Image by Andy Feliciotti.

There is an old Robin Williams gag about an unarmed English bobby who shouts at a fleeing criminal: “Stop! Or I’ll say stop again!” That is the Democratic Party today. Having lost the White House, both houses of Congress, a majority of the governors’s mansions and state houses, theirs is the powerless politics of frustration, their only tools, exasperation and symbolic gestures. Until the midterms, still more than a year off, there is nothing else in their box other than wishful thinking and the hope that the other side will misstep or self-destruct.

Six months into the second Trump administration, the Democratic Party is still in disarray, and progressivism is more or less dead in the United States. Questions abound about the degree to which either can be revived. Everybody is talking how the party must regroup and retool. Although the numbers in last year’s election were close in some states, the election of Donald Trump in the popular and electoral count was not just a defeat, it was a repudiation of the neoliberal economics and policies that offshored jobs, defunded the working and middle classes, laid waste to U.S. labor markets, and kept the border permeable.

But with danger comes opportunity. The implosion of the Democratic Party is also a once-in-a-generation chance for liberals to reject a half-century of Shibboleths—of bad policies—that culminated in the present disaster, and to get back to their roots in economic progressivism and social democracy. Karl Popper writes that “all life is problem solving,” that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. But the lessons have to be the right ones. The Democrats now have a rare chance to become the party of the future by studying the past—their own past. Like an addict hitting rock bottom, they must first admit that there is a problem. They lost because they forgot who they are, or were. They lost because they turned their backs on their historical base in the working class. They lost because they tried to be like the Republican establishment on the big issues of economics, trade, and finance, and in doing so came to look less like the party of FDR and more like the liberals of the Weimar Republic: weak and decadent. Looking back on the past four or five decades, it is a wonder that it took this long for the dispossessed to push back.

Remember when progressives were pro-organized labor? Believed in a vigorous domestic manufacturing sector? Believed in protecting vulnerable domestic markets and their workers? Acted on behalf of ordinary Americans in “flyover country”? Believed in actually talking to potential adversaries and people we didn’t like (e.g. Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Mao) in order to prevent great powers wars? Remember when liberals (although not hawkish Democrats) embraced a foreign policy based on diplomacy rather than on undeclared wars? Were critical of Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex? Were antiwar? Why did they let the populist right co-opt these things, and in doing so, make them disreputable to modern liberals? It is time to embrace them again.

From 1933 until the late 1960s, the Democrat Party stood for economic progress. The New Deal shepherded the nation through the Great Depression. It regulated the economy toward the public interest and created the great American mid-20th century economic miracle and a working class that was a part of the middle class. What followed was a quarter-century of unprecedented economic prosperity from 1945 until around 1970. What else did it do? It backed organized labor and provided a social safety net for all Americans. It mobilized U.S. industrial might for victory in WWII, and after it won the war, it won the peace by rebuilding Europe (the Marshall Plan) and Japan, and creating the GI Bill. In its postwar incarnations as the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society, it desegregated the military, passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and committed the nation to putting a man on the moon. Then things began to change.

The vigorous establishment liberalism that drove this economic and social progress, died in 1968. After the murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., tough-minded mainstream progressivism was pretty much finished and over the coming decades its program of social democracy would die a death of a thousand cuts. Afraid of being called soft on communism, Lyndon Johnson had unnecessarily mortgaged his domestic agenda on the war in Vietnam. The domestic economic paradigm that had begun under Franklin Roosevelt was arguably the most notable casualty of that war. The history of the United States since then has been the history of the dismantling of social democracy, the defunding of working America, and military hegemony and interventionism.

But it was a slow demise. Richard Nixon was content to govern mostly within the New Deal paradigm (having created the EPA and the Social Security Amendments of 1972, he was arguably more liberal domestically than Bill Clinton, who purged the rolls of Welfare), but the writing was on the wall. Rather than reinvesting in social democracy, both parties turned toward a model of economic efficiency. Rather than a system based on the idea of making a profit by employing people at a living wage, the new economy was based on the idea of making as much money as possible by paying people as little as possible. It embraced the efficient flow of wealth from the many to the top few. It was a paper economy with Big Finance as an end in itself—a generator of wealth rather than an adjunct of industry providing fluidity, savings, borrowing, and investment. Above all the new economy was based on cheap domestic and foreign labor. It was a service economy, an economy of decline. The United States of my youth is not sustainable under this model, and the Democrats need to understand that. It is striking that the period of our greatest national prosperity was also the period of greatest government involvement in the economy and the period of greatest taxation of the rich.

Locked out of the White House from 1981 until 1993, the Democrats learned from Reagan’s example and ideology, and in doing so, sold their souls. Where the social democrats of 1933-1968 were intelligent, economic progressives embracing the Old Left ethos of the tough guy looking out for the the little guy, Democrats, beginning with Jimmy Carter, were increasingly neoliberal on issues of trade, finance, defense, and diplomacy, but still swung left on women’s issues, affirmative action, guns, immigration, and gender issues. It was Bill Clinton and not a GOP true believer that killed Glass-Steagall and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into law.

In other words, establishment Democrats were still “liberal” on certain red-button domestic issues, but were more or less identical to establishment Republicans on the issues of economics, foreign affairs, and national security—issues that affect the entire nation on a daily basis. Starting with the rise of Clinton in the late 1980s, we saw the emergence of the “New Democrat,” or “GOP Lite.” The dirty little secret—no secret at all inside the Beltway—is that on the big questions of real-world governing, there is virtually no difference between members of the DNC and RNC establishments. By the 2000s, most rank and file Democrats still believed that free-trading globalists like Bill Clinton, interventionists like Hillary Clinton, presidential placeholders, like Barak Obama, and mediocrities, like Biden, were “real” liberals.

Populist Red America came to realize that the Republicans—although they courted working class voters with patriotic rhetoric, flag-waving, and conservative ca.es in election years—were the party of the rich that didn’t really care about most Americans. The Democrats, who had embraced the issues of working Americans for decades, increasingly abandoned organized labor and became the party of mass immigration. Initially both parties supported immigration as a cornucopia of endless cheap, often tax-free, labor. Until 2024, there was an assumption that the new arrivals would vote Democratic.

The Democrats also embraced immigration as a moral issue, and in doing so, undercut their own allies in organized labor. Their abandonment of the unions is one of the greatest political tragedies of American political history. Many of us sympathize with the tens of thousands of Federal workers who have lost their jobs over the past six months, but where were the tears for the American workers who lost their livelihoods to economic globalization over the past 40-odd years? The U.S. has increasingly become just another low-wage zone of the economic “flat Earth” heralded by neoliberal acolytes, like Tom Friedman.

Over the past 16 years, there were revolts in both parties. The progressive insurgency in the Democratic Party, led by Senator Bernie Sanders, was quashed by Hillary Clinton in 2016. The uprising in the Republican Party, began with the Tea Party in 2009, the pump having been primed for years by vile propagandists on cable TV “news” and AM radio. With the Trump candidacy of 2015-16—one of the most startling developments in U.S. political history—this coup succeeded. Fearing the he can turn their own constituents against them, once-hostile GOP establishment types now carry the president’s water with a smile.

With a powerful, charismatic leader, and a governmental monopoly, Republicans are dramatically overreaching in their control over all things Federal (both parties are shorn of political realism, and the only things more predictable than Democratic incompetence is Republican overreach). By the 2026 midterms, the Democrats could be in a position to undermine the Republican majorities in both houses. They could even win back the White House in four years, but only if they first win back a portion of populist America by re-embracing issues that used to be perennial mainstays of their platform. Associated with a range of broadly unpopular social-sexual issues rather than economic issues, like jobs and urban food deserts, the Democrats must get back to first principles and pocketbook issues that affect most Americans (after they start winning elections again, they can get back to secondary and tertiary issues). Above all they must learn how to fight and to do so effectively.

Of course, there is no guarantee that this will work. The larger and more diverse a nation’s population becomes, the less governable it becomes and certainly the less democratic. Social democracy—a nonstarter in overpopulated monster nations—works best in small homogenous countries, like Denmark. The most successful examples of democracy in the U.S. are in local settings, like the traditional New England town hall meeting, where citizens see themselves in the faces of their neighbors and share common outlooks and interests. With a population of more than one third of a billion, the U.S. is likely too large and diverse for something like the New Deal to ever work here again. But the Democrats can re-embrace organized labor, trade bilateralism, and the interests of working Americans in the great crimson expanses of the hinterlands. Assuming that the cultural and political changes that drove this year’s election results are reversible, it is conceivable that changes to win back working Americans could be made to secure blue popular and electoral majorities.

After all of the election postmortems and after-action reports are written, consumed, and digested, Democrats must take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves who they are. They must see themselves as they are relative to who they used to be when their party kept a Great Depression at bay, won a World War, and then gave the country the best economic years of its life. If the world and the United States are still around in three years, and assuming that environmental degradation has not already reached a chaotic tipping point—all big “ifs”—the future could belong to a revitalized Democratic Party based on principles of economic progressivism. But its members must make the right changes by rediscovering their 1930s roots. I suspect they will not because they have become a party that is wedded to a neoliberal ideology and a system that weeds out dynamic leadership. When necessary measures are rendered impossible because of ideological and structural realities, then it is the system and not the necessary measures that are unrealistic. As with a disease in the body, an ideological pathogen in the body politic sometimes has to run its course before health can return. Of course this assumes that the patient survives.

The post The Democrats’ Great Opportunity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed