Change to believe in: Democrats, the party of perpetual flux, prepare for the Biden banner

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David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics. He teaches at McGill’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.

As the Democrats prepare for their quadrennial convention, the world’s oldest active political party – the philosophical home of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy – is undergoing vast changes. Again.

Those changes go beyond the fact that, for the first time, this midsummer conclave is being held entirely remotely, with delegates confined to their dining-room tables, living-room sofas and basement bunkers. These transformations are happening in the character of the party, the content of its ideals and the coalition of its various interests. They are going on as the party leans left even as it girds itself to nominate a standard bearer whose instincts reside resolutely in the political centre. They are in train as the party seeks an awkward, almost certainly artificial, sense of unity in a desperate effort to wrest power from a President whose instinct is to divide.

“Parties change. The moment changes,” former secretary of state John Kerry, the Democrat’s 2004 presidential nominee, said in an interview. “And I hope we have changed in some respects. But this numb-skull nonentity in the White House won votes that are Democratic votes that we had taken for granted.”

The great defection of those very Democratic voters – grandchildren of the union members and immigrants who flocked to the party and its New Deal program to combat the Great Depression, and the children of the voters who stuck with the party during the tumult of the Vietnam War years – is what helped make Donald Trump president. And so the great, consequential question the Democrats face in their rump convention in the delegates’ homes, scattered from coast to coast: Can they win back those voters while still retaining the urban and university elites, minorities and women who increasingly have become the face of the new Democratic Party?

“Oh my God, there have been great changes,’' said former governor Michael Dukakis, who was the party’s 1988 presidential nominee. “Those of us who were big reformers in the 1960s and 1970s are the distant past for the whole new generation of new activists who are taking us in different directions, and taking us further. This is a time of change and we are looking at a very different party.’'

Indeed, the Democrats are in the throes of an enormous transition, in some ways mirroring the transitions in the broader American society; when the party’s putative nominee, former vice-president Joe Biden, selected Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate this week, he chose a woman who is both Black and South Asian and is married to a Jewish man – a vivid portrait of a changing country.

Moreover, Mr. Biden, 77, has acknowledged that he would be a “transitional” president – an inadvertently poignant self-description of a political figure who himself has undergone substantial change in an age of vast waves of change. In important ways, the Biden-Harris ticket is the personification of the transitions that have transpired in the party and in the country.

Mr. Biden was born into the New Deal voting bloc writ large, growing up with FDR as president in the blue-collar rail and coal-mining centre of Scranton, Pa. He graduated law school in 1968, the annus horribilis that included the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and senator Robert F. Kennedy and the riots outside that year’s Democratic National Convention. He was elected to the Senate in 1972, the year the Democrats overhauled their convention system to invite more women and Black Americans to power in the party. He presided over the bitter 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings that served as a precursor to the Me Too movement.

Two numbers underscore the changes in the Democratic Party and in American politics. In the election after the birth of Mr. Biden, his native Pennsylvania county sided with the Democratic ticket led by Roosevelt, by an 11-point margin. Just four years ago, Mr. Trump came within four percentage points of winning there – and captured Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes. Today, the Scranton area – along with the suburbs around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia – may be the most important battleground in U.S. politics.

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The Democratic Party that is undergoing such fundamental change was itself the party that fought change through the last half of the 19th century and sporadically in the 20th. The Democratic Party that is now rooted in the cities and in the North was the party of the South until the mid-1960s. The Democratic Party that was the vanguard of racial change in the civil-rights era and again in the age of Black Lives Matter was the party that fought integration – indeed, was unabashedly the party of white supremacy – after the Civil War and as late as the early 1960s. The Democratic Party that today speaks of increased Washington intervention in the economy and health care was the party that fought big government for decades.

The party that relied on white voters from the lower strata of 19th-century America is today struggling to win back the support of what political professionals call “non-college whites.” And the party that is today congenial to elites was the ultimate enemy of the nation’s elites at the end of the 19th century and into the early years of the 20th century, when three-time presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan inveighed against privilege and spoke of “the avenging wrath of an indignant people.’'

“We used to run against the elites,” said former vice-president Walter Mondale, who was the Democratic presidential nominee three-quarters of a century after Mr. Bryan’s last campaign. “Ivy League faculties didn’t vote for us. We didn’t fit. But they are voting for Democrats now.”

Several key moments of change stand out. One was in 1924, when, in a marathon 17-day convention that required 103 ballots to select a presidential nominee, the party deadlocked on whether to condemn the Ku Klux Klan. Four years later, with the first Catholic presidential nominee, the Democrats won the 10 biggest cities in the country; they had lost all 10 in the 1920 election. By 1964, when Congress was debating the Civil Rights Bill, the Southern mastodons of the Democratic Senate – avowed racists – discovered they could not muster the filibuster needed to kill the legislation.

“It was a slow evolution, driven in part by demography – by the growth of diversity in the country – and by the changing nature of the economy,” said Bruce Schulman, a Boston University historian. “By 1936, the Democratic coalition as we know it had taken shape, identified with liberalism and with activist government.” That was the year of FDR’s 46-state landslide, the first time a Democrat had enough support nationwide to win the White House without a single Southern electoral vote.

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The fissures in today’s Democratic Party have been bridged in part by time, and in part by the Trump phenomenon.

It has been six months since the most recent multiple-candidate Democratic debate. Since then, Mr. Biden has vanquished his rivals. Meanwhile, the coronavirus – as well as the protests and revival of awareness of Black pain prompted by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis – have dominated the news, blunting the effect of the differences among Democrats, but not eliminating them.

But the Democratic debates – 11 in all, the first coming 14 months ago with 20 candidates tangling in a two-night format – put the party’s divisions in sharp relief. And in every one of those sessions, Mr. Biden stood at the centre of the proceedings, not by virtue of his strength as a candidate – in truth, through most of the primary season it was his weakness, not his strength, that attracted the most attention – but by virtue of his Goldilockian political porridge: not too hot, not too cold. The battle lines swiftly took on an overarching theme: How much change did the modern party of change want, and how much could it stomach?

That debate can be distilled into one sentence, uttered by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and directed at a moderate with views not so different from Mr. Biden’s, former Representative John Delaney of Maryland: “I don’t understand why anyone goes to all the trouble of running for President of the United States,” she said, “to tell us what we can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”

Ms. Warren – along with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who was the last of Mr. Biden’s rivals for the nomination when he dropped out of the race in April – saw the Trump phenomenon as an opening for major change in the party and, if successful, in the country. Understanding that the party eventually would unite against just about anyone – lawn signs Democrats placed throughout the country urged the election of “Any Functioning Adult 2020” – the pair calculated that this was the year to work for fundamental change: a broad centralized health-insurance scheme to cover all Americans, far-reaching environmental structures to fight global climate change, dramatic changes in the tax code to battle the wealth gap. The two New England lawmakers spoke of revolution, and they meant it. “If there is going to be class warfare in this country,” Mr. Sanders said at the AFL-CIO union’s convention last year, “it’s time that the working class of this country won that war and not just the corporate elite.”

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At the same time there was ferment in the Democratic grassroots – ferment that continued throughout this summer.

Last month, Jamaal Bowman, a progressive insurgent, upset Representative Eliot Engel of New York, the powerful 16-term incumbent who was chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, in a Democratic primary. It was the third example in two years when a progressive candidate of colour toppled an urban establishment liberal in a Democratic primary.

His victory, combined with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 unexpected win over former fourth-ranking House Democrat Joseph Crowley in New York and Ayanna Pressley’s defeat of Michael Capuano of Massachusetts, laid bare the growing ideological and generational tensions in the party.

This new rebellion has all the potential power of the liberal insurgency of the 1960s, which G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot described as “The Liberal Hour” in a landmark 2008 book of that title.

“Today there’s an agenda that resembles the 1960s in some ways – the Green New Deal and Medicare-For-All,” said Mr. Mackenzie, an emeritus political scientist at Maine’s Colby College.

“But the forces of resistance – the vise-hold that special-interest groups and social media have – are far stronger than the resistance in the 1960s. Getting the magnitude of legislation that we had in the 1960s is extremely difficult and unlikely today.”

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For months, Mr. Biden resisted the entreaties from the left. He calculated that he was the “remainder man,” the candidate who would be left standing after Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren cancelled each other out and as the other moderates in the field – former mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota – faded.

That worked, but not without a large boost from Black voters in South Carolina and in the state primaries that followed. And as Mr. Biden moved closer to his apparent nomination, it became clear that he had to court the contenders to his left and, perhaps more importantly, their supporters.

Part of that was hard; Mr. Biden had to inch left on health insurance (he is now supporting Medicare for those at the age of 60, five years earlier than current law) and climate change (his is a Pale-Green New Deal). But part was not so difficult at all. Mr. Biden’s blue-collar roots and the party’s post-1932 profile make that a natural.

“Coronavirus and the economic meltdown have cast the Green New Deal and Medicare For All in a different light,” said Democratic Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts. “These things don’t seem so radical any more.”

Democratic strategists are arguing that, with Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket, the party’s leadership is no more elite than that of the Republican Party, and they’re emphasizing the party’s heritage as representatives of those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

“The party is interested in helping out people in the middle and lower classes,” said Molly Michelmore, a Washington and Lee University historian. “Very few people are paying much attention to the very poor, but if anybody is, it’s the Democrats.”

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Ordinarily, a struggle like the one that the two-dozen 2020 Democratic candidates engaged in would have played out in raucous midsummer platform hearings and in a colourful convention scene. But the virus has drained the colour from customary political activity, and the level of antagonism against the President has prompted Democrats to focus on their differences with Mr. Trump rather than their hesitations about Mr. Biden.

“We need a united front in this emergency and against this president,” said Edward Widmer, a Bill Clinton speechwriter who teaches at the Macaulay Honors College of City University of New York. “But progressives have qualms about centrist policies, and centrists have qualms about the progressives. The party will unite to defeat the President, but if Biden wins there will be fights among Democrats about which way to go next.”

That is, to borrow the title of an influential 1963 James Baldwin book about the sort of racial injustice that Americans are examining 57 years later, the fire next time. For now, and at this convention, it is only smouldering.

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