Polls suggest that a Republican wave is coming in November, one that will spell the end of the Democrats control of the House of Representatives, and perhaps the Senate.
The conventional wisdom is that anger over inflation is fueling this Republican surge. And there is some truth in that, to be sure. But this anger runs much deeper: Republicans, especially in the Trump Era, have mastered the politics of rage, which in a time of great anxiety is all too easy to mobilize.
As the country emerges from two years of pandemic emergency, we are beginning to see the damage more clearly. For the first time since the late 1970s, inflation—driven in part by war-spiked oil prices but also by big corporations taking advantage of pandemic-caused supply chain problems—is battering the already weakened middle class and the poor. Some 80 percent of Americans report that making ends meet has become difficult in the past year.
But underneath the inflationary debacle lies a deeper economic problem: forty years of hyper-inequality, deregulation and tax cuts have hollowed out the middle class. In a time of historic inequality and poverty, the American Dream itself lies in tatters.
The pandemic added gasoline to an already discontent society. And as a result, the U.S. (indeed much of the world) is experiencing a real mental health crisis. The last two years did real harm to everyone: the first year of the pandemic was especially terrifying because we were facing a deadly disease with no idea how we were going to contain it. The deaths of over a million Americans deeply and directly impacted the lives of tens of millions of their survivors. Two years of illness, death, lock-down, social isolation and economic deprivation stressed many families to the maximum: children and the elderly suffered the most, but parents did too, and many marriages were tested to the breaking point. Let us call this experience what it was: a collective trauma unlike anything since the Great Depression. But even collective trauma has different impacts: those with wealth have weathered this storm far easier than most Americans. Those who suffered the most were people living in poverty, and particularly people of color.
Worst of all, this nation has no language for talking about this collective trauma. Some individuals have the education and the resources to seek the help of mental health experts, who are now completely overwhelmed by the demand. But most Americans have neither the self-awareness nor the health insurance to get such help and are just trying to “get back to normal” on their own.
Republicans could hope for nothing better than unacknowledged trauma and deep anxiety to peddle their politics of rage. And even worse, Democrats have started to play the same game. This is election is indeed the race to the bottom that the Obamas warned us about.
There’s one more element in this vicious election that helps Republicans more than any other: racism. White supremacy is always premised on the view that white people deserve better because they are better. (Republicans have also gotten really good at promoting the idea of exceptional minorities who have somehow redeemed themselves with white people). Through this lens, white voters can easily slip from despair at their troubles into rage at having the good life that is justly ‘theirs’ taken away from them by ‘woke’ Democrats who have turned their backs on hard-working whites in favor of undeserving Black criminals and school dropouts and illegal aliens.
White rage has been given even more weight than in the past by the successful Republican strategy of using Supreme Court appointments and control of state legislatures to undermine minority voting rights.
What was once seen as unthinkable is now a real possibility: if the Trump Republicans are not stopped, it is possible that a white nationalist government could bring fascism to power in America.
So, what is to be done at such a fraught moment? One possibility is for Democrats to unleash their own version of the politics of rage, and this is indeed what is happening. The Democrats’ politics of rage depict Republicans (and anyone who votes Republican) as participating in a white-supremacist political movement that is opening the door to fascism in America.
But the Democrats’ politics of rage cannot win elections. Republicans have successfully won over many if not most of the white working class and sizable minorities of Black, Asian, Latino and Native American voters who are truly dispossessed from the American Dream. These voters hope that the old American fantasy of free markets and the Lockean dream of a self-regulating civic society (i.e. with minimal government interference in peoples’ lives) will reward the virtues of hard work and family values. To them, the only role government should play is to protect the virtuous (police, military powers) from the ‘unvirtous’, i.e. criminals and foreigners.
The Democrats’ problem is that they are trying to mobilize a base that is much better educated, and wealthier than the Democratic base of the 1930s or the ‘new’ Republican base. While the Democratic voters are certainly very upset by the threat of fascism, the loss of reproductive rights, and racism, polls show they are less likely to vote in this election than Republicans. Indeed, many progressives have responded to the politics of rage by turning away from politics altogether to save their mental health. The politics of rage is less effective with Democrats for another reason: Democrats always yearn for a politics of hope, in which government demonstrates the positive contributions that science-led policies can make to everyone’s well-being. While Democrats can rage against Republicans, they cannot rage against the government itself. And while Republicans can gleefully call for a nihilistic ‘revolution’ (a la Steve Bannon), Democrats wistfully look to smart government leading to a progressively improving society.
If politics becomes a battle between raging echo chambers, Republicans will win every time. Their message is simple. The Democrats’ is not.
The challenge of this moment for Democrats is to figure out a way to mobilize their base and win over independents with a politics of hope, one broad enough and real enough to win over even large chunks of disaffected and traumatized white working-class voters and the growing ranks of Latinos, Asians and Blacks who are voting Republican. While I am not obsessively looking at this election cycle, not one Democrat I have followed is doing this. No one is campaigning on the success of government in saving us from a deadly pandemic and preventing economic collapse by the Democratic-led historic interventions. Democrats should be running on the foundational importance of the infrastructure bill rather than getting defensive about Critical Race Theory or being allegedly soft on crime.
Fundamentally, however, the politics of rage will not be defeated by policy debates by themselves. Its defeat requires a straight-ahead acknowledgement of our collective trauma and specific reassurances–through action– that we will be ok. What we need today, indeed what we have needed ever since January 6, 2020, is a healing voice, one that can actually be believed. This is not an easy task, to be sure. Joe Biden should have been that voice. While his administration did some important work, he failed at his most important job: to minister to the pain of the American people the way that FDR did in his fireside chats of the 1930s.
Without progressive leaders who can publicly address our trauma and give people hope, the politics of rage will be successful, and our collective trauma and despair will grow even deeper.
The long view 