“We won with Abigail Spanberger, we won with Zoran Mamdani. They are part of the vision of the future,” he praised former President Barack Obama on the podcast “Pod Save America” shortly after the April 11 election.
Abigail’s victory leaves the state government of Virginia in the hands of a former CIA agent and ultra-moderate congressman with a hard-line stance on crime. Already, a majority of New Yorkers supported young Muslim immigrants who were openly socialist. The only black person to oppose Trumpism and sit in the White House gave another speech in which reason was the partner of empathy.
He argued that despite their differences, the two Democrats share pluralism, which, in their view, represents the best of America.
In addition to their pluralist beliefs, what allows Mr. Spanberger and Mr. Mamdani to coexist within the same party is a majority electoral system that imposes bipartisanship. If not, they are each more likely to belong to a group that better represents their political preferences. And the task of rallying forces against Donald Trump will be much more difficult.
No one in their right mind could have predicted how the harrowing experience of a presidency at the hands of a declared would-be dictator would end. Although some believe the United States is already on the verge of becoming an elected dictatorship, Harvard political scientists Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have reservations about the concept of competitive authoritarianism. There are still those who believe it is premature to declare the end of American democracy. The final test will be President Trump’s reaction to a possible defeat in the polls.
In any case, politicians like Obama know that in order to defeat Trumpism at the polls, the Democratic Party needs to be neither moderate nor left-leaning, but a place where Spanbergers and Mamdani coexist. In other words, it is possible to group different electorates with candidates with different political profiles.
The same argument has been defended by figures close to the Democratic Party, such as journalist Ezra Klein, who hosts an influential New York Times podcast. For those accustomed to thinking of party life as a constant struggle between factions for control of resources and the primacy of political views, this idea is far from obvious.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Klein know that the root Trumpists who support MAGA (Make America Great Again) are just part of the majority that has placed far-right leaders in the White House. They also know that this debate is about the votes of those who elected Trump but did not give him the power to dismantle democracy.
Under a fundamentally different institutional framework of increased multipartyism, the challenges that Mr. Obama and Mr. Klein have proposed for the Democratic Party are reminiscent of those faced by the Brazilian Democratic Party in the 2022 elections. To defeat Bolsonaro, he needed to win far more votes than voters loyal to the PT or from the left.
The same will be important to permanently defeat candidates who support the achievements of the coup leaders.
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