Illustration by João Fazenda

One of the worst side effects of Trumpism is the way that it drives its opponents into reactive mode, amid an atmosphere of cooked-up chaos. Donald Trump wants to build a “great, great wall,” and last week he considered declaring a national emergency to do it, despite the fact that illegal border crossings have drastically decreased since 2000, and that many of those trying to cross these days are women and children who are not evading border guards but seeking them out, to ask for asylum. At the outset of 2019, we’re in the second week of a partial government shutdown—which Trump said could last for months or years—because congressional Democrats have had to take his fixation seriously and insist that they won’t allocate the five billion dollars that he wants for the wall. (The actual costs of a concrete barrier could climb as high as forty billion dollars, according to an analysis in M.I.T. Technology Review, and a report from the Government Accountability Office warns that the wall could “cost more than projected, take longer than planned, or not fully perform as expected.”)

Democrats are offering two compromises that would reopen government agencies and give the Department of Homeland Security $1.3 billion to improve border-security technology and other measures, including fortified fencing. Meanwhile, some sense of the psychological vagaries that Democrats have to contend with can be derived from the increasingly peculiar way that Trump talks about the wall, as though it were not a policy but a totem—for the protection of his own ego, perhaps. “The wheel, the wall, some things never get old,” he said last week, at a rambling Cabinet meeting.

Still, whatever compromise is eventually reached to reopen the government, the best path forward for the Democrats as they take over the House of Representatives—the most effective way to counter the Administration’s frantic, unmoored agenda-setting, while also motivating voters for 2020—will be to pursue ambitious ideas. These could include the once utopian-sounding Medicare for All; a Green New Deal, to combat climate change while creating jobs; a national fifteen-dollar minimum wage; and a Voting Rights Advancement Act, to revive some of the protections that the Supreme Court eradicated in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder.

Such proposals are backed by the Party’s fired-up progressives, but not all Democrats in the House support them, and they are highly unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, let alone be signed into law by Trump. Yet they strike many people as fair and humane, if politically complicated. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, seventy per cent of respondents were in favor of Medicare for All. Support has also grown among doctors, who were once vocal critics of any single-payer system. It’s true that support tends to drop when pollsters tell people that they may have to pay more taxes, or that the government may exert “too much control.” But opponents can also be swayed when told that the plan would reduce the role of private insurers, or guarantee “that all Americans have health insurance as a basic right.”

Even if such proposals can’t make it out of Congress this term, they can help form a blueprint for a future in which the Democrats control the White House or the Senate. And, by bringing them up now, Democrats create the occasion to hammer out what a Green New Deal might actually look like, or how a national minimum wage might affect the working poor, while forcing Republicans to explain why they reject these approaches. Pete Buttigieg, the Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana—and a potential Presidential candidate—told the Times that it was important for Democrats to air big ideas, such as “whether guaranteed income is now right,” in part because only sweeping proposals to improve people’s lives can compete with the starkness and the simplicity of walls and bans and MAGA. In a sign that the Democratic leadership is listening, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, announced last week that she would support holding hearings on Medicare for All.

The 116th Congress is unusual in many ways. It has the largest freshman class in fifty years, the most women ever (a hundred and twenty-seven), the first Muslim and Native American women, and the first Latinas elected from Texas. It skews younger (eleven freshmen are under the age of thirty-five, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at twenty-nine, is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress) and more progressive (the Congressional Progressive Caucus has grown from seventy-eight members to ninety-six). Its brightest lights are more likely to break protocol—by joining a sit-in at Pelosi’s office, or by dishing about the arcane workings of the Capitol on Instagram—than their predecessors were. The freshman class is hipper, over all, and more unpredictable. It’s one of the most highly educated groups of incoming House members in modern history, according to the Brookings Institution, and also the least politically experienced: only forty-one per cent have held prior office. This may mean that they will be refreshingly unwilling to get hung up on precedent, but it could also make them a fractious bunch.

There are already tensions: between the progressives with activist backgrounds and the moderates who painstakingly peeled away districts that went for Trump in 2016; between senior members who want the newbies to wait their turn and the newbies who aren’t looking for their permission. The Los Angeles Times reported that “several freshmen have asked for—some have demanded—prime slots on powerful legislative committees.” Representative Jackie Speier said of her new colleagues, “They’re going to shake this place up, and that’s kind of a good thing.” Some mutual befuddlement will be unavoidable. When Representative Rashida Tlaib, shortly after being sworn in, told a group of activists, “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker,” Pelosi allowed that, “generationally, that would not be the language I would use.”

If all this sounds daunting, here’s a hopeful point to keep in mind about that record number of women, a hundred and six of whom are Democrats: research shows that women in Congress are more effective than their male counterparts at securing spending for their districts, which perhaps bodes well for the bipartisan project of infrastructure investment. They also sponsor and co-sponsor more legislation.

Inevitably, the House Democrats will be preoccupied with investigating Trump and with the traps that he keeps setting for them. Their challenge will be to work with the Senate to pass what positive legislation they can—while reminding Americans of how much more might be accomplished once the Trump era is over. ♦