With Trump's arrival, will the Democratic Party change shape?
All the talk was of the Republican Party鈥檚 folly, its lousy bet on a candidate who pinned his electoral hopes on a diminishing bloc of white voters 鈥� and after the party鈥檚 2012 shellacking with Hispanic and minority voters, too. Then the election鈥檚 results came in.
Now, it鈥檚 the Democrats who are urging their party鈥檚 centrist core to follow the lead of its populist wing.
"I think that the Democrats need to be Elizabeth Warren鈥檚 party, in shorthand. Bernie Sanders鈥� party," former Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman John Walsh in an interview on Friday morning.
For some, that鈥檚 already a foregone conclusion.听
"The coming Sanders-Warren party will advocate proposals that help communities with early education programs and the like,"聽, "but that party will close off trade, withdraw from the world, close off integration with hyper-race-conscious categories and close off debate with political correctness."
But after years of slow forging of party alliances and positions on things like trade and cultural issues, and faced with a president-elect who is deeply unpopular and even reviled among large swaths of the public, it鈥檚 unclear how drastically the party will carry out a meaningful shift in how it looks, talks, thinks and campaigns.
"In the political world, there is this obsession with party positioning," says David Hopkins, a Boston College professor of political science who studies political parties and elections. "When a party loses an election, there鈥檚 all this talk about what it did wrong to lose and what it should do right to win the next. The reality is, usually a lot of that stuff doesn鈥檛 make much of a difference."聽
"The question of which party wins the next election has more to do with the performance of the incumbent, the economy, and issues that come up over the course of four years than all of these sort of navel-gazing exercises," he tells 海角大神.
Trump鈥檚 success, says Dr. Hopkins, is the prime example. In 2013, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R) of South Carolina appealed to fellow Republicans to back immigration reform that if the party didn鈥檛 make inroads with Latinos, they faced a "demographic death spiral."
"If we don't pass immigration reform, if we don't get it off the table in a reasonable, practical way, it doesn't matter who you run in 2016," he said then.
There are certainly signs that the Democrats will empower the voices that have made the most impassioned pitches for revitalizing the economy for the working class. Senator Sanders (I) of Vermont is for a Senate leadership position, although it鈥檚 not clear which it would be. And signs are that the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee 鈥� a normally obscure role that was WikiLeaked into the public eye 鈥� might be Rep. Keith Ellison (D) of Minnesota, an African-American Midwesterner and the first Muslim to be elected to Congress, who also has聽credibility with the party's progressive wing,聽.听
"The current membership of the Democratic Party in Congress has a vocal progressive segment, but it doesn鈥檛 seem like the majority," says Deborah Schildkraut, a political scientist at Tufts University.
"The tea party movement brought in a whole lot of new faces into Congress [for the Republicans]," she tells the Monitor. "If Democrats are going to move in a more progressive direction, they鈥檙e going to need new people" to win primaries.
But as the public has gotten increasingly alienated from the political process, some say the better question is the more transcendent one, of how either political party can harness grass-roots energy to power change between elections, not just every two or four years.听
"When and where are the next Democratic and Republican Party meetings in your neighborhood? You don鈥檛 know, because neither the Democrats nor Republicans are political parties in the historical sense. Mostly they just demand we send them money and then yell at us about voting every few years,"聽.
Decades ago, local party meetings were a regular happening, and the community "yammered about politics for a while," he writes. "Elections were the culmination of what parties did, not the starting point.... A聽healthy political party would foster community and provide people with concrete things to do between elections."
