On November 28, Democrats officially nominated Nancy Pelosi to be the next Speaker of the House. No one ran against her; she received 203 yeas against 32 nays. Democrats who vowed during the campaign to vote against the former speaker were always a small group. Their opposition—largely rhetorical, since nobody else ran—had less to do with ideology than with arrogance. Pelosi’s progressive credentials are almost unimpeachable. What the mostly young and further left members want is power, and they’re not interested in waiting for it.
With all races in the House of Representatives accounted for, Democrats have a commanding majority of 35. The party gained 40 seats in the recent election. Republicans will pass no significant legislation in the next Congress, and the White House will almost certainly spend the preponderance of its energy responding to subpoenas and investigations and staving off Democratic threats to impeach the president.
Many conservatives are bracing for the worst, but we are more sanguine. The incoming Democratic majority is no cohesive, unified crew. Indeed, the 116th Congress looks a lot like the 112th, in which Republicans held a 42-seat majority. The 2010 election had been a blow to Barack Obama, but the GOP on the Hill was hopelessly divided between “establishment” Republicans, Tea Party Republicans, and “establishment” Republicans trying to mimic Tea Party Republicans. It led to the creation of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of around 40 members whose chief aim, it often seemed, was to block any legislative reform on the grounds that it “didn’t go far enough.” What began as a good and necessary corrective to the unprincipled transactionalism of the GOP leadership turned into obstructionism for the sake of obstruction.
House Democrats seem determined to reenact this play, but the divisions are more or less the inverse. As Republicans were dominated by lawmakers whose chief aim was staying in power but who were thwarted at every point by a vocal minority increasingly preoccupied with its own righteousness, so today’s Democratic powerbrokers in the House are united only by opposition to Trump and appear destined for conflict with a young and arrogant minority who consider the senior members of their own party just as much the enemy.
The Progressive Caucus, in which this bellicose band of left-wing ideologues resides, grew by 12 in the election and now numbers 90. Many of them campaigned on the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, ending private health insurance, and of course the impeachment of the president at the earliest opportunity. As one of the Democrats’ young guns, Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, put it to the New York Times: “I’m not so wedded to this seat or a seat in Congress to now begin to compromise the things that I believe in.” For Republicans who watched for eight years as their party failed to achieve major victories and even struggled for the little ones, the sentiment sounds familiar.
The real challenge for Democrats, though, and for liberals generally, isn’t so much political as intellectual. Progressives have no new ideas—which is rather a problem for a philosophy based on novelty. On domestic policy they’re content to dress up old failures as though they were cutting-edge innovations (“Medicare for All”) and to engage in culture-war radicalism on issues of racial and sexual identity that alienate much of the public. On foreign policy, their one original contribution—an alliance with Iran and a concomitant cooling toward Israel and Saudi Arabia—was an unqualified disaster that obliged them to side with the regime in Tehran against hundreds of thousands of Iranians demanding human rights and representative government.
The deficiency of ideas is one reason Democrats attribute their losses to anything and everything but their own party. Whereas Republicans blame each other for their defeats—this side was too rigid on abortion and same-sex marriage, that side was too lax on immigration—Democrats blame everybody buteach other: Russian trolls, gerrymandering, voter suppression, white racism, and whatever other conspiracy theory looks momentarily plausible.
If the rise of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus was the tragic version of the play, the next two years are likely to be the farce: a reenactment, only with unworkable ideas and vastly more hatred. The progressive left will simultaneously push the party toward a fanatical and unpopular radicalism—“free” health care and higher education, a $15 minimum wage, a dramatic expansion of the welfare state, a rollback of military spending, a slew of identity-based laws and regulations—and undermine any attempt to work with Republicans. Meanwhile the one thing both leftists and pragmatists are likely to agree on is the need to undermine the president with its investigatory powers. There will be plenty of action, but little if any of it will move the plot along.
As Pelosi ascends the Speaker’s rostrum, worried conservatives can take heart: She takes charge of an ungovernable mess.
