.. Elizabeth Warren, to pick one example, would have had fewer of these problems if she’d decided to run, and given how well Sanders has done it’s reasonable to suspect that Warren could have actually defeated Clinton. Now that it’s clear that the opening is there, a candidate of full-spectrum progressivism could plausibly enter the next contested Democratic primary as a favorite.
.. Bernie Sanders’s answer, was to promise the thing that every major Democratic politician since Walter Mondale has abjured:major tax increases, not only on the rich (who would be taxed at a rate upward of 70 percent under his plans), but on everybody, middle class and working class and upper middle class alike.
.. it would threaten the stability of the larger Democratic coalition, which depends heavily on middle- and upper-middle-class support and whose leaders have repeatedly backed away from middle-class tax increases lest they give Republicans an opening.
What African Americans lost by aligning with the Democratic Party
The personal call and the timely intervention significantly bolstered Kennedy’s standing among black voters. They also strengthened the political alliance between the Democratic Party and African Americans. After his release, King praised Kennedy for exhibiting “moral courage of a high order.”
.. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he cemented a political alliance between African Americans and the Democratic Party that continues to this day. But celebrating these landmark pieces of legislation makes it easy to overlook what black people in the United States lost when civil rights and equality for blacks were hitched to the Democratic Party.
.. As King understood, Democratic politicians acted more boldly on race issues in Alabama and Mississippi than in New York and Massachusetts.
.. “liberalism seems to be related to the distance people are from the problem.”
.. After the 1964 election, where Republican candidate Barry Goldwater described the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional, black voters essentially found themselves in a one-party system for presidential elections.
.. This is a problem for black voters, because the Democratic Party’s vision of racial justice is also extremely limited. Northern liberals pioneered what scholars now call “colorblind racism.” That’s when racially neutral language makes extreme racial inequalities appear to be the natural outcome of innocent private choices or free-market forces rather than intentional public policies like housing covenants, federal mortgage redlining, public housing segregation, and school zoning.
.. “People have to understand that although the civil-rights bill was good and something for which I worked arduously, there was nothing in it that had any effect whatsoever on the three major problems Negroes face in the North: housing, jobs, and integrated schools…the civil-rights bill, because of this failure, has caused an even deeper frustration in the North.”
.. most white politicians and voters assume that the civil-rights revolution not only leveled the playing field, but also tilted it in favor of African Americans.
Obama has been disastrous for Democrats
It may be churlish to question the political acumen of the first African-American to be elected (and reëlected) President, but it is true that Obama’s tenure has been disastrous for Democrats. The Party has gone from a Senate caucus of sixty members to forty-six, and from a substantial majority in the House of Representatives to a seemingly permanent minority. In the states, Democrats have lost ten governorships and nine hundred and ten legislative seats.
Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats: The Asymmetry of American Party Politics
The Republican Party is best viewed as the agent of an ideological movement whose members are united by a common devotion to the principle of limited government. Conservatives maintain an innate skepticism about—or opposition to—the use of government action to address social problems and tend to evaluate candidates and policies on the basis of ideological congeniality
.. In contrast, the Democratic Party is properly understood as a coalition of social groups whose interests are served by various forms of government activity. Most Democrats are committed less to the abstract cause of liberalism than to specific policies designed to benefit particular groups.
.. Unlike the Republican Party, Democrats lack a powerful internal movement designed to impose ideological discipline on elected officials, which gives Democratic officeholders more freedom to maneuver pragmatically but also denies the party a common philosophy to direct its actions and a comm