where I lived, being an “environmentalist” was something like a candidacy for sainthood, but in the places where I was shooting it was a dirty word—and the environmental advocacy organizations seemed really to not get that. In retrospect, it was shockingly short-sighted of environmental organizations to (for instance) make emissions from cars the focus of climate change campaigns. Cars, even taken as a totality, were responsible for a very small piece of the pie of carbon emissions and the focus on trying to get people to drive less was (particularly in places where public transit wasn’t an option) the very worst kind of scolding. 

And strike three was wokeism. People in the middle of the country were paying a great deal of attention to the news (even if it was FOX and conservative talk radio) and the 2020 riots across American cities, the “abolish the police movement,” the lack of effective law enforcement in places like San Francisco and Portland, the rash of cancellations in liberal institutions, and the new progressive orthodoxy coming through schools and media outlets rubbed people deeply the wrong way. Structural racism was also a tough argument to make in some of the Western states I’d been working in—South Dakota, Utah, New Mexico, etc.—which had very low percentages of blacks and hadn’t been in the Union at the time of the Civil War. 

Trump may have been deeply flawed in very many ways, but the more time I spent in the middle of the country the less clear it was to me what the Democrats were offering. The messaging was really off. Democratic leadership may have come across as more polished and professional than their Republican adversaries but, at the national level, they seemed to have lost all ability to communicate simply and clearly to hinterland voters. I know what Donald Trump’s promise was to voters in 2016—build a wall, deal with illegal immigration, cut taxes. I can’t even begin to tell you what the Hillary Clinton campaign promised the average voter about how their life would meaningfully improve, nor can I tell you what Biden’s campaign promises right now. 

The more thoughtful Democratic leaders are aware of these problems. I’ve seen Bill Clinton and Barack Obama muse on it. James Carville is particularly eloquent on this theme. But most of the Democratic establishment seem to think that they can get away with it indefinitely. Trump and MAGA are attackable enough as adversaries that Democrats have these ready-made tactical points—January 6th, the Dobbs decision, Trump as a danger to democracy—and, as the Democratic establishment loves to point out, Dems have done well in the last three elections and may once again exceed expectations.

But I don’t buy it. Fundamentally, the Democratic position is—and has been for years now—a house of cards. My fear is that it will collapse at the worst possible moment—this November. In any case, though, the Democrats are due for a reckoning.

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In modern American history, there have been two great political transformations, both led by a politically savvy national leader who was reading the mood of the time and was willing to decisively break with party tradition. One was Theodore Roosevelt in the Progressive Era—with much of his platform picked up by Woodrow Wilson. The other was Franklin Roosevelt with the great domestic revolution of the New Deal.

In both cases, it was about a national leader having the courage to lead—which in both cases meant standing up to big business and exercising the prerogatives of government—and most importantly having the political capital and personal charisma to push through sweeping changes in messaging and direction. Fundamentally, the Democrats’ political vision is stuck somewhere in the 1960s and has made little accommodation to the sorts of Sun Belt and suburbanite viewers who powered what Kevin Phillips in 1969 called “the Emerging Republican Majority.” 

A recent paper pins the Democrats’ current woes on a series of political decisions taken around 1975, which led to a break with the working class. To me, that analysis seems about right. Democrats have cast themselves for at least a half-century as custodians of a crumbling New Deal without a new, concrete vision. They allow themselves to go into election after election with a losing hand as the party of taxes and regulation (if not also of progressive radicalism). It’s sort of okay when, once in a generation, a charismatic national figure like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama comes along, but otherwise the election strategy seems to be along the lines of Biden’s ringing “The economy isn’t as bad as you think it is!” or “We may be somewhat dysfunctional but the Republicans are so much worse!” 

The decision of the Democratic establishment not to challenge or replace Biden means that this reckoning on the party’s direction will be postponed for at least another election cycle (and, in the way of these things, will almost certainly be postponed until after a bruising, unarguable defeat). What that direction can (and should) be is up for vigorous debate. Some of it is tone and messaging—Democrats convincingly signaling to the electorate that they are, after all, a party of regular Americans, not a jet-setting, police-abolishing coastal elite. (John Fetterman, by the way, has been a trailblazer in resetting tone and style closer to where it needs to be.) And part of it is vision. The Democrats will likely always be a party of larger government. And that somehow needs to be paired with messaging that has mass appeal—with a satisfying image of a puissant, benevolent government. FDR succeeded in doing that. Bernie Sanders, in 2016, had surprising success in convincing independent-type voters that larger government, if deployed to rein in big business and to invest in civic infrastructure, could actually be beneficial. Whatever it is, the new direction must be both bolder and homier than the party’s current inchoate, at-least-we’re-not-Trump self-presentation.

The fix isn’t going to happen this cycle. But the problem is there. And, sooner or later, the reckoning is coming. 

Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

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