I’m not a liberal or, really, a Democrat (though during the Trump years, I registered with the Democratic Party because I understood his unique threat to the country.) (Edit: I’m a leftist, usually identifying as a red-green.)  So, yeah, I went to Bluesky because fuck Facebook and X, and it’s very liberal over there. Given the times, there’s a lot of stress about Trump’s regime, and a lot of people are going, “How could this have happened?” They aren’t lifting a mirror to themselves, so I will.

A lot of what’s happening has been coming for a long time, and much of it has been abetted by the Democratic Party and its liberals.

I.

I’ll go back as far as the war on drugs, which was started by Richard Nixon. It was – transparently, mind you – an attempt to roll back the civil rights gained by people of color. You couldn’t just kick the shit out of Americans anymore because they were black. You needed a reason. That reason became “drugs.” It was an easy sell. White Americans “knew” that people of color were the reason there were drugs in America. Heroin was tainted by an association with Asia (the best called “China white,” even though China has no role in its production, and ignoring the place of the British Empire in the spread of opioid addiction,) cannabis is routinely called by a Spanish name, marijuana, and everyone knew that jazz musicians were junkies. It wasn’t subtle.

For a while, Democrats knew this. They didn’t like the war on drugs. And the guy who started it – Nixon – was forced out of the presidency in disgrace, and I imagine many Democrats thought the war on drugs was over before it properly began. They were in error.

After Watergate, the Democrats expected the American people to punish the Republicans. But Jimmy Carter turned out to be a one-term President and then the Reagan Revolution happened. By 1980, not only has the US forgiven the Republicans, conservatives had purged the party of almost all of their moderates. Though started by Nixon, the drug war took off under Reagan, and terms like “drug czar” and “this is your brain on drugs” were everywhere. And, predictably, the drug war fell almost exclusively on poor communities of color. After all, that was always the intent. But white voters loved it. All the white kids who voted Democratic during the Vietnam War discovered their inner conservative. Reagan also stumbled on powerful tools for turning poor, rural communities against the Democratic Party: a combination of defunding education and increasing military spending created a pipeline for poor kids to go into the military, which radicalized poor Americans in a right-wing direction. Reagan’s administration replaced factory jobs with military jobs, ripping working-class rural voters away from the Democrats.

The presidential elections were bloodbaths. For his second term, Reagan went against Walter Mondale, who was very much a politician in the stately, intellectual, humanist mold of Jimmy Carter. He got stomped. But, worse, when George H. W. Bush went up against Michael Dukakis, also in the intellectual and humanist mold, Bush won. The perception became, even inside the Democratic Party, that the problem was policy, not personality. It wasn’t that Reagan was popular because of his folksy charisma but that Democratic policies were out-of-sync with the national zeitgeist. It wasn’t that Bush rode the Reagan coattails to victory but that Democratic policies were out-of-sync with the times.

So, onto the Democratic Party came Bill fucking Clinton. Whereas Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis were all by-the-book New Deal and New Society Democrats, Clinton was a “third-way” Democrat. And that way was being a Republican.

In my opinion, that isn’t why he got elected. I think he got elected because he was good-looking and charismatic. He played the saxophone on late-night TV! Even his well-known womanizing was just fine (something, obviously, we would see repeated with Trump – a connection that Trump made to the rue of Hillary Clinton, that Americans don’t much care about presidents sexually abusing women.) But he was well-dressed and good-looking, and he was cool. His politics were incidental to his success.

In office, though, he was the best President big business had, better than even the union- and regulation-busting Reagan. Clinton pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA was the final nail in the coffin of American heavy industry. Before the ink was dry on the law, US auto industries had moved most of their factories to the maquiladoras in northern Mexico, turning the Rust Belt from a temporary aberration into an American institution while destroying the United Auto Workers union, the strongest union in the country. Environmental regulation didn’t even matter to American industry anymore since it was cheaper to move those factories overseas, which is what happened.

Clinton also set the stage for the Great Recession. In 1999, Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which reduced bank regulations, allowing commercial and investment banks to merge. This act partially repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which was a response to the Great Depression’s market crash. This allowed people’s savings to be used to support the derivatives markets in the housing markets, which became the toxic assets that caused the Great Recession.

In addition, Clinton slashed social services all across the board in service to balancing the budget while supporting the drug war policies of Republican administrations. He did everything that the Republicans did and more because he was in the Democratic Party. At the same time, Democrats made the same error with Clinton as they had with Mondale and Dukakis but in reverse. They attributed his political success to his policies, not his charisma.

II.

There might be a tendency to think that Obama was better, but not only did he not have any interest in reversing Clinton-era policies, but he also had no interest in reversing George W. Bush’s policies. Gitmo remained open, and drone strikes intensified under Obama. The Middle Eastern wars continued. (1) This was a repeat of what happened with Clinton: policies started by Republicans and initially loathed by Democrats became normalized under a Democratic President. It was harder to have anti-torture rhetoric when your party does it, too. But, by then, it was Democratic lore: actual left-wing Democrats couldn’t win. They needed centrists, ignoring that from JFK to Obama, what the American people want to see is a tall, good-looking, charismatic man. (2)

All the while, the war on drugs continued, too. Obama didn’t even try to do anything about it except offer rhetorical support. The public murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray… I mean, during the Obama administration, police killings happened at the same rate as before and after the Obama administration, with roughly 1000 Americans killed every year by the police. The prisons were equally full, with about two million Americans in jails and prisons at any given time. In regards to on-the-ground law enforcement, nothing changed.

Even Obamacare is, in my estimation, a giant giveaway to insurance companies. Rather than having a national system to handle everyone, almost all Americans must give money to insurance companies! They’ve seen their profits soar, so they’re not continuing to pursue action against Obamacare. It isn’t in their interests to do so. Obama couldn’t imagine a United States where the government did something for the people, even though all the evidence and research suggest if the US had a single-payer system that, costs would go down and services would go up, and the support of his party base regarding a single-payer system. It was never seriously considered.

And while Trump’s first term was uniquely bad in so many ways, the fact remains that during the Biden administration, the US did support Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and he did deport more people than Trump. He didn’t make as much noise about it, but the Trump-era immigration policies were largely continued by Biden.

III.

And here we are with a second Trump administration, a real regime, and while Trump is uniquely bad – as Dubya was before him, with introducing legalized torture and globe-spanning drone strikes to the US repertoire – the Democrats have supported almost all the evil bullshit that the Republicans have started. The deregulation of industries, slashing of social services, and union-busting of the Reagan Administration were furthered and normalized by the Clinton administration. The drone strikes and use of torture started by George H. W. Bush were continued by Barack Obama. The deportations quickened under Biden as he raced to outdo Trump in bowing to Netanyahu’s war crimes.

It happens so often, so reliably, that it is hard for me to see the Democratic Party as anything but a cooling-off mechanism that the Republicans use to advance their agenda. When Americans grow weary of Republican excesses, they vote in some Democrats, and everyone is cooled off. The Democrats don’t generally make things worse, but they won’t even try to roll back Republican gains. And after a few years, it’s normalized. Union busting is normalized, corporate globalization is normalized, slashing social services is normalized, torture is normalized, colonial wars are normalized. Then, after a short break, the right-wing of the Republican Party creates a new, even more radical movement. So, the Reagan Revolution gave way to the Contract with America. They gave way to the Tea Party. And now we have MAGA, which is an outright fascist movement. And in four years, if there is any democracy left, what will probably happen is a brief Democratic respite where MAGA becomes normalized, and some super-strain of right-wing madness spreads. There have been zero Democratic political movements of national or international significance during my lifetime, where once they had the New Deal and New Society. Now? Nothing.

But the Democratic Party isn’t the solution to MAGA. Step by step, day by day, year by year, they have drifted to the right, too. They are part of the problem.

My AI overlord editor wants a call to action. Here it is: if the Democratic Party grows to understand that charisma trumps policy for presidential elections, I sincerely think they could win almost all the elections and return to progressive politics that help the people.

IV.

It took a Republican to get out of Afghanistan, just as it took a Republican to get out of Vietnam. Policy isn’t why politicians are elected. The war hawk, tough guy policies of the Republicans that got the US into the mess in the Middle East led to the rise of ISIS and continue to destabilize the area, but didn’t stop the Republicans from pivoting and withdrawing troops from the mess they’d made while, of course, blaming the Democrats for what they’d done. And, now, in the 2024 election, to my goddamn, brain-melting amazement, Trump ran as both pro-war and anti-war at the same fucking time. Trump vowed that everyone would respect and fear US power while also promising no new wars, unlike under Biden! Policy means nothing in presidential elections.

I know it sounds reductionist to break it down to something that seems so simple, but for the life of me, I can’t clear it from my head that charisma trumps policy for presidential elections and that the vote is a giant popularity contest. In mid-term and local elections – where voter participation plummets – policy is more important because all the voters are policy-based. They vote in midterm and local elections, but they also pay attention to the details of government. But most presidential voters only vote every four years. They’re not bothering to inform themselves on the issues. In the 2024 elections, a month out from the vote, most “independent” voters didn’t know anything of substance about either candidate. All they saw was a charismatic man and a dull woman. (1)

I feel it’s the same for Republicans – and this is crucially important. George W. Bush didn’t beat John Kerry because of policies but because he projected this artificial Texas swagger. This male cheerleader from Maine, this goddamn draft dodging SOB, manufactured a tough-guy image that was so successful that he was able to alpha dog the combat veteran John Kerry over their service during the Vietnam War. This draft dodger (!!) was able to go over swift boat pilot John Kerry (an absurdly dangerous job where Kerry was wounded in combat) regarding their war service!

Of course, we’ve seen it with Trump. Macho swagger and shamelessness are the totality of his gifts. Even now, as Trump takes a wrecking ball to the economy and foreign relations, his aura of strength (which, like Bush’s, is totally manufactured) keeps Trump’s approval ratings high. I’m not saying policies don’t count, but they don’t count nearly as much as charisma, and before long, the shine may well come off the Trump turd. Still, who should win is not as important as who does win.

We can have both, though! The Republicans manage to do it because they know that style beats substance in elections, but presidents rule through the party. (2) You push the person who can get elected. It doesn’t matter who they are. Once in office, they’ll have to turn to the party to get anything done. If the party can control things like judicial nominees, cabinet picks, and judges, the President matters only insofar as they act the part of a cheerleader. This is as true for Democrats as for Republicans. There is no reason to imagine that the Democrats couldn’t push a charismatic leader with progressive goals, winning not because of policy but because they’re an aggressive campaigner who is good-looking and charismatic, photogenic with good sound-bites that make people feel proud while in office enacting a progressive agenda. The whole party could be geared towards this goal and should be regardless of policy goals. After all, if you don’t get elected, nothing happens. But by focusing on the electability of – specifically – Presidents, it would open up the party to pursuing progressive political goals just as focusing on electability has allowed Republicans to pursue increasingly conservative goals.

However, I don’t expect the Democrats to realize that they need to focus on the charisma of the candidate more than policies. After Kamala Harris’s defeat, I haven’t seen anyone in the Democratic Party looking for cool, hip politicians to push in the 2028 elections. But it would be nice if they did decide they wanted to win if only to stop the burgeoning fascism.

Note

(1) And these fucked-up, ignorant “undecided” or “independent” voters will never, not even a little bit, take any responsibility for their role in Trumpism. Just like they didn’t for Dubya or Nixon. It’s never their fault, even though they voted for the guy, because, gosh, next time, they voted for the other party. Totally absolves them of all responsibility!

(2) Though the Republicans have also shown us the risk where a demagogue seizes the party apparatus, too.  One of the way to prevent this is to have a strong multiparty system, which the US doesn’t have.  It has Republicans and their victims.