Don’t expect anything more from Republicans than a muted critique of the Trumpism in the wake of the Capitol siege because their raison d'etre is the protection of White wealth and power and no strategy is off the table. They have no legal fallback strategies. At least since Nixon’s embrace of his Southern Strategy and, yes, criminality, Republicans have depended upon appeals to racist and xenophobic resentment, voter suppression, and gerrymandering to hold on to power. Shifting demographics and values in the United States make Republicans a desperate minority party. The African American, youth, and progressive supported Biden/Harris victory, as well as the Warnock and Ossoff multiracial, issue-focused grassroots organizing triumphs in Georgia only highlight the bankruptcy of Republican’s persistent effort. These wins presage the future. The siege on the Capitol and illegal attempts in Congress to steal the election are the apotheoses of a decades-long, but last-ditch power grab.
The insurrectionists, Trump, and his congressional enablers must be prosecuted. His defenders should be shunned, and importantly, denied employment and positions of responsibility. However, that is far from enough to turn the tide.
To ensure supremacy, Republicans became power and idea entrepreneurs. These political and intellectual investments filled a vacuum of political and moral leadership during an inflection point in American history. The successes of the Civil Rights Movement and its turn to issues of economic and social justice, the challenge of the anti-war movement to American imperialism and the defeat of the United States in the Vietnam War, the challenge to American global dominance of the Iranian Revolution and OPEC, the decline of American manufacturing, globalization, and job loss all shook the foundations and security of the empowered and disempowered alike. With foresight and bit-by-bit determination, Republicans advanced an out-for-yourself, government-is-the-problem ideological campaign as the only way to protect their power. Cynically, they embraced religious fundamentalism as an instrumental diversionary ally. Eventually, they turned to authoritarianism.
Democratic party power up through the 1960s depended on an alliance of northern workers, northern city political bosses, white Southern wealth holders, and poor whites. Even in the seemingly pro-worker Roosevelt administration, Democrats winked at, if not actively promoted, segregation. They supported racial covenants in housing and excluded farmworkers and domestic employees from the labor protections. However, incrementally, the moral imperative of the defeat of Nazism, the northern migration of African-Americans, the post-war rise of unions, and the subsequent Democratic embrace of de jure civil rights splintered the north-south Democratic alliance.
Democrats became the party identified with both civil rights and labor, if tepidly on both counts. However, they never fully embraced a multiracial movement for social and economic justice. Neither movement overcame mutual distrust. Segments of working- and middle-class Americans who found economic success in the post-war period began to experience social and economic insecurity. They responded positively to Republicans' full-frontal law and order, anti-government racist appeals. In response, a group of Democrats identified as the Democratic Leadership Council offered a counter-strategy to gain or maintain diminishing influence. In essence, it amounted to acting more like Republicans in language and policy. They welcomed corporate campaign contributions and deregulation, backed away from integration, became less pro-union, embraced the conservative rhetoric of personal responsibility, public-private partnerships, and individual choice and competition in both education and healthcare.
At the same time, disparate movements for women’s, LGTBQ, and marriage rights, and protecting the environment met with some success and shifted predominant values but did not coalesce into a broader unifying movement for change.
While Democrats did elect Clinton and Obama as two-term presidents, they lost control of the majority of statehouses. Even the momentous election of the first Black president did not fundamentally alter Republican political or ideological hegemony. The Democratic strategy amounted to concessions on big ideas and values. Their compromises on the core idea that government is responsible for the well-being of all failed. They continually repeated, “Chance to climb the latter of success if you work hard and play by the rules,” rhetoric. As the saying goes, you can’t be a little bit pregnant. Either a political party represents full support for equity and democracy or not. Republicans controlled the terms of the debate. The result of the Democrats' a little-bit progressive and a little-bit conservative strategy was a loss of credibility with great swaths of Americans.
Betrayal and cynicism elected Donald Trump.
Democrats need to stop saying, “This is not who we are,” to counter the conservative implicit proposition that racist selfishness and unrestrained wealth accumulation and callousness is who we should be and that democracy is a dispensable inconvenience. Democrats need to stop tempering and moderating full-throated advocacy for democracy, equity, and justice. Advocating and delivering on it for all is the only viable antidote. Demonstrating that help for the most vulnerable among us helps us all is what they must do.
The only Democratic answer to the lived precariousness with which too many struggle is to fight for and establish security for all with no exceptions. Programs pitched to help some but not all, such as the Affordable Care Act or charter schools, divide and alienate rather than unify.
The enabling ideas of racist appeals are that inequity is inevitable, whites and the wealthy are more worthy than people of color and the poor, and that their gain must come at the expense of white people. Ensuring a decent life for all and the unified struggle required to attain it cannot happen without a direct reckoning with the divisive role of white supremacy. Acting to challenge this explicitly in ideas and deed is the only answer to Trumpism.
The birthplace of that challenge is the kind of multiracial person-to-person organizing that Georgia has demonstrated. That is the lead that the Democrats must follow.
Arthur H. Camins is a lifelong educator. He writes about education and social justice. He works part-time with curriculum developers at UC Berkeley as an assessment specialist. He retired recently as Director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology. He has taught and been an administrator in New York City, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone.
Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/arthurcamins