The Democrats need a new rulebook

Donald Trump’s triumphal return to the White House is the end of more than just the Joe Biden era. Since Bill Clinton’s presidency, Democrats had adhered to a formula they thought unbeatable: They would be socially progressive, economically centrist and staunchly internationalist. Republicans, they thought, had staked their future on demographics that were in decline — whites and the most conservative Christians. Democrats were the party of twenty-first-century America, an ethnically diverse and more secular, or at least religiously liberal, land.

What went wrong?

When Trump won in 2016, Democrats dismissed it as a fluke. He hadn’t won the popular vote; he was simply the last gasp of a dying GOP; the fact he had destroyed the party’s establishment was, if anything, confirmation of their theory that Republicans were obsolete. Trump couldn’t repeat his feat in 2020, when history resumed its rightful course.

Yet now things look very different — 2020, not 2016, was the anomaly. The midterm defeats Democrats suffered under Obama were the beginning of a trend: When Republicans ran as insurgents, as populists opposed to elitist Democratic rule, they could win. Trump, however, has done some- thing more than that. He has shown that the Democratic strategy evolved since Clinton can be overcome on all fronts.

Trump has not rolled back social liberalism, but he has shown its limits. Progressives now are, ironically, in much the same position the religious right found itself in twenty years ago. Time and again, same-sex marriage was defeated in popular referendums, yet this did not give social conservatives momentum in national elections. Republicans and even Democrats like Obama said they stood firm in support of traditional marriage, and voters were satisfied with the lip service, even as same-sex marriage advanced in the courts. Now voters have much the same attitude toward abortion rights, which they almost always support in state-level referendums but have not turned into a decisive national issue.

One reason abortion is not as potent as Democrats think it ought to be is that the cultural left has alienated women on another issue: transgenderism. The Kamala Harris campaign could not think of a way to blunt the damage caused by ads that linked the Democrats to transgender ideology. Most women find the idea of men competing in women’s sports or using women’s bathrooms or locker rooms disturbing or repulsive. Social liberals are in one sense victims of their own success: having won the war for same-sex marriage, the only way to keep their army together was to advance to the next battlefield, transgender rights. But that involves fighting on much more difficult terrain, with the public unwilling to accept what the ideology demands. Democrats can retreat, but doing so means at least tacitly acknowledging that Trump and the Republicans were right, a concession that cedes the middle ground. Trump’s GOP is now the party not only of social conservatives but social moderates, too.

In economics and foreign policy, Trump has also outflanked the Democrats in ways that conventional wisdom thought not long ago would be impossible. The GOP is still a low-tax party, and renewing Trump’s first-term tax cuts is a high priority for the new administration. But while Democrats since the 1990s have presented themselves as a pro-business “have it all” party —more generous with government benefits than the Republicans, but just as devoted to GDP growth — Trump returned to the old politics of class war and discovered it still works. He’s not a left-wing class warrior, of course: foreign governments and “disloyal” domestic businesses, not capitalists as a whole, are the enemies of the working class in Trump’s nationalist narrative. Democrats worked hard in the past decade to quell the Bernie Sanders wing of the party and the anti-capitalist spirit of Occupy Wall Street, even while trying to keep the support of labor unions. But earning the votes of working-class Americans has proved difficult for a party that is wedded to globalism for reasons of culture and foreign policy as well as economics.

Trump appeals to the class feeling and patriotism of working-class Americans, as well as to their exasperation with the Democrats’ left-wing cultural preoccupations. This has not only won Trump the white working class; it has disrupted Democrats’ demographic strategy, which relied on the idea that non-white populations of relatively recent immigrant origin would always and increasingly vote blue. It turns out that race and ethnicity may not be as important at the ballot box as class, a concept that liberal intellectuals considered largely redundant after the end of the Cold War. Instead, it’s identity politics that is starting to look decidedly quaint.

Democrats mistook the past for the future in foreign affairs as well. Starting with Bill Clinton, Democrats were eager to show that despite having adopted the cultural agenda of the Sixties and Seventies New Left, they were no longer the party of Vietnam protesters. Instead, they would use American military power to maintain the “liberal international order” and advance humanitarian concerns. Yet American foreign policy has repeatedly created humanitarian catastrophes, while eighty years after World War Two, and more than thirty after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the liberal international order has come to mean that America’s allies remain excessively dependent on us even as our rivals multiply. It’s an outdated model whose institutions, such as NATO, persist long after they met their original purpose, yet without undergoing any renewal of their popular legitimacy.

At the start of this century Democrats had a very clear picture of what the future was supposed to look like. Trump proved it a mirage.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2025 World edition.