Democrats are wasting a populist moment They learned nothing from the election

The start of President Trump’s second term has produced the expected shock and awe. From the new détente with Russia to severe, sometimes lawless, budget cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s DOGE, the appetite for disruption far exceeds what was glimpsed in Trump’s first term. So what happened to the anti-Trump #Resistance? And why can’t Democrats and their base forge a compelling opposition movement?

An opposition party with any sense of its populist roots would strike fast. The looming return of inflation is sinking consumer confidence. The job market is freezing up. And new data show that the richest Americans account for 50% of household spending. To “pay” for tax cuts, House Republicans are contemplating slashing Medicaid, which provides health insurance to nearly 80 million low-income Americans; the GOP would sooner penalise its new working-class base than disobey its C-suite masters.

Democrats, in short, have a chance at redemption — provided they embrace a populist spirit to counter Trump’s billionaire-led pseudo-populism.

Yet enfeebled only begins to capture their coalition’s pitiable state. Instead of mounting a cohesive strategy, elected Democrats are rehashing their Trump I playbook, only more lamely, with protests staged by fired civil servants and lawsuits against executive orders that subvert or violate existing laws and regulations. Neither tactic has demonstrated real conviction. By their own admission, congressional Democrats are unfocused, torn over whom and what to stand for.

It’s a dismaying symptom of how little progressives have learned from the 2024 election, and how they fail to see the populist opportunity. Consider the target-rich environment created by Musk and DOGE. The Tesla and SpaceX boss’s vast role in the new White House amounts to direct oligarchic capture of the American state. He is quite literally deleting agencies that could regulate his current and future enterprises or empower labour unions at his foundries.

But the Democratic leadership is still patently afraid of channeling Americans’ frustration with the system, as Trump did. They have become too dependent on fighting Trump through the courts and government agencies to truly seize the populist case against him: to wit, a majority of inflation-stung working-class Americans backed Trump in 2024 because he pledged to protect entitlements and to lower costs, and because he courted organised labour — not to deregulate Wall Street or cripple collective bargaining.

Democratic paralysis betrays a fear of the electorate. Ardent liberals still thrill to the promise of “enlightened” judges striking down Trump’s actions, viewing every ideological battle through the lens of what jurisprudence, not retail politics, can do to improve the nation’s moral fiber. A politics that leads by injunction, however, isn’t grounded in persuasion and popular mobilisation. And it disregards the problems Trump exploited to win the election, from soaring living costs and rising consumer debt to progressives’ ill-conceived policies on migration and public safety.

Nor have they shown much desire to counter the impression that upscale cultural stances have supplanted the party’s focus on egalitarian development and progressive redistribution. Not exactly free of their own conflicts of interest, most Democrats sound stilted and insincere when it comes to discussing the role of power and money in US politics outside Trump’s orbit.

It’s no surprise, then, that Democrats are plainly flailing in their battle to change “the narrative.” At this stage, formulaic denunciations of Trump and his most zealous appointees won’t do; on the contrary, the cartoon epithets and rehearsed preachiness offered by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the party’s congressional leaders, have only magnified the liberal establishment’s petrifaction over a dying order.

One wonders why Democrats haven’t revisited the formative speeches and ideas of liberal icons like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Robert F. Kennedy or populists like William Jennings Bryan, who sparked the party’s renewal in the Gilded Age. With the exception of Sen. Bernie Sanders — who, at 83, is barnstorming the Farm Belt — progressives seem to be waiting for another Covid-level crisis to torpedo Trump’s support.

That is yet another reminder of how insular modern progressivism has become. Restraining the executive branch through the courts is, to be sure, a time-honored tradition across the political spectrum. Progressives should not hesitate to impede, wherever possible, brazen attacks on labour and consumer protections and essential social programs. But to truly countervail Trump II requires unstinting support for more Americans’ active participation in civil society, including those citizens without college degrees. An older breed of progressives who won office through their alliances with small farmers, consumer-protection leagues, and trade unionists understood this well; a judicial blow against vested interests, malfeasance, and corruption, though important, wasn’t a substitute for arrangements and institutions that gave ordinary people a genuine voice in their community affairs.

In a bygone era, Democrats’ lawyerly instincts were directed primarily against monopolists, local magnates, and unscrupulous business practices. At the state and federal level, they recognised that the law could apply intelligent restraints against market power, while also stimulating the development that their downtrodden base demanded of them.

Later in the postwar era, Democrats joined with liberal Republicans to enact laws that codified principles of nondiscrimination on questions of race, national origin, sex, and disability. Although the corresponding growth of the federal bureaucracy served as a pretext for Reagan conservatives to roll back these social protections, Democrats were hardly the high-handed bureaucrats they were depicted as by their “small-government” adversaries.

In fact, until the mid-Nineties, when they began to lose their populist bona fides in the South and greater Midwest, Democrats tended to view Congress as the best vehicle to defend and advance the interests of working people from all regions. Their support of a strong federal government, whose departments for regulatory oversight and social insurance expanded between the New Deal and Great Society, was complemented and balanced by an understanding of each region’s needs. They didn’t, accordingly, view politics as a zero-sum contest that largely revolved around the legitimacy of decisions made by the executive branch and judiciary.

Since Trump’s ascent, however, the legal stratagems of Democrats and their media allies have allowed them to ignore the root causes of populist discontent, economic and cultural. This has had the unintended effect of aiding Trump’s claim that a multipronged “deep state” is undermining his authority, thwarting the will of the people.

In turn, progressives have backed themselves into a corner, disconnected, even in deep-blue cities, from the very people they profess to serve. Thanks to their uncritical defense of all things branded “woke,” Democrats are now viewed by working-class voters of all races as litigious, censorious, and elitist. Indeed, the Democratic Party is seen as the very opposite of the one whose unifying thread, from Bryan’s heyday through the Seventies, was its respect for the dignity — and judgement — of the common man and woman.

It will take much more that clever rhetoric to change perceptions. Democratic allies sermonise about democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law at the same time that they repeat the self-defeating, self-righteous notion that all voters who have rejected the party’s Soviet-esque succession of leaders are rubes and bigots. Such attitudes are, in a way, akin to Trumpian defiance, but with none of the obvious political benefits.

A party that preys on its base’s fears of right-wing authoritarianism ought, at the very least, to be plowing money toward candidates who can speak to middle America. Yet Democrats are seemingly content to allow competitive elections to dwindle so long as they retain control of the nation’s largest urban and commercial centers (which, not incidentally, tend to have low turnout in local elections). This signals that Democrats are wary of being accountable to downscale and left-behind Americans. But disaffected workers, especially those who make a conscious decision to withhold their votes, aren’t foolish: they know the liberal establishment is much less concerned about democracy than it pretends to be.

The party’s deepening identity and ideological crisis also explains its strangely Janus-faced view of grassroots democracy. Democrats face a distinct burden as the normative “party of government” in an age of stark inequality, unabashed clientelism, and staggering corporate patronage. As social trust and  approval of major institutions have plummeted in the last two decades, Democrats have failed to restore confidence in basic public administration at the federal and local level, much less inspire hope that government can once again implement reforms that directly benefit millions of citizens. The economic experiments of Bidenism excepted, today’s Democrats have become rather guarded about government’s purpose, even as they cry foul over Republicans’ indiscriminate attacks on social programmes, civil servants, and scientific research.

The Trumpian assault on government as such may finally spur Democrats to confront all which ails American workers. Or not. Democrats and their professional-class base seem primed to relitigate the same battles over “big government” that were fought in the Eighties and Nineties, rather than uncritically examine why so many Americans, both rural and urban, feel disenfranchised.

Ever since becoming the favoured party of the coastal establishment (and, until Trump’s 2024 campaign, Silicon Valley), Democrats grew too comfortable running a globalised economic system, playing both its cautious reformer and its custodian. That blinded them to the contradictions that now percolate their philosophy of governance, above all, the friction between the egalitarian aims that made Rooseveltian liberalism triumph and the party’s yearslong fixation with becoming — rather than taming — the American elite. Enthralled by esoteric beliefs about self-actualisation, social justice, and cultural progress, many imagine they are part of a forward-thinking vanguard, even as the areas they govern show signs of acute distress.

Attempts to check Trump will prove dismal so long as Democrats fail to confront why they are no longer seen as champions of the public interest. While blue-collar Trump supporters may soon rue the powers granted to an unreconstructed GOP, they aren’t necessarily confused or hypocritical in their desires.

Many Americans clearly long for more effective, transparent, and responsive government in a manner that doesn’t conform to the worldviews of either progressive or conservative intellectuals. Depending on the issue, it could mean more state capacity and oversight or more impartial respect for individual rights. Progressives, therefore, might consider actually engaging with the societal complexity in which they so often claim expertise, and immerse themselves, as few have, in the actual lifeworld of the forgotten and dispossessed.

Revamping the #Resistance along familiar lines is and will remain tempting. Trump’s betrayals and broken promises are already accumulating, and they should be attacked without fear at every opportunity. But this must be connected to a broader reckoning with the American crisis. Yet if the consultant class and the Democratic establishment had their way, the party would continue to ignore the rampant failures that have rekindled Americans’ Jacksonian mood.

Countering Trump ultimately requires an unflinching account of America’s precipitous decline — as well as a cogent vision of radical reform, and accountable governance, for the 21^st century.

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