A few days after the 2016 election, I posted a flowchart with options for responses. It was by far my most-shared post in decades of blogging and was used a fair amount in grassroots meetings between 2016 and 2018.
This is a better version of the same graphic:
Two questions: How much was done in each of these boxes in 2016-18? And what is most important now?
The anti-Trump side did win the next two elections, although by a closer margin in ’20 than some might have expected. I think we observed a complex mix of all the ideas in that column, from changing some voting rules to building new coalitions. However, at the national level, the majority coalition is mainly the same as the one that elected Obama, and not larger as a percentage of the population.
Characterizing Black Lives Matter and climate mobilization as “resistance to Trump” is reductive: those movements were already underway before his election and will continue after, frequently targeting Democrats. Still, the combination of protest and litigation has been pretty effective.
Under “repairing the fabric” are two importantly different paths. Many people have worked hard on both. For examples of work in the cross-partisan lane, see Braver Angels, the Bridge Alliance, the Civic Health Project, and many other groups. Meanwhile, institutions and communities are paying attention to vulnerable people.
Both strategies are very hard, and the main trends are against them. Trauma and affective partisanship have intensified, which doesn’t take anything away from the people who are combatting either or both. The situation might well be even worse without these people, but now is a time to reflect on larger-scale strategies.
The last column is about preserving or changing the “regime.” I didn’t mean that word as pejorative; it’s just political-science talk for the government plus the other institutions that connect to it, such as parties and the media. The current regime survived but is surely fragile–see a recent piece of mine for some reasons.
Which of these paths should we emphasize next? My predictable answer is: all of them. I thought that a Biden administration would face a genuine dilemma: either fighting for valuable political reforms that would be seen as partisan or else reducing partisanship. GOP control of the Senate may simply preclude political reform at the national level, which might be an argument for focusing a four-year Biden administration on lowering the partisan temperature. That doesn’t mean that political reform is dead, because it has potential at the state and city level.
I remain interested in policy approaches that could possibly expand the majority while disrupting partisanship by assembling strange bedfellows. For instance, libertarians should be (and often are) appalled by Trump and can find substantive common ground with left-liberals on some policies, e.g., criminal justice reform.
A related strategy is to emphasize certain bread-and-butter policies that involve the government less in people’s lives while still boosting economic equity. A minimum wage referendum passed in Florida even as Trump won the state. The reason could be that there’s a latent majority for left-economic policies that the Democrats missed by nominating a moderate. (That’s the “Bernie would have won” argument.) A different explanation is that people don’t like the government or taxes, partly because they see the government as the representative of hostile cultural values, but they’re happy to pass unfunded mandates on the private sector. This kind of social policy has promise if the outcomes are actually beneficial.
See also white working class alienation from government; promoting democracy and reducing polarization; some remarks on Elinor Ostrom and police reform; political reform in Massachusetts, etc.
