Here is an excerpt from an
interview of Skrowronek with
The Nation, for those who might be interested.
RK: So what comes next?
SS: Obama sketched an outline of what an alternative to Reaganism looks like, but since he couldn’t dislodge the orthodoxy that alternative has been pushed off into the distance. Think of Richard Nixon. He had this idea of the Southern strategy, a way to break white voters off from the Democratic Party, but the regime of New Deal liberalism was too strong for him to accomplish a wholesale political reconstruction. That had to wait for Ronald Reagan. Similarly, Obama has this idea of a diverse coalition but he couldn’t yet displace the old orthodoxy. If you have a real disjunctive moment now, if conservatism finally implodes, if it exposes through its insufficient actions the impossibility of its own formula, then we should expect Trump to be replaced by a genuine reconstructive leader, someone who can firmly repudiate that Reaganism and completely redefine the terms and conditions of legitimate national government.
RK: What might that reconstruction look like?
SS: The obvious answer would be somebody like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. But I’m not so sure. If the opportunity is not simply to oppose conservatism but to build something different and new, then something much broader than the current left alternative—something that mixes things up—might be more attractive.
We already see in the rise of Donald Trump the limitations of thinking in terms of Reagan-style conservatism versus Obama-style progressivism. He is already mixing up these new coalitions with a different ideological makeup than anything we have seen before. That’s precisely why he is out of sync with his own party. The most brilliant and interesting thing about Trump is that he has a sense of creating something that’s largely alien to the Republican Party but which at least is fresh and new.
With that in mind, it may be wrongheaded for Democrats to plan on returning to power on the basis of old-school left-liberalism. It might be better to consider what a totally different configuration would look like. Instead of trying more of the same, maybe Democrats need to think about what something completely different would look like for them, and how they can bring it about. It would need to be something broader than just harping on the old lines of cleavage.
Think about reconstructive leaders in the past. They don’t just come in with the opposite of what was there before. There hasn’t always been this eternal battle of liberalism and conservatism—if conservatism loses then liberalism wins. That’s not how history works. Jefferson built something completely new. In his first inaugural address he said, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Jackson marginalized many of his supporters and created this new thing that hadn’t been anticipated in the previous set of alternatives. That’s also true of Franklin Roosevelt. He said he didn’t want the support of conservative Democrats, and he welcomed progressive Republicans with a New Deal. And then there’s Reagan, who famously won over blue-collar Democrats in the South and Midwest.
If there’s going to be a reconstruction following a failed Trump presidency, it’s going to be something completely different than what we’ve seen before. Somebody has to come up with what that’s going to be. That’s a job for political action, not political science.
