Liberals were absolutely in the political wilderness in this country from 1968 to 1992, and Clinton and Gore were hardly liberal even by 1992 standards (much less current standards), but they certainly paved the way for W.’s moderate “compassionate conservatism”, Obama and Biden — what MAGA (and a lot of independents) view as the Uniparty (I think they include GHWB in that).
Clinton dispatched with a lot of liberal orthodoxy to get elected in ‘92 (and even then only got about 43% of the vote but won an electoral landslide thanks to Ross Perot) and a lot of liberals felt betrayed by him pretty quickly. But he listened to a lot of what folks who are now MAGA said they cared about and actually responded to that.
Grocery prices were a HUGE deal in the 1992 election (which was during what turned out to be a relatively mild recession). At town halls, people asked Clinton about the price of staples like Milne and bread and he clearly knew. GHWB tried to counter with a trip to a grocery store, which was obviously a first for him as he was impressed by the scanner used at checkout. The contrast was obvious and the generational difference was also a huge factor.
But Clinton was a man with plans (and a willingness to stab anyone in the back to get ahead), so while the Dems took their lumps in the ‘94 election, by ‘96 he could point to positive economic change while the Pubs ran another geezer.
Anyway, I think the second great realignment of the two parties is still working itself out right now and I am not sure if the Democratic coalition of the highly educated (including politically homeless neocons) and various liberals with a gazillion different agendas can ever be a majority party again since no one is willing to compromise their pet issue. And the two issue rattling democracies all over the world right now are immigration (a rejection of liberal orthodoxy about multiculturalism) and inflation/economic issues — Democrats and liberals keep losing ground telling people they are wrong about immigration and don’t understand how good the economy is on paper.
So, yeah, I tend to think the liberal days in the wilderness have a long way to go yet. It is important to win skirmishes in the 2026 midterms to sustain some democratic processes for the future, but I think something profound would have to shift in the zeitgeist and in the ongoing party realignment for Dems to have electoral success in 2028 …
1. Third great realignment, unless you're saying that we're still working out post Civil Rights Act America (I don't think so).
2. This post could have been written in 2005. Substitute out some details but the sentiment is the same. Trump is screwing the country over so badly that right wing propaganda will be powerless to prop the GOP up.
This is, of course, why the GOP is fucking with the elections. And when they find out that gerrymandering didn't in fact save them, they are going to try more active measures. It's up to the courts to stop them. Sigh. Who knows -- maybe SCOTUS does have a line it won't cross.
3. The reason that Farage is back in the UK is that most Western democracies -- especially the ones with robust speech rights (even if we are the only ones with the speech-on-steroids First Amendment) -- have had their zones flooded with shit for a while. The $$ to be made in media is by stoking outrage. No government can keep up and deliver on the expectations being put to them.
Look at that headline: 54 shot, 7 killed over Labor Day weekend. OMG the crime is out of control!!! Chicago is a very big place. It's one weekend. There is no policy ever that will prevent these types of crime clusterings.
And then apparently we can't point out facts because it makes us look out of touch. I mean, forget the messaging for a minute and just think about why are having this discussion. Does ABC News not have anything better to do than review crime records day by day over Labor Day? Why are they doing that? Oh, because they want a headline. They sure did get attention.
Back in the days when government worked OK, this type of information was not available. News organizations couldn't get easy access to this sort of data; if they did, it wouldn't necessarily get anyone's attention because it couldn't zip around the world in 10 minutes. And the upshot, then, is that the people who cannot intelligently process this "data" didn't get it.
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