The Descent of Democratic Man

W hy don’t the Democrats have better leaders?

We know why the Republicans don’t have better leaders: The GOP turned itself into a Donald Trump personality cult, and would-be alternatives such as Ron DeSantis of Florida haven’t figured out how to get out from under the considerable shadow of the former president. Republicans may find some focus if, as expected, they have a good election in November. William Munny might have made a good political analyst: “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

But you’d think the Democratic Party would at least throw up some interesting leaders, if not necessarily good ones. Young voters have soured on Joe Biden — for the obvious reason that the more future you have the more irritating it is when someone devalues it — but they still back Democrats decisively, as evidenced by their generic-congressional-ballot preferences. College-educated people, women, and the most-affluent communities all lean Democratic. Immigrants in Texas, California, Florida, Massachusetts, and New Jersey lean a lot more Democratic than Republican. Two of the political indicators you would think would go hand-in-hand with being a Democrat — not being especially proud of your country and enthusiasm for butchering unborn children — are at or near all-time highs.

That’s not to say that America-hating well-off educated young women from immigrant backgrounds with an unseemly passion for abortion can’t be boring mediocrities — Ilhan Omar exists — but you’d think that a party with those characteristics would produce some interesting cultural churn.

Instead, you get Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer — the Senate majority leader who, at a spry 71 years of age, is the youngest member of that group by almost a decade.

What do they have in their second tier? The Squad, who are basically campus Democrats who somehow ended up sitting at the grown-ups’ table. Elizabeth Warren, another grim septuagenarian who has been trying to become a celebrity since she was writing dopey self-help books. Dick Blumenthal of Greenwich and not of Dien Bien Phu.

In a very amusing (seriously — what’s got into Ben Mathis-Lilley?) piece at Slate, possible post-Biden contenders are given due consideration. They are not an inspiring bunch. Roy Cooper, the North Carolina governor whose great boast is that he gets elected in a state where Democrats generally have a hard time of it these days. Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, one of those sad wretches who has been running for office practically all of her life. John Fetterman, the son of a wealthy insurance executive, who went to grad school at Harvard and then spent his days pretending to be a blue-collar guy in Braddock, Pa., serving as mayor while living on an allowance from his parents. Jared “Who?” Polis. Connecticut barnacle Chris Murphy, another scion of suburban wealth (his father was managing partner at Shipman & Goodwin) who has never done anything except hang around politics. Kirsten Gillibrand, last heard describing herself as a “young mom” at 52 years of age.

Gavin Newsom.

Maybe it’s a class thing, with so many prominent Democrats hailing from that very strange parochial class of upper-upper-middle-income to genuinely rich-adjacent politically connected families. Gillibrand’s father was a lobbyist crony of Al D’Amato’s. Pelosi’s father was mayor of Baltimore (so was her brother) and a member of the House of which she currently is speaker. Newsom has exactly the biography you’d expect of someone named “Gavin.” (He started a wine business with the help of some Getty money.) Whitmer’s father was the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and a minor political figure. Roy Asberry Cooper III, a former Young Democrats president born during the Eisenhower administration, is a Chi Psi and a lawyer; his father was a lawyer and a tobacco farmer, a fact that must have amused the heck out of him when his state accepted that multi-million-dollar vaping settlement. Jared Polis, who was Jared Schutz before he got into politics, is a graduate of La Jolla Country Day School (he would have just missed Tucker Carlson there), a true child of the 1990s whose Princeton thesis was titled “Paradigm Shift” and whose family earned the better part of a billion dollars selling its online-greeting-card business back when you could get mad money for a company with “dot-com” in its name.

The Republicans at least have some genuine plebs in their ranks: Q-Anon kook Lauren Boebert was a knocked-up high-school dropout who started a Hooters knockoff that eventually went bust after losing its lease — because there is nothing that screams “Real America!” like fake Hooters. Her foundational political document is the Rifle Rodeo food-poisoning-outbreak report. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a different Q-Anon kook, was a CrossFit instructor until she became obsessed with conspiracy websites, which are now the road to Congress for Republicans. Not going to get prolier-than-thou with that bunch. There are still some classic Republicans out there, like the Trump-endorsed nut in Michigan who got canned by his law firm when his employers accused him of padding his billing, which is some old-school, Alex P. Keaton-type Republican stuff.

So, maybe it’s class. Maybe it’s something in the water. Maybe it’s just bad luck.

Or maybe it is evolution in reverse: Consider the Senate seat from New York currently held by Kirsten Gillibrand. Before Gillibrand, the seat was held by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not exactly Cincinnatus, but before Clinton, it was held by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a genuinely interesting and intelligent contributor to American life; trace it back from Moynihan and you get James Buckley (“the sainted junior senator from New York”), Bobby Kennedy, and, if you go far enough, Gouverneur Morris. Some scoundrels and rat-bastards in that bunch, to be sure, but many welcome breaks from the insipidity of Senator Gillibrand. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat once was held by Barry Goldwater. Senator Warren’s predecessors include John Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles Sumner, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy Adams — Hyperions to a Birkenstock. The Impossible Burger guys could whip up a more convincing senator in their mad-vegan-scientist lab.

Elections are binary, they tell us. So is testicular cancer, if you’re lucky.