What This Country Needs Is More Conservative Democrats!

Not just Minimum Necessary Heterodoxy.

It’s easy to underestimate how much the Democratic Party has changed in this century. In particular, you can miss how liberals have gone from being a voice in the choir to the choir director. Cast your mind back to the beginning of the century. At that point, a mere 28 percent of Democrats described themselves as liberal, and two-thirds were either moderate or conservative.

Fast-forward to today, and the liberal share has more than doubled to 59 percent while the moderate/conservative share has declined drastically. It’s the liberals’ party now. Moderates are just along for the ride. And as for conservatives, well, they’re on the verge of disappearing entirely.

In 2000, nearly as many Democrats identified as conservative (24 percent) as liberal. Today, that number is only eight percent—and dropping. That’s a ratio of over 7-to-1 between liberals and conservatives, a stark change from the beginning of the century when those groups were almost at parity.

Now, many Democrats might look at these data and see this development as a feature, not a bug. At last, we’re rid of those pesky conservatives!

But in reality, this development has unbalanced the party and enabled cultural radicalism to dominate it and its supporting institutions. As liberals moved to the left on these (and other) issues, there were fewer and fewer voices in the party that could be relied upon to push back because they were, in fact, conservative on many of these issues. Instead, liberals have largely pushed through an open door, embracing one radical position after another on immigration, race, gender, crime, climate, and more.

This has been terrible for the party and estranged it ever further from America’s working class, once the backbone of the party. If there had been more conservative Democrats, more party members might have been willing to say—because they were conservatives and believed it—that there are only two sexes, trans women are not literally women, and medicalizing children because they are supposedly “trapped in the wrong body” is an appalling practice.

Conservative Democrats would have insisted that illegal immigrants are in fact illegal, not “undocumented,” as if they had inadvertently forgotten their paperwork. They would have forcefully reminded the party’s liberals that a nation’s borders should be rigorously enforced and that, no, simply making it across the border does not entitle a migrant to stay here forever. And they would have been shocked by their party’s acquiescence to abuse of the asylum system and profligate use of irregular immigration pathways (parole, etc.).

Conservative Democrats also could have provided a bulwark against the frenzied embrace of radical ideology around race that took hold of the party. No, America is not a white supremacist society, and Democrats did not need to interpret all racial disparities as evidence of continued white racism. And they did not need to push a neo-racism that sought to institutionalize countervailing racial preferences across society. Conservative Democrats would have been perfectly happy to stick to the mantra of equal opportunity and a color-blind society, in the sense associated with MLK, where merit, not skin color, determines outcomes.

And conservative Democrats would have been fast out of the gate to call out the bizarre vogue among Democrats for denigrating the role of the police in fighting crime. Laws should have been vigorously enforced and criminals sent to jail regardless of “disparate impact.” And there should have been zero tolerance for public disorder, which was exacerbated by “housing first” and “harm reduction” policies combined with lax law enforcement. Conservative Democrats would have called for law and order—and meant it, as many did in the 1990s.

As for climate, conservative Democrats would have tenaciously resisted the rise of climate doomerism, with the consequent demonization of fossil fuels and embrace of an extremely rapid renewable energy transition. They would have challenged the idea of a “climate emergency” that must override other Democratic economic goals. And they would have regarded the claim that a renewable energy transition was the key to rapid economic growth and would deliver a cornucopia of good jobs with the deep skepticism it deserved.

That’s a lot of would-haves and should-haves that generally did not happen. To be fair, some conservative Democrats did try to raise the alarm, but they were increasingly outnumbered. More importantly, Democratic politicians whose views were genuinely conservative in at least some of these areas were essentially wiped out over the course of the 21st century. The decks were cleared for cultural radicalism.

Many contemporary Democrats would look at the positions above with horror. Aren’t these conservative positions? To which I say: so what? Conservative positions aren’t intrinsically wrong simply because they’re conservative. That makes no sense. They should be judged on their merits, not by ideology. Besides, these are all views that many, many Democrats, especially prior to the 21st century, would have been quite comfortable espousing. They have simply become so right-coded over time that very few Democrats in today’s liberal-dominated party dare to be identified with them.

The consequent dearth of Democrats—especially politicians—who are authentically conservative in some ways is a severe handicap for the party. They are completely uncompetitive in wide areas of the country where they used to have a strong presence, such as in many southern states, the Dakotas, West Virginia, and Montana. Even in conservative states where they have a shot, such as Texas, the best they can do is a liberal Democrat like James Talarico, who offers some slight dissents from party orthodoxy but is largely relying on a terrible national environment for Republicans and an exceptionally weak opponent to carry him over the line (and he still may not make it). Democrats would have been much better off running a more conservative candidate—but such candidates are scarce, even in Texas, and intra-party dynamics simply do not permit it.

The handicap is deepened by population trends: liberal states, especially large ones, have weak or negative growth, while conservative states are gaining population. That has big political implications.

Estimates from the American Redistricting Project show that California is projected to lose four House seats (and thus four electoral votes) in the 2030 reapportionment. Five other Democratic states—New York, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Illinois—may lose one each as well. Meanwhile, ruby-red Texas is projected to gain a stunning four seats and increasingly Republican Florida is set to gain two. Conservative Idaho and Utah could each add another seat, too.

The pattern is clear. The states projected to gain representation—and an Electoral College boost—are more conservative; the states projected to lose representation are more liberal. If we exclude the battlegrounds of Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, conservative states are on track to add ten electoral votes while liberal states are projected to lose nine electoral votes ahead of the 2032 presidential election.

This should concentrate Democrats’ minds, even as they are likely to enjoy a very good midterm election this fall. To meet long-term challenges, they need genuinely conservative Democrats, and they really don’t have any.

Instead, they have chosen to ignore this problem and concentrate on promoting candidates whose underlying views are in sync with current orthodoxy but who attempt to limit the damage from these views by signaling “heterodoxy” in some very circumscribed ways. This does not mean such candidates have sincerely conservative views on immigration, race, gender, crime, or climate—far from it. Rather, they are titrating their liberal views with the Minimum Necessary Heterodoxy (MNH) to get through the election, after which the MNH is likely to be discarded and their underlying views will dominate once again.

Another way Democrats seek to avoid the distasteful idea that authentic conservatism might be desirable on some issues and in some areas is finding candidates who “look the part.” As former Democratic fundraiser Evan Barker (whose new book, Nothing Left, I strongly recommend) explains:

For the better part of a decade, progressive Democrats have desperately sought to recruit working-class candidates able to win back a crucial constituency: blue-collar voters, particularly men. Such potential leaders aren’t that hard to find. The trouble is that the Left — more specifically, a complex of donors, media outlets, consultants, and organizations — can’t actually tolerate working-class values when it comes to cultural questions like immigration, race, and gender.

Call it Progress, Inc.: a machine for advancing full-spectrum progressivism, using working-class aesthetics as a sort of skinsuit, if need be. What the party — and the nation — end up with are politicians who certainly look the part — sometimes connected to the traditional labor movement, comfortable in plaid, tossing a football or drinking beer — but whose substantive views are indistinguishable from those that prevail in places like Brooklyn and San Francisco…

These behind-the-scenes operatives want to find people with “working-class costumes,” and “masculine images” — not leaders with actual working-class views. Graham Platner was the most obvious example. Before he was #MeToo’d out of the Maine Senate race, the scion of a prominent family checked all the right “image” boxes: bearded, tattooed, with a stint in the Marines under his belt. Another is El-Sayed, whose “bro energy,” his backers believe, is enough to attract disaffected men who’ve left the Democratic Party, with no need to change position on the actual issues that alienate men. Both, however, hold standard-issue ultra-progressive views when it comes to divisive identity politics, among other hot-button issues.

Neither of these dodges is likely to work over the long term. In the end, there is no substitute for conservative Democrats except conservative Democrats. That’s what this country—and the Democrats—need. Unfortunately, they are dying out as the party zooms in the opposite direction and embraces the DSA. This is unlikely to end well.