Restoring Norms Fixes Nothing

I was struck by a bit in this about the horrors of the Polish election (and the Polish electorate):

Now the last two years in Poland, like Joe Biden’s four years as president after Mr. Trump’s first term in the United States, seem like little more than a liberal intermezzo in which some institutions were restored and some democratic norms reasserted. But voters’ deep dissatisfaction and polarization had not simply disappeared; what looked like a restoration was just a narrow opening — and one that may be closing now.

There’s a big lesson for Democrats here. And this is one reason why we need to have serious debates about the future of the Democratic Party. Things are never, ever going to be the same after Donald Trump. Attempts to just restore good government and norms will backfire. And the reason is clear–voters think the system is broken. They don’t want the system. They want something else. If Democrats win the House and/or Senate in 2026 (almost certainly the former) and the presidency in 2028, what is the agenda? Because, you know, just being anti-Trump isn’t going to do anything to fix the problems. It might forestall the next fascist for a few years and, hey, some of us will die without seeing that next fascist. So I guess that’s something? But if you want to defeat this far-right movement, you have to govern in a way that makes people feel like something good is happening to change the broken system.

Restoring USAID? No one cares. Restarting federal grants to Harvard researchers? No one cares. People do eventually care when they see something that bothers them, as all the stories about theoretically regretting Trump voters demonstrate, but if they still think the system is broken, they are unlikely to make many connections between their leaders and what is happening to their lives. And remember, these voters we have to persuade are determined that Donald Trump won’t ban abortion and thus are pro-choice Trump voters, etc. So yeah, they ain’t too bright and they ain’t paying too much attention. That’s where we have to start our understanding of the American electorate. The idea of an informed, educated electorate who will weigh policies and make a smart decision is absolutely a liberal fantasy and should discarded.

What I’m saying here is that we need a bigger agenda and a bigger vision than just being anti-Trump. Because the way I see it, liberals are deeply committed to institutionalism. And that’s great! Institutions work, trust me, I am a very big believer in institutions myself. The problem here there’s no politics in making democratic norms the center of Democratic governance. Four years of Democratic governance under Biden should demonstrate that loud and clear to every liberal. It simply didn’t matter, though Biden being a zillion years old obviously was an anvil that helped sink democracy, possibly forever. So there’s a lot of factors, sure.

Let me put this another way. It’s not just in Poland that voters didn’t care about restoration of norms. Or in the United States. Look at Britain. Disastrous Tory governance finally led a broad coalition to sweep Labour into power, huge victory. But behind that victory was basically nothing but disgust over the Tories. Keir Starmer has no agenda, no thoughts, no visions. He’s just a marginally competent neoliberal. And no one likes him, Labour is tanking, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is surging rapidly. Labour didn’t get their heads around that they need to solve the problems of broken politics and so many of their own voters in the election are now looking to far right parties. Trump represents the same alternative to a lot of marginal Democratic voters, and of course he saw huge gains in the working classes among all races.

Is that what we want the next time we take power? A brief interregnum between fascists? I don’t think so.

I’m not even using this little essay as one of those “the only way to solve the Democrats’ problems is to adopt my own personal policy preferences,” the ubiquitous angle on Democratic Party-based political writing from DSA to Third Way. While I’d like to think that a Sanders-esque class-based approach that demonized the rich would work, it very well might not. What I do know is that a liberal politics around restoring norms will lead to nothing but a huge Republican landslide in the next midterms after Democrats win again, with a strong change of someone worse than Trump after that taking the presidency. We need to recognize that problem and move the Democratic Party to inoculate itself early by figuring out what the hell it even means to be a Democrat other than opposing Donald Trump.