How the Democrats Became the Party That Brings Pencils to a Knife Fight [View all]

[BeyondGeography]

When Texas Republicans announced last month that they would redraw congressional maps for the explicit purpose of picking up five seats currently held by Democrats, they shocked the Democratic Party into action. Within days, Eric Holder, the former attorney general who has spent his post-White House career fighting to end gerrymandering, said he was done playing by the rules. It was time to rig the maps, too. “Progressives and Democrats are uncomfortable with the acquisition and the use of power in ways that Republicans are not,” Mr. Holder said. “And that time has got to be over. We need to be unabashed in our desire to acquire power, and then to use power.”

…Democratic voters may be wondering what took so long. When asked to describe their party, a full quarter of Democrats used words like “weak,” “ineffective” or “apathetic,” according to a recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Only two in 10 Democrats had positive things to say about the Democratic Party.

…The Democratic Party has long had two distinct political styles. To borrow Mr. Martin’s formulation, it’s the knives versus the pencils. For more than a century, a more ruthless, transactional model dominated Democratic politics, for better and for worse. But since the 1970s, the experts with the pencils have come to run the show. And it is increasingly clear that this model has hindered the party’s ability to deliver, even to its most loyal supporters.

…During the Obama administration, this version of democracy seemed to involve an unyielding faith in bipartisanship, even as Republicans were growing fiercer in their tactics…”The reality of the situation, one that never quite hit home with the Obama team, was that the technocratic, consensus-driven, bipartisan approach to government favored by the president and by professional-class liberals was simply no match for Republican obstruction,” Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University, writes in an essay titled “The Professional-Class Presidency of Barack Obama.” “It wasn’t that Republicans were stronger or more powerful than Democrats; they were simply employing a different mode of politics.”

…A more difficult issue for the party may not just be about how Democrats fight, but about what they might fight for. By embracing a high-minded, technical style of governance, the party has diminished its ability to excite the public with ideas that tangibly affect people’s lives. Meanwhile, campaign promises that do have mass appeal — whether they are from Mr. Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders or the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — are often vetted and laughed out of the classroom by the party’s leaders and in-house technocrats. While Democrats dismissed as absurd fantasy Mr. Trump’s promise to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border and sanded off the details of their own immigration policy, voters merely heard that Mr. Trump would make the border a top priority. “You get this mishmash of policies that are technically more rigorous than what Republicans offer. But whether it’s Trump or Sanders, the policies are simple and at least I can remember them,” said Timothy Shenk, professor of history at George Washington University and author of “Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.” “In real-world politics that counts so much more than the compendium of policies that are so massive you have no idea what’s actually going to happen.”

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