Did The 26th Amendment Fail, Part 6: How The Democrats Decision To Appeal To Future Voters May Have Damaged Them Irrevocably In The Present

 

Only the stunning upset of Donald Trump in 2016 is an explanation for the Democratic Party’s actions in its aftermath when it came to the strategy it has followed – off a cliff, some might say – to the present day. In the aftermath of previous electoral defeats the party had attempt to move away from strategies that had led to defeat. Bill Clinton had won in 1992 because of his decision to find ‘a Third Way’ and eventually had built a coalition of Blue Dog Democrats. After John Kerry’s electoral loss in 2004 Howard Dean had adopted a 50 state strategy that would lead to the Democrats winning control of Congress for the first time in twelve years in 2006 and Obama’s victory two years later.

By contrast the strategy that the Democrats adopted was one that had already failed in 2016 -  Bernie Sanders’s insurgent attempt to win the Democratic nomination by appealing to the left. As illustrated above this strategy mirrored almost exactly George McGovern’s attempt to win the Democratic nomination and then the Presidency in 1972; the latter had led to the most resounding electoral defeat in the history of the party and Sanders hadn’t even been able to win the nomination in his attempt. The Democrats for the first time in their long history seemed determined not to win voters that had been part of the coalition that had worked for them but to win voters that might be part of it. Rather than lean on the present and the past, they were gambling that they could win potential voters.

It was a ridiculous tactic because history already proved it had failed. While the percentage of 18-21 years olds had increased slightly since its nadir of 32 percent in 2000, it had by and large remained low compared to the rest of the coalition. During Obama’s run for the Presidency he had managed to get 44 percent in 2008 but it had dropped to 38 percent four years later and had only marginally increased in 2016. In the forty-five years since the passage of the 26^th Amendment the young had made it very clear that they viewed the electoral process as irrelevant to bring about the change they claimed to want.

And it was still vastly unclear what they wanted. They marched against big corporations polluting the environment; they marched in meetings of the WTO; they marched against the War in Iraq and the War on Terror; they gathered in Occupy Wall Street and they marched against police killings across the country. But just as with the anti-Vietnam protests, they did so regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat was the President and they frequently saw everyone in power as part of the problem. They didn’t think the system could be fixed and they made no effort to argue for what they wanted in its place. They didn’t like reform and they were too lazy for revolution. The idea that one could form an electoral coalition with a group that, by and large, thought elections could change nothing was one of the most foolhardy ideas any political party has ever tried in the history of the world.

And the Democrats got the biggest of warning signs in the leadup to the 2018 midterms. Three days after Trump was sworn in, two leaders of Sanders’ failed presidential campaign formed the Justice Democrats. It aspired to elect ‘a new type of Democratic majority in Congress that will create a thriving economy and democracy that works for the people, not big money interests.” It made clear it would only endorse candidates who promised to refuse donations from corporate PACs and lobbyists. Sanders, it should be noted, has never identified with the Justice Democrats.

Refusing to accept corporate donations was noble and also foolish. They knew the only way to win elections was with money but by refusing to accept the major source they guaranteed they would always be underfunded. Indeed it was only after merging with two other progressive groups that they were able to compete at all.

By July of that year, they had what amounted to platform and almost from the start it was very clear what the Justice Democrats wanted: they were in favor of the Green New Deal, ending the death penalty, ending the War on Drugs, ensuring universal education, universal health care, expanding anti-discrimination laws, expanding background checks on firearms, campaign finance reform, and larger electoral reform, abolishing ICE and reforming police, renegotiating world trade, stopping reductions to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Notably absent from the platform is how one would pay for any of these huge reforms.

And there is almost nothing in this platform that would help the working class voter or indeed anything that isn’t related to some form of minority rights or protection. The closes they come is a federal job guarantee (not far removed from some of the more ridiculed elements of McGovern’s campaign) and making the minimum wage a living wage and tying into inflation. There is much for the future and nothing for the present. None of it could be passed without sweeping majorities in both houses of Congress as well as a Democratic President, none of which they were going to have any time soon.

It is worth comparing this movement to other left-wing parties. The Populist Party in the 1890s, which was based on a combination of rights for workers and many classifications that were part of the New Deal from 1890 to 1894 was becoming an electoral force, eventually gaining 13 seats in the House and four seats in the Senate from the West and the South before the rise of William Jennings Bryan gutted them. Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party managed to gain 10 congressional seats and two Senate seats in 1912. In both cases the party was less concerned with social change but economic changes and was trying to help the working class through economic reform. The Justice Democrats were built on social revolution – much of which was built to appeal to the underprivileged – and had very little to offer in economics to working class voters.

And from the start it was clear how limited this appeal was. The Justice Democrats endorsed 79 candidates in Democratic primaries in the 2018 midterms, five gubernatorial candidates, four senate candidates and the rest in Congress. They were able to elect four new members in 2018 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Taib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Presley. All four were represented the bluest states in America  (New York, Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts.) And their were limitation even within those states:  four other Justice Democrats ran for Congress or Governor in New York state; none got more than 19 percent in their primary. Rashida Taib barely survived her primary and while two other Michigan Justice Democrats were unopposed both lost. None moved forward in California and none could get off the ground in Texas.

The Justice Democrats had no appeal outside the selected few but the Democratic Party for whatever reason more or less chose to make so much of the Squad and the platform they represented part almost front row center going in 2020. This merger, as one might expect, helped the Justice Democrats more than the national party.

In 2020 they reduced their endorsement to 17 candidates in primaries, including Bernie Sanders for President. (He declined their endorsement. Their biggest push was in the House where they endorsed eight new candidates. Five of them managed to make it past their primary and only three of them -   Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush and Marie Newman of Illinois -managed to win seats. By contrast the Democrats lost thirteen seats in Congress and didn’t defeat a single Republican incumbent.

By any rational interpretation the 2020 election was a mandate on Trump’s mishandling of the Covid Pandemic than any possible mandate for the Justice Democrats. But because the number of 18-21 year olds had jumped from 39.4 percent in 2016 to nearly 48 percent in 2020 the Biden administration interpreted this to mean that the left should be given a seat at the table more prominently than they had in the past. No doubt Biden and his team hoped that this would finally add young voters and members of the left coalition to full throated Democratic supporters.

That did not happen, certainly not among the Justice Democrats themselves. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were among the biggest thorns in the Biden administration’s side, refusing to vote for his Infrastructure bill and continuing to advocate for the far left causes they had been a part of. Members of the squad used their seats in Congress to continuously demand their legislation such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All be passed by Congress even though the administration knew that there was no way they get through even in a compromised form given the makeup of Congress. Biden had famously campaigned as a unifier determined to represent all Americans ‘even the ones who didn’t vote for him.’ For members of the Justice Democrats such as Cori Bush, who once said she ignored the calls of people who disagreed with her, that made his administration as much the problem as anything.

The left and its websites chose to turn its wrath not just on the Republican party but members that had been Democrats longer than they had. Prominent among them was Joe Manchin who had been elected for a full term since Robert Byrd’s passing and had been part of the West Virgina Democratic party since 1982. Throughout his career he was considered by far the most centrist member of the Senate, a necessity for someone trying to be a Democrat in a state that was becoming ruby red.

None of this mattered to the left or the Justice Democrats who constantly show an inability to understand that being a Democrat in an urban state like New York is not the same thing as one in a rural state like West Virginia. And as of the 2020 elections the Democratic Party was running out of red state Democrats at a frightening number. This was in keeping with the attitude of so many members of the left who constantly feel that red states themselves are a foreign country unworthy of the kindness of Democrats. There are, of course, African-Americans, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community and Latinos in these deep red states. But because there aren’t as many of them in these states as in the urban states the Democratic Party had always tried to mandate its message to working class voters.

By 2020, it was clear the working class voter was now almost exclusive Republican: Biden had managed to only win 37 percent of that demographic that year, by far the lowest margin in nearly a century. The Justice Democrats made it very clear that they couldn’t care less and neither did many of their major voters. In their opinion, the working class voter represented the past and they were the future. Best to leave them in the footnotes of history.

This is in keeping with the attitude of the left ever since the Vietnam War and it has only amplified exponentially in the era of social media. Activists can afford to take the binary moral visions of the left; politicians can’t. That two members of the Justice Democrats found this out in 2024  - when their positions on Gaza ran contrary to their own voters – is a sign of their own limitations. Both Bowman and Bush were more committed to the positions of activists in Congress then politicians. Neither seemed that sorry to be primaried out.

As the Democratic Party found out well before Biden had to withdraw trying to win over the young and the left is nearly impossible because they seem more obsessed with what they think they should have then what they actually have. Much has been made about how in the era of Trump, the Republican party has embraced the politics of grievances and rage rather than policy. But the far left is actually worse: they have grievances and rage to spare but find electoral politics beneath them.

Much of this was on full display in an editorial run by the leftwing magazine The Nation last October. Written by the interns of the publications, it ran an editorial counter to the publication endorsement of Kamala Harris. The interns argued that neither Trump nor Harris’s election was likely to bring about an adequate solution in the Middle East – and that neither was good candidate when it came to preserving democracy. To be clear these interns had all lived through the first Trump administration and like so many of the left knew what he was planning to do in his second administration. And yet showing no common sense, they argued that a man who was very clear on what he was and what he intended to was no more danger to democracy then someone who had campaigned on preserving it.

They advocated that the best thing to help the situation in Gaza was to continue demonstrating and marching on campuses, demanded universities divest from Israel. (Only one had in the year since October 7^th.) That these kinds of protests had led to Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 – and by extension four more years of horror in Vietnam – might not have been known to the interns but was certainly known to the editors. Those editors also had to know that the only way to bring about a ceasefire was through political pressure and a willingness on both sides to negotiate: something that the administration had been doing everything in his power to do for months. They also knew it could not happen unless people across the globe agreed to it,  and that the actions of protests around the world was a very minor factor in the corridors of power.

That the editors chose to let this editorial, which was a direct disagreement with their previous endorsement is in a way a larger metaphor for how the left sees so much of the world. In their minds, everything that happens is a moral choice with a simple right and wrong answer of which they the left know what the right one is. Everyone in the world should act solely on that, absent economic, political, or any real world factors and make the morally right decision regardless of whatever the ramifications or consequences might be to themselves or the institution they represent. Doing the right thing is all that matters.

This is not a position that survives in the real world. But increasingly among the young, they live not in the real world but on social media where one can pick and choose ones friends based solely on whether they agree with what you think and one doesn’t have to listen to a single dissenting voice. On the internet one can find any information one wants about almost anything in the world without any real effort. And with no controls or guard rails, opinion and fact are interchangeable and depending upon the viewer, they can find a historical record that fits their own that is relevant to their world view and has nothing to do with reality. And it is far easier in these dissent to shun and dismiss as a monster anyone who disagrees with you than at any time in the history of the world.

And combined with a generation of parent that is both too controlling and too lazy, an entire generation has been raised to trust only themselves and no institutions. Much of the world has become dark and chaotic over the decades – in large part due to the absence of younger generations from the political process –  but the generation that has the power where it will fall on by and large has decided that if it happens, they have no intention of doing anything that might make it better. They will march, they will protest, they will rant on social media but get involved in voting drives? Talk with people who have opposing viewpoints? That’s not their job. The heavy lifting is for someone else to do, not them.

There is a large part of our nation that still believes that this generation is the future, far less because of intelligence and almost entirely on technological savvy. Common sense is not only a dying art, for most of this generation it’s something that never worked in the first place because it was part of the system. That this system provided them with everything they have, including the tools they use to denounce it, is irrelevant. It is not their responsibility to fix what is broken in our society. Their job is to do what the left has always done: denounce it, march against it and not do a think to give guidance as to what might work better. The future and the past are meaningless to the online present they live in. The world owes them everything even if they can’t define it.

In the conclusion to this article I will deal with the myths that the youth  believes can fix America and what may have to be done to actually fix it.