Impeachment is a losing strategy for the left. Let's focus on winning in 2020

Donald Trump’s administration has not just been a moral abomination – it’s been marred in accusations of illegality. Ongoing impeachment hearings suggest that Trump attempted to use his office to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, state business has become mixed in with Trump’s corporate interests, and the president has obstructed justice repeatedly.

This matters. I don’t believe that a right-wing president ushering about the breakdown of republican institutions – no matter how unjust those institutions have historically been – will do anything to help working people. But I worry that employing impeachment as a strategy to deal with Trump may just keep his brand of right-populism in power.

For one thing, impeachment is hardly amplifying popular demands for good paying jobs, universal health care, and funding for education and childcare. Democrats are instead hammering away at Trump’s legitimacy in a vague defense of the Constitution, “our intelligence community,” and the separation of powers. As Jerry Nadler, the judiciary committee’s chair put it, “The Framers’ worst nightmare is what we are facing in this very moment. President Trump abused his power, betrayed our national security, and corrupted our elections, all for personal gain.”

Unfortunately it seems that many Democrats drew the wrong lessons from the 2018 midterms: they want to focus on winning over wavering Republican voters in wealthy suburbs, by making the coming election about personal character, executive power, and corruption, rather than a Bernie Sanders-style reform program.

Let’s remember how well that strategy worked in November 2016, just months after the wise Senator Chuck Schumer claimed that “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

A singular focus on corruption and contests of legitimacy, without an overarching social program, risks furthering the kind of “they’re all crooks, anyway” narrative that encourages working Americans to retreat from politics. That outcome would surely benefit the Right, not the Left.

Plus, Trump – one of the most flagrantly corrupt politicians in recent American history – is, counter-intuitively, rather good at insulating himself from the consequences. Part of his appeal in 2016 was conveying a message to voters that everyone’s corrupt and self-interested but at least he’s honest about it and would be in their corner. Trump both donated to the Clinton Foundation and called it “the most corrupt enterprise in political history.”

To defeat Trump and set the stage for real social reform, progressives need to connect Trump’s shady dealings with the unfairness of economic and political life in the United States. But the impeachment proceedings are a poor venue in which to drive home that message. Hunter Biden’s shady dealings in Ukraine, for example, have put House Democrats in a double bind: either argue he did nothing wrong, and therefore look like hypocrites, or concede that he did, and validate Republican efforts to muddy the waters.

Hunter Biden using his father’s connections to maneuver his way to riches is exactly what’s wrong with the system that millions of Americans rejected when they refused to choose between Trump and Clinton in 2016. And by shifting away from this core injustice – the hardship and lack of opportunity that working people all over the country face – mainstream Democrats are showing they will never manage to solve the problems that created Trumpism in the first place.

Plus, even if removing the president was a real possibility, what would it accomplish? There would be the risk of a backlash from Republican voters who feel like a democratic mandate has been violated. And we’d have an equally dangerous figure – Mike Pence – in power. With polls indicating that Democratic frontrunners might beat Trump in a general election, why radically change the dynamic of the race?

I have little doubt that Trump is a criminal, a figure even uglier that what we’ve come to expect from US presidents. But let’s keep an eye on the ball: a larger political revolution which will dismantle our failed establishment, Democrat and Republican alike.

• Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality