Democracy May Survive Trump, but It Looks Like Capitalism Might Not

It was a surreal week, bursting with surreal news generated by the surreal idiot who sits in the White House, but maybe the most surreal headline of all was the one I saw Thursday morning telling me that Costco was rationing motor oil. The limit they’ve set is very likely more than your average motorist needs, but still. Rationing! Am I in England in the 1950s? And on top of that, the price has nearly doubled since April, to $58 for a 10-quart pack.

Or maybe it was the news that diesel had topped $6 a gallon. Before the war in Iran, it was about $3.60 a gallon. Some stations, in fact, are out of diesel. That’s right, on the signs that normally list the price per gallon of diesel fuel, it just says “Out.” Diesel powers trucks and delivery vans and tractors and other farm equipment. (Harvest season is around the corner, by the way.) Also freight trains. And buses and ships and barges and tugboats. And bulldozers and backhoes and cranes, and I guess that also means forklifts—you know, the kind seen this week crashing repeatedly into the Kennedy Center. The nation’s, and the world’s, commerce, in other words, runs on diesel gasoline.

For years, we’ve wondered whether American democracy would survive Donald Trump. We still do, of course, and by the way, if you haven’t read Judge Michael Luttig’s terrifying piece on that subject that we posted last week, do so immediately (well, after you finish this). But now, we need to fret that capitalism may not survive Trump, and that between now and January 2029, assuming the GOP doesn’t go Twenty-Fifth Amendment on him, he’ll single-handedly bring not only the American but the global economy to its knees.

America is finally coming to terms with just what an ignoramus Trump is. In his first term, he inherited a steady economy with a record 75 consecutive months of job growth. Until the pandemic hit, he didn’t do anything to screw it up. He inflicted horror after horror on the nation in other realms, but until March 2020, his economy was fine to good.

But that was a different Trump. That was the “leashed” Trump—the Trump who still had a few grown-ups in the room who were willing to save him from his worst impulses. In term two, we have the unleashed Trump, surrounded by people who say only “yes” and tell him how brilliant he is. They validate every major decision he makes, and every major decision the unleashed Trump has made has been calamitous.

The first-term tariffs, mediated through more cautious figures like then–Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin (who made his real feelings about tariffs known in early 2025), were comparatively modest. They didn’t do the economy any good, but they also didn’t do much long-term harm.

But these tariffs, these unleashed ones—they’re a disaster. Wall Street hates them, Main Street hates them, farmers hate them, consumers hate them, China hates them, Canada hates them, the markets and bond traders hate them, everybody hates them. Even the normally toadyish Supreme Court said it hated them. A new poll from the Cato Institute confirms all this.

Trump’s other major decision, of course, was the war in Iran, which has been a top-to-bottom disaster. The Strait of Hormuz, no matter what he says, is effectively closed. On Monday, four commodity ships passed through the strait, compared to the prewar normal of 120, 130. And now of course, on the other side of the Arab Peninsula, Iran has the Houthis seizing Saudi pipelines and facilities. Saudi King MBS asked Trump for help. He said no. Twice.

And that’s why diesel prices are headed toward $7 a gallon. They’re already $8.35 in California. As California accounts for nearly 15 percent of the U.S. economy, that’s a pretty big deal. So much of our produce comes from California. Produce prices were already rising over the summer—after all, growing produce requires fertilizer, and getting it to us requires diesel gas to power those refrigerated trucks. A bag of baby spinach or mixed greens runs what, $2.99? Picture that at $4.29 in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Finally, there’s just the general chaos that Trump creates on a daily basis. Every day, he enrages one world leader or another. Every day, he says or does something that makes the global situation more tenuous, and that weakens the United States. And has he met his match in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney or what? One thing he did not expect was a leader of a soft little icy appendage he viewed as the fifty-first state being smarter and savvier and far more respected around the world than he is.

If a human being with normal cognitive development was presiding over this mess, we could reasonably hope that he’d recognize what has gone wrong and change. But Trump is not a normally developed human being. In an interview with Chris Hayes Thursday night, Maggie Haberman, who knows Trump’s congealed brain as well as anyone, said that she estimates he spends 70 percent of his time on the matter of his monuments—the arch, the ballroom, the aforementioned Kennedy Center. When he does bother to turn his attention to the economy, he says that it’s the best in the history of the country and that gas prices will come down rapidly as soon as X thing happens, which never happens.

In other words, given normalcy, we could hope that a president would huddle with his advisers and ask, What can we do to get out of this mess? Such a president would change course. But changing course requires two things. First, experimentation with ideas that don’t fit comfortably within his preconceived worldview. Second, admission that he might have been wrong about something. Obviously, Trump is capable of neither of those things.

The head of the Postal Service announced Thursday that work has stopped on developing systems to support Trump’s attack on mail-in voting. Looks like we’ve dodged that bullet. There will be more to come, perhaps culminating in the Luttig scenario. Or perhaps culminating in some elaborate attempt to steal the 2028 election. This will never stop.

So far, though, the guardrails of democracy have more or less held. But what about the guardrails of the economic system? They are: a Congress that conducts real oversight and demands accountability; a class of corporate and financial leaders who actually put the good of the country ahead of the next tax cut or earnings statement; a well-regulated market system that is set up to punish short-term excess and wealth creation for the few and reward efforts to produce shared prosperity. Right now, we have none of those things.

Democracy just might survive Trump. But it’s looking more and more like capitalism might not. It wouldn’t be the first time the system was brought to the brink of ruin by men who claim to worship it (see 1929). When will we ever learn?

We have trained ourselves to think of Donald Trump as sui generis, an outlier in the history of the American political experience. And of course, in so many ghastly ways, he is. But he arose from somewhere; the instant and fervent attachment of millions of conservatives to his brand of search-and-destroy politics, his disregard for the truth, did not emerge from whole cloth in 2015. It had antecedents. Some thing or things inculcated in the conservative mind a fealty to that brand of relentless political warfare.

And so, on this twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, older people need to be reminded of—and younger readers told for perhaps the first time—how the Republican Party of that era used that tragedy to impose its worldview on a confused and malleable populace and to browbeat the political opposition (and how, tragically, said opposition largely complied in ways that resonate loudly today). Superficial reminiscences published this week will bemoan the “fact” that we were a country united then, and look how far we’ve fallen. It sounds soothing. But nothing could be further from the more forensically examined truth.

The nation was united in shock and grief, that much is true. A different presidential administration might have approached that reality with a certain humility; an acknowledgment—especially given the dubious terms under which it took power (the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president, not the voters, who preferred Al Gore)—that its job was to give oxygen to that shock and grief in a sincere and nonideological way. To guide a tremulous nation through a gut-churning moment without hitching the trauma to a preconceived political agenda.

Bush did just enough of that to appear to your average person to be sincere about it. He visited a mosque in Washington just six days after the attacks and said, “Islam is peace.” That, to be sure, was laudable. Could you picture Trump doing that?

But behind the scenes, other, darker wheels were spinning, almost from the moment of the attack. Donald Rumsfeld was Bush’s secretary of defense. The very afternoon of the attack, he told an aide, according to declassified, handwritten notes: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time—not only U.B.L,” referring to the man then known in intelligence circles as “Usama” bin Laden and widely and correctly assumed to have orchestrated the attacks. And: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” And not?

Hussein, at the time, was the leader of Iraq—and of what was without question a fascist, evil regime. American neoconservatives, a cohort that included Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and many others in the administration—had trained their bellicose eyes on Hussein since 1991, when the first President Bush repelled his invasion of Kuwait but spurned the neocons’ importunings to press on into Baghdad and depose Saddam. An organization, the Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, was conjured into existence during the Clinton presidency for the express purpose of keeping the pressure on U.S. administrations to wage war on Iraq. Cheney was a key figure in PNAC, a founding member in fact. He had been Bush Sr.’s defense secretary and had scorned his boss’s decision not to march on to Baghdad.

In other words: The great, unifying national tragedy was—within hours—converted into an excuse to wage a highly divisive and very ideological war, which was commenced in due course 18 months later. Those 18 months were defined by a campaign of lies about Saddam being six months away from being able to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States and having links to the 9/11 attackers. You see, Cheney, as Pentagon chief under Bush I, had developed with aides, including Wolfowitz, a plan—massively controversial at the time, when The New York Times revealed its existence in 1992—for U.S. global hegemony. At the heart of the plan was invading Iraq and turning it into a democracy.

So, to sum up: Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al. had wanted to invade Iraq since 1991. The 9/11 attacks gave them an excuse because they put the public in a jittery, revenge-seeking frame of mind. But public opinion was still skeptical, so from there, they started lying.

It worked, and they got their war. That it proved to be a disaster was no surprise. That’s what generally happens with wars when the people who start them think they’ll be cakewalks, over in weeks. I trust that sounds familiar.

On the domestic front, the uses to which the Bush team put 9/11 were possibly even worse. The surveillance powers of the federal government were expanded vastly and immediately. Those who raised questions about all this were attacked and maligned—not just for disagreeing with Bush, but for being enemies of America (“Why do you hate freedom?” became what we now call a meme in those pre-Twitter days).

Bush said in a speech a week or so after the attack that the terrorists came after us because they “hate our freedoms.” It was irresponsible nonsense. Al Qaeda did not attack the United States because we have a Bill of Rights. It attacked the United States because of our military adventurism in the Middle East. I wish to be clear that I do not think it is remotely justified that 3,000 innocent civilians died because of that, but that was the justification, which bin Laden stated many times, not “our freedoms.”

But once Bush said that—once he stripped the attacks of their specific motivation and assigned to them a fuzzier one that would hit average Americans in their emotional kishkes—he blurred the line of what did and did not constitute legitimate criticism of his government. Now what the United States did to avenge 9/11 was about defending “freedom.” And now, anyone who questioned any action of the administration could easily be branded an enemy of freedom.

And so we arrive at September 26, 2001, when presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer, responding to a late-night joke by Bill Maher, much more conventionally liberal then, said that Americans in this new era “need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” This suggests an atmosphere of Gestapo-like censorship, but in fact none such was even needed. The world—the media, the late-night shows, the Democrats—largely censored itself.

Ah, the Democrats. A moment of national unity was appropriate. Except, ask yourself this: If these attacks had happened under President Gore, do you think Rush Limbaugh would have pled for national unity? Of course not. But still—a moment was appropriate. But only a moment. Once the neocons on the Bush team started exploiting 9/11 for a war that they had wanted to wage since 1991 and that most Democrats opposed, the Democrats should have become a genuine opposition. They failed to do that. They were cowed. They went along.

The hangover from that sad episode extends into our time. Can one draw a line, for example, from the 2002–03 Democrats’ capitulation on Bush’s war to the Democrats’ general confusion last year? I think one can. It’s a different party, with younger people who are less afraid, and who know that their base wants a more pugilistic stance. But some of the leaders are the same people. And even for those in the current leadership who weren’t there in 2001, they seem too often to have inherited the backpedaling caution that characterized the 9/11-era Democrats’ response to Bush’s aggressive posture.

So that’s what happened after 9/11. The Republican Party hijacked this national, indeed international, tragedy to start a war that was a practical and moral calamity (and I can’t write this without at least mentioning the sanctioning by the United States of America of torture and special prisons and CIA “black sites” and more) and to commence a crackdown at home that unleashed deeply reactionary forces. Those forces grew and metastasized as the nation elected its first Black president, and they became bolder and more public with the arrival of a demagogue who stripped the sentiment of its more polished veneer and got matters down to the rough surface. 

I do think there’s a difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump. I believe that Bush, on a personal level, is a decent man, while Trump is not. But personal decency is not what matters most in a leader. What matters in a leader is what he will and will not do in his public capacity for the sake of political advantage; what moral lines he draws. And Bush, after 9/11, drew a couple good lines, but he drew too many lines that pointed his party in the direction of Trump. On this anniversary, we should not forget this, or absolve him and the people who enabled him.

On this cusp of Labor Day, when election campaigns kick into fourth gear, I don’t want to jinx anything, but I have to say it: The voters are going to barber-strap Donald Trump in the November midterms.

I’ve been wrong before, of course. On the other hand, I’ve also been right before. In 1998, for example, everybody—I mean everybody—was saying that Bill Clinton’s Democrats were going to lose umpteen seats in that year’s midterms, because the elections took place in the wake of the revelations that Clinton had had a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and all the smart people knew that the voters were going to rise in fury to smite him and the louche Democrats who were defending him. The Republicans, in the majority already, were surely going to pick up another 20, 30 seats.

Not so fast, said I. Because the polls were showing clearly, to anyone who bothered to study them, that the public was more disgusted with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his morality police—Gingrich’s mistress at the time, by the way, is now my and your official American representative to the Holy See in the Vatican—than with Clinton and his very human, if gross, weaknesses.

I just sniffed the zeitgeist and sensed the conventional wisdom was dead wrong (in the end, the Democrats gained five House seats that year). This year, that same olfactory sense is telling me, dare I write it, that November 3 may be even worse for the Republicans than the conventional wisdom now predicts. There are three groups of voters who matter in this election, and each of them is going to punish Trump severely.

The first is people like you and me—the people who have always thought he was a fascist goon and an imbecile, and who would go out to cast a vote against him and his minions even if it meant voting for Homer Simpson. We are turbocharged to get to the polls, and there are millions of us.

The second is the swing voters who were, to be frank—oh, OK, let’s put it slightly more politely—naïve enough to believe that Trump could lower prices and fix the economy. They know now that Trump cannot do that; he possesses no such magic wand. Would that they had known in November 2024. But they know now, and those who bother to vote will vote 80, 90 percent against Trump and his party.

Third is the BMPs: the Betrayed MAGA Pigeons. They’re not the same as swing voters. Unlike swing voters, they were never going to think for five minutes about voting for a Black woman in 2024. But to feel OK about themselves, they had to build a case for Trump in their brains that justified their Trump vote, even made it a righteous protest against the status quo. Core to the BMP justification were a few central ideas: that Trump would improve the economy; that he was right on immigration and heads needed to be cracked; that Kamala Harris was the real warmonger, and Trump would calmly keep the peace.

Well, that defense against reality has been crushed like a grape under a tire. Trump has failed on the economy. He’s gone way too far for these people on immigration (Joe Rogan this year compared ICE to the Gestapo). And finally, the Iran war destroyed it. Trump and the Republicans are losing the “manosphere,” a process Sidney Blumenthal described with coruscating precision on this site a couple weeks ago. But they’re losing many other segments of MAGA-land as well that simply can’t believe he started a war; let alone an obviously stupid war that we’re losing; let alone at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, as the Israeli prime minister just bragged on Israeli TV.

The first two groups will turn out in droves against Republican candidates. The third group won’t do that. But it, dispirited and confused, simply won’t turn out. And its absence, I think, is what will be decisive. There will be no defense against the onslaught.

Well, you say. That may all be true. But a clever politician can reframe things. We’re on the cusp of Labor Day—the traditional start of general election campaigns in the regular-people-start-to-pay-attention sense. On the assumption that most people haven’t been paying attention so far, doesn’t Trump have time to redirect the narrative?

The answer is that he does, maybe, have the time. He certainly has the money, though he may be hoarding it for his own selfish purposes well beyond this year. But he doesn’t have the brains. And he doesn’t have the brains because his brain marinates in a fantasy world in which Trump can do no wrong. His reality-denying cocoon has sometimes been beneficial to him. Last year, for example, when he was riding (comparatively) high, when law firms and elite universities quaked before him, he was able to create a willed reality. But today?

The cultural power that he possessed in the spring and summer of 2025 has completely vaporized. He sits up there and says we’ve won the war, we control the Strait of Hormuz. Inflation’s no big deal. Affordability isn’t a thing. Data centers are great, and if you’re against them, you want to stay “backwards and poor.” The United States is the “hottest” country on earth. As the American people cry out for help, he’s obsessed with building monuments to himself.

With the multibillion-dollar propaganda machine he’s got behind him, there are, of course, still millions of Americans who believe him. But to return to my three groups: The first group of course doesn’t believe a word, the median representative of the second group has lost all faith in him, and the BMPs have turned on him.

And ask yourself: What’s going to get better in this country between now and Election Day? Answer: Not much that I can see. We got a good jobs report this morning, but the bond market is still jittery and central banks are contemplating rate hikes. On Iran, he may cut a deal, but it will be a bad, desperate deal, and most people will recognize it as such. He’d better pray that a new ICE shooting controversy doesn’t explode in October. Am I missing anything? Ah, yes. Water-body renaming. He may score a couple more key wins there.

So: By November 3, there’s every chance that Trump will be more unpopular than he is today. His mental deterioration in just these last few weeks is noticeable, and in two more months, he may literally be drooling. Even dear old Rasmussen may have him down in the 30s by then.

The result? Again—I don’t want to jinx anything. I’ll just say it like this: I heard someone the other day on TV say that we may need to start paying more attention to Senate races in states like Kansas, where Democratic preacher Adam Hamilton is in a near dead heat with GOP incumbent Roger Marshall. In Nebraska, a recent poll has independent Dan Osborn running even with GOP incumbent Pete Ricketts. One recent Arkansas poll was close. In Florida, everybody laughs off the democratic socialist who won the Democratic nomination. But she pulled off a stunning upset in the Democratic primary, and she did it without running a single television ad. And the appointed Republican incumbent is knee-deep in that Medicaid scandal involving the governor’s wife.

I’m not predicting Democratic wins in the last two states. I am saying that a wave is building. And the man toward whom the wave is heading looks out on the ocean and sees calm, pacific seas. He’s delusional, spent, incapable of responding to reality. In the next two months, all that is only going to get worse—and more apparent to the American people.

Today is the six-month anniversary of President Trump’s war in Iran, which as any non-brainwashed human can see has been a failure in every sense. Meanwhile, with diplomacy stalled, Russian insiders tell Bloomberg News that Vladimir Putin is frustrated (poor thing!) and is weighing an escalation in Ukraine that could ultimately include the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

These next few months will be extremely dangerous ones for the world. We have two old men whose purchase on reality is slipping by the week—that’s obviously true in Trump’s case, and it sure seems to be accurate with respect to Putin too. But they have something else in common that’s much more ominous: Both will do anything to maintain their corrupt hold on power, which makes both nations a threat to global peace. Sadder still: I never thought I’d see the day when we’d be saying that the United States and Russia were more or less equally malevolent forces in the world.

Here in the U.S., Trump retreats more and more into a fantasyland of denial. He posts a grotesque, tacky, fascistic, AI-generated poster of himself proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” trying to compare his Iran misadventure favorably to George W. Bush’s own misadventure in Iraq. He insists the Iranian regime is weakened. He brags about controlling the Strait of Hormuz.

In reality, Iran has almost total control of the strait. Right now, says Reuters, 10 or 15 ships are getting through the strait every day. That’s down from 100 or more. As I write these words Friday morning, the Strait of Hormuz traffic tracker has three ships transiting and 319 vessels waiting.

Trump’s latest policy solution, to the extent that he has any, involves the “D-Day sanctions” announced earlier this week by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Bessent said his department was going to isolate business done with Iran in five economic sectors and sanction 60 businesses, individuals, and vessels. But he didn’t say which countries that do business with Iran would be targeted (that is—China, most notably). He said Trump would be calling world leaders “with specific requests to cease their interactions with the regime.”

Mr. Art of the Deal at work again. Donald Trump is the last person in the world who still believes that Donald Trump has any leverage whatsoever over Xi Jinping and can cajole him into doing what Trump wants him to do. To everyone else (well, not everyone—Bessent, Natalie Harp, and so on), the idea is ludicrous.

And a lot of experts think that these sanctions, as announced anyway, won’t bring Iran to its knees. The Financial Times’ Gillian Tett quoted one sanctions expert as saying: “Unless they sanction a Chinese bank everyone has heard of, this will fall flat.”

Trump lives in this cocoon where he thinks he can bend people to his will because he’s Trump. Facts about leverage and how the world actually works—he just ignores them. And the fact is that China has all kinds of leverage. Most conspicuously, it could decide to stop exporting rare earth minerals. It already did so in 2025 in response to Trump’s tariffs. Then, write two experts, “a wave of turbulent Chinese export restrictions on rare earth elements and magnets—triggered by the Trump administration’s tariffs and semiconductor controls—laid bare a critical choke point across defense, semiconductor, and automotive supply chains.” Worse could happen if that’s what China wants.

It’s a disaster, entirely of Trump’s making. The Washington Post reports today that six months into the Iran war, while Americans aren’t dying in large numbers, this is still a conflict with no plausible end in sight. Trump has boxed himself in: “His fierce aversion to becoming a twenty-first-century Herbert Hoover, who presided over the Great Depression, limits the economic moves available to him. His decision, at least so far, to hold back from the riskiest and most extreme military moves against Iran similarly limits his war options.”

“At least so far.” That’s the scary part. What happens six months from now, if Trump hasn’t managed to sue for peace, i.e., capitulate, and hand over hundred of billions of dollars to Iran? This war will never become “Trump’s Ukraine,” in the sense of the massive number of casualties—in the half a million range—Putin has racked up in his war. There is no check whatever on Putin in Russia, whereas the U.S. is at least enough of a democracy that Trump has to pay some attention to public opinion, which obviously would not tolerate such losses.

Still … Putin is, in a sense, Trump’s unfiltered id. Imagine no Constitution, no First Amendment, no vast network of civil society–oriented nonprofits, no 250-year history of democratic habit; without those guardrails, Trump would be Putin. So what Putin does, arguably, is what Trump might do if he feels desperate or reckless enough.

So Putin is contemplating a tactical nuke. It would be a fraction of the size of the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in kiloton terms. It wouldn’t wipe out Kyiv; just a neighborhood or two. And it might just get Trump thinking. We are living in a new age of nuclear proliferation, which is to say that our longtime consensus around extreme nuclear caution has been waning. And also bear in mind: The U.S. stockpile of conventional weapons is depleting to the point that the Council on Foreign Relations calls it a “munitions crisis.”

It probably won’t come to that. But even if it doesn’t, we’re left with the fact that we have two wars that are inflicting upon the world and its people a tremendous amount of pain, both started by delusional men who live in bubbles where everyone told them victory would be easy, a matter of days.

We’re accustomed to things working that way in an autocratic state like Russia. In the United States, they’re supposed to happen differently. But the United States is no longer so different from those places.

The question has popped up frequently in this election cycle. Even in the wins notched by left-leaning and socialist candidates, those candidates appear to have fared comparatively poorly among voters of the actual working class.

There aren’t exit polls in primaries, so we don’t know how voters without a college education—the typical proxy for working-class—cast their ballots. But we can still tell a lot from geography: Cities are liberal and on average more educated, rural areas the opposite; some counties are dominated by universities or colleges; and finally, we know the demographics of the bellwether swing counties in every state. So in the Michigan Democratic senatorial primary, Abdul El-Sayed did best in urban and diverse Grand Rapids (Kent County) and where the University of Michigan is (Washtenaw). Haley Stevens won Detroit, where she did a better job of connecting to Black voters, and she tended to win the rural counties. In the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial, David Crowley won Milwaukee and most of the rural counties, while Francesca Hong took the counties with universities and colleges.

Critics of the left like to sneer about this, saying it exposes a hypocrisy at the core of the current left resurgence—namely, that these candidates who claim to speak for the proletariat are doing a pretty lousy job of winning their votes. They’re obviously not wrong, factually. But I think they’re wrong, or mostly wrong, about why.

These critics tend to argue that these results prove that the new populist politics doesn’t appeal to actual working-class people, who are, in the critics’ telling, more moderate in their politics. Therefore the right way to appeal to these people is with sensible, moderate positions. They also often point out with no small amount of schadenfreude that the inability of people like El-Sayed and Hong—this was also true, according to the polls, of Maine’s Graham Platner, the Hotchkiss oysterman—to win working-class voters is proof of what out-of-touch elitists they really are.

Leftists shouldn’t delude themselves: There is some truth to the second point. There’s a long, long history here. In 1848, there were revolutions across Europe as citizens finally became restive enough about all those inbred monarchies to demand change. Initially, students and workers in Vienna, Prague, and other cities marched side by side. Before too long, however, divisions began to emerge. The students wanted things like political rights. The workers just wanted better factory conditions and more bread. Things didn’t end well in most places—like Paris, for example, where Napoleon’s nephew seized power and held it for more than two decades until he started a dumb war and the radical Paris Commune took over.

Today, we see the split in, say, certain aspects of the platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America. A national DSA co-chair has recently done two hugely embarrassing interviews, one with Fox News and the other with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, in which she touted prison abolition and border elimination and so on (and incredibly had no idea at what rate she would tax rich people). These are, to be sure, not ideas working-class people would get behind. They’re purely campus-left positions that aren’t going to get you very far in electoral politics.

The local DSA chapters, in contrast, are far more pragmatic. They emphasize housing and health care and economic things that actually matter in people’s lives. The difference between the more ideological national DSA and the more grounded local chapters was well and knowledgeably laid out by Nathan Newman in a Substack post in early July.

But even that isn’t really the main reason why progressive candidates have trouble getting working-class votes. The main reason, in my view, is this.

Non-college working-class voters are more skeptical than more educated voters are. I say that not to praise or damn one group or the other. It’s just, I think, the reality. It stems from the fact, more glaringly true in this country with each successive generation, that for the educated class, things like opportunity and advancement and the confidence that one’s children will live better lives are far more real than they are for working-class people. Working-class people’s lives in these last couple of decades have just gotten much harder, inching ever closer to the precipice of job loss, default, indignity. Working-class people live in regular if not constant fear of these things. Educated people, in an economy that leans more and more toward rewarding them, do not.

Therefore, educated voters and non-college voters hear politicians’ promises through very different ears. To educated voters, big promises about government improving people’s lives sound great, or at least plausible. To non-college voters, those promises sound like just more empty talk. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that to non-college voters, the bigger the promise, the phonier it sounds. They hear promises about free health care for all, and they think yeah, right, that’s never gonna happen in this country. Their experience has taught them not to believe, and for the most part, you can’t blame them.

It’s true that it’s not fair that social democrats—and again, most of these candidates are really social democrats, not democratic socialists—should pay the electoral price for this. After all, it wasn’t they who’ve been screwing over the working class for four decades. But they’re stuck with the reality that the screwing has made working-class people extremely suspicious of those promising them big things.

So what’s the solution? Well, the only real solution is to win office in sufficient numbers to deliver on the promises to the point that working people do see genuine improvement in their material conditions. But that’s going to take a lot of time. A decade, maybe more.

In the meantime, I think the best progressive candidates can do is first and obviously, stay away from topics like prison abolition; but second and more importantly, really just explain things to working-class voters in a way that understands and assumes their skepticism. Aspirational rhetoric appeals to educated voters. To non-college voters, it just sounds like more fluff. Tell them, specifically and concretely, why their rent keeps going up, who’s doing it to them, and how you’re going to go after the people doing it. And explain clearly and specifically how your Republican opponent is on the side of the rent-raisers. Dot-connecting of that sort seems to me more likely to win working-class votes than lofty rhetoric and big promises.