What To Do Now

The heart of any “ideal” scenario for the next four years is understanding how nominally unified power can rapidly accelerate the tensions centrifugal forces within the Republican Party. One thing we learned, too late, too slow, to our horror, is that the dynamics of American elections tend strongly towards the centripetal. It does not necessarily follow, however, that 2017 and beyond will look like 2016 — but surfacing the thinly-submerged points of fissure between the various power-and-interest centers in the Republican governing coalition will require careful strategy, mass mobilization, and at times, uncomfortable choices and compromises.

There are many people in power right now, and all of them are bad. Therefore, the worst-case scenario is one where all of them get everything they want. Fortunately for America, it turns out that many of their wants are incompatible or mutually-exclusive, and that they have all been elected on a widely-disparate set of priorities, coalitions, and interests. Therefore, anything close to a best-case scenario is going to involve ruthlessly exploiting those tensions.

Let’s take them in turn:

The Republicans in the House. The key tensions within the House Republican caucus is going to be between the corrupt and cynical tendency to abandon all notions of good governance or principle to back President Trump, the actual “conservative” Republican platform and ideology which is in both direction and priorities in conflict with President Trump, and the need for each of these members to face the electorate in two short years. It is not obviously the case that House Republicans are, in aggregate, sufficiently craven that they will simply rubber-stamp either the Trump or Ryan agenda; even at their most craven, it was still agony to extract Medicare Part D from them despite what a political no-brainer it was, and many of the House GOP are ideologues, self-selected into politics in order to enact a certain agenda.

Paul Ryan. Let’s be clear — if any single person in America deserves the most blame for the election of Donald Trump to be President, it was Paul Ryan. The series of cascading flukes that actually put Trump over 270 couldn’t have happened without the necessary precondition of sufficient Republican solidarity, and nobody was more responsible for that than Paul Ryan. Ryan clearly, visibly thought that Trump was unfit to hold the most powerful office in the history of the world, and nevertheless endorsed him, probably because he thought Trump would lose but needed to keep his House majority so he could pursue his agenda of subjecting all of America to the will of capital. He loaded bullets into the chamber of America’s game of Russian Roulette, endorsing an evil he opposed so he could hold out hope of the enacting the evil in his heart. He is the most despicable, vile person to hold any of America’s highest offices in the United States in decades.

That being said, he may be in line for a rude awakening. His agenda has two massive strikes against it — first, that it is massively unpopular, and second, that it is completely orthogonal from anything Trump himself campaigned on or actually cares about. In the other direction, it is abundantly clear that Ryan himself has no interest in Trumpism in its core components — trade and immigration on the issues, populism and disregard for elites in style. His ideological interests and priorities and Trump’s political interests and priorities are almost diametrically opposed — if this becomes a clash, rather than two ships passing in the night, the possibilities are explosive.

The Senate. The GOP will likely control 52 seats in the Senate after Louisiana votes. That’s bad. The Senate, on the other hand, is the worst legislative body in the world. Normally, that’s also bad. However, in 2017, that may suddenly become, if not good, temporarily much less bad (whether and how this election should cause progressives to rethink priors on the quality of American institutions is a separate essay, but my current thinking is “less than you might immediately think”). Unlike the House, where parties sink and swim together in much more parliamentary style (though with diverging beliefs and interests nonetheless), every Senator is an island, with a bespoke electorate, bespoke personal interests, and potentially very distant (if any) popular accountability. Along with the anachronistic but deeply-held investment of Senators in the institution’s procedures and norms, the possibility that the Senate could grind almost any legislative progress to a halt is very real, especially if the filibuster is preserved.

Fully a fifth of GOP Senators — McCain, Graham, Collins, Sasse, Portman, Lee, Flake, Murkowski, Gardner, and Sullivan, if I’m counting correctly — either never endorsed Trump or ended the campaign in a state of Trump non-endorsement. Three of them — McCain, Graham, and Collins — were members of the “Gang of 14” who went to substantial lengths in 2005 to preserve the filibuster. Most of them represent states that have plenty of potential to elect Democrats in the future, either because they have in the recent past or because they very well may in the future. Many of them represent states that have expanded Medicaid.

These Senators currently have zero incentive to repeal the filibuster. The only reason they might is if the Republican Party unifies. Therefore, the trick is to keep the Republican Party disunified. These Senators also have zero incentive to rubber-stamp either Trump’s agenda or Ryan’s. Giving these Senators the space to pursue their egos and their individual interests can help logjam the most logjammable legislature since the late Sejm.

Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell’s lifelong dream is to hold a permanent majority in the United States Senate and pass no legislation whatsoever. Legistlation is unpopular! Legislation alienates potential voters and donors! Passing legislation is hard! Simply passing annual budgets, giving everybody everything they want, and then sipping a lot of mint juleps while cultivating reelection for Republicans, is the thing Mitch McConnell makes collages of on his dream board. But being the cynical operator that he is, he understands that passing some legislation here and there might be necessary to getting his members reelected, but only for that reason. McConnell also, for reasons of strategy and institutionalism alike, would love to keep the filibuster in place.

Donald Trump. Oh yeah. Him. It’s easy to write Trump off as a black box; a con artist; a sociopathic narcissist; an authoritarian-in-waiting. And any and all of these may be true. But the most important thing to understand right now is that Donald Trump is President of the United States, which suddenly vests him with certain interests; first and foremost, he has to start running for re-election. This is a pretty daunting challenge, given that he is a very unpopular person leading a party with an unpopular agenda.

What it will take to make a second Trump term possible is clear — economic growth, a lack of catastrophes, and meaningful progress on Trump’s signature agenda items, namely trade, immigration, and jobs. The question is whether Trump and the circle of folks around him will awaken quickly to the realization that Trump’s political interests and priorities may be totally orthogonal to the Congressional Republican Party, and that the worst-case scenario for Trump himself is a series of embarrassing SNAFUs in foreign relations and being a generic Republican on domestic policy. The former may be hard to avoid, but the latter is entirely up to Trump and his inner circle.

The other thing to hope for is that Trump is not just all the things we think he is above, but also all the other things he might be: a deeply transactional person willing to do business, deeply un-ideological, deeply invested in being perceived as a savvy, dealmaking winner, and (even in the most cynical and venal way possible) invested in leaving some kind of legacy for his children to inherit — which means leaving the White House with Trump name as a sufficiently-valuable asset to empower his children to pursue their own agendas.

This sets up a clear challenge for the opposition — how to proactively exacerbate all the tensions and incompatibilities between these priorities and interests, hopefully stymieing as much legislative activity as possible without giving the GOP an incentive to unite behind eliminating the filibuster and trying to hammer through the full portfolio of Trumpist and traditional GOP evils alike.

This is where this can start to be uncomfortable. It may be than in many, if not most cases, the key to getting all these disparate centers of interest and power to turn on each other is to strategically compromise and cooperate with some of them — and it seems very clear that the one ripest for cooperation and compromise is Trump himself.

The trick will be to loudly and transactionally open the door to dealmaking on the areas where deals are to be made and dealmaking with Democrats can elevate both Trump and Congressional Democrats while blowing up Congressional Republicans:

• Infrastructure. Trump has said he wants to pass a giant infrastructure bill. This is a just plain good idea. It is also a good idea that Paul Ryan and conservative elements in the Republican Party have absolutely no interest in whatseoever. Democrats should be open and willing to deliver 100% of their votes behind a “deal” that would make the price tag as big as Trump would like, if not bigger, so long as it includes some progressive priorities, like clean energy and public transit. Given that Trump gives zero actual shits about the deficit, energy policy, or transportation policy, these can simply be added to what he proposes — votes for goodies. Paul Ryan will hate this with every fiber of his being. Let him squirm.
• Paid family leave. Democrats should loudly signal that Trump should follow through on his commitment to paid family leave. Plant a bug in Ivanka’s ear that this can be a real thing that happens. Make her push him to push Congress to get this on the agenda. The Congressional GOP will hate this, it is antithetical to their whole platform.
• Healthcare. Democrats should signal openness to support any “repeal and replacement” of Obamacare that doesn’t actually reduce overall coverage. Repeal and replacement of Obamacare is the briar patch — stripping tens of millions of voters of their health insurance will tank any chance of GOP control of either house in 2018, and therefore members won’t vote for it. Use votes to push towards retaining the Medicaid expansion, perhaps even expanding it, while replacing the other parts with something either Trump or Congressional Republicans can accept. But only dangle a little bit — let them try to work out the rest themselves. Watch Trump’s DGAF-about-health-policy-but-I-said-the-government-would-cover people and GOP Senator’s desire to be reelected collide head-on with Ryan’s desire to get rid of Medicare and Medicaid. The fireworks could be extraordinary
• Trade and immigration. The trick to this will be to make it one issue and to expand, not contract, the field of play. Open up NAFTA with Mexico and wrap it up into the wall and the fate of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Give Trump the possibility to make a big deal, a huge deal, a legendary deal, one of the all time greatest deals:

1. Build a wall. No seriously, build a fucking wall. It’s a useless waste but hey, it’s jobs.
2. Throw a few symbolic concessions on allowable tariffs into NAFTA. Business will squeal, and they probably will be a net-negative, but nothing that will really grind cross-border exchange to a halt.
3. A path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. It won’t be the one we want — it will be long, expensive, and probably come with all kinds of undesirable qualifiers, like a long-period of second-class citizenship in terms of ineligibility for public benefits and zero-tolerance for any criminal activity worse than running a red light. But Trump has signaled his willingness to something like this, and if he goes along with it there’s no way any Congressional Republican can credibly outflank him on this issue.

A deal that wraps all these together, perhaps with one or two other hard-to-swallow compromises — say, a tax on remittances to Mexico — that will allow Trump to say he did all the things he said he’d do when he ran (“I built the wall and made Mexico pay for it; I renegotiated a terrible trade deal; I got the criminals out and let only the terrific people stay”) is a real possibility that nobody will love but Democrats should absolutely accept.

Look at how much legislative and political oxygen we’ve already sucked up. The key to all this is understanding that Congress can’t actually do too many different things at once, especially with slim majorities and divergent preferences; if we can make this the agenda we’ve already helped to depress the possibility that anything else can make the agenda, especially when you consider:

• Executive appointees. Democrats shouldn’t vote for any of Trump’s appointees but shouldn’t filibuster any of them either. Trump will stack his government with horribles but preventing him from fulfilling a basic Presidential prerogative is an easy way to get the nuclear option on the table early. Anyway, denying votes but not filibustering will force GOP Senators to have to vote for Trump’s clowns, votes that can be hung around them when they inevitably do clown shit.
• Court appointees. This will be miserable, but the same goes as above. This is the one place we may just have to eat shit. That’s the price we pay for fucking this election up.
• Everything else. The Congressional GOP, especially Ryan, will try to undo the other, popular and/or good parts of the Obama legacy. Dodd-Frank, the CARD Act, the Tobacco Control Act, Lily Ledbetter, etc. Democrats should filibuster the shit out of this. They will also try to pass other super-unpopular stuff, like cutting taxes for rich people and big corporations. Filibuster the shit out of this, too (but be open to an actually-middle-class-tax-cut). If they try and bring up any social conservative shit, oppose like crazy.

Combined, this will be a shit sandwich, but far from the apocalypse. In ten years, if we can keep most of the Obama legacy, get some good shit out of Trump, and minimize the bad shit the Congressional GOP might want to do, that would be a huge long-term win. The only problems with this scenario is that this could result in a bad-but-not-worst-case scenario 2018 midterms for the GOP (losing the Senate narrowly but not the House, for example) and actually making Trump look Presidential. It also has nothing to really say about Trump on foreign policy (terrifying) or the shit he could do with the executive branch alone (also terrifying).

The trick will be to mobilize mass resistance to the terrible things that can’t be directly opposed legislatively in a way that further exacerbates tension within the Republican Party and doesn’t activate Trump’s vindictive streak. The thing that could kill all of this is if Trump decides that the Democratic Party, rather than intra-party opposition, is the thing he needs to dominate and destroy, rather than cut deals with. Therefore, mass mobilization has to be smart — huge and visible protests and rallies, absolutely, but also targeted pressure campaigns against members of Congress from both parties. We’ll discuss this more below.

A last note — the temptation to demand universal opposition and filibusters to Trump will be overwhelming. This will be wrong. This will result in the nuclear option, a closing of GOP ranks, and the passing of a lot of terrible legislation. Mass GOP opposition to Obama flummoxed the Democratic elites and led to six years of legislative gridlock; but it also led to Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the stimulus, the CARD Act, the Tobacco Control Act, Lily Ledbetter, and repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, not to mention Obama being re-elected. Query whether, in 2025, we want to assume broad control of a government and a country over which Trump and the GOP were able to have even two years of untrammeled dominance.

How can we get to a 2021 where we’ve minimized the harm that Trump can do, extracted what good we can out of the situation, and built power for a progressive future? First, let’s discuss how we definitely won’t get there.

• Social media. These platforms are useful tools when subordinated to the goals of organization and real-life activism. But they are, at best, a compliment to the actual tools of making change. Sharing information and debating policy ideas, documenting and promoting actions, coordinating and facilitating communication between people working for change, absolutely — but all in service to effective work, not a substitute for it.
• Policing the dialogue. I’m going to lay a marker down right now: trying to prevent Trump, his coterie, and his rhetoric and behavior from being “normalized” is not just useless, but actively counterproductive and exactly what got us here in the first place. Trump was already elected President. And if you want to bring up the popular vote, screw you, not just because it doesn’t matter but because a candidate who wins only 49% of the popular vote is someone way too late to resist normalizing. We don’t need to prevent Trump, his behavior, and his ideas from being normalized — we need to resist, oppose, and eventually defeat them.
• Accepting xenophobia, bigotry, and exclusion. Firstly, it would be wrong and bad. Secondly, progressivism has never won by hitching itself to a Democratic party whose main strategy is “50% of the other party, plus three means-tested benefits.” Voters respect those who stand on principle and offer an alternative. We have both a responsibility and an incentive to defend a vision of America which includes everyone.
• Excluding and stigmatizing anyone who has ever had a bad thought. If you tell people that they should only vote for you if they think exactly like you, you will lose. If you tell people that they should vote for you because you can identify their problems and propose real solutions, you have a chance. That doesn’t mean accepting or tolerating xenophobia, bigotry, and exclusion, but it does mean finding ways to appeal to voters who are at best indifferent to xenophobia, bigotry, and exclusion but, like most Americans, would benefit from real progressive government.
• Moping. This sucks. It definitely sucks. Very little about it doesn’t suck. But learning helplessness, resigning to the worst, and receding out of activism and public engagement is exactly how “this sucks” becomes “this sucks worse than anything that’s ever happened.”

So what can we do?