The Democratic Party Must Change If It Wants to Defeat Trumpism

For as long as most of us have been alive, the Democratic Party of the United States has enjoyed a rare and extraordinary luxury: basic, unquestioned stability in its nation’s laws, values, and political processes. The United States has, of course, undergone extraordinary changes in the last 80 years or so—racial integration, deindustrialization, women’s liberation, suburbanization, television and the internet. But the basic ethos of what it meant to be an American was an unquestioned consensus, pure background noise to the game of day-to-day Congressional debates and electoral campaigns. There was no serious reason to fear for the country’s small-r republican government structure, its capital-L Liberal values of individualism and political equality, or its ability to peacefully transfer power from one regime to the next.

This is no longer true. It probably will not be true again for the rest of any of our lifetimes. The second Trump administration is an organized, concerted effort to permanently destroy the America that anyone reading this thought they lived in, and assemble a new, fascist one in its place. This is not merely a shift in the political winds, to which savvy politicians might adjust their sails and ride on to new career accomplishments. This is an attempt to prevent the political winds from blowing altogether—to make it impossible for anyone but Trump and his innermost circle of ideologues to ever be considered truly American, and thus, to have even the option of wielding power in American society.

It has left Democrats in the nation’s capital blindsided. Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng recently wrote that Democrats worry they don’t have their own Stephen Miller. Why don’t they?

Simple: Stephen Miller chose a life in politics for fundamentally different reasons than the top Democratic operatives. Miller is not interested in networking with Democrats after work, whispering ways they can advance each other’s careers, which ultimately drives policy moderation and compromise for the sake of mutual professional advancement. Miller came to Washington to imprison, humiliate, torture, and kill immigrants. He doesn’t care if doing so is uncollegial, or if some rules on an old piece of parchment say he’s not allowed to. This disregard for “the way it’s done” means the two major parties—and thus, the American ruling classes—no longer share a core ideological framework.

For decades, Democrats have clung to the fantasy that after one more election, one more vote, one more scandal, the Republican “fever” will break and their “friends across the aisle” will snap back to the postwar liberal-democratic consensus that Democrats treat as America’s natural state. But as Jon Stewart put it, “if someone’s been running a fever since the aughts, that’s not a fever. That’s their default resting temperature.”

The old mid-century world is gone. If the Democratic Party, and the country, want to survive, they need to wake up and choose what they want the next world to look like. Then they need to start fighting for it.

The Democratic Ethos

The Democratic Party is not a movement. As Michael Kazin shows in his history of the party, its core political identity has always been in flux, even contradiction. In 1860, the archetypal Democrat was an avowed pro-slavery small-farmer. By 1960, the archetypal Democrat was an urbanite leading the charge for integration. To Kazin, the Democratic Party’s only consistent principle has been support for its own continuation—doing What It Took To Win.

After working in and around Democratic politics for years, my own mental model of the party today is basically LinkedIn: “the Democrats” are a slew of concentric and overlapping professional circles, whose members join primarily to advance their individual careers through collegiality, networking, and co-branding. There is no clearly stated, much less enforced, set of political principles that one must adopt and abide by to be a Democrat. Efforts to develop such core commitments are decried as “purity tests.” The only question is “What can you do for me?”

Of course, the Democratic Party has struck bargains with many grassroots political movements over the decades, such as the labor, environmental, and civil rights movements. They promise to vote for Democratic candidates if the candidates promise to enact the movements’ preferred policies. But this tit-for-tat contractual relationship is not the same thing as being a party for a movement, in the way that the Republicans are now the party for Trumpist fascism. Trump loyalists drove out any Republican who opposed or even questioned the Trump agenda, and they now enforce rigid discipline among electeds by threatening primaries and even violence. By contrast, a Democrat in good standing may take votes and funds from capital as well as labor, big polluters as well as environmentalists. The only way to be a true traitor to the Democratic Party is to inconvenience its electoral goals or internal hierarchies, such as by primarying a long-time member. Allies are exchangeable, club loyalty is not.

No matter what, some vision must emerge to unify and organize the full anti-Trump camp. It must be a vision that has genuinely learned from past mistakes.

This social-network-as-political-party model can work just fine in a country with unquestioned commitment to capital-L Liberal values—individual rights, democratic-republican government, market economics, and so on. If the whole society agrees that each individual should rise or fall on their own merit, then finding fellows to help one another rise as efficiently as possible is common cause enough for politics. Parties need money and votes, both of which are perfectly fungible goods. Thus, anyone who can provide money or votes, regardless of context, is someone to court. However, some allies may alienate others. Thus, it’s economically optimal to promise each ally only modest progress—capture the lion’s share of each rivalrous faction for the largest total support pool, don’t chase the marginal die-hards, and make it that much easier to keep your modest promises once elected.

This was how America worked for generations, and it was so stable and consistent that people started to forget the Liberal structures enabling it were choices, subject to change. Party politics began to look like a math problem, and the solution was always moderation. Data-intensive pollsters and media-savvy strategists became Democratic celebrities, offering lucrative advice on how to say the right thing, rather than listening and doing the right thing. Philosophy and political economy became political and economic “science,” governed by rational “laws” of human behavior, so naturalized were we all to Constitutional government. Today, the most professionally successful Democrats exploit the normie voters for cash with ever-more-manic fundraising emails, rather than actually using that cash to win elections.

Unfortunately for those operatives, the music has nearly stopped playing. The last decade of Trumpism steadily demolished the Liberal social expectations that underpinned the Democratic alliance system, and the last year in particular has crushed the legal pillars of American Liberal life. Regardless of whether it was ever truly the case, in America today, one clearly does not rise or fall on their own merit. Today, one rises or falls based on proximity to, similarity to, and identification with Donald Trump.

The Trumpian Ethos

Trump has already seized three of the key constituent elements of a country: its laws, its soldiers, and law enforcement, and its fiscal apparatus. In law, it is now effectively impossible for the President of the United States to commit a crime. The entire federal bureaucracy now serves at the President’s pleasure, meaning their job is to please the President. The Justice Department legally intimidates his enemies, while business regulators extort firms for his pleasure.

This is all backed by Trump’s command of state violence. He controls a private army of masked thugs who send his chosen scapegoats to concentration camps foreign and domestic, threatening lawmakers who stand in their way. As for the money, his attendants can terminate allocated funds as they wish, effectively seizing the power of the purse; if they successfully crush central bank independence, they will fully seize the government’s ability to create liquidity.

With control over the lawyers, guns, and money, the President now turns to the podiums. Trump’s peon at the once-independent Federal Communications Commission has installed an “ombudsman” at CBS News to neutralize criticism, where Stephen Colbert suddenly lost his job; no jester’s privilege under this king. Three Ivy-League universities have already paid ransoms to the President and granted him control over some curricula, while promising to suppress student speech. A fourth school is publicly considering a similar deal, and Trump has already threatened a fifth.

These changes will not disappear quickly, and certainly not under the deliberative, compromising norms to which Democrats are acculturated. Paul Starr concluded in the American Prospect that just re-establishing the old “three branches of government” Constitutional framework would require sweeping amendments and court reform unseen since the New Deal. And let’s not forget that the Trumpist movement features violent, armed, and organized paramilitaries, steeped in apocalyptic rhetoric about a Democratic takeover, who already attempted a coup the last time their enemy gained power. Republican states are already trying to criminalize Democratic efforts at resistance.

If liberal-left governments do not address the material causes of public anger, the right will always fill the void by scapegoating the most vulnerable.

Viewed altogether, it is clear that the societal assumptions that made the Democratic Party possible are either dead or dying.

But the long-term success of the President’s project will be measured in control over the history books. Deleting webpages that reference the Navajo Code Talkers, painting over Black Lives Matter murals, and the weaponized obsession with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives—the latest way for the American right to say the n-word without saying the n-word—are all part of purging the 2010s’ nascent, tiptoed efforts at government finally telling a multiracial, non-triumphalist, honest version of American history.

This is the heart of the Trump movement for its most devoted followers. Even deleting climate-change science and undermining vaccine safety share the thread of obliterating any acknowledgement that America—specifically, the America of the past—can fail, face unintended consequences, and needs community and healthy self-criticism to overcome weakness, frailty, and faults. To Trumpists, the only story of America is glorious white-nationalist conquest; strong white men are right, and they are right because they are strong white men.

That vision is evil. It is also clear and at least facially coherent. The policies that Trump adopts—and perhaps more importantly, the means through which he adopts them—reflect that vision. Any force that complicates or qualifies it, much less defies it, is an enemy to be destroyed.

Is the United States of America actually about anything besides white-nationalist conquest? Were words like freedom, justice, equality, and democracy only ever smokescreens to fool the lower classes—those rubes—into doing the bidding of their rightful rulers? And once those rubes got a bit too uppity, too diverse, too restive, was it only right for a billionaire tyrant to wave away the smoke and beat the country back into its rightful, cruel state? Does Trump have a point?

The Next Ethos

The 2028 Democratic primary will be a referendum on these fundamental questions. In practical terms, the 2026 midterms are the most immediate opportunity for Democrats to grasp some formal political power and throw a wrench in Donald Trump’s fascist national takeover. (Assuming it’s still legal for Republicans to lose an election by then.)

But actually ending said takeover is what matters, and that requires executing a coherent plan to reverse this long, painful decade—and really, the four decades preceding it as well. Presidential primaries are the one and only time the whole national party makes a single political decision together, so if any one moment will lock the Democrats into their future, that will be it.

In practical terms, the 2026 midterms are the most immediate opportunity for Democrats to grasp some formal political power and throw a wrench in Donald Trump’s fascist national takeover. (Assuming it’s still legal for Republicans to lose an election by then.)

Until then, different Democratic factions will formulate their pitches behind closed doors for what that future should be, and test it in proxy fights like the current New York mayoral election. This will be framed as yet another interminable fight between the Democratic moderate and progressive wings.

Moderates seem to have already found their frame in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s so-called “Abundance agenda.” An enormous amount of money and press has gone toward turning Klein and Thompson’s airport best-seller into a top-down “movement.” The speakers’ list for Abundance’s upcoming D.C. convening—on the heels of “Welcomefest” back in June, an abundance conference in all but name—says all you need to know about how this “movement” hopes to reshape the Democratic party. There’s not a union leader to be found on the list, but plenty of think-tankers from the American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute, and Niskanen Center, all libertarian organizations that work to turn the preferences of management into political common sense. These groups were once Democratic Party adversaries, but were forced out of the fascist Republican Party coalition for putting shareholder value ahead of fealty to the king. Other speakers include Ted Nordhaus, a self-described “eco-modernist” who argues for abandoning political efforts to protect the existing ecosystem and instead focus singularly on making clean energy as cheap as possible, then letting the market sort it all out, and Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who sued for the right to sell or monetize his state’s federal lands, according to Utah environmental groups.

This all fits with Klein and Thompson’s much-critiqued manifesto. The book Abundance calls for plentiful housing, energy, and research funds, but conspicuously does not call for an abundance of jobs, nor an abundance of tax revenue from confiscatory action against the ultra-wealthy. Compare this to the New Deal era, the last time Democrats organized to deliver material plenty through federal policy. Back then, true full employment and material limits on individual wealth were indispensable lynchpins of the strategy. That vision went on to deliver decades of Democratic dominance, all but invented American macroeconomics, and produced the greatest material prosperity in modern world history. Yet Keynesian thinking is largely absent from Klein and Thompson’s tract.

Even critiquing Abundance on the policy merits is kind of missing the point. What Democrats need is an ethics; what Abundance offers is an urban planning strategy. Trumpism, like all white nationalist and masculinist movements, sings an epic narrative of its followers’ glorious conquest over their hated, inhuman enemies. You too, they declare, can become a hero by obeying the king and indulging your suppressed hatreds. For all their florid language—Abundance is very convinced of its own significance—Klein and Thompson can’t paper over that their closest alternative to this epic narrative is “what if it was easier to move to Palo Alto?”

Joe Biden tried to provide a Democratic ethics with his rhetoric of “restoring the soul of America.” The problem is that “restoration” is necessarily backwards-looking, nostalgic for the Cold War country (and Democratic Party) of Biden’s youth. His welcome embrace of industrial policy and tolerance of labor organizing were both downstream of a return to the grand theater of a great-power competition. China, once an understudy, would take the Soviet Union’s role as the communist rival against whom Americans could unite to prove our Liberal markets and freedom superior.

If liberal-left governments do not address the material causes of public anger, the right will always fill the void by scapegoating the most vulnerable.

But a key goal of Cold War liberalism was refuting communism’s claim that markets breed inequality. Biden never really pursued this. There was no push to restore taxes on the wealthy to mid-century levels, even as the K-shaped Covid recovery bred greater concentrations of wealth than the Gilded Age. True, Biden’s appointees waged antitrust campaigns against concentrated corporate power, and full employment meant the lowest wage-earners saw their paychecks rise for a change. But sustained attention to the yawning material gap between the haves and have-nots was something of a taboo in Biden’s D.C. Fearful of losing vital campaign funds, Democrats largely shut their traps about taxing the rich—a policy that’s overwhelmingly popular among both college-educated and non-college voters, precisely the cleavage point that we are repeatedly told (including by abundanceers) is tearing the Democratic coalition apart.

If liberal-left governments do not address the material causes of public anger, the right will always fill the void by scapegoating the most vulnerable. Among other targets, Trumpists fed a worldwide moral panic to make transgender student athletes the subject of endless national press and federal political debate. In recent weeks, Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg, both salivating at the chance to run for President, have each signaled willingness to throw the trans community under the bus in the name of performing moderation, reasonableness, and compromise.

Assuming, as I do, that Newsom and Buttigieg are not themselves hateful people, this reflects a calculated political logic ill-suited to our extreme times. No one should want to find common ground with fascists, primarily for the obvious ethical reasons. But if that is somehow insufficient, remember that the entire job of an opposition party’s nominee is to draw a clear contrast with the majority. If Newsom and Buttigieg want to find common ground with Trump to show that they are all Americans, then what does it say about America that this commonality is fear of a minoritized other?

Like the abundancistas, progressives have plenty of policy proposals, but not a clearly-stated ethics that ties it all together and assures true solidarity.

Finally, there’s the left. Even at their (our) 2010’s peak, the progressives’ platform and vision was always somewhat hazy. It was being cobbled together in real time—a product of underfunding and, frankly, lack of belief that they (we) ever really could win. What progressives knew for sure was what we were all against: neoliberalism and corporate power. But the left’s advocates in Washington were organized in a loose web of individual nonprofits, each hawking their own One Big Idea while awkwardly competing for philanthropy funds. Predictably, the struggle for party influence pitted these “groups” against each other, which their neoliberal critics were happy to egg on. Moreover, few “groups” could claim an organized grassroots coalition capable of exerting political leverage; all that talk about solidarity and community reflected more than a bit of projection.

Like the abundancistas, progressives have plenty of policy proposals, but not a clearly-stated ethics that ties it all together and assures true solidarity. This allows their (our) enemies to fill in the gaps, hence the many, many, many centrist and right-wing efforts to define the “ideology” of “wokeness,” something no one who they called “woke” ever tried to do—for better and for worse. The left’s stated enemies actually are the causes of most Americans’ problems. But progressives can’t quite put their affirmative, alternative vision into words yet.

It does appear in images, though: for my money, Zohran Mamdani’s infectiously positive, casually multicultural, and relentlessly on-message viral videos point the way forward. What is a progressive America? One where everyone loves each other’s differences, because we all share a common cause: beating back fascists, one-percenters, and anyone without a sense of humor.

No matter what, some vision must emerge to unify and organize the full anti-Trump camp. It must be a vision that has genuinely learned from past mistakes. In the wake of Trump II, victory is not a question of one, two, or 20 election results. It is whether Trump and what he represents can be annihilated, relegated to history books as the shameful event that finally rattled the United States into a new, more mature self-conception…or whether Trump is, in the final sense, who we are.

Note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Ted Nordhaus favored state subsidies for fossil fuels. He has never endorsed this position, although environmentalists have criticized his views on majorly subsidizing new energy production as potentially opening a door for further subsidizing fossil fuel production.