David Shribman
The Oklahoma performer and humorist Will Rogers liked to say "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." The man who was known for his vaudeville rope act and for a 1924 silent film called Going to Congress would feel right at home in his old party.
Today's Democrats are still smarting from their November loss to Donald Trump. On Capitol Hill, the party is in the minority in both chambers, and decisively outnumbered in the House. It has barely a third of the governors' offices and controls the state legislatures in only a quarter of the states.
And important groups within the Democratic Party are in despair over their prospects in a country governed by Mr. Trump and the conservative inner circle he is creating as he builds his administration.
Read more: Democratic Party faces struggle to regroup after Trump win
Read more: The real reason Donald Trump got elected? We have a white extremism problem
Margaret Wente: Did racism and sexism elect Trump?
"We were beginning to have a voice – just beginning," Antonia Hernandez, the former president and general counsel of the influential Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund who now heads the California Community Foundation, said in an interview. "We were beginning to feel as if we were part of the politics of this country. And now it's as if that sense of being a part of it has been rejected. There's a great deal of fear, a great deal of anxiety."
And so the world's oldest political party, facing its biggest identity crisis since the party's 1984 nominee, former vice-president Walter Mondale lost every state but his native Minnesota a third of a century ago, is struggling to find the way forward.
What to do? Resist Mr. Trump at every turn? (Some ideologues believe that is their duty.) Look for areas where they can work together? (Some pragmatists point to infrastructure investments, a hardy Democratic perennial embraced by Mr. Trump to the distress of Republicans leery of big-spending initiatives.) Go on a legal offensive and sue the president at every turn? (A group of state attorneys-general is contemplating this, emphasizing immigration, health care and climate change.)
The early strategy – wait and see what kind of administration he will put together, and hope he's more the abortion-rights, austerity-skeptic version of Donald Trump from the past century than the social-conservative, anti-immigration trade opponent of 2016 – plainly didn't work. This month, Mr. Trump is salting his administration with Obamacare opponents, global-warming doubters and public-school skeptics. Above all, they are cabinet picks more at odds with the Washington departments, many of which were created by Democrats, that they soon will control than advocates of their missions.
Most of all, Democrats are worried about confronting a national leader and party rival whose appeal they don't understand, whose policies they cannot abide, whose style they hold in contempt but who in some ways resembles the famous sports columnist Red Smith's description of the dazzling but enigmatic 1930s baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean: "a natural phenomenon, like the Grand Canyon or the Great Barrier Reef." They are also confronting the sobering realization of the futility of the observation of the great American president of the Dizzy Dean era, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Democrats, including President Barack Obama, long counted on a reprise of FDR's insight about Social Security, the income supplement for the aged – "No damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program," he said – to save Obamacare.
Instead, everyone, including beleaguered Democrats, expects the Republican Congress to vote to scrap the Obama health plan before the first month of 2017 is out. Congress reconvenes Jan. 3, and Mr. Trump is inaugurated Jan. 20. The Republicans almost certainly will want to phase out Obamacare gradually, but Democrats know that it is very likely the plan is doomed – and that an early vote will set its demise in motion.
And yet a peculiar, even haunting, Roosevelt shadow hangs over the party. It was the 32nd president whose initial victory in the 1932 election established the character of the party as the defender of the poor and striving, and the repository of hopes of immigrant groups and labour. Indeed, in setting out the New Deal in a speech at the convention that delivered the Depression-era presidential nomination to the New York governor, he specifically spoke of people "on the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in villages" who "cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever." Now those very people, especially in farmlands, the smaller cities and the urban areas that once were teeming centres of manufacturing plants that have been shuttered and whose jobs have been sent south of the border or overseas, are at the heart of the party's great angst over its future.
Earlier Democratic dilemmas have been ideological – the questions in 1972, after George McGovern was defeated in a landslide by Richard Nixon and after party losses in 1984 and 1988, plainly were about whether the party was too liberal. (It took a relative moderate, governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, to return the party to power in 1993.)
And while Mr. Clinton's support of NAFTA and of tough crime legislation is anathema to today's Democrats – his wife, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, had to disavow both policies under extreme pressure and amid great distress in the 2016 campaign – the axis of the debate over the party's future has shifted from ideology to identity.
Put simply, the question is whether the Democrats embrace their 21st-century inclination (to favour racial diversity, feminism, and gay and transgender rights) or retool to appeal again to their traditional blue-collar constituents, many of whom believe, as J.D. Vance put it starkly in the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy, "my home is a hub of misery." The misery surely is there – white working-class Americans are far more pessimistic than even their Hispanic and black counterparts, according to a CNN poll – and Democrats traditionally have been drawn to appeals to ameliorate misery.
But critics of the current impulses in the Democratic Party believe its leaders have strayed too far from party principles to make this mid-course correction.
"The party embodies the wishes and dreams of white-collar affluent, highly educated professionals," Thomas Frank, the author of the landmark 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas, which sought to explain the emergence of conservative populism, said in an interview. "This group is deeply mistrustful not only of New Deal politics but also of the people those policies are supposed to benefit." So while the short-term Washington legislative strategy is emerging in fits and starts, the broader strategic questions remain unanswered. How the Democrats sort out these questions will help shape the party's response to Mr. Trump, its effort to regain the White House in 2020 and its profile for the third decade of the 21st century.