These are giddy times for the forces of reason and light. A surge of resistance to a bumbling and unstable president has sent millions of people into the streets, into the faces of politicians, and into bookstores to make best sellers again of authoritarian nightmare stories.
And all of that hasn’t changed the fact that Democrats, the opposition party, are more removed from power than at almost any point in history. Republicans control everything in Washington, two-thirds of state legislative chambers and 33 governor’s mansions.
Every day brings some fresh affront to decency, some assault on progress, some blow to the truth. The people who run the White House can’t spell, can’t govern, can’t get through a news cycle without insulting an ally or defaming a cherished institution. Republicans just shrug and move on, in lock step with a leader who wants to set the country back a century. From their view, things are going swimmingly.
Outraged about the ban on people from Muslim-majority nations? So what. About half the nation, and a majority of Republicans, are in favor of it. Upset over the return of Wall Street pirates to power? President Donald Trump’s supporters aren’t.
Democrats haven’t been able to stop a single one of Trump’s gallery of ill-qualified, ethically challenged and backward-thinking Cabinet appointees. His pick for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, doesn’t believe people should be paid a living wage to stir a milkshake, and he hired an unauthorized immigrant to clean his house. He’ll fit right in.
Millions of reasonable people are appalled that a madman is in charge of the country. But tell that to Mitch McConnell when he cuts off the right of a fellow senator to speak. Or tell it to Paul Ryan when he can’t find his copy of the Constitution he has sworn to uphold. These invertebrate leaders don’t care if Trump’s residence is a house of lies. They don’t care that their president is a sexual predator, or that his family is using the office to enrich themselves. All they care about is the R stitched to his jersey.
When Adlai Stevenson was told that all thinking people were with him in his race for president, he famously responded: “That’s not enough. I need a majority.”
And so, too, do the Democrats. This week, the powerless party went into their winter cave for an annual retreat — three days of soul-searching and strategizing.
“This is our moment in history,” the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, told her fellow Ds. “This man in the White House is incoherent, incompetent and dangerous. And we have to protect children and other living things from him.”
Feels good, right? Sorry. The Democrats shouldn’t mistake a sugar high for nutrition. They’re still getting their butts kicked. Being Not Trump gained them only a net of six seats in the House in November’s election, and will not be enough to win a majority in 2018.
Reliance on identity politics and media-cushioned affirmation, and a blind spot to the genuine pain of the white working class, is precisely what produced a President Trump. For the next year, Democrats should filter their policy initiatives through the eyes of the person Trump claims to speak for — the forgotten American.
Of course, Trump’s phrase was lifted from somewhere else. Franklin Roosevelt first rode to victory in 1932 by urging fellow citizens to put faith in “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
Roosevelt actually did something for that overlooked American — Social Security, minimum wage, building roads, bridges and dams — and was rewarded with a majority coalition that carried the United States to new heights. Therein lies the way back to power for Democrats.
When Democrats lost the South — for multiple generations, as it turned out — it put them in a deep hole, forcing them to rely on a surge of young and Latino voters to turn the demographic tide, or candidates with broad appeal beyond the party strongholds on the coasts.
President Barack Obama left office with soaring approval numbers and a great legacy. But Democrats also lost 1,034 state and federal offices in his time. Whites are still 70 percent of the vote. If Democrats continue to hemorrhage voters among the working class, they will never see the presidency, or even expect to govern in one house, for a long time.
The way out is not that difficult. Yes, they should engage in hand-to-hand combat in the capital. And certainly, Democrats must turn to the courts when the rule of law is broken. But they have to be for something, as well — a master policy narrative, promoting things that help average Americans. The old Broadway adage was how it will play in Peoria. For Democrats, they should think of Joe Biden’s Scranton, Pennsylvania, every time they take to a podium.