All Bets Are Off

In Joseph O’Neill’s first essay in our pages, he warned readers that “the Republican Party enjoyed a mystifying presumption of legitimacy,” contrasted with “the curious timidity of Democrats.” In that instance, he was describing the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida, but he has made clear in his subsequent writing to what extent that dynamic has dogged American politics ever since: from an article about Democrats’ failure to win statewide elections—“Their core mission is to practice a ceremonial innocence about the unshakable virtue of American conservatism—and to do so even as the worst, full of passionate intensity, are cleaning their clocks”—to his analysis of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s campaign. “What will they do?” he asked in October. “Stick with the cautious, timid posture we saw at the veep debate, or go on the offensive? It seems extraordinary that this is a question at all.”

After another presidential election in which the Democrats’ strategy failed spectacularly, I e-mailed O’Neill to ask how he thinks the party might pick up the pieces.

Daniel Drake: There is a temptation, already evident on TV news and social media, to identify which particular campaign strategies caused the Democrats to lose, but I wonder how you think, going forward, the party ought to expend its resources: What would it look like for the Democrats to mount a meaningful opposition to a president who has vowed, for example, to prosecute his political opponents?

Joseph O’Neill: It looks daunting. The Republican Party will (very likely) have unlimited legislative power; the president, freely declaring emergencies and dispensing pardons to his allies, emboldened by the near-total immunity from prosecution bestowed on him by a corrupt Supreme Court, will assume unprecedented executive power. The top Democratic officeholders—Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, and Hakeem Jeffries—are notoriously reluctant and ineffectual adversaries of the Republican Party. We will be relying very heavily on judges (many of whom are Trump appointees) to apply the law in the face of threats and political pressure. But what if President Trump decides to ignore their rulings? What if he follows through on his dictatorial campaign promises? 

When Trump came to power in 2016, the apparatus and culture of US democracy was still intact. It required an attempted coup for Republicans to impose their will. This time around, authoritarian power fell into their lap like a ripe apple. Most voters, their political consciousness captured by an ideological environment overwhelmingly controlled by oligarchs, seem either to want a dictatorship or to not care about it one way or the other. Some legacy media organizations seem almost anxious to abdicate their Fourth Estate responsibilities. Must the onus of opposition again be borne by our concerned citizenry, now exhausted and dispirited after nearly a decade of extraordinary civic effort? Who can they look to for leadership and inspiration? Barack Obama? Mark Cuban? Who have issued statements congratulating Donald Trump on his victory?

The truth of the matter is that, until the next midterm elections—which will take place—we find ourselves somewhat at the mercy of Trump’s will. A successful opposition, in such circumstances, will require unusual measures of courage, imagination, adaptability, disruptiveness. New tactics will have to be employed. New people will have to be given leadership positions. Blue state authorities will have to coordinate with one another to protect vulnerable Americans. To make this happen, the DNC should finally do what it should have done years ago: set up a political operations unit to devise and coordinate anti-GOP actions nationwide. (Fox News performs this function, and others, for the GOP.)

Most importantly, the Democratic Party will have to reinvent itself in a way that restores its credibility and its relevance. The most critical job of Democrats is to fill their supporters with hope: a hopeless population is more vulnerable to autocracy. This requires them to consult with their base about how to fight Trump; and then to fight.

Their basic strategy must be twofold: first, do everything in their power and influence to oppose, slow down, and attach political costs to the Trump agenda. They must show exemplary fortitude and courage. (Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, has already indicated that he will not step down if requested to do so by Trump.) Second, start planning and campaigning for the midterms now. The House and Senate will be winnable. Tactically, all bets should be off. If Democrats have to activate thousands of bots and hire thousands of trolls to penetrate Trumpist propaganda platforms they should do that. If they have to induce Senator Susan Collins to caucus or side with them, they should offer her every inducement. (Collins is up for reelection in 2026. If she stands down, a Democrat will likely succeed her.)

A running theme in some of the essays you’ve written for the Review is, to quote the headline of an essay you wrote for us in 2020, “No More Nice Dems.” Do you think, as a strategic matter, the Democrats’ (and Harris’s) perceived timorousness was an underlying problem? How did that passivity affect their relationship to the party’s base?

I don’t think Harris lost because of campaign missteps. To put it another way: it’s hard to think of a campaign she could have run that would have overcome the negative ideological environment in which the election took place. We don’t yet fully understand that environment. We do know that the disastrously misguided political operations of the Democratic Party over the last four years contributed significantly to the problem. Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, Garland, et al. utterly failed to grasp the threat posed by Donald Trump’s Republican Party, including its Supreme Court branch. They sentimentally overestimated the attachment of American whites to the liberal order. They failed to take seriously that vast numbers of Americans inhabit far-right information communities. They undervalued the importance of showing cultural solidarity with working-class voters. And so on and so forth. A lot went wrong, politically. The richest, most militarily secure democracy in the world doesn’t embrace authoritarianism unless lots of mistakes have been made. 

The current prevailing theory about Trump’s victory is that most Americans, irked by an unpleasant encounter with inflation, cast an anti-incumbent vote without giving much thought to the consequences of that vote for US democracy. I don’t totally buy this whoops! theory. My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed. Of course, political science is not designed to investigate this kind of stuff. The clearest insights we have come from the realm of philosophy and literature. Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi did not rely on focus groups.

The magnitude of Harris’s loss also makes me wonder about alternatives outside of party politics. If the Democratic party ends up tacking right or otherwise appeasing Trump on, say, some of his more draconian immigration policies in order to stave off cuts to social security, do you have a sense of how people might organize against both parties? Historically, how have voters been able to advance policies that both the ruling and opposition parties are against?

Harris lost, yes—but let’s not overegg the pudding. Trump’s margin of victory was humdrum. His final vote tally will fall millions short of the votes won by Biden in 2020. The opposition to him is huge and intense and in the right. So let’s be clear: this malicious criminal does not have the barbaric mandate he claims for himself. On the contrary, it is the opposition that has a mandate, derived from centuries of democratic tradition.

If one thing will guarantee excess years of dictatorship, it would be fracturing the antifascist opposition into squabbling factions. Republicans and their allies in social media will do everything they can to divide the left. The responsibility is on all of us, and the Democratic Party in particular, to ensure that this doesn’t happen. In practice this will mean listening and deferring to the concerns and values of the base, whose grassroots efforts prevented the Democrats from suffering a collapse in the Senate and House.

What do you think the first hundred days of Trump’s term will look like? Are there any specific policies or obsessions that you think will occupy him?

I think we can expect an attempt to round up, incarcerate, and deport tens of thousands of suspected undocumented immigrants. We can expect a flurry of executive orders designed to transform and weaponize the Department of Justice. We can expect business leaders to gather in the Oval Office to pay homage to the president. We can expect Elon Musk to be horribly prominent, possibly as an enforcer of Trump’s promises to impose tariffs on imported goods. I’m going to assume that the Democratic Party, as we speak, is preparing for these and other eventualities. I am sure Trump will overreach. It is up to the opposition to make him pay for his overreaches. It is not our job to help him “succeed.” It’s not our job to “unite the country” or, as President Biden has suggested, “turn down the temperature.” It’s our job to make Trump fail, fail again, fail worse.