Whither the Democratic Party?

Our national political crisis has been going on for at least 26 years, in my opinion, and Donald Trump remains as much a symptom of it as a cause. Together my wife and I have just gone through my last book, States of the Union, and many problems within the Democratic Party emerge from my summaries of the state of the union addresses and other major speeches of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. To begin with, the Democratic Party largely accepted the Reagan revolution and never fundamentally challenged it. Both Clinton and Obama echoed Reagan's arguments that the federal government had grown too large and that the American people, not the government, had to solve their own problems. Clinton, of course, pushed the work of deregulating the financial world, setting the stage for the subprime boom and the crisis of 2008. Obama's response to that crisis worked too slowly and did not reflect a belief that there was anything fundamentally wrong with our new deregulated financial…