Trump outrage helps to reinvigorate Democratic Party
Nothing has impact like an unintended consequence. The last thing Donald Trump intends is to re-create and reinvigorate the Democratic Party. But so he has done. He has no idea what he has wreaked. Yet.
In retrospect the Democratic Party, nationally and in New York, had become enfeebled and moribund. It was the party of yesterday. It was dominated by big money and big names: If you had enough of both, or either, you emerged and won. It was for more of the same in substance and in style. It lost its ethical core values. Fewer and fewer people voted or registered or joined the party infrastructure.
Change came slowly. Think back. You could see stirrings in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and again in the Sanders candidacy. What we lacked was a unifying figure, someone who can galvanize small discontents and point the way to an organized insurgency.
Comes now Donald Trump. No need to recite the litany of disgraces, retrogressions and foulness. But people noticed. Millions of them. Outrage grew. And, in keeping with American tradition, a movement happened. Its founding principle is opposition to Trump. Not Trump-hating, although some of that is inevitable. Rather, a sense that we as a people and as individuals are better than our elected leader. A profound revulsion to Trump’s words and actions swelled, mostly in elements of the Democratic Party that had given up on voting and politics.
Elected officials either joined the movement or were swept away. Gov. Andrew Cuomo joined. Those like state Sen. Jeff Klein and U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley did not. Even of more consequence, voters poured out to vote. The turnout in the gubernatorial primary tripled. Tripled.
Cuomo ran the best campaign of his life, emerging from the shadows of alliances with Republicans, right wing economics and corruption scandal to seize the mantle of the anti-trump. Voters loved it. Klein and other Independent Democratic Conference incumbents were run out of town from Syracuse to New York City. Voters hated it. Of such a witches brew is a Blue Wave made.
Watch the November results with great care. An army is marching on Washington and Albany. It will win. January will bring power to ideas and forces that seemed forever dormant. It will be messy. It will lurch and misstep. It will elevate unexpected and strange people. It will marry opposition to Trump to ideas for a better, fairer, more just New York and America. Things will change, largely for the better.
Without a clue as to what he was achieving Donald Trump is revolutionizing us. He is making America great again. Just not in the way he intended.