Inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defense of their local and national security

From The coming bloodbath of the Democrats by Joel Kotkin.  

Given the probability of a significant loss in this November’s Midterms, we should expect – and hope for – a full-scale brawl over the party’s trajectory. There needs to be something equivalent to the New Democrats who, under Bill Clinton, revived the party after the devastating defeats of George McGovern and Michael Dukakis in the 1970s and 80s by moving the party to the centre and connecting it to the country’s diverse regions. ‘Too many Americans’, wrote New Democrats Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck in 1989, ‘have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defence of their national security’.

It is a useful reminder that we have been down this path before.  I had been thinking primarily of the Democrat wipeouts in 2010 and 2014 leading to a loss of some 1,000 elected positions across the nation and the obliteration of a full generation of Democratic political talent.  Which is partly why the party is so geriatric today. 

But Kotkin is right.  However, it wasn't only Obama with those kind of wipeouts.  Certainly at the national presidential level, the McGovern and Dukakis campaigns were embarrassing defeats.  But the health of national parties are not measured in presidential campaigns alone.  They are measured in the aggregation of political seats at the federal, state and even local levels.

While Clinton was a pragmatist in many ways, it is worth recalling that his best years were in his second term with a Republican Congress.  In his first term, after his first two years, Democrats lost 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate, historic losses in what became known as the Republican Revolution.  This historic reversal was later consolidated and amplified with the large midterm defeats during the Obama years.

That is a great money quote though, revealing in 1989 and still pertinent in 2020.

Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defence of their national security.

The ineffectiveness has now extended to local security as well.

It is striking that the same diagnosis that was true in 1989 is still true thirty-three years later.  One would have thought the survival instinct to have been stronger.