The Prospect is proud to exclusively release the book Take Back Our Party: Restoring the Democratic Legacy by James Kwak. We will release one chapter every other day over the next two weeks. Read the Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2.
The first question is, “How is what you’re selling unique?”
—Don Draper, in Mad Men
Marketing is something that everyone thinks he or she is an expert in. We may not know how to design or build a computer, we may not have the guts to try to sell a million dollars’ worth of software to a large company, but we all know a good tagline or a bad television commercial when we see it. I know this because I worked in marketing for most of my time in the business world, which meant that most of my colleagues thought (perhaps with good reason) that they could do my job as well as I could.
I don’t often write about my business experience. It just isn’t that relevant to most questions of economics, policy, or politics—no matter what Ross Perot, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and a host of businessmen-turned-politicians like to say. Building and selling a product is very different from balancing the interests of multiple constituencies to cobble together a package of policy initiatives that serve most people more or less well, while responding to external shocks and threats like recessions or hostile regimes.
There are, however, a few basic principles of marketing that apply reasonably well to the political arena. First, whatever you are selling, your message has to relate to something that your audience cares about. If you are selling expensive software systems to large companies—something I did a lot of—you need to talk about how you can improve their business or reduce their costs, not the fanciest features of your cutting-edge technology. Second, you have to differentiate yourself from your competitors. If everyone else claims that they help companies save money, you should focus on how you help them attract new customers. Third, your message has to be legitimately based on your actual product. If you try to position yourself as the reliable, bulletproof, no-risk option, you had better have the product to back it up, or the market will soon see through you. That’s why Don Draper starts off by asking a budding computer entrepreneur about his product—and what is unique about it.
Once upon a time, the Democratic Party did all of these things well. In the 1930s, in the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt’s central theme was economic security: jobs for the unemployed and pensions for the elderly. He identified the Democrats as the party of common people, portraying the Republicans as flunkies of the rich in the pocket of Wall Street. In a 1936 speech, he listed his enemies: “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” He continued, “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” And Roosevelt backed up his words with action. His first term in office saw structural regulation of the financial sector, major public works programs, and the creation of Social Security. There could be no doubt about what the Democratic Party stood for, and why you should vote for (or against) it.
In recent decades, however, our party has forgotten these core principles. Not surprisingly, we have been routinely pummeled at the polls by our opponents, up and down the ballot and all across the country. Since the 1994 election, Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress for 14 years, Democrats for only four (and that thanks to George W. Bush’s catastrophic incompetence and the Iraq War). Between 2009 and 2017, Republicans captured more than 950 seats in state legislatures from Democrats, and the number of states in which they controlled the legislature grew from 14 to 32. (In the 2017 and 2018 anti-Trump elections, Republicans lost about 300 seats and control of two legislatures.) On the presidential level—where Democrats have best been able to compete, thanks to occasionally charismatic nominees and the ability to match Republicans financially—we somehow lost the unlosable elections of 2000 and 2016, when the hand-picked successors of popular presidents, running in favorable economic environments, somehow made the contest close enough that the Electoral College mattered. And these dismal results came even as the Republicans drifted further to the right and further away from a voting public whose expressed preferences on health care, taxes, immigration, and even “cultural” issues such as gay marriage are closer to the Democrats.
The most striking example of bad political marketing in recent years, of course, was the 2016 presidential election. There are many reasons why Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, including his exploitation of anti-immigrant, anti-female, and anti-minority sentiments among part of the electorate. We have to remember, however, that most Americans are not xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist, and Trump’s embrace of these positions should not have been a winning strategy. While Clinton was unmistakably the candidate of tolerance and diversity (as well as basic human decency, respect for the facts, and facility with the English language), what made the election close in the first place was her inability to explain to ordinary voters what her administration would actually do for them.
Hillary Clinton’s basic promise was to make the economy “work for everyone” and to “drive growth that’s strong, fair, and lasting.” Political campaigns are shifting targets, so I will focus here on a major speech she gave in June 2016 to lay out her economic vision. Her plan focused on five key points:
- Create better jobs.
- Make college debt-free.
- Change regulations to encourage corporations to pay their employees more and deter them from shifting jobs or profits overseas.
- Increase taxes on corporations and the rich, in particular by eliminating the tax break for carried interest and implementing the “Buffett rule” (which would impose a minimum overall tax rate on the wealthy).
- “Put families first” by providing paid family leave and better employment benefits.
As policy, these are all decent ideas. As politics, they miss the mark—beginning with the fact that three of her five points were really broad headings that encompassed laundry lists of actual ideas. (In her speech, her plan to create better jobs included 22 different policy proposals, by my count.) A platform oriented around “growth” for “everyone” is too broad to address anyone’s most important concerns. How many people sitting at the kitchen table late at night, wondering how to pay the bills, think to themselves, “If only the economy would grow faster”? With the exception of debt-free college—a position Clinton was pushed into by the popularity of the Bernie Sanders campaign—and paid family leave, her proposals did not promise to solve the concrete problems of working- and middle-class Americans today. People who have jobs but struggle with rising rents or medical bills are unlikely to see how raising taxes on hedge fund managers or investing in broadband infrastructure is likely to help them.
In addition, Clinton failed to explain how her vague promise to create more higher-paying jobs was better than (or even significantly different from) the Republicans’ perpetual promise to create more higher-paying jobs by cutting taxes and eliminating regulations. Her talking points included investing in infrastructure, encouraging “advanced manufacturing,” improving access to credit for small businesses by “slashing unnecessary regulations” on banks, “freeing entrepreneurs to do what they do best,” and providing tax credits to encourage private-sector investment and apprenticeship programs—in other words, a long catalog of nudges to try to get profit-seeking businesses to hire a few more people at somewhat higher wages. Once she conceded that all good things come from markets and the private sector, all Clinton could argue was that she would be a better economic manager than Trump—probably true, but hardly compelling. Even in a speech about the economy, her most effective means of differentiating herself from her opponent was invoking demographic issues—immigration reform, systemic racism, equal pay for women, and gay rights.
After the 2016 debacle laid bare the failure of the party to address ordinary Americans’ economic concerns, the Democratic leadership promised to develop a new platform that would, in the words of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, “show the country that we’re the party on the side of working people.” The campaign they rolled out under the headline “A Better Deal,” however, was so broad as to be meaningless. “We stand for three simple things,” Schumer pledged: “First, we’re going to increase people’s pay. Second, we’re going to reduce their everyday expenses. And third, we’re going to provide workers with the tools they need for the 21st-century economy.” Party spokespeople, afraid to say anything that might turn away any potential voter, somehow managed to avoid differentiating the Democratic Party from the most toxic presidential administration in American history.
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Chuck Schumer after a news conference unveiling “A Better Deal on Trade and Jobs,” August 2, 2017
“We want to be in a position to help create 10 million good-paying, full-time jobs,” Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois, one of the designers of A Better Deal, said in one meeting to pitch newspaper editors. “There are still people hurting, and I think we need to acknowledge that and say that we want to do something about that.” Chuck Sweeny, a reporter, answered, “Donald Trump says that too. He says exactly the same thing. Too many people are still out of work. You know, we need to do something about bringing back jobs.” Bustos even went on to argue for lowering the corporate tax rate—at the time, one of Trump’s few coherent proposals—to which Sweeney responded, “Once again, I have no idea what the Democratic Party actually stands for anymore.” Nor does anyone else.
The Democrats did win a majority of the House of Representatives in 2018 (while losing two seats in the Senate), but they did so largely by ignoring A Better Deal and riding a wave of anti-Trump resentment that had been seeking an outlet for two years. When it came to economic issues, their most potent weapon was an old-fashioned defense of a federal entitlement: in this case, protections for people with preexisting conditions.
The 2018 elections proved that Democrats can still put up a fight when Republicans go after popular government programs. But the first major weakness of the Democratic economic platform in recent decades has been a failure to talk about the economic issues that most people actually care about. Presidents Obama and Clinton liked nothing more than invoking the soaring rhetoric of growth and opportunity. Schumer, Bustos, and the rest of the leadership seem to think that repeating the word “jobs” will enable them to connect with the working class. But for most people, growth and opportunity are just abstract concepts, and jobs are not what keep them up late at night. Few people setting aside their medical bills because they are afraid to open them think that a larger economy will be the solution to their problems, or that cheaper student loans will turn their lives around. Nor are jobs the answer to all problems. For one thing, the unemployment rate is historically low; it was less than 5 percent when Donald Trump was elected president, and has since fallen as low as 3.5 percent. It is true that many people have given up on looking for jobs and are not counted in those figures (although the broadest measure of unemployment, which includes discouraged and underemployed workers, is also at the lowest level since 2000). But workers without the skills to find employment in a highly favorable labor market are unlikely to think that the existence of more job openings will magically make them better off. The economy has been growing for a decade, and unemployment is low, yet tens of millions of people still face a daily struggle to make ends meet.
People have real economic anxieties: the cost of health care and the prospect of illness; paying for their children’s education; finding a place where they can afford to live; or not being able to retire. In recent decades, mainstream Democrats have responded by promising that growth, jobs, and prosperity would solve all of these pocketbook concerns. Of course, it is logically true that if someone makes more money, she will have more to spend on health care, education, housing, or retirement. But speaking in vague generalities is not the way to convince voters that you understand and will address the challenges that they face, especially when ordinary Americans who have lived through the past 40 years can see that prosperity has largely passed them by.
In 2000, for example, the centerpiece of Al Gore’s economic platform was his promise to maintain budget surpluses and use them to pay down the national debt. While this may have been a sound policy, as politics it appealed only to a handful of policy wonks and, perhaps, the bond traders President Clinton had complained about. More generally, the desire to be seen as fiscally responsible, market-oriented centrists—and not as architects of the welfare state—has constrained Democrats’ ability to say anything compelling on the subjects people care about most. Instead, the party line on education has been increased accountability and competition from charter schools; on housing, relaxing constraints on financial institutions to stimulate the mortgage market; and on retirement, incentives to help people save in private accounts sold by the asset management industry. The one exception has been health care, which both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama made the centerpiece of their initial presidential campaigns. While both were willing to offer a new federal program, in both cases they took care to highlight the role of markets and private insurers.
Ironically, some of the Democratic Party’s greatest political successes have come when it has posed as the defender of the welfare state. Recall the government shutdowns of 1995–1996, which President Clinton successfully framed as a battle to defend Medicare; the resounding defeat of President George W. Bush’s 2005 campaign to privatize Social Security; the 2012 electoral wins following Paul Ryan’s proposal to privatize Medicare; and the 2018 defense of the Affordable Care Act. While a relentless focus on preexisting conditions helped win in the House, the strategy of playing to the middle to hold onto vulnerable Senate seats in red states largely failed. Moderates such as Joe Donnelly and Heidi Heitkamp thought that collaborating with Republicans on a 2018 financial deregulation bill would win themselves points for sensible bipartisanship, only to be soundly defeated in November.
David Phillip/AP Photo
Bush and Gore wait for the start of a debate at Wake Forest University, October 11, 2000.
Politically speaking, nothing suits Democratic politicians quite so well as a Republican attack on a major entitlement program, which enables them to take up arms on behalf of the common man. And yet they are mortally afraid of proposing anything that might sound like an expansion of those programs and the size of the federal government. The Democrats’ defensive crouch of protecting entitlement programs can win an election here and there, but taking an emphatic stand for comprehensive economic security would build the party’s brand as the champion of the ordinary voter.
The second fundamental flaw in our economic messaging is that it fails Don Draper’s uniqueness test. The current Democratic Party’s economic platform, boiled down to its essence, is that sound management of market capitalism will promote growth, bringing jobs and prosperity to everyone. This is scarcely distinguishable from the Republican platform, which is that market capitalism will promote growth, bringing jobs and prosperity to everyone. (Did you catch the difference?) Worse, the Republican story is better. It is simpler, more memorable, and more intuitive. For the past half-century, the conservative mantra has been unchanged: Government suppresses innovation and entrepreneurship, so minimizing taxes and regulation will unleash the power of free markets and generate prosperity for everyone. Regardless of whether this is true, it’s easy to understand and communicate in memorable sound bites.
Cowed by the potent symbolism of this story, Democrats have been afraid to stand up for the importance of collective action, instead conceding that market capitalism is the answer to all economic problems and that the role of government is to support the private sector. We attempt to distinguish ourselves from Republican zealots by displaying our superior understanding of economics; because markets are prone to failures (externalities, adverse selection, moral hazard, and so on), we argue, smart government policies are necessary to make them run optimally and maximize social welfare. Plus, we continue, the Republicans are actually incompetent hypocrites who run up spending on foreign wars, while Democrats are the most prudent stewards of the national balance sheet.
Everything we say may be true. Smart public policy can improve market functioning, and Republican administrations in recent decades have been associated with lower economic growth and higher deficits (to say nothing of the tax cut–fueled disaster that was Sam Brownback’s tenure as governor of Kansas). But none of that matters, as far as marketing—and hence politics—is concerned. The conservative Republican credo is passionate, unequivocal, and inspiring: Give people liberty, and they will do great things. By comparison, the Democratic response is derivative, intellectual, and patronizing: Unregulated markets generally produce good outcomes, but not always, and that’s why narrowly tailored government interventions are necessary to make people better off … if anyone is still paying attention. We keep expecting the electorate to reward us for our greater intellectual refinement and our ability to use empirical evidence correctly, forgetting that voters don’t care about such things.
The feebleness of our economic message is particularly apparent today. President Trump’s story of how he will make the economy great again is simple: stop immigrants from stealing Americans’ jobs, negotiate new trade deals that will enable us to “defeat” our trade partners, eliminate government regulations that stifle companies, and cut taxes to stimulate innovation and industry. The Democratic response is that immigrants help the economy, trade barriers hurt all countries involved, markets need regulation, and the optimal tax rate is actually higher than current levels. Again, we may be right on all counts, but at best we have captured the overeducated intellectual vote. We have forgotten that while membership in the reality-based community can help win votes against an outrageous target like President Trump, on its own it cannot generate the political support necessary to roll back decades of rightward drift and stem the rising tide of inequality.
The core problem is that we have let ourselves be maneuvered onto the enemy’s home turf. Once both sides agree that the sole source of prosperity is the private sector, Republicans can keep repeating their one, easily understandable talking point: get government out of the way and let capitalism flourish. (Or, as former House Majority Leader Dick Armey said, “The market is rational and the government is dumb.”) Democrats can’t offer anything equally bold for two reasons. First, once we have accepted the basic premise that markets know best, all we have to offer are nudges that try to get those markets to behave a little bit better than they currently do. Even the best-designed nudges—say, automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans—are limited in what they can achieve, and are ill suited to galvanize voters. Second, our insistence that everything must be budget-neutral—based on our profound fear of being seen as fiscally irresponsible—prevents us from using the one powerful political weapon in the traditional left-wing arsenal: the promise of a bold new program. Even the Green New Deal—which is urgently needed in order to, among other things, protect the continued existence of our species —continues to be opposed and undermined by centrist Democrats. (“There’s no way to pay for it,” Senator Dianne Feinstein said in a hostile lecture to … 15 children.)
On this battleground, we cannot win. If you look at the typical profile of the candidates that Democratic congressional leaders like to recruit and support, it’s almost as if they are admitting that fact. For the last decade, the prototype has been people with compelling personal profiles—particularly veterans with combat experience in Afghanistan or Iraq—strong fundraising potential, and inoffensive, middle-of-the-road policy ideas, particularly on economic issues. Looking ahead to 2020, Rahm Emanuel—President Obama’s first chief of staff and a leading power broker in the party—listed “authenticity, credibility, and viability” as the key ingredients to defeating President Trump, with scarcely a mention of standing for anything in particular. American conservatives discovered long ago that the way to effect real, long-term change is to come up with bold ideas on issues that people care about and champion them passionately and persistently until the country moves in your direction. We Democrats may consider those conservative ideas to be crazy. But instead of offering bold ideas of our own, we continue to muddle through, trying to squeak out one election victory at a time by offending as few people as possible.
The Democratic Party could start talking about the real economic problems that American families face today. And we could come up with a message that clearly differentiates us from the Republicans. Some politicians already have. But the third failing of our political strategy will take much longer to fix.
It is a widespread belief that marketing is the same thing as advertising: coming up with catchy slogans and images that induce people to buy something. This notion is especially prevalent in that peculiar branch of marketing known as politics. In this age of “low information” voters, the story goes, a candidate need only figure out what different groups adding up to 51 percent of the electorate want—through surveys and focus groups—and then promise them that. Winning politicians are those who can identify key themes that resonate with voters and boil them down into powerful sound bites (of which “Build the wall” is the latest example). The losers fail to come up with the right message, or they change their message too often, or they can’t deliver their message effectively.
But, as discussed above, this isn’t how marketing works. Marketing begins with understanding what your target customers want—and then building it. It wasn’t the “Think different” campaign, brilliant as it was, that rescued Apple from oblivion in the late 1990s and early 2000s. What mattered was that the company introduced the iMac, OS X, the iPod, and the iTunes Store within less than five years. Without excellent products that people wanted to buy, billboards featuring Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, and Pablo Picasso would have become just another failed gimmick deserving a brief footnote in advertising history. Spending lots of money on a flashy campaign will get you attention and perhaps a short-term bump in sales, but if you can’t deliver the goods, the market will eventually see through your pitch. In general, great brands have to be built on a foundation of great products, and they have to be consistent with the way people perceive those products. That’s why “Think different” worked for Apple but would have flopped for IBM, whose reputation is based on reliability, dependability, and conservatism.
AP Photo
A voting machine in 1952
Once upon a time, the Democratic Party successfully marketed a powerful brand as the advocate of workers and the middle class against the privileged elite. That brand was the consequence of things that Democratic leaders actually did for ordinary families, from Social Security and jobs programs in the 1930s through Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps in the 1960s. The popularity of those policies and the consistency of the image they projected were the foundation for the party’s nearly uninterrupted reign over Congress from the Great Depression until the Reagan Revolution. Over those decades, the party built up a deep reservoir of trust—of brand loyalty—among lower- and middle-class families. They might disagree with certain policies or dislike specific electoral candidates, but they continued to identify Democrats as the party of the New Deal and Social Security, of workers’ rights and pensions and health care. The Republicans, by contrast, were the party of local notables who owned real-estate agencies and car dealerships and sat on bank boards, and of rich executives who occupied corner offices and socialized at country clubs.
After losing both the Senate and the White House in 1980, however, and especially after Walter Mondale’s crushing defeat four years later, the Democratic elite no longer wanted to be associated with the poor or with workers, or at least not the unionized factory workers who had once symbolized the party. Instead, the New Democrats decided to become the party of finance, technology, and a brave new world in which the magic of markets would deliver prosperity to everyone, as told in Chapter 1. For the most part, the party has successfully expanded its appeal to these new constituencies; today, Silicon Valley and the Southern California entertainment industry are largely Democratic, and Wall Street is no longer the Republican enclave it once was. As the Republicans have increasingly espoused racism, sexism, and xenophobia, Democrats have also responded by becoming the party of immigration, racial and ethnic minorities, gay rights, and women’s rights. Tolerance and diversity are important values, and it is good that at least one party is willing to stand up for them (although, as on other issues, national Democrats did not embrace marriage equality until pushed into it by the courts and by their constituents). But they became the brand of contemporary Democrats by flowing into the vacuum left by the party’s abandonment of its traditional economic identity.
At the same time that they tried to reposition themselves as forward-looking, compassionate, demographically diverse capitalists, however, Democratic candidates wanted to hold onto the votes of the poor and the working class. By definition, people making less than the median income can cast half the votes in any election, making them an important constituency. So the political balancing act of establishment Democrats from Bill Clinton forward has been cozying up to elites—and taking their cash by the bushel—while loudly proclaiming their affection for the common man and woman. (The latest installment in this story is 2020 presidential candidates—including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, but particularly Pete Buttigieg—holding fundraisers for wealthy donors virtually in secret while touting their small-dollar donations in public.) The first Clinton was the master of the genre. With his friendly Southern drawl, his immense charisma, and his modest origins—born to a single mother in a rural town called Hope—he could make peace with Wall Street, sign a draconian welfare reform bill, cut taxes on investment income, and still pass as a man of the people.
With each successive decade, however, the magic act has become harder to pull off. Struggling to pull away from the mediocre George W. Bush in 2000, Al Gore promised to fight for “those who need a voice, those who need a champion, those who need to be lifted up, so they are never left behind.” Unlike Clinton, however, Gore was born and grew up in Washington, D.C., son of a congressman and future senator, and the spark never passed. John Kerry, a Boston Brahmin who married into the Heinz Ketchup family, hardly tried to reach out to the masses, preferring to run as a military man and a competent civil servant.
Barack Obama had both the political gifts and the personal narrative—as a mixed-race child raised by a single mother—to cast the Clinton spell. In 2008, he was enough of a blank slate for people to project their hopes and dreams onto him, enabling him to combine a vaguely technocratic, centrist platform with a shining evocation of a better future for all people. In 2012, Obama’s campaign successfully played the populist card by characterizing Mitt Romney, a private equity magnate, as the ruthless boss who lays you off. By contrast, Hillary Clinton was widely perceived as immensely rich and accustomed to the corridors of power. The awkward spectacle of her paid speeches to Wall Street financiers—and her steadfast refusal to tell the public what she had actually said—highlighted the immense difficulty she faced in appealing to the working-class voters who were once the bedrock of her party.
Clinton still won a majority of votes from people in households with incomes less than $50,000 per year. But Donald Trump won 16 percentage points more than Mitt Romney had four years earlier among people making less than $30,000; he did six points better among those making between $30,000 and $50,000. He won 78 percent of the votes of people who said their family’s financial situation was worse than four years before—people facing economic insecurity who once would have naturally turned to Democrats. Compared to Romney, Trump did better in counties suffering economic distress, particularly in the (post-)industrial Midwest, both rural and urban; he won in places like Trumbull County, Ohio, where real median household income fell by 27 percent since 1980, and which voted for Obama twice by more than 20 percentage points. In general, Trump did better in counties with lower (or negative) gains in median incomes and employment levels. He also did especially well in counties that were vulnerable to competition from imports from China.
One could argue that, whatever Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate, low- and middle-income voters should still have recognized that she would better serve their interests than Donald Trump, who was promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act and shower the rich with yet another major tax cut. But the underlying problem was that the historical Democratic brand—the party of the workers and ordinary people, not corporate executives and the rich—had withered away due to years of neglect. In politics, as in business, brands don’t last forever. Lincoln freed the slaves, and, for almost a century, African Americans were largely loyal to the Republican Party. Then Lyndon Johnson embraced the civil rights movement, Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy drew in formerly Democratic whites unhappy with desegregation, and soon the party of Lincoln had become the party of racial resentment.
Bill Clinton inherited a brand image that had been built up over decades, as Democratic presidents and congressional majorities actually did things that helped the working class, often at the expense of the rich, who paid higher taxes to fund a larger government and a broader safety net. That image was a major reason why Clinton could sustain his popularity with lower-income voters despite not doing anything in particular to help them. The popular identification of the Democratic Party with ordinary people of modest means survived into this century, even as the party’s elected representatives did little to justify it. But by 2016, the credit built up by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson had been completely drawn down. Unemployed factory workers, underpaid service industry employees, single mothers struggling to find child care, retirees stretching their Social Security checks to cover their prescriptions—at some point they stopped trusting that the Democratic Party would do anything for them or even cared about them. They may not have wholeheartedly embraced the Republicans, but they didn’t turn out to support Democrats, particularly in the states that were decisive in the 2016 election.
It is true that American voters are not particularly well informed about economic issues and what policies are best for them and for the country. But you can only fool people for so long, and certainly not for a quarter-century. The marketing remained the same: Democrats would “fight for you” or restore “power to the people” or give you a “better deal” or some such collection of words. But the product itself changed during those years, to the point where it could no longer support the message. In the 2016 presidential election, for the first time in modern history, the Democratic candidate did better among high-income voters (the top 10 percent by income) than among everyone else. Today, many in the party want to take up the important cause of antitrust and pose as the scourge of big business. But few people will believe it as long as congressional leaders continue doing the bidding of monopolies like Facebook, which counts Minority Leader Schumer among its most powerful supporters. If Democrats have a brand identity today, it is as the party of tolerance, multiculturalism, and women’s rights, all of which are important causes. But it is no longer the party of the economically less fortunate, regardless of what its politicians claim.
By adopting the central Republican idea that dynamic markets and limited government are the sole source of prosperity, we lost the ability to differentiate our economic message from our opponents’. By forgoing bold programs to help struggling families directly and doing nothing to slow the progress of extreme inequality, we squandered our brand equity and our greatest political asset. Yes, we can still win elections by combining attractive candidate
William Smith/AP Photo
President Eisenhower in October 1953
biographies with important themes such as women’s rights and climate change, while hoping that voters will be repelled by Republican bigotry and corruption. But when
it comes to the basic economic issues that still play a large role in dictating election outcomes, we have a lousy product and no real message at all.
In tacking toward the middle and trying to be all things to all people—defenders of the 99 percent andenablers of the 1 percent—Democrats have also forgotten the cardinal lesson of modern American political history. In the 1950s, conservatism was completely impotent as an ideology in the United States. There was a Republican Party, but its economic platform amounted to little more than accommodation to the New Deal and a vague claim to fiscal responsibility. Its leader, President Dwight Eisenhower, famously wrote:
Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. … Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
Eisenhower also believed exactly what Democrats today believe: that government action was necessary to correct for the failings of the private sector. His compelling personal story as the conquering general of World War II got him by, but did little for the Republican brand.
Sixty years later, extreme conservatives have completely reshaped the political landscape. They have increasingly tightened their stranglehold on the Republican Party; they have lowered taxes and cut back regulations to an extent their ancestors could only have dreamed of; they have slashed welfare (with President Clinton’s assistance) and put privatization of Social Security and Medicare onto the national agenda; they have installed a generation of judges who are determined to restore pre–New Deal limits on the powers of the federal government; and, as discussed above, they have dragged the Democratic Party so far to the right that it occupies the space once taken by mainstream Republicans. They have accomplished all this despite positions on immigration, women’s rights, and gay rights that are offensive to a majority of the population. They did it not by adapting their identity to what the median voter wanted, but by staking out compelling positions on core issues (most importantly, that small government and free markets are the source of prosperity) and repeating their key messages incessantly until the electorate came to them. They did it while rallying around Barry Goldwater in 1964 even though he had no chance at winning the general election, backing Ronald Reagan’s 1976 challenge to a sitting Republican president, and purging their congressional delegation of moderate incumbents better positioned to hold onto seats for their party.
By contrast, in recent elections—particularly since 1992—Democrats have run toward the middle, desperately trying to please the crucial swing demographic of the moment, whatever it may be. That’s why the national party was opposed to or silent on gay marriage until state-level momentum was impossible to ignore, why it tiptoed around abortion (largely supporting restrictions on federal funding for abortions) until only the last few years, and why it still has an equivocal position on climate change and the fossil fuel industry, to cite only a few issues. That’s why the ideal candidate recruited by the Democratic Congressional or Senatorial Campaign Committee is a combat veteran who started a small business and now promises to get Washington to work creating jobs and opportunity—without saying anything that might sound like redistribution, expanding the welfare state, or raising taxes on the rich. While conservatives demand ideological purity, the Democratic establishment silences its left wing and extols the political virtues of centrism (while its presidential candidates fantasize about a mythical post-partisan America). To us, every election is so crucial, every swing voter so important, that the priority is always to grind out a win by catering to any bloc of undecideds or independents necessary—rather than spelling out a clear vision of where we are headed and asking the people to come with us.
But the joke is on us. While we have been eagerly cozying up to the median voter, the conservatives have been remaking the American economy. They have cut taxes, undermined the safety net, slashed “job-killing” regulations, turned federal agencies over to the industries they are supposed to monitor, promoted the extraction of fossil fuels, stacked the judiciary with pro-business judges, and so on—sometimes (as with welfare reform, financial deregulation, and shale gas drilling) abetted by Democrats anxious to seem “pro-business” or simply hopeful for campaign contributions or plum lobbying jobs. If you look at how the landscape of national politics has changed since 1980, it is clear who won and who lost, at least when it comes to economic issues. The Republicans don’t win every election or every vote—although from 2010 through 2016, it often seemed that way—but that is because they have moved the terrain of political debate so far in their direction. We don’t have to endorse their substantive positions, or their often cavalier disregard for facts, to appreciate that the conservative minority has executed the most powerful, long-running political marketing campaign of our lifetimes.
The most important lesson of the conservative revolution is that real change takes time. It took decades of centrist policies to undermine the Democratic brand, and it will take decades to restore it. But the sooner we begin, the better.
