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The ACLU had a full-page ad in The New York Times last Friday announcing that it’s going to go after every one of the incoming Trump administration’s violations of individuals’ rights, whoever those individuals may be. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already said he’ll convene a special session of the newly elected and still overwhelmingly Democratic legislature in December to protect safeguards for California residents against the coming Trump onslaught on immigrants, on clean-air standards and climate mitigation laws, for women who come to California for abortions, and so on.
These are all crucially important and necessary endeavors. However, they can’t be the primary image of the Democratic Party going forward. If the Democrats are to win back the voters who swung into Trump’s column last week, they have to become once more the party that advances the interests of the American working class—and they have to be seen that way by that working class, as they demonstrably have not succeeded in doing.
That means the primary focus of their elected officials at all levels needs to be such causes as raising taxes on the rich and corporations to fund expansions of Medicare and Social Security (both creating coverage in areas like dental care that Medicare doesn’t currently cover, and significantly increasing the level of Social Security benefits), reducing the cost of prescription drugs, greater funding of child care and senior care, greater funding of apprenticeship programs and trade schools for blue-collar occupations, and increasing investment in infrastructure and housing construction, both as a way to make housing more affordable and to create more jobs in construction. They need to push for the abolition of noncompete agreements. They need to introduce windfall profits tax legislation when profits’ share of revenues rise, and (my pet cause) create a sliding scale on corporate tax rates based on the ratio between CEO and median employee pay (the higher the multiple, the higher the tax).
None of these causes will become federal law over the next four years, but the challenge for the Democrats is to become identified with these and kindred causes. The Democrats’ congressional caucuses aren’t accustomed to taking unified stands on specific legislation, much less legislation that Republican congressional leaders won’t even allow to come to the floor for a vote. Despite that, caucus unanimity on bills that would make such changes, and constant party agitation for them, would be the least the party could do to reposition itself as a party that puts a premium on bread-and-butter issues.
The primary focus of elected officials needs to be such causes as raising taxes on the rich and corporations to fund expansions of Medicare and Social Security.
Putting all of those proposals together in a defining platform would certainly help. Getting every union and pro-Democratic organization to promote that platform would help, too. So would setting up some kind of communication apparatus to get that platform in front of voters and counter the vast right-wing propaganda machine, instead of relying on campaigns that do that, extremely inefficiently, every couple of years.
It really shouldn’t be that hard to get the Democrats to do a better job of affirming and advancing working-class interests. The harder part is to get them not to run afoul of some prevalent working-class values, which can tilt to cultural traditionalism, keeping in mind that a lot of cultural traditions are intolerant of deviations and outsiders. This challenge is all the harder because the Republicans and right-wing media (both mass and social) define the Democrats, on a daily basis, as cultural radicals. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown was unseated by the huckster the Republicans set against him last week despite that fact that no politician of any party has more constantly, effectively, and volubly advanced workers’ interests throughout his career. Nonetheless, Brown lost because Republicans preposterously depicted him as the standard-bearer for transgender surgery, and because cryptocurrency speculators spent tens of millions of dollars against him—funding ads, however, that said nothing about Brown’s record of support for oversight of financial speculation, and focused rather on the danger he allegedly posed to gender definitions.
If that kind of characterization can take down Sherrod Brown, it can, over time, take down other Democrats in numbers that could keep the Democrats out of power for a very long time. This may require the Democrats to redefine themselves somewhat in the image of Dan Osborn, the union activist who ran as an independent against an incumbent Republican senator in Nebraska, and came close to unseating her. Osborn was a clear progressive on economics, and railed against our corporate overlords in the manner of Bernie Sanders. He also supported what is Americans’ common sense on our highest-profile cultural issue by favoring women’s right to an abortion. He did not, however, claim common cause with the Democrats’ positions—either actual or those invented by the Democrats’ enemies—on a host of other issues that, for better or worse, ran afoul of some cultural traditions or roused xenophobic hackles. To be sure, Osborn was running in one of the most Republican states in the nation, but his campaign offers Democrats a host of lessons, some of which they may conclude to be prudent courses of action. Clearly, the Democrats need to oppose mass deportations, but maintaining the current numerical quota (or something close to it) at our borders is a political necessity in the coming period.
What’s clear is that Democrats need to hone their self-definition if they’re to retake power. As they seek to limit the era of MAGA ascendency to Trump’s second term (ideally, to the first two years of Trump’s second term), that needs to be the work they are about.
