To win back power, Democrats must do things that make them uncomfortable

JERRY BROWN, California’s governor, is once again pondering the decline of Western civilisation. Mr Brown is sitting in his San Francisco office, having spent part of the morning at a conference where business people were discussing how to use artificial intelligence to sell more cosmetics. “I’ve never heard the word ‘experience’ so often…the ‘make-up experience’...all that brain power, a massive mobilisation of talent and capital, and for what?” The governor will step down at the start of next year after a second two-term stint in Sacramento (his first was 1975-83), making him both the longest-serving governor in the state’s history and a reliquary of the changes the Democratic Party has undergone in the past half century.

In a state synonymous with cloudless skies, Mr Brown always seems to be expecting the next storm. He is something of a fiscal conservative, cutting spending and raising taxes, and will bequeath his state both a budget surplus and a full rainy-day fund when he goes. He was a serious environmentalist 30 years before protection of the environment became one of his party’s main purposes, and he was railing against the distorting effects of large campaign donations long before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision made that position fashionable on the left. But he is also the veteran of three failed presidential bids, proof that being correct in politics is not the same as winning.

Politicians are usually obliged to pretend that they can command the sea to part when they can really only surf on the waves. “The economy is the most important thing, and it’s the thing we can’t control,” muses Mr Brown. What they can do is be ready when a sufficient number of voters decide they want a change. At that point, the party or candidates who are not in power must be able to persuade people that they share their worries, are on their side and, at some level, are like them. Voting is partly an exercise in narcissism. People want to be able to look at a candidate and see something of themselves.

When your party does this, it is called empathy. When the other side tries, it is called identity politics. President Donald Trump’s hostility to immigrants who are not high-cheekboned Slovenian models suggests to a large number of white Americans that he cares about them and will put their interests ahead of other people’s. Democrats cannot do this kind of identity politics. What they can do, however, is avoid the wrong kind of identity politics. That would mean not speaking to the different bits of their mosaic coalition as if each had separate interests that are opposed to those of the population at large.

Because Democratic candidates are so aware of the need to bring a fragmented coalition together, their speeches can resemble lists, and any sizeable Democratic political event must feature speakers who are black, brown, white, male, female, gay, straight, natural-born citizens, immigrants and undocumented. The instinct behind this is noble: America is becoming more diverse and its future success depends on the acceptance of that.

But, whereas in the 1960s, identity politics on the left was about big issues such as free speech and racial segregation, now all too often it emphasises questions that affect very few people directly, such as transgender equality. The Democratic platform in 2016 contained 20 mentions of LGBT rights and almost no mention of illegal immigration. “There’s a whole set of parents in the country who just don’t get it,” says Lynn Vavreck of UCLA.

Democrats do not need to abandon small, vulnerable groups; but they cannot build a winning coalition out of them alone. Better identity politics requires playing down identity, not playing it up. “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. I am a Jew. I am black. I am gay,” Andrew Cuomo, the state’s governor, announced last year. “I am a woman seeking to control her body.” It would have been enough to say that everyone is welcome in New York, regardless of how they look, what they believe or whom they love, so long as they extend that tolerance to others. It ought to be possible to talk about the large numbers of black men murdered every year and the large numbers of rural whites dying of heroin overdoses in the same breath, as a sad waste of human potential, without getting into an argument over white privilege. It should also be possible to welcome into the party with equal passion women who are against abortion and those who oppose the president.

At its worst, putting identity first can become a way to close down debates that Democrats need to have. After supporters of Bernie Sanders were removed from key committees on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2017, for reasons that really had to do with the senator from Vermont and his supporters speaking a language that many found too revolutionary, the DNC denied that it had retaliated against Mr Sanders’s allies, and said the changes were intended to increase diversity. The new additions included a black, millennial transgender woman and a child of undocumented migrants, as if the real problem with Mr Sanders’s people was that they were not oppressed or gender fluid enough. One Sanders supporter bruised by the experience describes this focus on oppression as “the misery Olympics”. The temptation to suggest that people’s views are a product of their skin colour, gender or sexuality is bad enough. As a principle for unifying a party as diverse as the Democratic Party, it is a disaster.

Many Democratic politicians deeply dislike what Mr Trump’s success reveals about their country. Yet in a political system where winning the popular vote does not necessarily result in gaining political power, they may need to wrap themselves in the flag and become as grounded in what Governor Brown calls “this Americana business” as the president is.

“Children do not respond well to scolding and neither do nations,” writes Mark Lilla in “The Once and Future Liberal”. “It just puts their backs up. They become better only when they are told they are already good and therefore can improve.” The spectacle of the president taking policy advice in the Oval Office from Kim Kardashian, a fellow star of reality TV, might convince Democrats that the demise of Western civilisation feared by Governor Brown is already here. They must put such thoughts aside and relearn the language of American civil religion: self-evident truths; a shining city upon a hill; life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And, above all, e pluribus unum: out of many, one.