History doesn’t give us second chances.
All this year, right up through the start of voting and even over the past weekend in Michigan, the Democratic Party has been roiled by assorted fights within its primaries and in the media. Some insist that these fights reflect great, irreconcilable differences. We have been told that this election is about the young versus the old, or socialism versus capitalism, or minding our own business in the world versus honoring our longtime alliances.
But President Trump has it right: We should vote as if he were on the ballot. Ultimately, nothing else matters.
The Democratic Party remains the only viable alternative to the Trump administration. And for all of their shortcomings, the Democrats remain a mass political party in the American tradition, rather than the bizarre personality cult into which the Republican Party has devolved.
Democrats argue openly with one another. They disagree. They see the world in different ways. We have been treated to the standard punchlines (again): “I’m not a member of any organized political party … I’m a Democrat.” And: “Democrats want to fall in love. Republicans just fall in line.”
They’re great lines; they just aren’t true. Historically, Democrats have fallen in line plenty of times. Many of us had grave qualms about Bill Clinton, or didn’t much care for Hillary or Joe or Kamala. We voted for them anyway. It’s difficult to think of any major Democratic candidate who has been widely loved in the party over the past 60 years, with the sterling exception of President Barack Obama.
Somehow, we managed to go on. Facing the world like adults (most of the time), we did not expect to find perfection in a political platform or a person.
I don’t mean to minimize all of the splits in the Democratic Party. Some of them are very real and very deep — as are the divisions in our nation. We are genuinely, morally offended by what some of those whom we want to vote with believe in. I am morally offended myself by what some of my fellow Democrats profess to want and believe. But then, I always was. When I started voting for Democrats, George Wallace and a great many last-ditch defenders of segregation were still in the party. So were those who were shocked by the idea of women’s rights, gay rights and abortion rights.
Like it or not, making common cause with people you disagree with, even vehemently, even on moral grounds, is an American tradition — a necessity, especially in times of crisis.
The Republican Party was born out of such a coalition of antagonists and fought and won the Civil War with them: nativist Know-Nothings and Irish and German immigrants who died by the tens of thousands fighting for the Union. Freed African Americans who made the same ultimate sacrifice. Early feminists struggling for their own freedom. Yeoman farmers and merchants and the new titans of industry, and even many Democrats.
The Democratic coalition that Franklin Delano Roosevelt put together in the 1930s to get us through the Great Depression, win the worst war in human history and bring about profound, lasting reform to American life was an even broader alliance — one so wide that it seems impossible now that it came into existence at all, much less lasted for some 64 years, despite various eruptions and fissures. Ethnic urban whites and Dust Bowl farmers, union men and women, environmentalists, feminists, isolationists and internationalists, Black sharecroppers and Southern bourbons.
For all that divided us, we have — enough of us — come together when we saw the greater evil, and that united effort is if nothing else the essence of practical democracy. When the Slave Power did its best to destroy the Union in the 1860s, when it seemed that we would be smothered by economic despair and ecological collapse and global fascism in the 1930s and ’40s, we put aside our differences at least long enough to stand against the more immediate threat.
In sheer dollar terms, Mr. Trump is the most corrupt leader in the history of Western democracy. He, his family and their confederates have solicited and accepted (and continue to solicit and accept) billions of dollars from business interests and foreign governments. The money aside — and it is never an aside for Mr. Trump — it is easy enough to leaf through the depredations of his administration. The foolish wars, recklessly fought. The threats to abandon or invade some of our best and oldest allies. The deployment of the Justice Department to intimidate all enemies, real and imagined, from talk show hosts to college presidents. The killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the slashing of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the growing shadow worlds of A.I. and crypto, the revival of measles and other long conquered diseases. The degradation of our civic life through endless, meandering social media posts and speeches dripping with insults and lies and vulgarities. The threats to annul our elections, backed by the memory of the criminal storming of the Capitol in 2021. The constant hollowing out of what we are and what we aspire to be as Americans, at home and in the world.
One of the less noticed outrages of the past year was Mr. Trump floating the notion to Iran that we should settle our war by agreeing to control and exploit together the oil trade through the Strait of Hormuz. This is the essence of Trumpism: there is no moral stand, even in defense of the nation, that cannot be instantly converted into a business opportunity.
It is impossible to believe that the fractious, bickering Democratic Party would ever back any administration, its own included, engaged in such runaway lawlessness and destruction. Yet save for some feeble, token opposition, Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court, motivated by fantasy and fear, have fallen in line and enabled Mr. Trump to do largely what he likes.
We face now the greatest threat in our history — a combination, in effect, of the worst threats we have faced in the past. Never before have such powerful, well-funded and ruthless forces from within our country so colluded with one another and with foreign powers as they do today — starting with our president.
Those of us who caviled at Bernie bros for not coming forward readily enough to support Hillary Clinton against Mr. Trump in 2016 cannot now deny our votes to those candidates we adamantly disagree with if it means bringing in House and Senate majorities that might finally curb Mr. Trump’s power. Those of us who believed ourselves too pure to support establishment Democrats cannot now stand on our principles and watch the world go to hell.
Hate what your candidate has to say about Israel or Palestine? Believe that Medicare for all is the only solution or the worst one? Convinced that Chuck Schumer isn’t fighting hard enough, or that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will alienate swing voters? Think that A.I. is the future — or the end of the future?
If those fights matter at all — and I believe they do — we cannot have them now. We must first deal with the active menace at hand.
History is a string of critical moments, which can never be regained or recreated just as they were. We cannot miss this one.
Kevin Baker is a co-author of Harry Belafonte’s memoir, “A Burning House: My Politics.”
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