The Future of the Democratic Party

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

Democrats have veered into identity politics and away from the interests of the working class. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, George Packer joins Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss his recent reporting on the Democratic Party’s illusions and the future of American politics.

Donald Trump’s reelection should put an end to two progressive illusions, Packer explained last night: The first of these illusions is the notion that identity is political destiny; the second is the theory that the Democratic Party has been kept out of power by a white Republican minority thwarting the popular will through means such as voter suppression or gerrymandering.

[George Packer: The End of Democratic Delusions]

“The Democratic Party has become the party of establishment, of status quo, of the institutions,” Packer said. The party has come to organize itself under a framework that the “most basic identity of a citizen is group identity based on race, gender, sexuality.” But in doing so, they’ve “lost a large number of ordinary Americans who don’t see themselves primarily in those terms, who are mostly working-class … and who used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party.”

Meanwhile, as with the drift of the working class away from Democrats and towards Republicans, the country’s increasingly isolationist global stance has also been building. “We are not the unipolar power that we were after the end of the Cold War,” Packer said. “We stood for a certain order, a certain set of values, a certain liberal view of the world, and I think that could collapse very quickly under Trump because he doesn’t believe in it—in fact, he wants to destroy it, and so do the people he’s putting into key positions.”

Packer discusses this, as well as his reporting on conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in Phoenix, Arizona, the nation’s fastest-growing city, with the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Watch the full episode here.