The Split

It’s Obama’s fault for raising our hopes

Jacob Hacker, professor of political science at Yale and co-author of Winner-Take-All Politics: We’ve now had almost eight years of a Democratic presidency. And with the exception of the policy breakthroughs in 2009 and 2010, they’ve been viewed as relatively lean years by many in the Democratic Party. There’s a sense of, “We went with someone within the system, and look what happened—Republicans still tried to crush that person. So let’s go for the whole thing.” There’s a sense that supporting the Democratic establishment and going the conventional route hasn’t been that productive.

Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A lot of young people who showed up to vote for Obama were voting for the very first time. But now they’re looking at the ways economic inequality persists, and they’re saying, “Oh, the Democratic Party doesn’t actually stand against that.” They’re looking at the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the two big linchpins in the Black Lives Matter movement, and they’re like, “Oh, Democrats are actually the architects of the policies that have affected and continue to define young black life in terms of systemic, institutionalized racism.” So you have young folks getting into the Democratic Party and realizing they don’t have a place.

Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age: This is in part a symptom of the expectations that people had for the Obama administration that weren’t met. It got its first major expression through Occupy Wall Street, and it’s still playing out. Because nothing has changed, and people know that.

Ruy Teixeira, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority: You can make the case that Obama has been a very successful and progressive president, but people are impatient. What used to keep people in line, so to speak, when they had these kinds of dissatisfactions was, “Oh, I’m really frustrated, but what can we do? The country is so right-wing. We’ve got to worry about the national debt—there’s no room in the system for change.” Now there’s much more of a sense of possibility. The Democratic Party has contributed to this transformation by becoming more liberal, and by ceasing to be obsessed with the national debt and the deficit.

Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Primary Politics: Here’s the irony—the Bernie people are the Obama people. They’re all the young people; that’s the Obama coalition. They’re frustrated because under Obama, nothing much happened that they liked. They’re taking it out on Hillary, which is unfortunate, since she’s much more capable of making something happen.

Jedediah Purdy, Professor of Law at Duke and author of After Nature: The disappointment in Obama took a while to set in. The Obama campaign had the form and rhetoric of transformative politics, but not the substance. Many of us believed or hoped the substance might follow the form; but it didn’t. It turns out you need a program that challenges existing power and aims to reshape it. So Sanders represents the continuation of these insurgent energies. Clinton is also the continuation of Obama, but the Obama of governance, not of the campaign.

The party hasn’t kept up with its base

Jill Filipovic, lawyer and political columnist: The party itself has been stuck in some old ideas for a while. You’ve been seeing movement around the edges, whether from Elizabeth Warren or these grassroots movements for income inequality. The pro-choice movement, for example, is a key part of the Democratic base that has liberalized and modernized and completely changed its messaging in a way that the party is now just catching up to. So you get these internal discords that dredge up a lot of bad feelings.

Danielle Allen, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard: In the last 20 years, we’ve collectively experienced various forms of social acceleration. Rates of change in social dynamics have increased across the spectrum, from income inequality to mass incarceration to immigration to the effects of globalization and the restructuring of the economy. When you have an acceleration of social transformation, there’s a lag problem. The reigning policy paradigms will be out of sync with the actual needs on the ground. That’s what we’re experiencing now.

Jedediah Purdy: The people who have been drawn to the Sanders campaign have no love for or confidence in elites, Hillary’s habitus. And why should they? They’ve seen growing inequality and insecurity, the naked corruption of politics by oligarchic money, total cynicism in the political class of consultants and pundits, and wars so stupid and destructive that Trump can say as much and win the GOP primaries. There’s a whole world that people are surging to reject.

There’s a double standard against Hillary

Jill Filipovic: The dovetailing of gender and wealth in this election is really striking. I don’t remember a lot of Democrats ripping John Kerry to shreds for being wealthy when he ran for president. But it’s been interesting to see Clinton demonized for her Goldman Sachs speeches. For some Democrats, that seems to be inherently disqualifying. Obviously, money would be an issue even if she were a male candidate, because this is an election that’s about income inequality. But the sense that she’s somehow undeserving, that does strike me as gendered.

Theda Skocpol: Older women support Clinton because they’ve witnessed her career, and she’s always been into economic redistribution. Some Sanders followers have been quite sexist in things they’ve said; that’s very apparent to older women. A friend who studies abortion politics tells me that the nasty tweets she’s gotten from Bernie supporters for backing Hillary are worse than anything she gets from the right wing.

Amanda Marcotte, politics writer for Salon:What you’re seeing is a huge drift in the party, away from having our leadership be just a bunch of white men who claim to speak for everybody else. We’re moving to a party that puts women’s interests at the center, that considers the votes of people of color just as valuable as the votes of white people. Unfortunately, some of the support for Sanders comes from people who are uncomfortable with that change and are looking to a benevolent, white patriarch to save them.

ELAINE KAMARCK: Clinton is being penalized because she has a realistic view of what can be done, and that leads people to mistake her for some kind of bad conservative. She’s not. She’s extraordinarily liberal, particularly on children and families. But because she’s been around a while, when Sanders comes out with this new radical stuff, they think, “Oh, he’s the one whose heart is in the right place.” But listen, she took on Wall Street before he did, in a way that hit their bottom line. If people really want to get something done, they’d vote for her.

Mark Green: Look, there’s a debate I have with my friend Ralph Nader. He sees Hillary as more Wall Street, and I see her as more Wellesley. She’s as smart as anyone, grounded, practical, engaging, and unlike most testosterone-fueled male politicians, actually listens more than lectures. So she’s not as dynamic a candidate as Bill and Barack? Who is? That’s an unfair comparison. But if I had to bet, I’d guess she’ll be as consequential and good a president as either of them.

It’s the economy, stupid

John Judis: There have been insurgencies before—George Wallace in ’64 and ’72—that were radical. What made Wallace radical was the split in the party over civil rights. What makes Sanders radical is the lingering rage over the Great Recession.

If you want to move the question up a level theoretically, you can talk about the failure of “new Democrat” politics to deliver prosperity or economy security. Clinton and the Democrats in Washington don’t understand the level of anxiety that Americans, and particularly the young, feel about their economic prospects. It can’t be addressed by charts showing the drop in the unemployment rate.

Brett Flehinger, historian at Harvard and author of The 1912 Election and the Power of Progressivism: The Democratic Party has done a poor job of delivering on the economic promises of equality. That’s what’s opened up the possibility for Sanders. It’s what he’s believed in for 20-plus years. But the question is: What’s making it resonate now? It’s the failure of the party to liberalize, since Bill Clinton.

Jacob Hacker: There’s a feeling of, “Really? This is it? This is the recovery we’ve been promised?” It’s been a long, difficult path since 2008 and the financial crisis. Even Democratic voters who are doing pretty well are feeling that something has gone seriously awry.

This may be the first time in my life that there’s been a full-throated critique of the Democratic Party as being excessively beholden to money and too willing to work within the system. You saw echoes of this in the Howard Dean campaign, and you saw it much more forcefully in 2000 with Ralph Nader. But Nader was not running within the Democratic Party; he was clearly playing a spoiler role. Whereas Sanders is essentially trying to take the Democratic Party in a different direction.

Jedediah purdy: Bernie’s campaign is the first to put class politics at its center. Not poverty, which liberal elites have always been comfortable addressing, and not “We are the 99 percent,” which is populist in a more fantastical sense, but class more concretely: the jobs and communities of blue-collar people, the decline of the middle class, the cost of education.

Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center: When you ask Clinton supporters, or people who see Clinton favorably, you’ll find that more than half will say that, compared to 50 years ago, life is better in America today. Whereas among Sanders supporters, one-third will say that things are actually worse.

Democrats are too fixated on white workers

Jill Filipovic: The class-based concerns that a lot of the loudest voices in the Sanders contingent of the Democratic Party focus on are the concerns of the white working class, and they aren’t bringing a lot of race analysis into it. The income-inequality argument makes a case, particularly to the white working class, in a way that seems to have alienated African Americans and, to a lesser extent, the Hispanic vote.

Mychal Denzel Smith: Look at every demographic breakdown of who votes. The strongest Democratic Party voters are black women. So why is it that you’re so zeroed in and focused on regaining the white working-class vote? What value does that have to you, as opposed to appeasing the voters that are actually there for you? Democrats want it both ways. They want to attract the white working-class voter again, but what they don’t accept is that the reason they lost that voter is because of Republican appeals to racism. So the Democrats want to be the party of anti-racism but also win back the racists. You can’t do that! Why would you want a coalition of those people? It doesn’t make sense.

Millennials of color are tired of waiting

Alan Abramowitz, professor of political science at Emory and author of The Polarized Public? Why American Government Is So Dysfunctional: Why are African Americans so loyal to the Clintons? Part of it is just familiarity. They feel a comfort level with the Clintons, and they really like Bill Clinton, especially older African American voters. But there’s a generational divide even among African American voters. Younger African Americans and Latinos are not as supportive of Clinton.

Mark Hugo Lopez: I was in Chicago recently, and I was surprised when a young Latina college student stood up and described how much she did not like Clinton. She actually said, “I hate Hillary Clinton.” That’s the phrase she used, which drew a round of applause from everybody in the room.

Johnetta Elzie, a leader of Black Lives Matter: I don’t think anyone was ready to deal with black millennials. I just don’t believe that anyone in politics who is running on a national scale knows how to address young black or brown people in a way that’s different from how they addressed our elders. Because we’re not the same.

I remember when Hillary got shut down by some young black students in Atlanta. They wanted to know, “What does she even know about young black people in this neighborhood and what we go through?” John Lewis basically told them, “You need to wait to speak to Hillary. Just be polite, ask questions, yada yada.” And people were like, “But you were a protester before you were a politician! You know what it is, you know the sense of urgency, you know what it means to be told to wait and to know that we don’t have time to wait.”

Mychal Denzel Smith: Throughout our history, progressive movements have often left out the idea of ending racism. Then they go to communities of color and say, “What choice do you have but to join with us­—to put aside your concerns about the differences that we experience in terms of racism?” In this election, the movement on the ground has at least pushed Democrats to adopt the language of anti-racism. They’ve had to say things like “institutionalized racism”—they’re learning the language on the fly. The problem is, they understand that they don’t actually have to move on these issues, because they have Trump to run against. All they have to do is say, “Look at how crazy the other option is. Where else are you going to go?”

Split? What split?

Ruy Teixeira: I don’t see differences massive enough to provoke any kind of split that has serious consequences. It’s just part of an ongoing shift in the Democratic Party. The party is going to continue to consolidate behind a more aggressive and liberal program, and the Sanders people are a reflection of that. We shouldn’t lose track of the fact that Clinton will be the most liberal presidential candidate the Democrats have run since George McGovern.

Brett Flehinger: In historic terms I don’t think this party is split. I don’t even think the divide is as big as it was in 2000, when a significant portion of Democratic voters either considered Ralph Nader or voted for Nader.

Alan Abramowitz: It’s easy to overstate how substantial the divide is. Some of it is more a matter of style, the sense that Clinton and some of these longtime party leaders are tainted by their ties to Wall Street and big money. But it’s not based so much on their issue positions, because Clinton’s issue positions are pretty liberal. Not as far left as Bernie—but then, nobody’s as far left as Bernie. Part of it is a distortion, because you can’t get to Bernie’s left, except maybe on the guns issue. So Bernie can always be the one taking the purist position.

Theda Skocpol: This isn’t a revolution. The phenomenon of having a left challenger to somebody called an establishment Democrat goes way back. It’s been happening my whole life, and I’m not a child. It’s never successful, except in the case of Obama. And Obama had something that the other challengers didn’t: He was able to appeal to blacks. Most of these left candidates appeal to white liberals, and Sanders is certainly in that category. His entire base is white liberals.

Kevin Baker, author of the novel Strivers Row: Democrats have almost always been the party that co-opts and brings in literal outsiders and outside movements. In the late nineteenth century, it was a bizarre coalition between Southern bourbon planters and big-city machines, which each had their own grievances. Then it was an uneasy coalition between those same machines and the agrarian populists brought in by William Jennings Bryan. Then you had the Grand Coalition, the biggest, most diverse coalition in American history, which was the New Deal one: farmers and workers, urbanites and Main Street progressives, blacks, whites, feminists, unionists. It lasted a long time, until it broke down over race and the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Finally, you had the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council and the Clinton-ite and Obama-ite version of more conservative progressivism. But what that coalition left unanswered, for a lot of people in the party and in the country, was just how they were going to make a living in this new world. What we’re seeing now is a very civil contest, relatively speaking, over who is going to lead that coalition.

Bernie isn’t the future, but his politics are

Alan Abramowitz: Younger voters are the future of the Democratic Party. But Bernie Sanders is not the future of the Democratic Party. The question is: Who’s going to come along who can tap into that combination of idealism and discontent that he represents?

john Judis: Sanders is an old guy, like I am, and not one, I suspect, to build a movement. And I think “movement” is probably the wrong word. What inspires movements is particular causes (Vietnam, civil rights, high taxes) or a party in power that is seen as taking the wrong stance on those issues (George W. Bush for liberals, Barack Obama for Republicans). If Clinton is the next president, I don’t expect a movement to spring up. Instead, I’d expect to see caucuses within the party that take a Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren point of view. But if Trump wins, you will see a movement, whatever Sanders does.

Jacob Hacker: There’s a growing chunk of the Democratic electorate that believes the existing policy ideas that define the mainstream of the party don’t go far enough. The question becomes: What do those folks do after the election? What kind of force will they be within the party going forward? Can they form a strong movement that will press national politicians to move to the left, the way the Tea Party did on the right?

If a Democrat wins in November, you probably can’t get a movement like the Tea Party under Obama, or Move On under Bush. But what you could get—what you would hope to get—is a true grassroots, longer-term movement that tries to move the center of gravity of American politics to the left.

Jedediah Purdy: But what would a movement built out of Sanders supporters be for, exactly? The campaign itself gives some answers. The Sanders campaign is much more distinct from the Clinton campaign, in substance, than Obama’s first campaign was. The Fight for $15, single-payer health care, stronger antitrust law, free college: These are huge, concrete goals. If people can organize around one guy who expresses them but, if elected, could do very little unless we also changed Congress, then we should be able to organize around them to try to change the makeup of political structures from top to bottom. Maybe we need to move into our local Democratic parties. The Moral Majority took over school boards with a specific agenda they could implement. Are there electoral institutions, as well as party institutions, that we should be aiming to reshape in our image?

Danielle Allen: It’s a huge opportunity for Democrats, if they can take all the incoming young participants seriously and give them a real role in digging into hard policy questions. This is a chance to cultivate leaders who can run for office across the landscape—not just national office, but local office. The Republicans have done a much better job, in all honesty, at growing up a generation of younger politicians. Democratic politicians skew older, so that sums up the real question about the Sanders moment: Is this enough of a wake-up call to the Democratic Party to start bringing talent in?

The worst thing would be to ignore the split

David Simon: The Democrats are going to win, because they’re up against Trump. But I’m worried they’re going to paper over a fundamental flaw in their coalition, which is: You’ve got to help working people and the middle-middle class. They’re not your guaranteed votes, and you lost them once to Reagan. Maybe you can do without them long-term. But I would get them back because (a) it secures your coalition going forward and (b) it’s the right thing to fucking do.

Jill Filipovic: The brawls that people are having on Twitter every day—I don’t know if that’s healthy for the party. But the bigger debates are really important conversations to be having. Who is our coalition? Who are we representing, and how do we best do that? Do we want to be the center-left party of the ’90s, or should we be serving a more diverse and liberal voter base? I don’t think those conversations are going to destroy the party. I think they’re going to set us in a better direction.

Jacob Hacker: It’s nice to be able to talk about what’s happening on the Democratic side, because all of the focus has been on the Republican side. It’s a bit like living in a house that’s got some peeling paint and holes in the roof. Right next to it is a derelict building that’s practically falling over. And you’re like, “Man, I’ve got a nice house.” But if you just put your hand up and cover up your neighbor’s house so you can’t see it, you’d be like, “Um, I think my house needs some work.” The Democratic Party is kind of like that right now. I want to live there, but I really would love to upgrade it.