Remember when America was stagnant? Sure you do. It was a mere two years ago. “Culture has hit a standstill,” The New York Times declared in 2023. Everything was stuck, Ross Douthat wrote, from Christian theology to “secular fashion.” In Filterworld, his 2024 exploration of how algorithms rule our existence, Kyle Chayka called the whole damn world “stultifying.”
The ennui was baffling then, but it’s monstrous now. Nothing’s at a standstill. A wing of the White House is smashed; we have zero working government during the longest-ever shutdown, which this one officially becomes today; American cities are occupied; nukes are back as live possibilities. Even secular fashion is on fire, with Miuccia Prada’s anti-fascist spring 2026 show.
I’ll spare you another “We Didn’t Start the Fire”–style litany of freakery under Trump. But the whole shebang is a tinderbox. And 56 percent of Americans now describe Trump as a dictator, according to PRRI.
No one can be blasé about this. A meaningful and aggressive opposition can be mounted against MAGA only when we recognize the volatile state of play. Which brings us to the Democrats, and how they’re handling this Election Day, which inevitably will double as a verdict on Trump’s second term.
Whether candidates should offer voters more fight from the left or more stability from the center is up to them. Zohran Mamdani can say things in New York City that Abigail Spanberger in Virginia can’t. As Spanberger herself says, “I hope the takeaway is to be of the place and of the people you’re trying to serve.” But there’s one thing they all must have in common. To win, each candidate needs to sweat. If there’s one thing Americans don’t need now, it’s Democrats playing it cool.
Gubernatorial candidates Spanberger and Mikie Sherill, for all the sexist flak they’ve taken, have recognized this. They let themselves look uncool and strained. Instead of chill, they brought athleticism, hard work, and stamina to races the media seemed at times to want them to lose.
Though dismissed as boring by The Economist, Spanberger has raised nearly twice as much money as her opponent, held rallies for thousands of people, and spent the race widening her lead until it stands steady in the double digits. She also broke with party precedent to make repeat visits to deep-red rural counties. “We are going to win because there is literally no other option,” she has said.
Sherill, for her part, has run on what a colleague called “ruthless competence,” outraising her Trump-endorsed opponent and assembling a massive field operation; New Jersey Senator Andy Kim called Sherill’s campaign a “juggernaut.”
And yet: the headwinds from the media. Here’s just one example: Four days before the election, Nate Silver’s Silver Bullet proposed (absent evidence) that Sherill’s MAGA opponent could win and asked, tauntingly, “Is NJ the next swing state?”—even as Silver’s beloved prediction markets were betting on Sherrill 80–20. But Sherrill didn’t miss a beat on the stump. And both Sherill and Spanberger are picked to win—Spanberger by a hefty margin, Sherrill somewhat less so.
Then of course there are the mayoral candidates, including Zohran Mamdani in New York City. There’s nothing like the prospect of governing a city facing ICE occupation to spike adrenaline—and Mamdani ran this race as if his life depended on it.
The whippersnapper’s charisma is real. But his chief asset is not repose. He’s brought tryhardism back. Throughout his galvanic campaign, Mamdani was never serene, never laid back, and never out of a suit. Popping up around the clock on seemingly every block of the city, Zohran let absolutely everyone see him sweat. In the last days of his campaign, he talked openly about his claustrophobia and anxiety. He’s one of us. Americans in 2025 are anxious and sweating everything too.
Alas, the national party leadership, notably Barack Obama, may never summon their cortisol. Over the weekend, at a rally for Spanberger, Obama, low-key in shirtsleeves, accused Trump tepidly of “craziness.”
Craziness, got it? Like a rambunctious frisbee game.
Obama’s body language was devoted, as it often is, to telling the crowd to settle down, cool off. He refused—as usual—to let people so much as boo Trump. Or fascism. But of course he didn’t say the word “fascism.” Listening to him, I’m reminded of a 2016 analysis of presidential personality traits by the psychologist Dan P. Adams. Adams noted that Obama was conscientious, agreeable, and open but “almost preternaturally low on neuroticism—emotionally calm and dispassionate, perhaps to a fault.”
At the Spanberger rally, Obama also joked about how old he feels, and it’s true that his manner, though always charming, comes off as out of step. He’s like Bing Crosby trying to perform at CBGBs in the ’80s. Neuroticism, the kind Obama used to satirize in Hillary Clinton, perhaps needs a reboot. Democrats can play it as anxiety or rage: dealer’s choice. But now’s not the time for another no-drama Obama type.
It’s been seven months since Illinois Governor JB Pritzker gave his thunderous oration: “It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.” And: “The reckoning is finally here.”
With ICE zip-tying people in Chicago, it’s fair to say Pritzker is even angrier now.
And no one, no one at all, is saying American culture and politics is stagnant. That was a luxury afforded to pundits in 2023 and 2024, those far-off Biden days when the American economy was the envy of the world and a fascist dictatorship still seemed like it could never, ever happen here.
Now that it has happened here, Democrats need to put down their favorite fidget toy: the ideological slider that runs from Mamdani to Spanberger. Instead, they need to let candidates run the campaigns they want to run, and get foursquare behind the ones who command popular support. Above all, Democrats need to act like things are dire, because they are.
