I was wrong about the "blue wave": it's here. But where will he land and what does he mean?

There is more than a year – at the time of Trump, it's like being in another century – I wrote with contempt that there would be no " blue wave "in 2018. I was wrong, maybe dramatically. I think the most interesting questions are Why I was wrong and exactly wrong, as well as what we can not answer for the moment, what type of policy and what kind of country we will know in 2019 and beyond.

The most important and instructive thing I was wrong about was that I could not predict how the power of women's just anger would transform the political landscape in an extremely short time. This was evident throughout the extraordinary events of this first season, culminating this week in New York, where seven moderate Democratic senators were ousted by progressive opponents, including four women (and no white men).

In my district, Senator Jeff Klein, a long-time Bronx broker, spent $ 2 million defending his seat – and lost so much to challenger Alessandra Biaggi that he did not even attend his election night. In an even more striking primary result across the river in Brooklyn, voters dismissed a harmless Democrat Senator, Senator Martin Dilan, in favor of Julia Salazar, 27, a member of the Democratic Socialist Party. ;America. (I did not look for this question, but it is surely the biggest year of the AED.)

In the political greenhouse in New York, it is clearly the effect "Ocasio-Cortez" in action: Biaggi and Salazar are both very close to the future Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Jessica Ramos, another progressive senator coming out in Queens. But virtually everywhere in the country, it is women candidates – many of whom are leftists or progressives, but also many liberals and moderates – who are at the forefront of this year's Democratic wave.

It is an important learning experience for many men, and I look a little here in the mirror. It is obvious to everyone that voters are at the heart of the democratic constituency, but I also believe that the entrenched and often unconscious reluctance of many male voters to support a candidate is disappearing in the Trump era. Or to put it another way, most men motivated by sexist impulses were pushed into the camp of the most openly misogynistic political figure of modern history, and the rest of us was eventually forced to count with reality.

Let us insert the caveats required here: nothing that has happened so far this year dictates the outcome of the November elections and there are still vaguely reasonable scenarios that Republicans could hold a majority in Congress. But do you feel like that?

I submit that this does not seem to be the case for anyone. Paul Ryan has not decided to embark on a once-exceptional political career, just on a whim, or because he misses the Wisconsin canasta party so much. To date, about 50 days before the mid-term elections, almost everyone in and around politics would be shocked if Democrats do not get at least the 24 seats they need for their majority since 2010.

The question is largely how much this majority will be: are we talking about a few seats, held by a split party and divided into an even more divided congress? Or is it one of those unpredictable wave elections like 2010 or 1994, when many incumbents who think they are above the floodwaters will wake up on November 7 looking for a new job?

We should observe that almost everyone expects the Democrats to win. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump thinks he's the Lucky Charms elf of politics, able to save all the dark, chubby and third-level Republican candidates through the sheer outpouring of his king. (Whenever a candidate endorsed by Trump loses, it's considered proof that the guy did not like Trump enough.) Is not it at least a little endearing that? No human being has ever been less cluttered by shame? No, I guess not.)

Republicans have recently begun to talk openly about the loss of the House and are now beginning to fear losing Senate, a perspective that seemed inconceivable a few weeks ago. The odds are still in their favor, certainly – only nine of the 35 Senate seats to be elected this year are occupied by Republicans, and most of them are in states in deep red – but this kind of speeches Expectations reasonable are not nearly as reassuring as before.

I do not want to get into political calculation, but if the election is really a wave, Republicans have many reasons to worry. In Arizona and Nevada, there were two Senate seats that seemed plausible throughout the week, and last week the political class began to consider the possibility that the previously impregnable Texas senator could lose Rep . Beto O 'Rourke, whose policy is imprecise but has become a prairie fire phenomenon. (How colorful this is that at least half of the Senate Republicans hate Cruz and would like to see him defeated is hard to say.)

Meanwhile, in Tennessee, Republican Republican Trumpian Marsha Blackburn faces a tight race against former governor Phil Bredesen, a bland democrat and dead end on the road. If the Democrats win three of those four races, one of the Democratic senators in the red state – like Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota or Joe Donnelly in Indiana – could lose, and they would always finish with 51 seats.

I do not predict what will happen, to be clear. I observe that it seems conceivable enough to keep Mitch McConnell running Kentucky bourbon long into the night, and that's a sign that the terrain has changed. When I wrote my original ha-ha-no-blue-wave article, no one imagined that a Democrat could win an election in the Alabama Senate or an election in the House of Commons. Blue collar workers from Trumpy, Western Pennsylvania. No one outside their immediate communities had heard of Ocasio-Cortez or Ayanna Pressley (who had defeated Rep. Mike Capuano in Massachusetts) or Andrew Gillum (who had defeated the US). Democrat Gwen Graham in the Florida Governor's Run) or the many other progressive insurgents win primaries against better-funded and better-known candidates.

My previous prediction that the Democrats would again find a way to defeat the defeat – or, as Samantha Bee said, that there is no guarantee that the party could pick up a basket, leave the Congress – was based on a number of 39 assumptions that made me look good at the time. Some of them proved wrong, but not all.

First of all, I thought that being the anti-Trump party – in fact, the party of decency and reasonable management and not a lot of ideology – would not be enough. This is partly or largely a mistake: in many districts and in many states, appear as reasonable adults (who value the equal participation of women in the human race) Whether this leads to a viable government coalition or long-term political stability is an entirely different issue.

READ MORE: The year of the woman in electoral politics? Maybe – but not for Republicans

I also assumed that the political and organizational decadence of the Democratic Party over the decades Clinton and Obama – who had virtually wiped it off the map in many central states – had made it unable to convey a consistent message or draw abundant lessons from its recent history. defeat without glory. It's more complicated: it's a bit true and a little false, depending on whether the light falls on the picture.

It is certainly true that many Democrats felt that what happened in 2016 was essentially a stroke of luck and that the status quo of the years before Trump would reaffirm: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, the long-term demographic trends were in their favor. and the phenomenon Bernie Sanders seemed to be a unique and irreplaceable event. These were not totally unreasonable opinions, to be fair; but they added to a massive illegality story.

What I have failed to predict, and almost no one either, is that the ideological battle within the Democratic Party would spread so quickly and on so many fronts, with such dramatic results. It's not a pure coincidence that most of the potential presidential candidates of 2020, including former "moderates" such as Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker, have suddenly accepted Bernie's programs. -lite that include health pay reforms and other progressive reforms. More importantly, for all the clashes between progressive and moderate camps, this battle was a huge majority positive phenomenon in political terms.

Let's say it: a party that names Conor Lamb in one district and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in another, and allows them to disagree on many things, is much more like the Ronald Reagan Democratic Party which has dominated American politics. 40 years. (Lamb and Ocasio-Cortez would agree on at least one thing, interestingly: that Nancy Pelosi's time is up). This feast of yesteryear included many factions fighting bitterly, but it managed to welcome Liberals like Hubert McGovern, innovative pioneers like Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, and the Cold War proto-neo-conservatives like Henry "Scoop Jackson, nicknamed "Boeing Senator" for his dedication to military spending, especially if he was headed to the state of Washington.

You and I might conclude that some of these ideological currents were tastier than others, but at least partly outside the subject. Indeed, whoever today insists on the fact that there is a unique formula for democratic victory – that all candidates from around the world must join Medicare for All and the abolition of the ICE or, conversely, that this leads to contaminate national brand with Commie germs and send suburban moms screaming into Donald Trump's arms – missing the point on a large scale.

Internal conflicts and debates are healthy within political parties, and only the long-term PTSD of the Democratic Party after the disorientation of the 1970s and 1980s has revealed the opposite. For nearly 30 years, Democrats have acted on the principle that internal party conflicts must be removed – in fact, that the ideology itself had to be suppressed – and the progressive left had to be purged or silenced, because these things were electoral poison. It took a long time for the party to understand the neoliberal and anti-ideological orthodoxy of Bill Clinton's "New Democratic" years (where issues of economic justice, for example, were deemed not to exist or to not to be important) was the real poison. I think we can conclude that the era is now over, thank goddess.

I do not want to paint too rosy here, neither for the Democratic Party nor for the country: the corruption and corrosion of democracy that led America to Donald Trump was a long-term process in which both parties collaborating this fall (or defeating Trump in two years) will not provide a panacea. It will take years, if not decades, to determine whether this republic can be saved.

That the potential Democratic majority in internal conflict of 2019 can do something is an open question. (In the short term, the only reasonable answer is probably no.) But the fact that these conflicts are no longer hidden or forbidden, and that the Democrats are now fighting and opposing on true political and ideological principles, rather than to pretend things do not exist, it's a big step in the right direction.

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