A casualty of the election of Trump is the reliability of political punditry and the polls that predicted Hillary Clinton’s victory. Trump’s victory was stunning, hard to believe in the light of his ignorance, bigotry xenophobia, vulgarity, mendacity, narcissism, lack of empathy, corruption and viciousness. Surely, he would not survive in the presidency if he did not change his ways. More shocking than his election is the continuing unshakable support he draws from his base, indeed, from Republicans as a whole in spite or perhaps because of his not having changed his ways. It is little consolation that he lost the popular vote. Social media, voter suppression and Russian interference may have made their contribution, but they do not account for the enthusiasm of the base that propelled him to victory. What has happened to our country, or have we simply known only our part of it? Our bewildered surprise we are told by his supporters is a matter of coastal elite bias and a failure to appreciate the legitimate grievances of the white workers in the heartland. It is hard to see how these grievances have been addressed by a man with his character and traits. Shouldn’t his working class supporters see through the emptiness of his populist appeal? He boasts of his billions, consorts with fellow plutocrats, and resists all legislation addressed to the needs of workers such as an increase in the minimum wage. The fact remains that almost half the country is enthralled by a vacuous, charismatic demagogue. We are told again and again about the divide between the coastal elites and the heartland—unfortunate labels, as if those professing progressive ideals such as universal health care and hospitality to refugees seeking asylum are elitist and those opposed are all heart. If the heartland is represented by those who appear at the Trump rallies, perhaps heartlessland is the more fitting label.
Trump will be hard to defeat in the coming election for reasons, I believe, that would make him easy to beat in normal times. He has normalized the Big Lie by the sheer accumulation of thousands of lies big and small he has uttered on a daily basis mainly through the medium of twitter. His assault on the mainline media as enemy of the people has certainly succeeded with his base and perhaps beyond. Exposing his lies, the task of the media, has become routine and lost its edge. We are left with fascination as well as disgust of how he gets away with it in the eyes of his unshakable supporters. The Big Lie is in his unrelenting boasts of what he has achieved in domestic and foreign affairs, where the truth is that his achievement has been the wholly destructive and obsessive undoing of genuine achievements of the Obama administration. Never admitting error, never apologizing, Trump in his behavior is in sharp contrast to Democratic candidates who hold themselves to a higher standard. When they misspeak, they do so far fewer times than does Trump and for the most part admit error, Joe Biden the chief example, giving the media all the time to dwell on it. The asymmetry is to Trump’s unfair advantage.
Another advantage: almost two dozen Democrats are running for president, all of whom are greatly superior in intellect, articulateness and character to Trump, but with the exception of Biden, Sanders and Warren, they lack the kind of presence and experience on the national scene that would make him or her a formidable challenger. And the three have their problems, Biden, on his own account, a gaffe machine may have lost in aging whatever force he had as a speake, Sanders also aging seems to have lost nothing of his force as a hectoring finger pointer on the stump with little disposition to listen to and take seriously what others have to say. Never having joined the party he hopes to represent, it is at least a question if he deserves the nomination. Highly intelligent and impressive as a speaker, Warren too is not a natural listener; her substantive agenda is utopian, hard to sort out what is aspirational and what is being promised. In political campaigns aspirations are heard as promises and, if unfulfilled, their proponent suffers while in office and in the following election. It is revealing that when I ask friends if they have a candidate, they express more often than not uncertainty. For one thing, so many candidates make it very difficult to focus on the few who have a real chance for the nomination.
The case of Biden is the most problematic. The leading candidate at the moment, he is on policy and rhetorical persuasiveness the least impressive of the candidates. His advantages come from his long political life, his association with Obama and his message of restoring civility and decency to political discourse and practice. Compared to those of his rivals, his policies are virtually invisible in the campaign. Policies may be less determinative of political success than the personal presence of the candidate, so the question is whether his presence compensates for the lack. He communicates decency but neither force of intellect nor command of facts. As already noted, he is a gaffe machine on his own account. As the contender considered most capable of beating Trump, he is in the strange position of losing or at least not gaining support in the polls. This clearly has to do with the weakness in responses to his rivals in the debates, for instance, to Kamala Harris’s attack on his negative stand on busing as a policy for racial integration of public schools. He was caught off guard and unprepared. The scene on stage diminished him and it did not advance the Democratic cause. It did give a temporary boost to Harris, which she did not sustain, because, I suspect, it sunk in that the attack was mean spirited and opportunistic. It was also unfair in its insinuation that having reservations about busing as a solution makes one, if not complicit, complacent in the cause of desegregation. Biden could have been more forceful in pointing out that busing has its problems as an effective strategy and that instituting it should be a matter of local decision and not federal mandate: see Boston. More serious is the attack on his participation in the Obama administration by the so-called progressive candidates, reflecting, as it does, the sentiment of a significant portion of the progressive base of the party. A self-declared progressive recently began a blog with a screed titled The Case Against Obama. He may have voted for The Green Party in 2016, and probably would have voted against Obama if he could have run in 2016. For him and for others on the left, as for some of the candidates, Biden bears the stigma of his role in the Obama administration, unwittingly? fueling Trump’s insidious and relentless actions in undoing the Obama legacy, which has a high approval rating among voters. It was good to see an awakening to this reality in the September 13 debate. Julio Castro’s attack on Biden invoked Obama in support, but it was meanspirited and opportunistic. Castro seemed to have learned nothing from the Harris episode.
The problem with the Democrats more generally lies with the split between “progressives” and “moderates.” I enclose the terms in quotation marks, because they constitute a false binary. The more accurate distinction is between radical progressive and moderate progressive. On much both sides agree: climate change, gun control, reducing inequality, prime examples. The most contentious issue is health care. The radicals want to move further and faster to a single payer for universal health care, the moderates incrementally to a public option as a supplement to private insurance, but both sides want to move forward in the same direction, universal health care. It is a question whether either policy will be enacted. The chances for success, it would seem, are greater for the public option. Single payer would entail the forcible removal of 180 million people from private insurance and the unemployment of more than 2.5 million employees of the insurance companies. The cost of the transformation would be great, its effect on taxation, hospitals and the medical profession incalculable. It would be an extremely disruptive action by the left following extremely disruptive actions by a far-right administration, only intensifying the polarization that is crippling our politics. I don’t mean to equate the intelligence and moral character of the disruptions. I am questioning the wisdom of Medicare for All as a political strategy at this time. It also seems a problematic solution in a country as large and diverse as ours. The European countries with single payer are comparable in size and population with single American states. The idea of universal health care is of course appealing and essential, but it is disingenuous to make single payer its sole repository when the combination of public and regulated private universal health care successfully exists in European countries such as Germany and Switzerland. It is a disservice to the advocates of the public option to deny them the progressive label..
The president normally is expected to represent the entire nation, not simply his political constituency, especially in times of crisis. Trump is an anomaly in viewing the presidency as confined to his political base that helped elect him and in demonizing the opposition with the intention of denying them participation in the political process. Democrats should beware of an exclusively base driven campaign for the presidency, In the absence of a unifying president, a united Democratic majority should present itself as a nationally unifying alternative. The Democrats have a double task: attack the polarizing presidency of Donald Trump and advance a positive agenda. There is tension, if not contradiction, between the two tasks. The agenda has to be a forthright, realistic expression of values and policies. The attack on polarization means listening not only to voices in your own party, but also listening to independents and even Trump supporters. The appeal for a more civil and cooperative politics may not move the opposition, but it is an essential message in a House Divided. We may never achieve agreement on fundamental principles with the opposition. What we can achieve is agreement on particular issues. Total consensus on issues is not possible or even desirable in a democracy. The choice is between total war or limited engagements and truces. In a democracy there is always opposition we must learn to live with. These remarks are addressed to the radical left, not to the center left. The far right is opaque to such an appeal and a principled center right has virtually gone with the wind. The president cares only for his base. The Democrats must speak and act to unite the nation. It is at this moment in our history that they must remind the country what a viable democracy is about.
The immediate task facing the Democratic party is finding common ground between radical and moderate progressives and support for whomever the nominee may be. On many issues common ground already exists, health care, immigration important exceptions. Neither side has a coherent policy on immigration, but they are united in their opposition to the cruel policies and practices of the Trump administration. On health care common ground should be the defense and extension of Obamacare with the addition of the public option and an acknowledgement that universal health care remains to be realized. Opposition to the chaos of Trump’s foreign policy unites the party, in particular on Iran, the Paris climate accord and his affinity with autocratic rulers, but a coherent foreign Democratic foreign policy has yet to be formulated.
Common ground is antithetical to identity politics. The struggle of minority groups such as African Americans and Hispanics to achieve full equality has in recent years found its expression in identity politics. Critics note its tendency to separate itself from the struggles of others and engage in what might be called single issue politics. It has also provoked a backlash in the opposition as in the case of Trump’s white supremacist followers. Identity politics is now a racist politics on the far right. What is needed now is a common front, black, brown and white, straight and gay on reducing economic and political inequality, protecting the environment, gun control, universal health care.
In opposing Trump one must be careful not to mirror his rhetoric or behavior. The opposite to Trump should not be shock and awe, but passionate conviction and civility., The goal should be the conversion of the electorate to the view that gridlock is not the agenda of the Democratic Party. Democrats must demonstrate in their campaigning a disdain and avoidance of the poisonous rhetoric of which Trump ix adolescent “master”. At the same time, his opponent needs to have the capacity to expose the vacuity and viciousness of his discourse and call him out for the charlatan he is. And the nominee must surround himself with a politically smart staff with a sure sense of where and how he or should campaign, It made a difference in Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton and, sadly, in Trump’s election.
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Postscript: On impeachment: The Mueller report was damning but the actors in the drama, in particular Mueller, fell short of the demands of the script. I believe with Nancy Pelosi that the vote for a time-consuming impeachment in the House, not followed by conviction in the Senate, would be the kind of fruitless symbolic action that would backfire among independent voters and only enrage the Trump base.
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