Americans Don’t Want Progress. They Want Punishment.
The future is demagogues.
We recorded The Next Level last night and it was a wheels-off show—night-time tapings will do that. During the course of the conversation I proposed that one path forward for Democrats is leaning into demagoguery. Sarah didn’t like this idea. I don’t like it, either.
But the question isn’t if the emergence of a populist, demagogic Democratic party would be good, as a question of morals and propriety. The question is whether or not such a thing could win elections.
And that’s what I want to talk about today.
1. Not. Nice.
There are two ways of viewing the Trump Era. The first is as a continuation of what came before in American politics, slightly exaggerated in various ways but basically recognizable as more of the same. The second is as a discontinuity—a new world.
Obviously both are true. Trump did continue some trends that had been present in American political life for years, or decades, or generations, even. But on balance, I find the latter view more helpfully descriptive: Trump extrapolated existing dynamics while also transforming the public’s attitudes toward violence, democracy, and the rule of law. In so doing he created something new, a sort of American Peronism.
Which has turned out to be a novel pathology against which our society has precious few defenses.
So if Trump has created a new political world, then how might the political opposition respond to it?