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THE UNITED STATES is in a remarkable place: for the first time, we are living in a truly post-cold-war political environment. For those on the center-left and center-right, there remains a desperate hope that if Trump were to be removed from the scene, through impeachment or defeat, the US could somehow return to its previous trajectory. And for all the past year’s politics of despair, a likely electoral outcome, because of popular revulsion toward Trump, is that centrist politicians in both parties will gain another shot at power. Given the razor-thin margin of Trump’s victory—despite institutional advantages like the electoral college and voter suppression—there is little reason to assume that Trump the politician will enjoy lasting political dominance. But as long as party stalwarts persist in recycling cold-war tropes, they will remain trapped in the same cycles of social crisis and popular disaffection. Even if this combination of nostalgia and outrage works for a couple of election cycles, it cannot work indefinitely. This is not 1989.
With the end of the cold-war frame, the left is now truly present at the political table for the first time in decades. It represents a growing and increasingly vocal slice of the American electorate, and it is more ideologically assertive than at any point since the 1960s, perhaps even since the 1930s. The left’s strength today is in its extra-institutional energy and capacity for mass mobilization. It is in the ability to turn out participants to public rallies and engage activists for specific and targeted protests. The strength also resides in broad popular sentiment, most dramatically evidenced by the shifting public perceptions of socialism and capitalism. Despite internal disagreement, this broadly democratic socialist left, as expressed in everything from the Fight for $15 to the vision statement of the Movement for Black Lives, has a systematic and practical agenda for addressing the central problems that have roiled American life: the destructive rise of plutocratic power, the reality of structural racism, and the effects at home and abroad of American militarism.
The goal is not merely to bring back the social welfarism of the past. It is to create an actual left majority—cross-racial and class-conscious—that has a clear agenda serving its interests and, just as vitally, the bargaining power institutionally to pursue those interests. To move past the moribund legacies of the cold war, we need to invest in new democratic reform efforts across the American institutional landscape.
Most obviously, this means harnessing mass anger at the corporate corruption of the political process and at the undemocratic implications of political features like voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the electoral college. But it also requires a targeted effort to bring together both economic and democratic demands, since when intertwined, these projects can help expand the left’s practical institutional capacity. One exemplary option, already being taken up by some activists, insists that “ban the box” hiring-reform efforts must be seen alongside the overturning of state felony-disenfranchisement laws. Another possibility, much older but less often heard today, would be to strengthen the classic bases of left politics like unions by, in addition to making it easier for them to organize and to strike, returning to the language of “workplace democracy,” insisting that the labor movement be viewed not as an interest group bargaining for mere material goods but as an institution that epitomizes how economic and democratic needs can be jointly satisfied. A similar approach could be taken to the decriminalization of immigrant status, since an empowered immigrant community is one able to press both at work and in politics for a racially and economically reconstructive agenda.