Matthew Yglesias has a piece over at Vox that is deservedly getting some recognition: “Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble”. But while Matt talks a lot about the facts on the ground—deep weakness at the state level and in both house of Congress, with no obvious way out—he doesn’t talk much about how the Democrats got to where they are, except by implying that the next time a chick spouting a “single mom in a trailer goes to Harvard Law School” rap shows up, the Democrats shouldn’t run her for state office in Texas. Which is true, but I think there’s more to the story than that.
As Paul Krugman and others have noted, governments across Europe and North America basically did the right things in the face of initial onslaught of the Great Recession of 2009: they bailed out the banks, errant or no, and generously funded countercyclical programs that aided the unemployed. The response was far from perfect, but it was the right response, and it worked: the Great Recession of 2009 did not become the Great Depression of 2009. Southern Europe took some brutal knocks, thanks to their buy-in to the Euro, which left them defenseless when severe economic problems hit, but everywhere else, and particularly in the “big” countries, disaster was averted.
Unfortunately, what makes sense economically, and what works economically, is often the opposite of what works politically. Where economists saw effective countercyclical spending that maintained buying power at all income levels, the middle class saw increased government spending as “wild” profligacy that rewarded the irresponsible at the expense of the virtuous. When times are hard, you don’t spend more! You spend less! And you punish the wicked! If a good person like me must suffer, everyone else must suffer too! A lot!
Well, successful economic policy is not a morality play, but you can’t convince an embittered middle class that that is the case. In the UK, the Labour Party, which was in power throughout the Great Recession, is universally regarded as the most spendthrift government in British history, when in fact “soaring deficits” saved the UK from economic collapse. And there were similar reactions against “government” throughout the developed world.
In the U.S., rage was directed at both political parties. The Republican Party, of course, has been half taken over by the “crazies,” effectively making the party the vehicle of reaction. President Obama made several policy choices that exacerbated middle-class rage. He deliberately positioned himself as Wall Street’s friend by choosing Timothy Geithner as secretary of the treasury, promising both to guard the multi-million dollar bonuses that Wall Street geniuses love to pay themselves and to cut those pesky entitlement programs that waste so much money on the middle class. At the same time, Obama went ahead and cut Medicare benefits so that he could extend health insurance to those who couldn’t pay for it. Republicans attacked Obama for favoring the rich and the poor over the middle class because that’s what he did.
At the state level, Democrats could not escape the charge of being the “government party”, because they were and are the government party, joined at the hip with public employee unions all across the country, a link that became particularly unattractive when tens of thousands of public employees began enjoying the retirement pensions they’d been promised by Democratic politicians for decades. The unions are still in the Democratic fold because they have nowhere else to go—Republicans love to talk about how they want to destroy unionism forever—but there’s plenty of love lost between the Democrats and the unions, the teachers’ unions in particular, the largest and most powerful of the lot.
The AFT and the NEA have been “disappointed” in President Clinton, in Senator Kennedy (for working with President Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind Act), and now President Obama without ever realizing that the reason is that reform liberals no longer consider the teachers a force for “change”. The teachers are so blinded by their own sense of virtue that they can’t understand how a person of good will could regard them as a force for ill rather than good. They have no choice but to work with the Democrats, but the alliance is far from happy, and the lack of coordination shows in the frequent defeats at the state level.
Democrats also injured themselves when a spate of particularly bloody mass shootings caused the liberal base to give up its self-imposed restraint on the gun control issue. I don’t believe that “effective” gun control legislation is possible in the U.S., for any number of reasons, but liberals simply regard guns as “sick” and are deaf to any arguments to the contrary. They want to “do something”, and they don’t care how useless or politically counterproductive it is. Liberals are similarly “passionate,” and similarly unrealistic, when it comes to the environment.
Liberals advantages lie in the issues of reproductive rights, where it is conservatives who are passionate and unrealistic, and immigration, where conservatives are pretty crazy. As Yglesias points out, if the Democrats lose the presidency, they will be faced with a near cataclysm. But, with a little luck, they can still eke out Clinton/Obama-style wins at the national level. At the state level, they will have to wait for the Republicans to exhaust themselves, and then see what they can do.
