The Clinton curse

Democrats have almost lost hope. Nearly a year after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, the party is rudderless. It opposes Trump, of course, but it can’t afford to oppose Trumpism. Denouncing the President for a short war against Iran’s nuclear program or for negotiating a Gaza ceasefire wouldn’t be smart. Criticizing his tariffs is safer – yet Democrats don’t want to be branded the party of free trade. Likewise, while they’re prepared to condemn the way the President is getting immigration under control, they know it would be suicidal for them to campaign for more immigration.

Even on cultural questions, Democrats are Trump’s prisoners. They remain devoted to the idea that men can be women, and vice versa, if only they want to be, but the public backlash against what that means for women’s sports and their safety in private places has forced Democrats into hypocritically insisting on transgenderism in principle while saying they’re prepared to curb its practical applications.

The party has no policies to sell and fears its own ideologues. What could possibly overcome these debilities?

The answer, say pragmatic Democrats and some Trump-averse Republicans, is simple: the party needs another Bill Clinton, a charismatic leader to move it back to the political middle. Clinton copied Republicans and rebuked progressives whenever he thought it expedient, and by doing so he delivered Democrats from the wilderness in which they had wandered during the 12-year tenure of presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

The decoupling of the working class from the Democrats is one of Clinton’s enduring legacies

The 1980s saw Democrats in doldrums not unlike today’s. Then, they were captive of left-wing economic orthodoxies that compelled them to be the party of higher taxes. Even as Reagan revived American confidence in the final phase of the Cold War, his opponents, like Trump’s today, could only carp about his actions. And then, too, Democrats appeared unable to get their coalition’s left wing, epitomized by Jesse Jackson and radical feminists, under control. The trouble with this view of Clinton as his party’s centrist savior is that he was the opposite – Clinton inaugurated today’s Democratic woes by shunting the party to the left. By doing so, he brought an end to 40 years of Democratic control in the House of Representatives. Never in history had a party enjoyed such a long run in national power. Clinton destroyed the most successful political coalition America has ever known, and the Democrats have never recovered. The New Deal coalition that Clinton wrecked was even more successful than a glance at its hold on Congress suggests. Although Democrats had an interrupted run in control of the House from 1955 to 1995, their dominance actually began in 1931 and was only interrupted briefly for two discrete two-year intervals during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. What was fatal about the Clinton years wasn’t just that Democrats lost the House but that, for the first time in 64 years, they couldn’t win it back.

Clinton attacked the left in the 1992 Democratic primaries, but he was no centrist. In his first two years in the White House, when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, he signed into law a flurry of progressive legislation expanding government, raising taxes, circumscribing the rights of abortion-clinic protesters, banning firearms deemed “assault weapons” for purely cosmetic reasons and much more. He pushed for homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces – the first major engagement of the culture war that would ultimately lead to same-sex marriage and, subsequently, the Democrats’ transgender quagmire. The result of all this was that Clinton alienated key parts of the New Deal coalition while polarizing many constituencies that had previously been content to be represented by pro-gun or culturally conservative Democrats. The decoupling of the working class from the Democrats is one of Clinton’s enduring legacies.

“A true revolution should be seeking a minimum of 12 years in power,” the New York Times’s Ross Douthat recently wrote. He’s wrong. The last “true revolution” in American politics was the creation of what was effectively a new regime in the 1930s. Democratic presidents – Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman – held power without interruption for 20 years, but again the actual magnitude of Democratic political success was much greater. There was only one Republican president between 1933 and 1968 and that single exception, president Eisenhower, was hardly a Republican at all.

What ended the Democrats’ lock on the White House was the rise of a radical young New Left, which would ultimately bring leaders like Clinton to the fore. The ideology of today’s Democratic party was already hatched, if not fully grown, in the late 1960s. Clinton brought that ideology to power and thereby cost the Democrats the second of the bastions of government they had controlled for decades: Congress. Nor did he succeed in getting another Democrat elected as his presidential successor.

Since the Clinton era, Democrats have typically needed the aid of a crisis to reclaim power from the Republicans: during the Iraq War in 2006, the financial meltdown in 2008, Covid in 2020. Voters have rejected such Clintonite Democrats as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris time and again. There simply is no national constituency for the party whose identity Clinton redefined in the 1990s – a party of ever more radically progressive cultural attitudes and an economic agenda keyed to urban professionals. Combine this disastrous record with the stagnation and depopulation of blue states relative to the booming demographics of red states such as Texas and Florida, and Democrats have cause for despair. Republicans can still lose elections, but Democrats don’t really win them.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.