Youthful mental models which are hard to update.

An interesting observation. From Still saddled with the politics of the Seventies by Michael Barone.

Not since James Monroe left the presidency in 1825, 48 years after he fought in the Battle of Princeton, has America had political leadership with careers running so far back in the past. Our current government leaders have political pedigrees going back to the 1970s.

Consider the Senate. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was first elected to the New York Assembly in 1974. Republican leader Mitch McConnell was elected Jefferson County judge — the county administrator for Louisville, Ky. — in 1977.

Consider the House. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was elected Northern California Democratic Chairman in 1977. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer was elected to the Maryland Senate in 1966 and was elected state Senate president in 1975.

Or how about California’s leading Democrats? Senator Dianne Feinstein was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1970 and became mayor in 1978. Governor Jerry Brown was elected California secretary of state in 1970 and to his first term as governor in 1974.

Technically, President Trump is an exception, never having held public office until 2017. But his public career began in the 1970s, a terrible decade in which New York City’s population fell by 823,000. That’s when Trump refocused his father’s business from the outer boroughs, whose white ethnics were fleeing into Manhattan, where low real estate prices, other people’s money, and political pull enabled him to flourish, in anticipation of an eventual upturn.

It’s when Trump developed his disdain for establishment liberal opinion and penchant for outrageous tabloid-style disparagement thereof. That left him an odd man out in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton high contentment years and a natural fit for post-2007 discontent.

The entire elected leadership of the party are late septuagenarians and octogenarians. That has been commented on to some extent for a while, principally from the perspective that they have a thin bench and that the old stalwarts are preventing a reinvigoration of leadership with newer, younger talent.

Barrone focuses on a slightly different issue. He is making the case that their current values and opinions were shaped by the problems of a different era and how that disconnect between the problems then and now represents a challenge. Possibly. Interesting argument and it necessarily has to have some degree of truth, but I am not especially convinced.

I wonder, instead, about a slightly different issue. These are the children of the sixties, of the youth movement, of the rainbow coalition. The coalition of blue collar workers, blacks, Hispanics, feminists, gays, and public employee union members. It is hard to recall now, but American politics in the 1970s was a Democratic Party dish with an occasional Republican seasoning. Democrats had controlled Congress more or less uninterruptedly since the Great Depression in the 1930s. They controlled the statehouses and/or governorships of most the states. Republicans got an occasional presidential look-in but they were not a nation-wide force nor was their tent particularly expansive. That was the world in which the gerontocratic leadership of the Democratic Party came of age.

I wonder about the extent to which that old understanding of the world might be coloring their views today. It has been rather a mystery to me that over the past decade or two that the DNC has not been more concerned about the erosion of their support, the thinning of their ranks, the decline of their leadership bench, and their loss of institutional power.

The political playing field has reversed itself since the 1970s. Republicans are now the diverse and big tent party. Republicans dominate the state houses and while they do not have a lock on the federal Congress as Democrats used to do, they are very powerful there in a fashion that is relatively recent.

2008-2016 was disastrous. Democrats lost more than a 1,000 state and federal seats in less than a decade. The red tide swept across the electoral map. Democrats are losing the judiciary. Why haven't they undertaken more fundamental institutional reform to maintain their relevance. I wonder if it isn't a certain blindness to the erosion of the rainbow coalition. Democrats used to be both demographically and ideologically heterogeneous.

Today that description more and more belongs to the Republicans. Look at that old Democratic Coalition - blue collar workers, blacks, Hispanics, feminists, gays, and public employee union members. The social justice postmodernism purity of the past couple of decades has driven out critical elements of the coalition. The insistence on tribal identifications has generated conflicts. The more ideologically pure (and extreme) the base becomes, the smaller is the Democratic tent.

Blue collar workers have defected or moved into the position of unaffiliated swing voters. They were the largest single block of voters in that coalition. Feminists, when it was about equality of rights, used to be a large and powerful force among voters. But the meaning of feminism shifted from a focus on equal rights to a focus on equality of outcomes. Today, 85% of the adult population support equal rights but only 18% self-identify as feminist. Feminists no longer speak for most women. Pro-life women, religious women, Second Amendment women are all being slowly squeezed out.

Not dissimilarly with Hispanics. The ties between Democrats and Hispanics have been more recent and more complex. The whole racial categorization of "hispanics" has been a problem. The more Hispanic immigrants put down roots, start businesses, integrate into the community, the more they self-identify as white and the looser become their ties to the Democratic Party. They are still solidly in the camp, but the erosion is marked.

LGBT are not a material electoral base in terms of numbers. Public sector unions remain a backbone and critical foundation for the party but they are at risk of collapsing. Their position has been secure all this while owing to Depression Era legislation that is almost certainly about to be held unconstitutional. Without a legal obligation to pay union dues which are then used to support Democratic candidates, it is not improbable that public sector unions will collapse to the same degree they did in Wisconsin when reforms led to a 40% decline in union membership when people were freed to exercise their choice of whether to belong to a public sector union or not.

African Americans remain a solid bulwark of the Democratic coalition but even there, there is a thawing of the ice at the margins. Republicans have a suite of African American public intellectuals, party elders, and leadership (Condoleezza Rice, Ben Carson, Tim Scott, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Michael Steele, etc..) There is no sea change yet back to the Republican Party but even a couple of point decline, election to election, will be devastating to Democrats based on our federal and republican structure of government.

So I wonder if the DNC lack of concern about the erosion of the Democratic Party electoral position is not perhaps a function of the fact that their gerontocratic leadership have the picture of that Rainbow Coalition locked into their mental model from their political youth and have not fully taken into account how the coalition has eroded.

An interesting thought. I don't set great credence to it but something has to explain why the leadership has not reacted more energetically to their own party's decline.