Memo to Democrats: Learn from "Les Gilets Jaunes" or Fail
Like most Americans, we Democrats do not naturally incline to look overseas for guidance.
That disinclination has cost us dearly. My July 2016 call to Democrats to "Learn The Lessons From Brexit or Lose" fell on deaf ears. And we lost.
We are at risk of repeating that insularity now, with disastrous implications for 2020.
We are so overjoyed with the mid-terms, and so preoccupied with progressives vs centrists, generational change, Mueller, and tweets, that we risk wining big in 2020 and failing.
To see how, consider France.
Their middle class, like ours, has long suffered economic stagnation and political alienation.
That heralded an electoral earthquake as French Presidential elections approached in 2017, with real concern that the hard right, led by Mme. Le Pen, would breach all barriers. And France, and so Europe's core, would end up with an Even-Worse-Than-Trump at the helm.
But M. Macron rode to the rescue, dashing, new, technocratic, engaging, next generation, whisking his brand new party—En Marche!—into existence overnight. He took 66 percent of the final popular vote to Mme. Le Pen's 34 percent. A crushing win. Nightmare ended!
Not so. M. Macron won big, but he has not succeeded.
A little more than a year after his triumph, his personal approval ratings have sunk way below even those of Mr. Trump. And, though little covered in the media here, for a month now the "Gilets Jaunes" (Yellow Vests) have ravaged French towns and cities with fiery protests, Paris has been on lock-down with shops on the Champs Élysée boarded up, and tens of thousands of police have been deployed nationwide to maintain public order.
Most French towns still remain quiet. But that was so in 1789 also, and, as then, anger is seething just below the surface. The warning has been given. We ignore it at our peril.
So what happened to his big win?
M. Macron won electorally, but he has not succeeded.
His central failure is that he ran on a program in 2017 to win the election—and in that he succeeded beyond all measure. But his program largely continued policies that went before—austerity above all—and so it has failed to fix the roots of middle-class anger. And his personal conduct in office aggravated their profound sense of alienation.
A regressive gas tax hike to cut carbon emissions, and Macron's initial dismissal of opposition to it, snapped the camel's back. He is now multi-U-turning in a fight for his political life.
Neera Tanden has drawn the attention of US progressives to the protests. But the underlying lesson for Democrats for 2020 is that if we wish to avoid M. Macron's fate, we have to run on a program in 2020 which decisively fixes the economic roots of the electoral earthquake that produced Mr. Trump. And we must do so with a style completely free of the whiff of our own entitlement that so inflamed his voters.
That poses a conundrum.
To do so will require that some of the most deeply entrenched interests, now hiding behind Trump's voters, are overcome. That will be an all-but-impossible political task, even if his voters are neutralized or outnumbered in the 2020 election. Instead, we need to add their volcanic political energy to our own in order to get the job done. We cannot do it alone.
Impossible?
Only if you think Trump's voters comprise unreconstructed racists, deplorables, and bigots.
Some of their leaders are. But many of his folk not only voted for us in 2008 and 2012, but did so with an unapologetically urbane African American at our helm. Before him, both Presidents Roosevelt managed to bring them onside also. They are reachable.
And France warns us loudly of the consequences of failing to do so. Even if we win both houses and the Presidency in 2020 and recapture the Supreme Court and many State offices, all as M. Macron did, we may still be stopped in our tracks without them behind us.
Claiming that we are "the most qualified" will not help; it just shrieks of the entitlement that hurt us so badly in 2016. Along with substance, our tone in this populist environment must be that the people will determine qualification, and no-one and nothing else.
All this neither requires us to jettison our priorities nor our identity. To the contrary, many of our policy preferences reflect the problems that produced Mr. Trump. And his policy program is utterly misspecified to fix to those problems.
But if we are to avoid M. Macron's fate, a program which just makes us feel good or which aims only at incremental progress will not do. The measure of our program must be that it fixes the economic roots of Mr. Trump, decisively. And it has to be presented that way.
I have proposed a full 9-point program for Democrats for 2020 to do that, "The Real Deal":
• No State Left Behind;
• Build Like We Mean It;
• Top Dollar For Your Work;
• Morning in America;
• American Medicare, not Mafia Medicine;
• Wall Street, Play With Your Own Money;
• The New Kid On The Block Is China;
• Its Our Money; Hands Off; and
• America Undivided.
At its heart is a radical fix of extortionate—hence the graphic nomenclature—health care.
The full program can be found here in the form of an acceptance speech delivered by our nominee as Democrat candidate for President at our party convention in 2020. The bulk of it is directly addressed at Mr. Trump's voters, laying out for them how and why they should back our program, and why it needs their energy, along with all of ours, to get it done.
It works for them, it works for us, and so it works for all of us.
We Democrats secured magnificent victories in the mid-terms, despite voter suppression, gerrymandering, and a hostile map, testament to all those at every level who labored these past two years to bring them about. We have every reason to anticipate more in 2020.
But as we prepare for those elections and select our Presidential nominee, what we must avoid at all costs is, as in France, winning big but not succeeding. We must not win with our version of M. Macron.
Quite literally, the fate of the world depends upon it.
Peter Doyle
Washington DC
December 11, 2018