Mostly, the Biden-era status quo.
This past weekend, the great Peggy Noonan wrote her column in the Wall Street Journal about the memoirs of former vice president Kamala Harris and Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman and came away wondering what mainstream Democrats stand for.
I am afraid that most of the time, they stand for the pre-Trump, Biden-era status quo, a set of economic, social, and geopolitical circumstances that most Americans found deeply unsatisfactory.
Noonan notices that Harris still refuses to call illegal immigration “illegal immigration,” choosing instead to use the anodyne euphemism, “irregular migration.” Some mainstream Democrats may concede, as Fetterman does, that concern about the U.S. southern border is not xenophobia. But you rarely see any Democratic enthusiasm for additional border security or immigration enforcement. In January, just 46 out of 215 House Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act. Just 11 of 213 House Democrats voted for a bill hiking penalties for both people who enter the U.S. illegally and those who commit felonies after that illegal entry. Up until very recently, most Democrats still called for “path to citizenship” for those in the country illegally, which is a de facto amnesty. Mainstream Democrats may begrudgingly concede the necessity of enforcing immigration laws, but they greet the task with as much enthusiasm as the rest of us greet going to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Mainstream Democrats like to talk about education, but you rarely if ever see them saying a critical word about teachers’ unions. The consequences of closing public schools for at least a year during the pandemic (and much longer in many places) was one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds in modern American history, and it was driven almost entirely by hypochondriac teachers’ unions. Most mainstream Democrats choose to avert their eyes from the lessons of that disaster and throw even more money at a system that has repeatedly demonstrated no connection between increased spending and better results.
For as much as mainstream Democrats insist they care about America’s schools, they don’t want to look too closely at them. I suspect almost all of them believe that California’s schools are better than Mississippi’s. They’re not, and in fact it’s not even not close. Kelsey Piper writes, Mississippi hasn’t “just caught up to your state; they are now wildly outperforming it. If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools.”
Most mainstream Democrats refused to believe that government, particularly the federal government, is a bureaucratic, slow-moving institution, too easily captured by special interests, often incapable of acting at the speed and scale the public’s problems demand, and when it does act, it can make things worse… until New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said it, and then it became a critique worth taking seriously.
In the past year, you might occasionally hear a mainstream Democrat saying something critical about “woke” policies or young men playing in women’s sports. But they have only felt safe saying those sorts of things since President Trump got elected. When Joe Biden was president, almost no one on the Democratic side of the aisle was willing to utter a critical word about policies like that. Mainstream Democrats have demonstrated that most of the time, they feel obligated to stifle their policy objections to further-left Democrats in the name of party unity. (This raises the question of how much meaningful difference there is between mainstream Democrats and far-left Democrats.)
Mainstream Democrats support Ukraine’s effort to resist the Russian invasion, but that support is about a mile wide and an inch deep. As I noted last year, Harris didn’t mention Ukraine in her first 11 speeches as the Democratic nominee. Democratic audiences weren’t itching to hear about it, and Harris wasn’t itching to tell them about it.
As discussed in the Morning Jolt a few days ago, the U.S. faces a slew of challenges from China, from artificial intelligence to trade policies to threats to Taiwan to an arms buildup to human rights abuses to influence all over the Pacific. These are thorny and multifaceted problems; if the Democrats have a different, clear, and well-thought-out strategy for confronting China’s rise and increasing aggressiveness, they have hidden it well.
Democrats criticize Trump’s tariffs, but are still generally protectionist. House Democrats accused Republicans of “blowing up the deficit” earlier this year, laughable when President Biden and a Democratic-controlled Congress increased the national debt by $3.7 trillion between January 2021 and January 2023.
We know what the far-left Democrats like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani stand for — overturning the apple cart and undoing every policy that has helped get America where it is today, pushing American in a socialist or even Communist direction. Raise taxes. Abolish ICE. Take police out of schools, if not abolishing the police entirely. Ban private health insurance and make every American rely on government-run health care. Reduce defense spending and bring all U.S. troops home from foreign deployments. Make illegal immigrants eligible for all U.S. social spending programs. Bring the U.S. to net-zero emissions by 2030 — five years from now. Pack the Supreme Court. Abolish the electoral college. And, as AOC recommends, “build LGBTQIA-affirming housing and shelter programs,” whatever the heck that is.
In short, my sense is that mainstream Democrats don’t like to think too hard about the problems facing America, because that might force them to reconsider their preexisting convenient policy preferences. So if often feels like they don’t stand for much at all.