The Democrats’ Problems Are Bigger Than You Think

Opinion|The Democrats’ Problems Are Bigger Than You Think

I have a lot of Democratic friends who are extremely disappointed with their party leaders. They tell me that the Democratic Party is currently rudderless, weak, passive, lacking a compelling message. I try to be polite, but I want to tell them: “The problem is not the party leaders. The problem is you. You don’t understand how big a shift we’re in the middle of. You think the Democrats can solve their problems with a new message and a new leader. But the Democrats’ challenge is that they have to adapt to a new historical era. That’s not something done by working politicians who are focused on fund-raising and the next election. That’s only accomplished by visionaries and people willing to shift their entire worldview. That’s up to you, my friends, not Chuck Schumer.”

There have been only a few world-shifting political movements over the past century and a half: the totalitarian movement, which led to communist revolutions in places like Russia and China and fascist coups in places like Germany; the welfare state movement, which led in the U.S. to the New Deal; the liberation movement, which led, from the ’60s on, to anti-colonialism, the civil rights movement, feminism and the L.G.B.T.Q. movement; the market liberalism movement, which led to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and, in their own contexts, Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev; and finally the global populist movement, which has led to Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Brexit and, in their own contexts, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

The global populist movement took off sometime in the early 2010s. It was driven by a comprehensive sense of social distrust, a firm conviction that the social systems of society were rigged, corrupted and malevolent.

In 2024, I wrote about an Ipsos poll that summarized the populist zeitgeist. Roughly 59 percent of Americans said the country was in decline. Sixty percent agreed “the system is broken.” Sixty-nine percent agreed the “political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people.” Sixty-three percent said “experts in this country don’t understand the lives of people like me.” The American results were essentially in line with the results from the 27 other countries around the world that were polled.

The Republicans have adjusted to the shift in the zeitgeist more effectively than the Democrats. Trump tells a clear story: The elites are screwing America. He took a free trade party and made it a protectionist party, an internationalist party and made it an isolationist party. Recently, George F. Will compiled a list of all the ways Trump is departing from conservative orthodoxy and behaving and thinking in ways contrary to the ways Republicans behaved in the age of conservative market liberalism. Will’s list of Trump pivots is worth quoting in full:

“1. Combating the citizenry’s false consciousness by permeating society, including cultural institutions, with government, which is politics. 2. Confidence in government’s ability to anticipate and control the consequences of broad interventions in modern society’s complexities. 3. Using industrial policy to pick economic winners and losers because the future is transparent, so government can know which enterprises should prosper. 4. Central planning of the evolution of the nation’s regions and the economy’s sectors, especially manufacturing. 5. Melding governing and party-building by constructing coalitions of government-dependent factions, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal did with the elderly (Social Security, 1935), labor (the 1935 National Labor Relations Act favoring unions) and farmers (the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act). 6. Rejecting conservative growth-oriented tax simplification — lowering rates by eliminating preferences — to use taxes (including tariffs) as tools of social engineering. Bypassing the appropriations process, the tax code can transfer wealth to favored constituencies. 7. Limitless borrowing from future Americans to fund today’s Americans’ consumption of government goods and services. 8. Presidential supremacy ensured by using executive orders to marginalize Congress. 9. Unfettered majoritarianism, hence opposition to the Senate filibuster.”

Trump has taken the atmosphere of alienation, magnified it with his own apocalypticism, and, assaulting institutions across society, has created a revolutionary government. More this term than last, he is shifting the conditions in which we live.