I may circle back to the Hungarian election to write something later this week about Viktor Orbán’s loss in Sunday’s vote. But for now I’ll just make two brief points that are really one point aimed in opposite directions.

1. To Orbán supporters: Democratic politics involves winning, losing, and then coming back to fight again. That’s perfectly normal, so please chill out.

2. To centrist liberals: Orbán’s loss is good news, but don’t over-read the results. Right-populism isn’t on the way out. It’s the right-leaning opposition now.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent big debate at The Bulwark about whether Democratic candidates for office should associate with leftist Twitch and YouTube streamer Hasan Piker. For those unfamiliar with the controversy, Tim Miller has made the case that Democrats should engage with Piker (and sometimes appear with him at rallies and other campaign events) because he has a large audience (in the range of five million listeners) and anti-Trump/pro-democracy forces in our politics need the broadest-possible coalition to win and hold power.

In response, numerous critics, including Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell, have recited a number of illiberal, extremist statements from Piker, including that “America deserved 9/11” and that rapes of Israeli women during Hamas’ terrorist invasion on October 7, 2023 are irrelevant for his assessment of that day’s events, which has been quite positive. Piker has also spoken favorably about China and Russia, with comments about the latter often intermixed with defenses of Vladimir Putin’s position on the legitimacy of its military seizure of Crimea and other territory from Ukraine. Put it all together and we’re left with a portrait of a toxic figure who should have no place in an anti-Trump/pro-democracy electoral coalition.

For more background on this debate, here is the Lauren Egan’s essay that kicked it off two weeks ago. Here is a nearly hour-long, mostly friendly but also occasionally testy conversation between Miller and Longwell on the issue. And Mona Charen making a powerful case for shunning Piker. And, finally, there is Jonathan Cohn’s reported piece on a recent campaign event in Michigan where Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Abdul El-Sayed implicitly followed Miller’s advice by appearing with Piker—and the New York Times’ Ezra Klein weighing in on Miller’s side of the disagreement.

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The reason why this issue has been preoccupying me is that it’s an important one for Democrats—and I genuinely think both sides have defensible positions. In the end, as I will explain below, I side with Miller at the broader level of strategy and Longwell at the narrower level of tactics—while also thinking that the very need to contend with this issue is ultimately an unfortunate consequence of our two-party (first past the post) electoral system. In a multiparty (proportional) electoral system, the dilemma would still be present, but it would be far less risky for the country’s major center-left party.

Cooptation or Excommunication of the Extremes?

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Among the many things I strongly dislike about this era of politics is its negative influence on the liberal mind—or rather, on the minds of increasing numbers of liberal intellectuals.

Liberalism at its best is a disposition oriented toward the ancient virtue of liberality, aspiring toward generosity and openness, including openness to examining liberalism’s own defects and blind spots. That, to my mind, is one of liberalism’s greatest strengths—its resistance to ideological dogmatism, its willingness to take criticism (and self-criticism) seriously, to strengthen itself and ward off complacency through an encounter with thoughtful, good-faith objections to its assumptions, to face honestly the negative real-world consequences of its principled commitments, and to make pragmatic adjustments in light of emerging facts.

But generosity and openness are not virtues of the battlefield—and liberalism today feels under existential siege. That is leading certain liberals to close their minds to critique on the grounds that such openness is a luxury they can no longer afford. The risk of giving aid and comfort to the enemy is too great, they imply. And anyway, the critiques in circulation today just aren’t serious. They’re based on something like disinformation, and a willful drive to discredit ideas and destroy institutions that, judged fairly, are well worth preserving. Liberalism is good, the liberals insist, and those who reject that premise can be quickly and easily dismissed on the grounds that they were never open to fair-minded debate and discussion about the reality of our world to begin with.

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The Permanent Problem

These thoughts were provoked by reading two reviews of one of the best books to be published in recent months. The book is Brink Lindsey’s The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing. The book began as Substack posts that I plugged in some of my own essays, and on the Bulwark’s “Beg to Differ” podcast, back in 2022 and 2023. I should also note that Lindsey and I both have ties to the Niskanen Center. Though that professional connection has nothing to do with why I appreciate his book so much, or why I found the two recent reviews of it so irksome.

Lindsey, to my mind, is asking exactly the question thoughtful liberals most need to be pondering in our moment: Why are voters in liberal democracies around the world succumbing to pessimism about the future, with faith in self-government fading, class divisions deepening, right-populist parties in ascendence, and longstanding liberal parties of the center-left and center-right struggling to remain viable?

The answer, Lindsey suggests, can be found at the level of liberal civilization itself. We appear to be experiencing turbulence following from the rise of affluent, post-materialist societies around the world. In such societies, where material scarcity and genuine economic precarity have largely receded from the lives of most people, citizens devote ever-larger portions of their lives to pursuing (and often failing to achieve) a kind of spiritual fulfillment. That leads to widespread anomie, anger, depression, and a generalized discontent that self-help gurus and political troublemakers can prey on for their own benefit.

This is the “permanent problem” to which Lindsey’s title alludes. The phrase comes from economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in 1930 that in the abundant societies of the capitalist future man would be faced “for the first time since his creation” with “his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Is this the only, or even the primary, reason why Donald Trump has dominated American politics for the past decade? Why British voters narrowly opted for Brexit? Why Viktor Orban’s right-populist party has been ruling Hungary for the better part of two decades? Why the party of Italy’s prime minister has roots in a neo-fascist movement? And why likeminded (or even more extreme) parties have been steadily rising in public-opinion polls in England, France, and Germany? I honestly don’t know. It’s a very hard question to answer.

My own pet theory is that social media’s network effects have enabled (culturally conservative) rural and exurban voters in low-population-density regions of nearly every liberal democracy in the world to mobilize politically in a way that was quite challenging if not impossible prior to the era of smart phones and apps, when such mobilization required face to face contact in physical space. Does that mean technology has allowed longstanding political tendencies to become newly potent? Or that technology has coincided with new trends to produce the widespread political turbulence of the moment? I suspect it’s probably the latter, but that’s just a guess.

There are undoubtedly many other plausible explanations, several of which can be used to tease out aspects of how we got here. Lindsey’s book offers one, and it’s smarter and backed up by more evidence than most. Its thesis is well worth pondering, taking seriously, and incorporating into our thinking about the challenges of the present. And of course, that also means it deserves to be subjected to skepticism and rigorous stress-testing by critics.

The Two Reviews

Unfortunately, two recent reviews fail to rise to that standard.

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I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel like I’m losing my mind.

No, not literally. But seriously enough that I need to take a pause and figure out just what the hell is going on.

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The Eternal Return of the Same

I’ve been observing, analyzing, and writing about Donald Trump—and the Democratic opposition to him—for more than ten years now. A lot of that has taken the form of writing opinion columns in response to whatever story has been dominating the news cycle for a few days or a week. That way of thinking is bound to encourage short-term, reactive takes in which the broader context of architectonic shifts and patterns emerge and do their work. Which isn’t to say it’s impossible to keep the bigger picture in view—at least if the writer works hard at all times to keep one eye on it, as I do. It’s just hard, takes a major effort, and requires a sustained commitment to the attempt.

Apparently there are fewer people around doing that work than I usually assume. Why do I say so? Because over the past couple of weeks, as it has become increasingly obvious that Trump and his party have lost the country, I’ve begun to feel like I’m living through Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same.

We’ve all been here before, in Trump’s first term.

Remember? Trump beat Hillary Clinton. At first Democrats were shocked and demoralized. But within a few short weeks of his inauguration, the 45th president’s polarizing and erratic behavior sent his approval rating sharply down. After a few months, his opponents concluded he was weak and wounded. He remained in the doldrums for the entirety of his first two years, leading to increasing Democratic confidence heading into the 2018 midterms, when they made a net gain of 40 seats in the House (while also losing two Senate seats to Republicans). And then of course Joe Biden and Kamala Harris defeated Trump’s bid for re-election in 2020.

If the goal of a party is to win a plurality of the next election coming down the pike, then it’s very good news for Democrats that the visceral recoil from Trump among voters (including among many who voted for him in 2024) looks likely to deliver gains for the party in November easily sufficient to give Democrats control of the House. Maybe they’ll even defy expectations to win control of the Senate. They could well find themselves heading into the 2028 presidential election as favorites.

That’s all good, all encouraging, all more than enough to justify some optimism and excitement. But I really do wish I saw more signs that those in charge of the party, as well as those pundits who know how important it is to defeat Donald Trump and what he represents, showed that they recalled more vividly what followed the elation of the 2020 election.

Live by Thermostatic Backlash, Die by Thermostatic Backlash

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With the Thanksgiving holiday coming up on Thursday, this will be my only post of the week. I wish all of you a joyous celebration with family and friends. I’ll be back with something new early next week.

I devote most of my writing at Substack to analyzing and seeking to understand the right, especially in its present-day populist-nationalist iteration. When I turn my gaze to the left, I typically focus on the internal politics of the Democratic Party and its tactical efforts and struggles to improve its electoral prospects.

But this is a post in which I do something a little different—which is to acknowledge one big thing the left gets right about the right. I don’t often write posts like this because I don’t actually think the left gets all that much right. I am a centrist liberal with some philosophically conservative assumptions and commitments. That means the left, with its utopian energies and extravagant moral hopes and expectations, holds limited intellectual or temperamental appeal to me.

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Yet I also think it’s undeniable that the left sees something in the right that many on the right don’t clearly see in themselves. This has come out in a pair of podcasts I’ve listened to over the past week or so. The first was John Ganz’s very illuminating conversation with Ezra Klein about the groypers, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and related topics. The second was an episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast in which hosts Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman talked to Peter Beinart about the intertwined topics of Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral race, how right-wing Jews and Jewish organizations resorted to outright Islamophobic messaging in the campaign’s final weeks, and the rise of right-wing anti-Semitism in the United States.

Listening to those podcasts back to back, I couldn’t help but be impressed at the extent to which the smartest people on the left understand the moral logic of universalism and particularism much more fully and honestly than the right typically does.

Moral Anarchy and a Dying Immune System

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If I lived in New York City, I would probably follow the lead of my friend (and fellow Substacker) Noah Millman and opt to sit out the mayoral election this Tuesday.

Republican Curtis Sliwa isn’t a serious candidate. Democrat Andrew Cuomo, who’s running as an independent, is everything that’s wrong with the Democratic Party in 2025. And as for Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate in the race, I am not a democratic socialist, and this particular democratic socialist has no practical political experience at all. Up until now, his only experience, as a member of the New York State assembly representing Astoria, Queens, has been to engage in performative leftism. I don’t think imposing more rent control is a good idea. I don’t think grocery stores should be run by the government. I don’t think public transportation should be “free.” (I put free in scare quotes because there is no such thing as free in politics. Someone always pays, in the form of higher taxes imposed today or, in the case of deficit spending, tomorrow. And taxes in New York City are already quite high.)

Note that I haven’t said a thing about Mamdani’s position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. That’s because the mayor of New York City doesn’t have a foreign policy. Mamdani’s view of that conflict isn’t mine, but neither does his view pose any kind of concrete threat to Jewish New Yorkers. A lot of what prominent Jews and Jewish organizations have been saying about Mamdani strikes me as indisputably Islamophobic, which doesn’t mean I think they should be banned or informally silenced. What it does mean is that I think these claims are largely an expression of paranoia. But then, I think American Jews are threatened far more by the revival and spread of right-wing anti-Semitism than they are by leftists angry at Israel about the seemingly interminable suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

My point, though, is that my decision to refrain from voting in the New York City mayoral election, if I lived there, would come from other considerations—except in the narrow sense that I think the rather severe hostility to Israel that Mamdani has expressed in the past is yet another example of the kind of performative leftism that I quite strongly dislike and would prefer to see fail at the ballot box.

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Expanding the Tent

But this doesn’t mean that I think it will be an unambivalently bad thing for the Democratic Party or the country if Mamdani wins on Tuesday. Assuming all the polls are accurate and it happens, I think it will prove to be a thoroughly mixed bag.

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When I sat down to write a post on Sunday morning, there were many potential topics to tackle.

I could have written a post about how Stephen Miller should win some sort of prize for unhinged malice by a senior government official. The man clearly wants to provoke the left into widespread violence so the president will have a pretext to crack down on all kinds of political dissent, as well as on the remaining institutional constraints on his power, very much including federal judges.

But I could also have written a post about how it’s bad that certain figures on the left, including people running for office, appear to be indulging in fantasies of political violence, while others, including judges, seem ready to respond with leniency to past acts of such violence.

And that means I could also have written a post about how the country feels like it’s begun a sideways slide toward a highly volatile blend of anarchistic acting out and dictatorial oppression—and how this is what the “civil war” increasing numbers of commentators are talking about would actually look like: tit-for-tat escalation between the president and figures on the left that “ends” [narrator interjects: the political story never “ends”] with Donald Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and through it imposing martial law on “blue” cities and college towns across the country. (How free and fair would the midterm elections be in parts of the country in which federal soldiers have been deployed and are patrolling the streets? I have no idea, and I bet you don’t either.)

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But I don’t want to write at length about any of those topics. I actually don’t have the time to write about anything at length. As I’ve explained, last week and this one are unusually busy for me. But I’m also uninspired to tackle any of the above because I’ve written about such worst-case scenarios so many times in the past—at The Week during the first Trump administration; and here and at Persuasion more recently—that I’d prefer not to repeat my concerns in a context where they feel much less like thought experiments about remote possibilities than realities just a few steps away from materializing right before our eyes.

The Challenge of Reviving the Floundering Left

I think it’s likely I’ll have no choice but to return to these topics in the coming weeks and months. But for now, I want to use this post to share a series of worthwhile essays and a podcast I spent time with as I traveled last week. All of them are about the left, broadly defined to include the Democratic Party in its full range voters, as well as those situated beyond the party’s leftward flank.

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When I ran across the news on Wednesday evening that Bari Weiss’ Substack-based media venture The Free Press is just inches away from being acquired by Paramount for a price somewhere in the low nine figures (between $100 and $200 million), with Weiss herself also poised to be given a senior role at CBS News in which she’ll help to guide the editorial direction of the division, I felt a little bit like I’d been clocked upside the head. I briefly felt dizzy. A little unmoored.

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Weiss is more of a distant acquaintance than a friend. We’ve never met in person. We don’t correspond. She and I have exchanged a handful of Twitter DMs and an email or two over the years. I subscribe to the FP, but it’s only a free subscription. That allows me to follow what they’re doing but not to read most of their content in full. I’m fine with that. It isn’t really a publication for me. I’ll explain why over the course of this post. But I mention it now just to make clear that my visceral response to Weiss’ extraordinarily good news wasn’t a function of either personal proximity or pique.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the left:

As my centrist and conservative readers are happily aware, and as my lefty readers endlessly lament, I am not on the left myself. (I can’t imagine casting a ballot for Zohran Mamdani.) Yet I delighted in Brandy Jensen’s tweet when I saw it around the time the first-round outcome of the Democratic primary in the mayoral race in New York City became obvious on Tuesday evening. I can always appreciate a good diatribe, and I love sharp writing and concision—and on all three counts Jensen’s tweet merits some kind of prize.

I also empathize with (and feel some of) her anger at the Democratic establishment and have long argued that responsible Democrats would be foolish to continue making the case for themselves in terms of defending a system in which many millions of voters have lost trust and lack confidence.

The outcome of the Democratic primary in New York City illustrated this more vividly than any event since Bernie Sanders’ narrow loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries. Above all, the results on Tuesday demonstrate that the right Democrat can tap into and channel populist discontents with as much potency as any MAGA Republican. For that reason Mamdani’s stunning upset can serve as an inspiring model for other left-of-center anti-establishment candidates—even those less committed to the specifics of Mamdani’s policy agenda.

The Mamdani-Cuomo Smackdown

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If you recently subscribed to “Notes from the Middleground” after reading my essay in Persuasion about teaching “Trump 2.0” this last semester at Penn, welcome! I’m happy to have you here. My posts, usually published twice a week, appear in one of three newsletters: Eyes on the Right, Looking Left, and Above the Fray. The overwhelming majority end up in Eyes on the Right. That includes nearly everything I’ve written here since the 2024 election. But today’s post is an exception. It’s about the Democrats and appears in Looking Left.

Some of my subscribers dislike when I throw elbows to my left. They share my disdain for Donald Trump and his party, and my commitment to understanding them in light of political theory and history, but they are also devoted Democrats who have warm feelings for Joe Biden, were thrilled by the campaign of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and still seethe about Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.

That isn’t me. I vote for Democrats. I directionally agree with them on most issues. And I consider the Republican alternative thoroughly unacceptable. Yet I am not a devoted Democrat. A big part of the reason is that I’m not a joiner—of anything. I value my own independence too much and temperamentally resist deploying my talents to advance a cause—any cause, even a worthy one, and even one wrapped up, at this moment, with the fate of liberal democratic self-government in the United States.

But this way of thinking presumes that working to help the Democrats should take the form of deferring to and falling in line behind party leadership and elected officials, taking marching orders, rallying around candidates and nominees endorsed by the party bigwigs, and then maintaining message discipline to get them elected. That’s what I resist. But there’s another kind of devotion—one that expresses itself as tough love and a willingness to speak candidly, and even harshly, about faults. That’s what I’m offering in this post.

Gloomy Skies for the Dems

People who analyze politics were all abuzz last week about the report published by the progressive-aligned data-crunching firm Catalist. The report breaks down the 2024 electorate into demographic groups and sub-groups. It shows that Donald Trump made significant gains across most of them—and confirms in all kinds of ways the conventional wisdom that formed almost immediately following the election: that Kamala Harris lost significant ground relative to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, and that this loss was felt across groups that form the core of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. You can read the Executive Summary of the report to get the gist of the findings here, and I encourage you to do so.

But for my money, the data-based analysis published by the New York Times over this past weekend was even more illuminating about the deepening hole in which Democrats find themselves. The most clarifying image is the one that leads the graphical package. It illustrates “triple-trending counties” across the country. These are counties that have shifted in the direction of one party or the other across the previous three presidential-election cycles: 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Here’s how the Times summarizes what we see on these maps:

Mr. Trump has increased the Republican Party’s share of the presidential vote in each election he’s been on the ballot in close to half the counties in America—1,433 in all…. By contrast, Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties.

And here are a few additional takeaways from the piece:

• Republicans are overwhelmingly making gains in working-class counties.

• Democrats are improving almost exclusively in wealthier areas.

• Republicans are running up the score in counties where fewer people have attended college.

• Democrats are gaining ground in a small sliver of the best-educated enclaves.

Given that there are more Americans who are working class and haven’t graduated from college than there are Americans who are wealthy and have graduated from college—and that the latter live in more densely populated areas than the former—this is a recipe for continued increases in Republican electoral strength going forward (all other factors being equal). Add in population shifts (away from deep-blue California and New York and toward deep-red Florida and Texas) that will benefit the GOP in House-seat allocation and electoral vote tallies after 2030, and the story for Democrats is extraordinarily gloomy at the moment.

Sources of Mistrust

The question is why.

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A little more than two months into the second Trump administration, the United States finds itself in a bad place. The elected president, expanding executive power on multiple fronts, is seeking to govern in an explicitly authoritarian manner. Yet the primary means laid out in the Constitution for checking his power grabs is the legislative branch, the members of which are uninterested in fulfilling that duty.

That lack of interest has multiple causes: the president’s party holds narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress; the parties have been thoroughly sorted in ideological terms; the ideology affirmed by the GOP is synonymous with the agenda and person of the would-be authoritarian president; Republican voters are more loyal to and approving of him than they are to and of Congress or the GOP itself; members of the House and Senate feel threated by their most ideologically militant constituents; it’s more enjoyable to appear on television and gain likes on social media than it is to take a risky stand against the sitting president and his billionaire handmaiden, who has promised to fund primary challengers to torpedo any member who dares to defy the president.

Put it all together and we’re left with a Congress that would never pursue impeachment, let alone a conviction at an impeachment trial; has done nothing and is unlikely to do anything to push back against the president’s defiance of congressional prerogatives (like shutting down congressionally authorized agencies and departments); and has even voluntarily voted to eviscerate its own power to override the president’s unpopular tariff policy.

On every day since January 20, the second Trump administration has displayed overabundant energy in the executive. And on every one of those days, the country’s legislature has demonstrated lethargy and complacency about what’s happening.

That leaves us with the judiciary as the only branch of the federal government standing up to the Trump administration. But courts have weak enforcement powers unless the Congress backs them up, and they could be weakened further if Congress chooses to side with the president against them.

So here’s the question I’d like to explore in this post: How do we jump-start Congress, waking it from its civic slumber? And is a popular protest movement the answer? I’ll highlight two thoughtful essays published over the past few days that make the claim that it is. I’m skeptical of their arguments, and I want to explain why. But not because I want to convince you I’m right so much as because I want to hear from you, dear readers, about why I’m wrong. (If you’re a paying subscriber, you have access to the comments function; if you’re not, you’ll have to become one in order to read the entire post and leave your response for me and the rest of my paying subscribers to read.)

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I’ve been waiting for the right occasion to write something about the Democrats in what is still the opening weeks of the second Trump administration. It hasn’t come until now for a couple of reasons.

First, because Trump 2.0 has been such an overwhelming storm of destructiveness and constitutionally dubious power grabs that until this week it’s felt irresponsible to focus on anything other than the harm the right is doing, and gearing up to do, to the country.

Second, because the Democrats have been so utterly inert it’s frankly been hard to come up with anything to say about them one way or the other. Whether or not Trump and his henchmen succeed in turning the United States into a competitive-authoritarian system, it’s definitely felt like a one-party state since January 20.

It seems fitting, then, that I’ve finally been inspired to say something about the opposition party by one of its leading members literally advising them to do … nothing.

No, I’m not making this up. James Carville, the political consultant who helped to elevate New Democrat Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992, published a Guest Essay in the New York Times earlier this week with the following thesis:

With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead.

That’s right: A leading Democrat, whom I’ve long admired, thinks the wisest and “most daring” move in a democracy enduring an assault on the separation of powers, the transformation of federal law enforcement into the president’s personal goon squad, and the shredding of our international alliances is for the opposition party to go silent and pretend to be deceased in the hope that the aspiring dictator self-destructs all on his own.

After decades of observing politics, this has to rank as one of most pathetic things I’ve ever heard.

A Proclamation of Political Impotence and Superfluousness

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What a week of news! In what follows, I don’t address the remarkable events in Syria over recent days. So here I’ll just say that I’m happy for the Syrian people released from the literal and figurative prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s Ba’athist tyranny. But I’m also concerned about what the future holds. I would be very surprised if a country with so many deep religious and ethnic cleavages could cohere into a stable nation with functional democratic institutions. We shall see.

In any event, what follows brings together a number of other news stories from over the past week—all of them shed an ominous light on the reverse of what we’ve seen in Syria: Not the fall of a brutal dictatorship but how a more authoritarian form of government could emerge in the United States—and how opponents of the incoming Trump administration could inadvertently contribute to its arrival.

When democracies devolve into more dictatorial forms of government, they usually do so dialectically.

South Korea provided a helpful negative illustration of the point over the past week. Last Tuesday, President Yoon Suk Yeol—a highly polarizing, Trump-like figure—declared martial law in what appears to have been a hapless attempt at a self-coup. The move was reversed less than a day later, when the South Korean National Assembly voted unanimously (190-0) to declare it invalid.

These events confirm that overturning a consolidated liberal democracy is more difficult than one might suppose. The United States learned the same lesson with the events surrounding the insurrectionary riot against Congress on January 6, 2021. Donald Trump looked for ways to halt the transfer of power to the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. But the process is embedded in a series of institutions, with numerous people at the state and federal levels following well-established norms and procedures. A wayward president can certainly make a mess, even stirring up grassroots anger and violence against the process. But the process will continue to unfold unless some powerful counterforce (the military, overwhelming public opinion, multiple senior officials in charge of key public institutions) takes his side against the system.

That didn’t happen in Seoul last week, just as it didn’t happen here in early January 2021.

That’s because something crucial was lacking in both cases: A prior, dialectical process in which a party aligned with the liberal-democratic system begins evolving in an authoritarian direction, in part as a result of attempting to defend against the challenge posed by an anti-system (populist) party or political movement.

Some recent events give us reason to worry that precisely such a dialectical process may be unfolding as we approach the advent of the second Trump administration.1

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I apologize. The headline and sub-headline above are a little unfair. I run the risk of antagonizing a large batch of my subscribers with that kind of language. But I got your attention, didn’t I?

Anyway, the point I want to make with this rather unusual and feistier than normal post isn’t that Democrats are stupid not to be responding the way I think they should to the news that Joe Biden has issued a sweeping pardon of his son Hunter. My point is that they have other faults that are blinding them to the need to break out of the party’s well-worn grooves. I’ve restrained myself from pushing this point during the post-election period until now. But I have to tell you, the Hunter Biden pardon has broken me. And the honest truth is that I really wish I saw signs it was breaking more members of the party.

A Little Anger, Please

As I’ve been arguing for the better part of a year, the Democratic Party combines paralyzing risk aversion (We can’t do that! We’ll scare the voters!) with unjustified overconfidence (We’re the good guys, and the good guys always win in the end). It’s that combination of psychological tendencies that got us this rolling series of strategically foolish and mutually contradictory positions since last spring:

• In February: Shut up about Joe Biden being too old! He’s sharper than you are, wiseass! Meanwhile, the voters are just being stupid in complaining about the economy, which is great by the way. (Just look at these charts!) Ditching Biden now/ever would be catastrophic! It would have to be Kamala, and she’s a far worse option.

• In late June: After that debate performance, of course Biden needs to go! But there’s no way we can have any kind of competitive contest over who should be the replacement nominee. That would be a disaster! So it has to Kamala, despite her faults.

• In late July: Kamala’s amaaaaazing! The joy is infectious! And picking Tim “They’re Weird” Walz for her running mate? A genius move! He’ll be a secret weapon to defeat Trump’s toxic masculinity.

• In mid-November: You mean we lost the election and the popular vote to Trump? Fuck the voters then. I hope they get what’s coming to them. We’ll be here when they come crawling back to us to clean up the mess, as they always do.

Okay, sure—this, too, is a little unfair. I was writing in anger. But you know what I’d like to see more of? Democrats speaking and writing in anger about where they’ve ended up at the conclusion of the one-term Biden administration.

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With Thanksgiving coming up on Thursday, this will be my only post for the week. I’ll be back a week from now. In the meantime, I hope my subscribers enjoy the holiday!

Since Election Day, I’ve been writing exclusively about the incoming Trump administration, with a lot of emphasis on its Cabinet picks. But what about the Democrats? My take on what went wrong for them this year isn’t hugely different than what you’ll find in the writings of such centrist liberals as Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Ruy Teixeira, and Josh Barro, though I think my emphases are distinct enough to justify writing a post on my views, rather than just listing a series of links to the writings of others.

The Democrats, in my view, find themselves at a crossroads. The slow-rolling migration of working-class voters rightward that began half a century ago accelerated in the 2024 election, culminating in the reality the New York Times (accurately) describes in the following terms: “Donald Trump’s populist pitch has helped swing almost every traditional Democratic constituency to the right.” (That Times piece contains data on which I rely for much of what follows.) Will the many Hispanic, Asian, younger, and black male-voters who cast Republican ballots for the first time this year become reliable members of the GOP’s electoral coalition going forward? Or will Democrats begin wooing them back in 2026 and 2028? An awful lot depends on the answer to those questions.  

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For years now, I’ve been a somewhat peripheral participant in the Fascism Debate about Donald Trump. Though I’ve only occasionally come down very strongly on the positive side of the dispute—usually in a half-serious headline written to draw attention and inspire clicks—I have expressed considerable sympathy for John Ganz’s position affirming the proposition, and signaled my own somewhat more ambivalent stance by deploying the semi-ironic term “fasc-ish” to describe the 45th president (and would-be 47th).

In these final weeks before the 2024 election, Kamala Harris and her campaign’s surrogates are not showing any hesitation in invoking the F-word. As the New York Times noted a week ago, the term, which had until recently been “avoided by top members of the Democratic Party,” is “suddenly everywhere.” Thanks to interviews four-star general and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly has given to the Times’ Michael S. Schmidt and The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the claim that Trump aspires to rule as a fascist dictator has now entered into wide circulation during the final two weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign.

I’m not convinced that’s a good thing—even if the evaluation of Trump and his MAGA movement is largely correct.

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With just under a month to go until Election Day, Kamala Harris is ahead of Donald Trump. The polling aggregators all say so: FiveThirtyEight has her 2.5 points ahead; she leads by 2.2 at RealClearPolitics; and Nate Silver has her beating Trump by 3.1. She also leads, consistently if very narrowly, in all three of the crucial northern rustbelt swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

That’s good, and vastly better than Joe Biden would be doing if he’d stayed in the race.

Yet Biden himself was doing much better in the polls four years ago against Trump, hovering during the final month of the race between 8 and 10 points ahead of the incumbent president. In the end, Biden prevailed by 4.5 points in the nationwide popular vote, demonstrating the difficulty pollsters were having with accurately measuring Trump’s support. If pollsters this year have fixed this problem (or overcorrected by boosting Trump’s standing beyond his true level of support in the electorate), then Harris will probably win on November 5. But if they’ve once again undercounted Trump’s support, then the former president might actually have a slight edge. We just don’t know, and we won’t know until the votes are counted in the hours (or, more likely, days) after the voting stops early next month.

The truth, then, is that the race is extraordinarily tight, despite the fact that Trump is running for president for the third cycle in a row. And that he is disliked or loathed by more than half of the country. And that he is a convicted felon and faces additional legal jeopardy in numerous jurisdictions. And that he attempted a self-coup the last time he held office. And that he’s less sharp and energetic on the campaign trail than he was in 2016 or 2020. And that his lengthy rallies don’t energize the MAGA masses as they once did.

Despite all of that, the Harris campaign can’t seem to pull into a comfortable lead over her opponent. We will have plenty of time to try and figure out why after the election, once we have actual results and accurate exit polls to pour over and analyze. Yet it’s still possible to speculate about the answer now, if only to lay down some hypotheses that get tested later. That’s what this post will attempt to do.

The Conservative Democrats

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I might write and think about politics for a living, but political conventions aren’t my thing. Too much of a cheerleading pep rally. Too much frothy, celebrity glitz. Too many propagandistic infomericals. But conventions are part of the American democratic tradition, so I watch them. Or at least the biggest speakers.

And I have to say: I think the just-concluded Democratic convention in Chicago went extremely well. Unlike how I felt after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, when I exclaimed that “every Democrat in America should be livid” and vowed not to vote for the sitting president’s re-election, I am genuinely excited about voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. They presented a patriotic, welcoming, disciplined vision of the Democratic Party I am proud to support. The trick is now to freeze this version of the party for the next 70 days, drive it all the way to victory, and then govern in its light.  

The Politics of the Open Hand

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I want to begin by stipulating something that should be obvious to everyone who reads my work or listens to me on podcasts: I want Donald Trump to lose, and therefore I want the Democrats to win, in November.

For that reason, I’m now much happier, in political terms, than I was a month ago, when it looked like Trump was on track to win the presidency—possibly, and for the first time, with a plurality or even a majority of the popular vote. That no longer seems likely. Indeed, the entire dynamic of the race has changed since Joe Biden, on July 21, announced his withdrawal from the contest and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be the Democratic nominee.

I know a lot of Democrats who have not merely become much happier over the past month but who are swooning, thrilled, ecstatic about voting for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. I assume it’s this 180-degree shift in mood or “vibe” that explains the dramatic change we’ve seen in the polls since the third week of July.

But why exactly has it happened? The more I think about it, the stranger it seems to me. Now, I know many Democrats will read the previous sentence, roll their eyes in exasperation, and say to themselves (or in a comment on this post) that this statement is a confession of the uselessness of punditry. You just don’t get it! And if you don’t get it, then just shut up! But here’s the thing: My struggle to grasp why things are unfolding in a particular way is not an occasion to pipe down. It’s an opportunity to seek the understanding I currently lack. That deeper analytical dive isn’t going to make it more likely that Trump wins and Harris loses. I’m merely looking for a theory that can explain why Biden was on track to lose while Harris is now (narrowly) on track to win.

I think I’ve come up with such a theory. But in order to explain it, first I need to set the stage.

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Those of you who just can’t get enough Linker may have an interest in reading my latest essay in The Atlantic, “The Post-liberal Catholics Find Their Man in J.D. Vance.” It’s a close look at how Donald Trump tapping Vance to serve as his running mate advances the ideas and ambitions of a group of prominent post-liberal Catholic intellectuals. I also do some work in the piece of comparing and contrasting these ideas and ambitions to those of the conservative Catholics I wrote about a generation ago in The Theocons. You can read the essay (until August 22) by following the gift link here.

It was only a couple of years ago that I found myself asking out loud on social media what everyone meant by the term “vibes.” I kept seeing it over and over again and found it perplexing.

Of course I knew the colloquial meaning of the term, which I associated with my youth in the late 1970s: There’s a really bad vibe in here. It’s the kind of thing you’d say if you walked into a room where a couple had just been fighting. You didn’t see or hear the conflict, but you could sense its aftermath, like a lingering bad odor, so you knew what had transpired. Then there was the post-hippy formulation that no one older than 22 would dare to express in so many words: Don’t harsh my vibe, man. Meaning: I just did a bong hit, am feeling good, and your uptight attitude is bringing me down.

In both cases, the word means, roughly, “mood.” Sometimes it can refer to my individual mood, but more often it has a collective dimension, describing how we are feeling in this place at this moment. As in: The economic data all show signs of falling inflation in the United States, but bad vibes about the economy persist from the price hikes of last year. Or: As a progressive, I was spooked by the angry vibes at the Trump rally. Or: The vibe among Democrats was really gloomy until Joe Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed Kamala Harris to run in his place. Since then, and especially since she picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate, the vibes have been fantastic!

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The presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, inspired by an offhand comment from Minnesota Gov. (and Harris running-mate finalist) Tim Walz, has decided the right approach to take against its Republican opponents is to call them “weird.”  

Will it work? Hell if I know.

What I do know, from observing Twitter/X over the past week, is that the very-online center-left gets a kick out of pointing to statements from Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance and labeling them weird. I also know that many Democrats are tired, after multiple election cycles, of insisting that Trump constitutes an existential threat to “democracy.” Many of them believe it’s true. But many others on their own side show by their actions (like, for example, boosting Trumpy primary candidates in the hope that they’ll be easier to beat in general-election contests) that they don’t take the warnings very seriously, but rather deploy them to gain an electoral advantage.

Rather than pointing and screaming about the civic horrors the MAGA movement supposedly aims to perpetrate, maybe it makes more sense to mock it, laugh at it, and point to its ridiculousness.

Then there’s the argument Matthew Yglesias made in his Monday Substack post about how taking aim at the weirdness of the Trump/Vance ticket puts the Democrats in the position (by way of contrast) of implicitly endorsing normalcy. He thinks that’s a good thing because it will move the party closer to the moderate middle on both policy and tactics. That’s something I can get behind, too.

Though Yglesias’ way of talking about the “weird” approach to campaign messaging also gestures toward what I find unfortunate about this way of talking about and criticizing the populist right.

The Downside of “Weird”

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