Peter Cunningham

(Published on Facebook on January 12. Apologies for the length of this post)

In reflecting on politics, we arbitrarily define eras. The Gilded Age, the New Deal Era, The Civil Rights Era or the Reagan Era. In my view, the modern era of Democratic politics began in 1992 with the election of Bill Clinton. Since then, Democrats have occupied the White House for 20 of the last 32 years.

Despite our dominance in the White House, many pundits and politicians are declaring the Democrat party in crisis and hopelessly out of touch. Right or wrong, consider the following thought exercise: name the three biggest things we got right in the last 32 years and the three biggest things we got wrong. I’ll start with what I think Democrats got right.

Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden all strengthened the safety net – primarily in health care and the child tax credit. Arguably, the welfare reforms under Clinton weakened the safety net, but, on the whole, the poorest Americans did better under all three Democratic presidents.

The second big thing we got right was climate change. To his credit, Jimmy Carter started the conversation a few years after the hippies started Earth Day, but Clinton, and especially his Vice President Al Gore, really advanced it. Obama took it to another level with various initiatives aimed at reducing dependence on fossil fuels even as he increased fossil fuel production. And he contributed to global awareness and action with the Paris Peace Accords.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act includes billions in new investments to address climate change. Collectively, the world is much more focused on climate change as a factor in the ever-increasing number of extreme weather events, the electric car industry is going gang-busters, and the GOP’s hoax narrative is pretty much discredited in all but the most extreme corners of the internet. The politics of climate change is another story but the issue itself is much more present in our lives because of Democratic leadership.

The third big thing we have done right is economic rescue. All three recent Democratic presidents inherited economies in crisis. All three built historically strong economies and handed them over to their GOP successors. According to one analysis, since 1980, there has been a net gain of 50 million jobs under Democratic presidents compared to 17 million jobs under Republican presidents. Note, as well, that when you start the clock at 1980, Republicans have occupied the White House for 24 of the last 44 years and we still tripled their net number of jobs created.

As for what Democrats got wrong, I again focus on the economy. Despite our considerabe achievements in restoring economic growth following economic collapse under Republicans, the lack of a long-term, consistent industrial policy sacrificed the American working class. NAFTA is the primary example. Passed under Clinton, NAFTA indisputably benefitted the coasts at the expense of the heartland. We should have seen that coming and done much, much, much, much more to counter it.

There are other examples. We failed to protect, strengthen and expand private sector unions; we were reluctant to subsidize manufacturing in order to protect American jobs even as we subsidized other industries like agriculture and energy; and we signaled in so many ways – from education policy to personnel decisions in presidential administrations – that we don’t really respect and value people who work with their hands. Over and over again, left-leaning pundits, economists and politicians declared manufacturing dead and celebrated sexy new industries like tech and social media. They were all wrong.

The second big shortcoming of Democratic presidents is also economic. Democrats have been unable to make the economy more equitable. Economic inequity is higher today than ever before, putting the basic American Dream further and further out of reach for more and more Americans. This is fundamentally unsustainable.

Putting more money into the pockets of those who need it and will spend it should have been a core strategy of the Democratic Party since Reagan – who began pushing in the opposite direction with his “trickle-down economics.” Instead, Democrats caved to tax-cutting Republicans and failed to show working-class Americans how they have lost in the long run to GOP wealth consolidation.

The third big failure might be summarized as “woke on steroids.” For a century now, we have joined noble fights for women’s rights, civil rights, worker’s rights, immigrant rights, abortion rights, the rights of people with disabilities, gay rights, transgender rights and human rights. We should all be proud of this work and our many successes to highlight.

But, over the years, we somehow lost the narrative thread with a lot of people – especially whites, males, and rural people. What should be viewed as core values have instead been recast as moralistic, judgmental, and unfair. The backlash has been harsh and effective.

Democrats should absolutely not retreat from any of these commitments, but we should reflect on how we lost public support in these rights debates and think about how to get the story back on track.

Part of it is coming down from our high horses. We have to stop acting like anyone who disagrees with us is morally inferior. We have a right to announce our pronouns. We don’t have a right to force others to announce their pronouns and we certainly should not condemn anyone who chooses not to do it.

We can defend transgender rights while acknowledging the potential discomfort some people may feel about formerly male athletes competing against their daughters or formerly male people using women’s rest rooms.

We can defend worker’s rights while acknowledging that empowered unions may add financial stress to corporations and governments. The auto workers union realized it is a partner with GM in selling cars, which means keeping them affordable in a competitive marketplace, or else everyone loses. Similarly, public sector unions must be partners in balancing budgets and keeping life affordable or else everyone loses. Acknowledging trade-offs does not make you a traitor. It’s part of the give and take in a healthy democracy. In the real world, most issues aren’t black and white.

From a purely political standpoint, there is one more thing we got wrong, and that is that we have failed to protect our majorities in Congress. In 14 of the last 32 years, we have had unified national government, meaning one party controlled the White House and both House of Congress.

Democrats had unified government for just six of the last 32 years. All three Democratic presidents lost control of Congress during their first mid-term elections and never gained it back. The result, of course, is that their legislative agendas mostly stalled. Republicans occupied the White House for just 12 of the last 32 years but had unified control for (essentially) eight of them, allowing them to better advance their legislative goals.

All that said, to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of Democratic demise are wildly exaggerated. The fact is, we lost the 2024 election by less than two points, the GOP margin in the House is miniscule, and we’re just four seats from flipping the Senate. Notably, we won close Senate races in four of the seven swing states that Trump won and we even put a scare in them in some “safe” red states like Texas and Nebraska.

Democrats have done some important things right in the last 32 years and some equally important things wrong. Hopefully, in the coming decades, we will do more of the former and less of the latter.