Former Vice President Joe Biden’s entry into the Democrats’ 2020 sweepstakes last month brought the party’s field to an even 20 candidates — nearly all of them running on promises to soothe the political turmoil touched off by the election of Donald Trump.
Which is the last thing any of them should try to do, says political analyst Frank J. DiStefano.
Trump did not create our bitter, broken politics, DiStefano says; instead, his rise is its most visible symptom. The upheaval goes much deeper than his 2016 election — and can’t be undone by turning him out of the White House.
“We have a whole political class that’s built on the old party system,” DiStefano, author of the “” (Prometheus), out Tuesday, told The Post. “But now we’re in a realignment, when all ideas are up for grabs. And the political class thinks things still work like they used to.”
If Trump’s opponents want lasting change — and to avoid inflaming our widening divisions — they must lean into the cycle of realignment, the period of political destruction and rebirth that’s already underway, and offer a brand new framework.
But only one of the top-tier Democrats is starting to make such a case: Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind.
“This is not just another election,” Buttigieg told CNBC last month. “We’re living through the end of an era that defined American politics . . . and we’re at the dawn of a new one. We’ve got to have answers that go a lot further than just saying, ‘The current guy’s rotten and we ought to vote him out.’ ”
The message has helped vault the millennial with the difficult name into third place in two recent national polls — and should give his rivals a hint.
“Buttigieg is beginning to offer a new diagnosis of our problems, acknowledging it isn’t 1932 anymore,” DiStefano said. “But any one of them has the potential to offer something new.”
Political realignment is a rare process — it’s happened only four previous times in American history — that transforms our parties and reshuffles the ideological coalitions within them to deal with a new era’s fundamental debates.
Our current party system, with liberal Democrats on one side and conservative Republicans on the other, has been in place since the 1930s — longer than 95% of Americans have been alive. It’s hard for us to conceive of politics in any other way.
But telltale signs of the imminent earthquake are all around us, DiStefano says: fractious party coalitions bound mainly by inertia, government corruption stoking public fury, zealous ideological warriors demanding purity and brash political newcomers who can’t be suppressed by either party’s weak leadership.
All are uncanny echoes of the four eras that preceded the political ruptures of America’s past.
“The situation today is similar to the 1920s and to the decade before the Civil War,” DiStefano said. “The old parties’ approach and ideology is no longer relevant to what people care about, and we have two parties obsessed with things that don’t matter.”
The tribalism and unrest of the last few years, from antifa on one end of the spectrum to the alt-right on the other, are tectonic rumbles rising from the political fault lines deep below us. They could erupt in violence, as they did in the 1860s — or push the parties into completely new forms.
“To realign, you need to come up with a new ideology that sums up the source of all the problems that are bothering voters,” DiStefano explained. “That topline will bind different philosophical groups of people. With these candidates, I have to ask: Is anyone doing that?”
The Democrats’ current 21-candidate field includes 15 members of the Washington, DC, establishment: seven sitting US senators, seven current or former US Representatives, and a former vice president. Two state governors in the race are also Democratic Party insiders.
“They’re risk-averse,” DiStefano said. “They’re politicians,” all relying on the tactics that they, and eight decades’ worth of Democrats, have successfully used to win high office.
“Most are doing what most Republicans did in 2015,” DiStefano said. “They’re trying to run a conventional race within the coalition they know, carefully taking positions within that coalition so they can come out well in the primary.”
Just like Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Florida), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) were doing at this point four years ago. “Each of them ran perfect races that, 10 years before, would have worked — a traditional Republican race based on the rules that had been in place since 1932,” DiStefano said.
The GOP learned the hard way that those rules had abruptly changed. The party’s field of insiders could not withstand the wave of anti-establishment anger unleashed by Donald Trump.
“I see Sen. Kamala Harris (D-California) as the Jeb of the Democratic race, running a traditional New Deal Democratic strategy,” DiStefano said. “Biden, also — a classic New Deal liberal.” Current polling has Biden in first place nationally and Harris in the high single digits.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (D/I-Vermont) presents himself as something new in American politics — a democratic socialist who runs as both a Democrat and an independent. But his platform is that of a 1960s-era liberal, pushing big-government policies that have been on leftists’ wish lists for decades, like Medicare-for-all and free college.
“He’s a throwback,” DiStefano said. “People only see him as new and exciting because they don’t remember that far back.”
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, the darling of the 2018 midterms who broke fundraising records in his losing effort to seize Cruz’s Senate seat, “seems at heart to be a Clinton New Deal Democrat,” DiStefano said.
O’Rourke entered the presidential race with great fanfare in March and has raised a healthy $9.4 million — but is struggling in the polls.
“He’s the Democrats’ Marco Rubio: good-looking, good speaker, young. And in the same way, he’s not disruptive as a candidate,” DiStefano said. “The content is the same that Democrats have run on for generations.”
Then there’s Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), who has championed an anti-corruption theme that addresses one aspect of public discontent.
“But she’s a pragmatist, ultimately,” DiStefano said. “I don’t see her doing anything disruptive.”
Warren’s main contribution has been on the policy front, issuing proposal after proposal — including the field’s first call for Trump’s impeachment.
“That’s important, but in a realignment era you can’t redefine your party with policies,” DiStefano said. “You have to rethink the ideology. She has a platform but hasn’t tied it to a message.”
Farther back in the pack are wannabes running mainly on identity: former Rep. Julian Castro (D-Texas) as the Latino candidate, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) as the African American one, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) as the female veteran, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) as the #MeToo fighter and others.
“Most of these people are trying to tactically get a little advantage here or there by bringing this or that group over onto their team,” DiStefano said. “They’re not thinking strategically.”
That leaves four candidates aiming to shake up the party from the outside: two small-city mayors, Buttigieg and Wayne Messam of Miramar, Fla.; tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang; and “spiritual teacher” Marianne Williamson, who is talking up realignment as part of her platform.
“The desire for change was palpable in 2016 & the desire is still there,” Williamson tweeted April 20. “We didn’t get a change agent last time except in the worst way; we’ll only defeat him with someone who’s a change agent in the best way.”
“There’s an opportunity that wasn’t there a few years ago for the right person to seize,” DiStefano said. “The gates that would normally keep out people with ‘minor’ résumés and without the ‘right’ career boxes ticked now can get a hearing and a chance.”
The dynamic could give rise to a new William Jennings Bryan, the 36-year-old ex-congressman who came out of nowhere in 1896 to win the Democrats’ presidential nomination by delivering the nation’s greatest barn burner, the famous “Cross of Gold” speech. Though he lost the presidential election, he helped realign the Democratic party from that point forward.
‘The gates that would normally keep out people with ‘minor’ résumés and without the ‘right’ career boxes ticked now can get a hearing and a chance.’
“He was a newspaper columnist, the equivalent of a local talk-radio host today,” DiStefano said. “He boxed out the entire establishment of the party, a party that had a sitting president, and within four years changed the whole idea of what it meant to be a Democrat. So it can happen very fast.”
Today’s system of state caucuses and primaries makes a shock convention coronation nearly impossible — but in June the candidates will get a similar chance.
“This year, pay attention to the Democratic debates,” DiStefano said. “Someone could come out with the equivalent of the Bryan speech and break out a fresh ideological take.”
Candidates can win a place on the debate stage by scoring better than 1% in major polls or collecting cash from 65,000 donors. Sixteen of the announced candidates — including Buttigieg and Yang among the outsiders — have already qualified.
DiStefano is betting on Buttigieg as one to watch.
“He’s addressing the big-picture questions and seems willing to apply new ideological approaches to solving them,” he said. “But it’s only baby steps — he hasn’t solidified it yet.”
Whoever comes out on top will have to face the wild card in the White House next November.
President Trump has already played a singular role in our era’s ongoing realignment, as the Disrupter in Chief who picked up on the national mood and surfed the wave of discontent all the way to Washington.
“Trump used the energy that was out there to put a coalition together,” DiStefano said. “But he has not produced a new ideology to bind it or bring in the next age.
“He ran on a radically different rhetoric, but up to now, he has governed more like a traditional Republican. He could have been the realignment guy, but that apparently has not interested him. So everything is in limbo.”
“The thing is,” he said, “nobody on the Democratic side appears to be doing that, either.”
THE FOUR BIG SHIFTS
Our two-party system of liberal Democrats against conservative Republicans may seem set in stone, but history tells us otherwise. “American parties are temporary coalitions forged as tools to self-govern our republic at specific moments of crisis,” writes Frank DiStefano. The terms of debate change radically every few decades — and create a new political landscape. Here are the four big times our politics realigned in the past
1824
- The Players: Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay
- The Issue: Frontier populism vs. the elites
- The Result: America’s only era of single-party rule blew apart when Jackson lost the presidency after winning the popular vote. His Democratic Party won the White House in 1828; Henry Clay’s Whig Party formed to oppose him.
1852
- The Players: Henry Clay’s Whigs and the new Republicans
- The Issue: Civil War and Reconstruction
- The Result: The Whigs’ collapse over slavery led to a decade of political chaos, creating both an emergent Republican Party — based in the North and welcoming newly freed black voters — and the realigned Democrats as the party of the South.
1896
- The Player: William Jennings Bryan
- The Issue: New populists vs. progressives
- The Result: Rural, agrarian Populist Party under Bryan seized the Democratic Party — but kept the name; urban progressive reformers like Teddy Roosevelt took over the Republicans in an industrializing economy.
1935
- The Player: Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- The Issue: New Deal vs. constitutional conservatism
- The Result: Great Depression shattered the coalitions; progressives and black voters joined the Democratic Party, and Republicans floundered until William F. Buckley sparked conservative opposition.
2020?
- The Players: the Resistance, the Deplorables, the Establishment and the Woke
- The Issues: The global economic collapse of 2008, rising workplace automation and international migration have frayed old alliances, fracturing both the Democratic and Republican parties.
- The Result: Watch this space.