The biggest challenge for any party whose political strategy involves uniting as many different factions as possible is managing the issues which set those factions against each other. Witness just a few of the internal conflicts currently plaguing the Democrat Party.
[W]hat most threatens the Democrat Party’s future is the only thing that keeps its various factions together.
The most obvious example is anti-Semitism, which has succeeded in turning longstanding Jewish Democrats against both woke academia and the growing Muslim communities in blue states like Maryland, Michigan, and New Jersey. As Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger recently observed, the party “may never [have] expected Jew-hatred to be a feature of its coalition,” but “the embrace by so much of the party’s emerging rank and file of anti-Semitism — a euphemism for active Jew hatred” has pushed many Jewish Democrats “over the line.” (READ MORE from Lew M. Andrews: Solzhenitsyn: Defeat Progressivism Through Conversation)
Another increasingly divisive issue for Democrats is border security, which pits those Biden administration progressives responsible for letting an estimated 8 million migrants illegally enter the U.S. against naturalized citizens from the same countries. So much so that the Spanish-language TV network Univision, which serves a large share of the domestic Spanish-speaking audience, recently featured an interview with Donald Trump, in which he bragged how, if elected in 2024, he would immediately finish his wall.
Democrats favoring an open border have also angered traditionally liberal voters in Boston, Chicago, New York, Seattle, and other large cities where the cost of sheltering migrants has forced deep cuts to basic services. Feeling pressure from their constituents, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, both Democrats, have lashed out against President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security for “lack of intervention and coordination at the border.”
School choice, which allows parents to use taxpayer money to educate their K-12th grade children outside the local public school system, is still another policy which has set traditional Democrat constituencies against each other. Especially as it has become clear just how much the agenda of the party’s biggest funder, the teacher unions, has hurt the children of the party’s minority voters.
According to a May study by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the successful effort by unionized teachers to close schools during Covid caused the learning gap between white students and black and Hispanic students to spike “sharply for the first time in a generation.” And even before the pandemic, union rules allowing incompetent teachers to keep their jobs, elevating leftist ideology above reading and math instruction, and permitting social promotion clearly disadvantaged minority children.
Yet despite these and other internal conflicts, the Democrat Party has kept itself intact by persuading its various factions that they all are better off supporting an agenda which promises each some new public subsidy or legislated benefit. As the Gallup Poll concluded in its 2021 analysis of the left’s “big tent” political strategy, what in the end keeps Democrats unified is their shared interest in “more active government.”
But whether the precarious condition of U.S. finances can continue to provide the party’s constituencies with sufficient incentive to mute or downplay their internal disagreements is an increasingly open question. It is not just that the country’s $33.7 trillion debt — growing at $2 trillion per year and not even reserving for projected Social Security and Medicare deficits — will soon make it impossible to enact any new spending plans. As former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard has observed, even many previously legislated programs will soon have to be seriously cut back or terminated altogether. (READ MORE: Progressivism Is Aggravating America’s Mental Health Crisis)
And given a choice between continued support for such expensive left-wing priorities as a rapid transition to electric vehicles, subsidizing college tuitions, and supporting illegal immigrants, versus ensuring an adequate defense or saving Social Security, it is not hard to predict what most voters will demand their representatives decide. One only need look at Germany, where debt problems have led its government to abandon previously adopted green subsidies in favor of maintaining economic growth.
Come crunch time, of course, Democrats will argue that cutting spending is not the only way to balance the federal budget. Instead of eliminating their factions’ worthy programs, party politicians will say, additional revenue could be raised from higher taxes on the wealthy and on big corporations.
And, indeed, something along this line will likely be tried for a while, if for no other reason than to persuade the electorate of the fairness of their country’s overall belt tightening. But the history of sovereign debt crises also tells us that anything gained by requiring the so-called “haves” to accept a sharply higher tax regimen will almost certainly be offset by their subsequent reluctance to generate taxable income — in the end only elevating the pressure to terminate many Democrat programs.
Even before confronting this reality, Democrats will find themselves sharply divided over the best way to tax the affluent. Traditional liberals may be content to seek steeper rates on earned and investment income. But the party’s powerful progressive base will almost certainly want a levy on unrealized capital gains or some other mechanism for confiscating wealth — an approach guaranteed to irk the many Wall Street doners to left-wing causes.
Left-wing economists like Paul Krugman will push for a higher than average inflation, which redistributes money from lenders (who tend to be richer) to borrowers (who tend to be poorer), but most rank-and-file Democrats are certain to be horrified by the idea. Green activists will block any tax policy that does not guarantee massive spending to achieve Net Zero emissions, while those on the furthest left of the party will sabotage any debt remedy at all, imagining they can use the subsequent financial collapse to restructure society along more equitable lines. (READ MORE: Make Offers to Public Employee Unions They Can’t Refuse)
Perceiving the danger of ever-increasing federal debt, some moderate Democrats like the Progressive Policy Institute’s Ben Ritz and former Harvard president Larry Summers have already begun urging their party’s leaders to tone down future spending demands, but with predictably little success. As the Gallup study clearly revealed, what most threatens the Democrat Party’s future is the only thing that keeps its various factions together.