Over at Vox, Matthew Yglesias is noticing that the Obama era has led to historic Republican majorities in the House, Senate, in and state capitols across the country. His conclusion? The Democrats face deep structural problems, and they don’t seem to realize the extent of their peril:
The Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or supporters recognize, and it has no plan to save itself.
Yes, Barack Obama is taking a victory lap in his seventh year in office. Yes, Republicans can’t find a credible candidate to so much as run for speaker of the House. Yes, the GOP presidential field is led by a megalomaniacal reality TV star. All this is true — but rather than lay the foundation for enduring Democratic success, all it’s done is breed a wrongheaded atmosphere of complacence.
For much of the article he outlines the extent of Republican gains — facts well-known to conservatives who’ve been looking for silver linings in the dark cloud of the Obama presidency — but then Yglesias hits an important truth about the Democrats’ mindset:
In some ways, the Democrats’ biggest disadvantage is simply their current smugness. A party that controls such a small share of elected offices around the country is a party that should be engaged in vigorous debate about how to improve its fortunes. Much of the current Republican infighting — embarrassing and counterproductive though it may be at times — reflects the healthy impulse to recognize that the party lacks the full measure of power that it desires, and needs to argue about optimal strategies for obtaining it.
On the Democratic side, the personal political success of Barack Obama has created an atmosphere of complacency and overconfidence. If a black guy with the middle name Hussein can win the White House, the thinking seems to be, then anything is possible. Consequently, the party is marching steadily to the left on its issue positions — embracing same-sex marriage, rediscovering enthusiasm for gun control, rejecting the January 2013 income tax rate settlement as inadequate, raising its minimum wage aspirations to the $12-to-$15 range, abandoning the quest for a grand bargain on balancing the budget while proposing new entitlements for child care and parental leave — even though existing issue positions seem incompatible with a House majority or any meaningful degree of success in state politics . . . But instead of a dialogue about how to obtain that success, Democrats are currently engaged in a slightly bizarre bidding war between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to see whether Congress in 2017 will reject a legislative agenda that is somewhat to the left of Obama’s or drastically to its left.
In hindsight, it looks like Democrats and Republicans over-interpreted the results of the 2012 election. Democrats looked at the unique person of Barack Obama and saw a validation of the progressive movement. Republicans looked at the unique person of Barack Obama and saw a nation slipping away from its constitutional roots. Yet it’s premature to declare that Obama’s election is transformative beyond his personal impact on American politics. If Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or Joe Biden win the White House by running as unabashed progressives, then we can talk about fundamental transformation. Until then, it’s not necessarily the Republicans who have the most to lose in 2016. Here’s Yglesias again:
Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States — a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition.
Yes, the stakes are high for both parties in 2016, but they may well be higher for the Democrats. Yglesias is among the first to understand this reality. He will not be the last.