Something wonderful has been happening in the Democratic Party over the last few years. For several good reasons a wide and deep bench of new leaders is emerging. First, the party is greening. By this I don’t necessarily mean that more young people are joining the party; rather, young people have in larger numbers than in the recent past become supportive of political positions in line with the party’s progressive platform, party leaders have recognized it and allowed the progressive wing of the party more room to operate. This has generated a virtuous feedback loop, drawing more of the traditional Democratic base back to supporting Democratic candidates with money and votes.
Second, the party is re-learning how to win in parts of the country that had been trending Republican for several generations. Even though some of this is a consequence of President Trump’s influence on the Republican party, which has lost that party significant support from independent voters, it is likely to continue after Donald Trump is off the stage. The reason I think this will continue is that Democrats are recovering from the elitist hangover that has dogged them since the ’80s.
Third, the party heard the complaints of its members and younger leaders about its top-heavy structure and decision-making processes and has begun to make positive changes. One notable instance of this change is the large number of declared candidates for President this cycle. Of course there would be more candidates in a cycle after four years of a Republican president, but the number lining up in this cycle is unprecedented. Here is a summary, skipping cycles following the first term of a Democratic president:
| 1984 | 8 |
| 1988 | 12 |
| 1992 | 8 |
| 2000 | 3 |
| 2004 | 10 |
| 2008 | 8 |
| 2016 | 6 |
| 2020 | 16, at last count |
It’s looking like Joe Biden will jump into the mix. Some pollsters tell us he’ll be the immediate front-runner if he does. If that’s true, hopefully it won’t last. Why? Not because Biden would be a bad president. He’d certainly be a far, far better president than Donald Trump. It’s not because he’d be less likely to beat Donald Trump than other candidates. He has boatloads of experience and policy smarts matched with the ability to speak plainly and directly to ordinary people. Plus, he’s an old, Christian, white male, and so has fewer hoops to clear than most of the other Democratic candidates to steal some of the archetypical Trump voters.
My problem with Biden is that, based on his past history, he’s likely to be too much of an incrementalist to deal adequately with the range of massive structural challenges facing our country. Our healthcare funding system is broken badly and needs a major overhaul. The country’s infrastructure is falling apart, costing us our competetive edge, and it will take hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild it. We are already experiencing severe consequences from climate change and the environmental impacts are only beginning to be felt, which means that we can’t just upgrade or fix in place. It will take some visionary leadership, extensive planning, and trillions of dollars more in investments to restructure our society to live with much less use of fossil fuels while protecting ourselves from the climate changes we can no longer prevent. Meanwhile, we continue to massively overfund our military while increasingly underfunding the soft power tools that won us the world’s admiration for decades, our immigration system is a joke, too many of our courts and regulatory agencies have been captured by corporate interests, our electoral system and elected officials have been bought and paid for to the point that a typical congressperson has had to spend hours each week raising money, our entire food production system is designed to make a few people fabulously rich while sending large numbers of us to an early grave due to diet-related illnesses, etc., etc., etc. All these challenges were either caused or greatly exacerbated by the single-minded determination of influential members of the very wealthy to remove every legal, economic, and social barrier to their excessive, unearned wealth accumulation, and they have the bulk of an entire political party behind them. Whoever wants to lead us effectively through this critical period will have to be an effective class warrior on behalf of ordinary people. We need a president of FDR’s or Lincoln’s stature and vision. I don’t know if any of the Democratic candidates meet this criterion, but I’m pretty sure Joe Biden doesn’t.