What do Democrats stand for? Over the last eight years, the answer has been simple: whatever Donald Trump is against. They have been the party of the so-called Resistance, defending institutions against a dangerous and fundamentally undemocratic movement. Two impeachments, four criminal investigations and 34 felony convictions, along with countless warnings that democracy was in peril: All of it flowed out of the conviction that Mr. Trump was a menace who couldn’t be addressed by politics as usual. It has defined what it means to be a Democrat. And it failed spectacularly this week, helping clear a path for Mr. Trump to return to the White House with a clean victory in the popular vote. This time, there’s no James Comey to scapegoat or Electoral College to blame. It’s a painful defeat — but it could also be a moment of rebirth for the party as it sets out to find a lasting Democratic majority.
The first step for Democrats is reckoning with how they got here. The origins of Resistance politics go back over a decade, even before Mr. Trump entered politics. In 2011, with Mr. Trump making headlines as the leading spokesman for birtherism, Barack Obama’s team seized the opportunity to cast him as the face of the entire Republican opposition. Years later, David Plouffe, an Obama campaign manager turned presidential adviser, explained the strategy. “Let’s really lean into Trump here,” Mr. Plouffe remembered thinking. “That’ll be good for us.”
And it was, for a while — so good that when Mr. Plouffe joined Kamala Harris’s campaign over the summer, it still seemed like the basis for a winning coalition. Democrats had reinvented themselves on policy several times over since Mr. Plouffe was in the White House, trading Hillary Clinton’s technocratic progressivism for President Biden’s attempt at a second New Deal and then pivoting back to the center with Ms. Harris. But the anti-MAGA coalition had rallied time and again, conveniently relieving Democrats of the burden that comes with deciding what to believe other than not being Mr. Trump.
But there was a price to be paid. No matter how progressive the rhetoric, Resistance politics inevitably feels conservative. It’s reactionary in a literal sense: The other side decides the terms of debate, and it usually ends with finding yet another norm under assault, a new outrage to be tutted over or another institution that needs protecting.
Whatever mistakes Ms. Harris made — and there will be plenty for the postmortems to chew over — her biggest challenges were downstream from the failure to build a Democratic identity beyond #Resistance. Commitment to stitching together an anti-MAGA coalition made it impossible to lay out the priorities that would have guided a Harris administration. There was no way to tie her policies together into a unifying vision that set her apart from Mr. Biden, no account of what Democrats learned presiding over a country that most Americans feel is on the wrong track.
This fundamental problem explains the strange incoherence of Ms. Harris’s strategy. Judge the campaign by how it was described in the press, and you’d think the chief targets were Never Trump Republicans waiting for Liz Cheney to give them permission to vote blue. Check out the ads that ran in swing states, though, and you’d hear a populist message that wouldn’t have sounded out of place coming from Bernie Sanders, filled with direct-to-camera addresses from voters saying that Ms. Harris would “cut taxes for working people like me” and “it makes me so mad that billionaires pay less in taxes than I do.”
Ms. Harris could express anger over election denialism, the rollback of abortion rights and the parade of scandals following in Mr. Trump’s wake. But she struggled to harness material frustrations, even though testing from her chief super PAC, Future Forward, repeatedly demonstrated that it was her strongest argument with swing voters. (That a secretive super PAC funded by a clique of uber-wealthy donors largely based in Silicon Valley — Bill Gates alone gave $50 million — took the lead in making the case for economic populism points to even bigger problems for Democrats.) No amount of on-the-ground organizing, cutting-edge data science, celebrity endorsements or good vibes could make up for this underlying weakness.
None of this means Democrats are destined for a protracted tour in the wilderness. Although it’s going to take time for reliable data to come in, the broad-based character of the shift toward Republicans is the classic tell of an electorate frustrated with an incumbent party. For now, the election looks like a rejection of Mr. Biden, not a realignment for Mr. Trump. There were enough victories for Democrats — including Senate candidates who outperformed Ms. Harris across the Midwest and the Sun Belt — to keep the election from turning into a Republican blowout. And the pendulum that swung against Democrats on Tuesday will bring them back into power eventually. If history is any guide, that day will probably arrive sooner than feels possible right now.
Still, progressives worried that fascism is on the march would benefit from taking a closer look at how these movements gain power. Reflecting on Hitler’s rise in her native Germany, Hannah Arendt pointed out that by the final days of the Weimar Republic, politics had split into two irreconcilable factions: “those who wanted the status quo at any price” versus “those who wanted change at any price.” One thing both groups had in common, she added, was “the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened.”
Awkward coalitions across left and right have their place during emergencies, and there’s no politics without some fearmongering. But the methods Democrats counted on to keep Mr. Trump out of the White House came up short, and the excuses have lost touch with electoral reality. He was impeached, indicted and convicted, and then he won more votes in a fair fight with what could well be the most racially diverse Republican coalition in decades. Trumpism doesn’t have a generational lock on American politics, but it has broad and deep support, with the potential to grow in the years to come.
Democrats brought this battle on themselves, and they lost it. The Resistance has run into a dead end. That doesn’t mean ignoring the ideological overreach, bureaucratic incompetence and flagrant corruption that is guaranteed to pile up in Mr. Trump’s Washington. But it does mean giving up on the hope that laws, norms or one last impeachment will deliver us from Trumpism. It’s going to take a sprawling, messy and sometimes brutal debate inside the Democratic coalition — a debate that ends with a party that can plausibly present itself as a champion of ordinary people trying to make a better life in a broken system.
That’s not Resistance. It’s democracy.
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