2017 could be good for Democrats — if they look to the heartland

It might be seen in some future history that there has never been a better moment for Democrats. The old generations, the old century, the old millennium have all fallen from them, finally, like the cast-off slough of a snake.

They will continue looking back in anger, blaming the FBI, blaming Russia, blaming Fox news, even blaming poor, hapless Huma Abedin — blaming everyone but themselves, but soon they will recognize that America is at a major historic turning and they could well be key to it.

Momentarily, Republicans have the advantage. They have won the election and with that win a new spirit has undeniably awakened in the heartland. There lies America’s future and with the victory of real estate mogul Donald Trump, Republicans have taken first steps into it.

It is possible to see Trump as a phoenix from which new generations and new vistas will arise; the potential of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), Trump’s nominee for U.N. ambassador, and retired Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s pick for Defense secretary, coming into the administration suggests an auspicious future.

Democrats might turn to history to find a solution. It is so widely said today that Trump brings a second age of Andrew Jackson, the iconoclastic warrior from the Tennessee hills and the seventh president of the United States, that the comparison is cited in Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” feature on Trump.

But Democrats might find solace in this quote from Karl Marx: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” And what we are seeing in Trump and what is reinforced almost daily now are policy initiatives like the dangerous and amateurish “madman theory” of foreign policy from the Richard Nixon playbook, thinly disguised and absurdly suggested.

{mosads}To recollect, these antics brought the country to its knees and sent President Nixon from his office in disgrace.

And as Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D) famously said to Sen. Dan Quayle (R-Ind.) in the vice presidential debate of 1988: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Neither Trump nor any of the supersized egos (“Bilderberg” billionaires, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a fellow Republican, called them) who will enter the White House next month are likely to be a match for “Old Hickory,” as Jackson was nicknamed.

Democrats must pay close attention, as Jackson was the key to America’s future and even to the millennium. For Jackson can be seen in hindsight to be merely an unfulfilled insurgency of political temperament; a prairie fire of the heart to which America, given time, would respond to with ferocity.

And if there had been no Andrew Jackson, there surely would have been no Abraham Lincoln. Jackson brought a foil to the rise of President Lincoln. Trump’s improvisational antics bring breathtaking advantage to a future challenge by Democrats.

But they must do what the Eastern colonials did when they were first purged by Jackson: Leave the Eastern cities behind, reinventing themselves by returning to the country. They must begin again in the American heartland where both Jackson and Lincoln found their power. It is the endless restorative well of American karma and spirit and the Democrats must begin there to seek, find and nurture a new political consciousness; a new era of political consciousness.

New York Times columnist Timothy Egan has a hopeful suggestion, claiming there is “Red State Hope for Democratic Blues“: Go to the heartland. Begin again at the beginning in Montana. It suggests the old ballad from Merle Haggard, “Big city, turn me loose and set me free.”

Democrats across rural America must know the feeling, Egan writes, “of looking into a black void and feeling so very alone.”

He continues:

There is a chance for the pulse to quicken — a flash of the northern lights, perhaps, the distant howl of a wolf — in that utter darkness. And there is hope for a party spurned in the wide-open spaces of the country, as well. Meet Steve Bullock, the newly re-elected Democratic governor of Montana.

Donald J. Trump took Montana by 20 percentage points — a rare win for celebrity-infatuated megalomaniacs in a state whose voters can usually smell the type from a hundred miles out. But once again, Democrats won the governor’s office, and did it with votes to spare. Bullock’s Mountain State secret sauce is something national party leaders should sample during their solstice.

There could not be a better place to start again.

But as Egan stated:

To Hillary Clinton, on the way to fund-raisers with tech millionaires, Montana was flyover country. [That phrase, popularized in the Clinton period, should be considered contemptuous.] Had she gone to Great Falls or Glendive, she would have seen that struggling white people desire the same things that struggling people in diverse urban areas want.

It was a fatal error. Democrats can no longer compete by appealing exclusively to Brooklyn hipsters, “bourgeois bohemians” and Los Angeles celebrities. They are at risk now of being marginalized or even brought to extinction.

But it will be a hard climb back for Democrats. Daily Kos reports that Republicans today dominate state governments with 32 legislatures and 33 governors. A few more governors and state legislatures and they will begin to smell the possibility of a previously unimagined victory as they will have gained enough inherent power to convene a constitutional convention composed entirely of red states.

And with a few more, they can forever bend America to their will as they will have the ability to radically rewrite the Constitution however they like, with ratification guaranteed by three-quarters of the states.

Welcome, then, to the Texas century.

And there is evidence that this red-state phenomenon is still rising with a growing acceptance of Trump. If this advances, it will bring a crisis to America, a ferocity of which we have not seen internally since 1860. The red states will have achieved dominion in America. And we are today sleepwalking to the edge of it.

“Whistling past Dixie” and the heartland was a fatal strategy and contemptuous of rural people. But as Egan says, “Democrats should not forget that they have the majority on their side on almost every major issue. It’s time they got reacquainted with the millions of other people who make up that majority.”

But are Democrats ready for the country?

Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.