I have a lot of Democratic friends who are extremely disappointed with their party leaders. They tell me that the Democratic Party is currently rudderless, weak, passive, lacking a compelling message. I try to be polite, but I want to tell them: “The problem is not the party leaders. The problem is you. You don’t understand how big a shift we’re in the middle of. You think the Democrats can solve their problems with a new message and a new leader. But the Democrats’ challenge is that they have to adapt to a new historical era. That’s not something done by working politicians who are focused on fundraising and the next election. That’s only accomplished by visionaries and people willing to shift their entire worldview. That’s up to you, my friends, not Chuck Schumer.”
There have been only a few world-shifting political movements over the past century and a half: the totalitarian movement, which led to communist revolutions in places like Russia and China and fascist coups in places like Germany; the welfare state movement, which led in the U.S. to the New Deal; the liberation movement, which led, from the ’60s on, to anti-colonialism, the civil rights movement, feminism and the LGBTQ movement; the market liberalism movement, which led to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and, in their own contexts, Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev; and finally the global populist movement, which has led to Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Brexit and, in their own contexts, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
The global populist movement took off sometime in the early 2010s. It was driven by a comprehensive sense of social distrust, a firm conviction that the social systems of society were rigged, corrupted and malevolent.
In 2024, I wrote about an Ipsos poll that summarized the populist zeitgeist. Roughly 59% of Americans said the country was in decline. Sixty percent agreed “the system is broken.” Sixty-nine percent agreed the “political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people.” Sixty-three percent said “experts in this country don’t understand the lives of people like me.” The American results were essentially in line with the results from the 27 other countries around the world that were polled.
The Republicans have adjusted to the shift in the zeitgeist more effectively than the Democrats. Trump tells a clear story: The elites are screwing America. He took a free trade party and made it a protectionist party, an internationalist party and made it an isolationist party. Recently, George F. Will compiled a list of all the ways Trump is departing from conservative orthodoxy and behaving and thinking in ways contrary to the ways Republicans behaved in the age of conservative market liberalism. Will’s list of Trump pivots is worth quoting in full:
“1. Combating the citizenry’s false consciousness by permeating society, including cultural institutions, with government, which IS politics.
“2. Confidence in government’s ability to anticipate and control the consequences of broad interventions in modern society’s complexities.
“3. Using industrial policy to pick economic winners and losers because the future is transparent, so government can know which enterprises should prosper.
“4. Central planning of the evolution of the nation’s regions and the economy’s sectors, especially manufacturing.
“5. Melding governing and party-building by constructing coalitions of government-dependent factions, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal did with the elderly (Social Security, 1935), labor (the 1935 National Labor Relations Act favoring unions) and farmers (the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act).
“6. Rejecting conservative growth-oriented tax simplification — lowering rates by eliminating preferences — to use taxes (including tariffs) as tools of social engineering. Bypassing the appropriations process, the tax code can transfer wealth to favored constituencies.
“7. Limitless borrowing from future Americans to fund today’s Americans’ consumption of government goods and services
“8. Presidential supremacy ensured by using executive orders to marginalize Congress.
“9. Unfettered majoritarianism, hence opposition to the Senate filibuster.”
Trump has taken the atmosphere of alienation, magnified it with his own apocalypticism, and, assaulting institutions across society, has created a revolutionary government. More this term than last, he is shifting the conditions in which we live.
Many of my Democratic friends have not fully internalized the magnitude of this historical shift. They are still thinking within the confines of the Clinton-Obama-Biden-Pelosi worldview. But I have a feeling that over the next few years, the tumult of events will push Democrats onto some new trajectory.
The crucial point was made by Bulgarian-born political scientist Ivan Krastev on “The Good Fight” podcast with Yascha Mounk. He said, “In every revolution, there is always more than one revolution.”
He went on to explain: “If this is a revolution, revolution changes the identity of all players. No political party or actor is going to get out of the revolution the way they started it. You can have Lenin after Kerensky; you cannot have Kerensky after Lenin. It is a totally different story. The Democratic Party is going to be as dramatically transformed by the Trumpian revolution — for good or for bad — as the Republican Party is.”
If you’re thinking the Democrats’ job now is to come up with some new policies that appeal to the working class, you are thinking too small. This is not about policies. Democrats have to do what Trump did: create a new party identity, come up with a clear answer to the question: What is the central problem of our time? Come up with a new grand narrative.
The Democrats’ first core challenge is that we live in an age that is hostile to institutions and Democrats dominate the institutions — the universities, the media, Hollywood, the foundations, the teachers unions, the Civil Service, etc. The second is that we live in an age in which a caste divide has opened up between the educated elite and everybody else, and Democrats are the party of the highly educated.
Democrats recently had an argument about whether they should use the word “oligarchy” to attack Republicans. They are so locked in their old narratives that they are apparently unaware that to many, they are the oligarchy.
If I could offer Democrats a couple of notions as they begin their process of renewal, the first would be this: Cultural elitism is more oppressive than economic elitism. The welfare state era gave Democrats the impression that everything can be solved with money funneled through some federal program. But the populist era is driven by social resentment more than economic scarcity.
Every society has a recognition order, a diffuse system for doling out attention and respect. When millions of people feel that they and their values are invisible to that order, they rightly feel furious and alienated. Of course they’ll go with the guy — Trump — who says: I see you. I respect you. If Democrats, and the educated class generally, can’t change their values and cultural posture, I doubt any set of economic policies will do them any good. It is just a fact that parties on the left can’t get a hearing until they get the big moral questions right: faith, family, flag, respect for people in all social classes.
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My second notion is this: Pay attention to Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was a Republican president in the middle of the welfare state era. He basically said: I’m going to endorse the basic shape of the New Deal, but I’m going to achieve those ends more sensibly. You can trust me.
For today’s Democrats that means this: If people rightly distrust establishment institutions and you are the party of the establishment institutions, then you have to be the party of thoroughgoing reform. You have to say that Trump is taking a blowtorch to institutions, and we are for effectively changing institutions.
Do you really think professional politicians are going to lead the tectonic shifts that are required? That takes intellectuals, organizers, a new generation, all of us. It’s the work of decades, not election cycles. Clear your mind. Think anew.
David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.
