Democrats Must Step Up to the Historic Challenge

 

Democrats Must Step Up to the Historic Challenge

We already know what’s at stake in the November presidential elections. On one side is a Republican candidate, Trump, who in eight years has utterly annihilated the establishment of the party and replaced it with a white nationalist and anti-democratic right populism. On the other side we see a Democratic Party establishment tenuously wed to its left populist base by its defense of multiracialism and by keeping the conversation about America’s future open via liberal democratic institutions.

The events of the last few weeks have ratcheted up the temperature on the ground as the election nears. Biden’s disastrous performance in the presidential debate fostered open cries for him to step aside so the Democrats could field a candidate that not only Democrats, but the young and independent voters could get behind. The assassination attempt on Trump last weekend has some pundits predicting a sympathy bump for him that may make his victory more imminent.

White nationalism and anti-democratic attitudes exist among many conservative voters even where they might not admit such feelings openly. There is a nagging concern about the browning of America, border security and racially-grounded law and order among many White Americans. In Trump’s ramblings in the debate he invariably circled back to the border and immigration as he spewed a litany of lies about the facts regarding those issues. That Biden was unable to use that platform to effectively counter Trump’s wild assertions in real time was alarming to progressives.

Democrats have spent nearly three weeks agonizing over the viability of Biden’s candidacy. The Trump assassination attempt gives his campaign all the impetus it needs heading toward November. Dems can’t wait any longer to move off of Biden and field a younger, more vital candidate for the fall. Progressives must yell, kick, scream and just go ballistic in demanding a new candidate. Harris, Newsome, Whitmer, Pritzker (others?) ... any of them would be great alternatives who could energetically articulate the vision of the progressive nation and beat back the challenge of American traditionalism, steeped as it is in racism and indifference to economic polarization.

In ways similar to me political strategist Michael Podhorzer argues that we’ve always been two nations, which is why we had the Civil War.[1] He points out how New Deal policies uplifting the material standing of the working class ameliorated those national and cultural identity differences across the middle decades of the Twentieth Century. But as the logic of egalitarian progressivism extended to race, gender and other social identities, a traditionalist backlash occurred that was initiated by Nixon and emerged full-blown under Reagan.

We plodded along fighting “culture wars” dominated by traditionalists for a generation, until the Great Recession hit in 2008. Right populism asserted itself with ascendance of the Tea Party in 2010. But as Johns Judis avers, The Occupy Movement in 2011 saw the first mass embrace of left class-based populism since the New Deal.[2] The Bernie Sanders candidacies of 2016 and 2020 cemented that thrust. It is these concurring eruptions of populism since the Recession that have brought us to the polar precipice that we face today.

Once the populist left has a candidate it feels good about, we will hit the streets, door to door, from the ghettos and barrios to Indian Country, and yes, even among the yuppie gentry who are re-inhabiting our cities and mixing with BIPOC America. We will engage the working class, (which btw, incudes most BIPOC folks) in hardheaded conversations over what has Trump ever done for you, and what is he really promising you now, other than immigrant restrictions that will open up jobs that y’all don’t want to do!

As Ryan Grim’s 2019 book exclaimed, “We Got People!”[3] The ground game that we produce as the campaign unfolds to get folks registered, to make sure they have the I.D. they need, to get them to the polls, or get access to the mail-in materials required, will be unprecedented. The veterans of the Obama campaigns, the devotees of Stacy Abrams; all of those hands will be on deck. You know why? Because we’re scared of fascism! We just need a candidate to get behind. That’s all!

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[1] Ronald Brownstein, America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good - The Atlantic, 2022.

[2] Johns Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016.

[3]  Ryan Grim, We Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.Washington , D.C.: Strong Arm Press, 2019.