It is an axiom of American politics that there is one born every minute. Even so, it boggles the mind to think that so many Americans fell for Donald Trump’s con two years ago. Many did, however, and now he is president of the United States.
To be sure, it was the Electoral College, not the popular vote, that put him in office. Still, some sixty-three million Americans voted for him.
This was impossible to justify, even before it became as clear as it soon would be, how manifestly unfit Trump is for the office he now holds. However, it is not hard to understand why so many people allowed themselves to be snookered.
The Trump vote was a rebuke to the dead center in a neoliberal age. This was not an “exceptional” phenomenon; all over the world, center left and center right political parties are losing support and drawing the ire of voters that they used to count upon.
For the most part, though, the center is holding — in the United States and, with few exceptions, elsewhere. There is nothing quite as dead center as the Democratic Party.
The conventional wisdom has it that the Democrats are a party of the center-left. That gives them too much credit.
But because better alternatives are all but precluded by America’s electoral institutions and by a duopoly party system that effectively neuters political initiatives that fall outside the “bipartisan” ambit, the Democratic Party is where leftists go when they want to step out of the margins and into…