OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA: Can Democrats Pivot to the Center?

In a post at the Liberal Patriot, the disaffected Democratic strategist Ruy Texeira notes that it is “magical thinking” to believe that voters will suddenly forget about Democrats’ cultural radicalism and inept governance if the party focuses on class war. Much of Trump’s populist appeal, he observes, comes from working-class resentment of progressive cultural politics—“soak the rich” messaging will do nothing to address it.

But a pivot to the left would have at least one advantage: delaying any reckoning with the party leadership that brought the Democrats to this point. Reading Rhodes’s fulminations against the “rigged” system of the “oligarchic global elite,” it’s easy to forget that these are the words of the man whose identification with Obama was so total that George Packer judged the phrase “mind meld” insufficient to describe it.

It was, after all, the Obama administration that oversaw the rise of the new identity politics and its nationwide implementation through the coercive power of the federal bureaucracy. It was the outgoing Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign that cooked up Russiagate and tried to use the resulting hysteria to consolidate the national security establishment against Trump. It was the Obama and (contrary to myth) Biden administrations that oversaw the tilt in American foreign policy away from Israel and Saudi Arabia and toward Iran, paving the way for the Gaza war that, ironically, ended up inflaming the Left against Biden and serving as an electoral millstone around his neck. And it was the Biden administration that pushed an economic agenda that pundits described as “economic populism” and “social democracy” and inspired regular comparisons of Biden with FDR. That agenda yielded the inflation that voters last November cited as a key reason for giving Democrats the shove.

In the Italian novel The Leopard, set during the nineteenth-century movement for national unification, a young Sicilian nobleman urges his uncle, a powerful conservative landowner allied with the Bourbons, to flip his allegiance to Garibaldi’s nationalists to avoid being caught on the losing side. As the young man explains, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Democratic leadership seems to be thinking similarly. What advocates of the pivot to the left are suggesting, in effect, is a rehash of what they have pushed as party leaders over the past decade and a half—albeit with fresh young faces and “radical” new antiestablishment branding to “meet our moment.” Given the institutional strength of the party, they may succeed. But as Donald Trump proved in 2016, a party exhausted of ideas, with a leadership class sporting a record of failures, makes a prime target for a hostile takeover.