If Senate Republicans pass a tax overhaul Tuesday, they will have done more for the cause of democratic populism than Bernie Sanders ever did. The Republicans, indeed, will demonstrate to his followers the independent senator was wrong about the Democratic Party. It was, is and will be the party of the working class – even if the working class, the white part, disbelieves it.

Sanders represents a tiny leftist faction within the Democratic Party that quibbles endlessly with the liberal majority. But in opposing the GOP, the party will be united on "a strong, bold, sharp-edged, and common-sense economic agenda," as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer once said, that will cut across racial lines to create competitive coalitions in 2018, even in places like Iowa.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the tax law would trigger a net loss of income for most tax-filers over time, around $370 a year for the middle 60 percent. Without having to declare class war, the Democrats will be on solid ground in accusing the Republicans of being no friend to the middle class.

2017: The Year in Cartoons View All 102 Images

But the Democrats have no reason not to declare class war due the GOP's overreach. Operatives are already laying the groundwork. "If Democrats are worried about class war, well, the Republicans started it," said John Lapp, a veteran Democratic strategist, told McClatchy's Alex Roarty. "And bring it on."

J.B. Poersch, head of Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC aligned with Senate Democrats, added: "Democrats have a pretty simple message: Republicans have failed to defend working families both in terms of health care and in this awful tax bill. 2018 is about holding them accountable for making the promise."

Opportunities for the Democrats don't end with the Congress. Thirty-six governorships are in contention next year. Before the Republicans moved to cut taxes for corporations and the very rich and making the rest of us finance them, the Democrats were fighting with themselves over which mattered more: class or race. Now that the Republicans are so obviously serving their donors, the Democrats don't have to answer that question (for now). They can push up against the Republicans' cash-grab with a class-based message and compete, even in Iowa. (The state's governorship is a toss up; a stunning 60 percent of Iowans disapprove of President Donald Trump's performance.)

None of this is to say Sanders is irrelevant. But it is to say the Democrats have had "a strong, bold, sharp-edged, and common-sense economic agenda" that has been part of a larger menu of pluralist democratic values. This has been true since at least the Great Recession began and certainly since the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement forced President Barack Obama to put inequality at the center of his 2012 re-election campaign. In 2016, Hillary Clinton talked about jobs and economics more than anything else, even qualifying her famed "deplorables" remark by saying the other half of Trump's base does not get the services, good faith and understanding they deserve by dint of being Americans.

A menu of pluralist democratic values can be hard to see, complex as it is, and by 2016, Bernie Sanders had taken advantage of that complexity to argue, wrongly, that Clinton and the Democratic Party stood for monied interests. (He also took advantage of leftist-socialist resentment for having lost the economic argument in the 1990s to Clinton's husband.) Her defeat appeared to confirm Sanders' erroneous claim, forcing even Chuck Schumer to concede, after Jon Ossoff lost Georgia's special election last June, that, OK OK fine, the party needs to "a strong, bold, sharp-edged, and common-sense economic agenda."

Even if that were true, it doesn't matter now. The Republican tax plan is probably the peak of a long arc of inequality during which Everest-sized mountains of wealth have been redistributed upward. In this context, Sanders will be a fading light fading faster as the Democrats assemble a coalition of Democrats, "Never-Trumpers" and disillusioned Republicans to mount a historic comeback. A large majority believes the president did something at least unethical with Russia. A near-majority believes the president should be impeached. And fully half of Americans believes the Democrats should be in control of Congress.