How Do Democrats Go Big in a World of Necessary and Perilous Compromises?

Vox’s Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein each have articles out that address and widen some of the issues for Democrats that I mulled over in last week’s piece.  They dig down into the complicated dynamics of what confronting Donald Trump looks like now that the Democrats can pass legislation and conduct investigations in one house of Congress.  Neither states so explicitly, but both raise a central question of our political moment: what is the balance to be struck between stopping Trump and advancing a more progressive, affirmative vision for America?  It is not so simple as saying the first will accomplish the second — as Yglesias and Klein discuss, there are many ways in which vigorous pursuit of the first may backfire and undermine the second.  

First, Klein suggests a basic tension between, on the one hand, the Democrats’ desire and obligation to investigate the corrupt activities of Trump and his administration, and on the other, their interest in pushing forward legislation that improves the lives of Americans.  A basic cause of this attention is the way that Trump-related stories tend to dominate the mediasphere, which in the case for scandals might be fairly bad for Trump but also bad for Democrats in that it makes it easier to counter-attack them by arguing they only care about destroying the president.  Klein raises the possibility that this would be the case even if such an aggressive Democratic posture were matched by bold legislative proposals, with the media providing overwhelming coverage of the former at the expense of the latter.

Klein’s point isn’t that the Democrats are simply screwed, but that they have difficult choices to make and a need for discipline in the face of Trump’s ability to dominate the media and thrive off confrontation.  His suggestion for threading the needle is to take on Trump on the policy front, in a way that ends up driving the conversation and exploiting Trump’s temperamental weakness in thinking about policy details.  Yet dangers abound here as well; as MoveOn.org’s Ben Wikler tells Klein, Trump is an unreliable negotiating partner who may well reneg on any agreements reached, and force the Democrats into base-dispiriting compromises in the process.

Yglesias’ piece drills down to a particular piece of possible legislation — an infrastructure bill that might cost as much as $1 trillion — to highlight the conflict between stopping Trump and improving the country.  His premise is that a revived push for infrastructure contains great danger for Democrats, in that a successful bill would allow the president to claim a patina of bipartisanship and crow about boosting the economy straight through to election day 2020; the downside for Democrats would be compounded if the bill ended up pouring vast amounts of money into an environmentally-unsustainable and wasteful batch of projects.  Like Klein, he ends up arguing that the Democrats would benefit most from boldness; if they put forward a transformative bill, it would at least contrast their vision with the retro one of Trump and the GOP.  If Trump ended up supporting it, he’d get some credit, but the Democrats at least would have gotten something major passed that redounded to the party’s credit and long-term goals.

Yglesias and Klein make me think I was on the right track with my argument that the Democrats need to go big, even as their gaming out the legislative battles of the next two years make me wonder if I’ve under-estimated the dangers facing the party once we start grappling with what “going big” means at the nitty-gritty level of actual legislation, confronting a president with unparalleled ability to dominate the political conversation, and entertaining compromise at the price of handing Trump re-election-enhancing victories.

Ensuring Donald Trump is a one-term president is the highest priority in American politics, yet it really can’t be separated out from re-making the Democrats into a progressive majority and holding the GOP as a whole accountable for the authoritarian, white nationalist abyss into which we all find ourselves collectively peering.  At this point, we have seen what unified Republican rule means, and it has resulted in nothing that helps working Americans and a whole lot that hurts them; voters rendered a verdict on this by giving the Democrats their biggest electoral success in the House since the post-Watergate election.  Against chalking up meaningful victories that make Americans’ lives better, even at the cost of compromises that enhance the electoral prospects of an unfit president, must be weighed the larger goal of changing the overall terms of economic and cultural debate.

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, one way forward for the Democrats is to make public and explicit their own efforts to figure out a way forward.  If the Democrats are to be the party of democracy, then they should embrace dissent and open dialogue.  And if and when they do compromise on legislation with the president, they must make the argument that such legislation is simply a downpayment on more far-reaching measures to be implemented once a Democratic president is elected.  The Democrats may not be able to unite on much, but it seems quite possible for them to hammer home the message that Trump and the GOP are simply getting in the way of improving the lives of all Americans.  The same is true for investigations of Trump administration corruption: the mission should be to hold the powerful accountable and ensure that no American is above the law, and the Democrats should be transparent about their goals and methods.

There is also no way forward without the Democrats bringing voting rights front and center, and perhaps no better means to set the terms of public debate over the next two years. Investigating GOP voter suppression efforts and proposing laws to ensure that voting is accessible to all Americans is both good politics and good for America. There are dozens of great ideas floating around for improving our elections, from making Election Day a public holiday to reinstating in the Voting Rights Act in states that still systematically suppress the votes of African-Americans. This is legislation that the Democrats would be fine not to compromise on, and could possibly balance out the possibility for compromise on matters less critical to the survival of American democracy. It would also paint the Trump and GOP further into a corner as opponents of one person, one vote. The midterm outcomes in Georgia and Florida have given national attention to what it looks like when the Republicans cheat their way into office; Stacy Abrams’ argument that Brian Kemp is the legal but not legitimate winner of the Georgia gubernatorial race is an example of the tough talk that combines the moral high ground, democratic accountability, and a road map to future pro-voter reforms.