The new politics of evasion

A little populism is great but you need to address the values question

In 1989, Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston published a paper called “The Politics of Evasion” that became a major touchstone for the Democratic Party’s post-Dukakis recovery. To say that Bill Clinton’s campaigns, and the entire New Democrat trend of the 1990s, were based on the paper’s diagnosis would be an oversimplification, but it’s not a terrible place to start. More recently, I’ve read the paper several times over my career, and it’s an obvious reference point for Slow Boring’s Common Sense Democrat Manifesto and other contemporary faction-building efforts.

Until now, though, I didn’t understand why the paper centered the idea of “evasion” so heavily. But as we see similar debates about party renewal play out, I get it.

Because on the one hand, you have people who are trying to shift the Democratic Party toward a bigger tent. On the other, you have those who are firmly opposed to structural changes or who are pursuing some kind of left-accelerationist strategies, people who are not particularly amenable to persuasion on this point. And in between is a very large camp of people who, I think, basically support the idea of growing the tent, but also don’t like fighting. They want Democrats to be a party that is electorally competitive everywhere, that wins the votes of people in the bottom half of the income distribution and serves their interests — not a niche party for intellectuals and HR managers. And I think they basically get that this requires politics to be something other than a food fight over culture war issues.

But they want this to happen without actually confronting the issues at hand.