Democrats — break, envision, fight

I’m just an interested amateur, but I said this in an exchange with some people with rather different politics who found it clarifying, so it seems worth capturing. Assuming that we have elections in 2026 and 2028, the Democrats should …

1. … make a persuasively sharp break from their current voice, to get inattentive voters to engage and re-evaluate them. Figures like Sanders, AOC, Walz, and Fetterman are models here, not for their policy agendas but for not sounding like Politicians.
2. … articulate a clear, coherent vision of the better America they want to build, not a preservation or restoration of the status quo ante Trump.
3. … fight hard for that vision, both practically and theatrically. Showing up hard is more important than tactical victory, as conservatives have demonstrated for decades.

What vision?

I believe that mainstream Dems underestimate Americans’ appetite for big change. Trump’s success demonstrates that hunger.

I believe that mainstream Dems underestimate the appeal of much of the wild-eyed leftist stuff I would include in the vision, if they presented it properly.

I believe that if we get to build a better America, we should swing for the fences to make it a lot better.

But.

Having the break-envision-fight formula displace the vague, tepid practices of the Democratic Party is more important than almost any policy particulars.

More

Later additions expanding the point.

On making a progressive appeal

A follow up a month later, arguing against the case opposing a much more progressive Democratic Party agenda in ’26 & ’28.

I became a serious politics nerd during the mid 2000s, as part of the wave of “netroots progressive” amateur bloggers who opposed the “centrist” turn the Democratic Party took during that era. The Dem establishment remembered Reagan’s movement conservative coalition breaking the Democrats’ New Deal coalition and governing with neoliberal policy, they saw Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy claw back voters who had defected to the Republicans for Reagan: campaigning as a “moderate” and governing as a neolib. Progressives like me thought that trying to woo voters in the supposed center so depressed turnout by the left-leaning Democratic base that it cost Dems more than it gained.

Events in the years that followed unfolded confusingly, so both progressives and the “centrist” Dem establishment had reason to claim vindication. Obama campaigned with a lot of progressive dogwhistles and won. But his policy agenda aligned with the neolibs and he won again. Trump shattered the movement conservative coalition, making Republicans the MAGA party, and won — a reälignment at least as significant as the turn toward neoliberalism, if not bigger. (I have a lot more on that, which animates this read.) Then after a long career as the embodiment of a neolib Dem, Biden defeated Trump in 2020 offering a bland return to “normal”. Then he governed with the most progressive policy agenda since LBJ! But voters never registered the shift, Harris & Dem candidates did not run on it in 2024 — going so far as to accept endorsements by Republicans! — and they lost with lower turnout than in 2020.

Confusing.

“Moderates” in the Dem establishment trying to decide where to go from here say that 2024 proves progressives wrong: enacting (some of) our policy agenda did not win elections. Progressives object that voters didn’t know about any of that policy, not least because Harris didn’t run on it. And 2024 was weird in a bunch of ways. Incumbents around the world got crushed — left, right, and center.

Progressives should beware doubling down by saying “our agenda didn’t work because Dems didn’t do it hard enough”. Saying that a strategy didn’t work because it was not implemented vigorously enough is Cope coming from anyone, and we recognize it as shenanigans:

“Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.” I came up with this during my long experience of studying the right, and realizing that basically anything that is politically successful is kind of labeled conservatism. Any failure is wiped off the books in this bad faith utterance that well, of course it failed because it wasn’t conservative. Romney wasn’t conservative enough. McCain wasn’t conservative enough. “Bush wasn’t conservative,” you began to hear in 2004, when the wheels came off the bus with Iraq, and all the rest.

But.

Obama in 2008 was the only presidential candidate in generations to even try campaigning on progressive change, and he won. Facing Trump’s promise of crazy boldness, Harris campaigned on moderate restoration, and she lost. I find it perverse to conclude that the progressive pitch is a demonstrated failure.

This post is about how Dems need to offer something bold. If you don’t like the hard moves progressives propose, what have ya got?

Against triangulation

Triangulation does not win over “moderates” by offering them something closer to the intermediate policy they prefer. True moderates are rare.

Most people in the “moderate” voting bloc have a bouquet of strong preferences which do not map to the platforms of the two poles of American politics; they find stuff they both like & dislike from both party platforms. When they vote, they decide which of their preferences to prioritize. Triangulation is theatre which neutralizes an issue for some “moderates” who prefer the Republican position. “Bill Clinton is not so bad on X and I do like him better on Y.”

The Dem establishment is mostly made up of geezers who survived the traumatizing collapse of the New Deal coalition in the Reagan era by using triangulation. They have over-learned the lesson, and now think that triangulation is the only move that works. This post is a response to them taking every loss as a demonstration that they need to triangulate harder.

Unlike some lefties, I see sufficiently crafty triangulation still helping in some “purple” state & congressional races. But the pols doing that successfully all combine it with a strong positive case on bread-and-butter policy, demonstrating my thesis that triangulation is not a positive move but a way to neutralize negatives.

Those exceptions aside, I think the Dems need to become fundamentally skeptical of triangulation. Obama successfully ran the opposite playbook, campaigning to the left of his actual policy agenda. Dems are not facing the movement conservatives of the ’90s, they are facing MAGA fascists; the 2016 presidential election demonstrated the different dynamics. Fascists reflexively speak in bad faith, so Dems must never triangulate on the battlegrounds they choose, because they know to choose wedge issues which invite triangulation which serves them. Triangulation assumed “moderate” voters seeing news media which liked reporting “Dem X moves right on Y ”; we occupy a radically more fragmented information space now.

And most importantly: 30+ years of triangulation brought us here. We need something different.

Other commentators

Josh Marshall on Dems in Congress

The popularity of Democrats is lower than it has been in years. History suggests it’s the unpopularity of Republicans, not Democrats, that will rule the 2026 elections. But when you look at the factors weighing down Democrats, it’s not crime or trans rights or wokeness. It’s the deep-seated belief among independents and Democratic voters than Democrats are weak and feckless; their nominal positions don’t matter because they’re either unwilling or unable to fight for them.

NYT | Ezra Klein | Stop Acting Like This Is Normal

I have been following Klein since the early blogosphere of the mid ’00s, when he was a college kid experimenting with the medium. Klein saw earlier than most how blogging might lead to a career as a journalist & commentator in mainstream political media, and staked out a place on the policy-oriented & progressive side of the liberal establishment.

Consistently offering a read a tiny bit ahead of the curve — what the establishment takes as bold-but-reasonable — has served him well. Vox was his project, and he’s joined NYT Opinion a few years back.

So his read on what the Dems in Congress have done and should do is useful when understood as part of an intra-establishment discussion, in at least two ways —

Him standing strongly for Team Fight indicates that they do not hold the tiller … but have been gathering strength and credibility. Even if the Dems make the turn, I don’t think it will be enough to address our crisis, but it will help a lot, so this inspires some hope.

Him outlining how the Dem establishment are not just stupid and gormless — that they operate from a theory of power which has strong arguments — is helpful for folks like me who are very frustrated with the Dems. I think their theory is badly wrong, but it is neither hollow nor absurd, and Klein frames how it works better than I could.

It’s worth getting the whole thing. NYT has the text paywalled on their site, but one can get Klein reading the whole thing on his podcast.

[In March 2025 ⋯] House Democrats wanted a shutdown. But Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats, didn’t. He voted for the funding bill and encouraged a crucial number of his colleagues to do the same. The bill passed.

To many Democrats, this seemed insane. Some began openly calling for Schumer to resign or face a primary challenge. This was Democrats’ first real opportunity to fight back against Trump, and they had folded. What were they good for?

[⋯]

The argument Schumer made was threefold. First, Trump was being stopped in the courts. [⋯] Second, DOGE was trying to gut the executive branch. [⋯] A shutdown wasn’t leverage against Trump. It was leverage against the Democrats’ own priorities. Third, the market was quaking at the threat of Trump’s tariffs. [⋯] And I thought there was a fourth argument: Democrats had not prepared for a shutdown. They had not explained why they were shutting the government down or what they wanted to achieve. They had no strategy. They had no message. [⋯] If you had forced me to choose, I would have said Schumer was probably right.

[⋯]

[In Sep 2025 ⋯] we’re facing the question again: Should Senate Democrats partner with Senate Republicans to fund this government?

I don’t see how they can.

Not a single argument Schumer made then is valid now. [⋯] Trump is not losing in the Supreme Court [⋯] the scale of DOGE’s assault on the government has shrunk [⋯] markets have settled into whatever this new normal is, at least for now ⋯

[⋯]

But something else has changed, too. We are no longer in the muzzle velocity stage of this presidency. We are in the authoritarian consolidation stage of this presidency.

I want to be very clear about what I am saying here. Donald Trump is corrupting the government — he is using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his own power. He is corrupting it the way the Mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under Mafia rule, get the trash picked up or buy construction materials. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the Mafia’s power and wealth. This is what Trump is doing to the government. This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop.

[⋯]

I was talking with a Democratic senator I respect, and he asked me a good question: Everything you say about what Trump is doing might be true. Everything you say about the kind of emergency this is might be right. But is a government shutdown the answer? Or is it a desire for emotional catharsis that might be self-defeating? Sometimes the best strategy is restraint.

The case for a shutdown is this: A shutdown is an attentional event. It’s an effort to turn the diffuse crisis of Trump’s corrupting of the government into an acute crisis that the media, that the public, will actually pay attention to.

Right now, Democrats have no power, so no one cares what they have to say. A shutdown would make people listen. But then Democrats would have to actually win the argument. They would need to have an argument. They would need a clear set of demands that kept them on the right side of public opinion and dramatized what is happening to the country right now.

In my head, the argument is something like this: Trump won the election. He is the legitimate president. But the government has to serve the people and be accountable to the people. ICE can conduct legitimate deportations, but there can’t be masked agents roaming the streets refusing to identify themselves or their authority. The Trump family cannot be hoovering in money and investments from the countries that depend on us and that fear our power and our sanctions. There have to be inspectors general and JAGs and career prosecutors watching to make sure the government is being run on behalf of the people rather than on behalf of the Trump family.

Democrats would have to pick a small set of policies and stick to that. They would have to choose those policies wisely. They would have to hold the line even when it got tough.

I’m not a political strategist. I hope somebody has better ideas than I do. But it’s been about six months since Schumer decided that it wasn’t the time for a fight, that neither he nor the country was ready. Democratic leaders have had six months to come up with a plan. If there’s a better plan than a shutdown, great. But if the plan is still nothing, then Democrats need new leaders.