Member Newsletter
We’ve been discussing a lot of plans and ingenious new strategies for a Democratic comeback which are variously half-baked, hyperbolic, histrionic or merely silly. Here’s one that I believe is not. It’s not even a strategy. It’s simply identifying a real challenge, or a knot Democrats need to untangle.
A key reason that many people are Democrats today is that they’re attached to a cluster of ideas like the rule of law, respect for and the employment of science and expertise, a free press and the protection of the range of institutions that guard civic life, quality of life and more. On the other side, say we have adherents of a revanchist, authoritarian politics which seeks break all those things and rule from the wreckage that destruction leaves in its path. So Democrats constantly find themselves defending institutions, or “the establishment,” or simply the status quo. Yet we live in an age of pervasive public distrust — distrust of institutions, leaders, expertise. And not all of this distrust is misplaced. Many institutions, professions, and power centers have failed to live up to their sides of the social contract.
In short, Democrats are by and large institutionalists in an age of mistrust. And that is challenging place to be.
What puts a finer point on the matter is that Democrats often find themselves carrying the water of institutions which do them no favors or are even affirmatively hostile. I think of this a lot when it comes to the establishment press. Civic democrats should and generally are in favor of a free and vital press. But that doesn’t or shouldn’t mean the press exactly as it’s structured right now. That’s not only wrong on the merits; it’s a losers’ game.
I remember earlier this year a reporter for the Times chided critics of the paper by saying she thought everyone agreed that in the Trump era it was critical to build up and support the press rather than tear it down. To me this illustrates the conundrum and often the sucker’s deal: Democrats get called in to run defense for flawed institutions which in this case routinely shortchange them on basic fairness.
The simple answer is just to move into tear it down mode, a populist rejection of the status quo. And in some cases that absolutely makes sense. There are still some people who lament every latest Supreme Court travesty because it reduces faith or trust in the Court. I jettisoned this thinking years ago. To me this is one of the few silver linings. The Court is thoroughly corrupt. It must be thoroughly reformed and the corruption rooted out. Respect for the Court’s decisions and the Court itself is a problem to be solved, not a rampart or castle wall to be reinforced.
When it comes to the establishment press, I think Democrats need to get used to running against the press. I don’t mean that simply because it’s good politics, though it probably is in many cases. I mean it because in many cases the way establishment press covers political news is very much part of the problem. You can criticize and yes even bash bad news coverage without in any way questioning the centrality of press freedom. A lot of people really seem to think they’re the same thing. They’re not. It’s stupid and wildly counterproductive to think otherwise.
But often it’s not as simple as that. The country needs an at least relatively disinterested Department of Justice. It needs scientists and clinicians studying and safeguarding public health. It needs a robust press and all the other infrastructure of civil society that together make up the soft tissue of civic freedom. If one side is saying “Burn it down!” and another is saying “We’re rootin’ tootin’ mad and we have many questions!” well then it’s definitely going to get burned to the ground because there’s no one taking up the defense. So often it’s not that simple.
We seem likely to see these issues come to the fore if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets confirmed to run HHS. I’m sure there are problems at FDA, NIH, CDC, the whole complex of food, medical and public health agencies. There’s no question that there’s a significant degree of agency capture when it comes to the national food supply, nutrition guidance and so forth. But that’s not going to be solved by a crank degenerate who claims COVID was created as part of a government plot. What is the public argument for why Kennedy shouldn’t be allowed to fire 500 or 600 government research scientists at NIH?
Often in political conversations I’ll hear people say, well, you need to move in a more populist direction. Start attacking Big This, Big That, Big The Other Thing. And I agree. But some of the big stuff is actually really necessary.
To some degree, Democrats need to fine tune their message to be one that works in an age of perverse public distrust — without losing its hold on those voters who have flocked to the party over the last 20 years precisely because it’s the party of civic democracy. But it’s not only that. Democrats are increasingly a party of the college educated. Certainly the people who define its messages come out of that cultural world. And they — we — are acculturated to think in terms of formal expertise, disinterested government, thinking there’s one bucket for policy and another for politics and you don’t mix them. Some of that is just a belief in civic democracy, how things really should run. But some of it is simply the mental habits of our acculturation, something that is substantively and certainly politically limiting.
This may all sound highly abstract, way more academic — for lack of a better word — than more concrete and immediate questions about coalition management or moving to the center or the left and whatever else. But I think it’s actually at the core of the big questions. Being the party of institutions in an age of distrust is an inherent challenge. It’s at the heart of why Democrats often think and talk in ways that don’t connect, break through to big chunks of the electorate. Democrats aren’t going to stop being the party of institutions because they want the rule of law; they want elections where votes are counted; they want real medicine over quacks. This is the foolery of those people whose response to the election is to fire Democrats’ voters. That’s not how anything works. But being a party of institutions and expertise in era of pervasive distrust is, again, an inherent challenge. You don’t surmount that challenge without giving the issue some real time and thought.