Eric Thayer for The New York Times        

Liberalism’s Big Bet

Sunday Review / International New York Times | 30 July 2016

Ross Douthat

THE key pivot point in the Democratic convention arrived during President Obama’s speech on Wednesday, when he told the throng of Democrats that Donald Trump’s baleful convention rhetoric “wasn’t particularly Republican — and it sure wasn’t conservative.”

With that olive branch to anti-Trump Republicans, he shifted his party’s convention from the mission of its first two days (shoring up the base, mollifying Berners) to the mission of its grand finale: the appropriation of conservative tropes and themes — God and country, the flag and 9/11, the founding fathers and the Constitution — in the service of symbolic outreach to Republicans and right-leaning independents.

As a gesture, it was immensely powerful. Anyone who came of age with Ronald Reagan found more to recognize in the Democratic Party’s rhetoric last week than in Donald Trump’s self-aggrandizing George Wallace imitation.

But it was also just a gesture. Yes, the convention’s showmanship was strikingly unifying, bipartisan, moderate — but Hillary Clinton’s domestic agenda is not. She’s running as a liberal, full stop, with a platform well to the left of where her party stood five or 10 or 20 years ago.

She’s happy to make right-leaning voters feel a little better about fleeing Trump, but she isn’t offering them substantive concessions, or seeking a grand centrist coalition. Instead she’s telling them: It’s me or Trump, and you know you can’t put the nuclear codes in his undersize hands, so my offer is … nothing.

But here’s a flag to cheer you up.

Imagine, for instance, that you’re one of the many churchgoing voters — Catholic, evangelical and Mormon — repelled by Trump’s vulgarian style, his bigotry and misogyny, his embodiment of an essentially post-religious right. You generally vote Republican because of issues like abortion, but Trump’s bluster about Supreme Court justices hasn’t convinced you that he’s worth the risk.

But on social issues, Clinton and her party aren’t even offering the fig leaf of her husband’s “safe, legal and rare” formulation. They’re for abortion rights without exception and for public funding of abortion, a maximalist stance that thrills pro-choice activists but is nowhere near the muddled middle on the issue. So any pro-lifer inclined to cast a vote for Hillary has no cover; to stop Trump, they have to cast a baldly pro-abortion vote.

Or again, imagine that you’re one of the many Americans conflicted about immigration policy — you view immigrants favorably, you find Trump’s rhetoric toxic, but you also favor limits on migration, and you want to make sure that the law is respected and enforced.

You would be happy to vote for the Hillary Clinton of the early 2000s, who talked a lot about border security and workplace enforcement. But that Clinton is long gone. Her party is evolving toward the position that illegal aliens, save criminals and terrorists, should never be deported once they’ve reached our soil, and Clinton herself is committed to a unilateral amnesty even more expansive than the one that President Obama attempted. Which for our conflicted voter isn’t really a middle ground compared to Trumpism; it’s closer to the opposite extreme.

Or finally, imagine that you’re a fiscal conservative who appreciated Bill Clinton’s balanced budgets. Trump looks to you like a big-government populist, not a budget-cutter, so a fiscally-sober Democrat would obviously represent the better choice.

But you listened to Hillary’s acceptance speech and you heard the voice of Bernie Sanders — expand Social Security, free college, new infrastructure spending, plus a call for a living wage and a jab at “unfair” trade deals. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop pointed out, there wasn’t even a nod to entitlement reform or the deficit, no mention of the costs of excessive regulation or the virtues of free trade, no real hint of how this largess might be paid for. It was just Great Society liberalism come ’round again, saner than Trumpism but (to your ears) ideologically similar at bottom.

Now it’s true that, if elected, Hillary probably couldn’t implement all of these proposals, and conflicted voters who vote for her and for Republicans down-ballot can feel that they’re voting for compromise rather than pure liberalism.

But the absence of outreach is still notable, especially in a campaign that the Democrats are casting as a kind of national emergency.

I won’t accuse them of putting party ahead of country — the party that nominated Donald Trump has cornered the market on that sin.

But strategically there are risks. The Clinton campaign needs to expand on the Obama coalition somewhere to make up for its likely losses among working-class white men. But it’s assuming that it can afford to be more left-wing than Obama while doing so, relying on the fear that Trump instills rather than any ideological inducements to bring some Romney voters inside its tent.

That bet may pay off big for liberalism. But for now, as a response to the Trump emergency, it’s still just that: a bet.