The Democrats Are Now America’s Conservative Party
Liberals find themselves in the strange position of having won most of their major battles of this century. Updated at 2:00 p.m. ET on July 10, 2023 The Democratic Party, for decades the progressive bastion of the United States, is emerging today as the party of the status quo. This strange turn of events was on display in late June, as Democrats lamented the Supreme Court rulings ending affirmative action in college admissions and marked the anniversary of the same Court overturning Roe v. Wade . They also celebrated the Courts decision not to further weaken the Voting Rights Act. The message is not a push for any specific transformative policy, but rather that the MAGA GOP and right-wing judiciary are ready to undo much progress that has already been achieved. To borrow a phrase , todays Democratic Party stands athwart recent history, shouting, Stop! This small- c conservative Democratic Party is the product of at least three converging currents. One is that the party has achieved many of its biggest goals in recent years, and has now shifted toward defending and consolidating those victories. Second, the changing demographics of the parties mean that some of the Democratic Partys most powerful backers are the winners of society as it exists now. Why would they want transformative change? Third, and relatedly, the Trump-era Republican Party has abandoned much of the partys old orthodoxy in favor of radicalism on domestic and foreign affairs. The pendulum of two-party politics seems to require that one party represent a conservativein the literal senseviewpoint. David A. Graham: One big difference between Biden and every other recent Democratic nominee As Chris Hayes wrote in The Atlantic in 2021 , liberals find themselves in the strange position of having won most of their major battles of this century. Some of these victories were smaller than they might have liked, but the scorecard is clear. The Affordable Care Act is here to stay. Republicans didnt even manage to repeal it when they controlled Congress and the White House in 2017 and 2018, and all but the deepest red states have expanded Medicaid. Gay marriage is legal and populareven if, as attacks on transgender Americans and a Supreme Court decision on June 30 show, battles over LGBTQ issues remain. Biden passed huge infrastructure and climate-change legislation. And the haste by Kevin McCarthy and other congressional leaders to rule out Social Security or Medicare cuts shows that Donald Trump has killed the GOPs appetite for entitlement reform, at least for now. But this record of policy wins is vulnerable. The Supreme Court has been steadily knocking down Democratic priorities , including not just abortion access and student-debt forgiveness but also gun control and environmental regulation. In recent memory, it narrowed Obamacare and eliminated campaign-finance laws. This turns Democrats into a necessarily conservative faction, trying to defend policies that are already in place. The party also sees potential electoral benefits in railing against the Court, reasoning that voters will object to the end of rights and policies that they like. The abortion issue already helped Democrats in midterm elections last year. Defending the way things are now is also probably safer for the party than pursuing new ideas. Progressives have long complained that the population supports more liberal policies but cant get them, but that may no longer be so true. A Democratic wish list at this moment would start with immigration reform and higher taxes on the wealthy, but although both poll well, neither seems within reach. After that, many of the remaining ideas pushed by activists divide the partys elected establishment and are unpopular with the public at large, such as Medicare for All, defunding the police, and open bordersall policies advocated by candidates whom Biden defeated in the 2020 Democratic primary. A policy can be both just and unpopularsuch as affirmative action, which the party is mourning nowbut its hard to build a successful political campaign around such policies, and Democrats seem disinclined to try. The affection for the status quo among Democrats also reflects how the party has changed. For decades, its base included the white and black working classes, labor, and immigrantsall groups that had a vested interest in major structural reforms to American society. The Republican Party, meanwhile, included the business classes, white-collar professionals, and other elites, and, after the civil-rights era, white southerners interested in protecting the regions racist hierarchy. Those coalitions have fractured somewhat. Democrats are still overwhelmingly the party of minority voters; they have lost white working-class support, but have gained a great deal of support among elite professionals. This trade is complex but driven by, among other things, the growing share of nonwhite people in the country , racial resentment, and Democratic support for free trade and globalism. Patrick Wyman: American gentry The result is that the Democratic Party is now to a large degree the party of minoritieswho are growing as a share of the American population and who consistently show greater optimism about the future than white peopleand of white professionals, who are doing very well under current conditions. Many wealthy people remain Republican, but they tend to be the business owners Patrick Wyman has called the American gentry or else the ultra-wealthy, who, not coincidentally, are most skeptical of the radical vision espoused by Trump and other MAGA politicians. The people who used to be called country-club Republicans, upper-middle-class white suburbanites, have shifted strongly toward the Democratic Party in the Trump years. All of these structural factors are amplified by the natural inclinations of the partys leader. Its not just as even Biden has started noting that at 80, he has a lot of past behind him. I wrote several times during the 2020 campaign about how Biden, unlike most of his rivals, was running on a platform of nostalgia and restoration. He believed that he could return to a pre-Trump paradigmin effect, he wanted to make America great again, but with a vision of greatness very different from Trumps. Biden has clothed some of his most transformative initiatives, including the reintroduction of an industrial policy, in the rhetoric of restoration, invoking the New Deal and often citing Franklin D. Roosevelt. Leading progressive writers have also looked to past ages of American innovation as inspiration for a muscular liberal approach. The age of Democratic conservatism probably does not portend a full-scale realignment of the parties, with Republicans taking up left-wing causes and Democrats adopting right-wing onesthough some intriguing examples of conservative dabbling in worker-focused populism exist. It may, however, help explain and prolong the current era of gridlock, with one party pursuing unpopular and often unconstitutional policies and the other promising stasis we can believe in. This article originally named Medicaid, not Medicare, as one of the programs McCarthy and other congressional leaders have ruled out for cuts.