This blog was originally posted on Medium on November
12th 2016.
President-elect Donald Trump.
Even by the standards of everything that has happened in politics
recently — this is I think the fourth ‘taking stock’ blog I’ve written in 18
months — having to type those words is still surreal. I cannot even begin to
imagine the pain and fear Democrats, women and minorities in America must be
feeling right now. But here are some thoughts.
This is much worse than
Brexit
The comparison is instinctive.
That sinking feeling you had in the early hours as northerly ex-industrial
heartlands started to go pear-shaped, and downhill from there. Our liberalism
repudiated. A spike racist incidents. The sense of bereavement many Remainers
and Democrats now share, that feeling of losing the country we thought we knew
(and the sudden need to in some way respond to the fact that those who had just
outvoted you had long felt the same way, whether or not they are justified).
Its easily arguable that they are part of the same anti-establishment
phenomenon sweeping Western politics.
This is worse though.
Fashionable though it may be to observe the similarities, there will be plenty
in Britain who voted for Brexit and abhor Trump (only
11% of Brits wanted a Trump win, at least at
least 64% opposed his Muslim ban — Nigel Farage is not a proxy for all
Leave voters here). While the Leave campaign itself was sodden with xenophobia
and untruths, there were also honourable reasons for many ordinary Leave voters
to feel the way they did, including democracy and accountability. Mass anxiety
about immigration was a key driver of both Brexit and Trump’s win and is a huge
challenge to overcome, but the nuances of British public opinion even there are
a reminder that we are a nation of moderates in a way that America is not (James
Morris wrote well on this for the Fabians recently). And there is at least
a distinct tradition of left-wing Euroscepticism in Britain, however subjugated
it may be in practice to its right-wing counterpart. But with Trump, it is
inescapable that open, unabashed and unforgivable bigotry was his entire
campaign, and a direct motivator for a huge share of his voters.
Remainers lost the referendum
in part through a lack of self-awareness and humility, and we have not all come
to terms with that since. So tempting though it is straightforwardly conflate
Trump and Brexit, I am not sure either loudly doing so in public or posturing
for each other on social media help endear us as we continue to make the
argument we must make for a softer Brexit that works better for ordinary people
in Britain.
It could even help us with
Brexit, if we’re lucky. There are valid reasons to fear the opposite, of
course — Hillary Clinton could’ve been an advocate for Britain, encouraging the
EU to agree softer terms, and we now face turmoil in both of our key
relationships. Even if Trump was minded to offer us a trade deal as Farage
now boasts, it would represent challenges for how Britain would square
being seen to align with him with our values and our other relationships. But
with a US cleaving towards protectionism, isolationism and even Putinism, the
UK’s role as an anchor for European security and free trade norms becomes more
of an asset as we strive to find continued common ground with the rest of the
continent.
Democrats are handling it
well
At the grassroots level,
protests against Trump are understandable so long as they are peaceful — he
lost the popular vote, and he won while victimising people who can never the
expected to respect his victory.
Among senior Democrats, both
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s statements have hit a balance — cordial and
emphasising the peaceful transfer of power as cornerstone of American
democracy, while also firing a verbal warning shot by pointedly stressing other
liberal democratic norms in the same breath (rule of law, freedom of expression
and religion). This is partly intended to safeguard political and economic
stability, but it’s also an attempt to hold Trump to those rules — Democrats
cannot be seen to flout them if they are to protect them. In contrast to Trump’s
statements about both leaders and his previous refusal to pledge to accept a
Hillary win, their restraint and their class is also boundlessly inspiring,
even in these dark days.
There is some hope for the
Democrats
There is no way of escaping
that the next four years will be horrifying for the Democrats, for all those
they represent and protect in the US, and for a world grappling with President
Trump. Racism will rise, deportations will follow and landmark Obama
achievements (much of Obamacare, Wall Street reform, environmental regulations)
will likely be repealed. But there is still more hope for US Democrats than
there is for social democrats in Europe.
Demographics continue to shift
towards the Democrats — they have won the popular vote in 6 out of the last 7
elections. Even as Hillary lost, she held onto states that Democrats could not
carry as recently as 2004 (Colorado, Virginia, Nevada). They are advancing in
Georgia, in Arizona and may eventually win Texas. And Trump has locked the
Republicans further into the strategy of doubling down on mobilising angry
white America.
For now, the filibuster in the
Senate will be the only means of scrutiny on Trump, and even that the
Republicans might vote to remove. But as the party out of the White House, 2018
could also be the first time in 12 years that the Democrats are on the
offensive in the midterms. In Congress the Democrats are sadly unlikely to gain
either chamber. In the Senate they need three gains to take the chamber, but
the third of Senate seats up in 2018 were last contested in the 2006 and 2012
cycles, both years where the Democrats dominated. This means only 8 of the 33
seats in 2018 are still left Republican-held, mostly in deep-red states — only
in Nevada and maybe Arizona are they vulnerable. Democrats would have to win
both, defend flawlessly in every one of their existing seats and still find a
third gain against all odds (maybe against Ted Cruz in Texas, but Democrats
have not won there statewide since 1994). And in the House of Representatives,
post-2010 Republican gerrymandering meant than even a popular vote win for the
Democrats in 2012 didn’t change control of the chamber.
However, 2018 is a chance to
mount a fightback against Republican control at the state level, where the
Republicans have dominated in the Obama years following their 2010 and 2014
waves. This in turn enabled them to gerrymander districts and pass sweeping
voter suppression laws. The Democrats can start to overturn these and
liberalise voting laws if they win more governorships and legislatures, not to
mention roll back GOP social and economic policies that have devastated many
states and trial their own agenda instead. Of 36 governorships on the ballot in
2018, only 9 are already Democratic-held. Out of all 50 states, Republicans
control 31 governorships and 33 legislatures (26 states have unified Republican
control, the Democrats have this is only 7). There is perhaps nowhere to go but
up for the Democrats at the state level, and rebuilding there will help them
win back Congress, and then the presidency.
As for 2020 — Trump starts out
with negative ratings and without a popular mandate, and his agenda could strip
healthcare from over 20 million people, hike taxes on working Americans and
worsen the American economy. The Democrats cannot be hubristic and will need to
rebuild themselves, taking the lessons of this week to heart and mount a
compelling positive case for themselves in the ex-industrial heartlands Hillary
lost. But as much as politics may surpass my worst expectations these days, I
hope this nightmare may only last one term.
Moreover, Democrats have some
rising stars, including BAME women — three rose to the US Senate on Tuesday
(former attorneys general Kamala Harris of California and Catherine Cortez
Masto of Nevada, and Iraq veteran Tammy Baldwin in Illinois). State governor
Maggie Hassan also beat narrowly beat an incumbent Republican senator in New
Hampshire. Already in the Senate they have figures like Amy Klobuchar and Corey
Booker — Tim Kaine remains there too. And the Democrats do have a few big-state
governors, notably Andrew Cuomo in New York. Democrats also hold the
governorship in Pennsylvania, where Trump just won — governor Tom Wolf ran a
family-owned business in the town of York before his election in 2014. There
may still be future presidents on the Democratic bench.
Yes, a better candidate
would’ve helped, but it’s harder to say who
As for who the Democrats
picked in 2016 — Hillary Clinton has been the victim of blatant sexism, decades
of ruthless partisan investigations from the Republicans and systemic media
bias. She has always been tenacious in the face of that, was eminently
qualified and ran on a policy platform more progressive even than that of
Barack Obama. She won all three debates hands-down.
It is also true to say that
Democrats nominated her knowing full well that fair or not, in politics
perception is reality and she has always been divisive. Some senior Democrats
backed Obama in 2008 over exactly this concern, knowing it would be hard for
her to redefine herself. While her conduct with her emails was not criminal and
drew altogether far too much media obsession — especially proportional to the
sheer enormity of the problems with Trump’s candidacy — she was not faultless
either and the Democrats would not often risk nominating a candidate under
investigation by the FBI. There were also issues around the Clinton Foundation
(again, not as serious as those with Trump’s Foundation or his business empire,
but nonetheless present), with her Goldman speeches and with the unshakable
impression that she personified the ‘establishment’ in an era of politics when
that is increasingly the worst thing to be. And worst of all, the final result
was very close. It’s hard not to suggest that another candidate might well have
seen off Trump, even if it still might only have been narrowly.
What is hard
is to say who that candidate could’ve been. The inevitable suggestion from
Bernie Sanders supporters that it should’ve been him is dubious. Yes he polled
better than Hillary, but that is meaningless when as the underdog, he had yet
to face real media scrutiny or Republican attacks (even the opposite — Karl
Rove’s Super PAC attempted to hit Hillary on her Wall Street ties in Iowa, to
try to manipulate the Democratic primaries in the Republicans’ favour). It
remains hard to imagine the small c-conservative middle-income white Americans
swayed by Trump rallying to an eccentric 74-year old self-described Jewish
socialist from Vermont. And it was always sketchy at best how a President
Sanders would’ve turned tub-thumping rhetoric into deliverable policy, and
secure sweeping changes in a political system defined by constitutional
divisions of power and extreme partisanship.
Moreover, I’m reminded of
something Sanders-sympathetic Corbynites in the UK are fond of telling Labour
moderates — that if Corbyn’s internal opponents couldn’t beat him, then it is
folly to speculate about their greater electability. In the UK party system
this is actually fairly fallacious. Labour moderates do have to work out how to
win our own party back regardless, but paid-up party membership and even the
Labour supporter schemes are only the preserve of a self-selecting few in
Britain’s political culture — the left-wing, urban English AB Labour
selectorate remains a small and deeply unrepresentative fraction of our 2015
core vote over 9 million (and that’s before we even start to think about
winning over Tory swing voters). However, in the US this logic does hold
somewhat more water, and Bernie Sanders fell down by this standard.
Primaries do still have a skew
and the US too struggles to be a mass participation culture in many ways, but
party registration is far more normalised and flexible and the gap between
selectorate and general election vote isn’t as great. Over 60 million voted for
Hillary in November, but 30 million still participated in the process that made
her the nominee, where she beat Bernie by well over 3 million votes. Bernie
also performed best in the caucus states, where the threshold for participation
is higher and turnout lower. Hillary may have lost in part because she still
did not inspire enough African-American and Hispanic voters to the polls in
November, but Bernie lost the nomination to her because he had no ability to connect
with them at all. And Bernie’s appeal to white working class voters in the
primaries was sometimes overstated, with Hillary winning them in some
states — white liberal college-educated voters were the most consistent part of
his base.
Of the Democrats who ran for
president, it was actually former Marine and Virginia senator Jim Webb who most
bluntly addressed Democrats’ economic and cultural estrangement from the white
working-class during his very brief bid in 2015. But even relatively
sympathetic liberal voices in the US wrote that they found his articulation and solutions crass
or simplistic, and even moreso than for Blue Labour in the UK, it would be a
struggle to square a less culturally liberal outlook with his party’s modern
electoral coalition. This was not a solution either, at least in its purest
form.
In April I
blogged about how the Democrats needed someone like Obama, combining
the prose of Hillary’s readiness for government with what seemed like the
poetry of Bernie’s ability to excite at the time. I did wonder whether this
person was Elizbeth Warren, but this may be doubtful too. First, she has shown
little interest in the presidency, despite grassroots efforts to draft her — it
is suggested that she feels more effective as a senator and a
campaigner. Even if she had, though she’d have had less baggage and more savvy
than Bernie, she would still have had some of the same problems, starting with
a lack of experience of needing connect with minority voters. Democrats
would’ve no doubt stressed her populism and her roots in a working-class
Republican family in Oklahoma, but Republicans would’ve trained all their fire
on her as an alien ‘liberal Massachusetts professor’, the same kind of campaign
that worked all too well against John Kerry in 2004. And given that Hillary was
shamelessly attacked simply for being an older woman, Warren would not have
been spared either.
Hillary running did clear the
field of other Democrats who might’ve otherwise tried, such was the regard in
which she was held in her party after her long career and stint as Secretary of
State (or alternately such was the depth of her establishment
inevitability — your mileage may very). It’s tempting to wonder if Joe Biden
might’ve won the rust belt voters Trump secured — as a two-term vice president
he was in the rare position of not being his party’s presumptive nominee, and
he was reluctant to challenge Hillary for her lead. But Biden has his
liabilities too and just as Hillary was viewed as a quasi-incumbent, in a
country where it is historically rare for a two-term president to be succeeded
by another member of their party, Biden could not have run as a change
candidate either. Democrats were also rightly hungry for a female nominee to
finally break that “highest,
hardest glass ceiling” Hillary so vividly raged against. Some
ambitious women, including Midwestern senators Amy Klobuchar and Claire
McCaskill, might’ve run if Hillary had not, and they may have been freer to
define themselves. But if they had wanted to lead, they needed to challenge her
against the odds, just as Obama did in 2008 — they chose not to.
As always in politics, those
who actually put themselves forward and make themselves most relevant are
liable to take scrutiny and criticism. Those who do not get to remain Rorschach
tests, idealised in our imaginations. In the end, we can say as we like about
Hillary, but she was the only serious Democrat to run. 17 million Democratic
primary voters put their faith in her. And she ran a disciplined campaign — it
just wasn’t enough.
‘Organisation’ or glib
platitudes won’t help the left — we must finally challenge ourselves
A standard refrain when the
left loses elections now is ‘get organised’ — this is meaningless. In
organisational terms, Hillary Clinton’s campaign adopted and even improved the
techniques of Obama’s successful runs and it dealt with challenges more calmly than
the faulty Clinton machine of 2008. Her party was largely united behind
her — Bernie Sanders’ fierce advocacy for her after the primaries was
admirable, and unlike in 2000, disgruntled liberal defections to the Greens
did not actually account for the margin of the Democrats’ electoral
college loss. Hillary was endorsed by the most newspapers, including some that
had never endorsed any Democrat for president before, and her debate
performances were a testament to how well her and her team prepared.
In contrast, Donald Trump’s
campaign was wracked with internal infighting and staff changes, and his
advisors struggled to keep him on message and even off his Twitter account.
Commentators widely assumed a lack of election day ground-game would cost him
in a close election, and there were very public clashes between him and senior
Republican officeholders.
On the day, none of this
mattered. Just as the Remain campaign’s vaunted use of digital targeting or
Labour’s doorstep advantage in 2015 didn’t matter. Better organisation can move
a critical few points if what the campaign is speaking to basically appeals,
but if it doesn’t, the instincts and emotions of the electorate will carry the
day.
Nor can we just mumble the
same platitudes about ‘listening’ or ‘engaging’, only to do exactly what we
always do — keep both feet firmly planted in our comfort zone, unwilling to
genuinely change our attitudes, priorities or language.
There is no ready-made
progressive majority, in the US or in the UK. To be fair, the Democrats fell
into this trap because there’s some validity to it. Due to America’s racial
makeup and strength among single women and white professionals alienated by an
extremely socially conservative Republican Party, the Democrats can now fairly
regularly secure popular vote majorities in presidential years. The Democrats
are consequently far less reliant on white working and middle-income voters than
Labour or any other European social democratic party. But perhaps due to an
overemphasis on these bits of the Obama coalition, in 2016 they became
complacent and forgot that final piece of the coalition altogether — this lost
Hillary the rust belt and the electoral college.
But for Labour, a similar
problem is ravaging us when we had no reason to expect we can win without these
voters at all, given Britain’s demographics and less polarised party loyalties.
Only the sheer force of our urban liberal middle-class groupthink keeps the
myths about winning with minor party and new voters alone going, when
statistical analysis and common sense disprove both. And insofar as we
acknowledge the reality that Tory, UKIP and Leave voters in middle England must
be at the heart of any winning strategy, it’s just lip-service — we make
pledges that amount to explaining how our existing patterns are the right ones,
but are prepared to do little that might challenge or discomfort us.
On the economy, we still fail
to show consistent solidarity with struggling small businesses and the
self-employed, or a basic understanding of taxpayers’ demand to know that their
money will be well-spent. We mention them occasionally, but these things are
not central to our lexicon because they’re just not on the minds of Labour
activists in the way that the NHS or cuts are. This is again might be an area
where Labour’s problem is worse than the Democrats’. Labour lost badly over
perceived readiness for office in 2015, but American voters saw Hillary Clinton
as qualified for president and some polls suggested she was basically trusted
on the economy — it is doubtful she could have even won the popular vote if
not. But insofar as economic anxiety motivated Trump voters (this is easy to
oversimplify — culture and race was a huge factor and Hillary won the very
poorest voters), the status quo was not enough and they were willing to risk
wholesale change.
Further, Trump’s emphasis was
on his image not just as a political outsider, but specifically on his
long-cultivated brand as a “successful” businessman. Here the Democrats failed
badly, as Trump had a string of broken ventures and a record of ripping off
working people, and he was pledging to repeal Obama’s healthcare and financial
sector reforms and cut taxes for the wealthiest. 2016 actually contrasts
strikingly with how well Obama’s campaign disarmed Mitt Romney’s similar pitch,
but this is again perhaps a testament to how voters’ economic behaviour
intertwines with cultural factors and the weight that impressions carry. Overt
racial and cultural politics being central to Trump’s platform forced Democrats
to respond and complicated attempts to counter him on bread-and-butter issues.
Trump’s hard-charging personality was perhaps more difficult to take apart than
Romney’s aloof northern stuffiness. And as the nominee for the right-wing
party, Trump made unorthodox promises on infrastructure spending without fear
of attack over America’s burgeoning deficit.
By contrast, in 2015 Labour
did talk about inequality and our focus here has sharpened under Corbyn, but
there is a reason this isn’t changing our fortunes. With all the populist
language in the world about a rigged system, working people won’t call on us to
unstack the deck against them if they don’t yet trust us enough not to threaten
their existing livelihoods. We don’t take apart the Tories’ record of economic
failure with gusto, because we haven’t earned that permission to speak and we
don’t actually seem to care much either when they miss their deficit targets.
And Labour lacks a populist shortcut to credibility — an equivalent to Trump’s
‘businessman’ shtick (or if we are making the Brexit comparison, Leave’s
feel-good bald-faced lies about returning contributions to the UK and the
world’s eagerness to cut favourable trade deals with us). Our biggest
ideas — borrow to invest, People’s QE and a Citizen’s Income — won’t fill the
same void in the public imagination, at least currently. Whatever the
economics, right now they risk confirming the existing narrative that Labour is
irresponsible, while the right’s pseudo-solutions are pitched to appeal to the
public’s instinctive belief in financial responsibility and human enterprise.
Nor are we at one with the
voters on their other concerns. On defence, in a world with ISIS, an assertive
Russia and now the potential loss of our main ally in the US, we are led by a
pacifist in all but name and argue with ourselves about Trident and forces
cuts. On immigration, we hog-tie ourselves so much that we cannot bring
ourselves to use words as plain as ‘control’ (the
same word that won Leave the referendum). There could be a majority for a fair
and managed migration system the public can trust, if we would pay attention
enough to lead it. On Europe, we refused to give the public the referendum they
longed for, and half of us still wish to ignore its outcome (and even those who
don’t still struggle to communicate our position). On welfare, we are rightly
compassionate and should now oppose a benefit cap, but we cannot comprehend the
anxiety of even traditional Labour voters at failings in the system where they
do occur, and so we cede the language of responsibility to Conservatives who
will destroy the system in its entirety.
And we continue to pick
leaders in our narrow image — weird, unpopular North Londoners have won three
times in a row now. Labour members like that Corbyn comes across to them as
humble and unambitious, but this is the very same reason that he doesn’t
radiate the strength and leadership the public reasonably look for in their PM. Conor
Pope is right that if Jeremy Corbyn could ever have a moment, it would
be now. But he still won’t. Yes, the polls in America were wrong, especially at
state level, but they weren’t thatwrong. When Jeremy Corbyn trailing far behind
“don’t know” for preferred prime minister and Labour down double
digits mid-term become the norm, that isn’t a modelling error. In the eyes of
Labour members he has
earned the right to face the general electorate regardless, but we
cannot be in denial about where we stand.
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