For as long as most of us have been alive, the Democratic Party of the United States has enjoyed a rare and extraordinary luxury: basic, unquestioned stability in its nation’s laws, values, and political processes. The United States has, of course, undergone extraordinary changes in the last 80 years or so—racial integration, deindustrialization, women’s liberation, suburbanization, television and the internet. But the basic ethos of what it meant to be an American was an unquestioned consensus, pure background noise to the game of day-to-day Congressional debates and electoral campaigns. There was no serious reason to fear for the country’s small-r republican government structure, its capital-L Liberal values of individualism and political equality, or its ability to peacefully transfer power from one regime to the next.

This is no longer true. It probably will not be true again for the rest of any of our lifetimes. The second Trump administration is an organized, concerted effort to permanently destroy the America that anyone reading this thought they lived in, and assemble a new, fascist one in its place. This is not merely a shift in the political winds, to which savvy politicians might adjust their sails and ride on to new career accomplishments. This is an attempt to prevent the political winds from blowing altogether—to make it impossible for anyone but Trump and his innermost circle of ideologues to ever be considered truly American, and thus, to have even the option of wielding power in American society.

It has left Democrats in the nation’s capital blindsided. Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng recently wrote that Democrats worry they don’t have their own Stephen Miller. Why don’t they?

Simple: Stephen Miller chose a life in politics for fundamentally different reasons than the top Democratic operatives. Miller is not interested in networking with Democrats after work, whispering ways they can advance each other’s careers, which ultimately drives policy moderation and compromise for the sake of mutual professional advancement. Miller came to Washington to imprison, humiliate, torture, and kill immigrants. He doesn’t care if doing so is uncollegial, or if some rules on an old piece of parchment say he’s not allowed to. This disregard for “the way it’s done” means the two major parties—and thus, the American ruling classes—no longer share a core ideological framework.

For decades, Democrats have clung to the fantasy that after one more election, one more vote, one more scandal, the Republican “fever” will break and their “friends across the aisle” will snap back to the postwar liberal-democratic consensus that Democrats treat as America’s natural state. But as Jon Stewart put it, “if someone’s been running a fever since the aughts, that’s not a fever. That’s their default resting temperature.”

The old mid-century world is gone. If the Democratic Party, and the country, want to survive, they need to wake up and choose what they want the next world to look like. Then they need to start fighting for it.

The Democratic Ethos

The Democratic Party is not a movement. As Michael Kazin shows in his history of the party, its core political identity has always been in flux, even contradiction. In 1860, the archetypal Democrat was an avowed pro-slavery small-farmer. By 1960, the archetypal Democrat was an urbanite leading the charge for integration. To Kazin, the Democratic Party’s only consistent principle has been support for its own continuation—doing What It Took To Win.

After working in and around Democratic politics for years, my own mental model of the party today is basically LinkedIn: “the Democrats” are a slew of concentric and overlapping professional circles, whose members join primarily to advance their individual careers through collegiality, networking, and co-branding. There is no clearly stated, much less enforced, set of political principles that one must adopt and abide by to be a Democrat. Efforts to develop such core commitments are decried as “purity tests.” The only question is “What can you do for me?”

Of course, the Democratic Party has struck bargains with many grassroots political movements over the decades, such as the labor, environmental, and civil rights movements. They promise to vote for Democratic candidates if the candidates promise to enact the movements’ preferred policies. But this tit-for-tat contractual relationship is not the same thing as being a party for a movement, in the way that the Republicans are now the party for Trumpist fascism. Trump loyalists drove out any Republican who opposed or even questioned the Trump agenda, and they now enforce rigid discipline among electeds by threatening primaries and even violence. By contrast, a Democrat in good standing may take votes and funds from capital as well as labor, big polluters as well as environmentalists. The only way to be a true traitor to the Democratic Party is to inconvenience its electoral goals or internal hierarchies, such as by primarying a long-time member. Allies are exchangeable, club loyalty is not.

No matter what, some vision must emerge to unify and organize the full anti-Trump camp. It must be a vision that has genuinely learned from past mistakes.

This social-network-as-political-party model can work just fine in a country with unquestioned commitment to capital-L Liberal values—individual rights, democratic-republican government, market economics, and so on. If the whole society agrees that each individual should rise or fall on their own merit, then finding fellows to help one another rise as efficiently as possible is common cause enough for politics. Parties need money and votes, both of which are perfectly fungible goods. Thus, anyone who can provide money or votes, regardless of context, is someone to court. However, some allies may alienate others. Thus, it’s economically optimal to promise each ally only modest progress—capture the lion’s share of each rivalrous faction for the largest total support pool, don’t chase the marginal die-hards, and make it that much easier to keep your modest promises once elected.

This was how America worked for generations, and it was so stable and consistent that people started to forget the Liberal structures enabling it were choices, subject to change. Party politics began to look like a math problem, and the solution was always moderation. Data-intensive pollsters and media-savvy strategists became Democratic celebrities, offering lucrative advice on how to say the right thing, rather than listening and doing the right thing. Philosophy and political economy became political and economic “science,” governed by rational “laws” of human behavior, so naturalized were we all to Constitutional government. Today, the most professionally successful Democrats exploit the normie voters for cash with ever-more-manic fundraising emails, rather than actually using that cash to win elections.

Unfortunately for those operatives, the music has nearly stopped playing. The last decade of Trumpism steadily demolished the Liberal social expectations that underpinned the Democratic alliance system, and the last year in particular has crushed the legal pillars of American Liberal life. Regardless of whether it was ever truly the case, in America today, one clearly does not rise or fall on their own merit. Today, one rises or falls based on proximity to, similarity to, and identification with Donald Trump.

The Trumpian Ethos

Trump has already seized three of the key constituent elements of a country: its laws, its soldiers, and law enforcement, and its fiscal apparatus. In law, it is now effectively impossible for the President of the United States to commit a crime. The entire federal bureaucracy now serves at the President’s pleasure, meaning their job is to please the President. The Justice Department legally intimidates his enemies, while business regulators extort firms for his pleasure.

This is all backed by Trump’s command of state violence. He controls a private army of masked thugs who send his chosen scapegoats to concentration camps foreign and domestic, threatening lawmakers who stand in their way. As for the money, his attendants can terminate allocated funds as they wish, effectively seizing the power of the purse; if they successfully crush central bank independence, they will fully seize the government’s ability to create liquidity.

With control over the lawyers, guns, and money, the President now turns to the podiums. Trump’s peon at the once-independent Federal Communications Commission has installed an “ombudsman” at CBS News to neutralize criticism, where Stephen Colbert suddenly lost his job; no jester’s privilege under this king. Three Ivy-League universities have already paid ransoms to the President and granted him control over some curricula, while promising to suppress student speech. A fourth school is publicly considering a similar deal, and Trump has already threatened a fifth.

These changes will not disappear quickly, and certainly not under the deliberative, compromising norms to which Democrats are acculturated. Paul Starr concluded in the American Prospect that just re-establishing the old “three branches of government” Constitutional framework would require sweeping amendments and court reform unseen since the New Deal. And let’s not forget that the Trumpist movement features violent, armed, and organized paramilitaries, steeped in apocalyptic rhetoric about a Democratic takeover, who already attempted a coup the last time their enemy gained power. Republican states are already trying to criminalize Democratic efforts at resistance.

If liberal-left governments do not address the material causes of public anger, the right will always fill the void by scapegoating the most vulnerable.

Viewed altogether, it is clear that the societal assumptions that made the Democratic Party possible are either dead or dying.

But the long-term success of the President’s project will be measured in control over the history books. Deleting webpages that reference the Navajo Code Talkers, painting over Black Lives Matter murals, and the weaponized obsession with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives—the latest way for the American right to

© Common Dreams