Making the Democrats great again might require a dash of Trumpism
The victory of Donald Trump has underscored an iron-clad rule of postwar US politics. Only Democrats who persuade the American people they are moderate end up in the White House. Joe Biden was a mainstream candidate, which helped him re-conquer the Rust Belt. Barack Obama, for all his flowery rhetoric, also presented himself as a pragmatic centrist, which meant downplaying the racial meaning of his candidacy.
The three previous Democratic victors – Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson – all hailed from the southern, conservative wing of the party. Nor was John F. Kennedy the crusading liberal of romantic lore. Liberal luminaries mistrusted him ahead of the 1960 election because of his close ties with the Republican senator Joe McCarthy, a demagogic forerunner of Donald Trump.
Reagan, Cinton, Trump and Harris.Credit: SMH graphic
Kamala Harris understood this history and tried to position herself as a moderate. She is, after all, a hard-nosed machine politician. But even though she de-emphasised her gender and race, and distanced herself from left-wing positions adopted in 2020, there is a reason why no Democrat from California has ever won the presidency. The golden state is so easy to caricature as a hotbed of modern-day wokeism and, before that, flower-power radicalism.
Polls repeatedly suggested more voters judged Harris as too liberal than deemed Trump as too conservative. A racist, misogynist felon with fascistic tendencies was considered the more mainstream figure. Nauseating though it may sound, the party will likely have to make concessions to Trumpism if it is to appeal to blue-collar voters who valorise the New York billionaire as a working-class hero.
Before venturing further down this path, it is worth pausing briefly to consider the scale of the president-elect’s victory – because there is a danger it is being exaggerated. Though he swept every battleground state, a landslide this was not. Presently, Trump has a 50.2 per cent share of the vote, which is lower than Biden in 2020 (51.3 per cent), Obama in 2008 (52.9 per cent) and 2012 (51.1 per cent) and George W. Bush in 2004 (50.7 per cent). Trump’s vote is also expected to dip below 50 per cent after millions of outstanding ballots are counted in California and Washington. Ronald Reagan swept 49 states in 1984, as did Richard Nixon in 1972. Even George Herbert Walker Bush won 40 states in 1988. Historically speaking, Trump, who won 31, is in the lower half of Electoral College victories.
What makes this defeat so traumatic, however, is that Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote. Democrats, moreover, suffered reversals with so many demographics. A majority of Latino men voted for Trump. The Democrats suffered their worst result among voters aged under 30 since 2004. For the third election in a row, Trump won a bigger share of white women – a demographic, incidentally, the Democrats have won only twice, in 1964 and 1996. Manifestly, the party is failing to connect with its traditional constituency, working-class voters.
Trump, obviously, benefitted from inflation and the anti-incumbency it has stoked. Rage at the governing status quo contributed to that rarity in American politics, of consecutive one-term presidencies. Yet the Democrats cannot rely solely on anti-incumbency to make a comeback.
Ceding some political ground to Trump is not as heretical as it sounds. Joe Biden kept and expanded many of Trump’s “America First” tariffs. On immigration, too, the Biden administration quietly left some of Trump’s first term policies in place. Now the party faces an even more morally complicated decision, of whether to make cultural concessions.
How to respond to Trumpism recalls how the Democrats answered Reaganism. Bill Clinton’s election-winning solution was the Third Way, where he sought to triangulate between the Reagan Revolution and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Democratic New Deal tradition. Clinton co-opted Reaganite language, such as his boast in 1996 that “the era of big government is over”. He cracked down on crime. Ahead of the 1992 New Hampshire primary, he even returned to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a lobotomised Black man, Ricky Ray Rector, to immunise himself from Republican attacks that Democrats were soft on law and order.
The 1992 campaign saw another of Clinton’s symbolic culture war plays, when he attacked the Black hip-hop activist Sister Souljah, who once conjectured that Blacks should respond to white homicidal violence by carrying out killings themselves. Clinton’s aim was to demonstrate he was unafraid of taking on the very groups white working-class voters complained had hijacked the Democratic Party.
What made for good politics, however, often made for terrible policy. Clinton’s deregulation of Wall Street, a Reaganite move, contributed to the 2008 great recession. His push for globalisation left many American workers feeling like economic castaways. The bridge that he boasted of building to the 21st century felt to many post-industrial communities like a bypass. In seeking a political response to Reaganism, Clinton’s neoliberal policies paved the way for Trumpism. The ultimate irony is that in 2016 Hillary Clinton herself became a victim of Clintonism.
So the lessons from recent history are morally and practically fraught. Distancing the party from the excesses of cancel culture and not saddling the unprivileged with the guilt of white privilege makes sense. But gender and racial equality still need to be fought for, and there is a danger that correctives veer into outright cynicism. Its grim to think, for example, who might be the modern-day equivalent of a Sister Souljah or Ricky Ray Rector, the target for a symbolic Trump-appeasing hit.
Bill Clinton was frequently accused of being a Reagan impersonator, not least by Reagan himself. Let us hope the Democrats can find a solution to their identity crisis without simply mimicking Donald Trump.
Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.
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