Things are bad. Donald Trump, a diapered, screaming orangutan-man, is President of the United States. Mitch McConnell, the turtle-like Senate majority leader, has allowed our game-show-host-in-chief to surround himself with a cabinet of war criminals, vicious ideologues and monocled lizard people. Paul Ryan, after being abused by Trump over a long campaign, is now giddily working for him, preparing to repeal Obamacare and in doing so kill thousands of poor people. And — perhaps scariest of all — the Republican Party is one state legislature away from being able to amend the Constitution.
So what have the Democrats done in response to this? So far, their resistance has mostly consisted of voting for all of Trump’s cabinet choices. Rather than strongly oppose the President and the entire GOP the way that Republicans opposed Obama for eight years, leading liberals have capitulated. Blinded by a historic defeat, completely impotent to resist an administration that makes Ronald Reagan’s look sane and competent, Democrats now do nothing but babble about fake news, Trump’s impropriety and the looming spectre of Vladimir Putin. They insist that nothing needs to change within their own party. Despite seeing their base mobilize angrily in massive protests against the President, the Dem establishment still seems to want to work with Trump rather than undermine him. And they certainly aren’t willing to critique the system that created him.
This is because Democrats hate doing politics. You could see this during the election. What exactly did Hillary Clinton want to do as President? No one remembers. Her entire campaign was about personality rather than policy. Rather than running on plans that would benefit the average voter materially, Hillary attempted to win by appealing to the American people’s sense of propriety, decency and civility. How well did that work out?
This is exactly what’s going on now. Instead of tying Trump to the GOP, and the twin evils of bigotry and capitalism, Democrats are once more attacking him on his personality. They love to say: Trump’s a meanie, he won’t release his taxes, his businesses are unethical, he tongue kisses the Russian President. They will never say: Trump represents a system that oppresses working people, minorities, women, etc. and we want to change that.
This is because of something fundamental about the Democratic Party: it’s base and it’s source of power are different. The constituents of the Democratic Party, ostensibly, are working people and minorities. But who funds the organization? Big business. Because of this, it’s always going to be an ersatz institution. Instead of being a party of, by and for working people of all races, it’s effectively just a milder party of the rich. The Republican Party, on the other hand, is openly a vehicle of business and bigotry, and can pursue it’s agenda ruthlessly. This is why the GOP could spend eight years under Obama voting against anything he proposed, and why the Democrats couldn’t pass card check when they had a Senate supermajority.
Aside from a small progressive wing, Democrats are for the most part centrists who’ll never mount a vigorous opposition to Trump on political grounds. This is because they are fundamentally not that different than Republicans. Trump is a capitalist and so is Nancy Pelosi. Don’t forget that this was the party whose dream general election strategy was to abandon the working class of every color and reach out to wealthy (white) “country club Republicans.” They consciously tried to run as diet conservatives, and in doing so, handed the reins of the most powerful country in history to a quasi-fascist game show host with no political experience.
At this point, you might say I’m criticizing the Democrats too harshly, and ignoring that they’re good on “identity politics” issues. This is true, and they deserve credit on that, although it’s not exactly hard to be to the left of the baying bigots in the GOP. However, a party as tied to capital as the Democrats can never really enact radical social justice policies, because correcting historical inequalities in a serious way requires the redistribution of wealth. I support ending the War on Drugs and abolishing prisons; Democrats take millions from companies that profit off locking people up. I support slavery reparations; Democrats will never be able to raise taxes enough to pay for them when they’re tied to big business. I support single-payer healthcare and free gender reassignment surgery for trans people; this is a political impossibility for a party bankrolled by insurance companies. In order to move further to the left on cultural issues, Democrats must also fight for the working class. These people couldn’t even muster a united opposition to Jeff Sessions, and that didn’t cost taxpayers a cent.
A political party of the people would be funded by, and draw it’s power from labor unions, grassroots organizations, mobilized minority voters and small donations. Unless the Democrats adopt this model, they will never be able to oppose Trumpism and conservatism strongly enough. (It shouldn’t be forgotten that President Barack Obama might agree with this — he banned federal lobbyist contributions to the DNC for most of his Presidency, and funded a large part of his massively successful 2008 campaign off small donations.) Because both parties are deeply tied to big business, the only way liberals can attack the GOP is to call out that party’s impropriety, their unfairness, their hypocrisy. They can’t and won’t mount a political opposition to Trump, Ryan and the rest of the Republicans by proposing a moral counter-narrative that sharply differs from theirs.
Here’s an article about Chuck Schumer’s statement on Trump’s border wall. You’ll notice, as writer Adam H. Johnson pointed out on Twitter, that Schumer’s main opposition to the project isn’t that it’s wrong on principle, it’s that it’s expensive. Trump’s border wall is tantamount to ethnic cleansing; it’s one of the ugliest campaign proposals made by a President in recent history. Deporting immigrants and closing down America’s borders isn’t wrong because it will cost the taxpayer money, it’s fundamentally immoral. Imagine a politician in 1930s Germany opposed to Hitler’s military buildup not because it’s wrong to invade other countries, but because it would be too pricey. These liberal half-measures aren’t going to do anything to stop Trump.
The way forward — for Democrats and the left — is to resist Trump on on policy, not tone. It’s not to call Trump mean and inappropriate and stop there. The left must create a positive vision to resist the right, one based on social democracy, equality for the marginalized, and peace. That’s going to require radical change within the Dems, the creation of a new left-wing party, or massive grassroots mobilization outside the electoral system. Maybe all three. But if this doesn’t happen — and wan liberalism remains the only left-of-center voice in American politics — those hard right hypocrites aren’t going anywhere.
