Democrats have watched with building anger the GOP hold on to power by legalizing dark money and disenfranchising millions of citizens.
People will not settle for tinkering when it comes to addressing income stagnation, inequality, taxes, fairness, corporate governance and CEO compensation, corporate abuse, investment and infrastructure, trade agreements, antitrust cases and monopolies, work and family, equal pay for women, entrenched racial disparities, early education, universal health care, climate change, and on and on. Edward Luce understates it when he says, “The center of gravity has shifted,” but not when he says, “For the first time in decades, America’s intellectual energy is on the left.”26
When the Republican Party is fully defeated, the country will be freed from the decade-long effort to stop Democratic governance and governmental function. That moment will produce a new sense of possibility that will compound the intellectual energy pushing up policy innovation in this period.
The nation sees the potential for new transformative policies according to the Roosevelt Institute’s report for the 2020 election, “New Rules for the 21st Century: Corporate Power, Public Power, and the Future of the American Economy.”27 It shows how out-of-control corporate power has produced a low-wage economy, inequality compounded across “generations and geographies,” a “yawning racial wealth gap over the last thirty years,” and “climate change that is destroying the health of our planet.” Like in so many areas, the Trump presidency has proved clarifying. The economy “rewards those who have power.” That is why Nell Abernathy, Darrick Hamilton, and Julie Margetta Morgan preface the Roosevelt Institute report with “the crucial need to curb corporate power and reclaim public power.” The idea of getting government out of the way to strengthen the economy is so bankrupt. Their economic plan begins with empowering ordinary citizens, limiting the power of big money, attacking concentrated corporate power, banning stock buybacks, and raising taxes dramatically on corporations and the richest. That makes it possible to “revive public power.” Government must make “vital investments” in infrastructure, clean energy, and emerging industries and ensure fair competition. It must create genuine public options in health care, education, and housing.
And the Democrats will not run in 2020 calling out to every aggrieved group in its potential winning coalition, as Hillary Clinton did so disastrously in 2016, unless Russian bots succeed in getting Democratic presidential candidates to sign up to support “reparations.” If they succeeded, Democrats would wait longer to capture the U.S. Senate and move its agenda. That is the risk of giving in to identity politics.
Some observers looked at Stacey Abrams falling just 56,000 votes short in Georgia, and concluded Clinton was just two years too early or just not passionate enough. I faulted the Clinton campaign on many things, but not her determination to crash the glass ceiling for women. I believe her experience remains instructive.
Stacey Abrams joined a symposium with Francis Fukuyama and correctly dismissed his fear that group identity necessarily fragments the country, undermines democracy, and precludes a unified American identity. Abrams went further though, pointing to a litany of groups—“women, Native Americans, immigrants, and LGBTQ”—that would benefit if the country understood the “barriers to entry” and the “most successful methods of fighting for inclusion.” She is right that with social media “isolated cruelties are yoked into a powerful narrative of marginalization” that nationalizes these wrongs and “spurs common cause.”
Yet Abrams is acutely conscious at the same time that “the current demographic and social evolution toward diversity in the United States has played out alongside a trend toward greater economic and social inequality.” She knows “these parallel but distinct developments are inextricably bound together,” which is why her success has such bigger implications.28 29 30 The barriers to entry are not just the race-specific ones. Working people and the poor have been hurt by the broader failure of the upper classes to educate and invest and the broader power to limit access to unions and the right to vote. Black voters could not be more sophisticated about how “social and economic inequality” are woven together and the implications for politics and policy.
The Roosevelt Institute’s transformative economic plan for the 2020 election powerfully underscores the problem: “Since America’s founding and continuing today, our economy has been built on implicit and explicit rules that include some people and exclude others based on race.” And with women facing structural obstacles, too, you get “rampant” race and gender inequality. So, reviving public power also means “actively addressing exclusions based on race and gender.” Going forward, a progressive agenda must “place inclusion at the core.”31
Every message test I conducted during the 2016 and 2018 campaigns described in chapter 8, “How Did Democrats Let Donald Trump Win?,” found the same kind of sophistication and clarity in the New America of African Americans and Hispanics, single women, millennials, and college women. It got more engaged and more determined to vote for Democrats when they called out the corrupt political deals that put government to work for big corporations and big donors, rather than calling out the “barriers to inclusion” and promising “ladders of opportunity.” The Democrats’ multicultural base were the most frustrated and hurt by the political status quo that further enriches the top 1 percent and weakens unions; a status quo that leaves the national minimum wage frozen, that allows infrastructure to deteriorate, education spending to be slashed, leaves working families on their own and health care ever more insecure and unaffordable. These are the people who can’t handle a sudden five-hundred-dollar expense and who would welcome this kind of relief.
The Democrats’ electoral base understands that a Democratic Party working to weaken corporate power, expand vital investments, help the poorest, and reduce inequality will make the biggest difference for those who have lived with generations of discrimination. People of color and women will be the first beneficiaries of this inclusive approach, and they know it and act on it.
Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist in the critical first year, thought he was dealing with a Democratic Party that had learned nothing from 2016. “The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and Democrats go with economic nationalism, the right can crush the Democrats on economic nationalism.”32
But Democrats in 2018 campaigned against the corruption, self-dealing, and failure to “drain the swamp.” They called for major investments in infrastructure to create American jobs. And they demanded the Republicans stop their war on the Affordable Care Act that is killing people with preexisting conditions and that makes the crisis in health care costs dramatically worse. Democrats promised to work for a government that works for all, not the special interests, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put forward H.R. 1, “For The People Act: bold, transformative legislation to put the power back in the hands of the people and restore the people’s faith that government works for the public interest, not the special interests.”33
Democrats in 2018 and afterward energized the New America, but also made major inroads into rural areas and with white working-class voters, too.
At the same time, most Americans have seen through Donald Trump’s mad and losing battle against America’s diversity and immigrant character where “social and economic inequality” are indeed fully intwined, as Stacey Abrams put it. They may not know how much New Deal programs or post–World War II housing policies discriminated against blacks and women, but they watch enough body cams or viral smartphone videos to know young black people are more at risk on the street. The legacy of segregation and discrimination, disenfranchisement, and the criminal justice system make all our economic inequalities worse.34 So it is a good thing that about 80 percent of the Democratic base and a majority of the country also believe the job of achieving equality for women and African Americans and other people of color is unfi
nished.
They think that is still a priority because the Democratic Party embraces a multiculturalism that is now fully aligned with today’s American creed. The political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck hit Fukuyama for failing to see how close America was to having a “creedal national identity.” Fully nine in ten Americans believe accepting people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds is important to being American, far above more nationalistic and exclusive definitions, like speaking English.35
What if multiculturalism is no longer politically contested?
When Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke at the London School of Economics about the state of Trump’s America, which I watched from the audience as a spouse in the congressional delegation accompanying her, she decided to address the controversy around immigration. She quoted President Ronald Reagan’s last speech in the White House:
We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals in this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.36
The political scientists and everyone else sees the country holding yet another election where it is even more polarized—where which party you identify with supersedes all others, where one party speaks for the whites who resent the country’s diversity and secularism, and where views of immigration are the strongest determination of the vote. That party has driven away millennials, suburban women, and college graduates. But what if the GOP’s last heave leaves it shattered, fractured, illegitimate, and ashamed?37
What if the GOP is off the battlefield, figuring out how to be relevant again?
What if the politics is not linear and the past no longer predicts the future?
What happens the day after?
* * *
The year 2020 is the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the 1910 off-year elections, when a blue wave gave Democrats control of the House, captured seven Senate seats, and won three governorships. Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton University, ran for governor of New Jersey, swept to a surprising victory, quickly repudiated the party bosses, and introduced a corrupt-practices law to bar business and government from conspiring against the public.38 The GOP was badly fractured then, as now, between the establishment wing led by President Taft and the progressives led by Teddy Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson won an extraordinary victory in a three-way presidential contest and would go on to work with a Congress where progressives from both parties were the majority. In his inaugural address in front of the U.S. Capitol, the new president declared America’s duty “to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil” before it.39
After being sworn in by the chief justice, President Wilson made clear he would attack the tariff system that “makes the Government a facile instrument in the hand of private interests,” including a banking and currency system suited to fifty years earlier; and an industrial system that “restricts the liberties and limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits without renewing or conserving the natural resources of the country.”40
In this intense period, the country enacted constitutional amendments that legalized the progressive income tax and the direct election of U.S. senators, and that gave women the right to vote—all resisted by conservative forces and won after reforms advanced in the cities and states and protest movements that pressed against the doors of power. The Wilson administration won passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act to break up the big corporate monopolies and pushed the Interstate Commerce Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Food and Drug Administration to regulate business excess and protect consumers.
They were blocked by a conservative Supreme Court from passing a forty-hour week and rights of unions—reforms that would have to wait for the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the 1930s. Progressives appreciate even more now how much racial equality was not on the agenda with Wilson or Roosevelt until new social movements to bend the arc of justice under Lyndon Baynes Johnson in the mid-1960s.
But the twentieth century’s path to democratic reform began with a progressive decade after an unapologetic pro-business Republican Party refused to address the collateral pain among the poor and working class, the growing inequality, and the corruption of business and politics. They refused to open up to workers and women. It took two landslide elections in 1912 and 1936 to shatter the Republican Party, vanquish the conservatives, and create a mandate for reform.
Trump’s Tea Party–Evangelical GOP can’t just be defeated. It must face a repudiating, shattering defeat that frees other brands of the GOP and conservatism to breathe again, find their own Republican candidates, switch loyalties to the Democrats, or perhaps vote for an independent presidential candidate.
Because Trump’s GOP fought the New America with a special ugliness, its death will give Democrats the energy and momentum to lead a new era of reform for the New America.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote this book because I had to.
Donald Trump becoming president of the United States was unimaginable because, to the very end, I believed that skilled and committed people would stop him. I knew a lot of working Americans might just take a chance on Trump given my own frustration with the direction of the country, but only clueless leaders and campaign malpractice would have allowed him to end up in the White House.
I felt compelled to write as quickly as possible what I believe really happened in the 2016 November election, and thankfully The Guardian, The New York Times, Democracy Journal, Democratic Strategist, and most of all, The American Prospect gave me the space to shout. (The Washington Post was first to publish my argument a year before the election.) I never wrote so fast and intently. The moment was too urgent to wait on a book. Thank you to Robert Kuttner, Harold Myerson, and Paul Starr; John Judis; and Andrew Levison.
Democrats “don’t have a white working-class problem,” I wrote. “They have a working-class problem.” After the financial crisis that wiped out so many jobs and so much wealth and the bailout of the big banks, white working-class voters scorned the Democrats, while their own base of voters disengaged. The base declined to defend Barack Obama at the polls, even though he called on them to “build on the progress.” I was pretty angry Democrats were not introspective after their deep losses down ballot in the states election after election, leading The New York Times to headline my piece with Anna Greenberg, “Was Barack Obama Bad for Democrats?”
I jumped at the chance to write a review of Shattered, the first inside account of the Clinton campaign. I wrote with exasperation of the campaign’s malpractice, which I got to observe fairly closely. Their failure to contest or even poll in Michigan and Wisconsin and taking for granted the discontented Bernie Sanders vote cost them the election. Hillary Clinton was hamstrung by her dogged determination to hew as closely as possible to President Obama, particularly on the economy, even when she encountered everyday people in so much pain.
I didn’t believe the lazy assumption that the country wanted an Obama Third Term. The country was going to vote for a disruptor.
I knew with my history of writing about disaffected white working-class voters and “Reagan Democrats” in Macomb County, I needed to listen and write about them, too. To start, my new polls needed to better represent them. Those with some college or a high school education or less would comprise 61.5 percent of all my polls in the 2018 election cycle. And no more second-guessing who is a “likely” voter. My polls are now of registered voters, open to the kind of surge of white working-class voters that happened in 2016 and of women voters that happened in 2018.
After the 2016 election and 2018, I
went to Macomb County to talk with working-class independents and Democrats who had voted for Trump. I knew they were under pressure. And I knew the elites had trouble respecting their choice, though I believed they had legitimate reasons to support him. My liberal friends would be unforgiving soon, pressing the Trump voter to regret their choice. I knew academics would soon bring back the studies on the “authoritarian personality” or start looking for nodes on the brain that make them “conservative.”
My wife, Rosa DeLauro, is a member of Congress, and she chose to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration; and because she is in the Democratic leadership, Rosa attended the private lunch with the president in Statuary Hall. She avoided him and never had to face shaking his hand.
So, we were in Washington for the inauguration, with its very modest crowds compared to those for President Barack Obama. The streets in Washington were pretty quiet, but not the next day, for the Women’s March. The streets, shops, and cafes were overrun with people. Such energy and excitement. Our house on Capitol Hill was full of family from out of town, and our children and grandchildren and friends gathered there before joining the half million who formed a crush in all the streets. Rosa brought me and the grandkids up on the speakers’ platform where we joined the women members of Congress and hugged Cecile Richards, head of Planned Parenthood, and Sister Simone Campbell, head of NETWORK and Rosa’s ally in her battles for the Affordable Care Act and against the Ryan budgets.
When I woke up the next day and every day, I asked myself, What have I done today to resist and make sure Donald Trump is repudiated? I couldn’t sleep most nights and it turns out, many millions were reacting in the same way. They got involved, gave money, attended marches, descended on town halls, rushed to airports to protect Muslim refugees.
I decided to write a book because of the resistance, most of whom were painfully uncertain how this would all turn out. I wrote it because of the opposite. I believed Donald Trump’s victory was the last, desperate battle of a Tea Party–dominated Republican Party to stop an unstoppable New America from governing, and they would fail. Indeed, Trump getting the nomination confirmed the story. Trump winning the election accelerated the defeat of his party, whose battle against modernity would leave it shattered. Trump governing would make the great majority of the country newly conscious of their own values, beliefs, and priorities.
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