Nearly four years after Hillary Clinton’s loss, it’s still hard to tell.
It is perhaps for the best that the Democratic Party has long prided itself on being a “big tent,” since it is quickly reaching circus-size proportions. On Monday night, John Kasich, a Republican who enacted some of the country’s most restrictive abortion laws, gutted collective bargaining rights and opposed same-sex marriage while serving as governor of Ohio, gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in support of Joe Biden. Just hours before, Mr. Kasich had said in an interview with BuzzFeed News that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York didn’t represent the Democratic Party. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who will speak for one minute tonight at the convention, returned the favor on Twitter: In truth, no one has more influence over how the Democratic Party defines itself now than Donald Trump. “From the progressive left to the moderate wing, Mr. Trump has served for months as the glue keeping the party from fracturing,” my colleagues Astead Herndon and Sydney Ember wrote of last night’s virtual festivities. “Everyone at the first night of the Democrats’ virtual gathering could at least agree that Mr. Biden should be the next president. They can worry about the rest later.” But later will come soon enough, and Mr. Trump will not always be there to provide the Democratic Party with a common purpose. If the Democrats actually manage to take power in November, what will they do with it? Here’s what people are saying. In Vox, Matthew Yglesias writes that the Democratic Party is divided, broadly speaking, into two camps: On one side lies the revolutionary wing, which views President Trump as a product of pre-existing political dysfunction that, if left unattended, will produce new and potentially more competent right-wing demagogues after he leaves office. On the other side, Mr. Yglesias says, lies the restorationist wing, which believes that Trump merely “took the sheen off a United States that really was a shining city on a hill.” Given both Mr. Biden’s ascent to the nomination and the slate of people the party chose to speak at the convention, it seems clear which wing predominates. “Joe Biden, one of the most experienced Democrats and the oldest nominee in history, has spoken of himself as a ‘bridge’ to the next generation of Democratic leaders,” Charlotte Alter writes for Time. “But after more than three years of nearly unprecedented grass roots activism in the Democratic Party, with a new crop of young rising stars shining across the country, few of those have been given prominent roles in this week’s convention. It’s like a band that wrote a whole new album but, when it came time to perform at Madison Square Garden, stuck to the safe, familiar hits instead.” Of course, the convention speaking schedule is not necessarily predictive of how a Biden administration might govern. But taken together, the party’s appeals to restraint and restoration are being interpreted by some not just as a canny electoral strategy but as an earnest expression of political principle.
