Forgetting the 2000s

One of Biden’s final acts as president was to name the country’s next two aircraft carriers after former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Aesthetically, the act is both a masterpiece and a travesty: on one hand, a kind of wink and nudge at the nation’s commitment to a peaceful transfer of power regardless of party; on the other, a convenient erasure of Bush’s deeply controversial legacy. 

The exact number of casualties from the Iraq War was never established, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands and, by one account, roughly a million. A recent study of post-9/11 wars, including Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, estimates total deaths at around 4.5 million.

Those wars and staggering death tolls, along with the Supreme Court’s decision to hand Bush the presidency in 2000, seem forgotten. By some measures, perhaps the latter is now quaint. After Trump’s disciples’ naive attempts to overturn an election through a coup, Bush’s coup by court seems rather orderly, maybe even genteel.

But there’s a deeper problem in mindlessly observing the rituals of a democratic political system that is competitive but not, strictly speaking, typically violent. For Democrats, such gestures reveal not only their willingness to play by a different set of rules than their opponents but also a moral posturing — “when they go low, we go high” — that acts as a fig leaf covering the party’s deeper failure to engage with the class-based dealignments that made Trump’s victory possible in the first place.

Chasing a Phantom

As Trump rose to power, Democrats made common cause with neoconservative “Never Trumpers,” fawning over the Lincoln Project and clapping like seals for David Frum — a former Bush speechwriter — as he scolded Trumpism. In the 2024 election, the Kamala Harris campaign made an ornate show of winning Republican Liz Cheney – daughter of Bush vice president Dick Cheney — who also backed the Democrat.

The spirit and cluelessnes of the Democrat’s attempt to woo Republicans was best captured by a sign that hung behind Harris and Cheney, a slogan adopted to capture the spirit of the alliance, during a conversation between the two: “Country Over Party,” it read.

As John Nichols points out in the Nation, “while many Democratic tacticians were enthusiastic about Cheney’s jumping on board as a Harris backer, Republican voters couldn’t have cared less.” Republicans repaid the patriotic, ostensibly bipartisan effort by voting for Trump in greater numbers than in 2020, a fact also noted by Nichols as “a political fiasco.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to capture voters from the other side of the aisle. But the Democrat’s appeal was not so much a substantive call to solidarity, based on a substantive program, as it was a mealy-mouthed call to “unity.” Trump, they warned correctly, is a threat to democratic institutions, even democracy itself. But they did not take into account the fact that plenty of people distrust those institutions and want something more. It is instructive to contrast this nebulous approach with the alternative path the Dems decided to dynamite — the one Bernie Sanders outlined in the speech announcing his 2016 presidential bid.

Some Democratic insiders didn’t love the Cheney play nor the ecumenical strategy. As Rolling Stone reports, a handful of them “begged” the Harris campaign not to do it, lest they alienate their base and fail to recruit converts from the other side. They were correct.

It’s something worse than ironic that the strategy not only contributed to the Harris’s loss but underscored the Democrat’s embrace of figures and policies that exacerbated and entrenched the economic woes of the working class, fueling anti-elite, anti-system backlash. In doing so, they helped cement the conditions for Trump’s ongoing success.

Democrats, Drop the Nice Guy Act

Now that Trump will be sworn in as the forty-seventh president, the Democrats face a critical decision. They can observe the niceties of the parliamentary tradition and the requirements of officialdom while pretending that some chivalric order of partisan restraint governs the politics of the day. Or they can decide that the other side is indeed as bad as they’ve been saying it is in their fundraising emails — and behave accordingly.

The Democrats could even be so bold as to draw a line from Trump back to the Ronald Reagan era — accounting for the Third Way failures of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama along the way — and reflect on the economic, civil rights, and military abuses of the Bush Jr years. They might even consult the now famous 2014 paper by political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page that found that, for all intents and purposes, the United States isn’t so much a democracy as it is an oligarchy. They might even note that the paper came out more than a decade before Biden’s White House farewell suggested that the president himself had caught on to the problem.

The challenge for Democrats now will be to ignore the instincts of their think tanks and advisors who press for a pan-national strategy rooted not just in another era but another universe. Instead, they must recognize that class dealignment — a phenomena that some, at least, understand as stretching back to the Reagan years — is a problem that isn’t just going to disappear. They need to appreciate that the Bush-era Republicans they seek to make common cause with are part of the problem — and that they will turn on the Democrats without warning.

Once the party has accepted that there’s nothing to gain electorally by chasing a fantasy, or by preserving decorum above all at the cost of winning, the healing can begin. Then, with an agenda that is unapologetically focused on the working class and affordability — on dismantling Republican programs of deregulation and tax cuts, curbing oligarchic power, and committing to no longer enabling or taking part in foreign misadventures — they could find a path to political renewal and an actual chance of victory.