I. Past and Present: The Democrats’ Four Core Problems
1. Why Don’t the Democrats Fight More?
Last July, I attended one of those Washington salon dinner-discussions. A private room at a restaurant, about two dozen invitees, discussion focused on some policy issue. The topic that night was wide-ranging but centered around the debate over the abundance agenda, and how blue states should move to counter the impacts of Donald Trump’s initiatives.
Navin Nayak was there. I first met him at another such dinner, in the wake of the 2022 elections. At the time, he worked at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and he and some colleagues had undertaken a massive study of Democratic ad messaging during those midterms. He was interested in an issue that has obsessed me for a while now: why polls routinely find that Americans think Republicans—whose last three presidents have presided over 1) a massive savings and loan crisis and a double-dip recession, 2) the near-collapse of the entire global capitalist economy, and 3) a pandemic-related economic meltdown that saw the disappearance of 23 million jobs—are better stewards of the economy than Democrats. Nayak and his team looked at more than half a million pieces of Democratic communication to voters in 2022 and found that, to their surprise, “only 5 percent mentioned the words ‘economy’ or ‘economics.’” So maybe one reason Republicans outpoll Democrats on the economics question is that Democrats don’t talk about it much.
But I tell the story of this dinner for another reason: something Nayak said that night. A range of views was represented at that table, but everyone was looking for answers to the basic question, the main question to emerge from the 2024 election, of how the Democrats—or “the progressive movement,” since the dinner was held under 501(c)(3) auspices, where Washington denizens know they need to make a good-faith effort not to be overtly partisan—could win the economic argument they’ve been losing for the better part of four decades and convince more working Americans that they are fighting for their interests.
I forget the exact context—we were probably complaining about the Democrats not putting up much of a fight against Trump—when Nayak said (close paraphrase): “Well, Democrats come to Washington to get things done, and Republicans come to Washington to fight.”
Sometimes, somebody says something at one of these dinners that cuts a little deeper than the usual policy chatter, and for me, this was such a statement. Nayak distilled in a few simple words a mindset I’ve observed and tried to write about for decades now; at least since the run-up to the Iraq War, when so many congressional Democrats seemed to be just terrified of criticizing George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.
That insurgent mindset among Republicans, that belief that they had to wage war against a powerful establishment whose values were destroying America, goes back to Newt Gingrich, who told the College Republicans in 1978 that “one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” This way of thinking has basically held sway ever since: Bush and his neocons challenging an inert foreign policy establishment, creating their own reality; the Tea Party movement; and, of course, Trump and MAGA.
Democrats, by and large, are not insurgents. They don’t come to Washington to topple any establishment. They come to pass some legislation, help make people’s lives better. These are worthy motivations, but over the years they’ve left Democrats bringing a lot of knives to a lot of gunfights.
It has also produced in Democrats, Nayak believes, a kind of complacency. “I think the prevailing wisdom, certainly through ’24 among the Democratic Party, is that the system’s mostly working well,” he told me recently. “We just need to get a few more programs in place to improve people’s lives—they need a tax credit they don’t currently have, or they need a better health care program they don’t currently have, but mostly the system is working well.”
There are signs that Democrats are finally understanding that they need to do more fighting, and that things are not mostly working well. Many—I still wouldn’t say most, but many—congressional Democrats now get just how angry people are. Their electoral losses among working-class voters in 2024 surely taught them a lesson about that. And, after a very confused first few months during Trump’s second term, many seem to grasp now that they need to fight harder. They did a good job during last fall’s government shutdown. True, eight of them eventually decided to end the shutdown. But the party basically won the argument about the importance of the Obamacare premium subsidies, and polls showed that the public blamed Trump and the Republicans more for the shutdown than the Democrats.
They stood their ground by enough to win the PR battle in that episode. They’ve become better at defending their position against GOP attacks. They’re better at responding to Trump. But one thing they still don’t do well is play offense—create preemptive lines of attack against Trump and the Republicans that put them on the defensive. California Governor Gavin Newsom has done a pretty good job of this for a few months, using his social media account to mock Trump and goad him into responding. But most Democrats still don’t understand the attention economy—the fact that people’s time is a scarce commodity, and a politician is only going to get so much of it—and the hideous but unavoidable rules social media has imposed on political communication.
Passing legislation and improving people’s lives are great things. But politics in this age is constant rhetorical war. And not only, or even chiefly, about issues. Today’s war is more over character and values, and it requires not just staking out positions but taking stands.
What’s the difference? A position announces a belief or commitment; a stand describes an action a person will take to enforce or defend the position. A stand, in other words, threatens somebody. Fighting on this terrain is the first prerequisite of politics today. It’s often said that people have a hard time answering the question, “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” This is why.
2. Why Do the Democrats Fight So Much?
If they’re not great at doing battle with Republicans, there’s another contest to which many Democrats bring a lot of zest: the fight with one another.
Anyone who thinks this is new should read a little history. The Democratic Party was literally created as an unholy alliance between “the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North,” in the words of the man who was really the party’s founder, Martin Van Buren. Throughout the nineteenth century, the party was basically a marriage of racist segregationists in the South and corrupt party bosses in the North: two rather unappealing contingents that never had a lot in common.
Democratic infighting has a long history. The current iteration has its roots in the 1980s, when Al From founded the Democratic Leadership Council to move the party away from traditional liberal positions that weren’t popular at the time (on trade, crime, welfare, and other issues). Immigration and LGBTQ rights are more recent sources of division.
Why do the Democrats quarrel so much among themselves? Well, the simple and superficial explanation, the answer most of the combatants on both sides would give, is ideological: The two wings of the party have genuinely strong disagreements, and that’s that.
This is true as far as it goes. But there’s more to it. I’ve always felt there’s a strong psychological element to this fight, on both sides. Over the years, I’ve been in meetings where I’ve watched progressives become far more passionate while laying into Bill Clinton (about NAFTA or Glass-Steagall repeal, say) than when discussing George W. Bush; and I’ve seen moderates get way more worked up assailing leftists’ litmus tests than anything emanating from the right.
Why? Sigmund Freud coined the phrase “the narcissism of minor differences” to explain the sometimes intense disputes between people who in fact have a lot in common. Nearly 200 years before, Jonathan Swift anticipated the phenomenon in Gulliver’s Travels, where bitter wars broke out between two different factions of people in the nation of Lilliput over the question of whether boiled eggs should be opened from the big end or the little end, the latter being the order of His Majesty. (“It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”)
This is not to say that some of their differences aren’t important. They are. Some fighting is inevitable and necessary. But is there something about the Democrats—emotionally, psychologically—that makes them want to fight with one another?
I put the question to Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University and the author of the 2007 book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, a groundbreaking and brilliant early discussion of how emotion is more important than reason in political debate and framing—and how Republicans got this more than Democrats did. Westen said he thinks the culprit is the Democrats’ tendency to start conversations by talking about specific policies rather than broad values.
“Democrats are fundamentally committed to issues and policies, and they lose sight of the values that underlie those issues and policies,” he said. “It’s a difference with Republicans. They start with values, but they never bother to get around to policy, because they’re not really interested in running anything.”
When you begin from values, Westen said, you inevitably are emphasizing points of commonality with others in your coalition, because you share those values. Whereas when you begin with policy, you inevitably end up emphasizing differences, because policies are particular, and people have different ideas about them. “If you start with values,” he told me, “by definition, you create a big tent of people who share those values. And it sort of doesn’t matter whether you’re for Medicare for All or whether you’re for some kind of mixed public-private system, because you’re all agreeing that everyone ought to have affordable health care.” But when you start with policies, he said, “You’re not only arguing about the policies, but you readily identify some policies as the left and some policies as center. That immediately creates an us and a them within the party. And that’s the last thing that you want to do publicly.” When people see that bickering, they see disorganization and weakness: “The meta-message”—i.e., the unintended message that is conveyed by actions—“is that Democrats can’t get their shit together.”
Democrats can’t and shouldn’t stop arguing over important matters. They should stop relishing it so much. They probably agree on 75 or 80 percent of things, and they mostly agree on the underlying values. Representatives of the two factions might try publicizing their points of commonality sometimes. I noticed that, during the closing days of Abigail Spanberger’s gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, I received a fundraising email on her behalf from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This was gratifying to see, because the two had a widely reported feud at a caucus meeting back in 2020. But this email emphasized the things they agree on. Credit to Spanberger for asking, and to Ocasio-Cortez for agreeing. It can be done.
3. What the Center Gets Wrong
Let’s now look a little more closely at these two wings. A key year for the centrists was 1989; though a long time ago now, it remains relevant in certain respects.
It was the year after the Democrats lost their third consecutive presidential election, a rare occurrence in U.S. history. And they were all total wipeouts. The party did need a different direction. William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, now both of the Brookings Institution, wrote a famous white paper, “The Politics of Evasion,” that castigated the Democrats for being out of touch with regular Americans. Their most memorable turn of phrase had it that Democrats had grown “indifferent if not hostile” to middle Americans’ “moral sentiments.” Ouch. The critique stuck, Bill Clinton rode it to victory, and the Democratic Party embraced several more centrist positions: a more favorable stance toward corporate America, pursuit of free-trade deals, support for the death penalty.
I will make no effort here to cover the intervening years in any detail. Those years do not tell a straightforward story of success or failure for the centrists. Like anybody, they won some, and they lost some. But with the center of gravity in the party having moved markedly to the left since Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign, the once-ascendant moderates have more often found themselves on the defensive in recent years.
I think they get two big things wrong. The first is that they always want to believe on some level that it’s still 1989, and the left either has just led or is about to lead the Democratic Party to ruin. But today is nothing like 1989. The Democrats haven’t been slaughtered in three consecutive elections. Yes, they’ve lost two of the last three, narrowly; so there is work to do. The consequence of those losses has placed the nation in a grave moral crisis, but that’s not the same thing as arguing that the Democrats face a profound electoral crisis. They don’t. Kamala Harris lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a combined 230,000 votes, each by less than 2 percent. If she’d carried those states, she’d have won 270 electoral votes and would be president.
Centrists carry on and on about the left’s “woke” cultural positions and how electorally costly they are. It’s certainly the case that the left can be insular and inflexible on these matters (see next section), and that liberal interest groups make too many specific demands of presidential candidates (I wrote about this at some length last year). But it’s far from clear that the right’s attacks along these lines always work to devastating effect. Trump’s anti-trans ads against Harris undoubtedly moved some votes away from her and toward him, though it’s hard to know how many (these things are notoriously difficult to measure). On the other hand, last year, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears ran a barrage of anti-trans rights ads against Spanberger, who didn’t exactly embrace the full LGBTQ agenda but also didn’t throw trans people under the bus. The ads failed pretty spectacularly.
There actually isn’t a lot of evidence to support the claim today that the Democrats are hostile to the moral sentiments of the great middle. In fact, it’s the MAGA Republicans and their Christian nationalist allies who are far more guilty of this posture. Nearly 70 percent of Americans support gay marriage, Gallup found last year; but support among Republicans had dropped 14 points since 2022. That is, they’re getting more out of touch with the majority. We’ve all seen poll after poll of majorities opposing Trump’s immigration crackdown. A December 2025 PRRI survey found that two-thirds of Americans oppose the crackdown—but Republicans (63 percent) and Christian nationalists (57 percent) back it. That poll also found that, while support for a pathway to citizenship had increased among Democrats since 2013 and held statistically steady among independents with a comfortable majority in the low 60s, it decreased among Republicans from 53 to 40 percent. Democrats and independents are going in one direction, and Republicans in another.
These polls confirm what our noses tell us: It’s the Trumpist right that’s living in its own cocoon. It’s true that not many middle Americans would identify themselves as leftists or even liberals. But they don’t want to live in a cruel country. Their moral sentiments are not directed toward the rounding up of millions of decent people or the attempted erasure of a tiny and powerless percentage of the population. Centrists ought to link arms with progressives and play offense on these issues.
The centrists’ second mistake is worse: the presumed yearning for “normalcy.” I hear some centrists say: People don’t want all these big plans; they don’t want Democrats to remake society. They just want things to get back to normal, by which they mean some sort of pre-Trump idea of business as usual.
My critique of this is not political or electoral, but substantive. Normal, for most working Americans these days, sucks. Normal is falling a little more behind every year. Normal is worrying that in two years an AI chatbot will take your job. Normal is not having the time to pursue leisure or enjoy life with your family. Normal is not being able to join a union or schedule a vacation. Normal is being terrified of a family illness and a huge medical bill. Normal is living in a state of near-constant anxiety about your teen or young adult child’s mental health and, if you’re working class, about where to turn for help or how you’ll pay for it (young people’s mental health is the sleeper issue of 2028, if some Democrat is smart enough to seize on it). And, on a level that your typical person doesn’t feel but those of us who follow such things know: Normal means rampant and worsening economic inequality, record homelessness, and the growing power of a new breed of billionaires who increasingly control our political system and want to convert it from a democracy into something they own more directly (more on them later).
If you’re an elected Democrat, and you just want to return things to that “normal,” if you think that’s all working people need and deserve—I say you’re aiming unpardonably low. It’s the richest country in the world. People are supposed to have better, happier, and freer lives than that.
4. What the Left Gets Wrong
The left has become the chief source of energy and creativity in the party. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez barnstorm the country, drawing tens of thousands. Zohran Mamdani vaults to his utterly stunning victory in New York’s mayoral election. Some other Democrats whom one wouldn’t quite call “left” have answered the Trump-era call and shown a willingness to dive into battle: Senator Chris Murphy, Representatives Robert Garcia and Ro Khanna and, as always, Jamie Raskin. But voices of the left have gotten millions of people excited about the Democratic Party for the first time in a very long time.
That said, we still don’t really know how large the audience is for the politics that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani represent. Big and enthusiastic crowds are great—they’re a sign of something. But they aren’t necessarily a sign of majority support.
What the left gets wrong stems from its general isolation and insularity. People willing to call themselves leftists or socialists tend on balance to be younger and to live in a relatively small number of urban areas and college towns where they’re surrounded by people who agree with them. They tend to spend more time on social media, where, again, the point of view they subscribe to is vastly overrepresented vis-à-vis the electorate. Operating in such an environment can make one forget that one’s community is in fact pretty small.
Every year since at least 1992, Gallup has been asking Americans if they describe themselves as conservative, moderate, or liberal. In 2024, the results came in like this: conservative 37, moderate 34, liberal 25. That 37 is remarkably consistent over the last three-plus decades; that 34 is down from 43 back in 1992; and the liberal 25, while still a fairly distant third, is actually way up from the 1990s, when liberal routinely clocked in at the mid- to high teens (makes it a lot less mysterious as to why Bill Clinton wasn’t an aggressively liberal president, doesn’t it?).
So that’s one thing I think the left doesn’t give a lot of thought to: There just aren’t that many liberals in the United States. The trend lines are encouraging, but still, the numbers are small. As for “leftist,” well, most polls don’t even measure that. The 2024 version of the Gallup survey did include the following breakdowns: very conservative, 10 percent; conservative, 27 percent; moderate, 34 percent; liberal, 17 percent; very liberal, 9 percent. So “very liberal” was dead last, albeit by only 1 point. In our exclusive new poll of rank-and-file Democrats, fully 32 percent of respondents said they identify as “progressive,” while 31 percent said “liberal,” 21 percent said “moderate to liberal,” and just 12 percent referred to themselves as “moderate” (and 3 percent “conservative”). People on the left shouldn’t read too much into that, according to pollster Andrea Everett of Embold Research; she said it’s basically in line with recent breakdowns of Democratic primary voters. In any case, there are more conservatives in this country than liberals or progressives, and there probably will be for the foreseeable future.
A related problem: It also feels as if many people on the left forget that the first job of any political party is to win a majority. If the Democrats don’t win 51 Senate seats and 218 House seats, they aren’t doing anybody a lick of good. That means they have to win in states and districts that are purple at best. Candidates in those places are going to have to take some positions that progressives won’t like. The left has to show more tolerance for these candidates. You can’t run in Orange County, California, or upstate New York the same way you can run in Brooklyn or Seattle. Indeed, if anything, the Democratic Party needs more moderates—by which I mean simply candidates whose overall profile can help them win toss-up or Republican-leaning districts—because it needs to make more exurban districts competitive. Just look at the 2008 House election results map against the 2024 one, and note how much more blue you see in the older one. The Democrats controlled 257 seats after those 2008 elections, and that’s what made Obamacare possible. Likewise, there were Democratic senators then from Nebraska, Indiana, Arkansas, Montana, and both Dakotas.
Two hundred fifty-seven seats in the House is likely impossible today, with gerrymandering and even sharper polarization. But is there an agenda that moderates and progressives can unite around that can get them, say, to 230 House seats, and a few of those lost Senate seats? And that can win them back enough working-class votes?
“Enough” is an important word here, and this is a crucial point. Postmortems after the 2024 election often asked the question: How can the Democrats win back the working class? It’s the wrong question, and one framed to produce panic and argument. Democrats don’t need to win back “the working class.” They need to win back a relatively small percentage of working-class votes. Kamala Harris, according to exit polls, won 43 percent of noncollege voters (the proxy for working class). In 2020, Joe Biden won 48 percent. That’s really all a future Democrat needs to do—get back up to Biden’s 48, maybe a hair better.
I think there is such an agenda. It is built, simply, around convincing more working people that they, Democrats, are on their side. But that can’t be done, as noted above, by taking positions. In this media environment, positions have little value. Instead, you have to take stands. And taking stands means taking on the bad actors who are making working people’s lives harder and, to a lesser extent, the uber-rich men who are openly contemptuous of democracy. People know who you’re for by the enemies you’re willing to make. And the Democrats need to make enemies.
II. The Future: A New Way of Explaining the World
5. Stories—and Villains
Let’s begin the discussion of how the Democrats should move forward to 2028 with this uncontroversial observation: People are struggling. Working people—and here, I mean everyone who lives on salaried compensation, from custodians to college deans, Pilates instructors to airline pilots; but especially those earning less than $100,000 a year, which one study last year found to be the minimum an individual needs to live comfortably in many states today—have difficult lives. Many live in communities that have never quite recovered from the loss of that factory or plant. They’ve lived through a pandemic followed by crushing inflation. Many feel their lives are more precarious than their parents’ or grandparents’ were, and most of them believe—in the United States of America!—that their children will be worse off than they are.
In the public sphere, politicians step forward to try to help people make sense of all this—to explain to them why this is happening to them, and how they, the politicians, will make things better. Facts and statistics are one way to explain things. But what people really respond to are stories. Stories have narrative power that facts and statistics don’t. There’s a reason why stories date to the most ancient civilizations, and a reason why our parents tell us stories from the time we’re toddlers; our brains are hard-wired to understand them, and to see the world in narrative terms. Albert Einstein, a pretty smart guy, is said to have advised parents trying to raise brilliant prodigies to “read them fairy tales.”
Stories have certain stock characters, or archetypes. The main one, of course, is the hero. But equally important is the antihero: the villain. Stories have heroes and villains. Snow White; the Evil Queen. Dorothy; the Wicked Witch. Harry Potter; Voldemort. Sheriff Bart; Hedley Lamarr. In every compelling story, there is conflict between the force trying to do good and the force trying to do evil. This tension hits home with us, and it’s how we make moral sense of the world.
Donald Trump tells working Americans a story about why their lives are hard, and, boy, does his story have villains. Immigrants. Trans people. Radical left lunatics. The Chinese, sometimes. The globalist elites who sold your lives down the river. Actually, the naming of villains by Republicans long predates Trump. Since its inception in the 1950s, the modern conservative movement has named villains—the liberal elites, the Harvard faculty. Trump has merely updated the list, and of course he does it more bluntly—the dog whistle has yielded to the screaming siren.
Democrats don’t tell stories. And they—or most of them—certainly don’t talk much about villains. Oh, sure, Trump is a villain, for Democrats. And Stephen Miller and the others. But those are gimmes. Obviously, the leading figures of the opposition party are going to be cast as bad guys. But who else? What story can the Democrats tell working Americans about why their lives are hard, and what villains can they name?
There’s only one obvious answer: corporate wrongdoers who are ripping people off and making their lives harder. I hasten to note I don’t mean all corporations; there are plenty of good ones who treat their employees fairly and provide genuinely desired products and services at a fair price. They deserve praise. But bad actors who are bending or breaking the rules to pick the pockets of average people make for pretty compelling villains. Ditto tech billionaires who have more and more control over our lives with each passing year. And this story, unlike Trump’s story, has the benefit of being true. It’s not transgender high school swimmers who are moving factories to Malaysia or imposing algorithms on society that are driving teenagers to suicide. It’s corporate bad actors.
But most Democrats don’t like calling out villains. Of course, campaign donations are one reason. (I’ll return to this topic later.) But money isn’t the only reason. Another key reason is psychological or attitudinal—there’s something in the genetic code of liberals that seeks consensus, that wants everyone to be happy.
“I think there are a lot of people who feel that governing can be a kumbaya playbook that seeks to form alliances with very powerful interests to make incremental change,” said Rohit Chopra, who headed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Joe Biden and is one Democrat who’s taken on many a corporate malfeasant. “But on net, that strategy has only made people worse off. We have really seen that many of our leaders are simply unwilling to call out some of the most egregious business practices that are really making people’s lives worse.”
Bharat Ramamurti, who was the deputy director of the National Economic Council under Biden and was an enthusiastic participant in the administration’s antitrust agenda, added: “We’re making everybody happy. The truth of the matter is, that rarely means that you’re accomplishing something. And also, nobody knows about it because nobody’s fighting against you. You need the controversy and the fight.”
Ramamurti hits on something of vital importance. You need the fight. Conflict gets attention. Conflict tells people there’s a battle going on, and it has real stakes, and you’ve taken a side. Conflict activates the parts of the brain that remember the Wicked Witch locking Dorothy in her castle and flipping over that huge hourglass. Conflict also feeds the media the entrée it craves. And Democrats should have learned by now from Trump that he who starts the fight and creates the conflict has a built-in advantage because he sets the terms of the debate. The party that starts the conflict will always be cast as the active initiator, the second party as the passive responder.
This instinct is just not in the Democratic Party’s collective DNA. It needs to be. “The simple fact is that a lot of Democrats weren’t built for this environment. They weren’t built for a world where the opposition party president breaks essentially all the rules, breaks them with gusto, and gets clout from breaking the rules,” said Alvaro Bedoya, who served as a federal trade commissioner under Lina Khan and took on many fights against corporate wrongdoers. “And the sad fact is that right now, what you need are street fighters. You need people who relish conflict. You need people who know how to be creative with the power they have and can do something with it.”
And how do you show people that you’re up for a fight? Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has a simple and elegant answer: “The way you define yourself as a fighter best is by going and having a fight.”
6. What Biden Did—and Didn’t—Do
Some skeptical Washington insiders are at this point saying to themselves: “But Biden did that. It didn’t work.”
There are several answers to this statement. The first is to agree that, yes, the Biden administration did pursue antitrust actions that were more aggressive than any administration since probably Lyndon Baines Johnson’s. And it had some significant successes—blocking several mergers, winning a major lawsuit against Google, forcing greater transparency from Ticketmaster, and more.
So yes, Biden did do this to a considerable extent. But—and here’s the second answer to the skeptics—he and his team had four years to try to reverse more than 45 years of conventional wisdom about corporate consolidation, going back to policymakers’ adoption of Robert Bork’s “consumer-welfare standard,” which he laid out in 1978. Before Bork, antitrust policy assumed that competition was good, that monopoly power was inherently corrupt (the view, incidentally, of conservative hero Adam Smith, and even of Milton Friedman, until a Kansas City furniture magnate paid him and his brother-in-law to change their position), and that big was probably bad. Bork’s standard turned all that on its head and said that as long as mergers didn’t raise prices, big was fine. Democratic administrations tended be somewhat less permissive than Republican ones, but in essence, we’ve been living in an era of “Merger Mania” ever since; and, additionally, an era in which workers have lost both their share of national income—the percentage of income paid out as labor compensation has declined dramatically since the 1970s—and their political leverage against capital in a host of ways.
There is no way all that was going to be undone in four years. Saying “Biden tried it and failed” is like insisting that the Colorado Rockies, who have the worst win-loss record in baseball over the last 20 years, either must win the World Series in a mere four years under new management or be declared an utter failure. It doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as an argument.
A third answer is that, because of the Democrats’ tenuous hold on Congress during Biden’s first two years (and then their loss of the House in the 2022 midterms), Biden couldn’t bring actions legislatively. Even when the Democrats had full control of Congress, senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—as well as a number of others who were less theatrical about it—just weren’t going to confront corporate power in any direct way.
That left the courts, and the courts are slow. Big corporations generally have excellent lawyers. And dozens, even hundreds of right-wing judges sit on the federal bench, thanks to the efforts of the Federalist Society. Ramamurti pointed out to me that the administration fought hard on student loans, junk fees, and noncompete agreements (which corporations sought to impose even on security guards … security guards?!), only to see courts rule against them. “We were willing to take on those fights,” he said. “The problem was that we couldn’t deliver the ultimate result because of the courts.”
A fourth and final answer has to do with Biden as a communicator. His heart was in this fight. He just wasn’t a forceful articulator and promoter of these ideas. Heather Boushey, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers for the entire Biden term, told me: “There were too many times, as I traveled the country and talked to economic audiences, I was stunned how many times people said to me in 2024 that the speech I had just given was the first time they had heard our economic agenda clearly articulated. And I would be thinking, the president literally gave this speech earlier this week.”
Jared Bernstein, who served alongside Boushey and then chaired the CEA for the last 19 months of Biden’s term, added that the administration’s constant hard work on these issues and many successes got them nothing politically. “I thought we got zero love for what was really a very concentrated attack on precisely the kinds of hassles we’re talking about,” he said. “We got zero for it. And, you know, maybe we didn’t do it right, but I do think that experiment does challenge your hypothesis.”
It does. But I would argue that the administration, from Biden on down, didn’t promote its efforts often or forcefully enough. Andrew Bates, the former senior deputy press secretary, seemed to agree. “The main thing that I feel we could have done better was taking more public fights, certain bad actors in the private sector, to illustrate for people we were really fighting for them. And we did that to a degree,” he said. “I think if that had been a larger proportion of our messaging, I think people would have better received it.”
Senator Whitehouse is withering on this point. “[Biden] didn’t want to have enemies, he didn’t want to have adversaries, he didn’t want to have villains,” he told me. “They wouldn’t think in those terms. They wouldn’t speak in those terms. They wouldn’t even set up infrastructure to prepare for a battle, like a war room to plot when it was a good chance to land a punch because they left themselves open in some grotesque way. So we had four years in which our bully pulpit was deliberately self-muffled, and that made it really, really hard to move.”
Biden did call out some bad actors by name, or at least by category—Big Pharma, the large meat-packers, the various imposers of junk fees. But he didn’t make a crusade of it. It takes time to tell people how the four big meat-packers make life difficult for small ranchers and jack up prices for working consumers. It’s not something your average person has probably ever given one minute’s thought to. You have to tell that story over and over and over again. You have to use vivid, illustrative examples. You have to name a villain. That’s how you start to undo 45 years of conventional wisdom and get people who don’t have much time in their lives for politics to start thinking in a new way. And that, Biden didn’t do.
Here is one lesson I hope the next Democratic president learns from Trump: In our present-day environment, the president needs to be out there nearly every day promoting his or her agenda—and doing so in terms that make the fight and the conflict readily apparent to people. This is one thing that Trump does well—virtually every day, he’s out there making it clear to people who his bad guys are and feeding the media a narrative of conflict that ensures coverage. True, he’s not popular, but that’s because his policies aren’t popular. He’s a successful agenda setter, and the next Democratic president needs to learn from his example and not regard the presidency as some precious, porcelain institution that should be shielded from too much exposure. That’s not the world we live in now.
Biden, of course, was physically incapable doing that toward the end. But he and his many admirable economic aides did start us down a better path, and it’s exactly the wrong lesson to conclude that because Biden didn’t vanquish Meta, it’s time to throw in the towel. The right conclusion is that Biden started a job that a new generation of Democrats must now finish.
7. Targets
So: What stories should the Democrats tell working people, and what names should they name? Several suggestions emerged from the interviews I did for this article, but I’d like to kick things off with an idea of my own, one I’ve had for a decade or so.
The next time they have the power to do so, Democrats should just make insulin free. It wouldn’t be complicated, or even very expensive. In 2022, Americans with diabetes spent around $22 billion on insulin. That represented a huge increase over the previous decade. But then, the government—the Democrats—stepped in and did good: The Inflation Reduction Act capped the price of an insulin dose at $35 for Medicare beneficiaries starting in 2023. Costs have gone down considerably, and the three manufacturers—Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi—have even lowered some prices voluntarily in response to government action. Figures aren’t in for what diabetes patients have spent in more recent years, after the cap kicked in, but experts say it’s well below $22 billion.
The government should just pick up the tab. It should negotiate a fair price with the manufacturers and pay them, just as it does now for Covid vaccines—and not just for Medicare recipients, but for every insulin user in America. Said the economist Dean Baker: “You just say OK, we’re going to give you a lump sum, and as many people who need it will get it.” This doesn’t even require making a villain, unless the companies refuse to negotiate. If they do, Democrats can remind Americans that manufacturing a vial of insulin costs around $4, and the market price can still be north of $250.
Democrats and liberal commentators (including this one) remark frequently on the disconnect between the party’s accomplishments and the public’s failure to see them and give Democrats credit for them. Well, life doesn’t get much simpler and clearer than “free.” It’s how things were always supposed to be, anyway. The three Canadian inventors of insulin refused the offer of a patent from the United States and sold their rights to it to the University of Toronto for one dollar each. Said Frederick Banting, the best-known of the trio: “Insulin does not belong to me. It belongs to the world.”
The people I interviewed had a lot to say about the health care industry. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, whose 2021 book, Antitrust, is a richly detailed history of anti-monopoly battles in the United States, said one of her chief goals as a legislator is “getting competition in the prescription drug market.” And by the way: For critics who think attacking these corporations is socialism, the answer is that it is exactly the opposite. Competition, as Klobuchar emphasized, is supposed to be at the heart of capitalism. These bad actors are killing competition. They’re the anti-capitalists.
One blatant example: There’s something drug companies do called pay-for-delay—they literally pay generic manufacturers to keep their lower-priced drugs off the market. The Federal Trade Commission under both parties has been trying to move against this for years, with limited success. There are bipartisan bills in both houses to end this practice, but they’ve never gotten to the floor. Only a president making a crusade of this and calling out the culprits can defeat the lobbyists and get that legislation passed.
The health care field is rife with targets. UnitedHealth Group has long been accused of monopolistic practices as it has gobbled up more and more of the health care market. “They’re essentially the poster child for vertical integration gone wrong, because they control the insurance, the pharmacy benefit manager, the physician practices,” and more, said Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project. “And that creates systematic conflicts at every level, allowing them essentially to turn health care into a rent extraction machine” (“rents” being the fancy economists’ term for excess profits). Biden’s Justice Department in 2022 sued to block UHG’s acquisition of another competitor. The judge, a Trump appointee and former Federalist Society member, blocked the suit.
Pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, which have played a key role in a process that has led to the closing of many independent pharmacies in underserved areas, are another rich target. Independent pharmacies, said Alvaro Bedoya, “are often the few places [people] can speak to a medical professional about their medicine, because there aren’t that many primary care physicians that serve working-class urban areas.… And they’re wondering, why is this happening? Why is the pharmacy I used to always go to closing while the CVS is shortening their hours?” The PBM problem is well-known in the policy world, but your average American has almost surely never heard of it. Democrats need to change that. One politician has taken them on, and it’s not who you think: Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law last year barring the issuance of state permits to pharmacies owned by PBMs. If she can do that in Little Rock, can’t Democrats do it in Washington?
Taking on fights like these can also win the good favor of voters who aren’t normally part of the Democratic coalition. The big four meat-packers—Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—totally dominate the industry. According to Reuters, their share of all cattle slaughtered in the United States rose from 25 percent in 1977 to 71 percent in 1992 (funny coincidence: the dawn of the Bork consumer-welfare era). They squeeze ranchers, paying less for cattle even as beef prices rise.
When’s the last time you heard a nationally prominent Democrat talk with passion about farmers? I don’t know the answer to that, but I can tell you the last time a Democratic presidential candidate devoted even a couple of sentences to discussing farmers in his or her convention speech: It was Al Gore, a quarter-century ago. Neither Harris nor Biden nor Hillary Clinton even used the word “farm” in their speeches. Imagine the signal it would send to farmers—and others in related fields—to hear national Democrats taking their struggles seriously. “When a [meat] plant closes,” said Hegde, “it impacts the truckers who are driving those lines. It impacts the grocery store.… You can really just build a wide-ranging coalition if you decide to pick this fight.”
In addition, there are some sleeper issues that politicians and pollsters haven’t bothered to notice. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told me about a trip he made to Florida, where people talked and talked about the rising cost of homeowners’ insurance. “I’m not the world’s most adept and sensitive public opinion guru, but I can detect when an issue is fully thermonuclear. And in Florida, this issue is fully thermonuclear,” he told me. He said that applies to Texas as well. Sounds to me like a good fight to pick, with a handy villain, in two states where Democrats badly need to break through.
Some battles might not hasten the revolution, but they are highly visible and get people’s blood boiling because they involve such obvious rip-offs. Public enemy number one here is Ticketmaster/Live Nation. According to a recent study by the National Independent Talent Organization, Ticketmaster and another company, AXS, charged fees averaging almost 35 percent of a ticket’s price, nearly double that of competitors. (Also, NITO found, Ticketmaster was the sole vendor for 86 percent of events in New York state held at venues with seating capacities over 2,000.)
The Biden administration’s FTC did force a change here: These firms must now use “all-in pricing,” meaning that the customer sees the full price, fees included, up front, instead of having their jaws hit their desks after the third or fourth click en route to purchase. That’s fine. But they didn’t reduce fees. How do they get away with charging a percentage in the first place? A good seat for a Sacramento Kings game can be had for around $100. A good seat to see Lady Gaga will set you back around $1,000. Is there really 10 times more labor involved in processing a Lady Gaga ticket than a Kings ticket? It’s preposterous. Democrats should legislate some kind of cap on what they can charge.
Klobuchar is livid about this. “They’re owning a huge amount of the arenas, they own Live Nation, this talent piece of it, and the talent management, and then they own the ticketing, so you just can’t get around it,” she said. Added Bedoya: “What I think Ticketmaster is just so emblematic for is how people feel completely nickel-and-dimed every single moment of every single day, even when they try to do something for themselves.” Will it change the world? Maybe not. But it will show voters that the Democrats have picked a fight with one powerful interest and won it on their behalf. That’s taking a stand, as opposed to a position.
Want to get men voting Democratic again? Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, suggests that Democrats should go after the streaming services and untangle these overly complicated packages and let people watch sports again for free, or at least without having to subscribe to other services they don’t want. The packages are “confusing and frustrating,” Stoller said. “Every year you get an email saying Netflix or Hulu has increased in price. And so I think people are experiencing a confusing ecosystem at higher prices.”
A small thing? Maybe. But people are pretty damn passionate about sports. Millions of Americans would appreciate making it cheaper to take the family to a ball game and making it less anxiety-inducing to figure out how and where to watch one. And it has to be done by calling out the bad actors. As Bharat Ramamurti said above, to get people to pay attention, “you need the controversy and the fight.”
I haven’t even gotten yet to the most obvious villains of all: big tech. We’ll circle back to them, but first I want to put forward another idea I’ve had for a few years, lifted from Franklin Roosevelt, that could do still more to show working Americans that Democrats are on their side.
8. An Economic Bill of Rights
In late 1943, as FDR was preparing to head to Tehran for a Big Three conference with Churchill and Stalin at which the United States and Britain agreed to open a Western front against Nazi Germany, he received a communication from aide Chester Bowles, head of the Office of Price Administration. Bowles was thinking not about the war, but about life in the United States after the victory, which by late 1943 seemed to be well in the cards.
Bowles asked the president to think about what kind of country troops would be returning to—one still mired in poverty and unemployment, or one committed to something better for a people who endured rationing and shortages during the war. The U.K. had already issued the Beveridge Report the year before, which committed postwar Britain to fighting disease, squalor, and other social ills. “I propose,” Bowles wrote to FDR, “a second Bill of Rights in the field of economics.”
Roosevelt did not exactly jump for joy upon reading this. But by the time of his State of the Union address the next January, he did speak of the need for “a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.” It included eight proposed rights, among them: a “useful and remunerative job”; a wage sufficient to provide adequate “food and clothing and recreation”; a decent home; satisfactory medical care; a good education; and, interestingly enough, for small businesses, “freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.”
Bowles hoped Roosevelt would make this Second Bill of Rights the core of his reelection campaign. He did not. He ran mostly as a wartime president. He mentioned the issue only one other time, in a speech in Chicago in October. But the marker had been laid down. In a 1945 address to Congress, Harry Truman laid out a 21-point reconversion program that expanded on Roosevelt’s points, although it didn’t assert these goals as rights as FDR had.
The time is overdue for the Democratic Party, or one of its enterprising 2028 presidential candidates, to propose a new Economic Bill of Rights aimed squarely at saying to working people: You have these rights, and we will move heaven and earth to enshrine them for you, and we’ll fight like hell against the people who don’t want you to have them. The rights should include but not be limited to: a decent wage; cradle-to-grave basic health care, which expressly means both physical and mental health; a good elementary and secondary education, and an affordable higher education; basic workplace rights, even if a person is not in a union, that will ensure ample leisure time and the ability to plan vacations well in advance; sufficient access to recreational activities and facilities; fair prices for everyday goods that are set by fair market competition and not distorted by monopoly or oligopoly power; no hidden or exorbitant fees from banks, airlines, ticket vendors, streaming services, and other businesses that have consumers over a barrel.
This Bill of Rights must also make an effort to lean in the direction of defending constituencies that don’t usually vote Democratic. The rights of small farmers must be made specific and explicit. It should proclaim a right for rural Americans to have access to hospitals and clinics and broadband. On the topic of housing, all I ever hear Democrats talk about is homeownership. That’s important, of course. But about one-third of Americans rent their housing, and they tend to be younger and/or working class. Anything for them, especially as evidence mounts that they’re being rooked by these algorithmic rent-setters like RealPage? On the subject of post–high school education, it should have language that speaks to the 60 percent or so of young people who don’t get college degrees. I hear Democrats talking all the time about the importance of college and the crushing problem of student debt, and these are real things. I can’t ever recall—literally, never—hearing a national Democrat talk at any length, or maybe even at all, about vocational school. How about making vocational and trade schools free? And community colleges? After all, some 40 percent of all college students in this country attend community college. Democrats need to talk to these future plumbers and electricians and dental hygienists and IT people. A big statement telling them that they have a right to a good life is a start.
Yes, an Economic Bill of Rights is just words. But so was the Declaration of Independence. It didn’t make the colonies independent—that had to be won in a war that dragged on for another five years. Giving people actual economic rights will take an enormous amount of legislative will and work. And it will require killing—not reforming or softening; killing—the Senate filibuster, which is a debate for another day, but which, it should never be forgotten, is absolutely crucial to the Democrats ever being able to do anything for working people should they be in a position to do so again.
A bold statement that builds on and modernizes Roosevelt’s 1944 declaration could be of enormous historical importance. People will notice it. It will be viciously attacked by right-wingers and libertarians and oligarchs and, now, the new-era Washington Post editorial page. Good. You need the conflict. Again: People know who you are by the enemies you’re willing to make.
9. Conclusion: The Democrats’ Third Great Challenge
The Democratic Party has faced two great challenges in its history, and it has risen to both. The first came in the 1930s, amid the Great Depression. It’s easy to forget this today, but global democratic capitalism seemed to many to be on its last legs. The Soviet Union had a firm hold on power in the East—and many promoters in the West argued that communism was the future. In Germany, Hitler was installed as chancellor about five weeks before FDR’s inauguration. To read histories of the period is to be struck by the number of commentators who believed that democracy was on the way out, and that humankind’s two choices were Soviet-style communism or Germany-Italy-style fascism.
So Roosevelt and Democrats stepped in. The New Deal had many flaws—it didn’t attack segregation, a number of its prominent programs didn’t work as promised, and it didn’t fully dig America out of the recession until the war. But it made working people’s lives much better. Social Security, a minimum wage, the right to unionize, unemployment insurance, the safety of bank deposits—the list goes on and on. The Democrats made the bold move of embracing Keynesianism, they built the modern state, and they saved the United States from totalitarian extremes; in doing so, they gave people better, happier, freer lives.
The second challenge came in the 1960s. The stain of legal racism in this country, which made a mockery of clichés like “the land of the free,” had finally to be erased. It took guts for LBJ, a Southerner, to press as hard as he did for the civil rights bill—and even more guts to turn around the very next year and, seeing that the Southern racists were circumventing the new law in terms of voter registration, pass the Voting Rights Act. And then, all the new laws that followed, about housing and lending discrimination and so on. We are of course still working on some of these problems, and we always will be. As we’re seeing with grim clarity in our time, the forces of reaction don’t just throw in the towel. But LBJ and the Democratic Party rose to the historic occasion.
Today, the Democrats face their third great historical challenge: to wrest political power back from the new billionaire class and return it to working people; to make the system function again in favor of the many not the few; to work to ensure that people have faith again in this country and its government; to give them better, happier, and freer lives.
I might also add: to reduce—or better yet end once and for all—the potential appeal of demagogues like Donald Trump. You perhaps will have noticed that, while Trump is mentioned several times in this piece in passing, he is not the focus here at all. Trumpism is a crisis for this country; there’s no doubt of that. But with respect to the problem I’ve tried to describe here, Trump is merely a symptom. When a large percentage of people feel the system is rigged and has failed them, they will turn to a Trump. Democrats must create conditions such that the people will never again make that choice.
Come to think of it, that is a good three-word summation of what the Democrats need to do: unrig the system. That it is rigged is well beyond dispute. It’s rigged by the excess profit-seekers I’ve suggested the Democrats attack. And it’s rigged by these new billionaires, who have amassed fortunes the Founders would have considered obscene, and who are now spending their money on politics as never before to protect and even advance their privilege. Last November, The Washington Post published a searing report on this: “In 2000, the country’s wealthiest 100 people donated about a quarter of 1 percent of the total cost of federal elections, according to a Post analysis of data from OpenSecrets. By 2024, they covered about 7.5 percent, even as the cost of such elections soared. In other words, roughly 1 in every 13 dollars spent in last year’s national elections was donated by a handful of the country’s richest people.”
Many of these people are building vast fortunes in a tech industry that the Democrats simply have to put in their sights. Steven Levy of Wired wrote an excellent report last September describing how Silicon Valley was shifting its allegiances to the GOP. Good. Good riddance. That should free the Democrats to regulate their companies and investigate their poisonous algorithmic formulas.
Many of them also oppose democracy. Peter Thiel famously wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He went on in that essay to note that the last time when it was possible to be “genuinely optimistic about politics” in America was the 1920s. Paging Tom Buchanan! Thiel writes—I’m not joking—that the increase in the number of welfare beneficiaries and the giving of the franchise to women had “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
We all know about Elon Musk and his hard-right, anti-statist, and kind of white supremacist views. There’s also Marc Andreessen, whose “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” sees the democratic state as “a hindrance to be opposed, dismantled, and destroyed,” in the words of Guardian opinion editor Amana Fontanella-Khan.
The problem of these uber-rich men is not the same thing as the problem of the bad corporate actors making people’s daily lives hard, but the two are obviously related. The second group picks people’s pockets and gets away with it because neither political party has the collective will to stop it; then, the first group comes forward to shout, “You see, democracy is a failure!” And they share a common goal: a state too weak and hollowed out to check their power and profits. For them, Trump is not some sort of culmination. Trumpism is the first stage in a process that they hope will produce a United States in which they and their kind call all the shots and have all the power.
This is the fight of our time. It is the Democrats’ third great challenge. Are they up to it, as they were in the 1930s and 1960s? I honestly don’t know. Many of them are. I hear more openness, in my private conversations and in their public statements, to the idea of fighting excess corporate power than I’ve heard in a long time, or probably ever. When James Carville writes in The New York Times that “it is abundantly clear even to me that the Democratic Party must now run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression,” as he did late last year, something has changed.
Some are still compromised by campaign contributions. Others still hold on to that old liberal faith in consensus. In theory, I support that consensus. And it can still happen on some issues. In fact, it can happen on some of these very issues I discuss in this piece—support for certain anti-monopolistic measures is gaining currency in the GOP, too. Where consensus is possible, it remains preferable.
But increasingly, consensus is not possible. Democrats must see this clearly. There are working people struggling to get by. And there are the people at the top making their lives harder and trying to destroy the public services on which they depend. It’s time for the Democrats to say unambiguously to working people, “We are on your side—and we will pick fights on your behalf.” If they do this consistently and aggressively, I believe they can not only get back to Biden’s 48 percent support among working-class voters; they can win over a consistent majority of working people, who will be far less distracted by right-wing wedge issues if they see clearly that the Democratic Party is genuinely and consistently fighting for their interests.
Between now and 2028, the Democrats have to decide whether they want to pocket their piles of crypto money and just get things back to an inadequate “normal,” or whether they want to be in fact what they claim to be in theory—the party of the working people—and create a new and better normal. The future of our democracy hangs on their decision.
