It will always be the people, the masses, who refuse to comply with authoritarian regimes, who are the last and strongest defense of our country and our freedom....
Now, "the masses" is part of a political vocabulary that grates on most American ears. It suggests the new politics of old countries, in which intellectual gods reach down to touch fingertips with an agglomerated hoi polloi. So does another term Ocasio-Cortez used in the same speech, "class solidarity". That may be an accurate shorthand for what is needed in place of racial solidarity, but it's an alien code to the majority of Americans in all walks of life. To succeed in American politics at the national level, one must bow to the American ethos of individual dignity. Politicians and activists whose hearts belong to the Left simply cannot bow — not to an individualist ethos, not to the traditionalism of many working people across ethnic lines, not to the possibility of progress without progressive ideology in full regalia.
Ocasio-Cortez apparently understands the need to bow but can't quite bring herself to go beyond alluding to it. Nothing less than a cathartic repudiation of her political debut would make any difference in her own standing with the electorate, and then probably not enough. Her established divisiveness is at least as limiting as Hillary Clinton's was. It's easy, too, to portray her as a phony: the architect's daughter who laundered her life story through a post-college job as a bartender and thus can let her supporters begin the story with "Working girl walks out of a bar...." Nevertheless, she's being touted widely as a leading contender for the next Democratic presidential nomination. Within progressive circles, the familiar upward spiral of enthusiasm for "rock star" figures is occurring in chronic isolation from the currents — and the stillnesses — of actual politics.
Individual figures aside, enthusiasm for progressive articles of faith is rapidly overwhelming the initial recognition that they hurt the Democratic Party in the 2024 elections. The party's national committee has chosen as its leader a denialist who says, "We've got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with voters." The erstwhile vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, a singularly gray eminence who, when photographed in the midst of orating, has the alarmed look of a school principal in a youth movie at the moment when things get out of hand, regrets that Democrats "weren't bold enough to stand up and say: 'You're damn right we're proud of these policies.'" He was referring to the faddish campaign of social coercion known as DEI, which was in retreat even as he spoke. Reaction against the outrages of Donald Trump is once again approaching symbiosis with them as Democrats prize those displays of diametric opposition that fail to click with the general public.
There are three ways, possibly all correct in various combinations, of understanding this perversity. It may be that the Democrats in question are suffering such extreme effects of intellectual incest that they really think a substantial majority of voters will start to like what they've been standing for if only the message gets through. Or it may be that they think each part of the message, such as the urgency of drastic action on climate change, is so important that there's no question of leaving it in the background; that one must simply keep expounding it. Or it may be that they find themselves in an endless game of musical chairs with other Democrats and can't bear to risk being ejected from the progressive circle.
The perversity is complicated by a false alternative: a message that concentrates on economic positions while leaving cultural ones implicitly unchanged. William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, in a conversation with Yascha Mounk and Galston's colleague Elaine C. Kamarck, puts his finger on the fatal flaw in that strategy:
Elaine and I came to regard cultural issues as a kind of credibility threshold. That is to say, unless people thought that you shared their sentiments and values, they wouldn't really give you a hearing for your economic message. There is a kind of economic fundamentalism that's at work in a lot of progressive thinking. And to use familiar language, the idea is that economics is the base and culture is the superstructure. And that economics does a lot more to shape the culture than culture does to shape the general mindset of the electorate. And the more we thought about that, the more we concluded that that was just wrong, that that might be true for progressive intellectuals, but by and large it was not true for average Americans.
Kamarck explains,
Yeah, and it's very simple. Look, the cultural issues are emotional. They scare people, they frighten people, okay? It's something they don't like. Emotion will always trump intellect.
It shouldn't take a think tank to arrive at that insight, but rigorously progressive minds are bound to skirt it. After all, it implies that they must give way to a different set of minds within the Democratic Party. One can hardly pretend to share sentiments and values that are antithetical to one's very persona; and even the most skillful pretense would fail with the electorate. So beleaguered party strategists ponder the superficial task of messaging and not the fundamental task of metamorphosis, while internal ideologues and external pressure groups redouble their rigor.
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"I had rather be right than be president."
— Henry Clay, 19th-century American statesman
Henry Clay never became president. Since his notion of being right was to strive for the best available modus vivendi between slaveholders and abolitionists with a view to eventual emancipation, he can be said to have upheld his principles by striving. Moreover, he actually succeeded in maintaining peace and national unity for a time by negotiating compromises.
In the Senate, leaders of the new generation, such as Jefferson Davis, Stephen A. Douglas, William H. Seward, and Salmon P. Chase, sat with giants of other days, such as Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. It was Henry Clay who divined the high strategy of the moment. The Union was not ripe to meet the issue of secession. Concessions must be made to stop the movement now; time might be trusted to deal with it later. On 27 January 1850 he brought forward the compromise resolutions that kept an uneasy peace for eleven years. The gist of them was (1) immediate admission of California; (2) organization of territorial governments in New Mexico and Utah without mention of slavery; (3) a new and stringent fugitive slave law; (4) abolition of the domestic slave trade in the District of Columbia. Such was the Compromise of 1850.
— Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People
Before that, however, Clay's adroitness had suffered a fateful lapse. In his fourth bid for the presidency, in 1844, he obfuscated his opposition to the annexation of Texas (a slaveholding republic). The upshot was that he failed to reassure the South while losing crucial support in the North and, with it, the election. An ambiguous approach to a great moral question must have seemed intolerable to abolitionists, but history's alternative to Henry Clay was not a foursquare abolitionist. It was James Knox Polk, a slavery expansionist who set in train the series of events that led to the carnage, and the legacy, of the Civil War. Of course, we'll never know what a President Clay would have wrought.
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Insist on a forcefully anti-slavery president, and you may get a disastrously pro-slavery one. Insist on the most rapid advancement of the climate agenda, and you may get a devastating reversal of it. It's not just the one agenda, either. On every head, Donald Trump's second presidency is far worse for leftist objectives than any Democratic moderation would have been. Successive Republican administrations will perpetuate the harm.
It matters who becomes president. It matters who occupies a seat in Congress and not in some coffee-shop retreat for righteous losers. Therefore it matters what mix of principle and practicality a candidate or a party offers to the electorate. If the Left can't bring itself to behave like the minority faction it is, then the Democratic Party can't afford to keep it.
