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What should the Democrats do? It’s a huge question right now, not only for the party, but for the US. Aside from Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who is travelling around the country to try to rally people against Donald Trump in town halls and on television, and the like-minded but less charismatic Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, few Democrats are sounding the alarm loudly. Even fewer are managing to mount any kind of political resistance to the US president.
There has been no strong challenge to his incoherent tariff policy, or effective outrage over proposed tax cuts for rich people and companies that would put the country in a less sustainable fiscal position. Unlike Democrats, the bond markets have been sounding the alarm on that front.
Even thoughtful Republicans are worried about Democrats’ inability to stand up to Trump, particularly given the risk his economic strategies could push the country into recession. At a recent high-profile Yale business school gathering of chief executives, there was huge disgruntlement about his plans and deep concern for America’s economic future.
Former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan summed it up: “If Democrats don’t wise up and sober up, Mr Trump and the Republicans will know there is no major party to slow them, temper them, stop them. This wouldn’t be good. They need an opponent. The Democratic party’s not reporting for duty is a dangerous thing.”
Yet some liberals are calling for just that. In an opinion piece, veteran Democratic strategist James Carville argued that Democrats should “play dead” and let Trump implode. Others suggest that progressives should “flood the zone” and control the attention economy in a more combative way, as Trump himself does.
But both sides miss a crucial point: Democrats can’t successfully communicate with the public until they have a coherent policy stance. Right now, they don’t, and that’s because they haven’t yet made the crucial choice between economic populism or some slightly updated version of neoliberalism. Will Franklin D Roosevelt be their North Star? Or Carville’s old boss, Bill Clinton?
While some, like Sanders, Murphy and Senator Elizabeth Warren, want to go down the populist route, the party leadership and the majority of the Democratic donor base seem to want to go back to some version of Obama-Clinton-era neoliberalism. This focused on identity rather than class, pushed free trade for its own sake and focused not on industrial strategy (and with it the interests of workers) but on making government itself more efficient.
The latter is the line being pushed by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their new book, Abundance, which argues in large part that too much regulation is what turned people against the Democrats. They have any number of good examples of how overregulation, inefficiency and siloed interests have made it impossible to do things such as build high-speed rail networks in California (where basically everyone wants them) or fix the housing affordability crisis. They argue that Democrats need to get out of their own way and make it easier for government to do things.
There’s much to be said for this advice, but it also skates over what I believe to be the key economic dysfunction in the US economy today: power asymmetry. The private sector, and particularly a handful of big companies, have too much money and power — something embodied by Elon Musk’s unprecedented proximity to Trump and the billionaire-filled seats at the president’s inauguration — while workers have far too little.
Meanwhile, although wealth and population is concentrated in a handful of mostly coastal urban areas, the structure of the electoral college means the middle of the country matters tremendously in terms of voter outcomes. That’s a key reason that too many regulations in California or New York were irrelevant to Trump’s victory. Rather, it was about the fact that people in hollowed-out post-industrial communities in three swing states voted in historic numbers for him, thinking, incorrectly, that he would protect their jobs.
As long as this electoral structure is in place, and if you believe that unfettered markets fail to provide key public goods, then you have to think genuine economic populism — not the fake Maga kind — will be the winning formula for the Democrats. But that means rich liberals must think beyond their own interests.
This tension is painfully evident right now in the failure of the party to fight against Trump’s tax cuts which, if the Democrats ever regain power, will place suffocating fiscal and budgetary constraints on their ability to get anything done. They didn’t speak out strongly enough in 2017, either, because wealthy donors like tax cuts.
Likewise, populists and neoliberals are split between those who want a primary strategy focused on the upper Midwest (where Trump’s trade wars with Canada could jack up energy prices for manufacturers), and those who favour concentrating on the south, where you can talk about race but largely avoid big economic issues.
Regular readers will know which direction I’d prefer. But the point is that the Democrats must make a clear choice. Until they do, they’ll have no message to convey.
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