Dueling Diagnoses

Implicit in all diagnoses of a problem is a prescriptive remedy about how to fix it. Traditionally, political scientists expect that when a party loses an election, party leaders, interest group stakeholders, and allied activists will come together to try to figure out what went wrong. While the collective conversation can stretch on interminably, the basic idea is that the party learns from its mistakes and corrects course before the next election.

What’s wrong with this picture is that modern American parties are not really collective organizations with deliberative institutions, active memberships, or binding authority structures capable of having the kinds of conversations imagined by sanguine political scientists. Rather, as entities that bridge state and society, parties are contentious institutions that pull together differently situated political actors with conflicting interests and divergent agendas.

Career politicians want to pursue reelection above all else. Interest groups, think tanks, and party-aligned movements tend to prioritize the content of the policy agenda. Donors may oppose what movements demand, while officeholders may resent the demands of both. Although relations of mutual dependence pull them together, party coalitions are shot through with contentious politics.

Such a perspective on political parties casts postelection debates in a new light. While they may seem inconsequential, or an exercise in ass–covering by those trying to avoid blame, they present unique opportunities to shift the balance of party power and seize the initiative. When the incumbent party leadership is temporarily discredited by the sting of defeat, the party’s electoral future is uncertain and its core identity is open to question; contending groups and aspiring party leaders can jockey for position.

Data Doesn’t Speak for Itself

Beyond internal party conflicts of interest, another reason these postelection debates can be so contentious is that election outcomes don’t speak for themselves. They tell us who won but not why they won.

Election data can be sliced and diced in a number of different ways, with each analysis mobilized in support of distinct narratives that diagnose what went wrong and what to do about it. While some postelection analyses are more plausible than others, the true reasons why an election turned out one way and not another can never be pinned down definitively. As a result, postelection hot takes become fodder for the internal party struggle.

The outcome of the 2024 election, for instance, can be looked at in at least two very different ways. From one angle, when we strip away all the specifics of the campaigns and focus on what political scientists call “the fundamentals,” Harris’s defeat appears entirely unsurprising. Despite her meteoric (though temporary) rise in the polls last summer, she was inevitably associated with a historically unpopular president who, rightly or wrongly, was held responsible for post-pandemic inflation.

Unpopular incumbents governing over a period of inflation typically lose vote share in the next election. Indeed, 2024 was an especially cruel year for incumbent governments across the world. In comparison with other wealthy democracies, the US economy brought inflation down faster without sacrificing employment levels, perhaps explaining why this year’s electoral referendum on the Biden economy was the least harsh of all electoral reckonings that year.

Nevertheless, according to this narrative, nothing was particularly surprising about the 2024 election: an unpopular incumbent administration lost decisively but narrowly, mainly due to economic circumstances beyond its control, repeating a pattern that looks very similar to 2016 and 2020.

But from another angle, we can tell a very different story that places the 2024 election in all its historical specificity. From this perspective, the outcome is perhaps one of the most extraordinary events in American political history.

In yet another previously unimaginable defiance of political norms and criminal law, Trump won reelection after attempting to overturn the outcome of the previous one. He is the first Republican to win the popular vote in twenty years. He expanded his coalition and grew his base of support in every single state of the country, compared to 2020. He also made significant inroads into traditionally Democratic metro areas. All of this was achieved by a candidate whose character flaws and political baggage are so monumental it is hard to believe that they wouldn’t have disqualified any other candidate.

In this narrative, the fact that 2024 fits with a pattern of anti-incumbent reactions against inflation is irrelevant. What’s important is the identity of candidates themselves: Trump as a historically unprecedented danger to the republic who got reelected, and Harris as the candidate who failed to stop him.

Which of these explanations is correct? For the purposes of the Democratic Discourse, it doesn’t really matter. Postelection narratives are not so much empirical claims made about the world than they are political claims made on the world. They are the discursive material out of which factional forces can be marshalled, old guards can be challenged, and, sometimes, new internal party alignments can be cemented. Durable party transformation requires more than winning debates, of course. But prevailing in the postelection contest of ideas is a necessary part of that struggle.

The Last Discourse War

If the Democratic Party’s trajectory is significantly affected by the current postelection debate, it wouldn’t be the first time in its history. While the seeds of party change are often planted by failed insurgent candidates, such as Bernie Sanders in 2016, it is in the fateful moments following electoral defeat when they are nurtured and take root.

In 1968, as the New Deal Democrats were torn apart by domestic and foreign policy disputes and a chaotic national convention, movement-aligned New Politics reformers capitalized on a moment of electoral disarray to advance a narrative that diagnosed the party’s electoral crisis as an absence of party democracy. For a party whose male, pale, and stale leadership contrasted so sharply with the young and diverse movement activists flooding into its ranks, old guard defenders of the status quo had little to offer a rapidly changing society.

With the old way of doing things discredited, and pressure to reunify the party building ahead of the next election, a coalition of New Politics reformers and pragmatic party officials swept aside their opponents and installed the most far-reaching party reforms in American history. They lowered the barriers for participation, increased demographic representation, and sought to develop robust leadership accountability mechanisms.

While election losses can open new opportunities for the Left, they can also do so for the Right. Before the most ambitious New Politics reforms could be fully institutionalized, counterreformers seized on the Democrats’ 1972 landslide defeat as proof that the new reforms were disastrous. Reversing the 1968 narratives of New Politics activists, counterreformers claimed that party reform had resulted in too few party officials being included in the new presidential nominating process. With the sting of electoral defeat hanging over them, New Politics reformers and their allies were unable to prevent the partial rollback of their reform project.

Over a decade later, in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s second landslide victory, New Democrats grouped around the Democratic Leadership Council used the playbook to assail the party’s alleged capture by liberal groups and make the case for severing the party brand from its “big government” legacy.  While not a guaranteed path to success, prevailing in the postelection debate has been a key facet of previous party transformations.

Three Tendencies

Though the current round of intra-Democratic debate rages on, enough dust has settled to discern some core ideas, convergences, and emerging points of tension among the competing narratives. At the risk of oversimplification, we can sort them into three broad tendencies: left populist, new centrist, and accommodationist.

Predictably, Bernie Sanders jumped into the fray without pulling any punches: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” In the days and weeks that followed, progressives followed up with vocal endorsements for a revived left populism capable of countering the Trumpian alternative.

The friendly reception Sanders’s statement received outside his amen corner was less predictable. Ezra Klein dedicated a whole podcast episode to the question, “Would Bernie Have Won?” Conservative columnist David Brooks wondered aloud, “Maybe Bernie Sanders Is Right.” In the face of the obvious success of Trump’s MAGA movement, the left-populist critique seems to have struck a chord.

A second predictable postelection narrative hails from the party center. In keeping with a tradition stretching back to the post-1968 counterreformers, many of these pollsters and former party strategists emphasize the off-centeredness of Democratic positions on what they consider hot-button “social issues,” especially trans rights. Much of the blame for Democratic electoral failure is laid at the feet of unchecked campus culture, use of “woke” terminology, and other Fox News–sounding villains.

However, while there is continuity to this centrist narrative over the decades, there are also interesting signs of change. Signifying the underlying crumbling of the bipartisan neoliberal consensus, the new centrism has begun to shift away from the virtues of free markets and free trade and a technocratic obsession with procedure and process.

Following the lead of Biden himself — a lifelong centrist — the vast majority of congressional Democrats voted for or announced their support for his revival of industrial policy. While only partially realized, the Build Back Better agenda would have constituted “the most extensive package of economic benefits for working- and middle-class families” since the 1960s, according to one analysis.

Building a truly progressive alternative to the neoliberal order obviously requires much more than bold policy pronouncements. But as far as rhetoric goes, a “bottom-up and middle-out” economic agenda, and the underlying philosophy of modern supply–side economics embraced by Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, represent new positions for the formerly neoliberal party center.

The third tendency are those who have announced their readiness to accommodate themselves to the new reality and engage with Trump on his own terms. Whether due to the exhaustion of #Resistance or mere opportunism, accommodationist Democrats are extending feelers for cooperating on restricting immigration, cutting federal spending, and defending Social Security and Medicare. Rep. Ro Khanna has called for finding common ground with MAGA Republicans. In his first Truth Social post, Senator John Fetterman has recommended that Biden pardon president-elect Trump of all federal charges associated with his “bullshit” hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. Wittingly or otherwise, their efforts work to normalize Trump and the core themes of the MAGA movement.

Undergirding all three positions is the growing recognition that Trumpism offers something quite appealing to many millions of working-class voters. If Trumpism is to be thwarted, either a left populism must win working-class voters back or a robust industrial policy must lessen inequality and insecurity. Otherwise, aspects of Trumpism will be appropriated by Democrats.

Which narrative will prevail is not clear or predictable. Much will depend on the many unknowns of the new Trump administration and how Democrats choose to navigate the post-neoliberal landscape.

The Battle for “Common Sense”

In the wake of Harris’s defeat, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by New York’s lieutenant governor entitled, “Democrats, It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Our Neoliberal Era.” While the piece rightly noted the ways in which Bidenism tried with very mixed success to do just that, it ignored the degree to which Trumpism has already said its goodbyes to neoliberalism and is in the process of ushering in something new.

Political change, of course, isn’t typically very sudden. We don’t go to sleep in neoliberalism and wake up in something else. Political change unfolds at different speeds at different scales, often layering the new atop the old, displacing some of what came before while also generating frictions and outright contradictions as new and old interact and collide.

The neoliberal order has not vanished, nor will it ever entirely. After all, aspects of the New Deal order live on today, as the third-rail status of Social Security demonstrates. Long-standing neoliberal fantasies of gutting the federal government have found a new lease on life in Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency, and abroad in Javier Milei’s Argentina. But neoliberalism’s glory days are behind us, and it is Trumpism and other right-wing populisms that are harvesting political capital from the wreckage it has left behind.

In this conjuncture, Democrats and other center-left parties around the world have a fundamental choice to make: continue to play the role of the loyal opposition in a political order defined primarily by the populist right, or mobilize a transformative ideological vision, viable electoral coalition, and distinctive set of policies capable of defining the political order itself.

Choosing the latter will require accepting the failure of the popular front general election strategy Democrats have embraced for the past three presidential cycles. A coalition that, as Tim Walz bragged, ranges “from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift” will always be about defending the status quo, nor does it actually succeed in pulling Republican voters across the aisle. Even party apparatchik Rahm Emanuel can now admit that the status quo is broken and no longer defendable.

No doubt, the transformative choice is a tougher climb for Democrats. For decades, they have avoided spending the political capital necessary to push through legislation that would make it easier to form private sector unions, challenge business power, and foster a progressive social base at the heart of the party. There are some signs that an increasing number of Democrats are amenable to filibuster reform, which would lower the legislative hurdles to pro-labor legislation, and Biden did take significant though symbolic action to establish himself as a pro-union president.

But establishing a new political order requires more than just good policy. It means nothing less than resetting the very boundaries of politics and making what once seemed impossible possible. Over the past decade, that kind of politics has been nearly monopolized by Trump, to great effect. As he recently defended his worldview in a speech to the Economic Club of New York: “Some might say it’s economic nationalism. I call it common sense.”

Establishing a new common sense, as Antonio Gramsci taught us, is what hegemony is all about. As Democrats cast about in search of a new party identity in a post-neoliberal world, it is more imperative than ever to present a political alternative to the authoritarian populism Trump and his enablers are normalizing. We have a clear choice: will the post-neoliberal order be shaped into something more just and democratic than what came before it, or is this now Trump’s world and we just live in it?