Perez

The Democratic Party has a new chair. Tom Perez, civil rights lawyer, former Secretary of Labor and Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department under President Obama, won on the second ballot in a close race with Congressman Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Ellison, an exceptional communicator and progressive firebrand, had the all-in support of Senator Sanders, who clearly hoped to acquire the apparatus of the party for his movement. Some Democratic power players, notably Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, added their support because they saw Ellison as someone who could harness the energy among progressives and turn it into electoral support. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and most of the large figures in the party supported Perez.

This might seem to suggest the impression - heavily encouraged by the Ellison camp throughout the campaign - that this race was in fact a rerunning of the primary campaign. Implicit in this view is that it was a chance for the party to "correct" its earlier mistake and embrace the activist energy that propelled Sanders' long-shot campaign to prominence. It has become, since the election, an article of faith among the Left that what doomed the Democratic campaign was the successful attempt of "the establishment" to foil Sanders' populist energy and the subsequent disaffection of the base.*

Has the Democratic Party then rejected its base in favor of a moderate, temporizing policy? The answer depends largely on how one views the Obama administration. Obama set out to reshape - sometimes quite radically - the American economy and international liberal order, but he did so with a view to maintenance and redirection. His goal was not to throw off the system and create anew. The Left was consistently disappointed with him, because they saw him as timid and hesitant.** Those on the ideological spectrum between liberalism and social democracy were more pleased. Obama, Clinton, and Perez, while they have differences on issues and perhaps some daylight between them ideologically, are of the evolutionary rather than revolutionary mold. Sanders, Ellison, and the activist Left take a different view.

All this is of course a gross oversimplification. But I think it provides a useful framework for thinking about the very real divisions within the Democratic Party. The Big Tent remains big, but its diversity has made it unruly. Perez will neither heal the divide nor make it worse. Ellison has been made his second-in-command, and unified opposition to Trump will paper over a lot of differences for the time being. What the party very badly needs in the long term is a leader who, like Obama during his campaigns, supplies a vision of the future that appeals to and motivates its various sectors. The Democrats have never in their history, to my knowledge, derived their unity as a party from a general agreement on policy. They have rallied around the vision of a more egalitarian society. "Hope" and "Change" may have been frequently mocked as campaign props in the last eight years, but I cannot think of a purer distillation of the thing in the Democratic Party that appeals to people.

The Left has gained a sense of identity and power from its recent successes, and seems prepared to flex that muscle electorally. If so, it will have earned its increased influence within the party. What concerns me, though, is that it already seems to be showing signs of the same attitude that overtook the Republicans in the last ten years. The right wing activists and pundits became increasingly empowered, and they used that power to redefine Republicanism into something much more unyielding and caustic. The party of the Bush family became the party of Trump. I have some concern that if the activists are allowed free rein the party of Obama will become something I cannot support because it, like the modern GOP, will have substituted ideology for truth, conformity for ability, and purity for merit.

*What actually doomed the Clinton campaign, incidentally, was a lack of forceful message, an unhealthy insularity among Clinton loyalists, misallocation of campaign resources, and a crass disregard for what organizers on the ground in the midwest were warning them was coming. 

**That disappointment and subsequent distrust is the root of the current suspicion with which the activists view the DNC, and why some relatively mild email criticisms were blown into a plot to rig the primary.