Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Epilogue

The Parties' Renewal and Democracy's Revitalization

Greetings, Citizens & Observers,

So, as you know, the people went for the whirlpool!  On reflection, I think this may be very good news, even if my team lost, and so I’m writing this little epilogue to Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool?

As most of you know, Rock or Whirlpool? has been a series of ten (eleven counting this epilogue) essays. Again, I mean essay in the old fashioned literal sense, the trace of an effort to think, a thought finding form. Not an argument, and by no means representative or complete — what would that even look like? Countless things that matter to me, you or somewhat else are not discussed, glanced upon, etc. So think of this as performance art, sort of, and thanks to those of you who have come along for the ride. Links to the entire series are at the end of this essay, or at Intermittent Signal.

It’s been said that the United States is like high school.  If so, then this election has been like a championship game between rival teams.  One side has won, the other has lost, and there has much jubilation and gnashing of teeth.  “This is the greatest/worst thing ever,” people say at the happy/sad dances that we hold afterwards.  (For my readers outside the US: yes, really, we hold dances.)

Now that a few days have passed, let me try to take a few steps back.  Whether your team won or lost, this election was good for both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.  What’s more, this election has renewed American democracy by giving political voice to groups that had little to none.

To be clear: I am not talking about what happens next, under the Trump administration.  Maybe the American people were wrong.  Maybe we will be beset by economic collapse, diverse wars, authoritarian government, the four horsemen riding Elon’s rockets.  I too have concerns (shocker!) and we shall come to know.  Taking that chance is part of believing in democracy.

My point today is that right now, this election itself, much like the first election of Obama, marked a sea change in American politics, and that change was for the better, regardless of your opinion of the Obama or Trump administrations.  For Obama, whatever else happened, on the morning after the election, it was significant that a majority of American voters had selected a Black man to be their President.

Trump’s election remade both parties for the better.  Trump gained considerable ground, over the last election, with virtually every demographic.  Women, men, young people, Black people, Hispanics, people making under 50,000 year, Muslims . . . it just goes on and on. 

Ruy Teixeira

, The Shattering of the Democratic Coalition, works through the demographics.  That is, this election both transformed the Republican Party and blew up the existing version of the Democratic Party. Both things needed to happen.

Ross Barkan

, in Twilight of the Liberal Left, provides an incisive, as in cutting, eulogy for this instantiation of the Democratic Party, running roughly speaking from Bill Clinton to Kamala Harris.  One might cogently argue that this version of the Democratic Party, properly speaking, is neither “left” nor “liberal,” but we and certainly Barkan know what we’re talking about: the Democratic Party as we in fact had it in American political life for a few decades.  It was a thing, held together on credentials, vibes, and baling wire, and pointing out its ideological inconsistencies might be amusing, in an academic sort of way, but not really the issue. (As I’ve suggested in these essays, I think the effort to define the party as a meritocracy was an understandable if doomed attempt to respond to the loss of the WASP consensus, and so I’m not entirely unsympathetic.)

The implosion of the Democratic Party was hardly unforeseen, but judging from the morning after, for many Democrats the debacle is more or less painful, in some cases shocking.  Lots of schools are offering counseling.  Typical. 

But this loss was entirely necessary for the Democrats, and is salutary.  (I thought it would be next cycle, because of Trump’s negatives and after another year of Democratic overreaching, but I was wrong.)  As has been remarked ad nauseum, the Dems for some time have been dominated by the professional class, and conversely, have tacitly abandoned the working class.  Rephrased, Biden’s blathering about unions aside, the Democratic Party of FDR is almost completely gone.  In the right political circumstances (Republican disarray, gifted politicians like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama), the fundamental conflicts within the Democratic Party could be papered over for a while, but the conflicts were deep and getting deeper.   Educated professionals are nowhere near a governing majority.  For years, the Democrats reached majorities by relying on liberal ideologues (often college educated), various ethnic minorities, who were assumed to have nowhere else to go, and the remnants of the working class vote.  First the white working class switched to the Republicans, and then substantial numbers of minority voters, and some of Silicon Valley and the new entreprenuerial classes . . . and the “Democratic Coalition” collapsed, as we saw on November 6^th.  The blue wall fell, all the swing states swung the same way, and so forth.

Not so long ago, it was argued that the future was Democratic, because “demography is destiny.”  Ironically enough, one of the names most associated with this (one might quibble with how fairly) is the aforementioned Ruy Teixeira, who co-authored a book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Young people, it was argued, voted Democratic.  Plus minorities.  Thus, youth plus minority votes . . . the flaw in this argument is that it assumes that preferences are stable.  They are not.  As

Ruy Teixeira

himself explains, Progressive Youth Chimera, “Democrats are drawn like a moth to a flame” to a false argument that, by operation of history, they will win.  (So they can do whatever they want?) But demographics are not destiny.  Informative, maybe.  But people change their minds.

And that is a good thing, that is a democratic thing, even if it is a tough moral lesson for the Democratic Party.  As I’ve stressed throughout Rock or Whirlpool? to say people vote X because they are Y is to give up on the notion of enlightened discourse, and with it, republican democracy.  Or, to put it more negatively, it is to make essentialist, often tacitly racist, assumptions that prior identity determines present thought.  (This is overstated for emphasis.)

In the United States and especially in Europe, lots of right wingers have similarly claimed that demographics is destiny, but from the perspective of the people being “replaced.”  White guys, mostly.  Therefore, the argument goes, immigration should be limited.  Germany for the Germans and the like.  The establishment condemns such “replacement theory” as false and racist, all skinheads and neo-Nazis.  But a softer version of replacement theory was Democratic Party dogma for decades. 

“Racism is bad,” however, is too blunt an instrument.  Shared culture does matter, a lot, for any polity.  Trump has taught us that, too.  Mary Harrington, at Reactionary Feminist, discusses these matters through a series of illuminating essays on controversial French thinker Renaud Camus, situating him within her own critique of the contemporary.

Mary Harrington

, Great Replacement Part One 

I say all this even though, at the end of the day, I allowed my identity (an academic, and so establishment, conservative, even if in the closet) to determine my vote.  It was a toss-up, I had spent weeks and thousands of words discussing . . . So I did think about it, and I did decide.  Being a lawyer, I can of course defend the decision.  In all candor, however, I’m not entirely happy that, at the end of the day, my demographics and my vote matched.  Casts doubt, in my own heart, on the independence of my thinking.  Rock or Whirlpool? was written to explore and to understand (not to argue).  To think through.

And one can overdo this line of reasoning, too.  Neither the United States nor any other polity is a creature of pure thought.  We are situated humans (Rawls notwithstanding), and so have interests, loyalties, and so forth that we do not arrive at purely rationally.  Certainly, Madison expected, indeed relied on, faction, economic first and foremost.  People will vote their interests and identities.  (But those words are not as solid as they might seem.)

Going forward, the Democratic Party will have to appeal to the interests of different people.  It’s usually said “working class,” but I think the problem of what used to be called solidarity, or community if you like, is much broader than that.  Most people are not elite, by definition, and even if the US offers a bewildering range of ways to be excellent at something or other.  Nor can we equate “working class” with the people when worker penetration is low and getting lower, when there are so many old people, when education takes forever, and that is before we get to people like prisoners, the sick, the homeless.  A topic for another day.  My point here is that to survive the Democratic Party will have to listen to, and actively represent, re – present, the issues that matter to a vast constituency.  Now that people of all sorts have someplace else to go, labelling this or that “progressive,” silencing all opposition, and telling people to vote Democratic simply won’t work.  There is work to be done, but this election marks the beginning of a new, and fundamentally democratic as opposed to elitist Democratic Party.  And insofar as they are indeed democratic, Democrats should be happy about that.

The Republican Party has also been transformed, and for the better.  Since the Civil Rights era, the Republican Party: captured the South (“racism”); argued for smaller government with fewer entitlements (“Goldwater”); less regulation and more free trade (“Chicago” or “NAFTA); a strong military (this is a little less clear, but that has been the branding); and wealth (“Rockefeller Republicans, rich guys generally).  This is a caricature, of course, but a familiar one, presumably containing some truth, and the house mythology of Democratic discourse.

In practice, this political arrangement was surprisingly workable.  A synecdoche: when I grew up in Atlanta, the political power was Black.  The City was in many ways the home of the Civil Rights movement, and some of that was local politics.  Maynard Jackson was the first Black mayor of a major city.  The money, however, was white.  Think Coca Cola, later Ted Turner.  Delta.  And that was before the city became huge, the Black Mecca, etc.  Over the last decades, and painting with a broad brush, national politics has been somewhat similar.  City dwellers, anybody who isn’t white, vote Democratic, or don’t vote.  Rich white people, people from some parts of the country, rural folk (mostly white), etc., vote Republican, or don’t vote.

See, everybody gets a vote!  But neither Blacks nor Hispanics nor rural whites nor lots of other groups were all that well represented, except occasionally, for the sake of appearances, or maybe charity.

This division of electoral share posed obvious dangers for Republicans: they could and would be labelled racists (“uneducated white men are ruining this country” we’ve heard again recently). To make matters worse, there would be racists of sorts (and we can argue over what counts) within the Party (where else would they go?) much as right wing parties in Europe cannot escape the charge of harboring neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and the like.  More subtly, as in any echo chamber, Republican views tended to converge, overmuch for a diverse continental polity, third largest population of any country.  The Republican Party was heir to a certain parochialism, to use a gentle word, even as it secured oil leases around the planet.  There is more to life, and to governance, than efficient business, for starters.  And, practically speaking, the Democratic coalition comprised more than half the population: people in cities, minorities, liberal white suburbanites, etc. – the Dems had the numbers.

Along comes Trump.  To win, he needs to broaden the Republican base, and he does.  Black people, Latino people, even Muslims!  Poor people, long thought to be inherently Democratic because of their dependence on government services (the ghost of FDR still walks), voted for Trump in unprecedented numbers.  Suddenly, Trump, who says very impolite things about all sorts of people, is presiding over a diverse coalition.  (Maybe language works a little differently than the Left thinks?  Just throwing that out there.)

Trump diversified the Republican Party.  This is at least as significant as the Goldwater realignment, and far more promising.  To stay in power, especially against a resurgent Democratic Party (and I am convinced there will be a resurgence), the Republican Party is going to have to address the concerns, and yes, grievances, of poor Americans, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, women.  For all the talk about Trump’s divisiveness, he has united a great deal, and will have to continue to do so.  The Republican Party will have to become, in a word, more democratic.  What that means in practice will, of course, be a matter for policy debate.  But what I mean by democratic is more fundamental: listening, representing, governing, for the people. And by the same token, realizing that these people, too, are citizens, Americans, potentially even your constituency means that policy will need to be tempered by all their so human concerns.

To be blunt: the realignment of November 6th promises a renewal of American democracy itself.  Groups that have been represented in name only, that did not have an effective political voice, will gain their voices, rather than be put in their places.  Their votes will matter, and so their interests will be heard.  Perhaps this promise will not be kept, but I am hopeful.

*          *          *

Maybe it is merely to provide jokes for the gods, but politics often happens in funny ways.  So Jefferson the slaveholder, and a natural aristocrat if there ever were one, waxes poetic about equality.  Lyndon Johnson, cordially regarded as a son of a bitch by one and all (and I think himself) gets the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed.  Cold warrior and anti-communist Richard Nixon opens relations with China, our wars in Southeast Asia notwithstanding.  And now, Donald J. Trump, a politician literally like none other, does more for underrepresented minorities in a long day than an army of DEI officers has done in years? 

Trump will be gone in four years.  A lot can happen.  Politics is hard.  But my fervent hope is that Trump will leave behind political parties that are much more democratic than they have been, and that all Americans will be better represented by their government.

Enjoy the dance, citizens.

— David A. Westbrook

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool?  Part I A Decision as Mosaic

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part II Why is this election so hard to think, and why does it matter for a diverse polity?

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part III Does Political Speech Matter? The Problem of Demographics

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part IV Critique of Pure Liberalism: Raising Babies; Choosing Kings I; How Serious is Philosophy?

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool?  Part V Crises of Representation: Accounting; Poetic Bullshit & Graphic Silences

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part VI Political Language, Two Confessions, and an Old Poem

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part VII Boring Robots; Single Issue Swords; Slouching Towards Westminster

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part VIII Disbelief; Dread; Scylla and Charybdis Explained; Switching Poles; Glennon

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part IX Closing Time; Why and How to Vote; Menu; Open Questions

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part X Exploding Chickens and Election Returns