Relax We're A Boomer Party - Be Proud of It

The election was close but in the end Biden triumphed, Democrats lost seats in the House and did not retake the Senate. (Pending a Georgia runoff, which admittedly could change the narrative).

Once again progressives are scratching their heads on why their dreams of libertine social democracy don't seem to be coming to fruition, why the white working class is deserting them. This time a new variation has come, with some Latino voters switching sides, providing further evidence against the demographics is destiny argument. 

As someone who's often wished the Democrats would make a radical transformation to hack a system which privileges rural whites, this is somewhat disheartening. But not really.  You accept it at a certain point. What we accomplish in the future will largely be based on luck and tactical decisions made on the fly. There is no new strategy, because any new strategy would be antithetical to our core values.

Was It Ever Possible to Be Something Else?

There are certain parts of the story that are well trod. Democrats were once the party of Jim Crow, but Republicans gradually made inroads in the South which culminated in Southern realignment. Republicans were once the party of black voters, but FDR won the black vote in 1936. Meanwhile, black Republicans became increasingly disenchanted by the social Darwinism of the Republican Party and both cohort replacement and changes in identification put them well on their way to becoming strong Democratic identifiers well before the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

That slavery and the civil rights movement had a unique role in shaping the Democratic Party is beyond dispute. And yet....

Enter the Boomers

(David Crosby - White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Son of a Wall Street employee and descendant of the Van Rensselaer family)

(Jerry Rubin - son of a Teamster. Upwardly mobile American of Jewish descent. )

The spiritual awakening of the 1960s and early 1970s, aka the boomers, is often poorly understood. To grasp the changes that America underwent during this period it's helpful to start with the fact that 2/3 of baby boomers did not go to college.  The elite counterculture then, was much more important in terms of gradual influence than representing a decisive political demographic.

In fact, as documented in the The Emerging Republican Majority, young people were trending away from the Democratic Party in many parts of the country throughout the 1960s.  If you were a WASP college student in the 1960s you saw your parents as somewhat square and thought the counterculture was onto something. If you were a Jewish American, your parents may have already been liberal, and the changes looked like progress. And yet everywhere else the counterculture looked more like a war against civilization.

Had it been possible to avoid, absent the counter culture, New Deal politics might have continued unabated without much interrupted, as society continued the debate on the the balance of resources between the haves and the have nots. 

However, this was not to be the case. Rather new questions would emerge. Does God exist? Is abortion moral? What responsibility does the United States military have to protect civilian lives overseas? Reason vs Faith, the gay rights movement, would all become theaters in the culture war. 

Boomers Can't Stop Being Boomers

With the decisive defeat of George McGovern in 1972, the self loathing and doubt of how Democrats could carry on as a party of Abortion, Acid and Amnesty began. Largely, this debate continues to this day. However at each turn the Democratic Party has largely become more boomer even while creating detailed mission statements on how to return to being the party of the New Deal.

This story starts with an organization called "Coalition for a Democratic Majority" which was affiliated with and inspired by Senator Scoop Jackson. Jackson, a cold war liberal born in 1912, was certainly no boomer and seemed to be sincere in his desire to return to the politics of the New Deal. Wikipedia lists his views as:

Cold War liberal, an anti-Communist, a supporter of high military spending and a hard line against the Soviet Union, especially on human rights' issues, but also a strong supporter of the welfare state, social programs and labor unions.

Jackson lost the 1976 nomination, but the Coalition for a Democratic Majority would largely be replaced by Democratic Leadership Council in 1985.  Unlike the CFDM though, the DLC would actually be staffed by counter culture boomers even as it maintained that it's mission statement was to move in the opposite direction.  By 1992, America had it's first anti-boomer boomer ticket in Clinton and Gore, who had both been DLC members.

 At this point, millennial leftists and some Republicans will try to tell the story a bit differently . In their retelling, it was Bill Clinton (or perhaps Carter. or perhaps Obama) who sold out the Democratic Party as a socially liberal pro business enterprise.   

The problem with this is it ignores the reality of the changes in the electorate. The electorate itself has gradually moved away from the old class antagonisms of the New Deal towards a central debate on the values of the 1960s.  Is the great man a macho, tough guy who restores order like Clint Eastwood? Or a thoughtful, gentle individual who promotes kindness and tolerance?

In this sense the why should not be hard to understand. A society that becomes wealthier will eventually move to see politics as a morality war rather than a fight for survival. 

Enter Trump - the Great Reactionary 

If Clinton had made it clear there was no going back, Trump finally threw gasoline onto the fire with his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. 

The central message of the 2016 campaign was that the country was out of control due to bad trade deals and illegal immigration run amuck, a mess created by liberal elites.

For most liberals then, it made sense to view the 2016 race as principally about racism. And indeed, it was clear that 2016 was "partly" about race, just as every election is in a country where black Americans are the principle remaining New Deal constituency in the Democratic Party and currently make $0.75 on the dollar that every white American does in our current social Darwinist hellscape.  

And yet...now having both the 2020 and 2016 campaigns under our belt, it may make sense to view the Trump as simply a new theater in the Boomer Wars.  Trump may be a sexual libertine and a boomer himself, but his message on the 1960s and 1970s is clear: the legacy is crime, terrorism, social distrust, babies being ground up, 8 year olds changing their gender and the destruction of traditional morality. 

 If these themes weren't entirely new, Trump's key contribution was also a rejection of reason itself. While we generally associate reason with the enlightenment, it was, at least until the 1960s considered a gentleman's playground. The increasing role of higher education and and the dissemination of information through the internet though, made it a way of life. Society increasingly has become divided into the Nice Smart Virgins battling the Dumb Cruel Chads, with each election becoming a chance for the competing factions to play cheerleader for their championed lifestyle. (Not e that Dems still, I repeat, still, need votes from Dump Cruel Chads. But we'll get to that)

Of course, Trump's rejection of reason could also be a forerunner of rejecting democracy itself, but we'll see. 

Bernie Sanders - the Last Anti Boomer Boomer

While Bernie Sanders is technically from the silent generation, his counter culture experience and lifetime values are thoroughly in the elite experience of the 1960s.  Like Bill Clinton, Bernie is often seen as rejecting the cultural warfare of the last 50 years and bringing back the coalition of the New Deal. But a closer analysis reveals this is largely not the case.

Bernie ism is essentially about an economic powergrab for younger urbanites. With his 2016 campaign of Free College for All Bernie hoped to provide a simple message to struggling young people packed into small dorm rooms, or recent grads in small apartments paying off student loans.   

That his message of Free Healthcare for All had more of a broad age range appeal cannot be denied. However the overall marketing and simple packaging is largely a repackaging of boomer values to a younger generation. There are simple solutions to America's problems which lie in copying the policies of foreign governments, in this case Canada. 

If Bernie did one thing right, it was to be oblivious to quagmire of white guilt and feminism which largely crippled by Hillary Clinton's campaign.  His plain speech and distrust of elites spoke somewhat well to Other America. However, by 2020 his campaign was largely moving in the opposite direction. 

We Are Screwed, We Can't Reverse It. The New Deal Isn't Dead Yet

A cursory glance at French and English politics would make it obvious that these trends aren't unique to America. The internationalization creates norms, which make it harder for each party to break out of. And again, this would not be so bad except that in the United States the Senate itself gives the Democrats a much weaker hand to play, with sparsely populated states like Montana being able to disproportionately strengthen the hand of the traditional morality that was rejected by elite 1960s counterculture.

Nor should we go too far and exaggerate the triumph of the boomers and their spiritual descendants. They continue to gain continue to gain control of the Democratic Party but they don't have a majority in America. Yet.  Moreover occasionally reactionary forces, such as the African American vote in South Carolina, puts a stop these trends by electing candidates who can speak to a more primal sense of the American electorate. 

Perhaps the last hurrah of the New Deal influence on the Democratic Party will probably be the passage of Obamacare, a piece of legislation which extended the unfinished business of the New Deal after calamitous elections by the Republicans. 

But the general sense is that the boomer influence will continue to grow. In some cases there will be quick and decisive cultural victories as on gay marriage. However I feel there are reasons to believe substantial New Deal legislation like Obama will never be passed again.  

This is not because the boomer Democrats are not strictly focused on social issues, they are if anything highly focused on the question of resources and power as well as social issues. However the decline in their political acumen just may not allow this to happen. To put it another way the Boomer Millenials carry too heavy a load. They want completely free healthcare, they want gun bans, they want representation for women, they want free college and debt forgiveness. 

To put it another way, modern liberalism just carries too much weight, and is largely both popular nationally and poorly suited towards winning elections under America's system. Therefore we face the worst of all worlds of an ascendant conservative age in terms of policy, even as the electorate becomes more liberal. 

So relax and enjoy you're irrelevance, progressives. If we're lucky, we'll win and get some of what we want. More likely will be that Roe v Wade will be overturned and the Republicans will continue to come up with just enough votes for the capitalist ideocracy alliance. But no big deal.  Keep on Trucking.