Before the electoral fight against Trump, there is a conflict within the Democratic party to be resolved: can Trump be beaten by a candidate who merely resets the dial, or is the US ready for more radical change?

And they’re off: the first Democratic presidential primary debate of 2020, in Des Moines, Iowa, 14 January Scott Olson · Getty

The personalisation of US politics has reached new heights since Donald Trump moved into the White House. His pronouncements, tweets, fantasies and egocentricity have obsessed, and exhausted, his country. But the media is delighted to have such a crowd-puller: no one talks about anything but him. The Republicans want to crown a champion who has undisputed authority in their camp. Democrats debate the quickest way to get rid of such a troubling figure. Since his removal through impeachment seems highly unlikely, they hope that their election primaries will produce a challenger who can defeat him in November.

But as Naomi Klein has explained, just getting rid of Trump will only take the US back to a situation that was so bad it produced Trump. She suggests it is better to treat the cause than the symptom. That is also the position of Andrew Yang, one of the 12 Democratic contenders for the nomination: ‘The media networks didn’t do us any favors by missing a reason why Donald Trump became our president in the first place. If your turn on cable network news today, you would think he’s our president because of some combination of Russia, racism, Facebook, Hillary Clinton, and emails all mixed together. But Americans around the country know different. We blasted away four million manufacturing jobs that were primarily based in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri [states Trump unexpectedly won in 2016, some by the narrowest of margins] ...The more we act like Donald Trump is the cause of all our problems, the more Americans lose trust that we can actually see what’s going on in our communities and solve those problems’ (1).

Risk of another Trump figure

To centrist Democrats, typified by Joe Biden, there is clear appeal in replacing Trump without addressing the conditions that enabled his win: it lets off the hook the people who failed to fight Trump when they had the chance, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama — and Biden himself, Obama’s vice-president for eight years. But the Biden approach risks producing another Trump figure, who could be even more dangerous if he were more skilful, less of a divisive braggart, less incorrigibly narcissistic and ignorant of how international power politics works, and so more capable of finding foreign and domestic allies who have a near-identical view of politics, with even more destructive effect.

It is worth recalling that in November 2008 the majority of Americans were proud and happy to have elected as president a young African American senator who promised hope and change. His election stunned the Republican party, which many saw as reactionary, bigoted, the pawn of the rich, militaristic, and dangerous as it retained support among some of the poorest (2). The hope Obama promised proved short-lived and the change modest, and we know who succeeded him. Trump loathes Obama and wanted to distinguish himself from his predecessor, and has been uncompromising with his opponents. Along the way, he has made commonplace behaviour — vulgarity, greed, sexist and racist language, glorification of violence, lying — the default setting.

The more we act like Trump is the cause of all our problems, the more Americans lose trust that we can see what's going on in our communities and solve those problems Andrew Yang

At the same time, there have been many worrying trends in the Democrat camp: questioning the popular vote on occasions when it produces an unpalatable result; taking an uncritical and complacent attitude to US history pre-Trump; championing western military alliances, suddenly regarded as ‘progressive’, to counter Trump’s ‘America First’ stance; venerating the intelligence services because they embarrass Trump by leaking information that compromises him; and celebrating large private media companies, which can do no wrong because Trump is angry with them for spreading ‘fake news’.

In November 2016, 22% of white voters without college degrees who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 voted for Trump (3). Clinton supporters could hardly accuse them of racism given their voting history, so they ascribed the defection to sexism, or the gullibility of ill-educated hicks easily manipulated by disinformation emanating from Russia. It did not occur to them that the Democrats’ destructive free trade policies and existence in a sociological bubble of patronising, urban graduates could have played at least as significant a role.

This short-sightedness does not just affect elections. When the first episodes of the revived comedy series Roseanne, whose main characters were blue-collar workers, not graphic designers, journalists and teachers of gender-neutral writing, got excellent ratings, the president of ABC (American Broadcasting Company) was baffled: ‘We had spent a lot of time looking for diverse voices in terms of people of color and people from different religions and even people with a different perspective on gender. But we had not been thinking nearly enough about economic diversity and some of the other cultural divisions within our own country. That’s been something we’ve been really looking at with eyes open since that time’ (4). It took a Trump victory fuelled by popular resentment of intellectual ‘elites’ to jolt writers and producers from their creative lethargy.

That lucidity rarely lasts. More commonly, the educated, urban upper-middle class who vote Democrat, especially in New York and California, see the growing support for Trump among poor whites without college degrees as a reason to write them off. Yet Trump, those poor whites’ supposed champion, has written them off too, and in this at least he is following Obama’s lead: Obama declared his solidarity with working-class African Americans, whom he charmed with fine words, but he never challenged the economic order that oppresses them.

‘There are a lot of killers’

Such is their desire to get rid of Trump that millions of Americans would put up with almost anyone, and anything, to achieve that. If Trump defends someone, they round on him; if he attacks something, they defend it. For example, on 5 February 2017, just two weeks after he took office, Trump was challenged by the ultraconservative presenter Bill O’Reilly on Fox News for refusing to condemn Vladimir Putin as a ‘killer’. Trump responded, ‘There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?’

Democrat senator and current primary contender Amy Klobuchar was angered by Trump daring to compare her country to ‘the evil empire’; the New York Times, which with the CNN and MSNBC cable channels, campaigns for centrists in the Democratic party, bristled: ‘Asserting the moral and political superiority of the United States over Russia has not traditionally been a difficult maneuver for American presidents. But rather than endorsing American exceptionalism, Mr Trump seemed to appreciate Mr Putin’s brutality — which includes bombing civilians in Syria and, his accusers allege, responsibility for a trail of dead political opponents and journalists at home — and suggested America acts the same way’ (5). Trump’s comparison so shocked Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, that she immediately demanded the FBI investigate Trump’s finances to find out if the Russian government held compromising material on him. And though she is highly intelligent, she keeps insisting that with Trump, ‘all roads lead to Putin.’

Even if little has come of Russiagate since special prosecutor Robert Mueller produced his report last spring, the fruitless hunt for an enemy agent hiding in the Oval Office obsessed the Democrats, and the media, during the first two years of Trump’s presidency (6). It fed a paranoia that has indirectly enabled the US military budget ($738bn) to spiral upwards, with overwhelming bipartisan support (senator Bernie Sanders being a rare dissenter). The idea that US democracy is under attack by Putin, often compared to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, has become an article of faith for most of Trump’s opponents. US democracy may face greater challenges than fake Facebook accounts though: Trump won the electoral college vote in 2016 despite having three million fewer votes than Clinton, and one of his declared Democratic challengers this year is Michael Bloomberg, another New York billionaire even richer than Trump.

Democratic party moderates and their media supporters have built an anti-Russian crusade around figures from the military and security world. As Glenn Greenwald, who — with Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange — has shown the tentacle-like extent of American spying, said, ‘It’s virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters’ (7). Moderate Democrats no longer balk at praising the intelligence services, despite their record of assassination of political opponents and planning coups abroad. They regard the services as islets of ‘resistance’ to an autocratic president. It was a CIA analyst who first raised concerns about the president’s phone conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart. The resulting quest to remove Trump by impeachment has given him a chance to lambast attempts orchestrated by the ‘deep state’ to destabilise politics, but should we not feel concern that any future president would run the same risk (8)?

Democratic party leaders, as well as encouraging their supporters to love the intelligence services, praise former Republican presidents to emphasise the contrast between them and their strange successor. Biden bestowed medals on George W and Laura Bush in recognition of their work on behalf of veterans, the lucky ones who returned alive from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one assumes. Michelle Obama called George W Bush ‘a wonderful man’ (Today, NBC, 11 October 2018). ‘Trumpwashing’ is the popular term for the left’s glorification of the most unpleasant elements of the US right, as long as they have criticised Trump or been criticised by him. Even Ronald Reagan’s memory has benefited from this Democratic rewriting of the past, strange as US foreign policy of the past three years has (so far) been much less bloody than in preceding decades.

Enough of ‘wars without end’

A strategy of international disengagement would be popular in the US where, since 9/11, the ‘fight for democracy’ has justified the intervention or continued deployment of 240,000 soldiers in 172 countries and territories, at an annual cost of over $700bn. That Trump has not benefited politically from the assassination of Iran’s Qassem Soleimani, an operation that went smoothly, confirms that Americans have had enough of ‘wars without end’. But Democratic candidates often present themselves as restorers of a global trade and strategic order that has been disturbed in the past three years. Biden, in particular, opposes protectionism, wants to keep US troops in Iraq and praises NATO. In a significant article, of the sort published in the depths of the cold war, he called for a policy of direct opposition to Russia to ‘defend democracy against its enemies’ (9).

It's virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters Glenn Greenwald

Why not go further? Bret Stephens, a New York Times op-ed writer with links to the Israeli right and a keen defender of all US military interventions, including those the US has withdrawn from, suggests that Democrats make up for Trump’s shortcomings and become the party of empire. He reckons that Trump’s ‘foreign policy of retreat, appeasement, and non-intervention’, especially in the Middle and Far East, has given his political opponents the chance to become the prophets of Pax Americana against Syria, Russia and North Korea (10).

Progressive Democrats have no interest in this role. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want to withdraw all US forces from the Middle East and Afghanistan; rather than systematically opposing everything Trump does, Sanders welcomed his meeting with the North Korean president: ‘If Trump can succeed, in fact, through face-to-face meetings with Kim Jong-un and rid that country of nuclear weapons, that is a very good thing ... I wish the president the best of luck’ (CNN, 25 February 2019). Months later Sanders, aware that Biden and Co’s opposition to Trump enabled them to ignore the structural changes that US society needs, said, ‘If we spend all of our time attacking Trump ... Democrats are going to lose’ (‘Town Hall’, Fox News, 15 April 2019).

The question now is what can they win? The centrist candidates justify their moderate position by suggesting they do not want to scare off voters who have had enough of Trump’s erratic behaviour but are not ready for radical change. They regard the status quo as acceptable, especially as economic indicators and the stock market do not seem to demand a change of course.

By contrast, Sanders, and to a lesser extent Warren, believe that if they win the primaries, loathing for Trump may mean they can persuade social groups who would normally reject radical change to accept it. They hope too that some of the electorate who have disengaged because they no longer believe in politics may return to the ballot box if they are offered the prospect of real change (socialised medicine, doubling the minimum wage, green revolution), not just a president who will take the country back to where it was three years ago. The choice between these Democratic options is at least as important as the election on 3 November.