It’s the new, old Democratic Party’s time to shine

The event the Democrats are staging this week is barely recognizable as a national political convention. And so it is fitting that a perplexing question hovers in the air in Delaware, where former Vice President Joe Biden is in coronavirus retreat, and in homes across the country where the delegates will participate remotely: Is the party that is about to nominate Mr. Biden for president recognizable as the Democratic Party of recent memory?

That question is vital to understanding not only the Democratic Party of today but also the structure of contemporary politics — and the Democrats’ prospects of denying Donald Trump a second term in the White House.

On the surface, the gang is all here, or at least scattered in their homes: urban left-liberal professionals. University progressives. Working women. Minorities. Members of union households. Immigrants.

But how much allegiance do any of them have to Mr. Biden, who has voted for one piece of legislation or another that each of these groups has reviled, who resisted the new progressivism until it became necessary to resist no more, who has the feel of a comfortable old shoe in an era when the new generation is casting away old shoes — like House members Joseph Crowley of New York (defeated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), Michael Capuano of Massachusetts (toppled by Ayanna Pressley) and, last month, Eliot L. Engel of New York (upset by Jamaal Bowman)?

“Who would have thought that some of these liberal stalwarts would be defeated, decisively, by new progressives?” former Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, the party’s 1988 presidential nominee, asked in an interview.

Then again, who in 1987, when the first (of three) Mr. Biden campaigns fell apart, would have guessed he would emerge a third of a century later as the putative savior of the Democratic Party?

Of course, no one could have predicted the emergence of a playboy New York billionaire and serial bridegroom as the most important person of the age, the destruction of the international alliances and institutions that Americans built in an unprecedented global burst of truly enlightened self-interest, or the spread of a virus that would debilitate the world economy, imperil millions, kill hundreds of thousands, send people on all continents to their living rooms, and threaten to wreck the greatest college and university system in the history of humankind, all in a few fevered, masked months?

In that context, the future of the Democratic Party may seem like small beer, but it is this week’s beverage and we must drink deeply of it. For just as America is awakening to the fact that its strength as a civilization depends on a healthy Republican Party, its strength as a nationstate depends on a coherent Democratic Party, despite what Will Rogers said. (You’ll have to look that up yourself. Your columnist can’t do everything for you.)

Today Democrats are not united on much at all except for one very important thing: their desire to repel Mr. Trump from the presidency. To that end, they will swallow Mr. Biden as their nominee, though he has been a voice of moderation in an immoderate time, though he has supported initiatives that favor the very corporations the new Democrats revile, though he has shepherded through Congress legislation (on welfare, on crime) that his rivals in 11 debates forced him to repudiate.

They will stomach him because he is perhaps the only person remaining on the face of the Earth who can perform Job One in Democratic Politics 2020: to speak with affection, and respect, to the old core of the traditional Democratic Party, which is not on the campus (where the party is safe), not in the cities (pretty much a lock for the Democrats), not among minorities (the Biden primary surge proved that), maybe not in the suburbs (highly significant but within reach), but in factories and mines and unemployment lines.

“Biden is doing a good job in working to get them,” former Secretary of State John F. Kerry, the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee, told me, “but it is important to work to get them.”

Hillary Clinton didn’t work to get them, which is partially the reason she lives in Westchester, not in the White House. “Biden, who is no elitist, lasted all these years,” said former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, himself the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee. “Hillary Clinton didn’t.”

Mr. Biden will have strong labor support, reversing a trend that began when the AFL-CIO refused to endorse George McGovern in 1972, implicitly giving support to Richard Nixon. Union membership may be around 10% of the labor force outside of government workers but, as David Plotke of The New School for Social Research points out, “The political power of labor has not declined as rapidly as their membership.” Its assets: fundraising, organizing, voter turnout.

As the Democrats prepare for their midsummer ministrations, there is a blast from the party’s past that could help blast Mr.

Biden into the presidency: immigrants.

“In the old days, the Democrats harvested all the immigrant votes,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist who is the labor studies chair at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies and the author of a recent book on immigrant labor. “But what is interesting is that it’s true again. In reaction to all the anti-immigrant talk in the country, a lot of naturalized citizens registered to vote, and they registered as Democrats. The Republican attacks on immigrants pushed them to the Democratic Party.”

For months before coronavirus and the reaction to the killing of George Floyd robbed the Democratic primary race of its attention, the Democrats fought fiercely. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, DVt., pilloried moderates like Mr. Biden, whose performance in early contests bordered on the pitiful. Each week he looked more like yesterday’s man in a party desperate for tomorrow’s candidate. Now he is about to accept his party’s presidential nomination.

The party is united, but only in its determination to defeat Mr. Trump. It turns out that the master of division has brought more than the Republican Party together. He’s done so for the Democrats, campaigning without a convention but with a most conventional nominee. Who needs the traditional post-acceptance speech balloon drop when you have Donald Trump as an opponent?