Time to return to Bill Clinton’s third way and the politics of tolerance?

I was wrong.

On Election Day, I got off the fence and publicly predicted a Kamala Harris win – and maybe a landslide sweep of most of the dead-heat swing states – on social media and RCP podcast.

Why did I post this prediction? Partly to prove to my children that what I promised them (a Harris victory) would happen. Partly, I can now see more clearly, I was trying to convince myself: My heart said Harris would win, but my head said Trump would prevail.

So now, after a sleepless night, here is my morning-after self-truth-telling. It’s time we liberal Democrats faced up to the truth: We have become the party of intolerance and shaming, and a lot of ordinary Americans who once reliably voted Democratic and shared our Franklin Roosevelt-era liberalism that viewed government as a force for good now look at us as out-of-touch elites. And worse, as controlling scolds.

I thought about my own fear of writing or saying something that might alienate those who call themselves “progressives” in the Democratic Party (and who roll their eyes when I use the word “liberal” from my dad and FDR’s vocabulary). We need to self-reflect on the fear we have created within our own ranks of saying and writing what we really think and feel out of fear of political and social ostracism and, honestly, of shaming by the base of our party.

I saw it happen to my law school friend, Hillary Rodham Clinton, when she ran for president against the “progressive base” hero, Sen. Bernie Sanders. Not only did Hillary (and inferentially, I and her supporters) become “illiberal” or “reactionary” in the vocabulary of the Bernie Sanders true believers. We became the “enemy.” (If you think that is an overstatement, look up the posts on Twitter and quotes on liberal cable shows from a group who called themselves “Bernie Bros” and their attacks on Hillary Clinton.) Hillary was fighting for liberal causes – civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, human rights – before these “Bros” were out of grade school.

So I begin this day-after assessment of Donald Trump’s victory with one simple thought: It’s up to those of us who’ve given our lives to the Democratic Party to take ownership of three elements that produced this unwelcome election result.

First and foremost, we’ve allowed what was once called “political correctness” to become an ideological enforcement tool. (Conservatives use the word “woke,” but I dislike that term because it reminds me of their hypocrisy: The political right also enforces its own orthodoxy with their version of cancel culture – and fails to see the irony that all they have to do to invoke it is to apply the word “woke” to those they disagree with.)

Second is the word intolerance. Our side applies this word to Trump and his supporters even as our left base refuses to tolerate any deviation from their stance on an increasingly long list of sacred cows. I speak from painful experience. I am sympathetic, empathetic, to those who suffer from the feeling they have two genders – one hidden inside, the other marked by physical characteristics on the outside. As President Clinton would say, sincerely, I feel their pain.

But I am also uncomfortable with the idea that males in transition to being females should be allowed to use restrooms for “girls” or “women” without any concern for the discomfort it might cause young girls or grown women. If we must be sensitive to the challenge of being transgender, why should trans people be insensitive to the discomfort of those who are not? And how did it become a litmus test in our political party to support biological males competing in female sports?

The Trump campaign made great hay out of reproducing a clip of Kamala Harris advocating using tax dollars to pay for transgender surgery in prisons. There is certainly a case to be made for paying for such surgery, but this debate isn’t really about incarcerated felons. It’s about shaming people – even fellow liberals with a history of supporting gay rights – for daring to even ask questions about whether children should be encouraged by adults (not their parents) to change genders.

For me, this is the biggest lesson of why so many people voted for Trump, so many people I know, people who are friends. They resent the intolerance of people who call themselves “progressives” – but whose instinct of intolerance is not liberal at all. It is illiberal and reactionary. And yet I feared alienating them. I feared being shamed by them.

A very long time ago, a candidate named Bill Clinton often used the expression “third way” to describe the courage to resist the entrenched orthodoxies of both major political parties. The courage to plant yourself on what you truly believe – not right, not left, but a third way, which happens to be the place in American politics where solutions are found.

So our base, and I include myself in sharing this blame, feared speaking out loud what we felt about the hundreds of thousands of migrants who crossed our borders in the last four years. I have Latino friends, waiting for their green cards, who admitted with some hesitancy that they were voting for Trump. They did so not despite his immigration views, but because of them. Knowing he would be called a racist for doing so, Trump said that it’s time to enforce the law and stop illegal migrants from “jumping the line,” as one of my Latino friends said to me approvingly – approving of Trump, not the migrants.

My second column in this series will be to expound on what I see as the future for the Democratic Party – to go back to Bill Clinton’s “third way,” or as he put it – “neither right nor left but the third way to solve problems.”

He did alienate both sides when he served his two terms as president – certainly the left, and, as seen by his hyper-partisan and illegitimate House impeachment vote, the right as well.

But President Clinton was right: He solved problems and he “put people first.” And he ended his last day in office, January 20, 2001, enjoying the highest job approval rating (65%) of any two-term president since polling and job approval surveys were invented decades ago.

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Lanny Davis is the founder of the Washington, D.C., law firm Lanny J. Davis & Associates. From 2018-2024 Davis served as a legal advisor for Michael Cohen, but for the N.Y. DA trial Cohen is represented by experienced N.Y. counsel. Davis uniquely operates at the intersection of law, media, and politics to solve client problems. From 1996-98, Mr. Davis served as special White House counsel to President Bill Clinton. In 2006, he was appointed by his Yale College friend, President George W. Bush, to serve on a special post-9/11 White House panel to advise the president on privacy and civil liberties issues. He is the author of six books on politics, government, law, and crisis management. He has been writing his “Purple Nation” column since 2010