The Lever - Fight Or Die

There’s policy, and then there’s politics. If Democrats ever want to win again, they need to embrace the fighting spirit.

Rock the boat.

AP Photo / Matt Rourke / Gene J. Puskar

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In 2008, I published a book with a straightforward premise: the upcoming era of American politics would be defined by a competition between the left and right to harness the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests. 

It was the twilight of the Bush era, and the country was beginning its nose-dive into recession and turmoil, but hope and change seemed just over the horizon. I predicted that with elements of both political parties in a warrior stance, simmering conflicts over deindustrialization, financialization, and neoliberalism would soon explode and realign politics, birthing some American version of either social democracy or authoritarianism. 

The 16 years since The Uprising was released have delivered much of the tumult I imagined. It has been a period of unrest, chaos, and flip-flopping control of government — and yet, amid all that volatility, the decline persisted. Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower life spans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything — life in America just kept getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible. 

In the political arena, there was a sensation of change, but in real life, there was more of the same.

Donald Trump’s 2016 win was a reaction to the dissonance — a pressure cooker that finally exploded — but still possibly just a weird anomaly. For shellshocked liberals, the end of his first term felt like the conclusion of a roller-coaster ride, a reversion to a mean, and proof that the competition to harness the discontent had finally been won on the center left. 

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But as Trump surges and Democrats teeter in this blazing summer of discontent, it’s the 2020 election that seems more like the anomaly — a last rest stop on a wild Natural Born Killers-style jaunt. 2024 feels like the final destination in a journey bookended by two iconic roadside billboards: the “HOPE” poster featuring Barack Obama’s cool gaze, and now the photograph of a bloodied Donald Trump defiantly calling his armies to battle. 

With polls suggesting a Republican landslide is possible in November, it seems that Democrats’ staid, technocratic ‘we-got-this’ confidence of 2008 and its grandfatherly successor now in the White House may be no match for the bravado of the orange hair, the red hat, and the fist pump. 

After two of the biggest weeks of political news in a generation, the most intriguing mystery isn’t whether Trump’s policy program is more economically populist than Democrats’ agenda (it isn’t), whether his movement is serious (it is), or whether MAGA threatens what’s left of democracy (it does). The big questions are about intangible vibes, brands, and emotions — the forces that now determine elections. 

And those questions are haunting: How did the two political parties flip their zeitgeists? How did conservatism realign to become the revolution, while liberals transformed hope and change into more of the same? 

A Realigned Republican Brand

The GOP rebrand was long overdue. The party’s Achilles heel was always its tenuous coalition described in Thomas Frank’s seminal tome What’s The Matter With Kansas? — the paradoxical alliance between Bible thumpers’ cultural conservatism, middle class strivers’ anxiety, and country clubbers’ greed. When the latter faction’s political weakness was exposed by the final catastrophic years of the Bush era and then Mitt Romney’s campaign, Trump found his opportunity to blow it all up in a social-media age that rewards the carnival barker. 

He barked his way through the Bush dynasty in the 2016 primary and then barked his way through the Clinton dynasty in the general. 

He pulled it off by rejecting the longstanding conventional wisdom of the 1990s and 2000s that assumed the most important batch of swing voters was in the affluent suburbs, where voters often prefer normalcy and revile disorder. MAGA belligerence instead courted the larger set of swing voters — the disaffected working class. It was a wildly successful gambit.

Trump comprehends what Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton before him knew: that politics is the permanent campaign. Everything — no matter how urgent or bipartisan or mundane — is an opportunity for conflict, controversy, chaos, and contrast with the opposition. Over so many years of scandal and celebrity, Trump’s fighting posture became so intrinsic that he instinctively turned an assassination attempt into a photo op, screaming “fight” as if he was once again headlining a pro-wrestling match.

Fight who? Fight what? That doesn’t matter in elections decided by vibes and a society riven by the culture war. What matters is only the call to arms — which both Trump and his party’s younger stars innately understand. 

Behold Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) excoriating Boeing’s CEO or Joe Biden’s judicial nominee from Wall Street, or watch Trump’s running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) depicting himself as a pro-union anti-corporate crusader echoing Bernie Sanders, and you can envision a realigned American Right that solved its What’s The Matter With Kansas? problem through permanent grievance. 

The result is the newfangled GOP’s reactionary cultural agenda mixed with the argot of economic populism. 

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“The C-suite long ago sold out the United States, shuttering factories in the homeland and gutting American jobs, while using the profits to push diversity, equity, and inclusion and the religion of the trans flag,” as Hawley put it this week in a sentence capturing both the righteous economic outrage and cartoonish cultural demagoguery on offer from the new GOP. 

Is that cultural extremism the sugar that makes the populist economic medicine go down the throat of the American Right? Or is it the other way around — is the active ingredient the social agenda, and the economic rhetoric just the inert sweetener to trick disenchanted left-leaners into swallowing the real agenda, the cultural poison? 

There are arguments on both sides of that Rorschach test, but for now, it’s still probably the latter. Either way, the ambiguity is shrewd politics in pursuit of the working-class electorate. And it’s effective: Polls show Trump and his party are winning back larger shares of those constituencies, including in communities of color that Democrats long considered among their strongest base of support.

Pining to go back to brunch, many liberals scoff at all this as neither smart politics or new. To them, it’s just deplorables and rubes being hoodwinked by the same cynical right-wing politics.

But if you aren’t yet lobotomized by TikTok or cable TV news and you live here in the real economy of crushing costs, red tape, and that pervasive feeling that you’re one medical diagnosis or arbitrary firing away from destitution, then you can at least understand why a thinking person might be able to see some of their own rage in the GOP’s demagogues. 

Even if you don’t agree with these Republicans; even if you know they are charlatans controlled by their own set of elites and their own form of (male and white) identity politics; even if you know a real estate tycoon and his venture-capitalist running mate are a ticket of oligarchs not populists — even if you stipulate all of this, an honest observer can still understand how a non-rube struggling to survive the American economy can be drawn to conservatives’ newly invigorated pugilism. 

Crazed and Howard Beale-ish as they may be, Republicans’ primal screams at least seem like proof of life in a dying world.

Democrats’ Death March

Democrats, by contrast, don’t seem alive at all, and not just because they have been led by an octogenarian who drifts in and out of consciousness. Their problem is bigger than Biden. 

This is a party whose policy agenda of higher taxes on the rich and tougher regulation is a clear contrast with Trump’s agenda — much of which remains transactional Chamber of Commerce fare, despite the aesthetic rebrand. But the brand is the whole problem: Where Republicans wrap a corporate agenda in the costume of populist revolution, Democrats hide their populist agenda in the veneer of compromise, comity, and conflict aversion. 

This is a Democratic Party whose president has been most comfortable speaking in bromides about unity, rather than in clarion calls for justice.

This is a party whose leaders have been most comfortable asking Supreme Court extremists to be nicer, rather than engaging in a direct confrontation with the justices who are repealing the 20th century.

This is a party whose lawmakers have been most comfortable politely requesting Republicans to work with them, rather than trying to circumvent or bulldoze the GOP’s obstructionism.

In this, many Americans see a party committed to respecting institutions they dislike, and pledging to defend norms they despise. It is still the party of the “HOPE” poster, even though it is a moment when billionaires, corporations, and the accelerated pace of technological change are pulping the last drops of hope out of the working class. 

The Democrats’ current brand contrast could not be more tone deaf to the times.

Where Trump fist pumps after getting shot and his minions instantly blame their opponents for the violence, Democrats reflexively stand down and apologize.

Where Trump does battle with recalcitrant Republican legislators, Biden has coddled his party’s obstructionists as they undermine his presidency.

Where Trump executes the final step of a master plan to permanently tilt the entire judiciary, Biden has spent most of his term opposing efforts to undo that scheme. 

Where Trump’s movement outlines the radical reshaping of society in a detailed Wall Street-funded treatise, Democrats who still control parts of the government have cited the filibuster, the next election, Joe Manchin, the Senate’s unelected parliamentarian, Kyrsten Sinema, and any number of other laughable reasons why they can’t fight for anything more than civility. 

And most recently, where Trump energetically lied his way to a dominating debate performance, Biden ambled onstage looking like he doesn’t even know where he is, totally unable to promote his agenda, much less sell it as a challenge to power.

To be sure, it’s not that Democrats have done nothing. Their political problem is that they have been uninterested in, averse to, and — with the elderly Biden — incapable of casting their party as any kind of vanguard. 

They have shied away from waging protracted, messy battles in pursuit of ideals. After all, that might be uncivil and “politically unrealistic,” in the vernacular of Washington. Time and again, they’ve made clear their foremost objective is being seen as pragmatic and polite, as competent managers of societal decline — regardless of what principles are being sacrificed in the transaction.

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This brand of Democratic politics emerged when I was finishing The Uprising in the late aughts, when New Deal-ish aspirations were still a flicker in the liberal mind. Back then, Obama was swept into office with huge congressional majorities, and promised to channel the fighting spirit in epic battles for expansive health care reform and serious financial regulation. 

But in retrospect, his health care and financial initiatives don’t look like fights at all — they look like surrenders designed to ward off pressure for more expansive changes, all in defense of manners. Though the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank bill included some important reforms, those signature initiatives were lucrative giveaways to health insurers and Wall Street behemoths as millions of Americans continued to be foreclosed on, medically bankrupted, and permanently disillusioned about the prospect for change.

Obama all but admitted his primary goal was good decorum and conflict aversion. He wrote that prosecuting bank executives in the wake of the financial crisis “would have required a violence to the social order, a wrenching of political and economic norms, that almost certainly would have made things worse.” That social order soon after rewarded him with a palatial Chicago library and a Martha’s Vineyard mansion to shelter within amid Democrats’ historic loss of power and Trump’s subsequent rampage.

When Covid finally delivered Democrats their narrow 2020 victory, Biden seemed to learn a lesson from his predecessor’s failures, using the mandate of his first few months as president to make a historic investment in the country’s working class. 

But when it got hard — when he and his party would’ve had to muster a fighting spirit and wage a public battle to continue that investment — scrappy Scranton Joe reverted to Glass Joe. He and Democratic congressional leaders folded in order to preserve comity and avoid too much friction, just like they did when they whittled down their Build Back Better bill into the far less ambitious Inflation Reduction Act, and just like they have in response to the Supreme Court’s assault. 

More recently, while the White House staff has been focused on covering up the president’s cognitive decline, a few feisty appointees at a handful of alphabet agencies have waged an increasingly successful guerrilla war against monopolies, predatory lenders, and crypto scammers. But those battles are rarely a central part of the Democratic story. 

The party’s media machine is almost exclusively focused on agitprop about “saving democracy,” protecting “the soul of America,” and other paeans that are torn from Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing scripts and that mean nothing to voters who are one family emergency away from bankruptcy.

Fighting The Left, Rather Than Fighting MAGA

Recognizing Republicans recasting themselves as revolutionary warriors is not to venerate Trump’s elitist record of corporate fealty — nor is it to suggest he’s changed his ways and become anything other than a plutocrat on policy.

On the contrary, Trump and his movement are doubling down on their old corporate agenda in an increasingly successful quest for financial support from the same oligarchy that his anti-establishment brand purports to stand against. Trump’s running mate is also following that bait-and-switch formula — after helping lobbyists water down his own rail safety bill, Vance followed up his vice presidential nomination by letting other lobbyists know he’ll now be abandoning his own credit card fee legislation that was supposed to prove his Hillbilly Elegy credo.

The same goes for the Democrats: Recognizing their rebrand as defenders of stasis is not to ignore their accomplishments. The macroeconomy is decent, and many of Biden’s economic policies are better than any administration’s of the last 50 years (which says more about how low the bar is). 

But there’s policy, and then there’s politics — and the political landscape is tough for Democrats right now because the adage about a difference between campaigning and governing is wrong. At the presidential level, governing is campaigning, but Biden and his White House seem incapable of doing that part — the part where the president looks like he’s fighting for something… anything. 

The result is a vast chasm on a Gallup poll metric that can decide elections: Americans see Biden as a far weaker leader than Trump.

Of course, Democratic leaders don’t lack the capacity to fight. The brutal 2008 primary and general election that kicked off this era proved that Democrats absolutely can scratch, claw, cheap-shot, and groin-kick as adroitly as Trump when they want to. But lately, they’ve mostly chosen to aim their political assaults downward at their most promising upstarts and now at their most stalwart foot soldiers. 

There was the show of force against Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaigns, the latter of which effectively ended when the Vermont Senator publicly apologized for his surrogate daring to tell the truth about Biden. 

There is the shock and awe of incumbent protection in primaries, where challengers are routinely spent into the ground.

There is the blacklisting and banishment of those who step out of line.

And now there is the omertà protecting the withering president as he teeters on the precipice of a landslide loss. 

Despite having no shortage of strong, experienced, and geographically ideal replacement candidates, Democrats spent the last month ignoring their own voters’ growing concerns about Biden and manufacturing a cone of silence in the president’s defense. Its enforcers have been a bizarre coalition of former presidents, party apparatchiks, and power brokers. Even the erstwhile upstarts who once stood as the glimmers of dissent and possibility joined in — shamed and disciplined for their past apostasy, they assembled to be the Dear Leader’s loyalty police.

It’s a reminder that if Democrats could muster even half the fighting spirit in combat with MAGA that they routinely muster for fighting their own left flank, they might be in a stronger electoral position — and the country might be on a better track.

A Darker, Harsher, More Menacing Normal

When I wrote The Uprising sixteen years ago, that better track is what I dreamed of. 

I had worked for Sanders and the old New Dealer Dave Obey in the House in those gloomy days of terrorist attacks and tax cuts at the beginning of the Bush presidency. I had then helped elect Brian Schweitzer governor of Montana as he pioneered a new form of prairie populism, and I had done a stint working for Ned Lamont, whose Connecticut Senate primary seemed to open up the possibility of a feistier, angstier, more democratic politics on the center-left. 

As dark as those last few years of the Bush tenure were, a sense of hope and possibility percolated toward the end of the 2000s because the Democrats seemed positioned as the fighters and the Republicans the stasis. 

At the time, I sounded a lonely alarm about Obama’s fealty to establishment boundaries. I did so not out of spite, but out of that same sense of, yes, hope. After the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the recession, I hoped the uprisings on both sides of the ideological spectrum might encourage some kind of Rooseveltian mix of substance, aspiration, and constructive “welcome their hatred” populism.

I didn’t yet grasp that Democrats were discarding their fighting spirit — and Republicans were embracing theirs.

Unless that asymmetry changes in the next few weeks, this moment could end up as pivotal and as ominous as it seems — a transition to a darker, harsher, more menacing normal that almost certainly will not make America great again.

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