Yogi Berra, the mid-century New York Yankees Hall of Fame catcher known for his pithy and often humorous life observations, once famously quipped: âWhen you come to a fork in the road, take it.â It was sound advice, perhaps, for a traveler on the go and in search of a quick meal. But the modern Democratic Party, rudderless and confused and reeling from a pitiful collective performance during Tuesday eveningâs presidential joint address to Congress, now confronts a fork in the road thatâs no joke.
On the one hand lies the path of least resistance: doubling down on the status quo â the progressive culture-warring, woke/identity politics-driven agenda that has dominated the party ever since Barack Obama upset Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. On the other hand lies the more difficult but ultimately more promising path: repudiation of that post-2008 legacy and a conscientious return to a politics of the prudential center. Which path Democrats choose from here will go a long way toward determining their relevance as a national political party for the foreseeable future.
Obamaâs shocking upset over the madam-president-in-waiting was an inflection point for the institutional trajectory of the Democratic Party. Voters rejected the cultural centrism that was a Clinton-era hallmark in favor of the âhopeâ and âchangeâ promised by Obamaâs âcoalition of the ascendant.â Initially, perhaps, that may have looked like a smart bet: Obama trounced John McCain in the 2008 presidential general election. But the one-time âcoalition of the ascendantâ transmogrified into an identitarian and deeply off-putting âcoalition of aggrieved interests.â Culturally militant wokeism eventually reached its pernicious apex during Joe Bidenâs presidency â which saw the first explicitly âDEIâ Supreme Court justice selection (Ketanji Brown Jackson, after Biden vowed to nominate a black woman) and a DEI vice presidential running mate (Kamala Harris, after Biden was pressured to choose a black woman).
This version of the Democratic Party, which featured the progenitor of wokeism, Obama himself, as the leading presidential campaign trail surrogate for Harris, was thoroughly rejected in November by the American people. It turns out that voters didnât really know what they were signing up for when they embarked on an extended political journey of âhopeâ and âchange.â They werenât interested â and arenât interested â in legitimizing the juvenile genital mutilation and chemical castration that has been euphemistically sold as âgender-affirming care.â They werenât interested â and arenât interested â in assenting to wide-scale importation and resettlement of foreigners whose cultures and customs are antithetical to our own.
Some leading Democrats do finally seem to get the memo. Former Clinton strategist James Carville, for instance, has called for Democrats to distance themselves from the excesses of woke civilizational arson. But many others disagree. There is no indication at all, for instance, that the ladies of âThe Viewâ have done any introspection: Shortly after Novemberâs electoral shellacking, cohost Sunny Hostin attributed Harrisâ loss to Donald Trump to âracismâ and âmisogyny.â Surveying the left-of-center punditocracy scene, it often seems that there are far more Hostin-like voices of escalation than there are Carville-like voices of sobriety.
Democratic elected officials are also deeply split. California Gov. Gavin Newsom made headlines on Thursday by repudiating certain facets of wokeism during an interview with Charlie Kirk, but congressional Democrats attending Trumpâs joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening took the opposite approach, beyond refusing to applaud: Rep. Al Green of Texas obnoxiously heckled the president and was kicked out of the House chamber within the speechâs first few minutes â deservedly so. In general, their conduct was positively buffoonish.
In what world do Democrats think they do themselves any political favors with these antics and, more important, these underlying substantive political stances? One guest of Trump on Tuesday, Payton McNabb, is a female former high school athlete who was grievously injured during a match against a team with a biological male player. On this issue, recent CNN polling indicates that roughly four-fifths of Americans oppose biological male participation in female athletic competitions. Even Newsom, in his podcast episode with Kirk, called the practice âdeeply unfair.â
Newsom seems to be reading the tea leaves â unlike congressional Democrats. There is a similar divide on the issue of illegal immigration and so-called âsanctuaryâ jurisdictions; consider, for instance, New York City Mayor Eric Adamsâ high-profile flip on the issue, which has brought him into line with Trump.
To make matters even worse, a majority of Democratic elites too often now come across not merely as schoolmarmish and excessively self-righteous â but as heartless and lacking compassion, to boot. Party leaders undoubtedly think of themselves as âcompassionate,â especially for those perceived as being âoppressedâ (on the neo-Marxist intersectional scale of victimization status). But where is the compassion for McNabb? Where is the compassion for the family of Laken Riley, the Athens, Georgia, student whose life was tragically cut short by an illegal alien who never should have been on our soil?
In order to recover their standing and regain lasting relevance as an electorally feasible national political party, Democrats are going to have to repudiate the entirety of their post-2008/post-Obama cultural legacy. That is the simple truth. The American people want a stable pocketbook, a stable border and a stable world stage. Theyâre not interested in the Obama-Biden-Harris Democratic Partyâs idiosyncratic conception of waging a culture war.
Are Democrats up to such a challenge? The intraparty civil war is on â but I certainly have my doubts. Unless and until they do repudiate their cultural militance, however, Democrats will continue to flounder about in irrelevance. Perhaps theyâll need to get their clocks cleaned at the ballot box a few more times. That wouldnât be the worst thing.
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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