2020 Can't Be About Defeating Trump at All Costs

There is an old joke-response, which remains popular online to this day, for whenever someone asks a how-to question ("How do I tell my boyfriend I've been having an affair?" "How do I use a pressure cooker?" etc.): "Very carefully." While it may have at times seemed it would never come, we have now made it to 2020, the year in which we will have the opportunity to choose the next president of the United States; and, as we are faced with the ongoing crises of climate change, rising authoritarianism around the globe and increasing inequality, the sincere answer to the question "How should we decide who will be the next president?" is the same as the jocular one: "Very carefully." After years of (mis)rule by Donald Trump and the Republicans, there is a widespread impulse to prioritize getting Trump out of office and put everything else on the back burner for now: the idea is that the Democratic primary voters should leave intra-party bickering behind and simply pick the most "electable" Democratic candidate, and then all who are opposed to Trump should line up and support this candidate in the general election. While this impulse is no doubt encouraged and exploited by cynical party insiders and their ilk, it remains completely understandable given the flagrant and explicit incompetence, corruption and downright cruelty of Trump et al. It is also an extremely dangerous and wrongheaded inclination that should be countered wherever it arises.

As appealing as it would be to believe that simply replacing Donald Trump with any one of the Democratic candidates in the running is enough to solve the problems we face—or at least take a decisive step in the right direction—it's far from clear that this is true; in fact, it plainly isn't. While there can be little question that any of the Democrats would be an overall more competent, honest and humane president than Donald Trump has been, simply being better is far from enough; and when we begin to take other important factors into account, the situation becomes even murkier.

President Donald Trump at the 2019 Conservative Political Action
Conference (Jose Luis Magana, AP via USA Today)

If the Democrat (whoever it ends up being) does defeat Trump this year, they will find themselves in an extremely sensitive and perilous position. They will be forced to confront the aforementioned issues of climate change, authoritarianism and inequality as well the increasingly obvious disconnect between average citizens and their political leadership; at the same time, they will face obstructionism and gridlock that will likely make even moderate reforms legislatively impossible. And, to top it all off, there is every reason to suspect they will have to deal with an economic recession within their first years in office. In a situation like this, there are few paths to success but many paths to failure—and either outcome will have long-term ramifications.

At the same time, the reactionary nativism that has its found its voice in a whole new way during the Trump years will by no means disappear the second a Democrat enters the White House; on the contrary, the GOP appears destined to remain the party of "Trumpism" well after Trump has left office. In fact, he may only be a prelude for what's yet to come. Donald Trump has always been, first and foremost, a billionaire on an ego trip, a creature of id rather than ideology. But whoever picks up the mantle when his time is over might well take Trump's talking points more seriously than he himself ever did. Nor can we expect that they will have the same total lack of decision-making skills and impulse control that has proven to be one of Trump's greatest liabilities. There's no need to rely our imaginations for an image of what a more consistent, shrewder post-Trumpian nationalist might look like: just turn, for instance, to Tucker Carlson, who has become a mainstream exponent of far-right ideology with the intelligence and (apparent) sincerity Trump himself lacks. Even more ominously, he has dabbled in the sort of pseudo-anticapitalist rhetoric that could attract swaths of working class and downwardly mobile voters to a right-wing "populist" candidate. If a Carlson-esque figure (perhaps even Carlson himself—hardly implausible given our current president's history before getting elected) were to emerge and secure the Republican nomination in 2024 or 2028, they might pose a serious challenge to the Democratic candidate. And if this hypothetical demagogue were to become president, they might well do far more lasting damage than Trump has.

Just as Trump will leave his mark on the Republican Party, the next Democratic president could shape their party's direction in long-lasting and important ways. Those changes might impact both the Democratic Party's future electoral success and the policies it enacts when it's in power, both of which could hardly be of greater importance: to allow the Republicans to return to power (assuming they lose it in 2020) could be to move decisively away from any pretense of pluralist liberal democracy and toward some kind of white ethnostate (that is, to return to the not-so-distant past of the United States). This is obviously Trump's vision (insofar as he has any true vision apart from his own glorification) and if he is not able to achieve it, the next Republican president could be. Even to elect a "moderate" Republican president would be to move ever faster toward environmental catastrophe and complete economic oligarchy. On the other hand, even if the Democrats are able to hold power indefinitely, it is a hollow victory if their own policies are ill-equipped to deal with these problems.

In this set of circumstances, no approach guarantees success. Some, however, guarantee failure. Continuing on the road of Clinton-Obama centrism ensures that, even if the Democrats do manage to keep the reactionary right out of power, their approach to the challenges humanity faces will be woefully inadequate and may even make things worse at times. But in one form or another, this is the approach most of the Democratic candidates are offering. However they choose to market it, it becomes clear when they try to paint center-left social democratic policies like single-payer healthcare and a wealth tax as too radical; and attending fundraisers in "wine caves" or with fossil fuel magnates only confirms what should be obvious. Furthermore, it's extremely dubious whether moderate liberalism will be an effective electoral strategy in the long term; after all, it was under Obama that the Democrats lost more combined positions (seats in Congress, state legislatures and governorships) than with any other president. And it was Hillary Clinton, the Democratic establishment's pick, who managed to lose the election to Donald Trump by failing to carry states that no Democratic presidential nominee had lost in decades.

What is the alternative? The only viable one is to build a nationwide (and, indeed, international) popular movement that unites the working class and the economically displaced of all races, ethnicities, sexualities etc. behind the causes of socioeconomic and environmental justice as well as mutual solidarity; specifically, behind policies such as universal single-payer healthcare, a global Green New Deal, an end to neo-imperialism and exploitation of the Third World, as well rights and protections for LGBTQ+ people, refugees, people of color and all other vulnerable groups. If successful, such a movement could help enact important changes on the state and local level and even open up a future path for reform at a federal level by electing progressive and socialist politicians in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to Congress. Additionally, this movement could offer the socially, economically and/or politically alienated a sense that they are part of "something bigger," removing the danger that they simply become (or remain) disengaged, or—worse—fall to prey to the allure of the right-wing (ethno)nationalist project in their search for something that offers them a feeling of belonging. Building such a movement would be no small task, and victory is far from assured; but if we want to protect (and expand) the greatest achievements of human civilization, then—to reappropriate a favorite catchphrase of Margaret Thatcher's—there is no alternative.

Obviously, this left-populist project would require far more than simply electing the right person president in November. But that hardly means the choice is unimportant: by making use of the "bully pulpit," a president could play a key role in encouraging this sort of mass movement, and even with Congress mired in gridlock the president has an enormous amount of power in some areas (foreign policy, for instance). Plus, as noted, the president can shape the direction their party takes in major ways—in this case, whether the Democratic Party would embrace and feed the nascent left-wing movement that already exists and take up that movement's cause as its own, or whether it would remain aloof, even hostile, to the movement and its goals.

The only candidate (at least of those with any realistic shot at winning the Democratic primary) who truly supports the sort of movement I've talked about, and the dramatic changes in both policy and the form of politics itself that such a movement could bring, is, of course, Bernie Sanders. With her completely feckless capitulations, Elizabeth Warren has made it clear that she is not truly committed even to social democratic goals like Medicare for All, let alone to a mass popular movement that could really take the reins and actively shape policy on its own terms; insofar as she supports any mobilization, it is only so the mobilized could bang at the gates of power loudly enough to remind those inside that they (the disempowered) exist and have needs. Warren sincerely supports a kinder and gentler form of the liberal-technocratic form of politics that has prevailed in the Democratic Party for decades now; that the power elite, to use the term coined by sociologist C. Wright Mills, should be more considerate of those affected by its decisions. Sanders, on the other, supports the dismantling of said power elite by changing the politico-economic system from one where a small minority makes the big decisions (with or without the input of "the masses") to one where the masses themselves are organized, informed and engaged—and have the final say over the policies that impact their lives.

The problem with Warren's vision is that the power elite can never truly be "kind" and "gentle" in its role as policymakers: no matter how decent a CEO may be personally, their job is still to make the company profitable even at the expense of its workers, the environment, etc. It is far more utopian to think that our de facto oligarchy could ever become truly benevolent than to think that the citizenry themselves could become informed and active participants in the political system. To even achieve some sort of power-sharing arrangement, as exists in some European social democracies for instance, would at this point require more popular unrest and disruption of the status quo than Warren is likely to encourage or support. Compromises, after all, require that the ruling class fear for its ability to continue ruling effectively—and Warren's readiness to all but abandon Medicare for All has surely shown them she is a paper tiger.

Sanders' liberal critics are certainly right when they say his agenda will be all but impossible to get through Congress, at least in the short term—though they are wrong if they believe his opponents are more likely to "get things done" just because their demands are watered down to begin with. But the primary importance of a Sanders presidency has nothing to do with what he could get enacted legislatively: rather, its significance would be as a disruption of the prevailing political order, opening up the potential for economic and political power to be shifted away from a small minority through popular struggle at the local, state and national level (a struggle that Sanders could serve as a sort of spiritual leader and spokesman for—or at least could keep alive by refusing to permit the feel-good complacency of the Obama era to creep back in).

The difference between Sanders and the rest of the Democratic field, then, is not just one of degree, but of kind. The change that a Bernie Sanders presidency would (ideally) represent offers a path out of the current global nightmare—a long and arduous path, to be certain, but a path nonetheless. Continuing with the liberal-technocratic politics the Democrats have embraced over the past decades can only result in one of two possible outcomes: either electoral success at the expense of a failure to adequately deal with climate change, inequality and our other crises; or electoral failure, bringing to power an extremist right wing that may, at that point, be led by someone more sincere and competent, and therefore more dangerous, than Donald Trump. Both of these options are catastrophic.

We can see, then, that it is inadequate to making defeating Donald Trump the sole—or even primary—priority for the year. The main priority must be to nominate Bernie Sanders—not out of commitment to him as a person, or even because his platform is so great, but because he is the only candidate who meets the bare minimum: specifically, that he fully rejects the utterly defective status quo and offers at least the possibility of transforming the basic structure of our politico-economic system. If the choice in the general election is between four more years of Donald Trump or four years of a liberal-technocratic Democrat like Biden, Buttigieg or, yes, even Elizabeth Warren, then we will already be choosing only between two disasters. We can't allow it to come to that.