Analysis: A non-American’s guide to the 2022 US midterms
By Sam Stein 17 January 2020
An increasingly polarized US electorate is the biggest challenge facing the Democrats and the Democratic Party establishment since the party was founded in the mid-1930s.
The election of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential contest was the culmination of a major political crisis. An increasingly polarized electorate, with the Republican Party dominating most of the key policy areas and a large contingent of the US electorate rejecting the Democratic-led status quo, created a situation that was both unprecedented and untenable.
Since the start of the 2020 US midterms process, the Democrats have been forced to attempt to deal with the political crisis in the way it unfolded. In the Senate, Democrats have taken the unprecedented step of passing the American Democracy Restoration Act (ADRA), legislation that would allow them to override a federal court injunction in order to proceed with the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.
In the House of Representatives, Democrats have pushed for several Democratic Party-line measures, including measures imposing a federal “citizens’ initiative” system to pass various issues that were previously approved by a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress.
The Democratic Party has also come to call for a large increase in the US military budget and a “Green New Deal” aimed at converting the US economy to a nationalized one. In addition, the Democrats have attempted to present themselves as the progressive champions of “the 99 percent,” while at the same time refusing to support any measures for raising the “fiscal base” of the US government and increasing its “public debt” (which amounts to more than $22 trillion).
It is worth noting that in recent days many of the proposals advanced by the Democrats on the basis of “progressive” measures have been rejected by the Republicans and the Democratic Party establishment.
But many of these proposals were never expected to be included in the Democratic Party platform for the 2020 US presidential election. In fact, only a few days before the Democrats were going to release their “progressive” platform, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) made an announcement that he was withdrawing his name from the “progressive” Democratic Party ticket
