The Democrats Were Designed For An America That No Longer Exists

If the Democratic Party, and the country, want to survive, they need to wake up and choose what they want the next world to look like. Then they need to start fighting for it.

By Max Moran, Revolving Door Project

For as long as most of us have been alive, the Democratic Party of the United States has enjoyed a rare and extraordinary luxury: basic, unquestioned stability in its nation’s laws, values, and political processes. The United States has, of course, undergone extraordinary changes in the last 80 years or so—racial integration, deindustrialization, women’s liberation, suburbanization, television and the internet. But the basic ethos of what it meant to be an American was an unquestioned consensus, pure background noise to the game of day-to-day Congressional debates and electoral campaigns. There was no serious reason to fear for the country’s small-r republican government structure, its capital-L Liberal values of individualism and political equality, or its ability to peacefully transfer power from one regime to the next.

This is no longer true. It probably will not be true again for the rest of any of our lifetimes. The second Trump administration is an organized, concerted effort to permanently destroy the America that anyone reading this newsletter thought they lived in, and assemble a new, fascist one in its place. This is not merely a shift in the political winds, to which savvy politicians might adjust their sails and ride on to new career accomplishments. This is an attempt to prevent the political winds from blowing altogether—to make it impossible for anyone but Trump and his innermost circle of ideologues to ever be considered truly American, and thus, to have even the option of wielding power in American society.

It has left Democrats in the nation’s capital blindsided. Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng recently wrote that Democrats worry they don’t have their own Stephen Miller. Why don’t they?

Simple: Stephen Miller chose a life in politics for fundamentally different reasons than the top Democratic operatives. Miller is not interested in networking with Democrats after work, whispering ways they can advance each other’s careers, which ultimately drives policy moderation and compromise for the sake of mutual professional advancement. Miller came to Washington to imprison, humiliate, torture, and kill immigrants. He doesn’t care if doing so is uncollegial, or if some rules on an old piece of parchment say he’s not allowed to. This disregard for “the way it’s done” means the two major parties—and thus, the American ruling classes—no longer share a core ideological framework.