The Left’s Muddled and Magical Thinking

A disagreement about how democratic politics works

It must be hard to be an American firmly committed to the political left—at least in recent decades.

Though the right fuels its own political indignation by portraying the left as a juggernaut constantly winning victories over hapless conservatives who must be goaded to become ever-more ruthless in response, the reality is that for roughly 55 years now the left has found itself fighting a rear-guard action.

From 1933 through 1968, the left ran the table in American politics, winning enormous electoral victories, with the only Republican to win the presidency in those decades a retired general and war hero who openly made his peace with the epochal changes ushered in during the New Deal era. But beginning with Richard Nixon’s narrow victory in 1968 and deepening with Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980, the left has found itself on the defensive, forced to compete politically within parameters set and enforced by Republicans.

Why did this happen? My own view, simplified enough to be summarized in two short paragraphs, is that the decline in the left’s fortunes had two sources. First, the combination of the sweeping (and often ill-thought-out) policy ambitions of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda with the surge of rioting and crime in American cities and a morally tainted military struggle and defeat in Vietnam, discredited the left, creating an opening for the right to gain electoral traction for the first time in decades. The energy crisis and stagflation in the late 1970s widened that opening further, and Reagan walked right through it.

Second, passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act antagonized the Southern segregationist faction of the Democratic Party, which first attached itself to George Wallace’s third-party, populist presidential campaign in 1968 but then fell in behind Nixon’s re-election bid in 1972. Over the next few decades, the Republican Party consolidated these new voters and their descendants, giving the GOP an edge in nationwide electoral contests that it hadn’t enjoyed since before the Great Depression.

Another way to put it is to say that public opinion shifted, leaving the left with the support of a smaller share of the electorate than it once enjoyed. This would imply that the solution to the left’s political woes is to adjust course to chase votes now clustered closer to the ideological center than they once were. This is what every Democratic presidential nominee since 1992 has attempted to do.

Yet it’s quite common to hear some of the left’s most intelligent writers and political analysts deny the validity of this interpretation in favor of another. I find this alternative wholly unpersuasive—the thinking behind it so muddled and magical that I often find it hard to believe smart people endorse it.

When Democrats moved to the left on immigration during the Obama administration, the political consequence was to give people with more hardline views on the issue only one option to vote for in 2016: Donald Trump.

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