There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.
John Adams
If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Thomas Jefferson
It’s been less than a week since the midterm Blue-nami, so we’re in a kind of shaking out period, where each party and their support organs in the Polarization Industrial Complex are still trying to determine the best course of action going forward. Republicans are trying out various explanations, with Ron DeSantis describing the drubbing as an “extinction level event,” while JD Vance is shrugging it off as simply a product of the war. Others are testing out the “people just didn’t realize how good they had it” excuse, saying that the Republican candidates didn’t remind people of all the amazing things that Trump has done for the country. Trump himself, of course, is blaming all the other Republicans in general, while boasting that if he had been on the ballot, the GOP would have easily won in an historic landslide. And in other news, I would now be super-rich if my Powerball numbers had just happened to match up with the winning ones.
But despite some Republicans calling for a soul-searching reassessment of their party, I can’t see that actually happening. Why? Because the entire GOP project since the mid to late 90s has been to create a comic book universe of good vs. evil, with anything that even remotely smacks of liberalism, diversity, social democracy, or social change being painted as part of a Satanic plot to destroy all things wholesome, white, straight, and Christian. Also, Trump has promised to get out his (I assume) gold-gilded veto stamp to thwart any Democratic attempts to actually get something done, which will embolden other Republicans to continue their delusional belief that they are defending America against, well, other Americans.
With the elevation of Lord Baldemort Stephen Miller to the chief of staff position, Trump is clearly signaling that, yes, the beatings will continue until morale improves. Some observers have suggested that Trump is not really sanctifying Miller’s extremist views per se, but is merely rewarding him for being the most enthusiastic and loyal turd-polisher in his inner circle. And that does make some sense. But the effect is the same, especially because Trump’s deteriorating mental health and pre-existing narcissistic personality make it likely that anything Miller whispers into Trump’s ear will lodge in the Orange One’s brain as his own brilliant idea anyway.
Suffice it to say, with Miller at the helm of Trump’s atrophying gray matter (or is it gold?), and with the smarmy and perpetually-eyelined JD Vance waiting to assume the mantle as the heir apparent, it is extremely unlikely that the GOP will move off of the “we’re the good guys and all those libs are evil freaks” strategy, at least not anytime soon. They’ll do everything they can to chip away at the midterm enthusiasm, relishing every Trump veto and absolving the administration of any responsibility should the economy continue to suck. If things don’t improve for regular people in 2027, the GOP refrain will be, “Hey, you idiots voted for this, don’t blame us.” The whole thing will have the timbre of a smug father telling his teenager, “See, I told you that nose ring would make it impossible to get a good job.”
So the Dems how have, thankfully, the problem of deciding what to do with their mandate. Currently, the debate that is getting most of the attention is regarding leadership in the new Congress. Should the (literally) old guard just step back into positions of power, even though they did very little to actually deliver the historic victories? While it would be wrong to credit the DSA and DSA-adjacent candidates for the whole thing, and while much of the vote was a negative protest against the Trump economy, it can’t be denied that youngsters and other non-mainstream Dems did incredible work to bring off the massive blue wave. They deserve seats at the leadership table, and it could happen in the Senate, where the vote for the leader is secret.
But aside from the leadership issue, there is also the big question of the overall agenda for the new Congress. Some Dems want to jump whole hog into impeachments, investigations, and other endeavors to get the Republicans speed-dialing their lawyers. Others are saying that prioritizing vengeance against Trump’s cronies and enablers is the quickest way to turn the public against the Democrats, as the election mandate is about delivering economic relief for the people, and not settling scores with the enemy. Rahm Emmanuel, a 2028 presidential hopeful, is urging the Dems not to squander their opportunity, and he’s suggesting a “transformational” approach to building a coalition with independents and MAGA defectors, with ethics reform, a higher minimum wage, and repealing the tariffs as the main policy ideas.
It’s hard to say what path the Dems will take. If they decide to show up for work more often than the current Congress, which has been in session just 294 days since the beginning of last year, they can probably walk and chew gum at the same time, going after some of the more egregious Trumpsters while also working on substantive stuff like Medicaid subsidies, minimum wage, tariffs, ICE accountability, etc. But the DSA and other like-minded Dems will also be pushing hard for some uncomfortable things, things that the American public actually supports — MFA, taxing the bejeezus out of billionaires, codifying of reproductive and marriage equality at the national level — but to which corporate Democrats are allergic. There always seem to be too many “practical” difficulties with enacting actual policies that plutocrats hate, but the new Democratic blood in Congress might force an internal showdown on these popular ideas.
As described many times on this blog, I believe that the entire consumer industrial way of life is unsustainable. It is ecologically disastrous (every natural support system is collapsing), economically and politically unstable (as it continually evolves into plutocracy, which then drives global revanchism), and psychologically destructive (as endless consumption fails to satisfy basic human needs for community). While Trumpism is essentially a rural-centric bundling of grievance groups, people who want to undo the many and various aspects of largely urban social change, there is an underlying and valid sense of universal angst that Trump tapped into. That broader anxiety, the often inchoate feeling that “the whole system is crazy,” is, I believe, an accurate popular understanding that we are inhabiting an unsustainable way of life, and that something else must come along soon to replace it.
Trump came along with an answer to that “What comes next?” question. That answer, essentially rolled out over the last 10 years, save the Biden interregnum, has come in the form of a project to create a white, patriarchal, Christian theocracy, with all things urban, liberal, and generally different squashed down, suppressed, or just disappeared, often violently. The economic part was supposed to kind of take care of itself, thanks to Trump’s brilliant business mind, which was 3-D chess enough to understand that things most people think are bad — tariffs, war, support for Russia, kidnapping foreign leaders, etc. — are actually good. In practice, what Trumpism actually delivered was a turbo-charged plutocracy, some good old-fashioned crony kleptocracy, with the Trump family itself raking in billions, and virtually no actual help for regular people and their skyrocketing cost of living.
The midterms were the people calling bullshit on the failed Trump agenda. But that lurking sense that the whole system is coming down is still there. And even if the Dems pass some good stuff, it will absolutely not magically make consumer industrial civilization a sustainable entity. The defects of the American version of this civilization (bad election mechanics, unlimited access of money to the political process, plutocratic capture of all media organs) are especially prominent, but the same unsustainability is everywhere, and all societies are feeling it in one way or another. No one is “winning” the long game, even if some countries are temporarily doing better than others. The popular intuition is right: the whole thing is coming down.
Certainly, if the Dems manage to pass some of their agenda, it will deliver some immediate and good things. A higher minimum wage, Medicaid subsidies, taxing the rich — these could all deliver some material improvement for people’s lives, no question. But will they bend the curve on the big things? Will they start to heal the collapsing natural support systems? Will they permanently dislodge the incredibly top-heavy plutocracy? Will they reverse the long-term (and global) decline of the labor share of GDP? Will they prevent AI and other technologies from hollowing out the labor market? Will they solve the demographic transition problem of an aging population trying to find the money to support the needs of its seniors? Will the loneliness and social fragmentation spun out by our atomized way of life be cured? Will the endless push for growth somehow be transformed into a sustainable, green path for the future?
The answer to all these questions is no. And critically, the answer is not “not yet.” What I mean by that awkward phrasing is that the underlying assumption of even the most liberal Democratic polices is that the system itself can be salvaged. Sure, it needs a lot of work, and new programs won’t make things better overnight. But it gets us heading in the right direction, towards more justice, more fairness, more security, more access to health care, etc. And while never a finished project, the right policies can bend the arc of consumer industrial civilization towards a brighter future for everyone, even if we never achieve perfection.
Except that they won’t, and I think that a lot of the popular disenchantment with Democrats, up until the midterms, is due to people just not buying the Dems’ vision of that brighter future, where we all have great “jobs of the future,” where some tinkering with wages will render life affordable for everyone, where taxing the rich is a permanent strategy for undoing inequality and plutocracy, and where a green new deal can magically flip an ecologically unsustainable way of life into an ecotopia. The people have temporarily rejected Trump’s model for the future, but that doesn’t mean that the Democratic vision has become compelling by default.
What should the Dems do? Well, I would swing for the fences, and make it clear that we need to enable a quick and massive transition to a different way of life. The three main drivers of this would be Universal Basic Income, Bigger Home Bases, and a Modern Money Theory redesign of our national budget. Check out my earlier posts on this blog for more details on how this could actually happen. And yes, I know it sounds like a complete and total non-starter, which is why I actually don’t see it starting with the political parties at all. I think it would need to start with privately-funded example communities, which would then drive popular opinion to demand the policy changes from the government. Again, there are many more details in earlier posts on this blog.
