Soul of a Democrat

April 1, 2018
The Democratic Party must refocus its efforts against the Republican Party, showing that their values are different and that the game is rigged.Providing plenty of historical context, Reston, son of famed New York Times editor James Reston and a two-time secretary of the State Democratic Party in Virginia, argues that his party has lost its way--and perhaps even its soul. It has become divided into identity-politics blocs which too often fight with each other rather than unite against the opposition. It must return to first principles, writes the author, to the inspiration of Jefferson and Jackson, James Polk and Manifest Destiny, William Jennings Bryan and his evangelical exhortations toward politics based on morality, the eloquence of Adlai Stevenson, and the ebullience of Hubert Humphrey. "Without its founding myths, the Party wanders," writes Reston, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter, with whom he doesn't seem much impressed. Though he attempts a balance between pragmatism and idealism, urging that Democrats must again become the party of the white working class that shifted much of its support to Donald Trump, he never really gets specific about how his expansive, big-tent approach will heal the party's fault lines; it will be difficult for those on the opposite sides of the abortion debate or immigration issues to set aside their polarized differences for the greater good of the party. "It's more difficult to be a Democrat," he concedes. "We are operating inside a vast and diverse coalition of ideas and ideals, and usually our opponents are not. Therefore, our task as Democrats is to imagine and encompass the nation as a whole, not just one or two narrow and cohesive slices of it. For this reason, we have to be purposeful in seeking out and embracing our own internal contradictions."A manifesto that looks to the past to find direction for the future.

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June 11, 2018
The Democratic Party has lost its way, but the path ahead is clear, claims Reston, deputy assistant secretary of state under President Carter, in this myopic book. He insists that Democrats must acknowledge that the 2016 election was not an anomaly, but the culmination of a decades-long drift away from the party’s core principles. Reston argues that Democrats must rediscover the political myths that animated the party and lent it meaning as the party of the “common man.” He traces the party’s scrappy fighting spirit through seven historical moments in which, he asserts, Democrats took heroic stands in favor of the ordinary American, from Andrew Jackson’s war against the autocratic Bank of the United States (during which recounting Reston unconvincingly downplays Jackson’s massacre of Native Americans) to William Jennings Bryan’s presidential campaigns championing progressive altruism. Reston’s message, surprisingly, is deeply conservative: he decries the rise of partisan voting blocs of “union members, blacks, browns, veterans, and women” and paints the white working class, upon whom he bestows the title of “Jacksonian outsiders,” as the real constituency worth fighting for. This is hardly a groundbreaking analysis of the Democrats’ electoral troubles.