(Nixon won 520 electoral votes compared to McGovern’s 17).įinally, many of the Democratic Party’s elite came of age in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton embraced a “triangulation” strategy that enabled him to win elections at the expense of the party’s traditional working-class base. Second, Democrats are scarred by old traumas, most notably the 1972 election, in which the criminal president Richard Nixon trounced the antiwar senator George McGovern. Perhaps nothing represents Democrats’ faith in institutional technocracy more than their groundless conviction that the Republican-controlled Senate would for some reason vote to convict Donald Trump in his impeachment trial. If smart people get together in a room and just talk it out, they believe, the world’s problems could be solved. What explains this Democratic fecklessness? First, Democratic Party elites, who are typically winners in the meritocratic struggle, are committed to a technocratic and institutionalist rationality that insists politics is ultimately about compromise instead of victory. Barack Obama, for instance, declined to use the presidential bully pulpit to force McConnell to seat Garland on the Supreme Court, while Joe Biden is currently running for president on the absurd claim that, if he were elected, McConnell would spontaneously become “mildly cooperative” and work with him to achieve his plans. It’s a reluctance that has led to an all-powerful GOP at every level of government, even as the party remains deeply unpopular. As these examples suggest, Republicans correctly understand that in politics one has friends and one has enemies, and that the goal is to aid the former and defeat the latter.ĭemocrats, though, have time and again refused to wield the power necessary not only to enact their agenda but even to save their own party from collapse. Gore Supreme Court decision to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s successful stonewalling of court nominee Merrick Garland, conservatives have used any and all means at their disposal to enact their agenda. And American workers have paid the price.įrom the 2000 Bush v. For decades, conservatives have wielded power far more effectively than liberals.
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