The fury currently welling up against our demagogue president is a gorgeous thing. The Women’s March on Washington bowled me over by its sheer numbers. The town hall meetings calling Republican representatives to account are delicious payback for decades of phony populism. The combination of the two is one of the healthiest political developments I have seen in many years.

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But opportunism never sleeps, and with the rage and the resistance of recent weeks some far less noble characters have seen a chance to develop a new con. They’re up on the resistance bandwagon right now, rending their garments, shaking their fists and praying that no one holds them responsible for the dead end into which they’ve steered us over the years. Inveighing loudly against Trump has become, for the people I am describing, a means of rescuing an ideology that has proven a disaster.

Comparing this moment with the Tea Party tells us a lot about this misdirection. In its 2009 heyday, the Tea Party represented a kind of superficial secession from the Republican party, which had discredited itself with the series of disasters we call the George W Bush presidency. Throw the old leaders out, the Tea Party seemed to demand, and start fresh.

But that’s not really what happened then, and it’s probably not going to happen with the hack politicians, million-dollar consultants and smug journalists who led Democrats to utter powerlessness this time around.

Yes, the Tea Party brought down many Republicans, but in truth it was a way of rebranding the same old Republican party without the stink of George W Bush attached. Conservative activists back then looked out over an economic disaster brought on by libertarian idealism – by a generation that worshiped bank deregulation – and insisted that what we needed was more deregulation, that we needed to go full-on free market. That’s the achievement of the Tea Party.

There is a possibility that the resistance to Trump will turn out the same way – that it will become a vehicle for our Enron Democrats to avoid accountability. “I don’t think people want a new direction,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in December. Now is not the moment for infighting, others have insisted, but for unity and togetherness. Unity behind the existing leadership, that is. Changing the personnel in the C-Suites will only weaken us, they will say; hell, we can’t even afford to see our leaders criticized.

And so the thinkers of the “center left” proceed to hold their failed leaders above scrutiny and to redouble their commitment to the shabby ideology that allowed Trump to win. Former prime minister Tony Blair, the British face of Clintonism and one of the principal forces behind the Iraq war has been doing just this. Writing the other day in the New York Times, Blair used his audience’s horror at the Trump phenomenon as an excuse to urge them into battle against, yes, the left.

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The correct strategy for taking on Trumpism, he wrote, was to do what he, the Clintons and the Obama did – move to “the center” – only to do it really emphatically this time around. As for the social group that centrist parties need to represent, Blair explained himself rather directly. We must have, he wrote, “an alliance between those driving the technological revolution, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and those responsible for public policy in government”.

And then there’s celebrated columnist and author Thomas Friedman. He called on “America’s business leaders” to pick up the banner of resistance and save “the country from a leader with a truly distorted view of how the world works”. Friedman listed the names of American CEOs from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, calling upon each and every one of them to stand up against Trump.

After all, he wrote, good and enlightened people know the formula for prosperity, and it’s “where business, philanthropies, the local school system and local government forge adaptive coalitions to enable every worker to engage in lifelong learning and every company to access global markets and every town to attract the smart risk-takers who start companies”.

“Adaptive coalitions.” “Lifelong learning.” Now that’s some resistance for you. Evidently the ideology Friedman has been trumpeting for years – government genuflection before “smart risk-takers” and the knowledge industries – need not change; it need only be hammered into us by a popular front of liberals and CEOs. That’s the way to challenge Trumpism: to tell the lowly that the answer for them is “lifelong learning”. Which is another way of saying that their situation is their own stupid fault.

•••

Lesson No 2 from the Tea Party movement has to do with good old money-making opportunism. Back in the day, Tea Party events were always accompanied by a sort of traveling trade show, where the countless entrepreneurs associated with the movement sought to get rich off one another.

Of all the pieces of Tea Party ephemera that I collected back then, my favorite was a missive advertising a DVD in which Richard Viguerie, the father of political direct mail, offered “fundraising secrets” for leaders of conservative organizations. Aspiring rightwing potentates were invited to send the great fundraiser money so they could learn how to raise money (like him) from the rightwing rank-and-file. And this was sort of brilliant: a pro-capitalist movement with a fair amount of capitalism mixed right in.

A resistance movement that imagines “America’s business leaders” to be its guiding lights can probably be counted upon to do something similar. After all, Donald Trump is a singularly ridiculous person. Every comedian in the world knows how easy it is to mock him. He is the most unpopular new president since polling began, and right now that fact must be flashing the thousand-watt word “opportunity” at anyone familiar with modern marketing techniques. Standing up in pseudo-defiance against this comb-over mountebank is a perfect way to position your brand as a radical sexy youth-rebel freespirit.

Harbingers of this approach are already visible. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has written a nonspecific but distinctly anti-Trump manifesto. Budweiser is running commercials perceived to be critical of Trumpism, as is Coca-Cola. Starbucks has made its antipathy clear. A bunch of tech companies have declared their undying hostility to Trump’s immigration policies. Before long, no doubt, Nike or Reebok will be encouraging you to make a stand against fascism with a specially branded line of resistance sneakers.

What will of course disappear in the thrilling waves of corporate resistance to come, I expect, is that many American companies have a lot to answer for themselves. One possible reason so many corporate types are against immigration reform, for example, is because of corporate America’s epidemic of H-1B visa abuse. It’s not freedom they care for, really, it’s profit squeezed out of desperate human beings.

•••

The last lesson to take from modern conservatism is the most important: the Tea Party succeeded by pretending to be a hard-times protest movement. It deliberately echoed the language of the old left. It raged against bank bailouts and crony capitalists. It dreamed about vast, crippling strikes. It pretended to stand up for workers. Paul Ryan denounced big business. Glenn Beck modeled himself after 30s enfant terrible Orson Welles. Trump himself constantly mourns deindustrialization and idle factories.

Another way of saying this is that the Tea Party movement was an imitation of the old, workers’ left. If you want an explanation for how the manufacturing states of the midwest went Republican last November, look no further. The insight here is that liberals don’t need to mimic the Tea Party in order to head off this powerful impulse; they merely need to be what they used to be – what they are supposed to be.



I doubt that many of our leading Democrats will be able even to do that, however. For decades now, Democrats and Blair-style “Third Way” leaders have praised one another for leaving all that workerist stuff behind, for embracing globalization and the knowledge economy and the enlightened professional class and affluent Republican voters in the suburbs. This has been going on for so long that the problem today is not only that they don’t want to recapture that part of their identity but that they don’t even know it exists.

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A telling example of this amnesia comes in a recent essay by Charles Blow, the fiery New York Times columnist who has written some of that paper’s hardest-hitting denunciations of Trump. Blow lists the many precursors to “the resistance”, all the forms of “disruption” and civil disobedience that got results over the years ... and he doesn’t think to mention strikes.

He name-checks nearly everything else – referencing Selma, Stonewall, ActUp back in the 90s, Occupy, Black Lives Matter and even the recent protests at Standing Rock – but he doesn’t acknowledge the one form of “disruption” that is a common element of economic life, that is happening all around us, all the time, that is sometimes even aimed directly at Trump and his advisers.

This is an extraordinary oversight in an essay meant to be a comprehensive homage to American dissidence, and it tells us what matters to modern liberals and what doesn’t.

That Democrats might resist Trumpist populism by getting in touch with the real deal hasn’t even occurred to certain liberals yet. According to recent news reports, House Democrats are conducting an election post-mortem in which they are considering what to do about the many hard-bitten rural areas that (as I described here a few weeks ago) have turned away from liberalism so decisively.

What is the solution these bold leaders have come up with? It’s to walk away from those places. If there is something Democrats once did to appeal to people like the ones I described, our modern-day Democrats don’t know what it is.

If there’s something Democrats once did to win the votes of people who didn’t go to college, it’s apparently not hinted at in the “350 unique characteristics” of political races that our data-minded Democrats are said to be sifting so diligently. Instead, our leaders believe, Democrats need to focus on seats in upscale suburban districts currently held by Republicans. Which is to say, to continue as before.

What is most pathetic about all the thinking I’ve described here is that it instinctively yearns for a movement of national unity, in which all the tasteful people from every high-status corner of society get together and put this braying New York bigot back in his place.

It was exactly the same dream that powered the Hillary campaign: all the respected people are together, and that’s what matters. All the foreign policy gurus, all the Silicon Valley CEOs, all the Wall Street guys, all the highly regarded policy wonks. Rs and Ds alike, holding hands and singing from the same hymnal.

A popular front it ain’t. This is the same Washington dream of a great consensus of the well-graduated that has animated every stage of loser liberalism’s decline. What is stupid about it is that it unconsciously fulfills Donald Trump’s vision of a rigged establishment game. But what truly is awful about it is that it wants to crush the very real possibility that the Democratic party might become relevant again.