Turn Out the Base
The Republican Party of today has a base. Call it MAGA. Call it something else. Whatever you call it, you’ll typically imagine it as a “base.” The recent controversy over Donald Trump’ relationship to Jeffrey Epstein revealed that even Trump cannot escape its orbit. Trumpublicanism is not only a top-down movement that will always follow its leader. To be sure it is still an authoritarian movement, but it is paradoxically a bottom-up, populist one as much as a top-down, directed one. Or better said, the right today stitches together a winning coalition that appears to be driven by—and ultimately beholden to—its base, which is not moderate, but hardline and radical in its reactionary fervor. Much reporting on Trump and MAGA focuses on this base: who is in it? What do they want?
Yet reporting on the left hardly ever speaks of a base. Instead the language is of constituencies and interest groups: different ethnic groups, educational sectors, class positions, policy perspectives, education levels, and generations. On the left, the framework is not a focus on rabid reactionary base and its demands in the least. Instead, the focus is on a splintered, fragmented coalition of interests, (which was actually always something of a quality of the Democratic Party in US political history). More fascinatingly, while the Republican right is driven by an amorphous mass base of populist reactionary politics, the Democratic Party seems to be driven more by a strange kind of rabid elite of moderates.
This framework could best be recognized by the backlash and panic to incursions into the Democratic Party by Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America since 2016. Remember that it was Sanders’s incursions into the Democratic Party from the left that oddly paralleled the rise of MAGA on the right. Yet Sanders, the “Squad,” and groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America are almost never thought of as a base. They are thought of as a radical fringe that has to be pushed away by the base of moderate centrist “New Democrats” (think Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden or so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats or the commentaries of James Carville).
To call this wing of the Democratic Party moderates, however, is really not accurate. For while centrist Democrats expect the leftwing of the party always to fall in line when their candidates win (as with Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election), when more leftwing candidates themselves emerge victorious from Democratic primaries, centrists refuse to fall in line behind these victors. To wit, witness the primary election victory of Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Did centrists unify behind him when he trounced centrist Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic mayoral candidacy? No, instead they are reconfiguring behind Cuomo as an independent candidate or, worse, some are backing corrupt incumbent Eric Adams, who is now a veritable pawn of Trump. That’s hardly “moderate” at all. Its a divisive form of moderation, and so different from what seems to happen on the right in the Republican Party. It is a dynamic far more twisted and strange.
Why this difference between perceptions of the “base”? Does it have to do with the kinds of assumptions analysts bring to the meaning of a political core to the right as compared to the left? If the Democrats increasingly are the party of the more highly educated and affluent, does that not count as a base because of histories of how we analyze class (a base had to be found among the working classes or the masses?)? Must a base always be a force for radicalization? Can a base ever stabilize? What is the meaning of being radical, reactionary, or moderate when the base operates in such different modes across the political spectrum? And who is assumed not to be the base in these political formations? Who so?
The different treatment of the base in the Republican and Democratic Parties asks us to think more critically about characterizations of political “bases.” Republicans today are ostensibly pushed ever rightward by a framework of a radicalized base. Democrats are forever paralyzed from moving leftward by a model of constituencies, special interest groups, and a centrist “moderate” group that is hardly moderate, that howls for acquiescence and obedience even when it loses.
What does that suggest? It suggests that in the 2020s perhaps we might question the basics of what makes a base. We might use fewer assumptions about what it is, how it functions, what makes it foundational or not. We might rethink it in new, better, and more vertiginous ways.
