Democratic Party needs to settle on a new narrative
There’s a lot of discussion about how far left the Democratic Party should go these days. Is it destroying its electoral chances when its members call for a single-payer health plan or abolishing ICE?
That’s an important question, but the most important question is what story is the Democratic Party telling? As Alasdair MacIntyre argued many years ago, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of. Story is more important than policies.
We post-Cold War Americans haven’t settled on what story we like. We’ll flock to anybody who tells us a story that feels true.
The story President Donald Trump tells is that we good-hearted, decent people of Middle America have been betrayed by elites who screw us and threatened by foreigners who are out to get us. That story resonated with many people. You can get a lot of facts wrong if you get your story right.
In the 1980s, the Democrats told two different stories. One was the compassion story: Too many Americans are poor, marginalized and left behind. We must care for them because we are one family.
The other was the brainpower/meritocracy story: Americans are masters at innovation. We must use our best minds to head into a new technological century.
I don’t hear those two stories much anymore. The Democrats are emphasizing fighting grit these days, not compassion or technocratic expertise.
Today’s Democrats tell two other stories. The first is the socialist story associated with Bernie Sanders: The U.S. is rived by class conflict. Bankers and oligarchs are exploiting the middles. We need a fighter who will battle concentrated economic power.
The second is the multicultural story: U.S. history has been marked by systems of oppression. Those who have been oppressed — women, African-Americans, Latinos — need to stand together and fight for justice.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has risen to prominence blending these two languages into one: racial justice socialism. “I can’t name a single issue with roots in race that doesn’t have economic implications,” she says, “and I cannot think of a single economic issue that doesn’t have racial implications. The idea that we have to separate them is a con.”
Racial justice socialism seems to be the story of the contemporary left. It effectively paints Trump as the villain on all fronts, and Democrats do face the distinct problem of how to run against a bully like Trump. But is it good politics for the entire Democratic Party to embrace it?
Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama went to great lengths to assure people they were not embracing this story.
They did it because Americans trust business more than the state, so socialism has never played well. They did it because if you throw race into your economic arguments you end up turning off potential allies in swing states. They did it because if you throw economics into your race arguments you end up dividing your coalitions on those issues.
Democrats have avoided this narrative because the long hoped-for alliance between oppressed racial minorities and the oppressed white working class has never materialized, and it looks very far from materializing now.
Maybe this year is different, but for 100 years, Democrats have tended to win with youthful optimism and not anger and indignation.