For more than 30 years -- ever since the rise of the "New Democrats" and the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s -- establishment centrists have practiced the top-down politics of neoliberalism, a politics founded on the free-market gospel: deregulation of banking and finance, friendliness toward corporate monopolies, limited support (at best) for labor unions and workers, the endless "liberalization" of global trade, and reflexive antagonism for the social safety net. As all the numbers show, corporate America and the One Percent reaped the lion's share of neoliberalism's benefits, while the Democratic Party's once-traditional constituencies -- poor people, and the working and middle classes -- fell further and further behind. The party itself -- once the dominant force in national politics, and in the majority of states -- gradually slid into minority status, culminating in the wipeout of 2016.
2018's blue-wave centrists are made of different stuff. This year's energy came from the bottom up, thanks to widespread local activism and grassroots organizing, much of it led by women newly politicized in the wake of 2016. The party's small-donor base became increasingly powerful, enabling candidates like Beto O'Rourke to run robustly financed campaigns while refusing PAC money and the strings that come with it.
This same small-donor and activist groundswell made Democrats competitive in regions long ago written off by establishment centrists who have long been less focused on the concerns of working people than on cherry-picking just enough Electoral College votes to win the presidency every four years. In 2018, however, we saw Democratic candidates running and winning in deep-red areas while talking up labor unions (Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania), slamming the "rigged system" that neoliberalism produced (Max Rose on New York's Staten Island), and pushing for common-sense gun control (Lucy McBath in Georgia).
Democrats interested in taking back the Midwest should look to the example of Ohio's Sherrod Brown, one of Bernie Sanders's closest allies in the Senate. A strong voice for labor and the middle class and a longtime skeptic of international trade deals, Brown won reelection by seven percentage points in a state otherwise trending Republican. The same was true for Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has prioritized the interests of working people her entire career. She won reelection by 24 points in Minnesota, a state Trump almost won in 2016.
The blue-wave centrists put real issues front and center: housing, wages, access to health care, basic fairness and opportunity for working people. Whatever name you want to put to these issues -- centrist, progressive, populist, lunch bucket, kitchen table -- these haven't been the priorities of the establishment centrists of the past 30 years. For a clue, look no farther than the Third Way's close ties to K Street, the epicenter of corporate lobbying in Washington, and to the investment banking industry.
Trump lost in 2018, but he remains nearly as powerful as ever. He's a sitting president with a ferociously loyal base, a Senate majority that's about to get bigger, and a federal judiciary that hews further to the right with each new raft of appointments. In the days since the election he's shown no moderating tendencies, instead threatening the incoming House Democratic majority with a "warlike posture," firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, illegally "appointing" a sketchy acting attorney general, further defying the Refugee Act of 1980, banning a CNN reporter from the White House, and defending Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the state-sponsored murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Trump is still Trump, and America is still America. In the days after the election, wildfires raged through northern California, leaving scores dead and many thousands homeless, and in the country's 307th mass shooting in the first 313 days of 2018, a gunman killed 13 people at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, California.
Welcome to the struggle for the country's soul. We haven't seen anything yet.
Ben Fountain's Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution has just been published by Ecco/HarperCollins. He is the author of a novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which received the National Book Critics' Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, and a story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which received the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize for Fiction. He lives in Dallas.
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Copyright 2018 Ben Fountain
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