The Democrats in Opposition: They can become the party of working Americans and win. Or... [View all]

[ND-Dem]

... they can appease Wall Street and lose.

Where should the Democrats go now? Losing both houses of Congress frees them to function as an opposition party, not just to the Republicans, but to a political economy that serves fewer and fewer Americans.

Whether they will seize that opportunity remains an open question. To many within the party establishment, the Democrats face a choice between moving to the center to win over white electors who have either stopped voting or strayed into the Republicans’ ranks, or moving left to re-energize the Rising American Electorate, the young and minority voters who powered Barack Obama into the White House.

The idea that a progressive populist agenda—one that explicitly champions the interests of the 99 percent against those of the one—could command support in both these constituencies is still alien to many Democratic leaders.. Judging by the Beltway discourse, the question that vexes Democrats most is whether the defection of whites or the absence of minorities played the decisive role in the party’s midterm debacle.

The mere existence of this debate reveals the disquieting blindness of some party leaders to both the economic changes that have blighted Americans’ lives in recent decades and to the political opportunities that await the party that reshapes that economy to create more broadly shared prosperity...Yet while many of these races featured flawed Democratic candidates, they also shared a common handicap: the failure of the Democrats to tell voters how they planned to re-create broadly shared prosperity. This was part and parcel of an even more serious failure (one the Democrats shared with virtually every governing party in the advanced industrial democracies): their inability, only partly due to Republican obstructionism, to arrest the declining economic fortunes of all but the wealthiest 10 percent...

http://prospect.org/article/democrats-opposition