The Establishment Party

On Friday the Democratic Party sued the Russian government, several members of the Trump campaign, and Wikileaks for allegedly conspiring to influence the 2016 election. The lawsuit itself will very probably go nowhere and accomplish nothing for a variety of reasons. For one, foreign governments are in general immune from legal action within the United States. For another, there is very little publicly available evidence that such contact as Trump campaign officials had with Russians was in itself illegal - the people who have thus far been charged have been charged not for the actions themselves, but for lying about them to investigators.

The suit itself throws into sharp relief the direction taken by the Democratic Party under the Trump Presidency. It is in effect a direct extension of the argument it made against him during the campaign. Trump isn't like "normal" Republicans. He is exotic and dangerous to the norms and structures of the government, and as such even (or perhaps especially?) the comfortable and respectable should fear him. He isn't even really, purely American, because his election was manufactured by the Russians!

It isn't difficult to divine what this argument is designed to accomplish. It aims, as the Clinton campaign did, to capture a population that is by temperament thoroughly Republican but disturbed by some aspect of Trump's behavior or government, and subsume it into a working majority of Moderation. Even the choice of the bogeyman in Vladimir Putin evokes the Cold War paranoia that is practically embedded in what is left of the American middle class.

The practical consequences of such a strategy are revealing. The party has discouraged and in a number of cases openly opposed candidates to the left of the party norm, in spite the evidence given by the 2016 primary and recent local elections that such candidates can generate an enormous amount of enthusiasm. This is done, as it was in 2016, for the sake of giving the party the "best chance" to win in a favorable environment. The hearts and minds of the upper middle class are not in general receptive to principles rooted in a democratic socialism.

The central strategic question at issue in the Democratic Party is really how one sees the 2016 election. The party leadership genuinely believes that Hillary Clinton was unjustly denied the presidency by the combination of Russian meddling and James Comey trying to protect himself from being accused of protecting her. The strategic errors of her campaign, the hubris and insularity of its leadership, and the lack of enthusiasm born of the candidate herself running as fast as she could from an energetic base don't seem to be factors that they have taken seriously.

The Democrats, myself included at the time, banked on the quintessential moderate, establishment-approved candidate in the hope that she would be the more comfortable choice in light of the profound unfitness of her opponent for high office. That was a mistake. It permitted an ignorant, boorish man whose only guiding principle is the single-minded pursuit of controversy as a means to fame and wealth to define himself as a roguish disruptor. This at a time when the electorate was registering an almost unprecedented disgust with the direction of official policy.

The bizarre thing is that the popular backlash to the Trump Presidency has been so powerful that in spite of their strategic buffoonery the Democrats remain likely to be swept to power in at least one house of Congress. I can't help but wonder, though, at what they could accomplish with this kind of popular angst if they were willing to take bold policy stands and use this opportunity to change the contours of the public discourse.

The party has actively discouraged discussion of a truly universal health insurance system, for example, in spite of the fact that the electorate which elected Connor Lamb in a Pennsylvania special election - in a district that preferred Trump to Clinton by an overwhelming 20 point margin - said that the most important issue to them wasn't Russia or Syria or taxes or even Trump himself, but health care.

The Sanders campaign was disappointing in many respects, but one thing it demonstrated unequivocally was that campaigns that embrace causes unflinchingly can be made financially viable without the money of a top dollar donor. Yet the Democratic Party has increasingly focused on large donations from wealthy liberal benefactors without significant critical examination of how those donations unreasonably empower the people who give them, or consideration that the super-rich as a class might have material and personal interests that are fundamentally incompatible with those of the rest of the country.

The Democratic Party, having run an establishment candidate against Trump and failed to beat him, has observed Trump remaking the GOP in his own image and resolved to make itself a party of the establishment. Granted, that decision still leaves a place in the party for activists and working-class advocates, but it is a fundamentally secondary and inferior place. I have grave doubts about whether the political overlap between the upper middle class voters the Democrats are courting and the young, working class base that is providing the real political energy on the left is significant enough for the strategy to be effective in the long term.

The bottom line is that if the Democrats take power but remain in hock to corporate money and the respectability politics of the upper middle class, all they will have accomplished is the power to establish limits on the damage President Trump can do. That is, to be sure, a worthy goal, but it is by definition a shortsighted one. What positive good would such a Congress accomplish?

When Trump leaves office, however he ends up doing it, the basis of their power would be revealed to be nothing more profound than the conservation of the status quo. That is an aim which fails to meet even the modest standards of progressivism the Democrats have set for themselves in recent decades. If the holding of power is all the Democratic Party really cares about, this doesn't present much of an issue. But if it is to be an organ for legitimate, positive change for a society desperately in need of it, more ambitious goals and more democratic (small d) politics are required.