Our Political Parties Are Struggling

"A look, from 30,000 feet, at both parties:

The Democrats are making a historic mistake. With the fraught issue of abortion devolving to the states and moving, in the next few years, toward local settlement, the national party is free to understand itself, and present itself to the public, in a different way. For half a century Democrats enjoyed the electoral and political benefits of their pro-choice stand -- they were for women's rights, reproductive freedom. But that stand also came with a stigma -- it was the party of heartless absolutism, of slippery-slope support for late-term abortion. There could be no gradations, every demand was maximalist. This stopped a lot of people from feeling they could join the party or support it, because support felt like complicity.

Now, in a national sense, the great agitating question is being taken off the board. The Democrats are free to be a normal party again, standing for things that are the normal concerns of parties (economics, war and peace). More voters would feel free to join.

Instead of seeing this they've replaced one stigma with another. Since at least 2020 they have aligned with or allowed themselves to be associated with another deeply agitating cultural question, the identity politics-wokeness regime. (It's amazing we still don't have an agreed upon word or phrase that fully captures this program.) Michael Lind, in a piece in the Tablet, sees it as composed of three parts, all falsely presented. The "Quota Project" uses anti-racism to pursue "social reconstruction." The "Androgyny Project" goes beyond civil rights and ignores gay rights to "redefine all male and female human beings as generic, androgynous humanoids whose sex is a matter of subjective self-definition." The "Green Project" uses climate change as an excuse to "radically restructure the society of the U.S. and other advanced industrial democracies."

These movements are of, from and driven by the left. The Democrats are the party of the left. Progressive pathologies morph into Democratic ideologies, tagging the party as radical. Why do the Democrats allow this to continue? Why don't they push back, hard -- as a party? Most of their elected officials aren't really on board with this stuff; many hate it. They know it limits their political prospects. America as it is currently constituted will never accept the regime, never be at peace with it, because Americans see it as a threat to their children and an insult to their sense of reality and fairness.

Arguments over wokeness -- in the schools, in legislation, in our public life as a nation -- will continue a long time. Democrats are on the wrong side, and making a historic mistake in not publicly and regularly beating back their fringe.

The Republicans -- where to start? They're riven by policy disagreements, some of which stem from philosophical disagreements regarding what conservatism is and must be in the 21st century. Weirdly, since politics is a word business, their Washington leadership can't find the words to talk about this. They don't know how to talk about public policy. In the debt-ceiling debate, if that's the right word, they're allowing themselves to be tagged as the Axe the Entitlements party, or at least as people who'd secretly like to do it but can't admit it, but when they're in power they'll try.

If they do that they will never win national power, or at least presidential power, again. Which they kind of know. But they do it anyway. Because they haven't decided if they're a "limited government" party or a party that accepts, as it should, that the federal government will never be small in our lifetimes, and being mature means seeing that and turning the party's focus toward the pursuit of more conservative ends, such as . . . helping families? Police the government, don't spend like nuts, aim for growth, encourage dynamism, think long term.

In any case they should stop saying "limited" government. People think the federal government is already limited, as in slow and stupid. They'd like it to be able and efficient. Maybe lean into a government that doesn't push us around, demanding more than it's due. Everybody wants that.

From 30,000 feet it's obvious that an attendant problem is that the GOP hasn't been able, on the national level, to present itself as a governing party -- a serious political entity into whose steady hands the American people can entrust their government. We saw this on the floor of the House during the vote for Speaker.

Both parties are missing something big. For the Democrats it's an inability to accept a gift from history and become a normal party again. For the Republicans, it's an inability to agree on what they stand for in this century, and an inability to talk about the meaning of things." [1]

1. Declarations: Our Political Parties Are Struggling
Noonan, Peggy.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 04 Feb 2023: A.15.