Democrats enabled Donald Trump to become president twice because of repetition compulsions that still propel the party’s leaders – undermining the party’s potential to end the real-life nightmare of Maga control over the federal government. Scrutinizing how this century’s Democratic leaders set the stage for Trump’s electoral triumphs is crucial not only for clarity about the past. It also makes possible a vital focus on how such failures can be avoided in the future.

Elites did quite well after Barack Obama took back the presidency for Democrats in January 2009, amid the Great Recession. He bailed out big banks while a huge number of people lost their homes. By the time Obama was most of the way through his presidency, he had facilitated “the dispossession of at least 5.2 million US homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century”, the journalist David Dayen pointed out.

Obama’s last year as president was supposed to lead to Hillary Clinton’s first. She was the party establishment’s favorite. “You know, I get accused of being kind of moderate and center,” Clinton told a Women for Hillary audience in 2015. “I plead guilty.” The Democratic National Committee and corporate media provided major assists as she withstood the strong progressive campaign of Bernie Sanders. But after winning the nomination, Clinton never got traction with younger voters, who had gone overwhelmingly for Sanders during the primaries.

After Trump defeated Clinton in November 2016, Democratic party leaders could hardly blame themselves or their “moderate and center” nominee. Criticizing her coziness with Wall Street wouldn’t do. Neither would critiquing her thinly veiled contempt for the progressive wing of the party. Instead, the swift response from prominent Clinton campaigners was to blame Russia, launching a prolonged fixation on “Russiagate” that let the corporate-friendly leaders of the party off the hook.

The party leadership’s devotion to economic elites continued to evade scrutiny. As Sanders told a reporter in 2017: “Certainly there are some people in the Democratic party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”

Ensconced in plush staterooms, the top congressional Democrats, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, kept a firm hold on the party’s legislators, deterring progressive efforts of much consequence as Trump became accustomed to wielding presidential power. The party discipline remained after Democrats won back the House in the 2018 midterm elections. With Pelosi again gripping the speaker’s gavel, her renowned ability to extract gobs of money from deep pockets went hand in hand with reinforcing continual deference to corporate power and a steady embrace of militarism benefitting giant corporations.

Shortly after the midterms, a Green New Deal sit-in at Pelosi’s Capitol office confronted the party’s anemic responses to the climate emergency. The Sunrise Movement charged that “Nancy Pelosi is bringing a squirt gun to a wildfire”. But the most powerful Democrat on Capitol Hill was dismissive, downplaying the climate crisis while further alienating activists in the youth-led climate movement and their allies. In February 2019, soon after settling back into the House speaker’s chair, Pelosi insulted supporters of the Green New Deal, referring to it in a media interview as “the green dream or whatever they........

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