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Instigated by the 2016 election debacle that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats "should have won by a landslide," John Nichols' new book, The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace's Antifascist, Antiracist Politics, asks a couple of questions that have haunted many of us:
Whatever happened to the liberal, social-and-industrial-Democratic party that FDR built in the course of leading Americans against the Great Depression and Fascism? And can progressives yet redeem it? His answers are timely and challenging--though presumably, given the outcome of the 2020 primaries, not the way he had hoped.
As his new book, attests, Nichols, national correspondent of The Nation magazine and author of many provocative works on American history, politics, and media, knows progressive politics past and present, inside and out. And in the interest of full disclosure, I should make it clear that John and I--fellow Wisconsinites--have been friends for years. We share an admiration for both Roosevelt and Thomas Paine, and he graciously praises my work in this new book. With that explained, I write this not for comradely but for historical and political reasons.
Whether my friend intended it or not, this deftly told history compels us to recognize that the repeated progressive failure to prevail in the now 75-year-long-struggle to take back the Democratic Party is owed not merely to the strength of the opposition, but also in good part to tragic decisions made, ironically enough, by our own champions Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and Bernie Sanders.
Nichols' telling of the Democratic Party's declension from FDR-liberalism to neoliberalism begins neither in the 1970s with Jimmy Carter's presidency, nor in the tumultuous 1960s with LBJ's decision to prioritize the war in Southeast Asia over the War on Poverty in America (both of which he addresses). Rather, Nichols takes us back to Roosevelt's surprising and fateful decision to bow to the demands of conservative-pro-business and reactionary-Southern Democratic Party elites that he place the centrist Senator Harry Truman on the 1944 presidential ticket instead of his outspokenly progressive wartime vice president Henry Wallace--outspoken to the point of unabashedly calling out anti-labor corporate bosses and pro-segregationist politicians as "fascists."
Recognizing the President's deteriorating health, those conservatives and reactionaries did not want a President-in-Waiting who they feared would aggressively revive the New Deal and seriously try to bring an end to white supremacy in Dixie.
FDR's decision remains puzzling today. Roosevelt had firmly insisted on having his two-term New Deal Secretary of Agriculture Wallace on the 1940 presidential ticket. Wallace as vice president not only had ably overseen critical aspects of the war effort, but also enthusiastically promoted FDR's vision of the Four Freedoms: "Freedom of speech and worship, Freedom from want and fear."
In fact, encouraged by polls showing the great majority of Americans wanted to revive the New Deal and make the Four Freedoms all the more real at war's end, Roosevelt launched his campaign that January in his Annual Message to Congress. He proposed an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans and that very October told the nation, "The right to vote must be open to our citizens irrespective of race, color, or creed--without tax or artificial restriction of any kind."
Moreover, we now know he was secretly exploring the possibility of joining with progressive Republicans (there were quite a few back then!) to turn the Democratic Party into a united liberal party purged of conservatives and reactionaries.
The decision to remove Wallace, as Nichols details, was fateful. On Roosevelt's passing in April 1945, Truman became president. Predictably, he was no FDR or Wallace. He brought hacks and cronies into the White House, drove New Dealers out of his administration (including the now Secretary of Commerce Wallace), mishandled the immediate transition from a wartime to peacetime economy, alienated both labor and liberals, and in 1946 essentially handed Congress to the Republicans, who quickly passed the Taft-Hartley Act and effectively forever after stymied labor organizing down South.
Yes, he proposed progressive legislation, but, with the GOP controlling Congress and able to count on southern Democratic votes in a pinch, he accomplished little of significance other than to bolster the Republicans' anti-New Deal "Red Scare" initiatives by subjecting all federal employees to a "loyalty review" and to lead the United States into a dangerous Cold War (which given Stalin's ambitions may have been unavoidable) and a hot war in Korea.
Nichols' primary protagonist Wallace himself made the next dreadful decision. Outraged by Truman's handling of both domestic and foreign policy, instead of fighting to win back the party in 1948, Wallace bolted from the Democrats to pursue a futile campaign as the presidential candidate of a new Progressive Party. Backed by left-led labor unions, militant liberals and progressives, and cohorts of American Communists, he campaigned courageously, even going down into the deep South to speak before racially integrated audiences.
"This deftly told history compels us to recognize that the repeated progressive failure to prevail in the now 75-year-long-struggle to take back the Democratic Party is owed not merely to the strength of the opposition, but also in good part to tragic decisions made, ironically enough, by our own champions Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and Bernie Sanders."
It was not without consequence, for Truman may well only have beaten the Republican Thomas Dewey that year because Wallace compelled Truman to move left to avoid losing significant numbers of labor and liberal voters. But as Nichols makes painfully clear, Wallace himself didn't just lose, he lost miserably. It finished off his political career and cost the Democratic Party its most progressive voice. A generation was to pass before progressives would again become a force in the party.
For all that, Nichols cites reasons to feel hopeful, if not optimistic, that progressives can finally prevail in the fight for the party's soul. Pointing to both the 2018 congressional victories by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and "the Squad" and the presidential candidacies of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, he sees a revival of the Democratic Party left. He even recounts a conversation he had with Sanders at Wallace's Iowa home in which Bernie signaled his determination if elected to pursue FDR's Four Freedoms and projected Economic Bill of Rights.
Which brings us to the third tragic decision.
Sanders was not to win the nomination. But to his credit, he once again did not, in contrast to Wallace, abandon the Democrats. And yet, he might actually have won the nomination had he not done what he also did in 2016. Despite his professed aspirations and his campaign website echoing FDR's New Deal (New Deal/Green New Deal; Social Security/Medicare for All; industrial democracy/workers democracy; Economic Bill of Rights/21C Economic Bill of Rights), he essentially turned his back on Roosevelt. He neither joined the Democratic Party, nor even ran as the FDR Democrat he clearly is.
Instead, he once again ran as a "democratic socialist" and wasted precious time trying to explain what that meant. Even worse, he never once mentioned FDR in the nationally televised primary debates to remind Americans of how President Roosevelt and the generation we revere beat the Great Depression and fascism by radically enhancing American democratic life. Nor did he chastise his neoliberal opponents for betraying FDR's and their grandparents' struggles, achievements, and the promise of the Four Freedoms. So Bernie lost, and we lost.
Nonetheless, Nichols' book gives us good reason to hope and to act. On entering Congress, AOC, the brightest and possibly most popular figure in the Democratic and progressive caucuses, linked herself to the tradition of FDR's politics and party. Indeed, she told Nichols, "I want us to be that party again!"
Meanwhile, we should not ignore or simply scoff at Joe Biden's statement that in view of the crises of Trump and the pandemic he plans to launch an FDR-style administration. We should push Joe on it, remember it, and hold him accountable to it.
The billionaire fascists are coming for your Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And they're openly bragging about it.
Right after Trump's election, back in December of 2016, Newt Gingrich openly bragged at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were going to "break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model." That "model," of course, created what we today refer to as "the middle class."
This week Mitch McConnell confirmed Gingrich's prophecy, using the huge deficits created by Trump's billionaire tax cuts as an excuse to destroy "entitlement" programs.
"I think it would be safe to say that the single biggest disappointment of my time in Congress has been our failure to address the entitlement issue, and it's a shame, because now the Democrats are promising Medicare for All," McConnell told Bloomberg. He added, "[W]e're talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid."
These programs, along with free public education and progressive taxation, are the core drivers and maintainers of the American middle class. History shows that without a strong middle class, democracy itself collapses, and fascism is the next step down a long and terrible road.
Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been working overtime to kneecap institutions that support the American middle class. And, as any working-class family can tell you, the GOP has had some substantial successes, particularly in shifting both income and political power away from voters and toward billionaires and transnational corporations.
In July of 2015, discussing SCOTUS's 5 to 4 conservative vote on Citizens United, President Jimmy Carter told me: "It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery..." He added: "[W]e've just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors..."
As Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated in an exhaustive analysis of the difference between what most Americans want their politicians to do legislatively, versus what American politicians actually do, it's pretty clear that President Carter was right.
They found that while the legislative priorities of the top 10 percent of Americans are consistently made into law, things the bottom 90 percent want are ignored. In other words, today in America, democracy only "works" for the top 10 percent of Americans.
For thousands of years, economists and economic observers from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Thomas Piketty have told us that a "middle class" is not a normal byproduct of raw, unregulated capitalism--what right-wing ideologues call "the free market."
Instead, unregulated markets--particularly markets not regulated by significant taxation on predatory incomes--invariably lead to the opposite of a healthy middle class: they produce extremes of inequality, which are as dangerous to democracy as cancer is to a living being.
With so-called "unregulated free markets," the rich become super-rich, while grinding poverty spreads among working people like a heroin epidemic. This further polarizes the nation, both economically and politically, which, perversely, further cements the power of the oligarchs.
While there's a clear moral dimension to this--pointed out by Adam Smith in his classic Theory of Moral Sentiments--there's also a vital political dimension.
Smith noted, in 1759, that, "All constitutions of government are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end."
Smith added a cautionary note, however: "[The] disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition... is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
Jefferson was acutely aware of this: the Declaration of Independence was the first founding document of any nation in the history of the world that explicitly declared "happiness" as a "right" that should be protected and promoted by government against predations by the very wealthy.
That was not at all, however, a consideration for the architects of supply-side Reaganomics, although they appropriated JFK's "rising tide lifts all boats" metaphor to sell their hustle to (boatless) working people.
Far more troubling (and well-known to both Smith and virtually all of our nation's founders), however, was Aristotle's observation that when a nation pursues economic/political activities that destroy its middle class, it will inevitably devolve either into mob rule or oligarchy. As he noted in Politics:
"Now in all states there are three elements: one class is very rich, another very poor, and a third in a mean. ... But a [government] ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes. ...
"Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant."
This is how America was for the Boomer generation until about two decades ago: a 30-year-old in the 1970s had a 90 percent chance of having or attaining a higher standard of living than his or her parents. But, since the 1980s introduction of Reaganomics, there's been more than a 70 percent drop in "social mobility"--the ability to move from one economic station of life into a better one.
So, if our democratic republic is to return to democracy and what's left of our middle class is to survive (or even grow), how do we do that?
History shows that the two primary regulators within a capitalist system that provide for the emergence of a middle class are progressive taxation and a healthy social safety net.
As Jefferson noted in a 1785 letter to Madison, "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."
Similarly, Thomas Paine, proposing in Agrarian Justice(1797) what we today call Social Security, said that a democracy can only survive when its people "[S]ee before them the certainty of escaping the miseries that under other governments accompany old age..." Such a strong social safety net, Paine argued, "will have an advocate and an ally in the heart of all nations."
Tragically, Republicans are today planning to destroy both our nation's progressive taxation system and our social safety net, in obsequious service to their billionaire paymasters.
Flipping Jefferson and FDR on their heads, Republicans last year passed a multi-trillion-dollar tax break for the rich, with a few-hundred-dollars bone tossed in for working people.
Meanwhile, Republicans are already hard at work dismantling the last remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society.
As Ian Milhiser notes, "Republicans in the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20-50 percent. Speaker Paul Ryan's plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he'd cut Medicaid by between a third and a half."
This is not, of course, the first time Republicans have tried this. They've been trying to dismantle Social Security since 1936, and Reagan himself even recorded a 33 RPM LP calling LBJ's Great Society proposal for a program called "Medicare" as "socialism," saying that if it passed then one day we'd all look back "remembering the time when men were free."
And it's always been in service to the same agenda--handing political and economic power over the morbidly rich and the corporations that got them there.
In earlier times, we had a word for this takeover of democracy by the morbidly rich and the corporations: fascism.
As I've written before, in early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in the New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. ... The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.
"With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public," Wallace continued, "but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist"--the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word.
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America: "American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, [and] the deliberate poisoners of public information..."
He could have been describing Fox, right-wing hate radio, and the billionaires who keep today's GOP in power.
Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggested that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."
Watching the Republicans of his day work from the same anti-worker playbook they are today, Wallace added:
"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion."
As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage."
In a comment prescient of Donald Trump's trashing of "Mexican rapists" and "gangs" in Chicago, Wallace wrote:
"The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.
"It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice."
And that prejudice would be exploited to win elections so that the fascists could rob the people and enhance their own power and wealthy.
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would still have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And if the day ever came when a billionaire opened a "news" network just to promote fascist thinking, they could promote their lies with ease.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the vice president of the United States saw rising in America, he added:
"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that using the power of the State and the power of the market simultaneously they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
In the election of 2018, we stand at a crossroad that Roosevelt and Wallace only imagined.
Billionaire-funded fascism is rising in America, calling itself "conservativism" and "Trumpism."
The Republican candidates' and their billionaire donors' behavior today eerily parallels that day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for." President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings are more urgent now than ever before.
If Trump and the billionaire fascists who bankroll the Republicans succeed in destroying the last supports for America's enfeebled middle class, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--and succeed in blocking any possibility of Medicare for All or free college and trade school--not only will the bottom 90 percent of Americans suffer, but what little democracy we have left in this republic will evaporate. History, from Greek and Roman times through Europe in the first half of the 20th century, suggests it will probably be replaced by a violent, kleptocratic oligarchy that no longer shrinks from words like "fascist."
The warning signs are already here, and, in the face of nationwide election fraud based in Republican voter purges, we must turn out massive numbers if we're to preserve the American Dream and finally make it available to all.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
President Donald Trump keeps signaling his determination to remake the Republican Party in the image of Steve Bannon and his circle of wild-eyed racists and xenophobes. Because the media in the United States tend to focus on personality clashes and electoral strategies rather than ideologies and the evolution of political parties, Trump's political project is still too little-noted by the pundits and politicians, who have consistently underestimated the threat he poses. Yet, for those who are paying attention, the President's extreme messaging sends a clear signal."The dog whistles get louder," says anti-racism activist and author Tim Wise.
Early in 2017, Trump expressed enthusiasm for France's far right, hailing National Front (now National Rally) leader Marine Le Pen as "the strongest on what's been going on in France"--an embrace of a candidate whom French conservatives rejected for leading a party "known for its violence, its intolerance." Several months later, when neo-Nazis rioted and killed a woman in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump suggested there were "good people" among those throwing up fascist salutes.
In August, Trump began hyperventilating about white farmers in South Africa, with a tweet announcing that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate "South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers." In so doing, he adopted a meme favored by shadowy global networks that mumble about "white genocide." The New York Times said the president was citing "false claims." Patrick Gaspard, the former U.S. ambassador to South Africa, warned that the President "needs political distractions to turn our gaze away from his criminal cabal, and so he's attacking South Africa with the disproven racial myth of 'large scale killings of farmers.'"
Gaspard was right about the impulse of this President to distract the media and his supporters from his many crises. Yet there is more going on here than the usual smoke and mirrors of politics.
"Ultimately, I don't see this tweet as being about South Africa at all," Wise told Joy Reid on an MSNBC program that offered a rare example of how Trump should be covered. "I think it is a way to try and scare white Americans not of black South Africans, about whom they don't think very much, but of black people in this country. It's all part of a larger political process."
The larger political process is what matters. Donald Trump knows this. So, too, do his sharpest critics. That makes the 2018 election cycle much more than the traditional partisan fight between Republicans and Democrats. What is playing out this year are battles for the souls of both major political parties.
A new generation of intersectional candidates is doing its best to drive the Democratic Party in a different direction.
Just as Trump is steering the Republican Party into the ditch of white nationalism, a new generation of intersectional candidates (many of them women, people of color, immigrants, or the children of immigrants) is doing its best to drive the Democratic Party in a different direction. It is a movement that Ayanna Pressley, who beat a ten-term incumbent Congressman in a Massachusetts primary in September, says "can ensure that this moment of hatred and division in Washington is a catalyst for the greatest progressive movement of our generation."
Neither major party will finish 2018 unchanged. Yet the extent of the transformation will be known only after the November 6 election results are digested. The changes may be uneven; one party may go through a more radical transformation than the other. But there is no going back for either party. Nor is there any reason to believe that this unavoidable process of radical transformation will end on a particular Election Day. Even if Republicans are completely vanquished by a "Blue Wave" election, the process of remaking the party in the President's image will continue.
The President is a dangerous man, a danger he extends by regularly intervening on behalf of his "mini-mes"--like race-baiting Florida Republican gubernatorial nominee Ron DeSantis. The threat Trump poses is multiplied by the fact that, as veteran Republican strategist Rick Wilson reminds us, GOP "leaders" such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan "lack the moral courage to stand up and say directly into the camera: this President is engaging in things that are overtly racial, this is a signal to some of the worst elements in our society."
With that said, however, it must be understood that Trump is not our condition. Rather, he is an alarming symptom of what ails our politics at a moment of dramatic change in how we organize our lives, our work, our world.
Trump is President because this country's political leaders have failed to respond honestly or usefully to the radical changes that are transforming the lives of Americans, and the anxiety these changes create.
The United States has barely begun to wrestle with the immediate crisis of climate change. At the same time, it is now thirty years into a globalization revolution that is changing everything about how we relate to the world--economically, socially, politically, and practically. It is twenty years into a digital revolution that is changing everything about how we communicate, with dramatic repercussions for how we organize our time and our relationships. And it is ten years into an automation revolution that is already changing everything about our workplaces, and that will ultimately upend our sense of who we are as workers and what we might seek to accomplish.
This is heavy stuff. It is hitting the average American with the force of three industrial revolutions at the same time. Unfortunately, because of the lingering influence of neoliberal fabulism on both parties, serious thinking about the policies needed to address this sea change has been neglected in favor of the fantasy that "the market will come up with a solution."
Economists tell us that the concentration of power in the hands of a billionaire class, and the monopolization of wealth by trillion-dollar tech corporations, is bad for business and worse for humanity. Social scientists identify economic and social inequality as an existential threat. The Harvard Business Review notes that "people in all walks of life are becoming very concerned about advancing automation." Yet the supposedly "enlightened" leaders of both parties continue to propose "more-of-the-same" schemes to divert precious public resources to billionaires, tech titans, and the military-industrial complex that has already locked up so much of our commonwealth.
Until Bernie Sanders opened up the debate with a 2016 presidential run that shook the Democratic Party's complacency, scant attention was paid to the fact that a Scandinavian-style social welfare state will have to be developed to provide Americans with guarantees of health care, education, transportation, and other basic needs. It is the only rational response to a "gig-economy," where workers cannot count on the benefits packages that sustained their grandparents and that their parents are now losing.
By the way, young voters did not back Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries because he was promising "free stuff." They voted for him because his social-democratic agenda sounded like a smart proposal for bringing a measure of stability to the chaotic future they are already experiencing.
Yet, even at his best, Sanders barely touched on the topics that will soon confront society, like whether a universal basic income will be required to sustain workers displaced by robots. And once the nomination fight was done, Democrats defaulted to the habitual caution that keeps the party from inspiring young people and disaffected Americans.
Neglect of the essential debate has made it easy for Trump to fill the anxiety void with a combination of over-the-top bragging about his dubious business skills and crude appeals to xenophobia. This was just enough to swing battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania--and, with them, the Electoral College--in 2016. But Trump is incapable of addressing the sources of the anxiety, which is one of the reasons why his approval numbers are so low and the prospects that Democrats might take the House in 2018 are so high.
There are plenty of people--many of them Trump voters and potential Trump voters--who recognize that good employment numbers are transitory, that wages are stagnant, and that tax cuts are more likely to be invested in robotification than long-term job creation. Trump has no answers for the real issues of our time. So he will keep going further down the rathole of racialized politics, and he is not going alone.
The story of the Republican Party's future is being written by Donald Trump. That tweet about South African farmers, like so many of the President's signals, should be read in the context of the politics of right now.
The evidence from the 2018 campaign is that Trump's trajectory will be every bit as horrible as his sharpest critics imagine. He'll keep intervening in Republican primaries on behalf of men like Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach, who peddles lies about "illegal voting" that Republicans use to make it harder for non-Republicans to cast ballots; and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, who proved that it was possible to be more venomous than Trump by promising to use his pickup truck to round up immigrants.
The story of the Democratic Party's pushback against Trump is, as yet, unwritten. There are no guarantees that the Democrats will rise to the challenge of the moment. They failed to do so in 2016 because party leaders at the highest level misread the moment. They spent too much time concentrating on Trump and too little time on the question of why the most divisive and discredited Republican nominee in the party's history was a viable contender for the presidency.
The story of the Democratic Party's pushback against Trump is, as yet, unwritten. There are no guarantees that the Democrats will rise to the challenge of the moment.
What Democrats must recognize is that the required response to Trumpism involves filling the void of the uncertainty he creates with information, ideas, and programs. This won't change the hearts of visceral racists and xenophobes, of the David Dukes and Richard Spencers, who relish the political normalization of white nationalism. But it will speak to frightened and frustrated Americans, and identify an agenda for mobilizing what Democracy for America Executive Director Charles Chamberlain calls "the New American Majority of people of color and progressive white voters [who] are ready to deliver transformative results for candidates who share their commitment to bold, inclusive populism."
This year's primary elections have been notable for breakthrough victories by scores of Democratic candidates who recognize the need for this new politics. In Massachusetts, for instance, Ayanna Pressley launched her campaign with a declaration that: "the people of this district deserve a representative who will enlist them as partners in the development, visioning, and governing of their communities. Activism is no longer an option, but is the expectation of our generation."
That last line went to the heart of the matter. Pressley, a forty-four-year-old African American progressive, shared many positions with incumbent Congressman Mike Capuano. What distinguished her was a promise to combine representation in Washington with movement activism at home. She communicated a sense of urgency that her party has lacked. After casting her primary ballot on September 4, she said: "This is a fight for the soul of our party, and the future of our democracy, at a time when our country is at a crossroads."
Pressley secured her upset victory with a 59-41 landslide. She was one of dozens of insurgents who prevailed in Democratic primaries during the course of the first nine months of 2018. Gubernatorial candidates such as Ben Jealous in Maryland, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, and Andrew Gillum in Florida won historic nominations, as did Congressional candidates such as Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York (see interview, page 60).
The first challenger to defeat an incumbent Congressman in a Democratic primary, Ocasio-Cortez became a symbol of the movement to change the party. She was open about the failure of the party to speak to the issues that matter to voters--including some voters who backed Trump in 2016, and many more who stayed home.
"[Trump] spoke very directly to a lot of needs that were not being met by both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party," she told The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald. "Our neglect of that is something we wholeheartedly have to take responsibility for, and correct for."
That's a vital acknowledgment, and an even more vital call to action.
Trump's answers to America's problems are wrong. Yet he is doubling down on them with a white-nationalist message that could come to fully define his party. The challenge for Democrats is to forge an alternative message that is bigger and bolder than the pathetic agenda that this President and his partisan allies propose.
The alternative to a "make-America-great-again" politics of old policies and older fears is a new politics for a new time. To achieve this new politics, the Democratic Party must be as radical as it was in the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Wallace. It must be more open to social democratic ideals, especially those that will shape and sustain a social welfare state sufficient to provide benefits as the economic order of the past gives way to a new order in which jobs are replaced by gigs.
It will recognize that a universal basic income may be the only answer for workers who are being displaced, not temporarily but permanently, by the robots and computers that Oxford University social scientists say could eliminate half of existing jobs in the next two decades. And it will know that antitrust initiatives to break up, regulate, and tax tech monopolies will allow citizens rather than CEOs to guide a technological revolution focused on the betterment of the human condition.
This is the politics proposed by the most tech-savvy Democrat in the current Congress, Ro Khanna of California, who two years ago defeated an eight-term incumbent Congressman in a primary contest that foretold the intraparty fights of 2018. "Our country is going through a profound transition from an industrial age to a digital age," Khanna has said. "The gains of that transition had gone to a few people who are creative, brilliant, at the right place at the right time. There are a lot of folks who had been left out in that transition."
If next-generation candidates who practice a politics of big ideas and big mobilization win in November, that will be a signal for the only major party that still has the potential to meet the challenges of the times
The Democratic Party can't be too bold. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party does not yet know whether it wants to be bold. This is what the primary battles of 2018 were about, and this is why the results from November contests matter more than a measure of D-versus-R alignment. If next-generation candidates who practice a politics of big ideas and big mobilization win in November, that will be a signal for the only major party that still has the potential to meet the challenges of the times.
Parties evolve, or die. That's a fact of political science. This year will tell us a great deal about just how dangerous the evolution of the Republican Party has become. But it could also tell us how the Democratic Party might avert the danger and claim the future.