Chaotic Neutral, by Ed Burmila
Review by Dave Gamrath
One-liner: In Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center, author Ed Burmila provides a well-written history of the Democratic Party’s move rightward over the past fifty years, and how this strategy has put Democrats in a very precarious position.
Book Review:
America’s political system seems broken. In Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center, author Ed Burmila describes America’s political situation as being “stuck in a cycle: Democrats win power when dissatisfaction with the GOP surges, talk themselves out of governing, and the GOP come roaring back into power and goes on a rampage. Things slowly, gradually, consistently get worse.” Chaotic Neutral tells the story of how we got to this place.
Burmila begins by describing New Deal Democrats, the party of FDR, who issued-in culture-changing progressive programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs highly valued in today’s America. The New Deal generated millions of jobs investing in the public good, improving the economic status of multiple classes, not just the poor. This provided Democrats a winning coalition for the next forty years. But this coalition included some strange bedfellows, such as minorities and (sometimes racist) working-class whites.
In 1968 and 1972, Richard Nixon was able to split the New Deal coalition, forcing Democrats to reevaluate. What Democrats decided upon is that election success is dependent upon moving to the right, and discarding New Deal philosophy. In doing so, Democrats also discarded the working-class and unions in favor of HEPs (Highly Educated Professionals) and suburban moderates. Burmila explains how Democrats rejected New Deal goals of poverty elimination and equality to embrace market-based policies. Beginning with Jimmy Carter, Democrats effectively started supporting a Republican-lite version of governing. Democrats hoped this would win over moderate Republicans, but Republicans kept moving further right and attacked Democrats continuously. Thus, this new centralist strategy only served to alienate the working-class core of the Democratic base, and gained no Republican support.
Repeated election losses in the 1980s lead to more strategizing by Democrats, but they consistently came to the same conclusion: Democrats needed to double-down on their move to the right. This philosophy inspired new, young Democrats like Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who committed to shrinking government and promoting market solutions to societal problems. Burmila states that “Clinton accomplished more of Reagan’s agenda than Regan did”. Clinton supported the export of jobs through NAFTA, deregulation, tougher criminal penalties and more policing, and the “ending welfare as we know it”. Democrats calculated that even though these policies hurt the working class and minorities, these constituencies would continue to support Democrats, because Republicans were so much worse. “They’re worse than us” continues as a core Democrat campaigning strategy.
In the 1990s, Republicans decided that they could better achieve their far-right goals if they stopped playing by traditional political rules. Newt Gingrich showed Republicans just how successful discarding decorum could be. Gingrich’s efforts, amplified by new media avenues, such as Talk Radio, Cable TV and something called the internet, began to move fringe-thinking into the mainstream. Republicans crafted simple talking points that were endlessly amplified on rightwing media. Mitch McConnell perfected the art of obstruction when Obama became president, yet Obama showed fierce determination to ignore this, and insisted that Democrats continue to play by rules abandoned long ago by Republicans. That’s another key point Burmila keeps coming back to: Republicans play hardball partisan politics, while Democrats refuse to respond in kind, and instead respond by wagging their finger at Republicans to play fair next time. Additionally, Democrats insist on investing heavily on unwinnable Senate races in lieu of supporting Democrats at the local level. This has led to massive Democratic losses in state legislatures and governorships, and because of Republicans willingness to use their power to “tilt the political playing field in their favor”, it is now extremely difficult for Democrats to win back local control.
Fast-forward to today: Republicans are hard at work to discard American democracy. Under the guise of baseless claims of voter fraud, Republicans are making it harder for people to vote, as well as installing partisan believers of The Big Lie to run local elections, count the votes, and anoint election winners to suit their liking. Burmila states that the January 6th insurrection was “effectively a dry run for Republicans to overturn future election results.” To this, Democrats continue to show no real sense of urgency, and have been unable to pass legislation to protect elections and voting rights, and seem unwilling to develop a plan to counter Republican efforts to control the electoral process.
Burmila describes how Barak Obama continued the Democrats ‘Republican-lite’ strategy. Instead of trying to govern ambitiously like FDR, Obama insisted on bipartisanship, but, surprise! The GOP absolutely refused to work with him. In 2016, Hillary Clinton represented the status quo, which didn’t work out so well. Trump, as feared, proved incompetent at actual governance, and horrified much of America. Thus in 2020, Joe Biden won the presidential election (honestly, he did), but Democrats were unable to obtain resounding wins down the election ticket. Now it seems the Democrat campaign strategy of 2022 is centered on “we did all we could” and that “Republicans are really bad”, as support for Democrats withers.
Burmila admits there is no simple solution to redirect the Democratic Party, but he does offer some guidance. He implores Democrats to abandon trying to be the party of the center-right. Democrats need to develop a political and economic worldview that “appeals to a wide enough coalition of working-class voters and professional-class liberals”; to again become “a party of the people.” Democrats should learn from Republicans and abandon attempts at bipartisanship, and instead strive towards being more successful partisans. Democrats need to stop supporting candidates who don’t basic support liberal policies such as voting rights (read Joe Manchin and Kristin Sinema) and not help fund their campaigns. Democrats need to focus on the long-term, not only on the next election. Burmila doesn’t provide a failure-proof action plan, but his message to Democrats is pretty straight forward: get the party back to New Deal progressive goals, and do your damnedest to deliver on those goals.
Chaotic Neutral provides a well-written history of how we got to this point, and I found Burmila’s tone at times LOL funny. (Hint: read the notes at the bottom of the pages). Burmila stats that “I don’t have a ton of faith” that Democrats can turn things around. Given the past fifty years, I can’t blame him. Democrats seem remarkably lost at a time when the need to fight like hell to ensure American democracy prevails, and to provide government that works for the majority of Americans, seem pretty obvious. It seems, once again, that effective change needs to be led by the bottom.
Reviewer Opinion: a good history
Reviewer Rating of Book: thumb up