Only socialist radicals and their sibling rivals, libertarians, mistakenly believe that we have to choose between pure socialism and pure capitalism. In technological societies, what has been called the “mixed economy” is clearly superior, combining technological dynamism and private initiative with social solidarity, industrial policy, and infrastructure and human development delivered by the state. In the 21st century, socialism — the dream of a new generation of Leftists in the DSA — is as impractical as the free-market fundamentalism of the Libertarian Party and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages. 

No purely capitalist economy has ever existed or ever will. Even in the supposed era of laissez-faire in the United States between the Civil War and the New Deal, there was a mixed economy at all levels of government. The feds intervened in trade to protect US industries with tariffs, lavished subsidies on railroads and colleges, and restricted immigration for good reasons (high wages) and bad ones (racism). 

Meanwhile, American states possessed sweeping “police powers” that they used to enforce moral laws, including “blue laws” that limited commerce on Sundays. The apartheid regime in the South, the heartland of hypocritical “limited-government” conservatives, intrusively regulated every aspect of life, from the most intimate — marriage — to the most commercial — dining and shopping — in the defense of white supremacy.

Contrary to libertarian mythology, the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, and the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s, didn’t replace a free economy with a statist or socialist one. The New Deal merely altered America’s existing mixed economy in important respects, providing organized labor with federally enforced rights, enacting a federal minimum wage and maximum-hours laws, and creating earned benefits like Social Security that codified earlier mutual-support networks established by workers themselves: not taxpayer dole, but a share of workers’ own earnings withheld, to be disbursed in old age.

The civil-rights movement, meanwhile, expanded freedom in American society. It diminished illiberal statism at the local level, freeing people to marry whom they wanted and to shop where they wanted, regardless of race. The elaborate structure of group preferences that was assembled later under the rubrics of “affirmative action” and “equity” was a betrayal of the civil-rights revolution, not its logical fulfillment.

America’s technological dynamism has always been based not on “free enterprise” alone, but on what might be called “mixed enterprise” — in which private firms, government, and nonprofit institutions work together to promote growth and advancement. 

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This sort of burden-sharing has proved especially fruitful in the realm of science and technology. Since the 19th century, technological innovation in the United States has benefited from federal intervention of various kinds, including the $30,000 (equivalent to more than $1 million today) that Congress granted Samuel F. B. Morse in 1843 for an experimental telegraph line from Washington, DC, to Baltimore. 

Atomic energy, space travel, and computers all depended in their early stages on civilian or military government funding or procurement, even when private enterprise entered the sector later. In these and other cases, governments and sometimes tax-favored universities and nonprofit foundations helped to develop new technologies with markets and commercial applications that came only later.

Such has been the success of the modern mixed-enterprise system that even communist countries like China and Vietnam have abandoned pure socialism for their own authoritarian versions of the mixed economy, blending markets and government bureaucracies, public and private entities. To the extent that the Cold War was a contest of economic systems, it was a contest between Marxist-Leninist state socialism and the Western-style mixed enterprise system, not between socialism and capitalism.

Far from being relevant in today’s world, pure socialism and free-market capitalism are both quaint and irrelevant ideologies. Both date back to the early 19th century before the modern industrial economy developed. Both are dogmatic secular religions, not practical public philosophies capable of being corrected by experience. The proof lies in the fact that their adherents tend to return to the same founders and early texts. Despite everything we have learned from the evolution of industrial civilization in the last two centuries, socialists still read and re-read Marx, whose Communist Manifesto was written with Friedrich Engels in 1848, while libertarians quote Jean-Baptiste Say, who died in 1832, and David Ricardo, who died in 1823.

By the time Marx died, in 1883, Marxism was already discredited by the fact that the development of industrial capitalism in mixed economies failed to produce the immiseration of the proletariat and the socialist revolution that his theory had predicted. After 1900, the Marxist tradition split into Leninism, a model of top-down, technocratic rule by a totalitarian party in which the economy was subordinated to politics, and social democracy, which sought to bring about a socialist economy through democratic elections and reforms. 

It is often said that Marxist-Leninist regimes proved that state socialism was doomed. But this is wrong. The Soviet Union survived for seven decades and hard-core communism survives in North Korea to this day. But such regimes were and are less efficient than mixed economies, and Marxist-Leninist dictatorship is inherently tyrannical, whether the tyranny is that of a single strongman or a politburo. Political oppression and relative poverty explain why millions of people fled these regimes — and also why millions of people did not try to move to them.

By the second half of the 20th century, the other successor to orthodox Marxism, social democracy, became a mere variant of the mixed economy. Germany’s Social Democratic Party jettisoned the last traces of orthodox Marxism in 1959 with its Godesberg Program. Likewise, Labour in Britain dumped socialism in 1995 by excising clause 4, demanding “common ownership” of the means of production, from the party’s constitution.

What, then, are we to make of the DSA and those who, at this late date of 2026, insist on calling themselves democratic socialists, as distinct from ordinary Left-of-center progressives? If we ignore neo-Stalinist and neo-Maoist “tankies” — a term originally referring to Leftists who supported Soviet crackdowns in East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War — the actual economic program of most self-described democratic socialists is merely a more generous version of the mixed economy, with more social insurance and maybe more public provision, such as Mamdani’s city-run grocery stores, alongside the market and nonprofit sectors. 

Outside of university campuses and some DSA cliques, then, social democracy has melted into a center-Left version of the mixed economy in Europe and the United States, while Marxism-Leninism has mutated into Market Leninism in China and Vietnam. Generations of efforts by democratic-socialist eggheads to define a third way between Marxist socialism and the mixed economy has produced nothing but some journal articles and academic papers about cooperatives and land banks and the like. Oh, no, not the Mondragon Cooperative and Yugoslav communist self-management again! 

The other utopian ideology of the early 19th century — libertarianism or “classical liberalism” — is equally irrelevant in the 21st century. While Marxist true believers are housed in the intellectual zoos that are university campuses, libertarians today are found chiefly in think tanks subsidized by rich donors who don’t like paying taxes or negotiating with unions. Within the framework of the mixed economy, socialists and libertarians may win small policy victories now and then — an expansion of social insurance for socialists, a libertarian-backed tax cut for their wealthy donors. But the means of production in the United States aren’t going to be socialized by politicians inspired by Marx and Engels, and Social Security and Medicare aren’t going to be abolished in favor of the privatization schemes peddled by policy wonks funded by rich admirers of the libertarian gurus Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek.

Marxist socialists and libertarians share other characteristics, in addition to pushing antiquated ideologies. For generations, there have been socialists and libertarians who have claimed that the mixed economy can’t exist — except as a way-station to something worse. That something worse is usually defined in political terms. For some Leftist radicals as much as for Hayek and his followers, the slippery slope leads from FDR to Hitler; moderate social democracy is “social fascism.” For some libertarian radicals, moderate welfare capitalism is scarcely different from full state communism. 

Neither sect can acknowledge that some version of the mixed economy might be — indeed, is — the successor of both socialism and libertarianism, after these ideologies fail in the real world.

To be sure, claiming to stake out a socialist position to the Left of progressive Democrats can still impress an audience of underpaid university adjuncts and nonprofit apparatchiks. Just as the men and women who attend the Right’s dumber rubber-chicken dinners will applaud as speaker after speaker denounces the Democratic Party as a conspiracy of communists or “cultural Marxists” or “Islamo-Marxists” threatening capitalism, the Founding Fathers, and Jesus Christ (in that order).

But tedious debates among disciples of the discredited 19th-century ideologies of socialism and libertarianism distract the rest of us from the only serious debate, which is not about whether to have a mixed economy, but about what kind of mixed economy we should have.

All mixed economies assign some functions to government, some to for-profit enterprises, some to nonprofit philanthropies, and some to self-help by individuals or families. Which functions are assigned to which sectors is a legitimate matter of debate, for which there is no single best answer, only different approaches that reflect different social values.

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Consider the case of childcare. Before the Industrial Revolution, with the exception of young aristocrats whom upper-class mothers could hand off to wet-nurses, infants were nursed by their mothers and cared for by their parents and other family members. In today’s industrialized societies, in which plastic bottles can mimic a mother’s breasts, there are other options, including nannies (often low-wage immigrant women) and various kinds of care outside the home — public preschool, nonprofit church kindergartens, for-profit childcare centers. In a contemporary mixed economy, should the government subsidize care at home by mothers, fathers, or other family members, in order to promote strong families? Or should childcare be provided outside of the home, to maximize the number of young mothers in the workforce, whether to promote feminist principles or corporate profits or national GDP?

The size and composition of the nonprofit sector is another subject about which reasonable people who otherwise agree on a mixed economy can disagree. For most of American history, philanthropy tended to be small and local and limited to functions like college endowments and help for the poor and charitable hospitals. Beginning with the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, however, the swollen fortunes of tycoons have endowed huge, bureaucratic foundations with the power to shape public policy and discourse for better or worse. And in the last half-century, governments have increasingly relied on nonprofit groups funded with taxpayer money to carry out state functions like helping immigrants or working with the homeless, as an alternative to hiring more full-time, salaried civil servants.  

Should taxpayers subsidize the private foundations of billionaires through tax breaks, allowing them to spend huge sums promoting the personal views of their rich founders or boards of directors? Are nonprofits whose income is derived partly or wholly from government grants as transparent and accountable to the citizenry as formal government employees would be? 

Another debate over the composition of the modern mixed economy involves the relative responsibilities of employers and taxpayer-funded government agencies in providing an adequate income to wage-earners. I have described the current American system as a “low wage/high welfare” system in my book Hell to Pay. Millions of Americans are paid too little by their employers to make ends meet. These low-wage workers need to be rescued by the government — that is, by the taxpayers — who top up their poverty wages with cash subsidies like the earned income tax credit, or EITC, and in-kind goods like food stamps and housing vouchers.  

Today’s low-wage/high-welfare systems benefit employers, who can keep labor costs down while knowing that their fellow citizens won’t let their workers starve. America’s low-wage/high-welfare system also benefits some consumers, to the extent that smaller labor costs reduce the prices of certain goods and services. The losers are the working poor, who have to cobble together a living income both from market wages and from various government welfare programs; and American taxpayers, who, by subsidizing the working poor, are indirectly subsidizing low-wage employers and their customers. In our contemporary version of the mixed economy that blends cheap-labor capitalism with welfare-state socialism, America’s low-wage employers are allowed to privatize the benefits of cheap labor while the costs are socialized.  

In politics, all three issues — childcare, philanthropy, and wages — cut across Left-Right divides, if the Left is defined as socialism and the Right as free-market capitalism. In debates about childcare, progressive feminists — for whom a woman’s place is in the workplace, not the nursery — are allied with the Chamber of Commerce and other employer organizations against pro-family conservatives and populists who believe that policy should strengthen families, not erode them in the name of individual rights or business profits.

When it comes to nonprofits, there can be common ground between Leftist critics of billionaire-endowed philanthropy and Right-wing populists suspicious of concentrations of economic power in the nonprofit sector. Conversely, many progressive neoliberals unite with cheap-labor conservatives in praising wage subsidies like the EITC. Meanwhile, the demand for a living wage paid by employers — a wage that doesn’t need to be supplemented by welfare — is a proposal that can conceivably unite the Labor left and the populist Right.   

These are all big debates worth having. But the debate between socialism and free-market capitalism was over by 1945, if not by 1900. And the winner was … neither. The mixed economy is the proverbial Chinese menu. You can take some items from one column and some from another. In our mixed-enterprise system, you can be in favor of school vouchers and also in favor of socialized medicine. Or you can be for public daycare and for privatizing the Post Office. Given a choice between state, market, and philanthropy, you are free to answer: all of the above, please.

It’s the summer of 2026. Most of Murphy’s fellow Democrats have long given up on the sort of national soul-searching that followed President Trump’s first election in 2016. You remember: that brief window in which Left-of-center pundits and electeds crisscrossed the de-industrialized heartland for clues to why they had lost their working-class base. Soon, though, soul-searching gave way to lawfare aimed at reversing the election’s outcome: Russiagate, the Ukraine phone call, this, that — all futile.

Not Murphy. For several years, the senator has been on something like a spiritual quest: not to find God or himself, but what ails America at a much deeper level than most of the center Left has either allowed or even bothered with. Murphy’s new book, titled Crisis of the Common Good, is the thoughtful, surprisingly well-written, densely researched product of that quest. This, even as Murphy carries a separate persona as a fierce #Resistance liberal on social media and the network formerly called MSNBC. 

Whether these two dimensions can work together, and perhaps elevate him to higher office, is the central question of his career.

Crisis of the Common Good is remarkable for many reasons. For one thing, its pages and notes section are littered with positive references to conservative intellectuals, mostly from the post-liberal-ish corner of the Right. These include the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the American Affairs editor and re-industrialization advocate Julius Krein, the political economist Oren Cass, and, ahem, yours truly.

“I’ve certainly been enamored of the intellectual Right,” he tells me, “and I think there’s a lot of overlap.” In a way, that understates things. Murphy’s deepest project involves translating to American terms and conditions the political tradition known as blue Labour in Britain and Left conservatism in continental Europe. 

Proponents accept the necessity and blessings of market activity. But they’re also acutely aware of the dangers posed by unrestrained capitalism to family, religion, belonging, and community — the goods historically cherished by conservatism. 

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To mitigate the dangers, they turn to social-democratic means, or what Murphy in his book describes as the “social-contract” model of American political economy: business regulation, labor unions, wage floors, industrial policy, jealous guardianship of public goods that private actors can’t preserve even if they want to. The “conservative” or “blue” half of the equation identifies what must be preserved; the “Labour” or “Left” half sets out the means. 

Or as FDR, quoting Macaulay in a 1936 speech, put it, “Reform, if you would preserve,” adding in his own words: “I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.” Reform the market if you care to protect society.

The words and speaker are significant. America came closest to adopting a blue-Labour or Left-conservative politics during the New Deal order, roughly from the 1930s through the mid-1970s. To cite one example: the New Dealers’ massive rural-development programs — emergency farm credits, foreclosure moratoria, rural electrification — kept hundreds of thousands of landowning families on farms they would otherwise have lost.

Under Eisenhower and Nixon, the Republican Party upheld these reforms in many areas, and even expanded their logic in others. Then came the neoliberal counterpunch under Reagan and the Bushes. Yet as Murphy is the first to admit in his book, neoliberal Democrats also did their part in tearing down the socially managed capitalism of the midcentury. 

The senator devotes the bulk of his book to chronicling the consequences with anecdotes and data. He organizes his chapters under several “cults” that enthrall Americans: the cults of profit, “everywhere,” technology, consumption, credentialism, and corruption. (The religious undertone here isn’t accidental; surprising for a progressive, Murphy seems to premise his thinking on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally religious animals; all culture is cultus, and some cult or other always commands our obeisance.)

He opens the chapter on the profit cult, for example, by noting how he and his fellow parents are barred from filming their own kids playing hockey by the for-profit entities that now control much of youth sports. Why? Because the firms insist you pay a monthly fee to access footage from their proprietary cameras. 

The example is well-chosen. The small businesses and wealthy donors who once underwrote youth sports in his part of Connecticut did so not expecting to turn a profit, as Murphy notes. They did it because they valued the camaraderie and public-spiritedness cultivated — cultus again — by youth sports. But now, profit-maximizing enterprises have invaded this corner of American life; the days aren’t far when you can place Polymarket bets on high-school sports.

The examples pile up grimly: a lonely teenager who killed himself after an AI chatbot convinced him that he could join her in the afterlife; the class-based stratification of literally every corner of public life ($20 gets you someone who will stand in line for you at a congressional hearing; $100 a night gets you special amenities in the California prison system); the obscene commodification of higher education; and much else of the kind.

In the book — if not always in his cable-news commentary — Murphy frames Donald Trump not as the cause of these transformations and the social alienation to which they’ve given rise. Rather, Murphy treats Trump as a symptom. “Literally the first time I mention his name in the book,” the senator tells me, “it’s in the context of drawing him as a symptom, not the cause, of our spiritual rot.”

The distinction matters, because many conventional Democrats would prefer to frame Trump as a demonic aberration — the easier to avoid the systemic rot the 45th and 47th president has revealed. Says Murphy: “It’s so easy to blame all of our problems on him. He is the main character, and he is, perhaps, an existential threat to democracy, so he’s an important character, and he can’t be avoided. But I just worry that it’s not enough to beat him in an election.” The underlying political, economic, and cultural crises would still churn beneath the surface.

More than that, Murphy is surprisingly willing to acknowledge Trump’s preternatural ability to register and address America’s subterranean ailments, even as the senator vehemently disagrees with Trumpian solutions (such as they are). And while the post-liberal intellectuals of the American Right, he believes, offered useful diagnoses and prescriptions, “my impression is that Donald Trump has effectively obliterated that small but previously growing movement within the party” that sought to re-orient the Right toward worker power and social solidarity. I think that’s overstated but, alas, directionally correct.

So does the Left have anyone who comes close to Trump’s capacity to “get” American discontent? And wouldn’t Democrats have to change course on immigration, especially, if they want to get within striking distance?

In his book, Murphy identifies a sense of place and belonging as one of the goods ravaged by corporate-led globalization and neoliberal capitalism. He rails against the commercial ideology of “everywhere” that runs roughshod over local community — “a belief that efficiency and scale should trump rootedness and place, that it really doesn’t matter where you live so long as you can order the same products, watch the same streaming shows, and follow the same influencers online,” as he writes. 

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But isn’t American discomfiture with mass, low-wage migration — a defining cause for the Trump campaign in 2024 — part of the same rejection of the cult of “everywhere”? 

Murphy seems to bristle a bit at this question. “I hope I’ve put my actions where my mouth is. I spent five months in a locked basement room trying to drag my party to the center on immigration.” He was a major proponent of a bill that would’ve given the president the authority to close the border if average daily crossings crossed 5,000 in a given week. Restrictionists objected — rightly, I believe — that the president already has the statutory authority to shutter the border, while the bill championed by Murphy would have legitimized a huge number of illegal crossings annually as long as figures stayed south of the threshold.

He goes on: “I think you have to have an answer to the existing, often unrestrained migration patterns this country has dealt with over the last decade. It is hard to live in a country where people are different from each other, in which there are so many new entrants. And one of the ways you keep a multicultural, multilinguistic country together is to have clear rules about who can enter — how you become a member of our club, how you become a citizen, how you become a worker. The Democratic Party has been far too casual about answering that question. And I do believe there’s a way for the Democratic Party to be stronger on the question of border security, stronger on the question of a true immigration rule of law.”

Fair enough, but doesn’t the right to call somewhere home also entail the expectation of some stability in who else gets to live there? More to the point, the #Resistance Murphy has joined many further to his Left in calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. What gives?

“Well, you have to have an internal immigration enforcement mechanism,” Murphy says. “You have to have a means to control the border. But he has literally built a personal political police force. There’s no way to just make a few personnel changes and have an actual internal immigration enforcement office that is obeying the law. So, yeah — I’m someone who believes we have to have a way to enforce our immigration laws internally. But I also believe we’re going to have to rebuild it in a different way when he’s gone.”

Perhaps this line — yes to what ICE does, no to ICE itself — is just enough to position Murphy in the sweet spot between a national electorate and where the Democratic Party’s insurgent socialist wing is taking it. Speaking of which, is Murphy planning a presidential run in 2028?

“I mean, I don’t know,” he replies, sounding earnest. “I really don’t. A reporter said to me earlier today, this would not be the book you’d write if you were running for president — because it’s not a book about me. It’s a book about a deeper set of questions about the country. And I’ve had a couple of my friends — who I absolutely know are running for president in 2028 — text me and say, ‘Hey, listen, I think you’ve found a way to frame some things that people have been having trouble talking about, this spiritual rot in the country.’ And, you know, hopefully, if this gives a vocabulary to people to use in 2028.”

Over the next three decades, those roles didn’t just fade — they completely reversed. Ozzy, far from the evil Svengali he was once imagined to be, re-emerged as the harmless, bumbling patriarch of  The Osbournes, a proto-Kardashian reality-TV show in which he muttered endearments to his dogs and struggled to work the remote. Meanwhile, Hulk Hogan’s legacy curdled amid sex tapes, lawsuits, and racist remarks.

What’s most striking today, however, isn’t how their reputations flipped. It’s that their reputations were considered important by serious institutions. The cultural gatekeepers who had once ignored or sneered at the two took them seriously once they passed from this earthly veil. A generation or two ago, Ozzy and Hulk were both largely considered lowbrow trash, the obsessions of the prime consumer of commercialized entertainment: the lower middle class. Yet after both figures died this month, The New Yorker ran an obituary for Ozzy, treating him as a misunderstood bard of evil with a heart of gold. PBS News, meanwhile, published a lengthy obituary that called Hogan “an icon to his ‘Hulkamaniacs.’”

Legacy media, the same outlets that looked down their noses at these men during their heydays, now solemnly reflected on their legacies. No one rolled their eyes. Perhaps it’s because Donald Trump, another cartoonish reality-TV patriarch who gained superstardom in the Eighties, has been handed political power twice now, and the old elite are now bending the knee.

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If this were the Eighties, this triumph of the lowbrow would be a moment to cheer. A common trope of Reagan-era comedies was the slobs versus the snobs, in which a ragtag gang of working-class kids or bros used their moxie to beat the aging establishment, the pretentious old-money types. But now we know how those stories really ended: the US class structure became even more lopsided, with the top 10% owning nearly 70% of all wealth, while 57% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The culture-industry slobs did not alter this trend. They just lent it a more vulgar veneer.

At the level of the culture, this turn of events does not represent authentic egalitarian progress, but a general decline in standards. The fact that the majority of Americans have lost economic mobility and security, combined with the mentally impairing effects of excessive internet and social media use, has transformed almost all of us into what was once considered lower middle class. Our reverential treatment of Ozzy and Hulk reflects our own childish sensibilities.

If that sounds snooty, look back and consider the breadth and mainstream popularity of elite and middlebrow institutions of the previous century, made possible by a specific set of conditions. The New Deal and the postwar economic miracle created an unusually stable and prosperous middle America comprising salaried professionals, civil servants, unionized workers, and strivers who had both disposable income and leisure time. Aspiration wasn’t just about the pure accumulation of wealth; it also meant pursuing intellectualism and cultural pursuits and democratizing them in the process.

Among members of the Greatest Generation, it wasn’t just the rich who subscribed to literary or political magazines, attended the symphony or opera, were card-carrying members of public libraries, or had museum and social-club memberships. My grandfather, a small-town mechanic with a formal eighth-grade education, once subscribed to National Geographic and Time, regularly tuned into 60 Minutes, and had a cultural and social diet that might now be called elitist.

Two factors changed everything. First, media technology has dramatically improved in fidelity and been integrated into almost every aspect of life, including both work and leisure. The shift from flesh-and-blood life to an internet-first version flattened all forms of entertainment and culture into a uniform sludge of content. Meanwhile, the economic foundation of the New Deal order crumbled, and neoliberalism became the dominant political philosophy. The downstream effects of the changes meant that the cultural standards of yore began to slip into oblivion.

To get a sense of how much has changed in 50 years, consider the historian Arno Mayer’s 1975 essay, “The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem.” In it, he described the lower middle class as literate but not cultivated, aspirational yet anxious, self-reliant yet highly individualistic, obsessed with their own property, terrified of downward mobility, and quick to mobilize politically only under conditions of stress. Too educated to be at home in folk culture, too economically precarious to claim elite culture, they became early adopters of the modern mass-media machine. “The modern opiate dispensers provided a heady mix of entertainment, distraction, diversion, and fantasy for a composite lower middle class that was characteristically insecure,” he wrote. As Mayer put it, “media and audience found each other.”

What Mayer is describing sounds less like a small slice of our nation’s class makeup and more like a blueprint for 21st-century American life writ large. Cable television may have given way to TikToks, but it’s still a culture where the defining class condition is not proletarian solidarity or elite professionalism, but a twitchy, consumerized in-betweenness. That psychic tension fuels both spectacle and political grievance.

In 2014, when actor Gary Oldman told Ted Koppel that “reality TV to me is the museum of social decay,” it was the last gasp of a dying worldview. By then, the reality juggernaut, the same genre of television once deemed brain-dead TV, had all absorbed Ozzy and Hogan and Trump into the maw of the spectacle. A decade later, when Trump clinched the presidency a second time, it was fitting that Hogan played a part as an Republican National Convention sideshow. The lowbrow shock and awe of the convention that ushered in Trump II was the culmination of a cultural reorientation that began in the Eighties.

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Trump’s place within the unholy trinity is ironic. Unlike Ozzy and Hogan, both of whom were working-class heroes of humble origins, Trump was a man born into wealth but who spoke and had the cultural tastes of someone without a silver spoon in his mouth. He insulted people like a talk-radio caller. He loved McDonald’s and candy. His political base, MAGA Nation, shares cultural DNA with Hogan and Ozzy fandom. They love Trump not in spite of his crudity, but because of it. He sounds like them. He hates the same people. He gets the joke, and is the joke, and doesn’t care either way. And maybe that’s the point. The joke has become the organizing principle of American life. Once, the Ozzy fan or Hulkamaniac was a punchline for the old-school commentariat, a proxy for tastelessness, vulgarity, or low aspirations. Now, those very traits are recoded as authenticity for everyone on the political spectrum, Left and Right.

It’s no wonder, then, that in 2025, the Democrats are casting off the blinkered brand of elitism-dressed-up-as-non-elitism they were associated with in the previous decade — by which I mean identity politics — and disregarding the old Michelle Obama dictum “When they go low, we go high.” Their answer to MAGA is to accept the new rules of engagement and start making stupid memes and yelling the F-word. The liberals have even elevated Kendrick Lamar to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s old post as their symbolic poet laureate — the rapper who used his Super Bowl show as one loud and expensive roast of Drake. In a new profile in The Atlantic, congressional Democrat Jasmine Crockett is presented as the future (“A Democrat for The Trump Era,” runs the headline). Why? She has a big social-media following and went viral for describing Marjorie Taylor Greene as “bleach-blond, bad built, butch body” during a House Oversight Committee meeting.

Forty years ago, Hulk Hogan used to say, “Whatcha gonna do, when Hulkamania runs wild on you?” It was a threat, a promise, and a sales pitch all rolled into one. Today, American culture has yet to answer that question.

Around a decade ago, in the fallout from the financial crisis, some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations started deploying the Left’s “woke” tropes to legitimize their own power and to disarm popular grievances. Since then, and especially in the wake of last year’s election, they have adopted the edgy aesthetics and rhetoric of the online Right in service of the same ends.

In both cases, the underlying message is remarkably similar, notwithstanding the enmity between Left and Right, between woke and anti-woke. The message is that all collective action is ultimately in vain; the individual — be he the anti-racist HR specialist of the Left or the heroic gym bro of the online Right — is the only realistic locus of change.

Take wokeness, which roughly emerged back in 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of an African-American teen, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. This triggered the first Black Lives Matter protests. It was also the year a PR exec named Justine Sacco tweeted a tasteless joke before hopping on a flight to South Africa (“Hope I don’t get AIDS”), only to be fired before the plane hit the Cape Town tarmac. In the ensuing years, wokeness and all the adjacent movements, from DEI to #MeToo, swept through and took hold of our mainstream institutions, reaching a fever pitch in 2020.

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Most conservatives associate wokeness with progressive utopianism, only the most recent attempt to revive Marxism. But this is a mistake. The woke, to be sure, demanded dramatic changes to our public language, monuments, and institutional practices: “unconscious-bias” trainings became de rigueur at workplaces; newspapers began to capitalize the races; Churchill statues were vandalized. But wokeness was far from utopian — quite the contrary, it amounted to an intensely pessimistic worldview. Drawing from the academic tradition of Afro-pessimism, as the scholar Geoff Shullenberger has pointed out, wokeness ended up “inscribing black oppression into the very fabric of reality”.

In the American context, this served an immediate purpose for a Democratic Party seeking to displace blame for the devastation of the black middle class in the Great Recession. It wasn’t that neoliberal Democrats had bailed out big banks while abandoning African-American homeowners to the vagaries of the market. Rather, blacks were immiserated because racial tyranny was and remains “a metaphysical — even ontological — condition”, as Shullenberger neatly puts it. A metaphysical crisis can’t be blamed on any one policy mix or even remedied by normal politics, and that was the point.

Woke cultural actors thus dismissed the legitimate achievements of civil rights and similar movements in Britain and elsewhere: colourblind justice — the ideal that inspired the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. — was framed as racist. Future progress was similarly foreclosed by the racism that stamped the modern West at its material and psychic origins. Even (and especially) those who denied harboring racial animus were, in fact, irredeemably racist.

The only thing left to do was for people to “work” on themselves as individuals: to “unpack” hidden biases, confess their role in structures of “supremacy”, and lower their expectations regarding things such as objectivity and punctuality, now condescendingly recast as white values. Crises which had concrete fixes, such as chronically low wages, were ditched in favor of vaguely defined ones such as “racial capitalism”, with US firms like American Express and CVS lining up to self-flagellate — even as they resisted antitrust, unionisation, caps on interest rates, and other tangible reforms as ferociously as ever.

Who could fail to notice this dynamic when Hillary Clinton assailed Bernie Sanders by suggesting that the Vermont socialist’s proposed bank regulations wouldn’t undo “systemic racism”? Or when the chief diversity officer at the US outdoor-gear chain REI opened a company podcast by making a land acknowledgment — before launching into an anti-union tirade? Or when a vegan-food firm warned its diverse workforce that unions are for “old white guys”?

The role of wokeness as a prop for institutional power is so familiar now as to be cliché, even among many progressives. Much less understood, however, is how corporate power is putting the edgy online Right to the same use today.

The online Right took shape amid the stresses of lockdown and corporate-approved race riots in 2020 and 2021. The streams that fed it included Right-wing populism; the manosphere starring Andrew Tate; crunchy moms, vaccine skeptics, and “chemtrail” watchers; along with sundry edgelords whose anti-woke provocations soon gave way to overt racism, among other tendencies.

There was always an element of bootstrapping individualism here, especially in the American variety of the online Right. Yet in their more productive forms, these subcultures mounted systemic critiques of oligarchy and a “deep state” that included not just government actors, but also corporate power. Pervasive censorship — carried out not by governmental agencies, but Silicon Valley firms — had alerted them to how overweening private actors can imperil freedom. Ditto so-called debanking, a sinister new private-censorship method road-tested on Right-wing populists such as Nigel Farage.

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As a result, taming “Big Tech” censorship was all the rage among Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic. Republican lawmakers, for example, took up Section 230 reform, threatening to revoke the special legislative license that permits social-media platforms to censor or promote content but without the defamation liabilities that traditional publishers carry.

Other conservatives, most notably Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, mused about treating such platforms as “common carriers”, the ancient common-law doctrine that bars firms operating things like public toll roads and rail lines from discriminating against customers. Just as your land-line provider can’t drop you based on what you say on the phone, the argument goes, so the likes of Facebook should be barred from un-personing users based on their viewpoints.

It wasn’t just social media. If Silicon Valley giants could amass a vast and unaccountable power, some on the Right wondered, were there other market actors that deserved similar scrutiny? When he was still a relatively sane anchor on Fox News, for example, Tucker Carlson devoted a long and penetrating segment to the asset-stripping of a beloved Midwestern sport-goods chain by Elliott Management, the hedge fund controlled by the uber-hawkish GOP donor Paul Singer. Some on the populist Right in America even took to calling themselves “Khan-servatives” in homage to Lina Khan, then-President Joe Biden’s crusading anti-monopoly czar.

But it all came to naught. That’s because, beginning in 2022 with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), the oligarchy pulled off a rapid and astoundingly successful ideological shape-shift: rebranding itself as the enemy, and the chief victim, of woke middle managers.

Musk is, of course, the figure who best embodies this alchemy of corporate power. Having once promoted DEI in his own firms, he now routinely and positively interacts with X accounts that traffic in explicit racism and antisemitism — agreeing with one, for example, that Jews are behind multiculturalism.

Spicy stuff. But take a closer look: his purchase of X and, I suspect, his toying with edgy memes motivated the Right to abandon Big Tech reform. One of “their own”, after all, was now in charge of the most politically sensitive platform. It didn’t matter that the basic power asymmetry between platform and user remained unchanged. Indeed, censorship still goes on — only now it takes place at the behest of one man, rather than being directed by a bureaucratic class with a clear set of rules and an appeals process with a human being (rather than a robot) on the other end.

Nor were many on the Right bothered by Musk’s blending of governmental authority (the Department of Government Efficiency) and private power (X) that so alarmed them when the ancien régime did the same thing during the pandemic. Seen this way, it becomes clear that Musk rescued not so much free speech as the very narrow class of men who own the social-media platforms.

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Musk is far from alone. Another richly instructive example is Jeff Bezos. Not too long ago, the Amazon boss placed his firm at the forefront of corporate America’s Black Lives Matter push. Moreover, Amazon for years banned When Harry Became Sally, a scholarly critique of gender ideology by the conservative thinker Ryan Anderson.

Yet now Bezos has inexplicably un-banned Anderson’s book and directed The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, to promote free-market and libertarian ideology. His new friendliness with Donald Trump’s GOP earned him and his fiancée an invitation to join the 45th and 47th President on the inauguration dais. The new administration has also handed Amazon a raft of deregulatory wins, not least an early attempt to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, the New Deal agency tasked with enforcing collective bargaining, including at Bezos’s Dickensian warehouses.

Again, the power asymmetry between Amazon and its workers remains unchanged under the firm’s new ideological dispensation. But with rare exceptions, the Right has ceased to speak out about workers oppressed by his mega-firm.

Perhaps most astonishing is how the oligarchs managed to reframe even populist regulators as agents of a woke deep state. Soon after the election, tech oligarchs led by Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (another censorious wokester-turned-Trump bestie) began to complain about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, established in the wake of the financial crisis to combat banking scams, especially those targeting downscale customers, the type who tend to pull for Trump at the ballot box.

Sure enough, one of the new administration’s first steps was to “delete CFPB” (as Musk had called for), compelling it to drop its legal cases — including against banks that insisted on the right to debank customers — and putting the agency under Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, an old-school pro-business Republican.

In a memo setting out its reasoning, the White House described the CFPB as a “woke, weaponized arm” of the deep state that had given “itself the right to regulate Americans’ checking accounts”. Which sounds pretty bad — until you realize that by regulating checking accounts, they meant banning banks from piling on fee after fee on low-income customers who overdraw their accounts. Also cited as an example of the CFPB’s “woke” tyranny was a rule requiring the removal of medical debt from credit reports.

In short, the populist Right’s anti-woke edginess and solicitude for the put-upon “anon” was absorbed, commodified, and elevated into a new “dialect of power”. In the bargain, the movement was divested of its radical policy energies. Much as the Left had cashiered its more radical economic demands for more diversity training, so the Right learned to content itself with CEOs who would “own the libs”.

All that remains now of the online Right is the bootstrapping self-help element: bodybuilding; the consumption of raw milk and animal protein; “trad” marriages that smack of kink; vaccine avoidance; and the like. But here, too, the movement has been of service to the oligarchs, by generating fantasies of the genetically superior CEO or entrepreneur onto whom millions of temporarily embarrassed non-CEOs could project themselves.

The fate of woke and anti-woke alike is a testament to corporate elites’ capacity for absorbing oppositional trends, symbols, and ideals, thus turning potential threats into a means for the upkeep of institutional power. It’s also a reminder of the limits of culture-centric politics for confronting the power differentials generated by markets. Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes — so long as wages and unions are kept down and antitrust regulators are brought to heel.

Beyond the question of legality, the move is a big favor to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two Trump-friendly oligarchs who’ve filed suit to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional. Crippling the agency is the second best option: if Trump doesn’t fill the vacancy, the board would lack quorum to intervene in labour disputes. The National Labor Relations Act — the cornerstone of the New Deal — would effectively become a dead letter.

The decision radiates cold air toward the labour movement. Populist conservatives and some labour figures — most notably, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien — had hoped that Trump could bring about a rapprochement between the GOP and the unions. A welcome early move came in the form of a surprisingly pro-union nominee for secretary of labour. But the new administration can’t pursue much by way of pro-worker reform if it collapses the entire labour-law architecture.

Why is Trump double-crossing the organised working class, having explicitly appealed to it during the 2024 campaign? The 45^th and 47^th president is a mercurial creature, to be sure, but the real reason is structural. To wit, Trump can’t deliver on his Gilded Age political economy — defined by tariffs and a labour market protected from immigration — without simultaneously empowering employers relative to employees domestically.

It is this structural reality that should shape the labour movement’s response to Trump’s encroachments: if he wants to upset the labour peace achieved by the New Deal, then labour leaders, too, can let it rip.

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There is no denying that Trump’s big pitch to the working class paid off politically. He argued that workers’ wages and living conditions had been sliding as a result of too much foreign trade and too many foreign workers. He promised to build walls to protect American jobs. Trump’s narrative, which echoes that of many populist leaders worldwide, has a lot of truth to it.

Since the 1990s, blue-collar workers have witnessed the offshoring of high-wage jobs to China, Mexico, and elsewhere. Automation accelerated these losses. At the same time, and inspired by the same political theory, workers from all over the world came to the United States in large numbers. In 2023, more immigrants entered the US homeland than at any other time in American history, and the share of foreign-born residents rivaled that of the 1890 peak.

For many consumers, the result was cheaper goods and services, and this is exactly why highly educated, white-collar workers, who now form the base of the Democratic Party, welcomed waves of immigration as an unalloyed good. Mass immigration allows these professionals to live like a neo-gentry on the cheap, thanks to a pliant, desperate foreign labour force for child care, dry cleaning, dining out, and home improvement.

But for those native-born workers who happen to find themselves in low-skilled construction or service jobs, the new arrivals depress wages. The refrain from employers, lately echoed by some progressives, has been that Americans simply “won’t do these jobs”. What they mean, however, is that Americans won’t do these jobs for serf-like wages and conditions.

Black and Latino voters are much more likely to compete directly with immigrants for scarce jobs, which is big one reason why many of them pulled for Trump in the last election. While liberals were focused on “the wages of whiteness” as an explanation for What’s the Matter with Kansas, voters in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles were far more concerned with the wage suppression wrought by decades of globalisation and immigration-driven labour arbitrage.

Trump promised to bring back high-wage manufacturing jobs and to kick out low-wage immigrants. But there is a catch. You can’t really have capitalism in one country. If the United States were to forswear all the benefits of trade and immigration, it would face a staggering economic contraction. Some economists estimate that a whopping 3% of GDP would vanish if Trump made good on his promise to deport all illegal immigrants. And if he succeeds in implementing the kinds of tariffs he called for on the campaign trail, prices would rise much faster than wages.

Put another way: Trump’s dream of ringfencing America’s home market, including its domestic labour market, comes with the risk of massive inflationary pressure. How, then, did Trump convince his billionaire donors and the business-friendly GOP to go along with his plans? The current drama around the NLRB provides a clue. As UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari argued in November, the flip side of Trump’s external protectionism is internal libertarianism.

That is, Trumpian Republicans hope to fatally weaken labour as a countervailing force to the power of big business. If they succeed, whatever economic benefits Trumponomics might yield would accrue mainly at the top. Sure, workers may no longer have to worry that their wages are being undermined by immigrants, but they would have no means to protest their wages being suppressed by employer collusion, their work being automated by the latest technologies, or their being fired for no reason at all.

Without the right to form unions and the right of those unions to strike, the corporate powers that control the commanding heights of the American government would be free to tear up all their contracts with workers to pursue profit with reckless abandon.

For union members struggling to respond, it’s important to keep in mind that we have been here before. Lately, Trump has taken to comparing himself to the Gilded Age President William McKinley (a lover of just this combination of tariffs and a boss-friendly labour regime). The analogies are apt, and will become more so if Trump’s attacks on organised labour escalate: Before the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 — the law the NLRB is charged with enforcing — the United States was an employers’ paradise: business had all the rights, and labour had none. The union movement was in its infancy, small and weak. But what it lacked in size and influence, it made up for in the clarity of its moral appeal and the courage of its members.

This was a labour movement that could strike, even when no one authorised industrial action.

While Grover Cleveland, another Gilded Age president, was able to shrug off Coxey’s Army—a ragtag group of unemployed workers who came to Washington to protest his economic policies—he wasn’t able to ignore the Pullman rail strike. A wildcat action launched by 4,000 workers in Chicago soon ballooned to include some 125,000 railmen across the country. Among them was Eugene Debs, the future socialist presidential candidate whose ideas would later inform the American labour law. Cleveland brought out the Army to suppress the strike, but with it, he crushed his own political fortunes; his party, the Democrats, would be discredited and kept out of power for years.

Today’s labour movement ought to approach Trump’s policies with the same fighting spirit and sense of political independence. If the NLRB has been unlawfully neutered, well, the unions ought to renew the tradition of sympathy and wildcat strikes, secondary boycotts, and other means of exercising strength — especially regarding corporate behemoths such as Amazon.

Labour still commands a great deal of power, if it can wield it. The ports, logistics hubs, and quite a bit of critical manufacturing could be held up in the name of labour’s fight for its life. If the White House feels no need to respect labour law, then the unions ought not play the role of lawful lambs waiting for slaughter.

At the same time, politics must not be forgotten. Militancy will come to naught if it’s paired with a political message that fails to reckon with Trump’s appeal among working-class voters. Labour needs to organise new units and strike for better conditions, but it also needs to become reacquainted with its political interests. For too long, the unions have neglected to put forth a political vision of their own. Many union leaders shrink from talking about politics with their members. Others have too often swallowed the shallow liberalism of the professional left. The failure to develop and defend labour’s distinct political interests made it too easy for Trump to appeal to union members even as they knew he was no friend to their movement.

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Nor must leaders shrink from the opportunities presented by this confused and seemingly hostile conjuncture. The new labour law being hammered out between the Teamsters and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — with apparent support from the likes of Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers—opens space for reform. But labour must assert its voice to ensure the reform doesn’t compromise on non-negotiables, such as its independence and the freedom to take industrial action.

Labour has a duty to reimagine what an independent working-class movement might look like. That will take investments in organising and in education, it would mean a lot of work for union officials to educate their members, to drag them into meetings, to set up strike schools, to ensure that committees are formed for raising funds etc. It will not be easy. But to fail to do so will be so much harder.

Now the race for the next leader of the Democratic National Committee, to be elected on 1 February, is an opportunity to confront the party’s utter collapse in Middle America and chart a new course. Whether the Democrats will seize the chance turns on the resolve of the winner to buck the party’s subservience to donors and allocate resources to fresh candidates in former swing states.

The two most prominent contenders — Wisconsin party chairman Ben Wikler and Minnesota chairman Ken Martin — are workhorses adept at the art of coalition management. As Midwestern white guys, Martin and Wikler could help the party stanch the hemorrhage of Democratic support among their own demographic. But while they have sounded populist notes, their appetite for a shake-up has yet to be tested.

The backdrop is bleak. Progressives are demoralized over The Squad’s diminished size. Red-state Democrats are reeling from the loss of Sens. Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, and Bob Casey. And establishment liberals such as Chuck Schumer have rationalized defeat by explaining that workers “didn’t realize” how much Democrats “care for them”. Party activists can’t spot any would-be saviors in the distant horizon.

The job of the next DNC chairperson won’t be easy or glamorous. He or she will face the daunting task of rebuilding the Democratic coalition in nearly every part of America. Not only are Democrats on a backfoot in the Rust Belt and former Sun Belt strongholds like Florida, they must reckon with Trump’s surprising inroads among working-class voters and people of color in deep-blue areas.

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To be effective, the DNC leader will have to intervene forcefully in big debates over ideology and strategy. Grassroots activists, Left-wing intellectuals, and labor leaders such as Shawn Fain of the United Autoworkers are urging a showdown with the donor class and corporate power to compete with Trump’s GOP. Others who are close to the party elite are proposing a “common-sense” approach to economics, which some suspect is code for a Wall Street-friendly tack.

As the DNC’s 448 members gear up to vote, it’s far from certain that the victor will have a mandate to court the working-class voters who have defected to Trump since 2016. Still, there are hopes for serious change following the hapless tenure of Jaime Harrison, a friend of elite lobbyists who staunchly defended the party’s embrace of identity politics after critics blamed it for November’s humbling results.

At first glance, Martin and Wikler, the two frontrunners, seem well-positioned to oversee a “reset”. Each boasts of having overhauled his respective state party. Each enjoys the backing of labor unions, grassroots organizations, and reform-minded establishment figures. And both have bluntly stated that the party lost the working class this past election.

The basic assumption is that either of these two middle-aged white men from the Upper Midwest is suited to reconnecting the party with Gen-X and Millennial men without a college education — a demographic group that extended its shift to the right in November. A victory by either Martin or Wikler, the thinking goes, would install a competent leader bent on revamping the party’s message and cultivating down-ballot insurgents in states that have swung to the GOP since the Obama era.

Yet there are reasons to doubt the Democrats will be so easily led out of their morass. Most centrally, there is no obvious basis for a truce between the party’s Left flank and its more centrist members. Many progressives are unwilling or afraid to discipline “the Groups” — the professional advocacy organizations that are widely seen as responsible for the party’s unpopular and outré positions on race, immigration, gender, sexuality, drugs, and criminal justice. This reputation has overshadowed progressives’ support for a strong welfare state, consumer protection, and workers’ rights, limiting their appeal among workers who lean Right or simply hold mainstream views on cultural questions.

The “moderates”, meanwhile, comprise two factions that generally disagree on economic priorities: Rust Belt populists who shrink from the excesses of the “woke” Left, and neoliberals who once exploited identity politics but are now willing to muzzle “the Groups” if that means regaining control of the party.

Although both moderate factions have recently stressed the importance of tackling high prices, they are divided on tariffs, corporate oversight, and the need for long-term re-industrialization. Team Biden’s gamble on industrial policy failed to stir the electorate, leaving populists who supported such efforts without a clear framework to move forward. And they diverge from progressives on key questions such as border security, the pace of the green transition, and the economic threat posed by China. This impasse has emboldened neoliberals backed by major donors to discourage a push toward populist economics.

Bridging these divides while preventing a return to neoliberal orthodoxy will require clearheaded leadership. An effective DNC leader must bend progressives and neoliberals on the issues where they are most vulnerable. Given Martin’s and Wikler’s Midwestern backgrounds, it is reasonable to wager that both would favor the pragmatic populists. Neither contender, however, seems terribly inclined to force hard choices on the party’s dominant factions.

Take Wikler, whom pundits have depicted as more likely to excite the progressive base and who just garnered the endorsements of seven Democratic governors. While some high-profile commentators see him as bolder than Martin, he has embraced the same naked appeals to identity politics that have backed his party into a corner. Wikler has also been credited with “nationalizing” elections in Wisconsin to make them more competitive for Democrats. This involves attracting major media to lesser-known contests and mobilizing party activists behind local candidates whose election could have a decisive impact on Democratic priorities.

In the right context, this strategy can generate momentum and pool resources for progressive challengers to Republican incumbents. But as disastrous races elsewhere have demonstrated, it can also exacerbate perceptions in places typically ignored by Democrats that the party elite is only interested in flashy contests that fill up campaign war chests.

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Martin, meanwhile, may be too mild-mannered to forge meaningful compromises. A leader possessing sangfroid still must be able to throw a punch, particularly in the age of Trump. Avoiding gaffes that reinforce perceptions that Democrats are as much in the pocket of Wall Street as the GOP is also crucial. In a recent candidate forum, Martin appeared to astound himself when he blurted that Democrats will take money from “good billionaires … who share our values,” but not from “those bad billionaires”. Oops.

Still, there is some evidence he has more of an independent streak than Wikler. Martin has focused on strengthening the autonomy of local party branches and irritated the elite by establishing a group of state leaders that is separate from the DNC. For the sake of rebuilding local trust, such a strategy might be worth the price of angering consultants and grandees from the Northeast and California. Democrats are in desperate need of someone willing to clean house and keep the liberal establishment at arm’s length.

Whoever prevails, however, must do more than hone a new image. For Democrats to have any hope of winning back the working class, they need to recall the policies but also the party vision that gave succor to struggling Americans from their party’s founding in the Jacksonian era to the New Deal and the Great Society.

Egalitarianism, the vitality of a free society, and a belief that active government could spur national progress: these were the ideas that the Democratic giants of the past masterfully combined in their appeals to ordinary people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman could denounce injustice in plain language while arousing the spirit of optimism once considered inherent to the American experience.

In more practical terms, that meant adapting the original progressive tradition of the Midwest, predicated on reining in monopolies and forging alliances between workers, small businesses, and farmers. For decades, this approach to coalition-building was embraced by Left-leaning Democrats, from populists like Oklahoma’s Fred Harris to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. It flourished until the end of last century, when Bill Clinton’s commitment to globalization sundered his party’s ties with small towns and fading industrial regions.

Biden, to his credit, did draw on this older progressive tradition through his administration’s antitrust policies. Despite stark obstacles in the heartland, rallying the party once more to the anti-monopoly banner is probably the best way to revive its fortunes. The alternative is to court America’s wealthy suburbs — an approach that would close the door on New Deal liberalism for good and that may not even be worth the candle, judging by Harris’s campaign.

Yet with the exception of Howard Dean, a former presidential candidate who pursued a 50-state strategy in the mid-aughts, all of the party’s recent leaders have been careerists beholden to the donor class. This has deepened the sense among disenchanted activists that the obstacles to major reform also run through the DNC. To rebuild the Democratic coalition, the DNC will have do more than serve as the gatekeeper of critical campaign funds.

The overarching task of the next four to eight years, then, is to build the bridge to a new era that Biden himself couldn’t deliver. That demands identifying future leaders who speak to the common interests of American workers, while encouraging stances that serve America’s long-term security.

It also means resisting pressure to cede control of the party’s direction to powerful presidential aspirants. The 2028 field is already anticipated to feature ultra-wealthy players such as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and celebrity tycoons like Mark Cuban. A party leader intent on protecting democracy from oligarchy would do well to act as Martin has and defy efforts to centralize power in patronage networks that resemble Trump’s.

No matter how ambitious the next DNC leader turns out to be, stoking an anti-donor insurgency won’t come naturally. Democrats in the Trump era have become the party of institutions — so much so that they can’t see the powerful interests that have suffocated reform in the cradle. But if the party has a soul, its salvation begins with a revolution against its own monopolists. A venerable tradition calls out to those willing to take up the gauntlet.

As that similarity reveals, tariffs and other trade restrictions are divisive across the political spectrum. High-profile, California-based donors had hoped a Harris administration would snuff out Joe Biden’s policy experiments which challenged globalisation. But some union-aligned Democrats still believe that a more effective leader could salvage Biden’s vision of a domestic manufacturing renaissance. The evolving politics of protectionism is bound to scramble traditional partisan alignments in this volatile era of geopolitics.

The great irony of the tariff debate is that Trump’s signature issue was largely stolen from Rust Belt Democrats. Although Trump’s nativist rhetoric and broadsides against “cheating”, not just by China but close allies, has alarmed the liberal foreign policy establishment over the years, his fundamental critique of free trade is not so different from the stance adopted by earlier Democrats.

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Between the late Sixties and early Eighties, a number of New Deal-style liberals dropped the Democratic Party’s historical support for trade liberalisation and turned toward full-bore protectionism. On top of advocating aggressive trade controls, these liberals focused on reindustrialising the Northeast and Midwest. The argument was essentially twofold: postwar trade agreements were destabilising wages and employment in once-flourishing manufacturing sectors while doing little to improve the welfare of exploited “sweat shop” workers abroad. This system of trade integration — engineered by import lobbies, US-based multinationals, and their bipartisan allies in Washington — represented what progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren later dubbed a “race to the bottom”.

The final iteration of this Left-protectionist vision, considerably watered down by the rise of tech-obsessed “Atari Democrats” and policy advisors like the young Robert Reich, received two fatal blows. First, Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide re-election, and then Bill Clinton’s support for NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China. But Rust Belt Democrats persevered for a time. As the China Shock unfolded, rising Democratic stars like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, a “progressive” economic nationalist, proved critical to the Democratic Party retaking Congress in 2006 and staying competitive in the industrial heartland.

There was hope among economic progressives that Barack Obama would use his formidable 2008 victory to pursue fair trade. Yet momentum behind reforms to globalisation stalled abruptly under his presidency. After the 2009 auto bailout, his administration mostly resumed the path charted by Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush. And by 2015, the Trans-Pacific-Partnership, another technocratic free-trade agreement, was on the horizon. The opening was Trump’s to seize.

Of course, Trump’s haphazard efforts to reorder global trade occurred in a different economy than the one which had vexed old-school liberals. The new politics of protectionism also took place in a country much more polarised by region — and one in which the parties had largely swapped their geographical orientations, if not quite their policy commitments. That had a strange effect on how the parties responded to the tariffs introduced by Trump’s trade ambassador, Robert Lighthizer. Republicans who supported the old Washington Consensus on globalisation drew their strength from the Midwest and the South, regions that were now suffering the most from trade shocks. Meanwhile, the Democrats, once a vehicle for both the South’s development and industrial workers, handily dominated the Northeastern and Pacific coasts — affluent hubs that had long since turned the corner on industrial decline.

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The basis for a coherent industrial strategy was stymied by this evolution in the party system. Trump’s unique coalition of ex-Democrats and populist independents did not fit easily in either party’s tent. Although Democrats retained some loyalty in ailing manufacturing districts, they increasingly represented highly educated metro areas that had benefitted most from the tech boom and globalisation. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan’s Republicans, for their part, were reluctant to drop their faith in free-trade, even though the party’s new working-class base opposed it and even though the GOP historically had been the party of industrial protectionism. Despite working-class voters’ longstanding support for a new approach to trade, the dominant wings of both parties treated tariffs and similar measures as anathema to America’s global leadership.

These dynamics further constrained the rise of a protectionist bloc in Congress during Trump’s first term. While House Democrats worked closely with Lighthizer on the USMCA, NAFTA’s replacement, mainstream liberal discourse routinely mocked Trump’s declaration that he was a “Tariff Man”. Besides the political risks of “agreeing” with Trump on trade during the high tide of the “Resistance”, national Democrats were hesitant over whether to try to win back white industrial workers or harness identity politics to mobilise the so-called “rising American electorate”. Under Biden, the pendulum swung toward the former strategy. This vindicated Rust Belt Democrats like Senator Brown who had pleaded with the party establishment to revise trade policy and decisively counter China’s export model. By then, however, the architects of Bidenism were conjuring a New Deal electorate whose remnants no longer trusted Democrats to deliver on trade. Inflation, meanwhile, had irreversibly soured many voters on the economy, sapping the positive impact of policies decades in the making. Brown and a handful of other red- and purple-state Democrats were among the casualties on election night.

The odds of deeper collaboration between protectionist Democrats and the incoming administration are hazy at best. The ranks of the former are now diminished, while the Wall Street types jockeying for influence are plainly allergic to a populist, pro-manufacturing agenda. As signalled by his pick of hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to lead the Treasury Department, Trump may simply resort to using the threat of new tariffs as a bargaining tool, rather than building on Biden’s more interventionist approach to long-term investment.

If Trump flounders, Democrats may once more have a window to argue they have the vision and the policies to rebuild an egalitarian economy. A nascent group of younger House Democrats who managed to fend off the GOP in parts of the Rust Belt are turning up the dial on economic populism, arguing for both more corporate oversight and more support for manufacturing. Along with Minnesota’s Ken Martin, a populist contender to chair the Democratic National Committee, these Democrats have not disowned Biden’s economic agenda. But they have reproached the party’s liberal elite and media allies, whose blithe view of the economy’s true health betrayed a maddening condescension toward discontent workers.

Blue-city progressives, meanwhile, are at a crossroads: with the purported rise of the “Trump-AOC voter”, they must come to terms with a multiracial electorate that defies easy categorisation on cultural issues and economics. But it is doubtful they can simply shed their close association with doctrinaire identity politics, much as they might find it advantageous to ally with the Rust Belt populists and emphasise workers’ top concerns. For now, both factions are a minority in a party whose internal disagreements on trade and industrial policy cut across its Left and centrist flanks.

Ultimately, any potential reconfiguration of the Democratic Party toward Left-protectionism won’t be possible without an overhaul of its national political strategy. Yet, under its present, ageing leadership, the party’s geographical woes seem insurmountable. Establishment coastal liberals tend to recoil from tariffs, and their potential heirs, in marked contrast to both the populists and the progressives, are mounting a new defence of globalisation. Until a new crop of Democrats forcefully champion left-behind America, the party will remain embattled — and estranged from the liberalism which once gave it purpose.

To be fair to Biden, he is the truest successor of FDR yet. Like Roosevelt, he came into office at a time of overwhelming economic crisis and despair. And like Roosevelt, he realised that nothing short of a programme of economic reconstruction as ambitious as the New Deal would suffice to address America’s long-term and corrosive economic suffering. It was not enough, in his eyes, simply to banish the virus and restore the economy to its pre-Covid state. He needed to restore faith in American democracy and the American dream.

At the heart of Bidenomics is the idea that 21st-century America is in the grip of its own economic crisis, this one emerging far more slowly and unevenly than the Great Depression, but with results that were just as disfiguring. In the past 30 years, a globalised world of free markets and unregulated capitalism has generated a vast economic gulf between deindustrialised rural and small-town America, and the vast metropolises. The resulting economic suffering and social disintegration, Biden observed, had made possible the rise of strongmen such as Trump who captivated angry and alienated portions of the population with their faux-populism and attacks on distant elites.

The only way to address the root of this populist anger and alienation, Biden thought, was by implementing a vast Rooseveltian public spending plan to bring manufacturing jobs back to America’s deindustrialised regions. His economic package — which included a mammoth trillion-dollar physical infrastructure bill, a $400 billion Chips and Science Act to re-shore the manufacturing of computer chips, and a $400 billion green energy bill, the largest investment the US had ever made in green energy — rivalled some of the biggest accomplishments of the early New Deal.

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In other ways, too, Biden has shown himself a careful student of Roosevelt. He has welcomed elements of a reawakened Left into his administration, cognisant that the greatest progressive advances by the Democratic Party across the last century have resulted from the willingness of the party’s centre to work with its Left-wing. In contrast to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who had both snubbed the Left, Biden embraced Bernie Sanders’s support for his election.

But here the similarities of Bidenomics and Roosevelt’s New Deal come to an end. Whereas Roosevelt pushed nearly the entirety of his legislative programme through Congress — much of this in the legendary First 100 Days of his administration — major parts of Biden’s programme have failed. That Biden hit a wall is not surprising, given that he had a small majority in the House and the slimmest possible majority in the Senate. Roosevelt by contrast enjoyed huge majorities in both the House (313 to 122) and Senate (58 to 37).

Their administrations have diverged in a second, more surprising, way. While Roosevelt’s popularity soared as his economic recovery programme faltered, Biden’s plummeted as his economic plan succeeded. In Roosevelt’s first year and a half in office, the economy ticked up briefly, then plunged into depression once again. His legislative programmes had generated intense hope; their early failure spread discontent and then social uprisings. Workers went on strike in large numbers. Populist demagogues — including Louisiana senator Huey Long and radio priest Father Coughlin — attracted millions to their crusades by criticising the New Deal for not doing enough for the “little guy”. However, very little of this populist fury was directed at Roosevelt himself. In the off-year elections of 1934, the Democrats’ Congressional majorities actually increased, deepening FDR’s control of Congress.

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Biden’s fate has been the opposite. As the economy soars, his popularity has sunk. Thanks to Biden, there’s now a palpable dynamism in the US economy, one felt neither in Britain nor Europe, nor in Thirties America under Roosevelt: unemployment has been below 4% since April 2022; economic growth in the third quarter of 2023 exceeded 5%, a level that mature industrial economies of the West no longer expect to achieve; and the number of manufacturing jobs in the US is the highest since 2008. And yet, Biden’s popularity has crashed: his approval rating now stands at a miserable 37%, down 20% since April 2021.

Biden’s age and perceived infirmity have undoubtedly contributed to this plunge. Yet when Roosevelt ran for a fourth term as president in 1944, though his ill health had led him near death’s door, few Americans seemed to care. A soaring inflation rate — the highest in 50 years — that erupted under Biden’s watch has no doubt damaged his reputation in ways that have nothing to do with his age. But one would think that he would get some credit for cutting the inflation rate from its 9% peak in 2022 by nearly two thirds. None has yet been forthcoming.

What was it about Roosevelt, or the Thirties, that allowed him to suffer defeats on the economic front without losing popularity? And how was he able to tap into what we might call the American imaginary — the section of the political soul where Americans fashion their hopes and dreams — in ways that Biden can’t? Roosevelt was certainly a more ebullient figure and a more eloquent speaker than Biden, but he was also living in a different era. He arrived in the White House at a moment when the 20th-century’s “age of reform”, to use Richard Hofstadter’s phrase, was far more advanced than its 21st-century counterpart.

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Three aspects of the Roosevelt era stand out as different from today. First, the magnitude of the Great Depression. Unlike the 2008 financial crisis, which hit some regions worse than others, the Great Depression came for every American state, and every group of people. It also went on for far longer than the Covid pandemic, which helped FDR, a politician skilled at giving comfort and generating hope in time of despair, build an enduring appeal. Indeed, Biden, whose own empathetic instincts are acute, enjoyed his greatest popularity when the threat of Covid was most severe and widespread — in other words, when life in America most closely resembled the Great Depression.

Then there’s the fact that Roosevelt was able to draw the metaphorical borders of the national community more tightly than can be done today. In the Thirties, the gates were shut tight to immigrants: Mexicans were allowed in, but they were just as easily deported when no longer wanted; feminism and an early gay movement had faded; patriarchy and heteronormativity reigned just about everywhere. Moreover, FDR made a deal with the devil — the southern barons of the Democratic Party who controlled Congress. The latter agreed to support New Deal programmes so long as FDR didn’t disturb the racial hierarchies and white supremacy that structured southern life. These moves shrank what David Hollinger has called the “circle of the we” — those considered to be full members of (and able to make full claims on) the national political community.

What’s more, unlike Biden, Roosevelt was heir to a 30-year-long effort to reform American capitalism, helped by the presidencies of his cousin Teddy and his Democratic predecessor in the White House, Woodrow Wilson. The movement that Biden leads, by contrast, is far younger and more naïve, with limited experience of power. It was Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, not FDR, who broke with the economic orthodoxy of their predecessors, as Biden is now the first to break with the neoliberal policies of Clinton and Obama. And it’s worth remembering that prior to FDR’s presidency, the progressive movement had lost more battles than it had won. Perhaps Biden and his Democratic Party will go through a similar cycle of defeats before achieving enduring victories. Donald Trump is certainly intent on laying waste to Biden’s economic programme if he wins in 2024.

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It took decades for the Democrats to build enough support to reform capitalism under Franklin Roosevelt. But the New Deal would never have succeeded had warring cultural tribes in America not put aside some of their differences in order to unite over a common political cause. Consider the scene that greeted Roosevelt when he appeared at the Democratic Party Convention in New York City in June 1924. This moment marked Roosevelt’s return to active political life after a devastating encounter with polio that cost him the use of his legs. On the evening of 26 June, Roosevelt made his way to the convention podium, supported by unwieldy steel leg braces, to put the name of Al Smith in nomination. Al Smith then battled his opponent William Gibbs McAdoo for 103 ballots across two weeks in an unbearably hot Madison Square Garden, before both men gave up, and shifted their support to a milquetoast candidate, John Davis, who then got crushed in the general election.

The divisions that Roosevelt encountered in 1924 were as bitter as any today: between Catholics and Protestants, between urban and rural districts, between “wets” and “drys”, between the North and the South, between the immigrant and the native born, between liberals and the KKK. These divisions then seemed insurmountable, especially in the Democratic party. There were grounds for thinking that the Democrats would never again win a Congressional majority or elect a president. Yet less than 10 years later, Democrats pushed aside their “insurmountable” differences. Americans who hated each other were now willing to come out of their bunkers and find common ground. Roosevelt helped to facilitate that process: he had the political skills, to be sure; he was assisted by the magnitude of the Great Depression, which thrust so many Americans of different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds into similar conditions of economic precarity. But Roosevelt, witness to the calamity of 1924, also understood that he had to find a way to temper the culture wars.

The cultural challenge that confronts Biden is more difficult. Roosevelt’s Republican predecessors had shut the country’s immigrant gates in the Twenties, saving FDR and his party from having to wade into that contentious issue themselves. Because racial equality is now a core commitment of the Democratic Party, the Roosevelt formula of addressing class inequality while marginalising issues of racial inequality cannot, and should not, be redeployed. But the higher level of difficulty that confronts Biden does not render his challenge — or that of his party — impossible. Culture wars wax and wane. And America is currently witnessing a possible waning in one very unexpected place: the coming together of women across the political, racial, and ethnic spectrum to defeat radical Republican measures in state legislatures to outlaw all access to abortion. These alliances of liberal and conservative women fuelled an unexpected surge in Democratic victories in the 2022 elections, and are likely to do so again in 2024.

This surprising alliance of Democratic and Republican women may not be enough to propel Biden to a second term. But should he lose in 2024, it would be wrong to regard his defeat as the end of his political undertaking. It may make sense to view the Biden presidency as the beginning, rather than as the culmination, of a 21st-century project of economic reconstruction. The heyday of reconstruction on this scale may lie in the 2030s, when an heir to Biden may play a role similar to the one that Roosevelt took on in the Thirties: learning from his predecessors, and accurately sizing up what needs to be done to bring to America, once again, a large and transformative Democratic majority.

But now, on the other side of that lonely road, lies a construction site. “There will be 38 buildings here, with over a thousand apartments,” Araz Imanov, a senior advisor to the Azerbaijani president, tells me. They will provide homes for people internally displaced in the Nineties. The project is part of a huge, government-led reconstruction effort — one that could serve as a blueprint, when the time comes, for the rebuilding of Ukraine.

Even after peace is declared, the scars of war zones make them hard to rebuild. A dozen or so metres from the edge of the road, there are signs warning of the presence of landmines — a legacy of the illegal military occupation of the town, which only ended after the Second Karabakh War in 2020. “That’s why it took us a long time, almost a month, to get in,” Imanov says.

When the authorities finally found safe passage into the town, they discovered houses that no longer had roofs, window frames or doors. They had been torn apart by hand rather than artillery. Everything, down to the copper wiring, was stripped away by occupiers and shipped over the border to Armenia, to be sold as building materials. The most well-preserved building is a former publishing house with an ornate doorway, flanked by two stone columns: a reminder of how culture, and commerce, used to flourish here.

“For 30 years, the Armenians claimed that these territories belonged to them,” says Imanov with a hint of sarcasm. The areas were given new Armenian names, and “their prime minister made statements claiming that they’re not even a separate territory but a part of Armenia itself. Yet this is the way that they treated the lands that they claimed to be their own.”

Azerbaijan’s intentions, however, couldn’t be more different. Cities that were destroyed in the first war will be rebuilt from scratch. Domestic refugees — of which there are 650,000 — will be given fully-furnished homes financed by the state, free of charge. Private sector businesses will be incentivised to invest in what the Azerbaijanis call “the liberated territories” — an area roughly equivalent in size to the state of Qatar — with tax breaks and customs duty exemptions. Dubbed “The Big Return”, this is a huge nation-building mission comparable to Roosevelt’s New Deal.

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Already, the progress made since the end of the war is remarkable. In April, when I visited Karabakh, only the skeletal outlines of the new apartment blocks had begun, but on the edge of town, the glistening Fuzuli International Airport is already in operation. Construction began just two months after the end of the Second Karabakh War, in January 2021; by September that year, it had already accommodated its first test flight. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles of newly-asphalted roads have been built in the formerly occupied territories. A railway linking Karabakh to the capital, Baku, which sits on the shores of the Caspian Sea, is already under construction.

The largest urban settlement in the liberated territories is Aghdam. Before the First Karabakh War, it was home to around 37,000 mostly ethnic Azeri population people. Nowadays, it’s known as “the Hiroshima of the Caucasus”, because it looks like it’s been hit by a nuclear bomb. The Azerbaijani government plans to rebuild the town from the ground up because the ruination is so total that there is nothing left to salvage. The same is true of Ukrainian cities including Bakhmut and Mariupol, which might one day be inspired by The Big Return.

Before anything can be built on newly liberated land, though, that land needs to be free of explosives. Decades of military occupation by Armenian forces turned south-western Azerbaijan into one of the most heavily landmined territories on the planet; according to the Halo Trust, “there have been more landmine accidents per capita in Karabakh than anywhere else in the world”. However, Ukraine is now in danger of taking this unfortunate title. Last September, the Ukrainian government estimated that 160,000km² of land may be “contaminated” by landmines and other unexploded ordnance — an area more than 13 times the size of the entire liberated territories of Azerbaijan.

“After the war, people wanted to go back to see their villages or visit cemeteries, and this is when the majority of [landmine] accidents happened,” says Samir Poladov, the deputy chairman of the Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action [ANAMA]. Founded in 1998, the agency both trains minesweepers and teaches the local population to avoid landmines, using everything from dogs to drones to locate them, Soon, it will begin using giant African rats, which have been trained to sniff out explosive substances.

Yet even with all of these cutting-edge methods, the mine-clearing process is incredibly slow, because the Armenians have largely failed to supply Azerbaijan with maps marked with their locations. “Every square metre might potentially be dangerous,” says Poladov. “The best approach is to be like: okay, everything is mined, the only non-mined territories are the ones that have been cleared.” Azerbaijan reclaimed some 11,700km² of territory in 2020 and, in the first year of operations, cleared a little over 500km² of landmines. For context, de-mining Ukraine at that rate would take over three centuries.

Nevertheless, ANAMA provides a useful model for how Ukraine can deal with its landmine problem once the war is over. As part of the Big Return programme, Azerbaijanis who have been internally displaced since the Nineties, and who wish to return to their former homelands, have the option of applying to the agency for mine clearance training. After they successfully complete it, they are offered jobs with the agency and posted to the liberated territories. “They’re clearing their own land,” says Poladov. “They’re doing this job for themselves.”

The workers are motivated, then, but they are also cheap. “If we didn’t have this agency, our government would have to outsource this to international companies,” says Poladov, “which would be 10 times more expensive.” Instead, Azerbaijan has become a world leader in mine clearance: Poladov regularly shares his expertise at international conferences.

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There has been a great deal of debate about how the funds set aside by the European Commission to rebuild Ukraine should be distributed, given the corruption that has plagued the country. Western donors fretting that funds might be misspent by government authorities could alleviate their fears by financing Ukraine’s very own version of ANAMA. Because not only is de-mining the unavoidable first step in the long process of reconstruction, but employing Ukrainians to do it would also help frame national renewal as an empowering, patriotic mission.

Citizens invariably want to help rebuild. “After the war, I felt like I must do something for my country,” a young Azeri teacher tells me. She’s based in the town of Agali, which is located in the deep south-western corner of Azerbaijan, nestled between the borders of Armenia and Iran. It is the first urban settlement in the region to welcome back returnees that had been displaced in the Nineties; the first batch arrived last July. As of April this year, Agali is home to roughly 420 people who make up 86 families, all of which live free-of-charge in the several-dozen houses that have been built here at the state’s expense over the past two years.

The teacher I spoke to is one of the few residents who is not a returnee. She grew up on the other side of the country, in a military family; her patriotic duty drove her to apply for a teaching job in Agali. “People younger than me died [in the war],” she says. “The whole people feel a duty to do something with this land. That’s why we want to come here.”

Agali looks and feels like a plush gated community built around a suburban shopping centre. Driving past street after street of identikit, two-storey houses with white walls and green roofs, visitors will arrive at a centre that includes a well-stocked supermarket, bank and a restaurant serving Azerbaijani classics. Nearby is the school where our tour guide works, built to accommodate 360 students, which opened last September and still smells of freshly laid paint.

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“We lived in [the town of] Sumqayit, but we always carried a wish to return to our land,” one man in his early sixties tells me. He’s standing outside his identikit house with his wife and teenage son. “When we finally came back for the first time and received this place, we were moved.” The man’s family were forced to flee in the first war. Since returning, they’ve been employed as drivers for none other than ANAMA: their days are spent ferrying around de-mining experts, their equipment and the scraps of de-fused explosives that get unearthed from the surrounding land.

Rather than simply rebuilding what was once here, state urban planners have taken the opportunity to improve on the past. Agali is fully WiFi connected and entirely energy self-sufficient. Solar panels are fitted to the buildings and a hydroelectric dam has been built on a nearby river. Settlements under construction across the liberated territories will likewise be equipped with green technologies. Azerbaijan is rising from the ashes as a nation of the future, ready for the challenges of the 21st century.

It is a path that Ukraine could follow. Prior to the Russian invasion, the country had been held back by a sclerotic post-Soviet economy. Many Ukrainians have fled to more advanced economies — a million to Germany alone. To entice them to return, and to stem future brain drain, the new Ukraine, built on present-day battlefields, will need to be thoroughly modern. By the time Kyiv is ready to start thinking about making plans, The Big Return to Karabakh should be complete. Then, Azerbaijan’s own hard-won experiences can be put to good use, helping to rebuild a war zone.