Is America back? It depends on what you mean by ‘back’

Joel ap Robert

What a week it’s been in American politics. Democrats made historic gains across the board, winning nearly every swing Senate seat – from Abdul El-Sayed’s historic win in Michigan to deep-red Kansas voting in a Democrat for the first time since 1932.

Most remarkably, Democrats are poised to come out on top in Mississippi – the same state with a famously troubled civil rights history that still haunts its present and a staunch record of supporting Donald Trump, most recently by nearly twenty-three points.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this election in terms of Democratic advances nationwide – including for progressives on the left wing of the party like El-Sayed. The message from the American people to the White House is clear: enough. No more terrorising our neighbours. No more trade wars. No more interventionist wars. No more threats against Canada or Greenland or Panama or Cuba or anywhere else.

With Democrats solidly in control of the House and Senate, they will be able to put the brakes on the president’s worst impulses, from the war in Iran to reining in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). We can all be grateful for that.

But is America “back”? That’s what Hakeem Jeffries, likely successor to outgoing House Speaker Mike Johnson, breathlessly declared on election night. But we’ve heard this before. Joe Biden declared as much after winning the White House in 2020 as he tried to reassure European allies. And back in 2009, the Nobel committee – following George W. Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq – welcomed the US back into the rules-based order by awarding Barack Obama the Peace Prize.

There are real reasons to be hopeful about the next chapter of American politics, but we must be clear-eyed about the road ahead and remember how we got here in the first place. We don’t need to remain in a doom loop of despair. Far from it. But we must not be naïve about the challenges ahead.

Both Dems and GOP will have a hard time backing down from Trumpism

While there’s much about Trumpism that is patently absurd (vanity projects, inability to agree on a basic set of facts, the elevation of absurdly unqualified individuals to cabinet-level positions), both Democrats and Republicans will find it difficult to back away from much of the damage that Trumpism has done.

Consider, for example, Trump’s massive investment in ICE to the tune of $115 billion over four years. While Americans have recoiled from the sickening excess of Trump’s immigration policy – from Alligator Alcatraz to the murder of American citizens in broad daylight to the arbitrary detention of travellers – don’t be surprised when Democrats leave in place many of the mechanisms that Trump exploited.

Democrats and many Republicans will use softer language on immigration than Donald Trump. But appearing weak on immigration is a cardinal sin in American political life, and it has been for the past twenty-plus years since hardliners in the George W. Bush era lambasted his immigration plans as “shamnesty”. And let’s not forget that Barack Obama earned himself the nickname “Deporter in Chief” for deporting more people from the United States than any other president.

We must beware of superficial changes of style rather than substance.

American elections are awash in the pocket change of billionaires

You’ve probably seen the headlines about the half-billion dollars that Elon Musk dumped into the election. While it’s gratifying to see that his investments didn’t pay out, and that his fortune has slumped in the days since, Musk and the super wealthy are already auditioning potential candidates for 2028, ready to drop even more money to buy a new set of politicians willing to resist even the most modest forms of regulation even as the planet burns and wealth inequality soars.

The problem goes back to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, in which a 5–4 majority essentially equated spending money with freedom of speech. It opened the floodgates to the wealthy dumping unfathomable amounts of money into each election cycle.

While many have campaigned on getting money out of politics and the question polls well with Americans across the political spectrum, passing the required constitutional amendment remains a heavy lift. The Supreme Court – with its 6–3 GOP tilt and three Trump appointees – is a far more hostile place than it was back in 2010.

A lesson from recent history

Remember when Barack Obama took office? I was twenty years old and studying in France. I remember waking up the day after the election to the images of the Obamas in Chicago’s Grant Park, crying tears of joy, the electric feeling that a new day had dawned and all things were possible.

And yet it was only two years later that Barack Obama suffered a midterm defeat far worse than the losses just suffered by Donald Trump.

As of 9 November, the GOP has lost thirty-seven seats in the US House (though nineteen seats remain to be called). Back in 2010, Obama lost sixty-three seats. Why? In large part, because he had dared push through modest healthcare reform. While most Americans access healthcare via private insurance policies provided by their employers, the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) established a public health exchange, allowed young people to stay on their parents’ insurance until the age of twenty-six and prevented health insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions.

In response, right-wing activists organised themselves as the Tea Party, accusing the Obama administration of treading on personal choice in healthcare and concocting stories of government “death panels” that would determine who received healthcare and who didn’t. The billionaire Koch brothers funnelled millions of dollars into these organisations to sow chaos. And the investment worked. Republicans maintained control of the House of Representatives for the rest of Obama’s time in office, leaving him hamstrung and with few legislative accomplishments as the GOP refused to work with him on anything but the most basic pieces of legislation.

As the United States struggled to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, the lack of economic progress for working Americans created fertile ground for Trump’s success. He did what had seemed unthinkable and won states like Michigan, which had previously voted for Obama by nearly twenty points.

The culture wars aren’t going anywhere

If you see a headline about the end of American culture wars, you can safely discredit anything that writer has to say about American politics. (Recall how talking heads said much the same after Obama’s election in 2008.) Instead, the culture wars intensified to an incredible pitch that resulted in much speculation about an actual civil war, intensified violence and the deaths of Americans over a decade-long period from Heather Heyer in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia (2017), to Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis (2026).

While the culture wars of the post-Trump era (if we are, indeed, entering into such an era) may look different, they will continue. While Trump has lost a significant amount of support – particularly from young and Hispanic voters – the core of his white, evangelical base will remain aggrieved and committed to a “muscular” Christian nationalist agenda. If Democrats are able to attend to the economic grievances of working- and middle-class Americans who feel the system isn’t working for them, they may be able to minimise some of the worst impulses of America’s culture warriors.

Little constructive policy will get passed in the next two years

Realistically, however, Democrats’ power for the next two years is limited. Donald Trump remains the president, able to veto almost any bill that comes across his desk. In this legislative vacuum, political operatives will lean heavily on culture wars to keep Americans engaged (see above).

If Democrats want to be strategic, they might pursue some low-hanging fruit like the federal minimum wage, which has been at $7.25 an hour since 2009. (That’s about £5 an hour – less than half of the UK’s rate of £12.71.) While many states (mostly controlled by Democrats) have raised their state-level minimum wage in the years since, vast swathes of the South (mostly controlled by Republicans) still have a $7.25 rate. This is an incredibly popular policy with broad support, and it would be difficult for the president to veto without exposing his callous indifference towards working Americans. Further, it would set Democrats up to maintain advances they made in the 2026 election in battleground states and traditional Republican strongholds.

Democrats’ hand is a tough one and the American people have little patience for grandstanding and politicking. But they aren’t powerless. The American people elected them to go to work on their behalf, and Democrats must be clever and ruthless in picking their battles.

The “special relationship” matters little to Americans, regardless of party

You know that scene from Mad Men with Don Draper and Michael Ginsberg in the elevator? Ginsberg tells Draper that he feels bad for him. “I don’t think about you at all,” Draper responds. While oversimplified, and perhaps overly brutal, that’s more or less reflective of how Americans – regardless of party – feel about the so-called special relationship with the UK. The same goes for other culturally (and geographically) proximate nations like Canada.

It’s not that Americans have any antipathy towards the UK or the rest of the world – but they are broadly ignorant of it and feel no pressing need to better understand it. Neither is it a totally callous indifference. Americans want to be friends with the world, especially the UK and Europe. But they’re a bit like that friend you’re hoping to grab lunch with sometime but who won’t return your texts. They’d love to make it happen, but it’s a question of being at the right place at the right time. Good luck with anything more than that.

The United States remains an important trading partner, but it is in the UK’s best interests to stop fetishising a relationship where one party puts in all the effort and the other shows up for a photo op with the royals once every couple of years. Whoever is next in the White House, it is in the best interests of Cymru and the wider UK to strategically nurture new and old relationships to minimise the damage from American whims.

Conclusion

American politics is frenetic. It moves from election cycle to election cycle without much consistency and with seemingly little logic. The issue, largely, is structural. Elections every two years are meant to hold the government to account, but they also leave the government little space to accomplish much in between – and in the meanwhile, the super wealthy are free to burn piles of cash to subvert legitimate grievances to their own ends.

Neither the GOP nor the Democrats have won more than two elections in a row since the so-called War on Terror helped George W. Bush’s party to a strong midterm result in 2002 and Bush himself to re-election in 2004.

Sure, America’s back. And yes, combined with Lula’s historic victory in Brazil and recent victories over authoritarian regimes in Serbia and Hungary, there is finally some reason for progressives to take hope. But we’ve been here before. And if we forget the lessons from 2008 and 2020, well … We all remember the famous words of George W. Bush.

About the writer

Originally from Michigan, Joel ap Robert is a PhD student at Bangor University.