The Democrats’ Identity Crisis

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, March 08, 2025

 

The Democratic Party has a split personality. It was on full display Tuesday night.

 

Face one: wacky, ideologically fevered, performatively outraged. Face two: collected, reassuring, conventional — and utterly misleading.

 

The split reflects a deeper problem. Democrats have no power, no leader, no role, no identity. Their presidential candidate lost every swing state and the popular vote. Their reputation is at its lowest level in decades. They are divided: Go wild, or stick with the old playbook?

 

The House Democrats chose derangement. As President Trump delivered his address to Congress, my eyes remained fixed on the House floor. There was no escaping the Democrats’ hysterical display.

 

It was a mass psychic breakdown — the political equivalent of the airline steward who, after his flight had landed, announced to the cabin that he was quitting his job, guzzled two beers, opened the emergency exit, and slid to the tarmac on the evacuation chute.

 

The theatrics began when Representative Melanie Stansbury (D., N.M.) held a small card that read “This is not normal” above President Trump’s shoulder as he walked down the aisle to the House rostrum. She might as well have held bunny ears behind him. What was she thinking? Voters are used to Trump. They’ve elected him twice. What isn’t normal is Stansbury’s stunt.

 

Her colleagues were even less restrained. Representative Al Green (D., Texas) was ejected from the chamber — and subsequently censured by the House — for heckling Trump at the speech’s outset. The image of the 77-year-old Green screaming and shaking his cane at the president was partly disturbing but mostly pathetic. He embodied the “old man yells at cloud” meme.

 

Throughout the president’s speech, the TV camera captured the party’s fossilized leadership. They simmered. They scowled. They refused to stand or applaud. Nancy Pelosi glowered, one hand on her cane. Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin sneered, melting into their chairs. Bernie Sanders looked as if he might combust — though he always looks like that. On Tuesday night his anger moved him to leave the House chamber.

 

Several younger colleagues put down their paddles and followed him. They removed their jackets as they left in protest, revealing T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “Resist” or “No Kings Live Here.” How brave. If democracy’s survival depends on our supply of graphic tees, America’s future is secure.

 

The Democrats behaved as if they were the majority. They showed no recognition that Trump has snatched their party’s legacy: secure borders, trade protections, defense of Social Security and Medicare, common-sense cultural positions, American patriotism, support for Israel, and nonintervention in foreign wars. Leaving the Democrats with . . . what? Rashida Tlaib’s whiteboard?

 

After a defeat, political parties often revert to the extremes. It’s a natural reflex. Diehards from heavily partisan districts are immune from larger electoral trends. Their visibility increases as the party licks its wounds and prepares to select more electable candidates.

 

Yet it was hard to see how the Democrats recover if they continue to comport themselves as they did in the House chamber Tuesday night. Who beyond those single-mindedly committed to Trump’s destruction would want to join them?

 

Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan delivered the official Democratic response. She represents the party’s alternate personality: sane but dissembling. Slotkin followed the old playbook, written in the jagged scrawl of a Ragin’ Cajun: It’s the economy, stupid. Change, not more of the same. And don’t forget health care.

Slotkin hit her marks. She was modest and patriotic. She complained about rising prices. She zinged Elon Musk. She warned that Trump would cut taxes for billionaires while “going after your health care.” She invoked American exceptionalism. She urged viewers to become “engaged citizens” who would “fight for the things they care about.”

 

She was also disingenuous. Incredible how Democrats suddenly became concerned with rising prices on January 20, 2025. Astonishing how Slotkin can say that “Democrats and Republicans should all be for” securing the border, when the last president had four years to take the executive actions President Trump is using now to bring illegal border crossings to record lows.

 

More stunning is how Democratic wordsmiths deploy euphemism and elision and HR-speak to disguise unpopular positions on DEI and gender ideology, while pretending as if the party’s views on climate policy and EVs and Israel and abortion simply do not exist.

 

This strategy may work for some candidates. It worked for Slotkin. But the Democratic playbook has been run so many times, voters have memorized the plays.

 

To resolve their identity crisis, national Democrats will have to integrate their split personalities into a coherent whole: a renewed sense of purpose as the party that believes the federal government can be an engine of social mobility. Democrats will have to stop merely talking about normalcy and secure borders and middle-class concerns, and act like a normal party once again. Based on this week’s antics, they need more than a new messenger. They need an exorcism.