America’s midterm elections proved that the era of Donald Trump is passing. But it returns the Democrats and Republicans to the struggle for a working majority after decades of failed policies. It is a struggle that Trump’s ascendancy kicked off – but also postponed with rounds of distraction by his high jinks and obsession with his persona, even after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.
The result that shocked so many in the fall of 2016 was a popular rejection of ruling elites who shared a great deal across partisan lines. Backlash at the economic neoliberalism and endless wars of the age of Ronald Reagan – which later presidents including Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama comfortably inhabited – allowed Trump a victory against mainstream Republicans and then against Hillary Clinton. It nearly allowed Bernie Sanders to break through as presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020; if Sanders failed while Trump succeeded, it was more because of Republican disorganization than because their complaints against both parties were different (though their solutions were).
In the six years since, Trump’s bizarre charisma has waylaid both parties. Neither has sought a credible politician and working majority that together might allow replacing the failed policies of the past. Instead, both declared war on Trump himself.
As the evanescent Never Trump movement among Republicans rose and fell, Democrats chose an avoidant strategy. Putting Trump himself on perpetual trial as if their own policies had not helped make possible his credibility to millions, Democrats first embraced Robert Mueller as a deus ex machina. When he failed to conform to the script, two impeachments were tried. Even their magnification of the frightening events of 6 January 2021 in congressional hearings in the last year – which had far less impact on yesterday’s election than they hoped – fit the avoidant pattern.
The results have been that, even as they presented democracy on the brink and fascism on the march, Democrats have failed to build the transracial working-class majority that alone can get the country beyond the gridlock brought on by the death throes in both parties of the Reagan paradigm.
To his credit, Joe Biden talked a lot about the need for fundamental change, and he was glowingly described as a new version of Franklin D Roosevelt by his fan club. But 2022 proves that he did not provide enough of the goods. Converting a promise to “build back better” into corporate-friendly versions of climate and infrastructure spending, Biden was forced to abandon any commitment to basic welfare protections. And while at first Congress spent a lot, its largesse didn’t trickle down to ordinary people soon enough to stave off the current results.
Roosevelt’s popularity surged after his initial election in 1932, and his own first midterms in 1934 extended his party’s dominance, where Democrats boasted a majority of over 70% of the seats in the House of Representatives. So far, Democrats have decided not to challenge the US supreme court’s abortion decision nationally the way that Roosevelt faced down the enemy juristocracy of his time. The conservative attack on women only helped the Democrats avoid losses in 2022 as grievous as some feared. Unlike Roosevelt, Biden could lose the House, if not the Congress as a whole, promising another two years of gridlock.
The only good news, unless the lowest of low bars is set for the Democrats, is that their need to pivot much further beyond their disastrous prior errors is clearer. Trump’s lies were rejected by enough people – and above all his potential rival Ron DeSantis surged in popularity and across ethnic and racial lines in Florida – that the Democrats will have to drop their obsession with the charlatan they blew up into a totalitarian.
American politics can no longer be a referendum on Trump, or reduced to the mistaken question of whether democracy will survive. Instead, if they are to transcend impasse, Democrats will have to offer a democratically winning proposition, even as the right wing attempts to prove that its politicians are Roosevelt’s better heirs to lead a working-class party.
As the one-hit-wonder band Semisonic once observed: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” They could have been talking about 2022. No one knows how long it will take one of the parties to act to seize the opportunity that has always been there to build a majority coalition beyond the economic neoliberalism and endless warmaking of past elites. But 2022 has cleared the way to do so.
Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale and the author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
