If I were a cynical political operative who wanted to construct a presidential candidate perfectly suited for this moment, I’d start by making this candidate culturally conservative. I’d want the candidate to show by dress, speech and style that he or she is not part of the coastal educated establishment. I’d want the candidate to connect with middle- and working-class voters on values and to be full-throatedly patriotic.
Then I’d make the candidate economically center-left. I’d want to fuse the economic anxieties of the working-class Republicans with the economic anxieties of the Bernie Sanders young into one big riled populist package. College debt forgiveness. An aggressive home-building project to bring down prices. Whatever it took.
Then I’d have that candidate deliver one nonpartisan message: Everything is broken. Then he or she would offer a slew of institutional reforms to match the comprehensive institutional reforms the Progressive movement offered more than a century ago.
Why cynical? It would only be cynical if someone like Steve Bannon was proposing it. But why shouldn't such a candidate emerge who is authentic? If he or she did, with the right candidate, it would be a winning formula. This, I would argue was Bernie's formula. He really tried as best he could to avoid identitarian politics, but BLM attacked him in '16 for not being woke enough, and Clinton attacked him for being mediocre on gun control and too-pie-in-the-sky on economic issues.
But that was the key to his success in a rural state like Vermont. He appealed to the educated coastal types in Burlington with his economic progressivism, his impeccable civil rights record, and he appealed to his rural constituents with his common sense, down-to-earth approach on identitarian cultural issues by putting them on the back burner.
Sanders was always really the true American conservative, if by conservative we mean someone who wanted to preserve the American New Deal public/private partnership that brought us the the widespread prosperity from the 1930s to 1980. Bernie has always been about social justice, but in a traditional sense, not in a postmodern identitarian sense. And his critique of Neoliberalism and the corporate Democrats like the Clintons who abetted it was always on the money.
The problem with ordinary working families is that most of them are not particularly cutting-edge when it comes to cultural issues. They are normies, which means they lean culturally conservative. They are persuadable, but their "evolution" on cultural issues has to resonate with their innate moral intuitions. But the Democratic Party has become so captured by its activist factions who are driven by counter-intuitive identitarian politics that too many normie Americas increasingly feel no longer at home there, and so are migrating out.
Any independent candidate--or possibly a new third party--that can formulate a flexible, common-sense normie approach on cultural issues and a progressive approach on economic issues can own the political future, imo. I fear the Democrats have become too tainted by their association with Neoliberalism and postmodern Left culture war activists, and so have lost or are losing the normie Americans--even normie Americans of color. Something new has to emerge one way or the other.
UPDATE 7/15: As if to bolster the timing of my argument, this from Politico about Ray Tuxeira leaving Liberal CAP to go to AEI :
Teixeira, whose role in the Beltway scrum often involved arguing against calls to move right on economic issues, insists his own policy views haven’t changed — but says the current cultural milieu of progressive organizations “sends me running screaming from the left.”
“My perspective is, the single most important thing to focus on in the social system is the economic system,” he tells me. “It’s class.”
...
To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP, and the rest of Washington’s institution-based left, stopped being a place where he could do the work he wanted. The reason, he says, is that the relentless focus on race, gender, and identity in historically liberal foundations and think tanks has made it hard to do work that looks at society through other prisms. It also makes people nervous about projects that could be accused of giving short shrift to anti-racism efforts.
“I would say that anybody who has a fundamentally class-oriented perspective, who thinks that’s a more important lens and doesn’t assume that any disparity is automatically a lens of racism or sexism or what have you … I think that perspective is not congenial in most left institutions,” he says.
“I’d say they have been affected by the nature and inclination and preferences of their junior staff,” he says. “It’s just the case that at CAP, like almost any other left think tank you can think of, it’s become very hard to have a conversation about race and gender and trans issues, even crime and immigration. You know, ‘How should the left handle these?’ There’s a default assumption about how you’re supposed to talk about these things, even the language. There’s a real chilling effect on all of these organizations, and I think it’s had an effect on CAP as well.”
Like a lot of older and whiter veterans of liberal think-tanks and foundations, he also says he’s exhausted by the internal agita. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land,” he says. “The fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”
If you just want to dismiss this as the blather of a disgruntled old white guy, you're missing the point. Identitarian politics on the Left is a loser for anybody who hasn't done the coursework in elite colleges and universities. Identitarian politics on the Right is a winner because it appeals to what most people grew up with. It's not about who's right or wrong in some academic sense; it's about how do we save democracy.
And besides, I think the class argument is right and the identitarian argument wrong in the academic sense because the class argument unites the bottom 80% rather than divides them. Bernie, another old white guy gets this, but so does a young brown guy Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin. Listen to his interview on the Ezra Klein podcast.
Corporate culture is more receptive to identitarian arguments than Main Street culture. Why? Because they don't threaten the existing class and wealth structure in the American meritocracy. You need an effective class analysis and political strategy to get real changes along those lines. Identitarians don't really understand how they've been coopted by their own privilege for all their blather about it. Even if they came from non-elite social-economic backgrounds, their careers in elite cultural institutions have depended on their ability to talk the identitarian talk, which is the lingua franca of almost all elite Liberal cultural institutions.
If the Democrats lose in the next two cycles, I think there will be serious talk about a new third party along the line described by Brooks above. We're in the 1850s, and the GOP has become the party of Southern reaction and the Dems are playing the role of feckless Whigs. Something different is called for if the Dems can't get it together. Getting it together means understanding that most American voters--especially black and brown voters--do not share the postmodern values of educated cultural elites. Maybe the Dems will figure this out--I hope they do. But if they don't, it's time for something different.