Are the Democrats blowing it? Are they about to hand the election to the one man they despise above all else, Donald J. Trump? That’s the fear of David Frum, who makes precisely that case in a brilliant and insightful essay in The Atlantic.
Frum, of course, is the intellectual leader of the Never Trump movement and someone who’s moved left politically in the past 15 years, ever since warning of the “axis of evil” as a speechwriter for George W. Bush in 2003. Still, he is a keen observer of the political scene and someone well worth listening to.
Frum focuses his firepower on Bernie Sanders, who continues to surge in the polls. Bernie, Frum argues, can’t win. His positions on matters of economic and foreign policy are too extreme and too easily caricatured and attacked to prevail against Trump.
Plus: he has real trouble appealing to suburban women and African Americans, “the two groups whose greater or lesser enthusiasm will make the difference for a Trump challenger in November,” Frum argues.
Equally worrisome: Bernie has something of a glass jaw. He “is a fragile candidate… [who has never] had to face serious personal scrutiny.” He and his team
“are experts in Democratic Party factional infighting. Few have dealt with people who do not play by the rules of the mainstream Democratic Party. They have always been the rule breakers, the people who got inside the other team’s decision cycle.
“They have been the Minutemen fighting the Redcoats, picking off the other side’s regulars from behind trees and fences. Now they are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off on an open field against a ruthless modern army with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.”
But if Bernie is the Democrats’ weakest candidate and a surefire loser in a general election matchup against Trump, the source of his political appeal is nonetheless instructive, says Frum, and something that Dems need to understand, internalize and embrace.
Simply put, Bernie is an old-fashioned socialist who focuses on bread-and-butter economic issues—jobs, healthcare, education, student debt relief, the social-safety net, et al. Other left-wing progressives running for president—Elizabeth Warren most notably—focus more on identity politics and on being “woke” or politically correct.
Frum is too polite to explicitly say it (especially in the pages of The Atlantic, which caters to woke, upscale progressives), but identity politics, left-wing cultural grievances, and PC purity tests are a real turnoff to most ordinary, working- and middle-class voters, black and white.
In fact, I believe that Trump’s 2016 win is far more attributable to the Democrats’ increasing embrace of cultural Marxism than it is to Trump’s embrace of economic populism.
Frum rightly fears that if the Dems continue to lean forward where they are weakest, on matters of culture and identity politics, they will lose in November to Trump. Thus he implores Democrats to lay off of their obsession with woke, identity politics, and, instead, to embrace Bernie’s more universal, broad-based, populist appeal.
It’s sound political advice, but will Democrats accept it?
Frum points to the fundamental divide within the Democratic Party: between the mostly white, affluent, upscale, college-educated progressives, for whom being woke is everything; and less affluent working- and middle-class blacks, who care more about the practical bread-and-butter issues that are at the heart of the Sanders’ campaign.
The white, affluent elite dominate the political dialogue and discussion and are the Dem’s donor class. However, the less affluent middle- and working class blacks are “in many ways the true base of the Democratic Party,” Frum says. They are the voters who will make all the difference in the South Carolina primary and, on Super Tuesday, in the South and industrial Midwest.
Ironically, Sanders has had real difficulty appealing to black voters; but Frum sees evidence that this is changing. “The latest CNN poll,” he notes, “showed Sanders erasing Biden’s lead among nonwhite voters—perhaps in spite of Sanders’s indifference to identity politics, or maybe, just maybe, because of that indifference” (though Frum acknowledges that this CNN poll may be an outlier).
If the polls are correct, then Biden is Frum’s only real hope for stopping Sanders and beating Trump. Biden has held up well, but he is still 77 years old and clearly not the man or candidate he was 10 or 20 years ago. He’s lost a step, and father time can be unkind.
Yet, as Frum observes, “the left-but-not-woke idea does have power—including with many members of racial minorities.” What we don’t yet know is whether that idea has enough power to overcome the Democratic Party’s woke brigades, or whether, instead, that idea will become their latest victim. All eyes are on Iowa, New Hampshire, and especially more racially and ethnically diverse South Carolina and Nevada. Stay tuned.
Feature photo credit: Associated Press via VOA News.