We are in the early days of an elective economic and governmental collapse. The Trump tariffs combined with the assault on government function, including defanging the revenue-gathering IRS, along with a massive tax cut for the rich, are about to explode the U.S. deficit and immiserate millions. Anyone who even glances at these actions understand immediately how dire our situation is. And you don’t have to be an economist to get it:
“This week, just before the tariff chaos, 63% of Americans had a negative view of the government’s economic policy, comfortably the highest figure since records began almost 50 years ago. All-time records were also shattered for the share of people who expect the economy to further deteriorate over the next year. Just 25% of US adults said they expect their finances to look better in five years than today — lower even than at the nadir of the Great Recession.” (Financial Times)
We see the disaster, understand what its consequences will be, and know who is to blame. So how are Democrats handling moment? Leaving aside a few notable and stellar outliers (Bernie, AOC, and their whistle stop tour, Cory Booker’s 25-hour Senate speech, Chris Murphy’s ongoing commentary), not well. You’d think the argument against the current situation would more or less make itself (see the 1,300 protests on Saturday and their various signs), but for Democrats, apparently not.
Here’s a clip posted by the House Democrats of a social media video prepared by Rep. Chris Deluzio, a Western PA Democrat.
“The President’s tariff announcement and his trade policy has been chaotic and it’s been inconsistent. [some throat-clearing and straw-manning about bad uses of tariffs in the lead up to:] Tariffs are a powerful tool. They can be used strategically or they can be misused.” (Source: X)
He goes on to describe how Trump did the tariffs wrong, but was basically right that they’re a good idea. This kind of messaging has been bog-standard since the 1980s, when Dems lost their House majority for the first time in forty years. They were shocked that the white working class rejected their pro-union message and went for Reagan’s “free-market” approach. For forty years they’ve been making some version of Deluzio’s argument: the Republicans are right, but we have a less-crazy version of their policies we think you’ll love.
(Narrator: they do not love it.)
For decades I never got why Republicans loved Reagan so much. He was mean, dumb, corrupt (don’t forget Iran-Contra!), and he lied a lot. Yeah, he cut a lot of taxes, but Carter did, too, and Republicans hated him. It wasn’t really until the Trump years that it started to come into focus. Reagan didn’t just give the GOP a big political win, he gave them a potent new message that would change how every American saw government and politics. He characterized government as both corrupt and inefficient (with more than a dash of latent racism), and proposed business as a moral, efficient counterpoint. Of course, Democrats, as handmaidens of government, were by association also corrupt and immoral.
Forty years later, this is the world we live in. No one trusts government or politicians, and the very enterprise of government is considered suspect by most Americans. It hasn’t been accidental, and the GOP has built amazing infrastructure to nurture it.
Pivoting off Reagan, the GOP learned how to do messaging right. Newt Gingrich was a key figure in this transition with his Contract with America, which gave the GOP a blueprint for singing in harmony. Rush Limbaugh, with his dittohead army, amplified the GOP in the early 1990s, and the party got an official “News” organization with Fox News in 1996. The Heritage Foundation gave them a think tank to workshop policies, and they began fitting other parts of their operation into a seamless messaging outfit.
Americans once loved the federal government—and why not? It helped defeat a depression as well as the Nazis and it put men on the moon. It provided health care and retirement benefits for the elderly. It defeated Jim Crow. More than three-quarters“trust[ed] the government to do what’s right” up until Nixon’s reign of corruption. Democrats are the party of government, but they rarely try to defend it. So now Dems hate government as much as Republicans.
Messaging has a lot to do with a party’s available politics, and the Dems have a more complex coalition, with unrelated and occasionally contradictory goals, to manage (unions and environmental activists are often in conflict, to offer one example). But the Democrats don’t even try to have coherent messaging, which is on magnificent display right now.
Because the GOP have had so much success framing the terms of the debate—if not reality—Democrats have internalized the lesson that they must always defer to conservative views as legitimate. For decades, they’ve tried to contain their messaging within the conservative framework. Republicans have claimed to be the real Americans, and they’ve defined the White working class, rural America, and traditional values as normative—and the Democrats have accepted the framing. Thus do you end up with convoluted arguments like Deluzio’s that they’re really more awesome than Republicans in helping “real” America.
So here we are in a crisis in which messaging couldn’t be easier, but the Dems continue to shrink from a fulsome defense of what they really believe. It’s like a political version of Stockholm Syndrome. In some ways the problem is more profound than mere messaging: in having to live in the Republican world their whole political careers, Chuck Schumer Democrats lack the imagination to envision a different world. (And of course they look inauthentic. Chuck Schumer, who valorizes this “real America,” would never be caught dead eating a smash burger at a pub.)
Eventually, the Democrats are going to have to develop a messaging strategy and infrastructure. They will always have outlier members, but as a body, they need to know what they believe, speak with a single voice, and blast their message out via networks they haven’t bothered to build yet.
But in the meantime, they must find their moral core and speak from that place. It probably wouldn’t hurt them to find their outrage and see where it points. Look at the college students being rounded up by goons in unmarked black uniforms and masks. Look at the legal immigrants being swept up in deportation purges. Consider the cancer and Alzheimer’s studies being canceled. This should outrage a Democratic politician, and that outrage should lead back to bedrock beliefs and values. Hundreds of thousands of people are out marching in the streets with a pretty clear idea about why this is wrong—surely Democratic politicians can appreciate it as well?
We have entered an existential crisis, and if the opposition party doesn’t understand what it’s opposing or why, we are in real trouble.
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