Useful Democratic Initiative
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Jamelle Bouie (gift link) points out that any Democratic response to Project 2025 that is some version of “restore the pre-Trump status quo” is doomed to failure, and indeed deserves to fail:
Much of the disruption and destruction of the past year and change is downstream of the revolutionary orientation of Roberts, Vought and the other alumni of Project 2025 who have taken up places in and around the Trump administration. To observe the aggrandizement of power in the executive, the decimation of the federal bureaucracy, the destruction of much of the nation’s medical, scientific and public health infrastructure and the broad attack on racial and gender equality is to see the many faces of a furious effort to restructure the existing nation to match the one envisioned by these far-right ideologues.
If this is all true, and it is, then any plausible response to Project 2025 must include a larger vision for the future of the American Republic. A Project 2029 cannot be a collection of Democratic Party agenda items. It must articulate a broad new conception of the nation’s political order — one that will guide the way a future Democratic-led government might wield power. Above all, Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction — for building something new on the wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought — not restoration of what was.
It’s painfully clear that, with the benefit of hindsight, the Biden administration is going to be remembered as a failure, and a fairly catastrophic one at that. The problem is not with what that administration accomplished, which was quite a bit, but rather with what it failed to do, which was to actually confront and combat Trumpism in any meaningful way.
“Broken eggs cannot be mended,” Lincoln observed in a reply to August Belmont, a leading Democratic Party organizer and financier in New York, who had forwarded, to the president, the comments of an angry Louisiana slaveholder who wanted restoration of the Union “as it was.” Not much later, Lincoln repurposed the quip in different form. “Broken eggs can never be mended,” he wrote in reference to the fate of slavery as the war carried on, “and the longer the breaking proceeds the more will be broken.”
Fort Sumter broke the Union and with it, slavery. Whatever the nation was or would be in the aftermath of the war, neither the nation nor its Constitution would protect, support or sanction human bondage.
You can think of this Trump administration as a similar state of affairs. The American people broke something when they gave Trump a second chance in office. And there is no going back to the Union as it was. If Democrats hope to lead the nation to any kind of recovery, much less renewal, they must understand and internalize this fact of the matter.
Broken eggs cannot be mended. To try to do so, to try to return to some notion of normality is to court failure. Worse, it is to play a repeat of the last Democratic administration when, in pursuit of the familiar, the Democratic Party all but passed the baton back to reactionaries working toward something revolutionary.
The failures here were multiple, and ultimately the fault of the voters, since voting for Biden was all but explicitly a vote for a restoration of the status quo ante. But as Bouie argues, restoration is now both impossible and not even desirable.
What after all would be “restored” by a political movement whose only clear goal is “not Trump?” The answers to that question include: An increasingly imperial presidency; an increasingly feckless and irresponsible Congress; an increasingly out of control Supreme Court; an increasingly anti-democratic political system (fifteen years from now, states home to 30% of the population, and mostly worshiping Confederate Jesus, will elect seventy senators); and most of all an increasingly intolerable failure to even begin to confront plutocracy and white supremacy. That’s what a restoration of the pre-Trump world would mean, and who would vote for that at this point, other than the most addled and delusional baby boomers, which is a category that unfortunately continues to include a significant portion of the Democratic party’s leadership?
Bouie cites the most relevant historical analogy:
During Reconstruction, after the Civil War, Republicans worked to refound the nation as a democratic and egalitarian republic that embodied the values of the Declaration of Independence. “By the Constitution it is stipulated that ‘the United States shall guaranty to every State a republican form of government,’ ” said Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in his eulogy for Abraham Lincoln, “but the meaning of this guaranty must be found in the birthday Declaration of the Republic, which is the controlling preamble of the Constitution. Beyond all question, the United States, when called to enforce the guaranty, must insist on the equality of all before the law, and the consent of the governed.” Such, he continued, “is the true idea of republican government according to American institutions.”
It was this view that led Republicans, Radical and otherwise, to write their aspirations toward freedom and political equality into the Constitution through the 14th and 15th Amendments. It also shaped how they responded to President Andrew Johnson and hostile Supreme Court justices, who tried to trim and curtail their vision. They did not just override Johnson’s vetoes; they impeached him. And they did not just criticize the court; they took steps to tie its hands, limit its power and strip its jurisdiction. The extent to which Republicans in this era operated as an imperial Congress was the closest this country has ever come to congressional supremacy, the result of their expansive conception of American democracy.
As they look ahead to 2029 and beyond, Democrats need that kind of vision. They need, in particular, a commitment to a constitutional order centered on the power and prerogatives of Congress. And they need to begin to work through the details of what this will mean in policy and in law. It is this work that will shape how Democrats approach the major concerns of the post-Trump moment: the state of the federal bureaucracy, the scope of executive power and the problem of judicial supremacy over the political system. It is ambitious, yes. But so was Project 2025.
It’s a platitude that the confederacy lost the war but won the peace. That platitude is also largely though not completely accurate. The attempt to roll back that latter victory that continues to be captured however vaguely by the phrase “the 1960s” is a battle that needs to be fought again and again. America is now a white supremacist plutocracy; it has been and can be something else. That the latter sentence gives the entire Democratic consultant class a heart attack doesn’t make it less true.
Today is the last day of the fundraiser, so as Thaddeus Stevens probably said at least once, it’s never too late to mend if you haven’t contributed yet: