As I said a few weeks ago, I don’t really believe a lot of the hype about the Democratic primaries this year. I don’t think that the United States is in the throes of a socialist revolution that will decimate the moderates. What I do see is a lot of voter enthusiasm for Democratic candidates (even as the party as an institution continues to have a public image problem) and some eye-popping turnout numbers. A wide variety of voters seem ready to give a wide variety of candidates a chance in November.
If this time of choosing brings Democrats back to power in Washington, the time of proving will be at hand—and Democrats will have to show their mettle. As TNR editor Michael Tomasky recently wrote, they will have to follow the pugilistic lead of conflict-ready lawmakers like Jon Ossoff, shedding themselves of the tendency to seek bipartisanship (looking at you, Hakeem!), and dedicate themselves to sanding the gears of Trump’s authoritarian machine. They’ll also have to collectively set a bold tone for the 2028 presidential election.
Democrats are typically averse to any sort of politicking that seems divisive. They’d prefer to work in comity with their Republican colleagues—even the feral ones we have today. History teaches us that Democrats don’t really have the yen for accountability; “Look forward, not backward” has been the watchword that has allowed CIA torturers, rogue financiers, and a coup-inciting president who lost an election to get off scot-free. And the media has, over the years, shaped the public conception of the two parties like a bodybuilder wielding a meat tenderizer: Republicans are allowed to govern maximally, while Democrats serve as helpmates to trim their excesses. To be honest, I think many Democrats have allowed themselves to be inculcated by this false binary.
That has to end. As Lincoln once said, “The quiet dogmas of the past are inadequate to the stormy present.” It’s time for Democrats to disenthrall. That means that the road ahead is going to take Democrats well outside of their comfort zone. Here, I have to caution those who are fretting about the new radicals in their midst: You’re all going to have to get a little bit more radical on a number of important fronts too.
As I’ve noted before, the biggest mindset change that Democrats will have to adopt is their view of the Supreme Court. Whether or not the high court ever had a period where it earned public esteem, this court as currently constructed has become naked in its partisanship, and it’s using its considerable power to enforce a line-item veto over Democratic lawmakers while simultaneously stripping Democratic voters of their electoral power.
President Joe Biden met this crisis with a milquetoast study. Whatever that was meant to accomplish, it didn’t work. Like it or not, Democrats have to expand the number of justices on the court if their party wants to survive (Republicans have fought just as hard to manipulate the high court’s membership, after all). It also means that Democrats should be making a sizable effort to drive down public opinion of the court. (Here’s the good news: The public has a considerable head start, so it’s best to meet them where they’re at.)
A few weeks ago, it was reported that U.S. debt had hit $40 trillion thanks to Trump’s tax giveaways, the Iran war, and his tariffs—which have become a tidy windfall for certain corporations as taxpayer money gets transferred to their coffers via tariff refunds. At first blush, this reads as damaging to Trump. But being well versed in the aforementioned asymmetry in the way the media treats the two parties, I know that if a Democrat were in power right now, their every plan or policy idea would have been dogged by chucklehead journalists asking them, “How will you pay for it?” Trump faced no such challenge. Republicans never do.
It’s a grim cycle: The GOP wrecks the shop, Democrats exhaust their political capital putting it back together. But the damage Trump leaves behind will be substantial, and it can’t be fixed for free. Just restoring the federal civil service to the sort of functional capacity that prevents lettuce from giving the populace explosive diarrhea will require a massive hiring binge, and I will promise you that the political press is going to be back, needling them with the same old question. Democrats can’t allow themselves to fear doing what needs to be done to eradicate Trumpism. When they’re asked how they will pay for it, they need to respond: “We will all pay dearly if we don’t undo Trump’s damage.”
And it goes without saying that Democrats will have to discover a new love of holding people accountable. That begins with offering the public a measure of justice for the harms meted out to them by the Trump administration. As I’ve written before, “Trump isn’t a president. He’s the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power.” Democrats need to be less like Merrick Garland and more like newly minted Minnesota Senate nominee Peggy Flanagan, who has vowed to “avenge” her state. The jokes about the grannies at the No Kings rallies baying for blood may be an exaggeration, but it’s not far off the current mood.
But accountability is due to a host of other non-Trump miscreants, as well. As Tomasky recently wrote, naming enemies and picking fights is now essential work for Democrats. There are many targets to choose from, including “Republicans and oligarchs and monopolists”—or, as Ossoff has collectively described the enemy, the “Epstein class”: that coven of elites that has been permitted to rule with impunity.
There are encouraging signs that Democrats are moving in the right direction. I took cheer at the news that the Democratic National Committee has added the abolition of ICE to the party’s platform. We have come a long way from the beginning of the year, when the notion that the agency could somehow be reformed or retrained was still annoyingly in vogue.
But this is just one of many matters that cannot simply be folded into a party document. As Brian Beutler recently wrote, Democrats must use this time to “normaliz[e] the kinds of things that will be necessary for American renewal in the post-Trump era.” That means taking these messages to the public, getting them used to hearing talk about abolishing ICE, packing the Supreme Court, hiring the next generation of public servants, and tearing down Trump’s vanity projects. It also affords you the opportunity to parry the political media’s brain-dead inquiries sooner rather than later.
I understand that Democrats would prefer a gentler and more thoughtful brand of politics and that they see uncommon virtue in finding common ground. That all sounds really nice; maybe one day that’s the way things can be again. But America’s Trumpian trajectory will not be gently turned aside. It will require a movement forceful enough to arrest MAGA’s momentum and bring the country—and the world—out of this era’s rack and ruin.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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