Calling a Truce: Ending the War within the Democratic Party

Last fall’s disastrous elections should have taught the Democratic Party many lessons. The list opens with the minor and tactical (it should not parade before the public a national chairman who delivers himself of ill-advised and oafish outbursts before the election and then appears at the National Press Club the day after the wipeout to announce that the party had “a good night”); it proceeds on up to the profound and historical (is the Democratic Party as presently constituted even capable of coming up with innovative ideas?).

But the chief lesson is this: the first thing the party needs to do is to make peace within itself. Nothing grated on me more in the days after the election, or struck me as more fatuous and dangerously wrongheaded, than hearing the sentence “This proves that the party has to move to the _____,” the blank being filled by “left” or “center.” Either argument is a prescription for ensured minority sta...