The Roots of the Hack Gap

There’s a lot of talk out there about the so-called Hack Gap, where no one really defends Democrats. I don’t know where I saw this, but recently someone had something on line that basically noted that everyone from the center to the far left defines themselves against the Democratic Party, including mainstream Democrats. And it’s true, no one actually likes the Democratic Party and defends it. The Democratic Party is so far less popular than the Republicans in polling, despite 6 months of Donald Trump. Centrists get off by talking moving to the right, while leftists talk about what a sellout party Democrats are.

Where did this begin?

The person most responsible for the problem is Bill Clinton.

Remember that Clinton won the nomination in 1992 by trashing Democrats and liberals especially. The media loved it. To this day, they want a Sister Souljah Moment and are talking about it today as so great for any Democrat who wants to run in 2028. I completely reject the conventional wisdom that Democrats needed to nominate a right-wing member of its party in 1992 because liberals had been trashed three straight elections. The problem with that formulation is that neither Carter nor Dukakis were anything like liberals. Dukakis and Clinton were very similar from a policy perspective. Dukakis after all had lost his first reelection campaign as governor of Massachusetts because he was so anti-union that the public sector unions went full-on to kick his ass in the primary, which they did. Mondale of course was a liberal.

This conventional wisdom is beloved by anyone who was around in the 80s and early 90s. But I think it’s half-baked at best. First, it ignores the context by which Bush declined in 1992, in which probably just about any good politician Democrat could win. Second, it overstates the policy reasons why people win. Clinton beat Bush in 92 as much because he was a young, charismatic man who was very good at retail politics than because he turned his back on the unions and supported NAFTA and flew back to Arkansas to kill a prisoner. That’s not to say that his moderate politics didn’t help him. They probably did. It is to say that there were lots of moderate Democrats at that time who had failed where he succeeded, both in the primaries and the general. People like charisma and change, especially after 12 years of the same thing.

Now, at first, Clinton’s presidency wasn’t particularly conservative or anything. The health care plan really was a noble attempt to expand the social welfare state. But after its defeat and the 94 elections, Clinton went all in on his own political survival by trashing Democrats. He hired Dick Morris, went all in on triangulation, and spent the rest of his two terms telling America that liberals sucked.

Well, it might have worked, but it really pissed off the party’s liberal wing. Then in 2000, Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman–William F. Buckley’s chosen Democrat to get rid of the far more liberal Republican senator Lowell Weicker–to be his VP. The lesson Gore took was that trashing liberals was a great way to win. But it’s not surprising that when your party leaders routinely tell you that you suck, well, you start to go to war with them or abandon them entirely. Thus the Nader campaign and the Bush victory. Then Democrats embraced the post-9/11 hysteria and the Patriot Act and the Iraq War.

Well, I hardly have to spell out the politics of the last twenty years to LGM readers. But basically, Bill Clinton set up the current civil war in the Democratic Party. Much of the establishment, especially the aging version who came of age in the 90s and are holding onto control like it was the Politburo in 1984, still believes that the path to victory is taking a huge shit on the liberals who make up the core of their primary base. And those liberals no longer trust the party. Whether for opportunity or for principle, everyone hates the Democratic Party, especially Democrats.

I’ve begun to wonder if the Democrats aren’t going to go the way of the Whigs and disappear in the face of Trumpism, with some similar but different party to replace it. Unlikely, I know. And perhaps not ideal. But the Democratic brand is not only toxic, it’s toxic on both the left and the right of the party. I don’t know how to make even Democrats love Democrats again. But I know who started this. It’s Bill Clinton. It’s hard to bridge the hack gap when your own leaders trash you and don’t embrace Democrats when they win the New York City Democratic primary, for example.