Un-Trumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again

by Dan Pfeiffer

The American political system is fundamentally broken—a fact the Republican Party has ruthlessly exploited to rig politics in their favor.

The biggest divide in the Democratic Party is not between left and center. It’s between those who believe once Trump is gone things will go back to normal, and those who believe that our democracy is under a threat that goes beyond Trump. Everything flows from this debate. If you believe the former, simply surviving the moment is enough. If you believe the latter—as I do9—then you have to be willing to contemplate ideas that were off the table even a few years ago.

but beating Trump is not nearly enough. The Democratic Party needs an aggressive strategy to fundamentally reshape American democracy.

Removing Trump is not enough. America is a “democracy” governed by antidemocratic institutions, a country where a growing progressive diverse majority is being governed by a shrinking conservative white minority.

I believe that un-Trumping America involves three elements: First, understanding who the Republicans are and what their strategy is. Second, winning in 2020. And finally, using our newfound political power to fix American politics to ensure we never have to deal with someone like Donald Trump ever again.

The best summary of Trumpism is “billionaire-funded racial grievance politics.” It’s plutocracy in populist clothing.

Many of these tactics were used before Trump, but never so explicitly or successfully. His win supercharged the worst instincts of the Republican Party and wrote a playbook for the party that will be around for years after Trump has been defeated, retired, or imprisoned.

Trump is the beginning of the next era of the Republican Party, not the end of the last era.

It taught the politicians that shame was weakness, truth was unnecessary, and democracy was the enemy. Trump also got the Republican base hooked on a particularly high dosage of racial resentment.

The reckoning between the billionaire-loving elites and the racist base never happened, because America elected a racist billionaire.

In this union lies the core of Trumpism—billionaire-funded racial grievance politics. Trump united the billionaires and the bigots. That union will continue after he is gone because they need each other to maintain their political power.

Democrats and Republicans are not opposite sides of the same coin. The great asymmetry in American politics is that Democrats view political power as a means to an end, and Republicans view political power as an end in and of itself. In other words, Democrats want to do the right thing and Republicans want to win. Modern politics is a contest between two different philosophies. It’s

Trump’s election didn’t turn the Republican Party into a nihilistic, win-at-all-costs, political-racketeering scheme. The fact that the Republican Party is a nihilistic, win-at-all-costs, political-racketeering scheme is what led to the election of Trump.

The Republican base responds to fear, and Democrats respond to hope. To win elections, we need to inspire nonvoters to become voters. To win elections, Republicans need to fire up their base while keeping everyone else from voting via cynicism and/or suppression.

Republicans have racked up wins with long-term consequences for the Democratic Party and American democracy. To win this battle, we have to stop playing by an old set of rules. We have to adapt to a new type of politics that fuses the hopeful idealism of Barack Obama with the realism that comes from the knowledge that someone like Trump can become president of the United States. We have to match the Republicans not in cynicism, but in strategy and toughness.

you believe Trump is an accident of history, you can have an approach that is simply about waiting out the storm. If you believe that Trump is the logical extension of modern Republicanism, then you need a different, more aggressive approach to right the ship. It means that you have to embrace bolder, more radical responses to Trumpism.

Every year, the American electorate is getting more diverse, which means that Republicans need to get more and more votes from a dwindling white base. This means the rhetoric is going to get more inflammatory. The appeals are going to be more explicit. This will threaten to tear apart the moral fabric of the country, ripping American democracy apart at the seams.

The first step to fixing our democracy is understanding the steps that Republicans have taken in Congress and in the states to hold on to power long after their voters become a distinct political minority.

Instead of trying to figure out how to get more Republicans to vote, the Republicans decided to figure out how to get fewer Democrats to vote.

While Republicans cut or eliminated early voting and made it harder to register people to vote, voter identification laws were the centerpiece of their strategy to wrest power from the public.

Loyola Law School study found only thirty-one credible allegations of in-person voter fraud—the “problem” voter ID is supposed to address—from 2000 to 2014 out of more than one billion votes cast.85 According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 25 percent of African Americans don’t have a government-issued ID. Only 8 percent of whites don’t have an ID. Getting an identification card is prohibitively expensive for a lot of voters. One study cited by the ACLU found that obtaining an ID can cost between $75 and $175.

Cynicism is the ally of conservatism.

My advice would be to hit Trump where he is strong. Instead of trying to exploit Trump’s many and very manifest weaknesses, erode his strengths. Immigration and trade are Trump’s two best issues—they

Your campaign needs to turn out first-time and periodic voters AND win over independent voters, particularly in the exurban and rural counties that turned Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania from Obama blue to Trump red. This is the task, and as daunting as it seems, it is very doable. Obama did it twice without twisting himself into an ideological pretzel. And dozens of Democrats did it in 2018.

But the biggest group of undecided voters is the people simply deciding whether to vote.

I am a proud Democrat because of what we believe in and who we fight for. The Democratic Party has made America stronger, more tolerant, and more just. Democratic presidents led the way on ending Jim Crow,140 passing Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, and legalizing marriage equality. Democrats are the ones who saved the country during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Great Recession. Whenever the country faced a critical juncture, it was the Democratic Party that stepped up, made the tough decisions, and saved America.

A plan to reform and reinvigorate the Democratic Party for battle against Trumpism begins with understanding where we came up short in the Obama era.

But…before you relax and soothe your nerves with Trump’s idiocy and endless grift, the Republicans are better organized and much better funded. They have an easier task come election time—they simply need to turn out a group of mostly homogenous149 very reliable voters. The Democrats have to turn out a larger, more diverse group of people who vote less reliably. We have to overcome voter suppression laws, while getting massively outspent by the other side.

Defeating Trumpism requires reimagining and reforming the Democratic Party.

Fixing democracy needs to become the primary purpose of the Democratic Party.

But…the Democratic Party is too obsessed with the White House.

However, the Democratic Party’s focus on winning the White House has come at the expense of everything else. Democrats have controlled the House of Representatives for only six of the last twenty-five years and the Senate for about nine of the last twenty-five. We have done worse in governorships and lost nearly one thousand state legislative seats during Obama’s presidency.

But in an era where Congress can’t agree on naming a post office,155 statehouses are where policy is made. States manage elections; they can expand or infringe upon reproductive and civil rights. States can make guns easier or more difficult to buy. Most important, state governments draw the congressional and legislative district lines.

The issues that matter to Democratic voters, the ones that help us win elections—health care, economic inequality, and civil rights—will never get their due in the current media environment. They aren’t outrageous enough.

The biggest takeaway from this change in the media environment is that political communications is no longer public relations; it is modern information warfare.

To compete in this new and terrifying environment, Democrats need to abandon our old strategies and nostalgia for bygone days and get on a war footing. Here are seven commandments for winning the information war.

1: Change or Die

Yet despite a massive technological, economic, and cultural transformation, the basic model for how Democratic politicians communicate has barely changed.

The task of the modern communications department is not about getting “coverage”; it’s about influencing the conversation. It’s about using every tool available to persuade people—the traditional media is just one tool in the box, and it ain’t the main tool.

2: The New York Times Is Not Going to Save Us

However, it’s time we realized that journalists are not on our side. We have vastly different agendas and competing interests.

3: Become Your Own Media Outlet

Communication in the modern age is about creating and distributing content to people who may be interested in that content. Campaigns need to become their own content factories. When you pass your message through the press to the public, you are passing it through a filter that dilutes the power of your message.

4: Progressive Media Is the Future

Nothing is more important in the long-term effort to defeat Trumpism than to build an aggressive, compelling media infrastructure that can be a countervailing force. We need to speak directly to progressives across the country. There have been some really good efforts to do this since 2016. I am very proud of Pod Save America and Crooked Media’s role in those efforts, but there is so much more work to do.

Progressives dominate the eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old cohort that advertisers and politicians covet. Yet there has been a limited willingness by the traditional players to invest in truly progressive media. There is as of yet no liberal Rupert Murdoch who wants to push their political agenda and build a successful business.201

5: It Takes an Army

Traditional field organizing is critical and effective and must continue, but it’s not sufficient.

Imagine a world where campaigns built tools that told you which of your contacts were undecided or unregistered.

6: Activism Works