This moment calls for it
As Democratic voters watched the GOP majority in the Congress completely abdicate their role as a separate branch of government and the Washington Democrats, out of power and out of gas, flail ineffectually against the onslaught of extremist right wing policy, they turned their lonely eyes to the Democratic governors in the Big Blue states. Over the last couple of weeks, California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has emerged as the national leader of this group for his pugilistic response to the GOP’s craven mid-decade redistricting plans in Texas. According to polls, as well as any quick perusal of a social media site, this is something the party’s base has been yearning for from their party’s representatives ever since Donald Trump won the White House again and commenced a wholesale destruction of our democratic institutions.
As the governor of the country’s richest and most populous state, Newsom is in an excellent position to take on this particular fight. California has some room to gerrymander enough seats to offset Texas’s move and the state having a strong Democratic majority makes it likely that the state’s voters will approve Newsom’s proposed ballot measure to change its law that requires a non-partisan redistricting commission. But this isn’t the only tactic that Newsom is deploying to bring the fight to Trump and the GOP.
From the moment Trump took office last January, he and Newsom have been at loggerheads over policies that have directly affected California. It started with the massive firestorm that hit Los Angeles in January in which Trump characteristically blamed the state for failing to “rake the forests” and fatuously insisted that it wouldn’t have happened if it had “turned on the valve” that would have supposedly released water from Canada and prevented the fires. To this day the money promised by the federal government has yet to be received. (Other states led by Democratic governors have suffered the same fate.) This summer, Newsom has been at the forefront of the state’s fight against the violent ICE raids and deployment of the National Guards and Marines in Los Angeles and now he’s leading the redistricting battle.
Trump’s antipathy toward California is no secret so it’s no surprise that he would focus on the state. But after an odd, brief foray into some kind of bi-partisan podcast outreach, Newsom’s decided to play a different kind of politics, adopting an aggressive social media trolling strategy and using the power he has as governor of a very big state to confront the Trump administration head on instead of relying on the procedural tactics generally adopted by the Democratic Party in recent decades.
An interesting New York Times article by Jia Lynn Yang provides an interesting insight into how the party evolved as it did and why it’s been so frustratingly impotent in the age of Trump. She notes that the party has had two different political styles, one of which was a ruthless, machine model that dominated the party after the civil war:
Some of the most aggressive gerrymandering in American history occurred after the Civil War, as the parties vied for control of the nation. In Northern industrial cities, Democratic party bosses built a new style of urban machine politics greased by the exchange of money and personal favors.
This system was hardly meritocratic although it did provide for the ascension of accomplished political players who knew how to excite a crowd and leverage the tools of power. But by the turn of the 20th century, the corruption of the Gilded Age opened the door to reform and the progressive movement began to gel, ushering in a new respect for expertise and technocratic skill. The Democrats began to practice this style of politics:
The New Deal coalition under President Franklin Roosevelt managed to merge the party’s urban white ethnic base with an expert reformer class in Washington that defeated both the Great Depression and Nazi Germany. But even as he allowed technocrats into his administration, President Roosevelt was a cutthroat practitioner of politics. No power grab was too outlandish if it helped him achieve his aims. As he wrote in a 1940 letter to Congress: “Substantial justice remains a higher aim for our civilization than technical legalism.”
That balance between good government legal proceduralism and the goal of using power to obtain “substantial justice” kept the Democrats in power for more than 40 years. But in the 1970s, when the New Deal coalition finally fell apart, the proceduralists took over. They made some great strides in the years since then, advancing civil rights and environmental protections among other things. But they were ill-equipped to deal with an opposition that was increasingly turning to hucksters and demagogues.
The Republicans so demeaned the “liberal” brand that defined Roosevelt and the New Deal that in recent years many Democrats adopted the “progressive” label in defense. At the same time, Trump and his movement can be pegged as populist although there are many permutations of that movement that don’t perfectly fit the definition. However, there is one aspect of the GOP’s populism that’s very familiar. As Yale professor Jack Balkin explained in Populism and Progressivism as Constitutional Categories:
History teaches us that populism has recurring pathologies; it is especially important to recognize and counteract them. These dangers are particularly obvious to academics and other intellectual elites: They include fascism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, persecution of unpopular minorities, exaltation of the mediocre, and romantic exaggeration of the wisdom and virtue of the masses.
That certainly sounds familiar doesn’t it? But at the same time, progressivism has its own pathologies. As Balkin writes:
Unfortunately, these tend to be less visible from within a progressivist sensibility. They include elitism, paternalism, authoritarianism, naivete, excessive and misplaced respect for the “best and brightest,” isolation from the concerns of ordinary people, an inflated sense of superiority over ordinary people, disdain for popular values, fear of popular rule, confusion of factual and moral expertise, and meritocratic hubris.
That also sounds familiar although I think the right’s depiction of the Democrats as the party of “elites” — which also includes most working class people of color — paints with a pretty broad brush.
The point is that we are in a populist era. People are upset and it’s not just the right wingers with all those negative traits listed above. There is a sense that things have taken a wrong turn among people of all political persuasions. Technocratic progressivism almost certainly has better solutions but it is cumbersome and doesn’t appeal to the people’s passions the way populist demagoguery does. Meanwhile, we are dealing with a Republican party for which it’s impossible to determine whether the greater danger is from its brutal destruction of democracy or its monumental ineptitude.
It’s clear that what Democrats need is New Deal style politics and they need it now. And that includes the ruthless tactics Roosevelt employed as well as the technocratic experimentation of the progressives in his administration. I have no idea who the leader might be that can manage such a thing but we have to hope that Newsom and others in the party who have national ambitions take these lessons seriously and follow the Roosevelt model with the best of both worlds.