Apart from his willingness to articulate grand historical takes on what’s happening in U.S. and international politics, I’ve long admired Andrew O’Hehir’s weekly Salon pieces for their unsentimental and realistic attitude to his topics. Calling him “contrarian” might be tempting, but it’s almost never accurate; rather, I’d say his interest in getting to the root of the matter leads him to places where undue optimism and sometimes hope are either irrelevant or just another part of what keeps us from perceiving the truth.
I said O’Hehir is “almost never” a contrarian with one particular essay in mind — his argument back in May 2017 that the Democrats would not be capable of pulling off a “blue wave” in the 2018 midterms. Writing in the wake of Democratic defeats in Georgia and Montana special elections to the House of Representatives, he pointed to the infighting and general disarray of the party as precluding a comeback in a year and a half, as well as structural impediments like gerrymandering and the sheer number of Democratic Senate seats playing defense in the next election cycle. His enumeration of the challenges seemed spot-on, but the declaration of hopelessness so far out from November 2018 seemed to me somewhat exaggerated.
This past weekend, though, he’s done a very O’Hehir-ian thing and written a critique of that very prognostication. Viewing the polls and other evidence that the Democrats may well take back the House and perhaps even the Senate in the 2018 midterms, O’Hehir first zeroes in on the way that the female backlash to Republican rule is driving a Democratic resurgence. Acknowledging his own slowness in anticipating and grasping this sea change, he notes how this development has also caught many other progressive men unawares as well. His diagnosis of what may be happening is intriguing: that “the ingrained and often unconscious reluctance among many male voters to support a female candidate is being burned away in the Trump era. Or to put it another way, most men motivated by sexist impulses have been driven into the camp of the most overtly misogynistic political figure in modern history, and the rest of us have been forced to reckon with reality at last.”
This take reminds me of the argument I’d made about Trump’s effect on racism: that many white Americans, seeing the racial vileness of the president, were beginning to reflect on their own racial attitudes as a form of reaction to his repellent racism. O’Hehir seems to be arguing for something analogous (and perhaps more persuasive) on the gender front. Faced with a president who embodies and displays a shameless misogyny, American males are effectively being made to choose sides, Trump having rendered unpalatable a formerly acceptable middle ground.
The larger lesson here is that, in times of political upheaval, we can’t anticipate the full forces of reaction and counter-reaction, or what forms they might take: reality is really complicated, for Pete’s sake! Yet we live in a media environment in which one of the meta-messages is that we’re being kept fully informed of all developments at all times, and that nothing will ever take us by surprise. This blow-by-blow focus results in a sort of “can’t see the forest for the trees” syndrome, in which we are led to forget that which is not so easily measured and the fundamental dynamism of reality.
So it’s actually deeply hope-inspiring but also darkly amusing that O’Hehir and many, many other observers would not have anticipated a female backlash to Trump large enough to shape politics in 2018 and beyond. We saw early signs in the women’s marches right after Trump’s inauguration; what has ensued since then, of course, are massive waves of organizing and political commitment by countless women, who through their actions have changed what we can count on as our fundamental assumptions about politics, both in 2018 and beyond. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has continued to remind everyone on a daily basis of his fundamental misogyny, fueling resolve to reject the president and the party that enables him. Even in a worst-case scenario, in which female candidates were somehow widely rejected by the electorate, is there really any question that this wave would stop? That women would simply pack up their electoral toolkits and go home? We certainly wouldn’t expect men to give up; why would anyone expect this female revolution not to continue even if the current wave doesn’t reach as high as one could wish?
Other events since O’Hehir wrote his initial article have shown that fears about Democratic inertia and infighting have proven to be overstated. In some ways, this is because more optimistic outcomes have been coming to fruition — enough progressives are seeing the Democratic party as a vehicle for their political platforms that they are transforming it from below, forcing more centrist and established politicians to make way or modify their own politics in a more progressive direction. Intriguingly, O’Hehir notes that the Democrats are now beginning to look more like they did in the decades between World War II and the Reagan administration: a party that embraces a wide variety of political views, yet maintains cohesion partly by allowing space for its conflicts to be aired and debated. He writes that:
For close to 30 years, Democrats have operated on the principle that intra-party conflict had to be suppressed — indeed, that ideology itself had to be suppressed — and the progressive left had to be purged or silenced, because those things were electoral poison. It took an embarrassingly long time for the party to figure out that the neoliberal, anti-ideological orthodoxy of the Bill Clinton “New Democrat” years (in which issues of economic justice, for instance, were deemed not to exist or not to matter) was the real poison. I think we can conclude that era is now over, thank the goddess.
There are enormous and perhaps even irreconcilable conflicts within the Democratic coalition - will the party be able to hold on to those in the 1% earning bracket when it ends up raising their taxes in order to fund the college education of middle-class kids? - but in the age of Trump, there are also unifying beliefs that it would serve the party well to highlight. I am thinking in particular of a fundamental commitment to the Constitution and American democracy, a commitment that is only highlighted by the current president and the GOP’s embrace of his authoritarian tendencies. A common adherence to the rules and norms of American democracy can unite red state senators and democratic socialists, and outcomes based on these rules are more likely to gain acceptance across the party. Even if you don’t like a result, you are more likely to accept it if you think that your concerns were heard, and that the process for reaching it was at least based on majority rule.
The party’s essential normalcy in contrast to Donald Trump’s deranged and anti-democratic tendencies also adds to the party’s general appeal. And in providing cover for the president, the GOP as a whole is deeply complicit in policies and attitudes deeply at odds with American values and the wishes of the majority. Not only does this leave the Democrats as the only “normal” American party, but it also gives them more room for maneuver, whether in terms of hashing out intra-party conflicts or putting forward more progressive policies like Medicare for all. We could also speculate that Donald Trump’s attacks on both decorum and a bipartisan economic consensus means that there is more room for ideas previously considered outside the bounds of possibility, and that Americans will end up preferring policies and ideas that build up our country rather than tear it down and tear us apart.
Finally, I think it will become increasingly clear that our concepts of what is far-left versus far-right will be increasingly viewed as far more obscuring that illuminating, as Americans realize that there is no equivalence between a “far-left” idea like universal healthcare and a “far-right” idea like mass internment for undocumented immigrants. The inequality and every-man-for-himself savagery of our dominant economic arrangements have created fertile ground for a humanistic, egalitarian backlash just as surely as it’s created the grounds for right-wing demagogues like Trump.