As Democratic voters watch the GOP congressional majority abdicate their role as a separate branch of government and national Democrats flail against the onslaught of extremist right-wing policy, they have turned their lonely eyes to Blue State governors. Over the last couple of weeks, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has emerged as the national leader of this group for his pugilistic response to the GOP’s craven mid-decade redistricting plans in Texas. According to polls, as well as any quick perusal of social media sites, this defiance is something the Democratic base has been yearning for from party leaders ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House and commenced a wholesale destruction of our democratic institutions.
As the governor of the country’s richest and most populous state, Newsom is in an excellent position to take on this particular fight. California has some room to gerrymander enough seats to offset Texas’ move, and having already elected a strong Democratic majority in Sacramento makes it likely the state’s voters will approve Newsom’s proposed ballot measure to change the law requiring a nonpartisan redistricting commission. But this isn’t the only tactic Newsom is deploying to fight Trump and the GOP.
From the moment he took office in January, Trump has been at loggerheads with Newsom over policies that have directly affected California. It started with the massive firestorm that hit Los Angeles in January, for which Trump characteristically blamed the state for failing to “rake the forests” and fatuously insisted the fires wouldn’t have happened if California had “turned on the valve,” which would have supposedly released water from Canada and prevented the devastation. To this day, the aid promised by the federal government has yet to be received. (Many other states led by Democratic governors and dealing with disasters have suffered similar fates.) Earlier this summer, Newsom was also at the forefront of the state’s fight against the violent ICE raids and deployment of the National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles.
But after an odd, brief foray into some kind of bipartisan podcast outreach, Newsom has apparently decided to play a different kind of politics not typically associated with Democrats as of late: Bareknuckle brawling.
Trump’s antipathy toward California is no secret, so it’s no surprise he would target the state. But after an odd, brief foray into some kind of bipartisan podcast outreach, Newsom has apparently decided to play a different kind of politics not typically associated with Democrats as of late: Bareknuckle brawling.
He has adopted an aggressive social media trolling strategy that has generated much attention from the media (and consternation from the right), and he is using his power as governor of a very big state to confront Trump head-on, instead of relying on the procedural tactics generally adopted by Democrats in recent decades.
On Friday, Jia Lynn Yang published an article in the New York Times that provided insight into how the Democratic party evolved as it did and why it’s been so frustratingly impotent in the age of Trump. She noted that the party has had two different political styles, one of which was a ruthless, machine model that dominated the party following the Civil War. “Some of the most aggressive gerrymandering in American history occurred after the Civil War, as the parties vied for control of the nation,” Yang wrote. “In Northern industrial cities, Democratic party bosses built a new style of urban machine politics greased by the exchange of money and personal favors.”
This system was hardly meritocratic, although it did provide for the ascension of accomplished political players who knew how to excite a crowd and leverage the tools of power. But by the turn of the 20th century, the economic disparities and corruption of the Gilded Age opened the door for reform. The Progressive movement began to gel, ushering in a new respect for expertise and technocratic skill. The Democrats began to practice this style of politics:
The New Deal coalition under President Franklin Roosevelt managed to merge the party’s urban white ethnic base with an expert reformer class in Washington that defeated both the Great Depression and Nazi Germany. But even as he allowed technocrats into his administration, President Roosevelt was a cutthroat practitioner of politics. No power grab was too outlandish if it helped him achieve his aims. As he wrote in a 1940 letter to Congress: “Substantial justice remains a higher aim for our civilization than technical legalism.”
Roosevelt’s example — balancing good government legal proceduralism and using power to obtain “substantial justice” at all costs — kept Democrats in power for more than 40 years and gave Americans the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Medicare, Medicaid and other major accomplishments the moved society forward. But by the 1970s, when the New Deal coalition finally began to fall apart, the party’s proceduralists took over. In the years after they made some great strides, advancing civil rights and environmental protections, among other issues. But they were ill-equipped to deal with an opposition party that was increasingly turning to hucksters and demagogues.
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The Republicans so demeaned the “liberal” brand that defined Roosevelt and the New Deal that, in recent years, many Democrats have adopted the “progressive” label in defense. At the same time, Trump and his movement can be pegged as populist — best defined as appealing to ordinary, everyday people — although there are many permutations of that movement that don’t perfectly fit the definition.
But there is one aspect of the GOP’s populism that is recognizable. As Yale Law School professor Jack M. Balkin explained in his essay “Populism and Progressivism as Constitutional Categories”:
History teaches us that populism has recurring pathologies; it is especially important to recognize and counteract them. These dangers are particularly obvious to academics and other intellectual elites: They include fascism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, persecution of unpopular minorities, exaltation of the mediocre, and romantic exaggeration of the wisdom and virtue of the masses.
This certainly sounds familiar, doesn’t it? At the same time, progressivism has its own pathologies:
Unfortunately, these tend to be less visible from within a progressivist sensibility. They include elitism, paternalism, authoritarianism, naivete, excessive and misplaced respect for the “best and brightest,” isolation from the concerns of ordinary people, an inflated sense of superiority over ordinary people, disdain for popular values, fear of popular rule, confusion of factual and moral expertise, and meritocratic hubris.
These words also ring a bell, although I think the right’s depiction of Democrats as the party of elites — a party that includes most working-class people of color — paints with a pretty broad brush.
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The point is that we are in a populist era. People are upset, and it’s not just right-wingers with all those negative traits listed by Balkin. Among people of all political persuasions, there is a sense that, somewhere, somehow, things have taken a wrong turn. Technocratic progressivism almost certainly has better solutions, but it is cumbersome and doesn’t appeal to or excite people’s passions the way populist demagoguery does. Meanwhile, we are dealing with a GOP for which it’s impossible to determine whether the greater danger to the country is from MAGA’s brutal destruction of democracy or the party’s monumental ineptitude.
One thing is clear: What Democrats need is New Deal-style politics, and they need it now. That includes the brazenly ruthless tactics Roosevelt employed, as well as the technocratic experimentation of the progressives in his administration.
Right now, only seven months into Trump’s second term, I have no idea who that leader might be. But we have to hope that Newsom and other Democrats with national ambitions will take Roosevelt’s lessons seriously and follow his model. Otherwise, I fear there will one day be nothing left of our government — and FDR’s legacy — to dismantle.
