Trump is showing what it looks like to wield the power of the presidency
I gotta give the devil his due: Donald Trump is following through on his promise to take aggressive action to accomplish his goals as president. He’s pulling every presidential lever he can find when it comes to addressing many of the issues that animate him and his base.
This isn’t remotely an endorsement of his decisions or the callous manner in which they are being carried out.
But it does make me wonder what it would have looked like if Democrats had wielded power this ruthlessly for good.
Democratic presidents in recent decades were in office as college prices, health care, and housing costs ballooned to insane, unjustifiable, and immoral prices. Parents (primarily mothers) continued to suffer from the burden of working and raising children with no government support for child care and lackluster or nonexistent maternity leave in the richest country in the world. Medical debt rose. Insurance companies continued to operate like criminal enterprises. Income inequality grew and grew and grew.
None of this was inevitable.
Yet, we’ve been asked to believe that the United States government lacks the power to address these problems. Bring up these issues to an establishment Democrat (versus Bernie, AOC, or Elizabeth Warren for example), and you will be told how complicated this all is and how it’s not possible to truly change anything when it comes to the many issues that make life in the US so hard.
Author Matt Stoller calls this phenomenon the Democratic Party’s “cult of helplessness” which is quite at odds with the kind of governing Trump promised to deliver during the campaign, and is in the midst of carrying out.
I’m going to quote at length from Stoller’s post on the Dems helplessness issue1:
I was a Congressional staffer during the financial crisis. In late 2008, many of us were eager to see what we could do to fix the banking system and the country, as Obama and the Democrats had immense political capital to reshape the economy. But over the next year, during the crafting of the Dodd-Frank legislation, it became clear that our political leaders didn’t really think solving anything was possible. Fellow Congressional staff would sometimes point out various problems we hadn’t addressed. After awhile, a friend of mine started to cynically joke, “yeah someone should do something about that.”
Everyone knew, even close advisors to Barney Frank, that our financial reform law, Dodd-Frank, didn’t fix much. It didn’t stop the gruesome foreclosure crisis. It certainly didn’t block bailouts, which was the point of the law. There was 15 years of busywork and compliance nonsense imposed by Dodd-Frank to ensure the banking system was strong enough to stand without bailouts, but of course, in 2023, the Fed immediately bailed out Silicon Valley Bank.
And yet, what was astonishing is no one felt they had any choice but to pass Dodd-Frank and declare victory. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and a small circle of populists made a critique of this approach. But it wasn’t a lefty argument, though it was characterized that way, it was mostly an argument “hey you can do more stuff, you should.”
We don’t know why Democrats do this, but it’s a serious problem, especially now that they are facing off with an emboldened Trump 2.0.
It’s notable that only a few Democrats even talk about the US’s systemic economic issues in the way they deserve to be discussed: obsessively and with fury.
There is something to be said about just trying to fix things in an aggressive manner, even if you aren’t successful. Still, I’ve lost track of how many establishment Democrats have told me that Bernie Sanders, who actually believes that these issues can and must be fixed, is too “angry.”
Which always leads me to ask why they aren’t angry about what is happening in the US. Why aren’t they enraged that people in the wealthiest nation on earth are struggling so much?
Many Democratic Party thought leaders and elected officials don’t seem to get what is happening in the US because they have basically become the Republican Party of my youth—educated, out-of-touch, rich elites. They are obsessed with “preserving norms” when the system is not normal and needs to be blown up.
Rather than promising to bring radical change, Democrats completely misread the situation and ran a “campaign of joy” to a nation in free fall. They were convinced they could replace their lost working class voters with more wealthy and educated Republicans in the suburbs, which tells you a lot.2 Bernie blasted them for this after the election and had to deal with all the delusional defensiveness of Democrats claiming they were the party of the working class because Biden did things for the working class.
What makes you the party of the working class is that working-class voters vote for you. Trump won working-class voters3, and no, they were not all white4.
I’m not saying that Democrats didn’t do good things when they were in power, or that I wouldn’t take a random Democrat off the street over Donald Trump to be president. (Though honestly, after a lifetime of supporting Democrats, I’ve gotten to the place where I’d love a true third-party option).
My point is that the US has been slowly collapsing under the weight of a neo-liberal5 agenda that many Democratic leaders helped create, and when it became clear it wasn’t working, didn’t do enough to course correct.
Interestingly, Joe Biden was one of the Democrats who understood this, but he failed to make it the central issue of his presidency in both substance and style. Unfortunately, many of today’s Democratic Party establishment figures still hew to the neo-liberal view, whether they call it that or not. Far too many of elected Democrats take money from the industries that benefited from this ideological framework and are making life in the US so hellish for so many people.
The Democrats who aggressively challenge this worldview, like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who was stupidly denied the position of ranking member on the Oversight Committee by Democrats) are treated by many in their party like they are fringe radicals for supporting what was once just normal in the US—things like affordable health care and education, for example—and is considered basic decency in all of our non-English speaking peer countries. (Unfortunately, most of the English-speaking capitalist countries are experiencing at least some of what is happening in the US..)
A few days ago the New York Times ran a story with a headline that is the understatement of the year: ‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump. It feels a bit late in the game to be in this place.
If the Democratic party doesn’t find itself soon enough, America may be lost forever.
Related
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on the cult of helplessness:
“In July, 2016, at the Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, Senator Chuck Schumer was asked whether he thought that, in the coming election, the anxiety about wages and jobs among working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania might benefit Donald Trump. Schumer dismissed the concern. “For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western P.A., we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,” he said.” They did it again in 2024. It didn’t work either time against Trump. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/how-donald-trump-gave-democrats-the-working-class-blues
Exit polls: Trump won 56 percent of working class voters, formerly a core part of the Dem coalition https://edition.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0
Trump’s return to power fueled by Hispanic, working-class voter support: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-return-power-fueled-by-hispanic-working-class-voter-support-2024-11-06/
I don’t want to play word games as many neo-liberal adherents like to do. They claim not to know what this word means or that it has no meaning. For our purposes, let’s use the dictionary definition: “a political approach that favors free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending.” It’s a view first promoted by Republicans—then embraced by Bill Clinton—that you should be “business-friendly,” which typically means socialism for corporations and capitalism for everyone else. If you think there is a better word that describes this ideological framework, then use that. The label is not the point.
Globalization was supposed to be good for everyone, but free trade helped corporations make more money and enriched the professional class, and screwed workers over, for example. I should note that I worked in the Clinton Administration in the US Trade Representative’s office as a political appointee, so I am very familiar with what we all believed at the time. I can say it was a sincere belief that “free trade” would be good for workers, but it was also sincerely wrong and there were many Democrats at the time warming about this. I held this globalist view, though tbf I was in my 20s, but nonetheless I was wrong.
