Chuck Schumer Should Resign | Nation

When the leader, whether of a party or a military campaign, lays out a clear strategy that overwhelmingly fails, that leader, if he has any honour, should resign. In the last few years alone, UK Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned after just 44 days in office; His successor, Rishi Sunak, recently resigned after leading his party to defeat. In August, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida resigned Because of the deep dissatisfaction of the people. Yesterday’s Democratic bloodbath required nothing less than Chuck Schumer.

Chuck Schumer in 2016 Confidently declared that Hillary Clinton would winHe predicted Democrats would win the Senate and “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we’ll get two moderate Republicans from the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin.”

This did not happen. The obvious lesson for many was this: the party’s total failure to engage in economic populism, both as a matter of politics and policy. We Democrats have not only joined hands with Republicans on hyperglobalization, we have He led the fight over opening everything to China and NAFTA. Clinton led the way, but Obama followed with the promise of big corporations and cheap goods, abandoning localism, economic patriotism, and anti-monopoly. deep dives Trade policy and polls reveal Trump’s embrace of tariffs key to his success.

However, the party did not learn its lesson. Instead, he kept chasing more and more suburban votes and kept promising that demographic change would magically do the job that campaigns had failed to do. generation Y, generation ZAnd Black and Latino voters We had to come and save the party that lost on its own terms. big money and large SuperPACs He needed to fill the void left by an increasingly empty local party infrastructure, and his goal of hunting suburban votes fit well with his goal of impressing big donors like Marc Cuban and Reid Hoffman.

There were exceptions in late adolescence and this cycle. Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania wins in Trump state He has a strong record of supporting tariffs against China and fighting against bad trade deals. Josh Riley in NY-19 won the knife fight in the nation’s most expensive home race. price gouging, labeling campaign donations as corruption, supporting tariffs and local production. (Of course, the unquestionably populist Sherrod Brown was swallowed up by the Red wave; the overall perception of the Democratic Party is more important than individual races, except in closely divided districts.)

Even so, Biden, of all people, seemed to truly understand the problem; On domestic policy, the President has at least turned his back on Wall Street and elite donors; instead, he pursued aggressive antitrust measures and doubled tariffs imposed by Donald Trump, backing them with significant domestic spending to support domestic production. He raised Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra and Katherine Tai and Senate to move to break up big tech.

But Biden had to work with a Federal Reserve determined to keep interest rates at unbearable levels. He also seemed to have chosen a press office that oddly mirrored the Clinton/Obama legacy, and rather than openly confronting the hatred of billionaires, monopolists, and globalists his administration faces, most of his public statements—with a few exceptions—sounded more like egregious. pragmatism does not reflect justified popular anger at elites who have politely ripped off Americans for decades and called it “efficiency.” But one of the most important obstacles to economic populism was the Schumer-led Senate, which was known to be uninterested in combating corporate power. Schumer killed big tech bills, and we carried water crypto-.

How could a voter whose most important issues were economy and democracy elect Trump? Because of the Democrats’ failure to defend the little guy against overwhelming concentrated financial power. What Schumer never understood, and many democratic elites continue to fail to understand, is that economic populism is as much about democracy as the great “democracy at the ballot box” debate that dominates legacy media coverage. It’s about working-class people having enough power, enough power, that they can speak freely, change jobs, start a company, without being oppressed by global business or corporate monopolies. And trade policy is about economics, of course, but it’s also about reaffirming democracy, the sovereign power that can make decisions over our own lives. Maybe dreams of big money and the SuperPAC dollars backing it blurred his vision.

Of course, this isn’t all Schumer’s fault, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t resign. There are dozens of leaders who share the blame. The other chairmen at the DCCC and DNC should also resign. But a high-profile resignation from Schumer would, on the contrary, give Democrats reason to hope. One of the fundamental responsibilities of leadership is to take responsibility for success and failure equally, without overdoing one or avoiding responsibility for the other.