The Left Won't Win Within the Democratic Party

Nina Turner delivers her concession speech
(Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images via Politico)

A week ago today, the modern progressive movement (to the extent that any such thing even exists) suffered yet another stinging setback: the defeat of Nina Turner, co-chair of Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign and former president of the advocacy group Our Revolution, in her bid to win election to Congress. In some ways, the Democratic race in Ohio's 11th congressional district went like a rerun in miniature of last year's presidential primary: when Turner had clear frontrunner status, major figures from the party establishment like Hillary Clinton and Jim Clyburn lined up behind her opponent Shontel Brown, and SuperPAC money flooded in, managing in the end to push Brown across the finish line.

The outcome of this election, for me, doesn't change anything—because I had already concluded some time ago that it's a fool's errand for anyone on the left to try to transform the Democratic Party from within. The 2020 primary made this clear to me once and for all: the Establishment is simply too powerful. It sets the parameters of the contest for power, it writes the rules of the game, and it is remarkably effective at winning that game. There is no "pushing the Democrats to the left" in any meaningful sense.

That doesn't mean that working within the Democratic Party will accomplish nothing, of course. No—in order to keep progressives and leftists from abandoning the party altogether, the Democratic establishment is certainly willing to throw a bone or two their way, every now and again. And occasionally, a progressive challenger can unseat an establishment-backed figure—even an incumbent (just ask Joe Crowley or Eliot Engel). But we're talking marginal, around-the-edges stuff here. There are not going to be enough AOC-defeats-Crowley type primaries to really transform the party, and the self-described socialist candidates that have made it all the way to Congress have so far been of limited utility, anyway. Which is not entirely their fault: they are working within a party and a political system designed to pull them to the right. 

Joe Biden's presidency has so far been illustrative of how little the Democratic Party has really changed, despite flimsy claims to the contrary. I've already addressed his willingness to abandon progressive goals like a $15-an-hour minimum wage seemingly at the drop of a hat, and recent events
only show how unwilling he is to deviate too far from the "center." In contrast to even Obama's attempts to thaw the US relationship with Cuba, the Biden administration recently slapped the country with new sanctions. Meanwhile on the domestic front, Biden allowed the eviction moratorium to lapse, claiming he had no legal authority to extend it—only to decide, days after the original ban had expired, that he did have the authority to put in place a more limited moratorium (so why not do that in the first place, one wonders)? Even this debacle overshadows the reality that the only thing "preventing" Biden from extending the original moratorium was Brett Kavanaugh's indication—not ruling—that he thought doing so exceeded the CDC's statutory authority. 

The Biden administration has, of course, done some good and important things on the economic front. But this is in the face of a major global crisis the likes of which hasn't been seen for at least the better part of a century. While it is certainly desirable to get the American economy back up and running, Biden's attempts to do so—and to provide temporary relief in the meantime—in no way amount to some kind of new New Deal, let alone anything more radical. He has taken actions that are absolutely pragmatic for someone who supports American capitalism as it has existed in the neoliberal era, and wants to return that system to full function—nothing more, nothing less.

We should also acknowledge that the power-holders within the Democratic Party are not the only thing preventing a left-wing takeover; so are its voters. Not surprisingly, the type of people who show up to vote in Democratic primaries tend to have reasonably positive views of figures like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton—all of whom are figures that any authentic left-wing movement must view as its opponents. On the other hand, the Democratic primary electorate is likely to exclude the type of people that the left should be trying the most hard to reach out to—those who correctly view both parties (and politics in general) as essentially corporate-run and/or alienated from regular people, and who are therefore disinclined to vote in either party's primaries, if at all. It's true that Democratic primary voters do often support leftish policies like Medicare for All and a higher minimum wage, but it should be clear by now that this doesn't translate into support for candidates who will actually deliver those policies. As long as the left associates itself with the Democratic Party, it only makes it easier for the Democrats to appeal to these left-leaning voters; after all, if two candidates are running in the same party's primary, it's hardly insane to assume they have similar policies and priorities. 

We should also take some lessons from history. For all the talk about Franklin D. Roosevelt and how he was successfully pushed leftward (which supposedly shows that Democrats, despite their flaws, are worth supporting), there's little acknowledgment of the factors that actually achieved this feat. Of major significance was the surging support for socialism and communism, both of which were represented by small but significant third parties. Also important was populist Louisiana senator Huey Long who—while a Democrat—had no particular party loyalty, and was widely believed to be gearing up for a third-party presidential run of his own before he was assassinated in 1935. While the US remained a thoroughly two-party system at the national level, these rumblings from the left were ominous enough that Roosevelt "lifted ideas from the likes of [six-time Socialist Party presidential candidate] Norman Thomas," in the words of historian Paul Berman. Even if the goal is simply to push the Democrats to the left (which, given the crises we face going forward, may not be enough anyway), it makes no sense to do this by wedding oneself to the Democratic Party before that goal has been achieved. 

This is not to say that leftists shouldn't run in Democratic primaries, or exercise whatever power they have within the Democratic Party to push it (ever so slightly) leftward. But if these are the only, or primary, tactics in the left's arsenal, it can't hope to achieve anything but very marginal successes. In my opinion, the only hope at this point involves organizing outside of the Democratic Party. This does not mean forming a third party, at least to start with (and it certainly doesn't mean joining one of the already existing, often laughable, third parties). Again, the people that need to be reached the most are the ones who are disenchanted with politics. 

The best way to activate them, in my estimation, is to reach out to them not about grand political projects but about the issues that impact their day to day life. What first united workers in the labor movement was not necessarily some ambition to build a new society in the future, but the possibility that they could improve their lives in the here and now by getting higher pay, shorter hours and better working conditions. Given how atomized society has become and how much shit everyone has to deal with day to day, it's hard to ask the average person to make sacrifices in hopes that we will one day achieve a society that seems impossible right now. But if they believe that by making some small sacrifice now they'll soon be coming out on top, that's a direct appeal to their self-interest. We're talking things like labor unions, tenants' unions and other associations that focus directly on the concrete issues that matter most to regular, relatively apolitical people, and offer hope of meaningful improvement in the short- to medium-term. Once groups of this sort have flourished and achieved some successes to energize their members, they could then set their sights higher. Such groups could also serve to educate their members and convince them that it's worth it to become part of a broader left-wing political project. 

I am not delusional enough to think that this process would be as quick and easy as I'm making it sound. At this point, the odds of bringing about some kind of truly just and equitable society—or even avoiding catastrophe—do not appear to be in our favor. If I had to make a prediction about how things would turn out, it would not be a favorable one. But this does not mean the left should resign itself to a bleak future, or to simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. There may be few paths, at this point, that lead to a truly brighter future; but even so, I believe all of them lie outside of the Democratic Party.

China: Our Best Worst Frenemy

Chinese President Xi Jinping
(Ju Peng/Associated Press via the Wall Street Journal)

 

Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Analogies like this are trite, of course, but sometimes they're impossible to resist. While, on the whole, the world could certainly do with fewer Nineteen Eighty-Four comparisons, the United States' complicated and shifting relationship with China is a particularly striking example of life imitating art. It truly does look like we may be entering into some era of neo-Cold War with the People's Republic, potentially one with all the same subterfuge, sabotage and espionage we remember from our last one with the USSR—updated with all the latest technological innovations, of course. But where things get really interesting is when you look at the people leading us into this new morass. 

Case in point: President Joe Biden. In his recent address before a joint session of Congress, he proclaimed that "[w]e’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century," and detailed how he had told Chinese president Xi Jinping that "we’ll maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific, just as we do with NATO in Europe" and "America will not back away from our commitments—our commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms and to our alliances." This strong stance was nothing new: in the final Democratic primary debate last year, Biden had compared China to Jack the Ripper, and his campaign released an ad accusing then-president Trump of "roll[ing] over for the Chinese" in its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But if China is some kind of global Jack the Ripper that must be opposed at every turn, Joe Biden has a great deal to answer for. At the turn of the century, as Senator from Delaware, he voted—along with a majority of Senators from both parties—to extend Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR, formerly known as Most Favored Nation status) to the People's Republic of China. Speaking before the Committee on Foreign Relations, Biden promised that "granting China permanent normal trade status would put our relationship on a more firm foundation and begin to build trust," and that "getting China into the World Trade Organization, a rules-based organization, will subject China to multilateral pressures on trade and, over time, enhance their respect for the rule of law[.]" 

Nor was this an uncontroversial stance, even at the time. In the House of Representatives, PNTR with China was opposed by a majority of Democrats (and Vermont's independent Congressman, one Bernard Sanders—whom Biden's China-as-Jack-the-Ripper analogy would, ironically, be directed at some 20 years later). A report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute argued that 

The potential benefits to the trade agreement are small—even by the supporters’ calculations—and largely benefit investors by providing them with wider choices of foreign investment opportunities. A more realistic analysis indicates that the net impact on U.S. employment and domestic business is likely to be negative rather than positive.   Furthermore, the claimed geopolitical benefits of this trade agreement are less than credible. Given the United States’ recent experiences in Russia and Mexico, the assumption that the United States can identify the true Chinese “reformers,” that these leaders will ultimately prevail in the political arena, and that the acceptance of an ever-widening trade imbalance will turn China into a democratic, free-market economy cannot be taken seriously.

It concluded by noting the "costs and dangers of this proposal substantially outweigh any potential gains for the United States."

It is not hard to see who was vindicated by the course of events since China was granted PNTR in 2000. Matt Yglesias, formerly a defender of the notion that PNTR had relatively little impact on the American economy, wrote in 2016 that "making NTR status permanent led to a very rapidly [sic] displacement of American manufacturing work by Chinese imports in a way few PNTR proponents anticipated or have even acknowledged." When Biden, in his address before Congress last month, claimed that "[t]here is simply no reason why the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing," he overlooked (and perhaps intentionally obscured) the way in which the policy he supported led to exactly this sort of result. 

On the "other side" of the aisle, of course, the situation is no less farcical. While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wasted no time in urging the Biden administration to continue Trump's "tough approach" toward China, he too voted for PNTR back in 2000. Indeed, while the line that Biden is soft on—or even in league with—China is popular on the Right, Republicans in both houses of Congress overwhelmingly voted to give the PRC largely unfettered access to American markets. 

So what explains this rather significant shift in politicians' attitudes toward the world's most populous country? This is, of course, a multifaceted question with no quick or easy answer. However, one common thread unites all the major possible factors: the interests of the American ruling class. 

One piece of the puzzle may be President Xi Jinping's differences from his immediate predecessors. An article for the New Yorker notes that "[u]nder Xi, market reforms have stalled, and schools have replaced books by Western economists with tracts published by the Marxist Theory Research and Building Project." Furthermore, 

Beijing has directed billions in subsidies and research funds to help Chinese companies surpass foreign competitors on such frontiers as electric vehicles and robotics. A Pentagon report commissioned under Obama warned that the U.S. was losing cutting-edge technology to China, not only through theft but also through Chinese involvement in joint ventures and tech startups.

Another major issue is intellectual property. In his argument for PNTR back in 2000, Biden claimed China would "agree to increased protection of our intellectual property laws," but the Biden administration's trade office now says China is still "fall[ing] short of the full range of fundamental changes needed to improve the IP landscape[.]" China's so-called "intellectual property theft" has reportedly cost American companies hundreds of billions of dollars per year—no doubt a source of some irritation. If PNTR failed to solve this "problem," it is no surprise that a new (and less friendly) approach is now desired. 

There are other factors as well. For instance, China's loans to developing countries and international Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure project also threaten to pull other countries into its orbit in ways that challenge US hegemony. But more important, perhaps, than any transgression on China's part is the role that it can play as our nemesis. A second Cold War would, of course, be a boon for the much-discussed military-industrial complex, but that is far from the only purpose it would serve. At a time when economic and social inequality runs rampant in the United States and the cracks in the American body politic have grown more visible, a rivalry with another Great Power offers a welcome distraction. If anything can unite the American people once more, it is a new common enemy. China makes an especially convenient scapegoat given its above-discussed significance in the de-industrialization of the US. Why acknowledge the role American politicians played in letting jobs get shipped overseas when they can simply blame the country where the jobs have been moved to? 

Senator Chris Coons came close to admitting this calculus when he spoke at an April 22 event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

Let me close by being optimistic about our ability to invest in innovation, science, and competitiveness here in the United States. If we look back at what happened when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, it was a moment that was a genuine wake-up call for the American people. And as a result, Congress and the administration invested in STEM education, invested in research, and in fundamental and applied science, and the benefits of that lasted for two generations.

January 6 was a moment that was challenging, divisive, difficult for all of us here in Congress, and it was a wake-up call that our country is badly divided. And the ways in which China has become a peer competitor in investing in R&D, in the number of patents issued, the number of research papers published, and the ways in which they are now trying to take the lead in standard essential—standard-setting bodies—that recent campaign to put a Chinese national at the head of the WIPO, where the PTO director, Andrei Iancu, was—did yeoman’s work to make sure that someone committed to a strong intellectual property system globally instead became the head of the WIPO—all of this is a wake-up call for us that we need to have another Sputnik-like moment of reinvestment in American innovation and competitiveness.

"[T]he implication[,]" Luke Savage correctly notes in an article for Jacobin, is "that America can and should try to rectify its internal cultural divisions by rallying the nation against global competitors[.]"

Acknowledging the cynical motivations behind the push for a new Cold War does not, of course, require that one pretend China’s government has done nothing wrong. From its treatment of the country’s Uighur minority to its clampdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, there is a great deal that merits (and has received) strong criticism. But, while these serious offenses may be invoked as justification for a new Cold War, it’s difficult to take this pretext very seriously when the US continues to ally with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and numerous other countries whose governments are also guilty of major crimes.

The proper stance on the new China-US conflict, in my view, is not support for either side, nor even simple neutrality. Rather, we should recognize the ways in which the governments of both countries betray the citizens they are supposed to be serving, and that it is in the interest of the Chinese and American people to live peacefully and to cooperate—not to compete. As we face global crises like climate change and growing inequality, the last thing we need is another interstate contest.

The Past Week Has Put Biden's Skewed Priorities on Full Display

Pop quiz: you're the new president of a nation that's experienced decades of wage stagnation, rising inequality, and where many low-paid workers have no choice but go to their jobs in person despite the fact that there's a contagious pandemic that has killed 500,000 people in this country alone. Which of the three options below is NOT a crucial thing to get done right now:      

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images via Politico)

A.) Convince the Senate to overcome their hesitance and confirm your nominee for the director of the OMB, a person who happens to be an bad boss with a history of left-punching (quite literally, in at least one alleged case);

B.) Order airstrikes to be carried out in a country the United States is not at war with, in violation of both the Constitution and international law; 

or 

C.) Raise the federal minimum wage for the first time in over a decade.

If you answered C, congratulations—the sitting president of the United States agrees with you. After the Senate parliamentarian ruled that a $15 an hour minimum wage could not be passed as part of the COVID relief package using budget reconciliation rules, Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated that "President Biden is disappointed in this outcome" but that he "respects the parliamentarian's decision and the Senate's process." To be perfectly clear, as an unelected official the parliamentarian's ruling is purely advisory, and could be completely ignored by Kamala Harris in her role as president of the Senate. But nonetheless, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain had already indicated beforehand that the Biden administration had no intent of exercising this option were the parliamentarian not to rule in its favor. In fact, whether Biden and his crew are actually "disappointed," as Psaki claimed, seems questionable; CNN reports that "far from being a defeat, the ruling is viewed as clearing the way for the bill's passage in the Senate, [according to] a Biden administration official[.]"

Now that the House has passed a version of the COVID relief bill that includes a minimum wage hike, if Kamala Harris did overrule the parliamentarian, the Senate could simply pass that same bill and deliver it to Joe Biden's desk—rather than wasting time by stripping out the minimum wage provision and then sending the modified bill back to the House for its approval. Some of the Democratic caucus's more conservative members may not like the inclusion of the minimum wage hike, but whether they would actually have the gall to sink the entire COVID relief bill because they objected to one (widely popular) provision within it seems at least questionable. 

Perhaps the Biden administration's willingness to abandon the minimum wage raise would be a little more forgivable if not for some of its other recent actions. For one thing, there's of course the Neera Tanden saga. Tanden, who Biden nominated to head the Office of Management and Budget, has come under fire for a less-than-charming online persona that's involved attacks on those both to her right and to her left. But mean tweets are pretty far from her worst offense. As a senior aide to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, Tanden assaulted a journalist who asked Clinton about her support for the Iraq War. A 2018 exposé by BuzzFeed News revealed that, based on the accounts of 19 current and former staffers, the Center for American Progress (of which Tanden is the president) had failed to adequately respond to sexual harassment by one of its employees. To make matters worse, in an all-staff meeting after the exposé was published, Tanden named the anonymous victim of sexual harassment the story had centered around, shocking the employees in attendance. 

None of this even touches on how fundamentally compromised the Center for American Progress is itself. According to the Washington Post, the think tank "received at least $33 million in donations from firms in the financial sector, private foundations primarily funded by wealth earned on Wall Street and in other investment firms, and current or former executives at financial firms such as Bain Capital, Blackstone and Evercore" between the years 2014 and 2019. Under Tanden's leadership, CAP has aggressively courted these deep-pocketed donors. The organization has also, in recent years, accepted between $1.5 million and $3 million dollars from the dictatorial government of the United Arab Emirates, which has joined Saudi Arabia in its murderous assault on Yemen. Not surprisingly, these large donations seem to have had an effect: CAP declined to support a bipartisan Senate resolution designed to end American involvement in the war in Yemen, and an unsigned essay on the organization's website lauded Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The think tank also censored its own report on anti-Muslim bias in the US by removing a chapter on New York City's surveillance of Muslim communities under Michael Bloomberg, who has given handsomely to CAP both before and after the publication of the report.

Nominating someone like this for a cabinet-level position is bad enough, but what's happened since makes it all the more insulting. Not shockingly, Neera Tanden's nomination has run into trouble in the Senate, as both Democrat Joe Manchin and a number of more "moderate" Republicans have expressed their intent to oppose her confirmation. Committee votes have even been postponed to give Senators more time to consider Tanden's nomination, which at this point is hanging by a thread. But rather than doing the obvious thing—withdrawing her nomination and finding a less controversial alternative—Biden has continued to stand by Tanden. Press Secretary Psaki has tweeted support for this "leading policy expert who brings critical qualifications to the table" and Ron Klain told MSNBC's Joy Reid that "[w]e're fighting our guts out to get [Tanden] confirmed."

But getting Tanden confirmed isn't the only thing that's apparently more urgent than raising the minimum wage. Biden also ordered that a "defensive" bombing be carried out on buildings in Syria, killing at least 22 people according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. As Rutgers Law School Professor Adil Ahmad Haque writes, the 

airstrikes almost certainly violated international law, for two basic reasons. The airstrikes did not repel an ongoing armed attack, halt an imminent one, or immediately respond to an armed attack that was in fact over but may have appeared ongoing at the time...And the airstrikes were carried out on the territory of another State, without its consent, against a non-State actor...These two reasons, combined, are decisive. It cannot be lawful to use armed force on the territory of another State when it is clear that no armed attack by a non-State actor is ongoing or even imminent.

[...]

The U.S. airstrikes were not defensive. They were expressive. The Pentagon says that the operation "sends an unambiguous message: President Biden will act to protect American and coalition personnel." The operation sends another message: President Biden will violate international law, much like his predecessors.

And even Democratic Senator Tim Kaine (who was the party's 2016 candidate for vice president) noted that "[o]ffensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances," and demanded to know "the Administration’s rationale for these strikes and its legal justification for acting without coming to Congress."

It's hard to see, in any case, how the strikes serve to draw the seemingly never-ending American military involvement in the Middle East any nearer to a close. The buildings struck by the bombs were, according to the Pentagon, being used by Iranian-backed militias, and the bombing was carried out in response to rocket attacks on American targets in Iraq. The obvious solution, some might say, would be to end the US presence in Iraq as quickly as is practical, rather than further escalating tensions with a significant regional power that already has plenty of reason to be angry with the United States. But that sort of thinking has long been rejected by those in charge of the US government, and that doesn't appear likely to change any time soon. 

Such are the twisted priorities of the Biden administration: Neera Tanden's confirmation is worth "fighting [their] guts out" for, and airstrikes in Syria must go ahead without Congressional approval and in violation of international law—but if the Senate parliamentarian says no minimum wage increase, well, that's that. To be fair, Biden has of course found time to take some positive steps: the continued suspension of student loan payments is one I'm personally grateful for, and reentering the Paris climate agreement is a plus. But for anyone still under the illusion Biden will govern as a new FDR, the past couple weeks should be enlightening. Anything that provides long-term help for the working class ranks as one of the least pressing, most disposable elements of the Biden agenda. That's nothing new, but it's certainly not encouraging.

Reflections on the Trump Years

 (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

 

Seeing the end of the Trump presidency this past Wednesday felt a bit like waking up after a long and strange fever dream: how much time has passed? Nine hours? Four years? A century? Am I really awake now or is this just some trick my mind is playing on me? Was there ever really a time before Trump was president? Or was that just a dream?

Not to imply it brought any great sense of relief for me. No, as I watched Joe Biden get sworn in as the country's 46th commander-in-chief and heard the paeans to unity and cooperation in his speech, I couldn't help but feel our long national nightmare is far from over. I don't know what "unity" will look like in this moment in history, but I have little optimism about it being the answer to the problems we're all facing — or that old "Uncle Joe" will be the right man to fix them. But I'm not writing this post to make predictions about the next four years, I'm trying to offer some insight about the last four — so we'll table that discussion for later. 

What can we say about the Trump presidency, now that it's all said and done? There are the obvious things, of course — that it was a grotesque carnival of incompetence, corruption and cruelty. But many others have remarked, and will continue to remark, on all of this. So why dwell on it? As I said, those are the obvious aspects of the Trump presidency. But perhaps the biggest underdiscussed truth about Trump's term in office is that he was in many ways a remarkably non-transformative president. George W. Bush left office having plunged the country into not one but two new wars, signed the Bill of Rights-shredding USA PATRIOT Act and established the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay where, to this day, "terror suspects" are being indefinitely detained. Ronald Reagan's orgy of deregulation, tax-cutting and union-busting helped reshape the economy in ways we're still living with today. Even the last one-termer, George H.W. Bush, managed to fit in the Gulf War and the invasion of Panama before leaving office, not to mention signing NAFTA. Aside from the tax bill he signed in 2017, what did Trump actually manage to get done? What legacy will he have left even a matter of months from now, when Biden's had time to undo the executive actions he took? 

One of the great ironies of the past several years is that, despite the unending focus on Trump himself — whether he was being worshiped by his followers as the savior who will Make America Great Again or vilified by his detractors as a Fascist threat to Our Democracy — he was little more than a vehicle for largely unexceptional Republican policies. While he might have run on a heterodox platform in 2016 and certainly never behaved like a regular politician, to say the least, he mostly governed as exactly what he was: a Republican president.

And an ineffectual one, at that. What the polarized discourse around Trump — the stark divide over whether he was either a godsend or a Nazi monster — obscured was that he was really a weakling all along. Political theorist Corey Robin was one of the ones to consistently get this right: 

[Trump's] weakness has been evident from the beginning, as skeptics of the authoritarianism thesis, myself included, have argued. For last the two years, it hasn’t been a Democratic House but a GOP Congress that refused to give Trump money for his wall. Even with total control of the federal government, Trump never got an inch of that wall built. Nor was he able to get any legislation to restrict immigration.

Far from consolidating control over the GOP, much less the polity, Trump and his positions have been consistently rebuffed by the electorate, the Democrats, officials in the Executive branch and other parts of the government, members of his administration — as well as his own party. Indeed, Trump delivered budgets that were rejected not once but twice by a GOP-led Congress, yielding a spending package in 2018, in the words of The Atlantic, that would “make Barack Obama proud.” [hyperlinks in original]

The last few months of his presidency made this clearer than it had ever been, as his attempts to overturn the election results amounted to making a whiny phone call to Georgia election officials and sending Rudy Giuliani to fart in court. The climax of it all came when a Trump-incited mob stormed the Capitol and ultimately succeeded only in convincing a number of congressional Republicans to drop their plans to challenge Biden's electoral college votes. 

Obviously, being inept and ineffectual limits a president's ability to do good — but it limits his ability to do harm as well. With this in mind, it's ridiculous to argue Trump might be worst president of all time, or even of this century, at least if one is thinking in terms of the damage caused. As Glenn Greenwald writes,

Those who want to insist that Trump’s evils are unprecedented...should be prepared to explain which acts of Trump’s compete with the destruction of Iraq, or the implementation of a global regime of torture, or the “rendition” kidnappings and CIA black sites and illegal domestic eavesdropping under Bush and Obama, or imprisoning people for decades with no due process, and on and on and on.

Of course, Trump himself was more flagrantly reprehensible than his predecessors, who usually made an effort to project some sort of decent and honorable image. And as a person he is, as I once put it, "defective on every level...moral, intellectual, spiritual, emotional." But judging Trump as a person and Trump as a president are two different matters. 

The most truly remarkable — and terrifying — effect that Trump had as president was to markedly increase the level of derangement apparent in American politics. If Nixon was the man who (in Hunter S. Thompson's words) "broke the heart of the American Dream," Trump was the man who broke its brain. 

The Right had more than its share of baseless conspiracy theories even before Trump began his campaign in 2015, but the developments since then have been nothing short of astounding. The adherents of QAnon, which casts Trump as the hero fighting against a cabal of Satanic pedophiles, have crafted a mythos as elaborate and unsettling as anything one could find in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. This isn't a belief confined to hyper-online weirdos, either: the last elections featured "at least a dozen Republican congressional candidates who had endorsed or given credence to [QAnon]," two of whom ended up winning seats in the House of Representatives. 

That same derangement was, of course, on full display when the Capitol was stormed earlier this month. Many, if not all, of the people taking part no doubt believed Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election — and that, somehow, he really would lead them in a revolution that would overturn Biden's victory. One doesn't have to agree with the more hysterical reactions to this (incredibly stupid and ultimately ineffectual) event to see it as a symptom of what amounts to mass insanity. 

But the madness certainly hasn't been confined to the Right. On the contrary, the thought patterns that became widespread among liberals during the Trump years were alarming in their own way. The so-called #Resistance emerged as, in many ways, a liberal equivalent of the Tea Party. Just as Tea Partiers had decried Obama as a Communist tyrant, many liberals spent Trump's presidency claiming that he was a Fascist menace.* And, just as conservatives often seemed to believe that Obama was paradoxically both a diabolical threat to freedom as we know it and also a feckless incompetent, #Resisters could easily swing back and forth between viewing Trump as a blundering doofus and viewing him as a terrifying American Hitler.

Worse than that, though, was the unshakeable obsession with Russia that took hold of countless liberal brains over the past four years. Awkwardly worded ads on Facebook and a spear-phishing scam that fooled John Podesta became an existential threat to American democracy and an act of war by Vladimir Putin. Polling by YouGov in 2018 found that "[t]wo out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President — something for which there has been no credible evidence." Before his investigation concluded without finding any evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, Special Counsel Robert Mueller developed an utterly creepy cult following "complete with T-shirts, scented candles and holiday-themed songs like 'We Wish You a Mueller Christmas.'"

This obsession with Russia quickly turned into an insistence that Trump was governing as a puppet of Vladimir Putin, despite the fact that his foreign policy was, for the most part, that of an unexceptional Republican (which is to say, often diametrically opposed to the Russian government's interests). Even now, after the anticlimactic end of the Mueller investigation, this mania still persists not just among Democratic voters but even among prominent figures in the party. Just this week, Hillary Clinton tweeted that "[Speaker Nancy Pelosi] and I agree: Congress needs to establish an investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to determine Trump's ties to Putin so we can repair the damage to our national security and prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency ever again." Attached to that tweet is a less-than-two-minute video of a conversation between Clinton and Pelosi, in which the Russian president is mentioned by name no less than seven times and more or less blamed for the storming of the Capitol. 

.@SpeakerPelosi and I agree:

Congress needs to establish an investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to determine Trump's ties to Putin so we can repair the damage to our national security and prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency ever again. pic.twitter.com/yR7LQmXm5Z

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 18, 2021

One of the few things that I allow myself to hope for from the Biden presidency is that at least Donald Trump will no longer be sucking the oxygen out of every political conversation. Even the complacency that seemed to prevail among many liberals during the Obama years is preferable to the hysteria it's often been replaced with under Trump. If "Sleepy Joe" can help the political discourse calm down a little bit then, well, I suppose that's something, at least.

Of course, the shock of Trump's victory and the surreal spectacle of his presidency did help radicalize some left-leaning people, and pushed others who were already politically radical (myself, for example) to get more active in trying to push for a left-wing agenda — probably the best thing to come out of the past four years. We can only hope that Bernie Sanders' defeat in the 2020 primary, and the victory of an utterly Establishment Democratic ticket in the general election, won't completely squelch out this nascent leftist movement — but ultimately that remains to be seen. 

So, those were the Trump years. Where do things go from here? God only knows. While I'm hardly overflowing with optimism about President Biden, I can of course only wish him the best when it comes to trying to manage the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic havoc that it's wrought. As for the Republicans, Trump's presidency has put them in a tight spot. At this point, Trump's cult of personality has probably outlived its usefulness for any conservative agenda, but the man still enjoys a high (if somewhat diminished) level of support from the GOP's voters. The bigwigs in the party would probably like to just move on from Trump, embracing his "accomplishments" (the tax bill and his judicial appointments) while putting the more embarrassing parts of his presidency down the memory hole. But it's doubtful that either he or his fans will let them do that.

Of course (as I wrote last year) the 2020 election should also give Democrats plenty of reason to be worried about their future, and hardly marked the stark repudiation of "Trumpism" that many had been hoping for. But, on the other hand, it's certainly questionable whether Republicans will be able to find someone who can replicate Trump's appeal. Trump is a "genuine rustic idiot," as Matt Christman recently said, and that was certainly a big part of what drew people to him — one that his wannabe successors like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley can't replicate. Trump's specific blend of authentic anti-intellectualism, star power and "political outsider" status was likely what let him and his party outperform expectations in both 2016 and 2020. But there aren't many figures who can offer that same distinctive appeal. That may be a saving grace for the Democratic Party going forward, despite their (all things considered) lackluster performance in 2020. 

But that's all speculation. All we know for now is that after finishing his 10,000-year-long term, Donald Trump has finally left office. There are few things, if any, that I will miss about the time when he was in power. Aside from the occasional moments of hilarity he provides, I'm tired of hearing about him, thinking about him — and writing about him. I hope this is the last time I will feel any need to do so.