It has now been very close to a year since the formal beginning of the Trump presidency. The Democrats have found themselves in opposition - in both houses of Congress as well as out of the presidency - for the first time since early 2007. It has been an opportunity for the party to do some soul searching and find out what it stands for in the post-Obama, post-Clinton political world. In practice, they have repeatedly opposed harmful things that President Trump has attempted or proposed, but refused to follow the logic of their opposition to a policy that addresses the fundamental principle.
They opposed and ultimately stopped the full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but there is still substantial establishment and conservative pushback against proposing a single-payer bill that would establish healthcare as a right. As a result of this equivocation, the official party position on healthcare is defending a law that is being crippled by deliberate sabotage at the federal level. "I like how things are" is hardly a progressive position to take when premiums continue to increase out of all proportion to medical inflation.
The Democrats protested loudly when Trump revoked DACA protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children. They then turned around and started negotiating changes to the immigration system designed to prevent people from poor countries particularly, and poor people in general, from being able to relocate to this country as a bargaining chip to get DACA back. When the congressional GOP is motivated to avoid allowing those protections to lapse permanently, offering significant concessions as a reward for restoring an obviously just policy - which should never have been revoked in the first place - seems like an unjustifiable capitulation.
Far from attempting either to rein in the war-making powers of the President or to limit our involvement in what is now essentially a region-wide war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East, they have continued to turn a blind eye to our complicity in campaigns in Yemen that are textbook atrocities. They have failed to exert any pressure to end an involvement in Afghanistan that is rapidly approaching 17 years in length and is little closer to a final resolution than it was ten years ago. The Democratic Congressional leadership also secured the passage of a continued authorization for only-thinly checked surveillance of Americans on domestic soil without a warrant in certain situations.
But the apparent allergy of the Democratic Party toward staking out a bold policy direction in the new era under Trump, when they no longer have any duty to defend the policies of a sitting president with their letter next to his name, is only half of their failure in the first year of Trump. The other half has been focusing entirely on him. In a way they are two sides of the same issue, because with all the Trump Talk there has scarcely been any time left over for serious policy discussions.
I don't mean to say that the Russia investigation isn't extremely serious, or that Trump's behavior and demeanor aren't alarming and disgraceful in a head of state. I happen to believe that both of those things are very true. But the exclusive focus on him as an individual implies that he himself is the problem, and as a corollary that removing him would make everything better. That is a delusion.
Just switching the people in office will not produce appropriate changes at a time when the inadequacy of the existing framework is comically obvious. If Trump were not president, the distribution of wealth would not narrow of its own accord. Racism would not vanish. Our wars would not end. Unjust and unlawful violence by law enforcement officials would not magically stop. Our nonviolent offenders would not be released from prison. Healthcare would not become accessible to everyone.
The fact of the matter is that the ruling crust of the Democratic Party has become far too comfortable. No party that claims affinity with the political Left should be comfortable enough with the status quo to be content presiding over it.
I supported Hillary Clinton in the primary, primarily because I felt that abandoning the path President Obama took for a more aggressive approach would give a powerful congressional GOP an opening to paralyze the legislative branch, as they successfully did for the last six years of his presidency, and prevent anything at all from being done. But at this point, faced with a Congress and administration that is already aggressively dismantling as much of the progress in social policy that was made under Obama as they possibly can, there is no principled reason for the Democratic Party to adopt a temporizing tone.
The inequalities that exist in this country are egregious and widening, but they were all here long before Trump came into office. Trump's obvious ineptitude in office presents an opportunity to aggressively sell a more progressive, egalitarian vision to a country wracked by conflicts - both foreign and domestic - that are fundamentally about inequality.
What the Democratic Party is currently doing is taking the easy way out by riding the wave of anti-Trump feeling and trying to upset as few people as possible between now and the Congressional elections in November. They will probably do very well in those elections. But as an opportunity to make an impact and aggressively fight for those who are held back by social barriers, the Democrats have thus far wasted the Trump presidency.
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