Why the Democrats' Future Is Brighter Than The Republicans'

Unfashionable optimism inspired by 42 year-old thoughts from my former boss Hendrik Hertzberg.

No, not that neoliberal movement. This was a different one.

Jimmy Carter is lingering in the news as funeral ceremonies begin today and continue through next week. My appreciation of Carter, which argued that his presidency marked the beginning of this country’s conservative turn rather than the end of its liberal one, is posted on Politico. Today I pulled down from my bookshelf a few volumes about Carter, including biographies by Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird that had not yet been published when I wrote that Politico piece way back in 2015. I think my analysis holds up. It’s far from the only truth about Carter, but it is a truth.

Let’s talk about another truth.

Among the books I looked at was A New Road for America: The Neoliberal Movement, which is an edited transcript of a conference that the Washington Monthly held in October 1983. The Monthly was then advocating what it called neoliberalism, which (contrary to current usage) called not for free-market fundamentalism, but rather for a more idealistic, more intellectually nimble, and more power-savvy liberalism after the debacle of Jimmy Carter’s failed re-election bid in 1980. This led the Monthly up some blind alleys, and in retrospect, for instance, I wish we’d noticed more quickly that the labor movement we were trying to repair was fighting for its life. But we asked the right questions, which is all you can really ask from political commentary decades later, and a remarkably high proportion of what the Monthly published back then is worth reading today (as is the excellent work it continues to publish under editor-in-chief Paul Glastris).

Historians now recognize that the post-New Deal order crumbled in the early 1970s. Carter never figured out what to build in its place because, for all his many exemplary qualities, Carter never understood the mechanics of political power. In fairness, the Democrats’ problem was quite difficult to solve, and in various ways neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama succeeded at rebuilding the party either, though they did better than Carter. Joe Biden showed us the beginnings of a new approach, at least in the domestic-policy realm, but voters rejected it, or anyway him, in 2024, even though he wasn’t on the ticket. More on this in a moment.

I attended the October 1983 conference (I was a Monthly editor at the time) and I’ve long remembered that Hendrik Hertzberg, who as editor of the New Republic had previously been my boss, and before that a Carter speechwriter, expressed some eloquent thoughts there about the Carter presidency. You may be more familiar with Rick as a New Yorker writer who for years wrote the magazine’s “Comment” section. It has never been as good since Rick stopped writing these.

Anyway, today I reread Rick’s 42 year-old assessment of Jimmy Carter. It is, I think, as sound an assessment as you’ll find of Carter’s legacy and what it means for the Democrats. Let me quote him at some length:

It’s taken for granted now, of course, that the Carter administration was a failure…. It was a failure. And one of the reasons was the failure to make the connection between moral impulses and political actions. That connection is called ideology, and the Carter administration didn’t have one. Or, more precisely, Jimmy Carter had a moral ideology, but not a political ideology. He had moral impulses but not a model of the political power relations in society that would build those moral impulses permanently into the process of government [italics mine]. The creation of an ideology is what the liberal side of the political spectrum desperately needs.

The story of the Democratic party since 1980 has largely been a story of trying and failing to build that ideological model of political power relations. Republicans, who (as Rick noted in that talk) did have an ideology, succeeded for awhile, but over time that ideology deteriorated and today it no longer exists. (See my February 2023 New Republic piece, “How the GOP Lost Its Brain.”) The GOP is now a proto-fascist cult of personality. Somewhat miraculously, it won the last presidential election, but nobody can tell you what it’s for except to pacify Donald Trump’s narcissistic personality disorder and deliver the goods to big business and the rich. Its model of political power relations is rickety in the extreme; as the 2024 primary season showed, Trump’s power to bully isn’t transferable to anybody else. No other duce arancia waits in the wings. And Trump himself is a much weaker figure than is generally recognized (though no less dangerous because of it).

It’s the Democrats, strangely, who’ve begun the process of renewal, with Biden reasserting the power of a strong central government to address the needs of working people. (On this point I urge you to read this recent New Yorker piece by Nicholas Lemann, who also attended that 1983 conference.) We’re in the early stages yet, and we haven’t seen this new ideology win an election, or even win working-class votes. That’s a problem! But for all the despair liberals are feeling today, the Democratic party has a brighter future than the Republican party, because Trump is a dead end and Biden is not. Assuming our democracy is still in working order four years from now—and I have to believe it will be—Democrats and liberalism may finally begin solving the problem that Jimmy Carter couldn’t.