We must win. We have no choice. The world cannot afford for us to lose nobly. We must win.
This is not just a matter of better policies as opposed to worse. It is not even just a matter of justice.
It is a matter of survival, and survival trumps all.
Not only our survival, but the survival of hundreds of millions of people and the survival of our civilization. That is how serious climate change is, and how serious the threat Trumpism poses to it is. We are at a crucial juncture. It was always debatable whether the path we were on was remotely adequate, but the path Trump will set us on is the path to unmitigated disaster.
We must take back at least one house of Congress in 2018. Without that, we have no institutional power to push back against the Republican Party.
The conventional wisdom will tell us this is impossible. There are only 8 seats in the Senate currently held by Republicans that are up for grabs. There are 23 Democratic seats, plus two independents who caucus with the Democrats. The House majority is securely gerrymandered into place.
But the convention wisdom told us it was impossible for Donald Trump to win the nomination. The conventional wisdom said Bernie Sanders would not last past the first two primary contests. The conventional wisdom insisted that Clinton had the election in the bag.
Even on the morning of election day.
Voter suppression is about to go into overdrive. There is nothing holding it back. That means most of the groups likely to vote Democratic: college students, nonwhites, will have a hard time voting. This is why we actually cannot settle for doing as well with the white working class as Obama did. We must do better. It is very irksome to have to cater to the other side’s base because the people they voted for are discriminating against your side, but we cannot fix the discrimination until we have power. So we must pander to the voters who have just made it clear they are very angry at us. The Republicans cannot suppress their own constituency.
Luckily, the Republicans will give us a lot of ammo. They already are. Going after Medicare will hurt them deeply. Going after Obamacare is already a lot less popular with Republicans than it was two months ago. Our big advantage has always been that our policies are more popular overall. Where we get killed is in symbolism. We think we’re good at symbolism, but we judge it in an echo chamber, and we let our normative positions distort our estimation of its impact. Trump is also making it abundantly clear that he is going to govern like a surly drunk who thinks he’s funny. It was not just an act. The disastrous nature of this will become obvious, hopefully at less than devastating cost.
Trump has unleashed the most vile bigotry that was hidden in the crevices of our culture. And we must fight that utterly. But that is not where we prefer to be fighting, because the votes from it are the votes we already have, not the votes we need, and we must win. I’m not saying we don’t resist. But we don’t pick fights ourselves in this area because it doesn’t help us with the only voters who can save us. We will have plenty of purely defensive fighting to do in this arena without picking other fights, but this is not the arena where we can win. That is identity politics. That is what has just failed catastrophically. The main fight has to be on policy, and on the general failures of Trump.
Taking back power will mean winning back votes from people who just voted for a candidate who said he wanted to put Muslims on a registry and halt Muslim immigration. That may not be why they voted for him, but it was not a deal killer. That is how deep the fear of Muslims goes now, and if there is another big terrorist attack – very likely with how belligerent, reckless, negligent, and stupid Trump is – it will quickly get much deeper.
Which is why I say the stupidest thing we could possibly do is put Keith Ellison in charge of the DNC. Personally, I like Ellison and would probably support him on the merits. But I know it would be politically suicidal to do this. Because he is Muslim. Because the ADL accuses him of supporting antisemitism, a charge we will probably be leveling at Trump, given his alliances, and will have neutralized by having to defend against the same charge. What Ellison did was defend the right of Nation of Islam to speak. I agree with that. I have no sympathy for Nation of Islam, but I am big on free speech. But the substance of Ellison’s position is not important. Winning is what is important.
The Republicans got where they are by, among other things, pretending a black President was secretly a Muslim. Now we’re going to give them a black man who is an actual Muslim as the official face of the Party? For their voters, it will confirm the worst things they have said. For them, it will mean that the talk radio crowd was right all along. It may seem that DNC head is not that visible a position, but if that position is filled by a Muslim, it will be the most visible political office in the world. The Republicans will frequently not want to talk about Trump, so they will talk about Ellison instead. They have their own media and social media. Ellison will be at the center of the political conversation, because it suits Republicans to put him there, and they can. Trump, of course, will be very cooperative in this, and it is impossible to simply ignore what the President says.
I am not saying we have to nominate a straight white man. Black, gay, female, latino – all fine. Blacks, women, and latinos have been Republican primary contenders, after all. Not open gays, but I don’t think Republicans could make the gayness of a DNC head into an issue. Muslims are a different category. They have attacked the country and probably will again. And, yes, I know that is not all Muslims. I am not arguing the merits here. I am arguing political impact.
Do we want to spend the next two years talking about how the Republicans are destroying Medicare and how Trump is completely out of his depth, or do we want to spend it denying that the head of our Party is secretly on the side of the terrorists? We will have no shortage of opportunities to fight bigotry against Muslims, and they will be on matters of actual consequence, not the mere symbolism of having a Muslim in charge. I know people are supporting Ellison primarily on the merits, not the symbolism, but it doesn’t matter. If Ellison becomes head of the DNC, the main thing he will achieve is making the political discussion revolve around his religion rather than the horrors that the Republican Party is about to unleash. We may feel that nominating him anyway is the right thing to do, but not if it means we lose. There are too many lives that would be sacrificed to that symbolism, or to that sense of fairness applied to a question of relatively little consequence. The consequences of this game are too serious right now for us to treat all our decisions as abstract questions of principle.
And we are fighting uphill. The Congressional landscape for us is terrible. Our voters will be heavily suppressed. Our only hope is in appealing to their voters, who do not respond to our values. And in keeping the conversation on the Republicans’ horrific actions, not anything else.
And we must win.
