Chuck Schumer Should Resign | The Nation

When a leader, be it a party or a military campaign, lays out a clear strategy that overwhelmingly fails, that leader, if he or she has any sense of honor, should step down. In the past few years alone, British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned after just 44 days in office; her successor Rishi Sunak recently resigned after leading his party to defeat. In August Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida resigned due to deep public discontent. Yesterday’s Democratic bloodbath demands Chuck Schumer no less.

In 2016, Chuck Schumer confidently stated that Hillary Clinton will win, that the Democrats will win the Senate and that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we’ll gain two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

That didn’t happen. The party was an obvious lesson for many complete failure of economic populismas a matter of both policy and politics. We Democrats didn’t just hold hands with Republicans on ultra-globalization; we had fought for the opening of everything to China and NAFTA. Clinton led, but Obama followed, abandoning localism, economic patriotism, and antitrust in favor of big business and the promise of cheap goods. A deep dive into trade policy and the survey revealed that Trump’s embrace of tariffs was the key to his success.

But the party did not learn the lesson. Instead, he continued to hunt for more and more votes in the suburbs and continued to promise that demographic change would magically do the work that canvassing does not. millennials, Generation Zand Blacks and Hispanics had to come and save the losing party on their own terms. Big money and big super PACs had to fill the void left by an increasingly eroded local party infrastructure, and the goal of hunting suburban votes dovetailed well with the goal of attracting big donors like Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman.

There were exceptions, in adolescence and this cycle. Representative Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania won in Trump country with extensive experience supporting tariffs against China and fighting bad trade deals. Josh Riley in New York-19 won a knife fight in the race for the most expensive houses in the country with a focused agenda fighting price gouging, calling campaign donations corruption, supporting tariffs and local production. (Of course, the undisputed populist Sherrod Brown has been swept up in a red wave; the overall perception of the Democratic Party matters more than individual races, except in closely divided districts.)

Despite this, Biden, of all people, seemed to really understand the problem; on domestic policy, at least, the president has turned his back on Wall Street and elite donors, instead pursuing aggressive antitrust action and doubling down on tariffs imposed by Donald Trump, supplementing them with important domestic spending to support local manufacturing. He raised Leena Khan, Rohit Chopra and Catherine Tay and called The Senate will take action to dismantle Big Tech.

But Biden had to work with the Federal Reserve, which was determined to keep interest rates at unsustainable levels. He seemed to oddly choose a press corps that reflected the Clinton/Obama legacy, and instead of openly welcoming the hatred of the billionaires, monopolists, and globalists his administration faced, most of his public statements — with few exceptions — sounded more like aw – reflects pragmatism without reflecting righteous public anger at the elites who have been politely cursing Americans for decades and calling it “efficiency”. But one of the key obstacles to economic populism was the Schumer-led Senate, which was notoriously uninterested in fighting corporate power. Sumer killed Big Tech’s billsand carried water for crypto.

How could an electorate whose main issues were the economy and democracy choose Trump? Because of the Democrats’ failure to stand up for the little guy against the destruction of 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 broad “democracy on the ballot” debate that dominated the old media airwaves. It’s about working-class people having power, enough power to be free to express themselves, change jobs, start a company without succumbing to global trade or corporate monopolies. And trade policy is certainly about the economy, but it’s also about affirming democracy, the sovereign power to make decisions about our lives. Perhaps big money and dreams of super PAC dollars are bolstering him darkened his gaze.

Of course, it’s not all Schumer’s fault, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t resign. There are leaders who share the blame for decades. Other heads of the DCCC and DNC must also resign. But Schumer’s high-profile resignation would give Democrats reason to hope. One of the primary responsibilities of a leader is to take equal responsibility for success and failure without making excessive claims for one or avoiding responsibility for the other.