Why Democrats Will Work Together This Time

Friends,

Democrats usually suffer Big Tent Disease. To win, they put together such large coalitions of voters — working class, middle class, Black people, Latinos, women, young people, moderates, liberals — that once they’re in office, intra-party feuds often threaten their agenda.

Will it happen again when they take power in January? I don’t think so. Two outside forces will keep Democrats glued together.

The first is raging economic inequality.

Wages and salaries have now fallen to 43 percent of the nation’s gross domestic income, the lowest since 1929. By contrast, corporate profits have climbed to a record high of 12.4 percent. Those profits go to the owners of corporations — top executives and investors whose incomes depend largely on shares of stock.

These trends are squeezing average working Americans. They caused a large majority of voters to demand change in the midterm elections.

The trends won’t change anytime soon because they’re the result of monopolies now baked into the economy, combined with the lowest level of labor unionization in almost a century, and a vicious cycle of legal bribes paid to politicians by big corporations and wealthy individuals seeking to keep their taxes low and maintain their government perks.

This raging inequality has given Democrats a clear goal — to reduce it! — and clear villains: billionaires and greedy corporations. The recent campaigns of nearly all newly-elected Democratic members of Congress — whether “moderate” or “Democratic socialist” — blasted billionaires and corporate greed.

Democratic winners from purple battleground states are singing from the same hymnals as the winners from deep blue states. Representative-elect Sam Forstag of Montana, who flipped a conservative seat, said he’d “fight for populist economic policies that are actually going to help working people, and finally put us back at the front of the line in terms of who Congress should be working for.”

In what had been ruby-red Republican Kansas, Senator-elect Adam Hamilton campaigned to expand Medicare to cover vision and dental care. Texas Senator-elect James Talarico, a self-styled moderate, wants to allow every American, regardless of age, to join Medicare. So do Michigan’s Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson.

The second force that will keep Democrats together is an even more combative Trump along with Trump’s more belligerent sycophants.

Trump likes nothing better than to go on the attack, and for the second half of his term he’s selected attack dogs: his new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and the new House Minority Leader, Jim Jordan. And he’s decided to keep the most belligerent member of his Cabinet: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

It would be different if the midterm shellacking had caused Trump to rethink his approach to governing — making him more amenable to working with the new Democratic majorities, softening his rhetoric, moving him to fire Hegseth and appoint a more reasonable defense secretary, a chief of staff who’d extend peace offerings, and a House Republican leader who’d collaborate with the Democrats.

Under these circumstances, some Democratic members of the next Congress might be tempted to tone down their demands and work with Trump Republicans.

But Trump has chosen the opposite approach. This week’s letter from White House counsel Will Scharf to incoming House Oversight Committee Chairman Robert Garcia — warning that aggressive congressional probes into the Trump administration could “cross the line into blatant criminality” — illustrates the sort of bizarre hostility we’re likely to see starting in January.

Trump’s fragile ego may feel more secure this way. As long as his attack dogs fill the airwaves with pugilistic assaults and nasty invective, Trump won’t have to admit to himself the mammoth failure of his presidency or its colossal repudiation by voters.

But his belligerence and that of the people around him are a gift to the Democrats. As with the record levels of inequality that’s uniting Democrats, the administration’s hostility toward them will also help Democrats stay united.

The Democrats’ Big Tent Disease has found two big cures.

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