Jeet Heer takes apart the folly of any opponents of Trump (he singles out comedian Bill Maher) hoping a recession will arrive in time to spoil the president’s chances of re-election. Taking the long view, Heer argues that while a recession may well help kick Trump out of the White House, it will pour fuel on the fire of the reactionary politics that Trump has glommed on to:
While bad economic times, if they come, will help defeat Trump and the GOP in 2020, they’ll also sow the seeds for an even more reactionary politics in the future. If history is any guide, an economic slowdown will make the American people more racist and less open to progressive policies, a likelihood increased by the fact that the current Trumpian moment is already a product of the Great Recession of 2008, the scars of which are still felt by many ordinary people.
Indeed, the concept that Democrats need only bide their time until things naturally turn their way (embodied perhaps most catastrophically in the idea that demographic change would inevitably and automatically deliver a permanent majority to Democrats forever and ever, amen) should make tingle the political spider sense of even the most arachnophobic among us. This attitude contains various poisonous assumptions: that substantive change to the U.S. economy and politics aren’t necessary; that the party need not fight for any particular ideas with any special effort, or take positions that might lose it some votes in the near term; that the Republican Party will sit back and not try to maintain power by hook or by crook. Such a description may seem like a caricature, but these tendencies have been demonstrated again and again over the past few decades, from President Obama’s decision not to pursue a fundamental reformation of the economy (such as of the financial sector that played such a huge role in gutting the financial livelihood of millions of Americans) to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that the Democrats can stand back and let Donald Trump “self-impeach.”
Heer notes that, perhaps contrary to many Democrats’ beliefs, recessions generally make voters more resistant to change (the major exceptions being the Great Depression and possibly the Great Recession, though the progressive possibilities of the latter were largely left unexplored by the Democrats). He observers that, “If there is an imminent recession, Democrats need to see it as not just an electoral opportunity but also as a political problem. How are they going to keep the public receptive to transformative policies, when recessions typically make voters more skittish and less generous?” The solution, he suggests, is to go big:
The New Deal example shows that an economic downturn doesn’t have to mean a more reactionary politics. But to avoid a shift to the right, the Democrats have to be as bold as Roosevelt. If there is a recession they have to pin the blame squarely on Trump—and create a lasting narrative of how his xenophobia and reckless policies squandered Obama’s legacy. They have to offer a robust alternative to the status quo. And they have to uphold the values of pluralism even as nativist and racist voices grow louder.
What Heer describes is a sort of one-two punch approach that in fact contains multitudes in terms of how Democrats should think of politics and what forms of governance and legislation they should push. The idea of blaming Trump for any recession, and putting together a (truthful) story of how his policies contributed to it, is essential. This is something the Democrats failed to do to George Bush in the aftermath of the 2008 elections, in part because the Democrats themselves were implicated in so many of the bad laws and policies that enabled the financial meltdown. This time around, they can’t make that mistake again. But the story we tell about Trump must reach beyond the president and the economy, and include how the GOP as a whole has supported not only his bad economic ideas, but a whole raft of authoritarian and racist policies that have no place in America. Just as the Democrats rightly court charges of incompetence when they fail to make the case that our economic straits are due not to impoverished immigrants but to nearly half a century of increasing corporate power at the expense of all workers, they also masochistically court electoral disaster by failing to hold the GOP accountable not only for Trump’s extremism, but for its own: the deadly fealty to keeping weapons of war on city streets, the unending effort to keep women and gays as second class citizens, the racism that may be better disguised than Donald Trump’s but is no less the expression of a deep-rooted white supremacism.
While there have been many promising signs that the Democrats are increasingly aware they’ll need to address how the GOP has gamed the political system to maintain political advantage — whether through racist gerrymandering or abuse of the Senate filibuster — there seems to have been less attention paid to systematically making the case for why the GOP has been in the wrong on these and other issues. A key reason is that telling a story about what the Republican Party has done to shift the country rightward over the last several decades also requires the Democrats to tell their own story: one that has included laudable advances, but more than that, countless desultory compromises and demoralizing defeats. Unless they want to continue to be complicit in the steady drift rightward, this leaves the Democrats with no choice but to make the case for progressive ideas going forward; as Heer puts it, Democrats must “offer a robust alternative to the status quo.” The steady advance of the GOP, and particularly the crisis of Trumpism, could only come about because of the vacuum the Democrats created through their reluctance to fight for the non-wealthy majority, including, crucially, the blue-collar white workers who swarmed to Trump like moths to a flame.