Why the Democrats are still stuck in the past

As opposition to Donald Trump’s autocratic regime has intensified — with a majority of Americans now seeing him as a dictator — it’s been widely noted that the most important difference between elected Democrats isn’t whether they’re “progressive” or “moderate,” but whether they’re willing to fight.

But behind these two distinctions there’s a more important one, the distinction between present-oriented and future-oriented behavior, which provides insight into the Democrats’ longstanding problems and how conservative Republicans have exploited them for decades — a dynamic that ultimately brought us Trump. 

I’ve been perplexed for decades by this paradox: The Democratic Party has brought us every major policy advance since at least the New Deal, but is now the party most firmly wedded to status-quo, poll-tested politics. The Republican Party, while growing  increasingly radical and backward-looking, is far more focused on creating fundamental change, if only to return America to an imaginary past golden age. 

A light bulb went off recently while I was reading Dan Davies’ “The Unaccountability Machine” (interview here). It’s about that  same tension between present and future orientation, which Davies argues is present in virtually every organization, as described by the Viable Systems Model developed by Stafford Beers. The VSM model describes systems at five levels: The first three dealing with things as they are, the fourth deals with future possibilities and the fifth deals with the tensions between those orientations. 

This was my Eureka moment: Democrats completely lack both fourth- and fifth-level systems, while Republicans don’t. This dovetails perfectly with the party differences described in Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins’ 2016 book "Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats" (review here), which I'll return to below.

The five-system model: What Democrats are missing

Here’s a quick overview of the five levels described by the VSM. The most basic is operations,  the part of the system that interacts with the outside world. The next is regulation, which organizes operations to “make sure people don’t bump into each other,” as Davies put it. The third level is optimization, dedicated to achieving specified specific goals as efficiently as possible.

Then we get to the fourth system, which makes the system viable over the long term, and capable of responding to unanticipated shocks. That one is "intelligence," devoted to understanding how the environment is changing and may change in the future, and how best  to cope with that. This creates a tension, as Davies describes:

You can't fail to respond to the outside environment, but if you try to restructure too rapidly or you change things too much, you break the organization. So you need an ultimate court of appeal to balance the here-and-now with the future and the outside. 

That’s the fifth level, which he calls “identity” or “philosophy,” because managing the balance of present and future — balancing the information you have now with information you don’t yet have — is how the organization’s identity is defined. 

Those last two are what Democrats don’t have. The party as an organization is almost entirely focused on the first three levels, with no coherent focus on the future, and thus no experienced need to reconcile present- and future-orientations. I’m not saying Democrats don’t have ideas about the future; they do. But they are forever putting new wine in old bottles, and that’s the fundamental source of the Democrats’ recurring problems, from high-level failures of issue-framing and communication to nitty-gritty organizing failures typified by the feckless abandonment of the 50-state strategy. I’ll cite some examples of how this manifests.

Radical asymmetry: Democrats and Republicans aren't alike

The VSM model dovetails perfectly with the explanation offered in “Asymmetric Politics,” where Grossmann and Hopkins provide a wealth of data to support the differences they see between the two parties: Democrats focus on concrete solutions (those involving VSM systems 1, 2 and 3) while Republicans are obsessed with conservative ideological purity (system 5) — which, I would argue, produced Trump as its unintended end-product (after George W. Bush was labeled as “globalist" and John McCain somehow became a snowflake liberal). 

The Democratic Party, they write, “fosters a relatively pragmatic, results-oriented style of politics in which officeholders are rewarded for delivering concrete benefits to targeted groups in order to address specific social problems.” By contrast, Republicans “forge partisan ties based on common ideological beliefs, encouraging party officials to pursue broad rightward shifts in public policy." 

Of course both parties can pursue policies that benefit targeted constituencies. But Democrats typically do so in highly pragmatic terms — a problem needs to be solved, and doing so the right way will help the nation as a whole — while Republicans do so in morally absolute terms, judging who is worthy and who is virtuous. Despite Trump’s chaos and evident corruption, this distinction still serves, but my focus here is on the Democrats and why their lack of systems four and five is a fundamental problem.

The New Deal base of the Democratic Party was largely served by economic programs, while new demands emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s — civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, etc. — which are sometimes called "post-materialist." That’s partly true but also misleading: Those issues emerged from changing material conditions, and reflected the needs, values and demands of material, identifiable groups.

That tension can be understood in terms of serving competing groups (a system 3 management problem) or as a tension between systems 3 and 4, as new demands move the party in new directions. Party officials and organizers who see it exclusively as a present-tense problem are missing something, because there's no coherent and functional system 4. Future-oriented thinking only happens among discrete groups within the party, who then must contend with other groups trying to do the same thing. That's seen as a system 3 problem, coordinating competing demands to achieve an optimal outcome, which is almost always about winning the next election. That’s a poor excuse for long-term thinking.

On the other side is the GOP, an intensely ideological party with much more coherent system 4 and 5 functions. Its goal for generations has been to undo the New Deal,as well as the entire civil rights era. It engages in system 4 thinking all the time, in terms of how to erode the Democrats’ power and gain more for themselves. Republicans consistently convey messaging that fits their long-term goal, portraying Democrats as recklessly pushing for dangerous system 4 changes driven by alien system 5 ideologies — socialism, Marxism, “radical feminism,” etc. — while portraying themselves as defenders of “real America,” tradition and the Constitution. They’re the party of “personal responsibility," “family values" and “personal freedom," regardless of whether the policies they push actually align with such claims.

Generations of conservative attack 

When Republicans finally regained the White House under Dwight Eisenhower after 20 years out of power, he concluded that the GOP dream of undoing the New Deal was unrealistic. In a letter to his brother, Ike wrote: “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” Then he mocked the “tiny splinter group … that believes you can do these things. … Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” 

Well, the “stupid’ and “negligible” folks have made quite a comeback since then, beginning with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. There are many ways to tell that story: I recommend Rick Perlstein’s series of books — “Before the Storm,” “Nixonland,” “The Invisible Bridge” and “Reaganland” — while Kim Phillips-Fein’s “Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal” recounts how the seeds were planted decades earlier. My purpose here is best served by Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields’ “The Long Southern Strategy” (interview here), which traces the GOP’s strategic identity-based attacks, meant to counter the purported threats advanced by Democrats. 

That began with race, of course, but that wasn’t enough. “Only by striking at the heart of Southern white identity,” the authors write, “could they hope to overcome the allegiance that [Jimmy] Carter, as the first true southern president since secession, would surely rebuild”:

Nixon’s initial race-based Southern Strategy could only take things so far. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both managed to buck the tide it influenced. It was the second gender phase of the Southern strategy that helped unseat Carter, as abortion and Phyllis Schlafely’s anti-ERA crusading helped further reshape the landscape. 

Religion also had to be brought into the mix, which involved a massive purge of the Southern Baptist church, effectively turning that demonination’s moral and theological identity upside down, as Maxwell and I discussed: 

[T]his was a complete transformation of the Baptist faith. It was very individualistic, non-hierarchical — the individual's relationship with God — and it was turned into the pastor telling believers what to believe, with the national organization over them. It just seemed to completely violate not just the Christian spirit, but the specific doctrinal nature of Baptism.

“Trump is not an anomaly,” Maxwell told me. “He’s the product of a really long counterrevolution” that involved future-oriented system 4 direction and was guided by a clearly articulated system 5 conservative identity. 

Throughout that history, there was no coherent Democratic response, no system 4 strategy and absolutely no system 5 identity or philosophy. That wasn't because no potential strategies or philosophies were available; it was because the necessary systems simply didn’t exist. 

The Democrats' missed opportunities 

The first such opportunity became visible in data from the 1964 election cycle, analyzed in Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril’s 1967 book “The Political Beliefs of Americans,” which I've written about many times over the last decade. Their focus was ideology, not partisan identity, but the asymmetry they discuss was virtually the same. 

More Americans identified as conservative than liberal, they found, although there was supermajority support for liberal big-government programs. What’s more, while half the population qualified as ideological conservatives, two-thirds were “operationally liberal,” meaning they supported stable or increased federal government spending on education, housing and urban renewal, favored Medicare and agreed that government should fight poverty. Most strikingly, 23 percent were both ideological conservatives and operational liberals, and that proportion was doubled in the Deep South states carried by Goldwater — precisely the targets of the Long Southern Strategy.

In their final chapter, Free and Cantril proposed “a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols incorporated, would focus people’s wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner.”

Of course that didn’t happen, once again because Democrats had no system for such a future-oriented task, and also had no coherent guiding identity or philosophy. Instead, we got the Long Southern Strategy and its consequences. 

Nearly 30 years later, linguist George Lakoff published “Moral Politics” (my review here), arguing that conservative ideology was structured by a “strict father” family model, which Republicans frequently articulated to bring many seemingly unrelated concerns together. It was based on a punitive model of parenting, Lakoff said, that has been shown to fail at producing the morally autonomous adults it promised. 

Liberal ideology was also structured by a family model, he wrote: the “nurturant parent” model, which could actually produce the healthy adult outcomes it aimed for and fit well with the “operational liberalism” endorsed by a large majority of the electorate.

But with no systemic structures in place to address Lakoff’s recommendations, the Democratic Party largely ignored him, with the exception of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and his subsequent role as party chair. Barack Obama later discarded Dean’s “50-state strategy” for unclear reasons, another consequence of the lack of any fourth-level system.  

You’ll often hear contemporary Democrats give lip service to framing issues in terns of values, and some certainly do so. The party as a whole does not. It never embraced or articulated the “nurturant parent” identity that Lakoff outlined, although it arguably underlies many of today’s most popular policies. 

More ideas ignored

Next we come to sociologist Jessica Carlaco’s articulation of a "politics of care" — a potential system 5 philosophy — in her book “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net” (interview here.) Here’s what she told me at the time: 

My hope is that by helping people to see how care links our fates — across race, across gender, across class — and how that kind of a stronger care network or stronger social safety net would benefit all of us, that we can come together across those differences. We can fight for things like universal health care, universal child care, universal paid family leave, which would help to ensure that all of us, regardless of gender, have more time and energy to commit to the shared project of care.   

That's closely akin relates to my own 2021 proposal that public health — framed as a collective articulation of caring — could play a similar role:

Public health — promoting wellness and preventing sickness and injury on a societal level — isn't just about mobilizing voters in an emergency for one election cycle. It can also serve as a long-term, overarching framework to reframe our politics, to provide us with new common sense in addressing a wide range of diverse issues by highlighting common themes and connecting what works.

Carlaco’s articulation of linked fates “across race, across gender, across class” recalls the “race-class narrative” developed in 2018 by Anat Shenker-Osorio and Ian Haney López. As I wrote at the time, such narratives

call out scapegoating by greedy, wealthy special interests, and … call on people to unify across racial lines for the common good. Not only can racial justice and economic issues be addressed simultaneously, other issues involving the common good — such as environmental protection — gain support as well, even if they’re not being talked about directly.

Although their original goal was to “mobilize the base” of the Democratic Party, Shenker-Osorio said their messages also won broad support from “persuadable” voters, who hold “a jumbled mix of progressive and reactionary views.” Again, the race-class narrative has been adopted in piecemeal fashion, if at all, because Democrats have no system in place to identify better strategies to reshape the political landscape.

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Echoing Lakoff, Shenker-Osorio’s 2012 book “Don’t Buy It” (review here) found that liberals and conservatives have different metaphors for understanding the economy, but that liberal metaphors are generally less coherent. Conservative metaphors reinforce a view of the economy "as something natural, and hence best left alone," and describe "the ‘why’ of the economy as a moral enforcer, rewarding hard work and virtue, and punishing those who fall short."

Progressives generally offer undisciplined or self-contradictory descriptions, she wrote, but have an appropriate metaphor available: "the economy as a human-made object in motion — ideally, a vehicle — which sends the factually accurate message that the economy would not even exist without human involvement, and needs conscious controlling in order to avoid disastrous results." That dovetails with one of the most basic human metaphors, the idea that life is a journey, providing a perfect structure for fact-based discussions of economic issues.

Missing messages on messaging

Two final points on failed messaging further underscore Democrats’ lack of a guiding philosophy and a system for managing change. More than a generation after Karl Rove pioneered the idea of running against a candidate’s strengths, Democratic conventional wisdom restrained them from attacking Trump on immigration even as he flagrantly violated the law and ignored the Constitution. Public opinion had to shift on its own before Democrats felt forced to react. 

There is also no positive, proactive strategy to shift voters toward the Democratic Party, as advanced by messaging strategist Hal Malchow in a 2021 op-ed for The Hill. (Interview here.) Malchow cited two tectonic shifts: Swing voters were disappearing — 90% of voters were choosing parties, not candidates — and direct mail as a campaign tactic had completely stopped working. He argued for a strategy of changing party identification by messaging around salient issues when voters’ emotions were aroused, essentially creating a liberal version of the Long Southern Strategy. 

Malchow was recognized as a legendary political consultant and a pioneer in statistical modeling, but he couldn’t get the attention of anyone who mattered: 

After the article came out, I got a ton of emails from people who said, “Yes! This is spot on! This is right, we need to do this!" But they weren't from anybody who actually made these decisions. 

Countering counterfeit narratives

These examples are fairly broad, but we could offer more specific ones, such as the failure to counter perennial conservative narratives that have created a counterfactual, “common sense” view of the world that too many Democrats thoughtlessly absorb.

For example, amid the wreckage caused by DOGE, consider the narrative of government "waste, fraud and abuse." Last December, when no one knew what form Elon Musk’s venture would take, Paul Krugman predicted that DOGE wouldn’t find much, because the far more competent Grace Commission, with “a staff of nearly 2,000 business executives divided into 36 task forces, who spent 18 months on the job… mostly came up empty.” That failure, Krugman wrote:

taught everyone serious about the budget, liberal or conservative, an important lesson: Anyone who proposes saving lots of taxpayer money by eliminating ‘waste, fraud and abuse” should be ignored, because the very use of the phrase shows that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

That certainly wasn’t the lesson absorbed by the general public, because conservatives have been repeating the mantra of “waste, fraud and abuse” for the past 40-odd years. Almost every Democrat feels obligated to begin by saying that, of course, they want to eliminate waste and fraud before they say criticize DOGE and Musk. It’s an article of faith that no amount of evidence can overcome.

That happened because Republicans’ system 4 and 5 repetition has turned a lie into a politico-religious truth, and because Democrats have no functional system or philosophy that allows them to fight back.

Things get more complicated when it comes to right-wing malarkey about the federal government as a "household" that must "live within its means." That claim emerges from a larger framework of forcefully articulated conservative ideas about the economy, which are wrong but can’t be effectively opposed by muddled progressive reasoning. 

The basic truth here is that the federal government creates money from nothing, and the only constraint it faces is inflation, not debt. That’s the central insight of modern monetary theory — and if Democrats had a functioning system 4 and 5, everyone would know that as surely as they know that two plus two is four. 

I could mention many other narratives as well. Conservatives long since realized that narratives are more powerful than facts, and developed a systemic infrastructure to bury the public in those narratives, while Democrats do almost nothing to fight back.

That has to change. Whatever else Democrats do in this critical moment of history, they need to develop the higher-level systems that any organization needs in order to survive. As I've tried to outline here, there are many things Democrats could and should do to shape their future and ours. But first, they must find the will and develop the capacity.