Reconstruction, Not Restoration

Any appeal to the Old Norms is useless politics. Things have to totally change when Democrats next take power. Any attempt to just return to “how things used to be” will lead to the sweeping of a new generation of crazy Republicans, in part because the low-information voter hates the way things are. They might not know why they do, but they sure do. We’ve had moments like this before. Boston Review held a forum around ideas of moderation and politics. Eric Rauchway, esteemed historian of the New Deal, had thoughts about how we need to think like the New Dealers in rejecting seventy years of economic norms when we create whatever we demand the post-Trump society should look like.

Which is why, though we have been asked to call the centrist response to this presidency “moderation,” recent events make it abundantly clear we should recognize it as appeasement: the principle that the best way to stop a bully from taking your lunch money is to give it to him. The historical application of this view is left as an exercise for the reader.

Bonica and Grumbach note that while the moderation argument allegedly appeals to the median voter, the position of the median voter depends on the shape of the electorate. Run timidly to the center and the electorate will reflect the options you propose, with a milquetoast median. Politicians with energy and clarity of purpose can turn out a different electorate, with a different median voter. Democrats should therefore call attention to the corruption of the authoritarian project, Bonica and Grumbach argue—a case that might well resonate with the right voters. A strategy like this one worked in the decades around 1900; much of the scholarship on populism and the various progressive movements that produced the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson highlights the effective, and mobilizing, anti-corruption campaigns of those years.

But we should be clear what we mean by corruption. The events of the last month suggest the commonplace sense of corruption, what progressives and muckrakers called boodling, or graft; looting of the public purse—which is certainly going on—might not cover the case. The deeper, older sense of corruption—the corruption that infects a body, turning a person’s parts into muck—is the one we need. Corruption used to mean, more broadly, that a thing, or at least a part of a thing, has died and become fodder for creepy crawlies. That sense seems apt, too.

The approach required by this profounder corruption is not recovery: returning to where we were means going back to a state of affairs that was manifestly unsustainable. To borrow from the architect of the Democratic Party’s most enduring platform, any recovery that simply restores things as they were will see us all right back where we are now before too much time has passed. Franklin Roosevelt argued in 1934 that the nation needed not merely recovery but “reform and reconstruction . . . much of our trouble today and in the past few years has been due to a lack of understanding of the elementary principles of justice and fairness by those in whom leadership and business and finance and public affairs was placed.” Reconstruction—Roosevelt was well aware of the word’s legacy after the Civil War—meant that leadership, and the conditions that kept them in place, “had to be corrected.”

But the sort of people who sustain themselves in leadership despite repeated failures are not the kind who take easily to correction. Roosevelt again: “It is true that the toes of some people are being stepped on and are going to be stepped on. But these toes belong to the comparative few who seek to retain or to gain position or riches or both by some short cut which is harmful to the greater good.”

Those are the toes it should prove safe for a Democratic leader to step on, and to call attention to their intention of stepping upon them. Their owners, still a comparative few, are conspicuously lacking in public spirit; you might say they’re corrupt. Roosevelt was confident in the electoral success of this message because, he said, he aimed at “the primary good of the greater number.” And it’s the greater number that wins elections, in countries where they happen.

Roosevelt, after giving that speech, went on to see his party win a historic victory in the midterm elections, which allowed him to carry out his program of reform. The demonstration that he really meant to change things for the large majority of Americans drew voters to the Democrats. The New Deal built the lasting Democratic coalition, rather than the other way around.

I’m sure Chuck and Hakeem are totally going to lead us to the promised land here………