US elections: Democratic party’s ‘identity crisis’

Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Joe Biden said at a rally four years ago in Detroit, flanked by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw standing behind me. They are the future of this country.”

That was the line then. Biden was the old warrior strapping on his armour one last time. Once Donald Trump was vanquished, the new guard could take over. “If Biden is elected,” a Biden adviser told Politico in 2019, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years, and he won’t be running for re-election.” The Democratic Party was becoming something else. Perhaps a party built around democratic socialism, as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would have it. Perhaps a party more firmly rooted in identity and diversity. Either way, Biden was the last of his kind.

Today, Biden is 81 years old and he is running for re-election. Trumpism is anything but vanquished. And the Democratic Party no longer looks to be in transition. The Squad feels more like a faction than a future. Few think leadership of the party will smoothly pass to Vice President Harris. Polls have long shown Democrats aren’t enthusiastic about Biden running for re-election, but he’s avoided any serious primary challenge or pressure to drop out. The orderliness of the Democrats in the past few years stands in stark contrast to the chaos among Republicans. The G.O.P. has humiliated and deposed a string of House speakers and potential House speakers, run critics like Liz Cheney out of office and refused to admit Trump lost the 2020 election. And now Republicans plan to nominate Trump again. That has been and continues to be a driver of Democratic unity.

“Donald Trump posed such a serious threat to so many Democrats that there was a strong desire both for stability and to win,” Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from Silicon Valley and co-chair of Sanders’s 2020 campaign, told me. “And that was at least as much a force or more of a force than the voices saying we need transformation.”

The cliché used to be that Democrats fell in love and Republicans fell in line. The reality, in recent years, has been that Democrats fall in line and Republicans fall apart. The Democratic Party’s establishment has held, even as the Republican Party’s establishment has buckled.

Perhaps the Democratic Party’s establishment has held because the Republican Party’s establishment has buckled.

The Trump era has stretched the Democratic Party into an awkward shape. It has become both the party of progressivism and of preservation, the party that promises both to defend American institutions and to reform them. It has not lost its yen for policy change. Biden’s first term has been impressive, legislatively speaking, and the bills he and the Democrats passed are the most ambitious effort to change America’s built environment since the construction of the Interstate System of highways, if not before.

But his re-election campaign began not by describing what he has transformed but by describing what he is still seeking to safeguard. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about,” Biden said. Before it is anything else, the national Democratic Party, for the ninth year running, is the not-Trump coalition. It is that first and everything else second.