A Centrist President Would Maintain Trumpism
From Clinton to Biden, centrist Democrats have built upon the worst tendencies of the right.
Third Way, a centrist democratic think tank, is hashing out plans to secure a centrist Democratic Party candidate in 2026. This would be a mistake and an almost childish misunderstanding of how we got here in the first place. Even if a centrist seems “more electable”, it can only lead us back down the same road we’re currently on.
Third Way centrist democrats were firmly established by Bill Clinton and a series of conferences and articles in the 1990s. They embraced the neoliberal politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, cutting public services, empowering corporations, and expanding militarism, while wearing a mask of social progress.
Today, American politics can easily be understood as a multi-decade Reagan presidency, backed all the way through by centrist Democrats. Some seeds were planted by Jimmy Carter’s attempts to balance feel good politics with early neoliberalism and the backing of death squads. But Reagan’s neoliberalism solidified the modern model.
Reagan chipped away at the social welfare state established in the New Deal Era and LBJ’s Great Society programs, and demonized poor Americans for using services that their tax dollars paid for. He cut public funding for everything from school lunches to healthcare.
He launched covert operations across the planet to crush socialist movements fighting for the poor, and built friendly relationships with genocidal dictators like Guatamala’s Efraín Ríos Montt and Chad’s Hissène Habré, and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
Reagan smothered pro-democratic leftists in favor of forces that mirrored the anti-Communist and anti-feminist politics of his own Christian base. He also escalated the “War on Drugs”, while his administration supported the cocaine trade, radically expanding the surveillance and prosecution of poor Black Americans. Our modern lobby state also grew under Ronald. He vetoed key, bi-partisan, legislation to combat lobbying and it showed. In 1973 there were only 300 Political Action Committees in the country, by 1985, there were 12,000.
These politics continued under his vice president George H.W Bush, but did not suddenly disappear when the charming, likely pedophile, Bill Clinton was elected. Clinton saw himself as the “third way”, a balance of lofty ideals and the violent pragmatism of Reagan.
Clinton had the benefit of not having to fight the Cold War and was thus able to abandon much of Reagan’s foreign policy, excluding a currently consequential attempt to encircle Russia by expanding NATO.
Bill brought war home by backing the national push to lock up as many Black people as possible through the 1994 Crime Bill and an expansion of the war on drugs. In 1997, he signed into creation the 1033 Program, which moved billions of dollars of military equipment into local police departments.
Further, he bought into Reagan’s narrative of welfare queens and signed legislation that targeted single mothers, scaling back support they could receive and mandating that they work outside the home. This often forced already struggling mothers into low paying work.
He continued Reagan’s trend of helping the rich concentrate their power by signing the 1994 telecommunications act, which led to the consolidation of major entertainment companies down to the 5 (and likely soon to be 4) remaining companies we have today.
Bush continued much of the legacy of Reagan and his father, and used 9/11 to launch naked resource wars that his predecessors could only dream of. What was covert could now be overt, and he took spying to a new level with the signing away of American civil liberties with the Patriot Act.
Luckily, the progressive champion, Barack Obama, would cease this trend (kidding, obviously).
Despite selling himself as a progressive in his original primary, Obama was firmly a third way centrist who carried forth the worst of his predecessors. He blended covert with overt, normalizing drone warfare in a mask of accountability that neglected to mention that his guidelines treated all young Arab men as legitimate targets of public execution. He used billions of public money to bail out banks, a process actually began by Bush, that exploited working class people and crashed the global economy in the process.
Obama picked up the racist narratives of his predecessors, scolding Black families for eating fried chicken and wearing fancy chains. Obama embraced Bush’s Patriot Act and coordinated the crushing of Occupy Wall Street, a social movement energized by the same hopeful youth that brought him into power.
In many ways, Obama set the final precedent for Trump. He killed the 16-year-old American boy Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and paved the way for Trump to murder his 8-year-old sister a few years later. Trump too promised radical change and used his “honesty” and charm to win over Americans who were fed up with the perceived status quo.
Trump seized upon Obama’s detention centers and record number of deportations–numbers that dwarfed those of any modern Republican administration. He continued Obama’s drone program and slow expansion of the use of unaccountable mercenaries like the far right led Blackwater company. He is radically upgrading the surveillance state set up by his predecessors, and combining Nixon and Reagan’s War on Drugs with Bush and Obama’s the War on Terror in a naked attempt to continue the resource wars of Bush.
Trump has arguably moved us into a new era, one in which the empire proudly exposes its rotten genitalia. That stark nudity, and inability to navigate the economic challenges of COVID-19, may have been why he lost to Biden in 2020.
Biden, who voted for many of Reagan’s economic policies in the 80s, did little to undo the damage of Trump. His greatest feat was the Inflation Reduction Act, which essentially took the ambitions of the New Deal era and the Sunrise Movement and weaponized them to continue the anti-Chinese Trade War of Trump.
He did not honor one of Obama’s most humane acts, normalizing relationship with Cuba, and instead doubled down on hurtling the world toward another global conflagration by adopting Trump’s military priorities. He also slowed down the fight against climate change by pressuring countries to disengage from China’s renewable programs.
Centrist attempts to balance right wing policies with good talk are fundamentally unable to deliver on a good life for working people. This drives the masses into disillusionment, or worse, into the arms of the far right.
And here we are, unsurprisingly, back to Trump. And here Chile is, back to Pinochet. And here Argentina is, back to Videla. At least their economic policies have returned, we are now forced to see if their scale of domestic violence will return.
Electing what are essentially Clintonian (and thus Reaganian and now Trumpian) centrists like Newsom or Harris will likely continue the Reagan and Trump eras. We will have friendlier faces overseeing Israeli genocide and American invasions, half in and half out immigration, criminal justice, and climate reform. It is unlikely that either will walk back the use of AI in warfare, or scale back the new surveillance state being setup with the help of corporations like Flock and Palantir.
Even electing AOC in 2028 or Mamdani in 2032 may likely just put the United States on the same trajectory of European social democracy, unable to reform the capitalists they will inevitably collaborate with. They may be forced to enact the starvation and punishment of the working class amid the fallout of a likely coming economic crash. I would be the first to sign up for their presidential campaigns, so do not mistake this for pessimism or “ultraleftism”.
History and modern European examples point to the limitations of social democratic parties, which were part of the global third way movement to balance the needs of people with the unsatiable hunger of capitalists.
Both roads, without well organized revolutionary fervor from the ground, will likely lead back to another version of Trump.
Does that mean doom and gloom? No, it means we need to reckon with history as a whole and think long term. We need to consider what it means to meet angry Zoomers and Gen Alpha where they are at, and be honest about the failures of the Democratic Party. That journey does not begin by electing another third way democrat.
The age of neoliberalism cannot be undone through simple elections, and even the social democratic exceptions to Europe are beginning to crumble under the contradictions of capitalism. Democracy cannot serve both the working class and the billionaire class. By attempting to do both, the billionaires will always win, perpetually using their wealth and control of media to maintain control over political parties and absorb or crush social movements.
It will likely require a complete rewriting of the system, as seen by both the American and Russian Revolutions. Both had their shortcomings, but no reasonable person could argue that they were simple clones of their previous systems.
In the meantime, we must reject the idea that centrism is the answer.