New, old Democratic party
The event the Democrats are staging this week is barely recognizable as a national political convention.
And so it’s fitting that a perplexing question hovers in the air in Delaware, where former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is in coronavirus retreat, and in homes across the country where the delegates will participate remotely: Is the party that’s about to nominate 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 J. 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 Biden, who has voted for one piece of legislation or another 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) 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 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 five 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’s this week’s beverage and we must drink deeply of it. For just as America is awakening to the fact its strength as a civilization depends on a healthy Republican Party, its strength as a nation-state 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 aren’t united on much at all except for one important thing: their desire to repel Trump from the presidency. To that end, they will swallow Biden as their nominee, though he has been a voice of moderation in an immoderate time, though he has supported initiatives that favor the corporations the new Democrats revile, though he has shepherded through Congress legislation (on welfare, on crime) his rivals in 11 debates forced him to repudiate.
They will stomach him because he’s 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 isn’t 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.
The party is united, but only in its determination to defeat Trump. It turns out 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?