In crucial ways, Senator Elizabeth Warren is the anti-Trump. Where the president has acted to aggrandize power in the demagogic figure of himself, Warren’s presidential platform includes various democratizing measures — not just for the political system, but for our economy as well. Where the president wields tariffs like an all-purpose instrument of statecraft and calls a tax cut an economic strategy, Warren has developed multiple highly-detailed plans for economic growth. Where the president mocks and undermines women, Warren’s election would radicalize our collective perceptions of female power in American society. I could go on.
In other ways, though, some of Warren’s contrast with Trump has been worrisome. Her decision to effectively give in to the president’s attacks on her claims of Native American heritage, by undergoing and releasing the results of DNA testing, seemed to be a strategic error, an attempt to sate a bully whose temperament is to never be satisfied with whatever humiliation he manages to inflict on his opponents — witness Trump’s continued hedging on whether or not President Obama was a U.S. citizen after Obama made the decision to release his long-form birth certificate. If their positions were somehow reversed, Trump never would have given ground on this issue like Warren did. The Massachusetts senator seemed to get outplayed in her attempt to take away the oxygen Trump was using to play his abusive and racist game.
But it is looking more and more as if the ancestry imbroglio, while unfortunate, was a deviation from Warren’s otherwise pugnacious approach both to Trump and to campaigning for president. In fact, there is one particular Trump-like quality that she seems to embody — her declaration that she’s fighting on behalf of Americans against those forces arrayed against the American dream. Like Trump, Warren has defined an us-versus-them picture of the world, though with decisive differences: hers is based in the realities of economic, racial, and gender inequality, rather than in the racist hysteria of white Americans facing a vengeful wave of brown-skinned interlopers who steal our jobs at home and abroad. And her remedy is a universe away from scapegoating immigrants, giving aid and comfort to white nationalism, and turning the White House into a nest of cronyism and corruption. Instead, it’s a promise to take down un-democratic power arrangements throughout our society, from self-serving bankers to boardrooms that shut out workers’ voices; to propose efforts to end corruption in government and protect our voting process; and to focus on actual measures to grow our economy and battle the inequality that’s turning this country into something out of dystopian sci-fi film.
Trump’s relative success, if nothing else, shows that the U.S. is primed for a more bully-pulpit presidency. Somewhat unexpectedly, it was reading Joe Biden’s comments a week or two ago about America easily being able to out-compete China that really crystalized this for me. In his casual dismissal of the idea that Americans might actually feel threatened by free trade arrangements that have at least in part contributed to massive losses of manufacturing jobs in great swathes of the country, Biden seemed to be ignoring key lessons of 2016 and before. One of those lessons is that those whose livelihoods are threatened by tectonic changes in our economy, whether through foreign competition or automation or the destruction of unions, don’t want to be told that they just need to change their attitudes. Whatever the particular combination of reasons for American deindustrialization, it’s a phenomenon that has helped mass produce voters willing to give Trump’s combination of fake economic populism and authoritarian race baiting a whirl.
Trump gets that Americans are in no mood to blame themselves for their problems: he told us that he was going to stick it to the Mexicans and the Chinese, and boy is he doing that, even if he’s also sticking it to himself, like a punch drunk boxer socking himself in the face half the time. Warren understands the basic political reality that a president needs to be sympathetic to voters’ struggles, which is arguably always true but is doubly so in these anxious times, when Americans have a hunger to get to the root causes of why they feel economically insecure even in a relatively roaring economy like we have at present. What the president has done is to legitimize the idea of making this quest for root causes and comprehensive solutions into an existential battle between success and ruination. Trump has identified not only other countries, but also non-white citizens and of course immigrants, as the enemies of (white) American prosperity, while essentially running a government that is seeking to siphon, through tax laws and corruption of federal regulatory powers, as much wealth as possible to the richest Americans. It is a contradictory mess that is authoritarian, racist, and plutocratic in comic book dimensions, but no less pernicious for its contradictions and self-sabotaging dynamics. So it is not only that Donald Trump has legitimized the idea of the president dividing up the country and fighting for his side, but that he’s done so based on a worldview that is so fundamentally wrong (and self-serving) that it calls out for just the reality-based, democratic, and truly populist response that we are seeing from Warren.
I really can’t overstate the importance of how so much of Warren’s analysis and proposals is based in actual reality, rather than the fever dreams of white nationalists and overemphasis on easy or misleading solutions (see Trump’s endless trade wars). As Farhad Manjoo observes in a recent column, Warren has taken a risk that most politicians avoid by getting so specific so early on; as he puts it, “she risks turning off key constituencies, alienating donors and muddying the gauzy visionary branding that is the fuel for so much early horse-race coverage.” Yet, as he notes, this specificity has helped drive the debate among Democrats, and he also suggests that the flip side of being so forthcoming is that Warren can absorb criticism; that is, hers is an agenda that’s responsive to empirical testing, and thus, correction. This couldn’t be farther from the Trump/GOP vision of an America that’s as much myth as anything else, where a vision of white hegemony as it existed in the 1950’s and where American workers are somehow prosperous even as the rich are allowed to take more and more of the nation’s wealth cannot really be reconciled with or refined by the real world. (Manjoo also notes the hopefulness of the fertile and wide-ranging discussion of democracy, the economy, and beyond among Democrats, despite the obvious temptation to just focus on Trump’s terribleness — another argument that Warren and other status quo-questioning Democrats are just what the political moment requires, and further evidenced by the fact that people are so obviously hungry for this broader discussion).
In a similar vein, we can see how Warren’s self-presentation, via a plethora of detailed plans (as well as a seemingly inexhaustible willingness to explain complicated policy matters in ways that non-experts can understand), might in itself constitute a vision — not just as the articulation of a perspective that sees the powerful pitted against the democratic many, but in a meta sense, in that politics is something that we need to talk about and make conscious, and that ultimately must be testable by facts and common agreement. In his survey of why Warren has been rising in the polls lately, Paul Waldman suggests as much when he writes that, “what’s in her plans may matter less for the support she gets than for the idea that she’s the candidate who has plans for everything. It means she’s serious, substantive, prepared and ambitious about change. Not coincidentally, these are all things President Trump is not.” As I hinted at earlier, the more philosophically-inclined might see something of a dialectic between Trump and Warren, the president being the white nationalist yang to the senator’s democratic, patriotic yin.