Seeking Alternatives To A Sledgehammer
When Trump inevitably lets the public down, what persuasive alternatives will lure people away from his false populism?
With anger, fear, and determination, we’re with you in this unsettled moment a week out from the election. It’s hard to predict or overstate how much may be on the brink of changing; hard to measure how much we’ve already lost, like the ‘functionally extinct’ goal of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 2.7°F, or 1.5°C. And it’s hard to know how much we may stand to gain from new visions and forms of solidarity and resistance that grow in the years to come.
This newsletter explores some initial takeaways from this presidential election. But before we get into all that, I just want to say that as we prepare to weather this storm together, it’s worth remembering that the most important parts of being a citizen take place offline, outside of the ballot box, in our communities. There are many, many ways of building a better world, brick by brick, tree by tree, child by child, that Donald J. Trump can’t take away.
With that, some challenging—and motivating—reflections:
A majority of voters chose change and disruption over stability and the continuation of business as usual.
This election result is an indictment of the elite-appeasing, “nothing will fundamentally change” Democratic brand. More Americans are willing to vote for a rapist felon who promises major change than are willing to vote for a former prosecutor who said she couldn’t think of a single way that she’d govern differently than her predecessor/current boss. (Oh, except having a Republican in her Cabinet.) We need to take people’s disgust with the status quo seriously. And that doesn’t mean adopting the targets of MAGA ire. It means internalizing the fact that people are not happy, that they feel the system is broken and rigged against them, and that they don’t see any persuasive alternative to a strongman like Trump for channeling that anger.
Democrats can’t win on making out the Republican party to be the party of fascism, even though it’s true, while failing to present an exciting alternative vision of change. To win power again, to make people believe again, Democrats will have to be a party of change, which means that the party itself has to change. It can’t be more wedded to norms than outcomes. It can’t prize civility and dismiss anger. It can’t be afraid of making powerful enemies.
The value of democracy and civil institutions needs to be proven and earned; most Americans don’t prize them very highly.
For a good governance group, this is a sobering one, but it’s important to internalize. The majority of people probably couldn’t say why a functioning Environmental Protection Agency or Federal Trade Commission or Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is important, how it shapes their lives, and are ready to throw the administrative state under the bus in favor of a strongman making bold economic promises. There’s a huge messaging gap between what the government does—both good and bad—and people’s ability to identify that impact in their lives. The dire state of our information ecosystem precludes both an accountability-driven politics and an informed public.
The focus needs to be on material impacts, not abstractions. (Even corruption is an abstraction until it’s tethered to exploitation that people can feel.)
When the Trump administration inevitably makes decisions that tangibly harm people, we need to be ready to tell the story of how those high-level policy decisions affect specific people and communities.
As our executive director Jeff Hauser put it: “Voters have made clear that they will acquiesce to corruption if it comes paired with a stronger economy. However, as experts in the corrosive impact of corporate cash in politics, we have learned that a corrupt government is in reality incompatible with a truly strong economy. Reporters, podcasters, and others who inform the public should understand that the Revolving Door Project is prepared to call out corruption when it occurs and to emphasize how its effects across the executive branch pose a material threat to working class Americans.”
That means connecting the dots all the way from the upper echelons of power to people’s schools, jobs, and bank accounts; to the air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we eat; to the infrastructure and ecosystems that we live with every day. And then, when people are invariably let down by the incoming political regime, Democrats can’t just pitch themselves as the party of cleaning up after Trump. The vision has to be bigger than that. Because the truth is, the current system was never equipped to meet the moment, to fulfill people’s needs, to avert climate disaster. So now is the time to dream big. What will it take to build the world we want to live in?
We need powerful, persuasive alternative visions of a different future to counteract Trump’s sledgehammer approach to the status quo.
If a party is pitching itself as an alternative to Trump’s hatefulness, then dehumanizing actions towards immigrants, Palestinians, trans people, and other vulnerable groups cannot be a part of its platform. The answer to MAGA fear-mongering cannot be “well, maybe we can make a couple of concessions to people’s evident anger by throwing a couple of groups under the bus.” No. People’s fear and anger needs to be redirected towards the real villains.
And yes, that means the villains probably won’t want to be in your big tent. But it’s pretty damn clear that a Democratic party with the corporate real estate lobby in its tent, and not the migrants that Republicans scapegoat as the cause of the housing crisis, is a party with a lot of money and no moral backbone. Which gives us two parties with a lot of money and no moral backbone. (And one that seems especially hypocritical, in the sense that Democrats promise to be less corrupt and more worker-friendly, which means their politicians face a higher cost for palling around with billionaires.)
It’s not enough to redirect anger towards where it’s deserved. We on the left have to invite people into a live, honest conversation about how the world is going to keep rapidly changing as a result of climate change, global upheavals, and technological development. An unavoidable truth of living in the era of unprecedented planetary warming is this: major changes in society cannot be suppressed. Changes are coming, and they will touch all of our lives. The question is whether a political movement will step up to take the reins and try to direct that change, or whether we will let the most powerful forces—supercharged hurricanes and multinational corporations alike—reshape the world through blunt force.
An Invitation To Our Readers
If you have questions that you’d like us to answer about Trump’s plans for the federal government, feel free to drop them in the comments, and we may answer them in a future newsletter.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
Two Plutocrats Shifted Harris’ Earned Media Message. It Didn’t End Well.
Democrats Are Letting a Vital Chance to Protect Workers Slip Away
The Frightening and Less Frightening Contenders for Trump’s White House and Cabinet Positions
Democrats begin soul-searching – and finger-pointing – after devastating loss
Did Plutocrats Like Mark Cuban and Tony West Help Sink Harris?
Not a question, but a list of suggestions for Hackwatch: With the news of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy taking up government efficiency, one potential subject’s hopes are being kept up: Samuel Hammond, of the Niskanen Center. (He said as much at an event with Jennifer Pahlka of Code for America in September.) Come to think of it, I would like to see RDP’s thoughts on the whole “abundance/bottlenecks” infosphere, and whether they are acting in good faith on the question of state capacity. The other potential subjects in the list are the Institute for Progress, James Pethokoukis and Eli Dourado.