The United States is now in the midst of the most serious attack on the nation’s democratic institutions, rule of law, and checks and balances on executive power in modern presidential history. Every day, Donald Trump and his authoritarian regime are violating constitutional norms, and civil and human rights as he embraces dictatorial powers, threatening to use political violence against his perceived enemies.
Even as Trump moves forward to deploy the U.S. military to occupy minority-majority cities, signaling the future invocation of the Insurrection Act and the imposition of martial law, there’s been little or no effective push back by federal courts — and mostly green lights from the fascist-friendly extremist right-wing majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Despite Trump’s plummeting approval ratings in recent public opinion polls, the Democratic party has seen its lowest favorability rating at 32 percent in nearly 30 years. Much of the anger directed at Democrats comes from their anemic and uninspired effort to fight against Trump’s authoritarian, racist and cruel policies targeting America’s working families and most vulnerable population. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton, who urges floundering Democrats — who want to strengthen the party’s appeal to working class voters — to embrace Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” style populist economic policies that change people’s lives.
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON: The piece that I wrote for Salon started off as I was taking a look at progressivism versus populism, going back historically to look how that had come through and because Trump is doing this return to the Gilded Age thing. And so it kind of sparked my interest and went back and looked a little bit at how the progressives came to kind of turn back that populist fervor that was happening around the turn of the century.
And they put a lot of faith in expertise, professionalism, technocratic ability and that kind of became the signature of the left and particularly the Democratic party. And when FDR came in, he adopted all that. He hired very, very highly skilled people to work on the problems, the vast problems that he was facing. I mean, this was a Great Depression and it was an absolutely terrible thing and big things had to be done.
And so, he put people in charge who knew what they were doing, who understood the problem and had ideas about how to fix them. He went back to a previous incarnation of the Democratic party, which was a ruthless, very hyperpartisan form of politics. And he was unafraid. He took on the right without any kind of hesitation and ended up combining those two things, the two parts of the Democratic party, which had been before progressivism and then progressivism itself and combined it with a ruthlessness to get things done for the good of the American people. And that’s what I think that the Democrats have if they choose to go that path. That’s the New Deal model, which is that “Yes, you know how to do things, you have policies, you’ve got plans, you’ve got all those things that need to be done and everybody knows it.”
But at the same time, you’ve got to be a ruthless political animal who is willing to take on the opposition, which in that case was the Great Depression. And then the literal fascists, the Nazis in World War II, that is where the Democrats have to be. They have that model. And it worked very well for the Democrats for decades. And it wasn’t until maybe the 1970s that really the pragmatic side of the Democratic party kind of started to fall away, and there became this great reliance on the technocratic expertise.
And that is where we find this kind of stale tepid inability to kind of recognize the foe that we have here in this new MAGA Republican party. And if they can recapture that, if they can find it and I think there are signs now that they’re seeing that we’re starting to see some life — people like Gavin Newsom or J.B. Pritzker or Wes Moore in Maryland. There are people who are seeing this, and I am just crossing my fingers and hopeful that that’s the direction they’re going to take.
SCOTT HARRIS: And Heather, I did want to mention here that for years the Democratic party has relied on Wall Street, large corporations and Silicon Valley campaign cash. And it seems to be a major obstacle to adopting a truly progressive popular policy agenda such as Medicare for All or housing as a human right, and then of course breaking with the fossil fuel industry to challenge corporate polluters causing the climate crisis and destroying our environment. Do you see that yourself as an impediment to the Democratic party really going where it needs to go to win over voters who really have been hurt by the neoliberal politics practice, both by Democrats and Republicans?
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON: There’s no doubt about it. And what we’re seeing laid out on a silver platter for the Democrats to just pick up and run with is this idea of that the billionaires which represent — you can use Donald Trump as the best example of it, as your great illustration and all the rest of them who have basically distorted our politics and our society in general.
And this is the argument, this is the campaign argument that they have waiting for them. It’s right there. It couldn’t be more obvious. And yes, it requires them to eschew those policies and that kind of interest twaddle that they’ve been using for the last several decades, and they have to go in a more populist working class kind of direction. But here it is, it’s presented to them. It’s right there. This is FDR and his four freedoms. This is him saying, “These are my enemies. I welcome their hatred.” That’s the kind of thing that they have to embrace, I think. I mean, don’t, when you look at the last election and the concerns that people had and what everybody was going through, and the way our economy is leaving vast numbers of people behind, particularly young people. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the people will respond to this; somebody just has to take the chance of just going after it and being as unabashed as FDR was when he did that.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Heather Digby Parton (17:17) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter to get updates to our “Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
For the best listening experience and to never miss an episode, subscribe to Between The Lines on your favorite podcast app or platform.
Or subscribe to our Between The Lines and Counterpoint Weekly Summary.