Politics & Power Quote by Sidney Blumenthal

Politics isn’t just a fight over policies; it’s a fight over narrative, and Sidney Blumenthal is putting his finger on the Democrats’ chronic weak spot: identity drift. The line reads like a strategic memo disguised as a moral reminder. “Sense of their history” isn’t nostalgia. It’s infrastructure. If you don’t know where your coalition came from - labor politics, civil rights, New Deal governance, the long argument for an active state - you can’t convincingly explain why you’re asking voters to trust you with power now.

Blumenthal’s subtext is that Democrats too often behave like a party of programs rather than a party of self-conception. Republicans, by contrast, tend to sell a story first (tradition, liberty, grievance), then retrofit policy to match. His phrase “project their values” is telling: values aren’t assumed to be legible; they have to be broadcast, framed, repeated. And “stand up for them” carries a mild indictment: Democrats may have values but lack the muscular rhetorical posture to defend them when attacked as elitist, bureaucratic, or culturally alien.

Contextually, Blumenthal comes out of the late-20th-century Democratic wars over triangulation, the Clinton-era urge to outrun the party label, and the post-Reagan fear of being tagged “big government.” He’s arguing that political durability requires continuity - not purity tests, but a confident through-line. Without it, every election becomes an improvisation, and every controversy becomes an identity crisis.