The result that shocked so many in the fall of 2016 was a popular rejection of ruling elites that split much along party lines. The backlash against economic neoliberalism and the endless wars of the Ronald Reagan era — comfortably inhabited by subsequent presidents, including Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — allowed Trump a victory against Republican incumbents and then Hillary Clinton. It almost allowed Bernie Sanders to break through as a presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020. If Sanders failed while Trump succeeded, it was more because of Republican disorganization than because their grievances against both parties were different (although the solutions it was to them). In the six years since, Trump’s uncanny charisma has riveted both parties. Neither sought a credible political and working majority that together could enable the replacement of the failed policies of the past. Instead, both declared war on Trump himself. As the ephemeral Never Trump movement among Republicans waxed and waned, Democrats opted for an avoidance strategy. Putting Trump himself on perpetual trial as if their own policies hadn’t helped make his credibility with millions possible, Democrats first embraced Robert Mueller as a deus ex machina. When he failed to comply with the script, two impeachments were tried. Even zooming in on the horrors of January 6, 2021 in congressional hearings over the past year – which had far less impact on yesterday’s election than they had hoped – fit the pattern of avoidance. The results were that, despite presenting democracy on the brink and fascism along the way, the Democrats failed to build the cross-racial majority of the working class that alone can pull the country out of the deadlock brought by the deadly pulses in both parties. the Reagan example. To his credit, Joe Biden has been vocal about the need for fundamental change and has been glowingly described as a new version of Franklin D. Roosevelt by his fan club. But 2022 proves it didn’t deliver enough of the goods. By turning a promise to “build back better” into business-friendly versions of climate and infrastructure spending, Biden was forced to abandon any commitment to basic welfare protections. And while in the first Congress he spent heavily, his magnanimity did not stop with the common people soon enough to prevent the current results. Roosevelt’s popularity increased after his initial election in 1932, and his own first midterms in 1934 extended his party’s dominance, where the Democrats boasted a majority of over 70% of the seats in the House of Representatives. So far, Democrats have decided not to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court’s nationwide abortion ruling the way Roosevelt did with the hostile judiciary of his day. The conservative attack on women only helped Democrats avoid losses in 2022 as painful as some feared. Unlike Roosevelt, Biden could lose the House, if not Congress altogether, promising two more years of gridlock. The only good news, unless the lowest of the lows has been set for Democrats, is that their need to turn much further from their disastrous past mistakes is clearer. Trump’s lies have been rejected by enough people — and above all his potential opponent Ron DeSandis has grown in popularity across ethnic and racial lines in Florida — that Democrats should abandon their obsession with the charlatan who they blew up in totality. American politics can no longer be a referendum on Trump or be reduced to the misguided question of whether democracy will survive. Instead, if they want to break the deadlock, Democrats will have to offer a democratically winning proposition, even as the right tries to prove that its politicians are better Roosevelt heirs to lead a party of the working class. As the rock band Semisonic once remarked: “Every new beginning comes from the end of some other beginning.” They could have been talking about 2022. No one knows how long it will take one of the parties to act to seize the opportunity that has always existed to build a majority coalition beyond economic neoliberalism and the endless warmongering of the previous elites . But 2022 has paved the way for that to happen.
