This Is Your Grandpa's Democratic Party(?)

"Democrats abandoned ordinary Americans."

It's not true. But it's stuck, like a craw in the mouth of the American voter (and the American pundit). And the big question amongst Democratic strategists is how to dislodge it.

My latest idea, in my ongoing quest to become the Democratic Party's Francis Coppola, is to explicitly run with a narrative that says "yes, this is your Grandfather's Democratic Party" -- directly tying oneself to JFK and the New Deal and the civil rights era and that whole period where (supposedly) the Democratic Party was the party of ordinary Americans. Cut to lines about:

• Defending labor unions.
• Bringing back honest, well-paying jobs that can support your family.
• Taking on the billionaires robbing our democracy.
• Protecting civil rights.
• Restoring a women's right to choose.

All intercut with images of modern workers interspersed with older imagery (the March on Selma, men on girders building skyscrapers, etc.) that evokes the good old days.

What's the point of the ad? Basically, it's to create a permission structure for people who have -- for whatever reason -- internalized the narrative of "the party left me" to tell themselves things have changed again. They're not voting for the modern Democratic Party that Fox News has created for them in their minds over the past few years (latte-sipping coastal elites blah blah blah), they're voting for the mythologized Democratic Party of yesteryear that the Fox News caricature is tacitly juxtaposed against -- the party of the New Deal and of JFK, the party that was a working-class party, the party that built things and fought for everyday Americans.

"Mythologized" is important. Obviously, in reality the Democratic Party of that era (or any era) was not some clarion beacon of the worker's voice; nor was it some uncomplicated bastion of civil rights and women's rights advocacy. I know that, you know that. I also know that "ordinary Americans" is a loaded term, that the past wasn't actually that great for a whole lot of people, and so on.

But we're not writing a history paper here, we're dealing with a mood, and that mood is not especially connected to historical reality. How many times have you heard someone say that the current Democratic Party "just keeps moving to the right" (when it is beyond obvious that the Biden administration is the most progressive Democratic administration in my lifetime)? Objectively, it is impossible to defend the notion that the Democratic Party leadership is more conservative now than it was during the Clinton administration. In reality, making a show of affirming people who think "well, back then Democrats were fighting for me" is worth playing a bit of make-believe. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and just the gesture of "this is a change in a direction that makes you feel fuzzy" can have an outsized impact. The past wasn't actually that great, and modern changes are good actually. But if you can make people feel as if the things we're pulling for now are simply a restoration of the hazy memories they have when things were inchoately "better" (or "less complicated" or "less divided" or whatever), you're in a very good position.

I'm not saying the idea is perfect. In particular, even as a subversion of the "not your grandpa's ..." frame, the tagline still is a rough one at a time when many people are aggrieved at the "gerontocracy" in American politics. So workshop the hell out of this. I'm not prideful about it. But I think there's something here. The great insight of the contemporary conservative movement is in how they manage to fuse their present-day reactionary values as if there were simply a restoration of the greatness of the founders (I read one constitutional commentator describe originalism as "ventriloquizing the present through the past"). Democrats can do it too -- and as the Republican Party falls deeper and deeper into the grip of billionaire oligarchs and weird paranoid extremists, there's an opening here we can and should exploit.

Learning the Right Wrong Lessons, Part II

The major pivot point in Joe Biden's term in office did not stem from inflation or the war in Gaza. It came following his withdrawal from Afghanistan. That decision was marked by a few key characteristics:

1. It was the right call: we weren't accomplishing anything in Afghanistan, and nobody had a better plan to turn things around other than "stay for six more months, and then six more months after that."
2. It was always going to be bumpy, leaving ample attack avenues open for political opponents (and the media) to exploit; and
3. It was vocally demanded by the American left.

Three of Biden's predecessors over a twenty year period had stayed in Afghanistan, perhaps not believing the first point, perhaps fearing the second. Biden was the one who actually followed through and did the right thing, hoping that the progressive actors who enlivened the third point would rise to his defense to counteract the second.

It didn't happen. Biden withdrew, got absolutely pilloried for it in the press, received essentially no credit for it from the left, and to be honest his presidential tenure never recovered. As I and many others observed, any rational political observer knew what lesson to draw from the ordeal, and it's not a good one.

I think we're going through the same scenario with Biden's recent commutation wave targeting persons who were already moved into home confinement during COVID. After the Hunter Biden pardon, there were absolutely valid questions about how the clemency power was being used, and one narrative many progressives rapidly coalesced on was that if Biden is going to pardon his own son, he better use it to the benefit of ordinary, non-connected inmates in the clutches of prison system. Much like the Afghanistan withdrawal, this was a vocal demand of the left, and much like the Afghanistan withdrawal it was essentially assured that any large-scale deployment of the clemency power would yield something that political opponents could exploit. Contrary to the idyll fantasies in certain quarter, most people in prison have indeed done something wrong, and any political action to benefit the likes of "them" is a ripe avenue for political attack. This is one reason why criminal justice reform is hard.

Anyway, Biden issues a commutation order for roughly 1500 people, the largest one-day usage of the clemency power in American history. One of the beneficiaries was the notorious "kids for cash" judge in Pennsylvania, Michael Conahan. People -- including liberals who a moment earlier were demanding expansive use of the clemency power -- went ballistic. And Biden got essentially got no credit.

It goes without saying that the Conahan committed an absolutely heinous crime. But it is a testament to how bad the media culture is around this issue that when I first heard about Biden's decision I was misled twice. First I thought it was the case that Biden pardoned Conahan; he didn't, the sentence was commuted. Then I got the impression that the commutation meant that the judge would serve a negligible time in jail (time is meaningless to me right now, I had absolutely no sense of when the judge committed his crimes or was convicted and sentenced). Wrong again: Conahan was sentenced to seventeen years in prison, and this commutation occurred after he served fourteen.

Could one say that the Biden administration could have reviewed the commutations more closely to make sure a guy like this wasn't included? Perhaps -- but I'd level two notes of caution. First, if it wasn't him, odds are it'd be someone else. Again, most people in federal prison did something to hurt someone. If you support using clemency on a wide scale, you have to be willing to take that hit. Second, there is an inherent incompatibility between doing clemency at scale and adding a bunch of extra layers of individualized review. If we're talking a dozen or so people or so, it's probably possible to conduct a timely review of each of their records in depth that will assure oneself that there's nothing there that will trigger major political blowback. When we're talking about thousands of people at once, that sort of review isn't feasible without gumming up the works indefinitely. So if you think the problems in our carceral system are not just a few idiosyncratic cases of unusually sympathetic people who were caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, but is systemic, then you need to allow for reform mechanisms that are systemic in nature, and that necessarily means they're not going to be perfectly attentive to the particularities of every inmate's case.

Here, the reason that Conahan received a commutation wasn't because someone looked at his particular case file and said "this person is especially worthy of executive grace." There was rather a broad metric the Biden administration was using -- people who had already served most of their sentences, were medically vulnerable in prison, had not been convicted of violent or sexual offenses, and who had already been transferred into home confinement -- and this man was one of 1500 or so who met the criteria. That's a reasonable metric, and if you're telling me that it's essential to add more bureaucratic barriers to the clemency process -- and, in essence, make it much, much harder to issue clemency at scale -- in order to ensure that Michale Conahan serves seventeen years in prison instead of fourteen, then I say your priorities are out of order.

But the reality is that, like with Afghanistan, any observer will see what Joe Biden did here, see the reaction, see the anemic defense he received even from many of those who demanded action just like this, and learn the only rational lesson there is to learn: stay away from criminal justice reform. Be stingy with the clemency power. Keep more people in prison for longer. That's the lesson, and I'm sure every savvy Democratic politico is internalizing it.