Tuesday’s midterm elections in the United States may not have delivered the long-awaited “blue wave” against President Trump, but they did reveal America’s demographic and cultural fault lines with unusual clarity. The Democrats’ new Congressional majority, for instance, is largely due to an unprecedented surge in female candidates: no fewer than 277 women ran for Congress and state governorships. The mid-terms also saw a record number of racial and sexual minorities campaigning successfully, or at least competitively, in areas long considered incontestably conservative.
In Texas, Beto O’Rourke’s narrow loss to incumbent senator Ted Cruz was one of several high-profile near-misses that produced more hope than disappointment. In Florida, Talla-hassee Mayor Andrew Gillum was edged out by Ron DeSantis, and in Georgia Stacey Abrams lost to Brian Kemp after widely reported voting problems. Each of these candidates made such a strong showing that they have achieved national name recognition. Their losses look transient, almost negligible, compared to the momentum they have created without using political action committees, special interests, or the other usual political suspects. O’Rourke’s campaign was particularly successful in this regard and his run may well prove the most consequential debut for a Democrat since Obama’s maiden speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
A week before the midterms, Trump’s former strategist, Steve Bannon, discussed the future of populism with President George W. Bush’s former speechwriter, David Frum. Ignoring an unusually fierce protest – Bannon was recently disinvited from The New Yorker Festival – the two men met on stage for a public debate in Toronto. Bannon argued that the right wing ethno-nationalist candidates he has helped into office are an inevitable response to neoliberalism’s failed economic experiments. He recast the debate question – whether the future belonged to populism or liberalism – into a consideration of whether the current upsurge of populism will be defined by Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders’ or economic nationalists like Donald Trump.
The argument that populism is the little man’s revenge for the economic chaos has become increasingly familiar. It presents Trump as a disrupter of business as usual in Washington and on Wall Street, as a people’s tribune fighting against the self-serving elites who bailed themselves out after the 2008 financial crisis and stiffed working Americans with the bill. Bannon indicated the ubiquity of this resentment by noting that Angela Merkel was quitting politics at almost the same time that another Trump-like economic nationalist, Jair Bolsonaro, was taking power in Brazil.
Counterpunching, Frum argued, correctly, that most of the new populists are xenophobic kleptocrats who have pandered to their base with racist ideologies and beguiled them with fraudulent economic promises. In a telling moment he addressed those who saw the scam for what it was but supported it anyway. “You will lose,” said Frum: “You will discover what so many thugs, and bullies, and plunderers, and people who elevate themselves by subordinating and humiliating others have discovered before you: Liberal democracy is tougher than it looks.”
Mercifully, Frum’s view has been vindicated. In a week when the poisoned atmosphere that Trump has done so much to cultivate led one of his supporters to mail bombs to 14 of the president’s supposed enemies, and a white supremacist gunned down worshippers at a synagogue, the American electorate showed that the nuts and bolts of democracy still function.
Control of the House will enable the Democrats to hold Trump accountable on several key matters, including his tax returns, his emoluments, the Russia investigation, and even potential perjury by Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing. The fact that such a transition can take place peacefully is confirmation of the fact that Trump and his base do not represent America in any final sense. Or, as Anthony Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union recently told the comedian Bill Maher, ordinary citizens have realized that it’s time to “remind Donald Trump that he’s living in our America: we’re not living in his.”
