Re-Centering the Democratic Party, with Elaine Kamarck

In 1989, in the wake of Republican president Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection, political scientists Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston issued a wake-up call to the Democratic Party. It came in the form of a widely discussed paper entitled “The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency,” which called upon Democrats to bring their party back to the political center. “The Politics of Evasion” became the intellectual and political manifesto for the moderate New Democrat movement and its organizational base, the Democratic Leadership Council. In 1992, the DLC’s president, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, won the presidency by running on a New Democrat platform. In February of this year, with moderate Democrats worrying anew that the party has drifted too far from the political center, Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston issued a paper entitled “The New Politics of Evasion: How Ignoring Swing Voters Could Reopen the Door for Donald Trump and Threaten American Democracy.” Once again, Kamarck and Galston warn Democrats that they are evading political reality in ways that may lead to durable Republican majorities. This time around, they write, Democrats have fallen under the sway of three persistent myths: the myth that people of color think and act in the same way, that economics always trumps culture, and that a progressive majority is emerging. But the stakes are much higher than they were 33 years ago. If the new politics of evasion leads to another era of Republican dominance under Donald Trump’s populist-authoritarianism, the result this time could be the end of American democracy. In this episode, podcast host Geoff Kabaservice talks with Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution about “The New Politics of Evasion” and what Democrats need to do to regain electoral competitiveness with much of the American working class, including Hispanic voters. The episode also explores Elaine Kamarck's career in the Clinton White House when from 1993 to 1997 she created and managed the National Performance Review, also known as the Reinventing Government Initiative. The conversation surveys the achievements of that initiative and raises the question of what needs to be done to reinvent government under the present circumstances.