With the fate of our democracy hanging in the balance, are we destined to watch every presidential election come down to a coin flip? Or is there a better way--can Democrats win enduring power and use it to solve the immense challenges we face? Can we learn from the past to dominate not just the next election, but the next decade?
These are the questions Adam Jentleson asks in Supermajority, the follow-up to his "truly excellent" (Ezra Klein) Kill Switch. Jentleson, who has been a party insider for two decades, demonstrates that we are not doomed to nail-biter elections and a broken government. But, he argues, the Democrats must change course. They learned the wrong lessons from the Obama era, believing that a rising, diverse generation of voters would swamp Republicans, and that the Democrats could--and should--embrace ideological purity as a way of motivating swing voters. That was a fatal miscalculation, as demonstrated by Donald Trump's two electoral victories and Democrats' shrinking tent.
Jentleson reminds us that Democrats once knew how to win and wield power. In a sweeping narrative, he takes us into earlier Democratic supermajorities--not just Barack Obama's, but also FDR's in the 1930s and LBJ's in the 1960s--and reveals that these coalitions were messy, never pure. Building them required breaking away from a binary conception of politics altogether, because Americans are remarkably diverse in their thinking and values. But whatever compromises earlier Democrats made to get elected, once in power, they made it count, passing sweeping legislation, such as Social Security, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Obamacare, achievements that continue to benefit millions of people today.
The challenge now is greater than at perhaps any point in our history, due to Republicans' entrenched advantages through redistricting, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. Drawing from the past to inform the present, Jentleson forges a new view of political power--one in which politicians embrace their role as both students and shapers of public opinion, and work in constructive tension with activists--to chart a path forward for the Democratic Party and the survival of American democracy itself.
