History is the Narrative That Hurts: Will 2020 Democrats Learn From It?
You didn’t need to be Nostradamus to see this coming.
By Jim Miller
Once the dust settled from the national election and the leadership of the Democratic Party came to terms with the fact that although Joe Biden won, the expected down-ballot blowout failed to materialize in Congress, they needed someone to blame.
Cue the “moderates,” from the ever-pompous and frequently wrong James Carville on MSNBC to a host of other angry centrists in opinion columns and elsewhere, attacking “the left,” the Squad, and the majority of the Democratic base for their crazy out of the mainstream views that allegedly scared away the otherwise reasonable suburbanites, rural heartland voters, and even (gasp) some people of color who would have (in this version of reality) voted in swarms for the Democrats if they just couldn’t be painted as a bunch of socialist police haters.
Translation: if you simply allowed neoliberal Democrats to be neoliberal Democrats and hid the base in a closet, the nation would swoon at their feet and the mythical bygone era of bipartisanship would re-emerge as frothing-at-the-mouth Trump voters would take the outreached hands of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and sing “Kumbaya” while the Trump era withered away in the face of corporate-friendly comity.
The problem with this analysis is that other than being about as deep as water on a flat rock, it’s entirely ahistorical. So rather than engage this profoundly useless argument, it might be better to take the long view. To do that, however, the leadership of the Democratic Party would have to look in the mirror, which clearly isn’t going to happen anytime soon as many of them are too busy hypocritically breaking public health recommendations and attacking progressives to spend much time doing self-reflection. Thus, a historical reckoning isn’t on their agenda.
But history, for the contemporary Democratic Party, is the narrative that hurts.
For that, there is no better place to go than Thomas Frank, whose seminal work on backlash populism, What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, outlined the seeds of our current malady on the right just as his more recent Listen Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? nailed the fatal flaws of the contemporary Democratic Party. In the immediate wake of the election, Frank avoided the mainstream media’s tit for tat focus on the centrist complaints and went straight to the heart of the matter with an insightful piece in the The Guardian:
In the spirit of this modern iconoclasm, let me offer my own suggestion for the reckoning that must come next, hopefully even before Biden chooses his cabinet and packs his bags for Pennsylvania Avenue: Democrats must confront their own past and acknowledge how their own decisions over the years helped make Trumpism possible . . .
Biden’s instinct, naturally, will be to govern as he always legislated: as a man of the center who works with Republicans to craft small-bore, business-friendly measures. After all, Biden’s name is virtually synonymous with Washington consensus. His years in the US Senate overlap almost precisely with his party’s famous turn to the “third way” right, and Biden personally played a leading role in many of the signature initiatives of the era: Nafta-style trade agreements, lucrative favors for banks, tough-on-crime measures, proposed cuts to social security, even.
What Biden must understand now, however, is that it was precisely this turn, this rightward shift in the 1980s and 90s, that set the stage for Trumpism.
Let us recall for a moment what that turn looked like. No longer were Democrats going to be the party of working people, they told us in those days. They were “new Democrats” now, preaching competence rather than ideology and reaching out to new constituencies: the enlightened suburbanites; the “wired workers”; the “learning class”; the winners in our new post-industrial society.
This is, of course, what Frank has been telling us for years now: that the Democrats’ turn toward neoliberalism has not only been a disaster for working people in America, but for the party itself. The Democratic leadership can complain all they want about progressives, but it is their own ideological drift that paved the way for the national nightmare that we have been enduring. As Frank argues in The Guardian column:
[T]here are consequences when the left party in a two-party system chooses to understand itself in this way. As we have learned from the Democrats’ experiment, such a party will show little understanding for the grievances of blue-collar workers, people who – by definition – have not climbed the ladder of meritocracy. And just think of all the shocking data that has flickered across our attention-screens in the last dozen years – how our economy’s winnings are hogged by the 1%; how ordinary people can no longer afford new cars; how young people are taking on huge debt burdens right out of college; and a thousand other points of awful. All of these have been direct or indirect products of the political experiment I am describing . . .
But the biggest consequence of the Democrats’ shabby experiment is one we have yet to reckon with: it has coincided with a period of ever more conservative governance. It turns out that when the party of the left abandons its populist traditions for high-minded white-collar rectitude, the road is cleared for a particularly poisonous species of rightwing demagoguery. It is no coincidence that, as Democrats pursued their professional-class “third way,” Republicans became ever bolder in their preposterous claim to be a “workers’ party” representing the aspirations of ordinary people.
When Democrats abandoned their majoritarian tradition, in other words, Republicans hastened to stake their own claim to it. For the last 30 years it has been the right, not the left, that rails against “elites” and that champions our down-home values in the face of the celebrities who mock them. During the 2008 financial crisis conservatives actually launched a hard-times protest movement from the floor of the Chicago board of trade; in the 2016 campaign they described their foul-mouthed champion, Trump, as a “blue-collar billionaire”, kin to and protector of the lowly – the lowly and the white, that is.
Frank is right to warn us that even as Trump’s “toxic brand of workerism” has gone down temporarily, Democrats would be delusional to think that it will go away or be seduced by a vigorous dose of centrist aisle-crossing. Indeed, even if Biden appoints half the Republican Party to cabinet posts, the knives will still be not just out but at his throat as anyone with a pair of eyes can see at present.
So, what should Biden do instead of trying to recreate the magic of the Clinton nineties or the glory years of split government during the Obama presidency? Frank thinks they should seize the moment and, horror of horrors, take back populism from the right rather than sneer at it:
Should Joe Biden do that, he might be able to see that he has before him a moment of great Democratic possibility. This country has grown sick of plutocracy. We don’t enjoy sluicing everything we earn into the bank accounts of a few dozen billionaires. We want a healthcare system that works and an economy in which ordinary people prosper, even people who didn’t go to a fancy college. Should Biden open his eyes and overcome his past, he may discover that he has it in his power to rebuild our sense of social solidarity, to make the middle-class promise real again, and to beat back the right. All at the same time.
Interestingly, William J. Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove have a similar prescription for what ails us, also in The Guardian, where instead of attacking progressives, they argue that what we saw in this election was the beginning of the demise of the Republicans’ racist Southern strategy and the birth of new coalitions that might just have the power to win the future:
[O]n the ground, in rural communities from Appalachia to Alabama’s Black Belt, we have seen new fusion coalitions of Black, white and brown voters come together to refuse the politics of division and embrace a moral vision of shared government that works for everyone. We know that the basic need for living wages, healthcare, just immigration policies and a livable planet are not right or left issues, but moral issues that can unite people of different backgrounds and ideologies.
Amen.
Thus far, there have been both good and bad signs out of the Biden camp. Bringing on a staff with deep ties to the corporate world raises the specter of more of the same while his leaning heavily on labor during his transition suggests some better possibilities. His linkage of climate policy to green, union jobs building infrastructure is also encouraging, but his hiring of a key staffer with deep fossil fuel industry ties is not.
While there aren’t a whole lot progressives who have much hope for a left leaning Biden administration, he would surely be wise to at least learn a little from the unfortunate recent history of his party and go big on relief and bread and butter policies that deliver tangible gains for working people, particularly those who live in the swing states that continue to vex Democrats. And many things can be done on that front simply through executive orders if the Georgia senate runoffs don’t produce a new Democratic majority.
Working people who are not permanently lost to the populist right won’t care a bit about how bipartisan Biden seems or whether or not he brings back civility. They will notice if he stops endorsing bad trade deals that outsource yet more blue-collar jobs and swaps out familiar neoliberal Democratic rhetoric about educational meritocracy for a working-class populism that actually brings bread and butter gains to their kitchen tables.
Let’s hope Biden’s union talk of late is not just a bunch of hot air. If what the Democrats deliver is more of the same tepid neoliberalism, they risk permanently losing a huge swath of the American working class to the hateful backlash populism which Trump perfected and that only succeeds because the party that stands in for the left has nothing to offer them.