Learn from the Republicans:
This is a Time for Divisiveness
In spite of winning the popular vote in six out of the last seven presidential elections — and the current election by a likely margin of close to 2 million votes — we Democrats find ourselves bereft of power at all levels of government. We face the prospect of having all the progress we’ve made for the last eight years, and all our hopes for further progress on vital issues such as climate change, erased in a few months of legislative and presidential action. There’s been a lot written in the last two weeks about how we can marshal the profound sense of violation we feel from the advent of a Trump presidency and Republican hegemony. Yet, nobody seems to be asking the most pertinent question: What would the Republicans do if they were in our shoes?
Consider recent history.
As Barack Obama was preparing to assume the Presidency at the end of 2008, the Republicans seemingly could not have been in a more chastened position. Bush’s approval ratings had been stuck in the thirtieth percentile for more than three years, battered first by highly unpopular wars in the Middle East and then by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. We had elected the first African American President by a ten million vote margin,-someone who thrilled the entire world and who was urging the country to transcend the red and blue Americas. Crisis, experience of Republican failure, and the President’s extended hand all suggested we were entering a period of relative bipartisanship.
What did the Republicans do? They opposed and obstructed everything our heroic President did. His essentially bipartisan proposals were derided as a socialist revolution. An indisputably essential stimulus package that provided massive tax cuts did not win the vote of a single Republican and was demonized for the tiny parts of its that favored clean energy. Republicans demonized a health care reform that had been dreamed up in Republican think tanks. They demonized a cap and trade climate control proposal that was nearly identical to the plan submitted by their own Presidential candidate. They demonized a modest effort to rein in the banks and curb risky financial activity, even as they attacked President Obama for saving the banks with a bailout proposed by their own leadership. At a time of maximum crisis, they were entirely AWOL, bitterly opposing the President’s every initiative and re-branding bipartisanship as extremism. With the aid of right wing media, they rallied their base to such an extent that it got out ahead of Republican leadership and the Tea Party was born.
Flash forward to 2016. We have spent the preceding eight years cleaning up the Republican mess. There is today no economic crisis to be addressed. We have stable growth, rising wages, an historic expansion of health care coverage, and the outgoing President has a 57% approval rating. Yet, somehow we are now faced with the most divisive President-elect in modern American history. A man who has just “won” an election after receiving 2 million fewer votes than the Democratic candidate. He and his party nevertheless brand this as a mandate to totally reverse everything that has been accomplished for the last eight years and to set this country and the world on a radically different path than the one we thought we were on.
How did they do it?
Republicans’ success in this election has little to do with their policies or “ideas” or even the appeal of their candidates. Their candidate, Trump, benefited from a populist current passing through the world, and racial and sexual dynamics played a part as well. Yet these factors, standing alone, would not necessarily have been decisive. What helped pull it all together was the aggression of the message, an underlying emotional edge born of a long history going back Nixon’s ”silent majority.” Clumsy election ads and 3AM tweets lacked the polish and execution that we’ve come to expect from national political campaigns. However, their messaging built on anger they have been stoking and themes they have been refining during eight years of implacable resistance to Obama and negative branding of everything he and the Democrats stood for. Trump should be viewed not as an independent “populist” phenomenon but as the apotheosis of Republicans’ emotional edge.
Trump should be viewed not as an independent “populist” phenomenon but as the apotheosis of Republicans’ emotional edge.
We Democrats instinctively constrain ourselves in myriad ways due to considerations of rationality and decency. We assume we are in an adult conversation about solutions to the America’s challenges. The Republicans, by contrast, behave like they’re in a football game. Perhaps because of the left’s perceived dominance of our culture, Republicans seek revenge in our politics.
Nobody succeeds in life or politics by trying to be something they are not. We are rational and decent and must remain so in our political activism. There is no point to political activism if the point isn’t to “solve the world’s problems.” But we need to come to terms with the fact that we’re playing in a football game.
Forget for a moment the shock of the Trump reality show moving into the White House.
The stakes are much higher. At a time when inequality and lack of social mobility have reached crisis proportions, the Republicans are poised to enact a gargantuan wealth transfer in the form of tax cuts to the wealthy, a radical defunding of the social safety net, and an end to the effort to provide affordable health care. Similar apocalypses loom across a myriad of issues from climate change to immigration to criminal justice.
There is enormous anger, disgust, and horror at the obscenity and the danger of Donald Trump becoming the most powerful person on the planet. These deeply powerful emotions will be the wind in our sails. Yet, they remain unfocused and insufficiently related to the consequences for Americans and the rest of the world of such complete Republican control of our government. We need to channel these emotions into a message that is forceful, simple, and rooted in the reality of people’s lives. That message is simply that Republicans are further enriching and empowering the wealthiest and powerful among us at the expense of the opportunity and security of everyone else. While Democrats should also get to work retooling their own brand and developing a strategy for 2018, the urgent priority is to slow the Republicans down and make them pay a price for the disastrous policies they are inevitably about to enact.
Here are some suggestions for how we might prosecute our case:
1. Keep our partisan focus on the Republican Party.
Their partisanship, their rhetoric, their cynicism, their fundamentally empty agenda are what has brought us to this extraordinary moment. A con-man has become our President-elect by deploying a thermonuclear version of longstanding Republican themes, tactics, and demagoguery. They, the Republicans, are the problem. As we have seen, even the most likely of messengers can co-opt attacks on billionaires, bankers, and “the swamp.” No ground will be gained by focusing on these targets now. Defend against and attack the party that is attacking you. The Trump presidency is likely to play itself out with much sound and fury about a myriad of hot button issues of varying degrees of actual consequence to the lives of most Americans. While the Republicans will be consolidating the position of the rich and powerful, savaging the safety net, and undermining opportunity and security for all but the wealthiest of us, Trump will be running interference for them, grabbing the headlines by “standing up to China,” humiliating Mexico, and perhaps bringing back a few token rust belt jobs. This has to be attacked as the big, juicy nothing burger that it will be. Trump will distance himself from the Republicans by his populist noises. The Republicans will seek to distance themselves from the inevitable excesses of Trump, his more colorful aides and cabinet officers, and his fringe supporters. But we cannot allow any daylight between Trump and the Republican party. The Republicans need to own and be tarnished by Trump’s excesses, just as Trump needs to own and be tarnished by the Republicans’ slavish devotion to the rich and powerful. Every stone thrown should be thrown at two birds: Trump and the party of Trump. This is critical.
2. Relentlessly attack Republicans as the party of the rich and powerful.
Able now to legislate to their heart’s content, the sham nature of their agenda should not be that difficult to expose, to show that the ascendance of the “outsider” Trump is a trojan horse for the Republican moneyed-elite agenda. At least domestically, the enduring legacy of a Trump administration will be more power and money for those who already have too much of both. As we go forward, the Republicans will happily watch us focus on the daily circus of Trump and his alt right, supposedly populist agenda while, under the radar, they will be accomplishing the tasks that are their raison d’etre: enacting tax cuts, paying for them with cuts to social spending, and checking off boxes of lobbyists’ wish lists. For Trump — who has no life experience of what it means to pay taxes — mammoth tax cuts and the repeal of Obamacare were just the price of admission to the Republican primaries. He has no ownership of these issues and they have not become part of his political identity.
It has been open season on “elites” for some time now. Trump’s white, non-college educated base thinks of elites primarily in terms of educated urbanites who look down on them. Trump has bonded with them because of his own visceral disdain for educated, competent people who have always been immune to his charms. But, if there’s an eternal verity, it is that dollars and cents matter. It shouldn’t require rhetorical somersaults to get at least a significant portion of Trump’s supporters to simply follow the money. The arithmetic of trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the top 1% and dramatic reductions in the safety net for the bottom 40% is not hard to follow.
3. Emphasize Trump’s role as “a useful idiot.”
Trump stands for little more than seeing his name on buildings and his face on television screens, to which he adds scraps of legacy Republican ideology that mean nothing to him — sales pitches honed for his target audience, and random actual opinions he’s had over the years. He is “unpredictable,” which is sometimes presented as a good thing. However, he must be attacked for what he has now become in actuality: a blank check for the Republican moneyed elite agenda. This point cannot be overemphasized. Trump is the Republicans’ “useful idiot.” He is the swaggering autocrat who was going to jail his election opponent but in reality he will no really be in charge. In general, instead of focusing on his “scariness”, our attacks should emphasize the fundamental weakness that is the necessary consequence of his ignorance, incompetence, and unstable personality.
Deeply felt inhibitions have made us recoil from rhetoric that seems to shatter norms of political discourse. We can no longer maintain the pretense that the majority of the country will inevitably come home to the party that “goes high.” We must use language and behave in ways that take the measure of the threat with which we are faced.
4. Tame the focus on the Trump circus.
The problem has always been that he presents a whole spinning sky of targets. We only have so many bullets. Let’s not waste too much of our energy on the interminable daily skirmishes about violations of norms and decency. Resist constant chatter about worst case scenarios. All this will inevitably be at the expense of focused opposition to the most impactful things that Trump and the Republicans will actually do. Certainly, revulsion at Trump personally will continue to be the primary driver of our partisan energy. However, we need to channel our emotion about him into a kind of implacable, ritualized contempt. In our messaging he must consistently be de-legitimized as a fundamentally dishonorable and mentally unbalanced person who, in spite of losing the election by two million votes, occupies and demeans the most powerful position in the world. It should be consistently pointed out that he has forfeited the President’s role as the “leader of the free world.” To this should be added a cold but systematic lack of respect.
Some perhaps radical suggestions in this regard: No Democrat should address him as “Mr. President.” No Democrat should stand when he enters the room. Make it clear that Democrats would happily show the appropriate deference if Trump would finally discover what it means to be patriotic, resign, and make way of Mike Pence. Do not be deterred if initially there is a strong backlash to these tactics. The Republicans wouldn’t be if they were doing it ,and they would be doing it if a Democratic had been elected with so much as a fraction of the baggage that Trump brings to the Presidency. Keep it cold. No heckling at the State of the Union Address. Trump is truly unique in our history and we need to be on record as marking the full measure of this. It should go without saying that Democrats should play as hard-to-get on cooperation with Trump as Republicans were when Obama sought them out on Obamacare or the stimulus package.
5. Focus on what the Republicans are immediately doing, not competing visions of an alternative progressive agenda.
Re-litigation of the Democratic primaries should be taboo. A portion of Democratic activists may see the current situation as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to push for a more radical agenda. But now, when the broadest possible coalition must be assembled and galvanized, is not the time. It will expose us to counter-attacks from the Republicans and will otherwise serve no immediate purpose. Learn from the Republicans and keep it simple: Attack, attack, attack.
6. Take conspiracy theories, fake news, and faux scandals seriously.
The Republicans incubate faux scandals in their media bubble, and then contaminate the mainstream conversation with their agitprop. Successive Democratic Presidential candidates have been “swiftboated” and “birtherized” with Republicans’ ingenious branding, with perhaps the most egregious example yet being the “lock her up” campaign about “those damned e-mails,” Benghazi, and the supposed corruption of the Clinton Foundation. They hone in on a perceived personality weakness in a leader, attach a “scandal” or a false narrative to it, and they never let go. The implacable effort to present the President of “hope and change” as the feckless “hopey, changey” President bled into the mainstream to such an extent that it became the conventional wisdom for even his supporters. Our enormously accomplished President was being attacked by Bernie Sanders himself as a “disappointment.” Social media makes this problem even more acute. I am not suggesting that we similarly “go low,” yet we must confront these faux scandals more forcefully.
7. Bannon is the low-hanging fruit.
Do not emulate the Republican’s cynicism in our own attacks but learn from them nonetheless. They leave the low hanging fruit for the mainstream media. Less Steve Bannon and other low-hanging “deplorables” and more Paul Ryan.
Less Steve Bannon and other low-hanging “deplorables” and more Paul Ryan.
Give him the branding he richly deserves. The party that systematically refers to the Democratic party as the “Democrat party” should have no problem with being systematically referred to as the “Trump party” since the Republican party, well, that was the party of Lincoln and Reagan. It no longer exists.
8. Think and talk gritty reality.
Avoid appearing to be the party of hyper-sensitivity and “political correctness.” Both parties are factionalized. The Republicans have been held together by their shared embrace of their Fox News propaganda. The Democrats have been held together by our universal regard for Barack Obama. Now, divided as we inevitably are, we need to be united and energized by our groundedness, by our undeviating focus on the economic reality and the struggles of ordinary Americans. The greatest good for the greatest number is accomplished by raising taxes on the wealthy to reduce inequality, to create jobs, and to enhance opportunity and security for ordinary Americans. That’s where real progress is to be made and where we should be bracing for the greatest setbacks. Fight the battle on the terrain that will actually decide the outcome of the war to accomplish fairness.
9. Trump and the Party of Trump have no mandate for their agenda.
Develop a consistently communicated message arising out of the fact that we won more votes, even if, under the “rigged rules” that we must deal with, Donald Trump was “elected.” There has to be discussion of the fact that gerrymandering, voter suppression, and eighteenth century rules totally unsuited to 21st century America mean that Democratic votes simply don’t have the weight of Republican votes. We need to de-legitimize Trump and the Republicans with this message. What do you think the Republicans would be doing if the shoe were on the other foot? They would be relentlessly harassing Hillary and the Democrats as the “losers” of the election. Read about what Bush’s people were prepared to do if, as was expected, it had been Gore that had lost the popular vote but claimed to have “won” the election. Read Trump’s tweet from 2012 when he thought the same thing was going to re-elect Obama.
Had the generic vote for members of the House of Representatives decided the 2012 election, the Democrats would have controlled the House in 2013 and immigration reform would be in the rearview mirror. Watch the Republicans severely weaken the Senate filibuster after using it to block or water down much of what Obama proposed in his first two years when Democrats controlled the House. Support for most elements of the core Democratic agenda has consistently been in the majority (albeit sometimes narrowly). It has been blocked by the Republicans leveraging their minority status with gerrymandering and antiquated rules. Attacks on this “democracy gap” should be a featured part of our messaging, regardless of the prospects for doing anything about it.
10. And lastly, we need to stick together.
Find a way to wed the small donor activism of the Bernie movement to a cranked-up traditional donor class. This could be accomplished with large donors providing multipliers of small donor contributions. This should be used to develop a unified Democratic infrastructure that can focus on down ballot elections, a long-term upsurge in voter turnout for both midterm and presidential elections, and implementation of the messaging that I have proposed above. Unlike the Republicans, we are inevitably a coalition of disparate groups, but, more than ever, we will be “stronger together.”
Have no illusions: In terms of actual political power, the near term is extremely bleak. The Republicans control the House, the Senate, the White House, and will soon control the Supreme Court. They dominate state legislatures and governorships. The 2018 map favors them disproportionately in the Senate, and presents few clear wins for us in the governor’s races. Our charismatic leader is losing his bully pulpit and the extent of his further involvement is unclear. The DNC is leaderless and discredited. We have what is perceived to be a “weak bench” of emerging Presidential contenders.
Our strength lies in the fact that we have the support of the majority of the American people. This majority has a low opinion of the Republican party and its Congressional leadership and will not cease to be embarrassed that Trump is our President. There is no mandate for what the Republicans now want to cram down our throats, far from it. Think again about eight years ago and two million people standing in the blistering cold on Inauguration Day to usher in the era of hope and change. I was there with tears in my eyes. But the Republicans, drawing on their fighting spirit and their bag of tricks, came back. We too can do so as well. But only if we develop an unerring killer instinct.
