Democrats would rather be moderate than good, writes EricLevitz
Nevertheless, she desisted. Photo: Pool/Getty Images House Democrats announced Tuesday that Donald Trump has become such a menace to American democracy, Congress has a constitutional obligation to remove him from office.
Pelosi’s liberal skeptics take a different view. If Democrats truly consider Trump a threat to America’s constitutional order, affording him a bipartisan victory on one of his defining causes – and thus, increasing his prospects for reelection – is unconscionable. Even if Trump’s new agreement is an improvement on NAFTA, its changes are quite modest in the grand scheme of things.
In my view, the substantive benefits of the USMCA appear to outweigh its political costs. Although it is plausible that fulfilling his promise to renegotiate NAFTA will endear Trump to Rust Belt swing voters, it is also possible that a bipartisan policy enacted 11 months before an election will have little influence on its outcome. The real problem with the Democrats’ support for the USMCA, however, can’t be seen when the trade deal is viewed in isolation.
All this would be less concerning if America’s political geography hadn’t become a co-conspirator in the conservative movement’s anti-democratic project. For all the GOP’s conscious efforts to immunize its power against the threat of majority rule, urban-rural polarization and the structure of our legislative institutions have done the bulk of the party’s work for it.
In a two-party system, even a nationally unpopular Republican Party would never be more than one well-timed recession away from winning full control of the federal government. Should it do so in a future context of climate chaos, war, and/or popular unrest, it is not hard to imagine a rightwing nationalist president establishing de-facto authoritarian rule with the tacit approval of a reactionary judiciary.
Given the trends cited above, there is good reason to think 2021 will be the Democrats’ last shot at reforming the Senate. If urban-rural polarization continues to deepen, while ticket-splitting continues to decline, the party won’t have Senators from West Virginia and Montana much longer. If the party is fortunate enough to win 50 seats in the upper chamber next year, they need to use that opportunity to rebalance the Senate before it is too late.
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