Cat Warren: I was disgusted reading about the correspondents’ dinner -- and the coverage was typically predictable, with the NY Times pulling its punches and providing a kind of sanitized version of what Trump actually said. I feel as though the mainstream media embarrassed themselves. Kaitlin Collins, whom I respect, shook his hand after his transphobic, mysoginistic attack on her. I feel as though the mainstream media continues to normalize what is egregious/outrageous behavior on his part. Staying silent…appeared to be the extent of the press’s disapproval of his attacks. Would love your thoughts.

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No disagreement, really.

The truth is, it wouldn’t have been much better if Trump were a “normal” president. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has been professionally indefensible on the reporter-source dimension, and basically corrupt on the reporter-sponsor and reporter-guest dimensions for decades. Arguably since the tradition began, but certainly since it became this networking festival of celebrities, politicians, and lobbyists 40ish years ago.

The correspondents’ association papered these defects over by emphasizing the fact that the proceeds fund journalism scholarships, and the idea that subjecting the president to a roasting sends a powerful signal to the world about the importance of press freedom. These are thin fig leaves.

Washington journalists are well connected enough to raise scholarship money without hosting a big party for the president and political operatives and lobbyists and advertisers. They spread the good word about speech and press freedom by challenging the president in public, to advance the public interest, not by teasing him at a fancy dinner.

And that was all true before it meant feting a man who’s abusing his powers, official and unofficial, to destroy the vocation of journalism.

So where it was once indefensible and corrupt, it’s now indefensible, corrupt, debasing, and an affront to the free people in this country resisting authoritarianism. Few will pick up on the subtle fact that the dinner honored the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, as Trump sat captive on the dais. Few will understand the professionalism of those journalists, in treating Trump politely, as providing a symbolic contrast to his corrosive behavior. But many will draw the inference: If this man was really trying to end democracy and destroy the first amendment, surely journalists wouldn’t break bread with him.

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Phil Schumacher: I listened to an interview of Kim Lane Sheppele on Strict Scrutiny discuss the walk back from autocracy to democracy. One interesting comment she made is some human right’s groups have come down on the new Hungarian government for attempting to remove Orban’s Supreme Court justices and other corrupt Fidesz officials. I am all for removing corrupt MAGA officials that have burrowed into the civil service and doing significant reforms to the Supreme Court similar to what Hungary is attempting. How do Democrats prepare for attacks by bad faith actors (Republicans, Fox) and norms/law afficionados who will criticize Dems for not following the “rules” to remove MAGA obstructors or reform the court? Is there anything Dems should be doing from now through 2028 to proactively blunt the damage of these attacks and how would you structure their messaging?

I’m much less concerned that norms police will get all huffy if and as Democrats root out MAGA officials who’ve burrowed in to the government than I am about how they’ll react to court expansion. So, to use a term I hate: Democrats should “socialize” the idea of expanding the court, and frame it in terms of both accountability and democracy reform.

We have to take for granted that the right wing will portray any post-Trump democratic reforms as terrible affronts to norms, democracy, “the Constitution” as it exists in their fictional universe. Filibuster reform? What would the founders think?! (There was no filibuster at the founding.) Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico? They’re trying to rig the Senate!!! (We’ve added dozens of states to the union in our history, and adding these would give representation to disenfranchised U.S. citizens.)

At the same time, we probably can take for granted that the overwhelming majority of liberals and progressives (read: Democratic Party voters) will not be taken in by this. We’re really talking here about tastemakers and gatekeepers in the middle. How do we get a critical mass of them to side with us over the clowder of Republicans caterwauling in bad faith?

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When I wrote last week’s newsletter about Medicare for All, and seeking detente in the Democratic Party’s factional wars, I didn’t know the Searchlight Institute—a new, moderate-branded think tank—was about to release what authors David Bowen and describe as a “comprehensive plan to achieve universal health care.”

Searchlight proposes building on the foundation of the Affordable Care Act by fixing what Republicans have broken, then going further: more generous subsidies for private insurance; fewer obstacles to enrolling in Medicaid; then, over time, a public option that would bring Medicare Advantage plans (privately administered but federally powered) into marketplaces for people who don’t get affordable insurance through their employers.

Searchlight would also create a novel inducement to impel holdout states like Florida and Texas to expand their Medicaid programs: No augmented private-market subsidies for states that continue boycotting the expansion. But the way the provision is structured might actually limit the overall coverage expansion (why wouldn’t Republicans just say no to both?) and would be vulnerable to sabotage by an unchecked, partisan Supreme Court.

Even still, these reforms would bring coverage rates much higher than they’ll be at the end of Donald Trump’s term, possibly even higher than they were when the ACA was functioning at its best under Joe Biden. Their plan would improve public welfare significantly. Millions of Americans would be better off.

But would coverage be universal, as the authors describe it?

They use that phrasing, at least in part, to emphasize a conceptual distinction between multipayer systems that, in sum, cover every citizen, and plans that aim to pool all citizens (or the overwhelming majority of them) into a single government-administered insurance program. Call the latter “Medicare for All.” The unspoken implication is that there’s a way to accomplish the goal of universality by sealing up all the cracks in the system that leave millions uninsured, without taking steps as radical as Medicare for All—which would either eliminate the private insurance industry, or shrink it dramatically.

This distinction is important to mainstream Democrats. If it is actionable in the real world, then the moral divide between the left and the center closes, and little is lost by embracing incremental reforms: We all support universal health care, we just have different ideas about how to achieve the goal.

The writer Jonathan Chait recently emphasized this point in an article called “You Don’t Need to Vote for Socialists to Get Universal Health Care.” In it, he asserts, “Nobody in the Democratic Party opposes universal coverage.”

Teeing off the same theme, Easton himself claimed that the plan I support—open up Medicare, and let it outcompete private health insurance—“isn't actually capitulating on Medicare for All. It's doubling down on a commitment to universal health care, which Democrats of every ideological stripe support.”

Are these claims true, though? Is there a way to make insurance coverage a basic, permanent fact of citizenship by incrementally reforming the current system rather than changing it radically? A lot hinges on the answer. If it’s “yes,” mainstream Democrats can protect the public from Republican sabotage without conceding much if anything to the left. We won’t, as I argued, “always be one election away from Republicans throwing 30 million people off their health plans.”

After covering national health care debates for about 20 years, though, I think the answer is no. Probably not on paper, and definitely not in our political reality, where all the different insurance systems comprise constituencies with different levels of political clout, and the right places bullseyes on the weakest.

The claim that Democrats of every stripe support universal health care is true abstractly but not programmatically. Many Democrats blanch at the steps that would be required to build out the last mile of coverage. Even under various manifestations of “Clintoncare,” which contemplated a much more aggressive approach to reform, it was widely understood that some millions of people would remain uninsured. Eight percent of the population, according to one 1994 report from the Congressional Budget Office. As President Clinton said at the time, “no one has yet found a way to do that without a law that says ‘universal coverage.’… [W]e have universal Social Security, but about two percent somehow don’t get covered. We have universal school attendance laws in every state in the country, but there are always a couple of percent of the people that fall through the cracks.”

The cracks in Obamacare were larger. Where Clintoncare would have opened job-based health insurance to tens of millions, growing out our biggest private system, the ACA created new, smallish systems at the margins for the self-employed, small-business employees, and near-indigent. These have proven attractive targets for Republicans.

What made Obamacare radical, in the American context, was its coverage guarantee. But even excluding those who’d choose to remain uninsured (like children who skip school, or seniors who don’t claim Social Security benefits) this did not make coverage universal. It just meant insurance companies could no longer legally discriminate against sick people by denying them coverage or overpricing it.

But the ACA wasn’t of much use to uninsured people (sick or healthy) who couldn’t afford private market premiums, even with subsidies, nor to people who were eligible, but too detached from social services to enroll.

And these shortcomings of the plan increased the number of people who chose to opt out: The law originally required them to pay a small penalty for going uninsured; Republicans eliminated the coverage-requirement penalty altogether after a few years, making free-riding literally free. Obviously no one anywhere is required to consume the health care services they’re entitled to, but in all societies, these defectors will eventually get sick or injured. In other societies, those people show up at hospitals or clinics, or get wheeled into emergency rooms, and providers treat them without sweating their patients’ ability to pay. There may still be de minimis out-of-pocket costs or paperwork at the point of care, but it’s understood that everyone’s covered.

The ACA design made it so that, for many abstainers, having a change of heart on the gurney wouldn’t really work. The public will cover (some) emergency care (through the mechanism of higher costs) but from there, options vary and thin out. If you’re poor and meet the criteria, you might end up on Medicaid. But if you aren’t insured, and one day you collapse due to an undiagnosed chronic condition, you can’t just count on being able to walk out of the hospital insured, with no huge unpaid bills, and embark on a course of coordinated care.

To accomplish that, you really do need a law that, per Bill Clinton, says “universal.” Or “all,” if you prefer.

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Nevertheless, it is true that regulated private health insurance, along with expanded public programs, can get you very close. Had Republicans cooperated in the establishment of the ACA as a compromise, tolerating a system that leaves, say, five to 10 percent of the population uncovered might have been worth the upside of long-run stability. And over time, with enhancements and wraparound services, we could have brought that number down. Ultimately my main problem with the incrementalist approach isn’t the cracks people fall through. It’s that the current system is highly vulnerable to partisan vandalism, which makes repeatedly sealing the biggest cracks a sucker’s game.

As enacted, the ACA was projected to leave a bit over 20 million Americans uninsured.

The first attack struck before the law had been implemented, when the Supreme Court rewrote it to make its Medicaid expansion optional for states rather than mandatory. Its coverage potential dropped by millions in an instant.

Then (as noted above) Republicans eliminated the coverage “requirement” (which was itself more like a parking ticket than a real inducement to buy coverage). Democrats countered under Biden by temporarily increasing the value of market subsidies. But those enhanced tax credits expired. Republicans didn’t and won’t renew them1. And they certainly don’t go out of their way to make the law function well, or to draw eligible beneficiaries out of the woodwork.

Their goal upon passage of the ACA was to get the law off the books altogether. They never accomplished it. But the Supreme Court got them, say, a quarter of the way there. They got another quarter of the way there through malign neglect and outright sabotage. By the end of Trump’s term, the ACA will likely still exist as a matter of law. But it will be in terrible shape.

This is why, apart from the goal of fostering intraparty cohesion, Democratic wonks should place a higher priority on establishing a truly universal system that’s insulated from GOP sabotage, than on fixing the visible damage Republicans have done to the current system. I suspect they’d quickly arrive at the conclusion that to protect beneficiaries, particularly lower-income ones, we need to consolidate them. Republicans would still be able to siphon money out of the system to finance tax cuts, but they wouldn’t be able to do it by removing poor people from the rolls.

In other words, I think it’s time to move on. Bowen recalls that Obama described the ACA as a starter home. He writes, “we don’t need to tear down the ACA ‘starter home’ and build a new one.”

But nobody tears down their “starter home” to build and move into a new starter home. The metaphor contemplates a better quality of life over time. People buy starter homes with the goal of moving on to something bigger and better. Some people do sink lifetimes into maintaining their starter homes, or even tearing down walls to build out new rooms. But it usually makes more sense, when the opportunity arises, to trade up.

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That’s my case against reattempting incrementalism. But I admit, I’m a cheap date.

I thought it was a bad idea for Obama to negotiate away the public option he campaigned on, and a worse idea for him to hide the ball about that choice. I thought it was a bad idea for Democrats in Congress to negotiate the zombie public option down from one with Medicare’s purchasing power to one with a trivial market advantage over private plans, before abandoning the idea altogether. But I did not think these disappointments merited killing what was left of the bill. That version of Obamacare, the one that became law, ended up providing insurance to tens of millions of people. This is why every progressive in Congress at the time, including Bernie Sanders, voted for it, resisting calls from the left to hold out for the public option. Even if it meant dooming the legislation. It’s hard to imagine a more cavalier example of making the perfect the enemy of the good, with so many lives in the balance.

If Democrats come back to power in 2029, and their main policy accomplishment is a tinkering that reinsures those who lost coverage under Trump, and then some, it would strike me similarly: a big missed opportunity, much better than nothing.

But my thought at this point is that we should aim for universality of the kind that moots the question “is this person insured?” with a system that’s “too big to sabotage.” When someone arrives at the hospital gravely ill or injured, nobody should have to fear that admitting him will ruin his finances, or that he won’t be able to afford days, months, years, or a lifetime of outpatient care. And Republicans should have to be willing to upset hundreds of millions of people, not just tens, if they want to attack the system.

Our balkanized approach is a recipe for endless legislative and administrative complexity, along with painful swings between near-universality and giant uninsured populations. If we’re going to sign up for chaos and fighting, I’d rather do something reckless but irreversible, than something cautious and fragile.

My preference would be something considered, like carefully written Open Medicare legislation. But after living through the past decade, I’d rather see Democrats embrace a “move fast and break things” mentality than re-embark on a strategic approach to reform that’s vulnerable to huge reversals. Stop playing patsy to Republicans and make them regret their conduct over the past 16 years. Better to (in essence) cross out the number 65 everywhere in the Social Security Act’s Medicare title and replace it with the number zero than leave the fate of millions up to 20,000 swing voters in Wisconsin every four years. Plant the stake and it’s done. Deal with the messy consequences as they arise.

Democrats would face fierce blowback—as a technocratic matter this would be a terrible way to establish Medicare for All—but good luck to anyone who, four years later, would try to raise that number back to 65 and leave hundreds of millions of Americans with nothing.

That kind of approach obviously won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s not really mine! But I can’t conjure a faithful opposition. And I wonder why, after all we’ve been through, we don’t see more ambition to move out of the straw starter home into one the big bad wolf can’t blow down.

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First, the right tried to “cancel” The Odyssey (film) for the sins of allowing a black woman (Lupita Nyong'o) to portray Helen of Troy, and casting a trans man (Elliot Page) in any role whatsoever.

These reactionaries, led by Elon Musk, did not come out and say “we find these people disgusting,” but what else could they have meant? The movie hadn’t even been released yet!

When their boycott method failed, and The Odyssey began setting box-office records, they retreated to more literary-sounding critiques. If they couldn’t cause the movie to flop, perhaps they could upend the critical consensus that the movie is good. They began complaining about the many ways director Christopher Nolan departed from the text of The Odyssey (book), as though it’s per se wrong to re-interpret old art.

This rhetorical concession has brought us endless Odyssey Discourse™️, as mainline writers (most of whom have watched the right-wing freakout unfold on X) take questionable sparring partners up on a revised critique. With the bigotry now thinly concealed, good-faith debate may resume.

A little pontificating is hard to resist from time to time, but this is a mistake. By treating instrumental ideas as if they’re analytically sincere (if a bit crude), they’re allowing improvisers to sniff out the sweet spot, where their exhausting crusade against modernity will get a fair hearing.

So let’s go meta instead. A worthier task is to examine what this whole deranged discourse says about them. What kind of person experiences an allergic reaction to any art that doesn’t serve as a trick mirror, reflecting back to them whatever they believe they and the world should look like?

To make the claims they’ve fallen back on, and stick to them, you’d have to believe very childish things about human nature. At some level, you’d have to believe there is no human nature at all, apart from what culture forces upon people. You have to believe that frailty is a choice; that He-Man would be possible, if only the right people were in charge.

Different haters have different nits to pick, but they’re all now upset about liberties Nolan took with the story (rather than with the gender and racial identities of his actors). Some of them characterize this as a preoccupation with “historical accuracy” (a complaint that conveniently allows them to smuggle the black-Helen freakout back into their critique) while others quibble more carefully: Nolan stripped the text of its intended cultural and moral lessons, and this is sacrilege.

“This isn’t something like having Denzel Washington play Macbeth,” complained one Townhall writer. “‘Macbeth’ is not specifically about Scottish culture the way ‘The Odyssey’ is about ancient Hellenics.”

(When Denzel Washington portrayed MacBeth, National Review maligned it as a “woke, Oscar-ready Shakespeare update.”)

To back up the notion that this is really just about the insult to long-dead “ancient Hellenics,” these critics bemoan that “Odysseus, as portrayed by a crusty Matt Damon… is torn and tormented about pretty much everything, often in contradictory ways, but certainly about his cunning plan to win the war against Troy. OK, there are a lot of things to say about the ancient Greeks, but being sad about winning a war is not one of them.”

"The main struggle for Nolan and his producer wife is that they can't make the ancient Greeks too heroic, masculine, iconic because that would uphold the Euro-supremacist roots of all Western Civilization. So you cast a woke manlet as the King."

That’s from the fanatical right-wing commentator Peachy Keenan, who may or may not have clacked out the words “Euro-supremacist roots of all Western Civilization” letter by letter, with two fingers marching across her keyboard in goosestep.

They’re right about this much: Nolan does not portray Odysseus as a remorseless conqueror, but rather an exhausted, regretful, traumatized elder, who bears little resemblance to Homer’s protagonist.

Ergo, something something, the movie does not deserve acclaim.

Sharper critics were quick to point out that The Odyssey isn’t a work of non-fiction. The Mediterranean has never been a funhouse of monsters or a gateway to the underworld. Homer wasn’t Herodotus. Poetry isn’t history. Odysseus wasn’t a real person. Helen probably wasn’t either, and the mythology isn’t even consistent on the question of whether she went to Troy.

But there were kings and elites and warriors and wars in Ancient Greece. It is thus practically certain that real people witnessed and committed real acts of heroism and brutality. Faithful recreations of these incidents are lost to time, but they form the basis of an oral tradition. They’re myths not just because they invoke supernatural beings and forces, but because they’re meant to impart lessons so that descendants would have archetypes to emulate, temptations to resist, sins to hate.

And if that is the case, then, as a modern and mature person, you should believe that someone like Odysseus—perhaps a composite of real-but-forgotten warriors—would fare in “real life” more like Nolan’s Odysseus than like Homer’s. Not only that, but (no one post this to X.com, and certainly don’t @ Elon) some ancient fighters and adventurers probably had vaginas, even if they didn’t really seem like it outwardly!

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We don’t need the classics to understand how myths grow untamed from underlying kernels of truth, and then persist in the popular imagination.

Our modern myths are less fantastical than the classics, because we have better historical practices, and better foundations of knowledge—about the human condition, but really the entire natural world.

There’s no reason to believe a man named Odysseus ever existed, let alone that gods beset him with mortal perils as he fought his way home from war. But it’s totally reasonable to believe that lost warriors, feared dead, returned home telling heart-rending tales of peril and deprivation.

Scanning through the right-wing Odyssey laments, I was reminded of the differences between Audie Murphy, the combat hero I learned about from popular culture, and Audie Murphy as depicted in Don Graham’s definitive biography No Name On The Bullet.

To the extent an American selected at random in 2026 knows anything at all about Audie Murphy, it probably has something to do with his courage and lethality on the frontlines of World War II. Some surely remember or know that his heroic service made him famous, prefiguring a successful Hollywood acting career. Perhaps they recall these scenes from the autobiographical film To Hell And Back, in which he portrayed himself.

In reality, the war shredded Murphy’s psyche, and he lived out his days addled, intemperate, and vulnerable. He suffered flashbacks. He picked fist fights with strangers. He slept with a gun under his pillow. Here’s a characteristic passage from Graham’s book.

Compounding his problems was insomnia, the old affliction from right after the war that had come back to ravage his nights from, he said, 1959 to 1966. He moved into his garage, made over into a bedroom, so that he could be farther away from noises. Hypersensitive to sound, he was bothered by any kind of noise. That, too, he traced back to combat: “In combat, you see, your hearing gets so acute you can interpret any noise. But now, there all kinds of noises that I couldn’t interpret.” Sometimes when he did sleep, the old nightmare returned. He was on a hilltop and faceless people were charging at him. He had his Garand rifle, but every time he shot one of these people a part of his rifle fell off. Finally all he had left was the trigger guard. Then he’d wake up. He kept the lights on so that when he woke up from the dream, he’d know where he was. Then, to cure the insomnia, he started taking a prescription drug, Placidyl. One pill would buy him three or four hours’ sleep; not enough but better than nothing. Before he knew it, he was hooked….

He started taking more pills and he began to lose weight. By now, he said, “I was a zombie. I dissipated all my money. I gave it away. I was not interested in anything. If a bus got in my way while I was driving on the freeway, I’d just force it to the side of the road....” His friend Al Jank, a wrangler and animal manager at Universal, was riding with Audie to the racetrack one day when a guy cut them off on the freeway. Audie threw his new Olds into high gear and raced after the guy at 100 miles an hour…. “I’m gonna catch that son of a bitch and run over him and shoot him.”

If you’re 12 years old, or a writer for Townhall.com you can lash out at Graham for puncturing the mythology. Or you can choose to be a grownup about it. Murphy did! He knew why he had a hard time functioning after the war. He was not shy about it. He even lobbied the government to study the effect of modern combat on the human mind.

We valorize warriors by recounting their daring escapes from captivity. If you’re interested in an underheralded, truly Odyssean story, find yourself a copy of Prisoner Of The U-90, the autobiography of World War I hero Edouard V.M. Izac, who was taken captive after a German U-boat sank his transport ship. As a prisoner and fluent German speaker, he eavesdropped on his captors, and committed the intelligence to memory, hoping to escape and debrief allied commanders. He once attempted escape by jumping from a moving train, but was recaptured with terrible injuries and held in solitary confinement. He eventually helped organize a jailbreak and trekked with an American compatriot over 100 haunting miles through mountainous terrain and across the Rhine into Switzerland.

“Often we were startled by sentinel-like trees standing alone in the fields: in the gloom they so closely resembled the guards, who we knew were by this time searching for us,” he later wrote. “When we spoke, which was seldom, it was always in whispers; and we never coughed from the moment we left the camp until we were safely in Switzerland.”

He received the Medal of Honor for his heroism, and eventually became a member of Congress, but his physical and psychological injuries forced his retirement from the military, and he grew to hate war.

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It’s not that there’d be anything wrong per se with purely mythological treatment of any of our great war stories. Civic mythology is propaganda, but it can be useful for promoting social virtue.

Part of the problem they perceive is that we—the culture—produce too much of the wrong type of propaganda. We valorize selfless heroes, but there will never be an acclaimed film or biography celebrating a marauder like Eddie Gallagher. Indeed, the modern right has less and less time these days for any cultural production that depicts the allies as the heroes of World War II.

But it’s also weird and revealing to get mad about truer depictions. Their response, as if experiencing the effects of poison, is bizarre to witness. It’s indicative of contempt, and not just for nuance or authority or different kinds of people, but for themselves. That were it not for our acknowledgement of and concern for human frailty—particularly male frailty—rightists would not need to be haunted by their own torments or feelings of inadequacy. They would not feel under siege because they could lay waste, mightily and without consequence, to whomever or whatever they perceived as a challenge to their divine excellence.

If it weren’t for the wokes, I could be Conan the Barbarian!

They direct their anger at Nolan and Nyong’o and Page, but their true beef is with reality. The human condition, and its durability across time and culture. The persistence of vulnerabilities and variabilities they'd prefer to deny. Until they can accept those things, discourse will be futile. PTSD wasn’t conjured into existence by psychiatrists intent on emasculating modern men. Men weren’t free from suffering until scholars identified common symptoms and triggers of trauma. Likewise, the coinage of the clinical term “transgender” did not cause people to become transgender. Gird your loins, Musk, but transgender people have always been with us. They were more real 3,000 years ago than Odysseus himself.

Could it be that the common language and consensus we’ve developed around conditions and identities we didn’t understand until recently drive what we might describe (in a collective sense) as “false positives”? People who, say, claim PTSD to explain different psychological symptoms, or even to pathologize what’s ultimately just flair for the dramatic? Absolutely. But people like that have always been with us, too. What it means to be human hasn’t changed, only how we regard the many manifestations of human existence. We don’t need to play along with child-minded chauvinists who’d drag us backward, to a time when it was easier to disown, sequester, or kill off the inconvenient ones.

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This piece has been updated for clarity.

Did you know that the House of Representatives has already passed temporary legislation to fund the government past September, so that there is not another shutdown before midterm elections?

Did you know that six Democrats voted for it1?

Did you know that if Democrats had achieved unanimity—every member present, all voting no—the measure would have failed? At the very least, Republicans would have had to twist arms or haul non-voting members back to Washington to clear the budget strictly along party lines?

My sense is almost nobody in America has any idea that this happened, let alone that there’s a funding deadline of any kind this year.

They don’t know this because there’s no indication of any controversy. Without controversy, it’s just minutiae of interest to political insiders.

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Chuck Schumer spoke recently with MSNOW’s Ali Vitali about the war-game exercises he’s convened in order to anticipate and prepare responses to actions Donald Trump might take to subvert the midterms.

“We have to prepare for it,” Schumer said on Wednesday. “What these so-called tabletop exercises teach us is when you’re prepared in advance, you can stop a lot of bad, bad things from happening. A lot of the stealing that [President Donald Trump] will do, but if you just wait for them to do it and then try to react that day? Not good.”

“You have to show that you can both stop Trump and try to have government move forward,” he added. “You have to. If every time Trump did one of these things we just froze, he’d win.”

It’s admittedly difficult to parse, but the implication seems to be that the Democratic approach to securing the election will be what you might call aggressive-reactive. That’s better than passive-reactive, where Democrats get caught with their pants down as the election unfolds and Trump begins deploying schemes. But the tabletop exercises seemingly do not include proactive steps Democrats could take to prevent Trump from even trying.

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In a recent court filing, the Trump administration admitted under penalty of perjury that it had canceled hundreds of Energy Department grants based solely on whether they’d been awarded to states with two Democratic senators, and that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, has lied about these cancelations repeatedly, including under oath.

Schumer hasn’t commented officially. Neither has Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. The two Democrats represent New York, which voted for Kamala Harris.

The top Democrat with jurisdiction over annual government spending is Patty Murray, who represents the blue state of Washington. She called it “an astounding admission that the President and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views.” But she also implied there can be no consequences without help from Trump’s accomplices in the GOP: “[I]t’s high time Republicans join us to hold this Administration accountable for the President’s failure to look out for all Americans.”

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Murray’s implication is incorrect. It’s incorrect as to the specific issue of the Energy Department grant cancelations, and it’s incorrect in general.

More to the point, it doesn’t take some parliamentary chess whiz to see the stronger set of moves on the gameboard. It would just take leaders willing to do what their own voters have been shrieking at them to do for well over a year now: stand up for themselves, and protect their constituents.

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The thread is open for members.

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How did Barack Obama manage to win over “traditional values” voters? Or, at least, enough of them to carry states like Indiana?

A few theories, not mutually exclusive:

• Obama was incredibly charismatic, which made people predisposed to liking him, sight unseen. Even people with, let’s say, strong unconscious bias against black people identified him as “one of the good ones.” This is what Joe Biden alluded to so clumsily in 2008, when he told the New York Observer, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man.”

• Obama was right from the outset, where most Democrats and all Republicans were wrong, on the central issue of the day: The war in Iraq was stupid.

• Obama was obviously more culturally progressive than just about anyone in Republican politics (cf. abortion) but did not front-run public opinion on most cultural issues, particularly pertaining to race, sexuality, and the nuclear family.

This is what made the Jeremiah Wright controversy such a threat to his political viability, and why he delivered a famous speech on race at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia in March 2008. But it’s also why he had to get dragged (or acted like he had to get dragged) into supporting same-sex marriage. He ran for president, and for much of his re-election campaign, as an opponent of same-sex marriage.

He invited Rick Warren, an avowed opponent of LGBT equality, to deliver the opening prayer at his first inauguration.

This was vexing to those of us who already understood “marriage is between one man and one woman” as an assertion right-wingers coined to draw mainstream support for discrimination against gay and lesbian couples.

Obama said it, too! How could he do that?! And how could it not run afoul of gay and lesbian voters, to say nothing of LGBT advocacy groups?

The answer, I think, is: That’s not all he said.

Here’s a representative comment, offered as an answer to a question from Jake Tapper. “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, but I also think that same-sex partners should be able to visit each other in hospitals, they should be able to transfer property, they should be able to get the same federal rights and benefits that are conferred onto married couples. And so, you know, as president, my job is to make sure that the federal government is not discriminating and that we maintain the federal government’s historic role in not meddling with what states are doing when it comes to marriage law. That’s what I’ll do as president.”

Or, here, just watch:

Charismatic as Obama was, though, I recall thinking this was all terribly inauthentic. (Turns out I was right.) I did not believe, even as an impressionable young person, that Obama sincerely opposed same-sex marriage. Perception is subjective, but he did not seem to be giving voice to his conscience. He seemed rather to be sheltering on the safe side of public opinion. This was frustrating—even to me, as a heterosexual person whose dignity wasn’t being treated as a political chit. But in a weird way, it was also reassuring: Better someone who’ll let the wind carry him than a regressive ideologue who’ll stand his ground. And maybe better someone whose heart is in the right place—who cares about all people—but who’ll fake traditionalism as a hedge against losing an election to someone who’d set back progress on all fronts.

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This is all relevant in today’s discourse, as Democrats find themselves whipsawed between public demands for “authentic” politicians, and public opinion on certain cultural issues, where progressive Americans and activists are well to the left of median.

Many of them experience cognitive dissonance, and, thus, appear inauthentic, when discourse alights on issues like race preferences, or language inclusivity, or (in edge cases) trans rights. Wherever their hearts lie, most of them can’t land the politics.

The latter is probably GOP’s preferred wedge issue. If 18 years ago, Republicans shrieked “one man, one woman” to place Democrats in a bind, today they shout “girl’s sports!” They say a variety of other, nastier things, too. But youth sports is the issue they cooked up in a lab to wrong foot Democrats. When they treat trans people as mentally ill or inherently violent, their cruelty is evident; but when they say “boys shouldn’t be allowed to play on girl’s sports teams,” they at least appear—in text if not intent—to be standing up for one set of children over another, on the basis of fairness.

In truth, they don’t care about children’s sports, or women’s sports, or even the main, professional, male-dominated sports, unless they’re useful for tribal recruitment. They care about political cudgels. Their views on NFL football and NBA basketball bounce around depending upon whether star players are obedient or free-thinking, or whether owners are willing to discipline players who speak out of turn. Athletic excellence is beside the point.

But they have made this a capital-I Issue. And while their cynicism is an essential part of the story, and a potential liability, Democrats can’t get away with refusing to weigh in on the controversy, no matter how frustrated they are that it’s ginned up in bad faith.

And this gives rise to a question at the heart of Democratic disarray, but that nobody can quite articulate in our soundbite-dominated politics: If the public today gravitates to authentic politicians, but a prominent Democrat authentically holds an unpopular view, what’s the right thing to do? Should they stick to their guns? Or should they do what Barack Obama did?

Frustratingly, I don’t believe there’s a correct, generalizable answer to this question.

But there are useful heuristics. And they point to the ways factional warriors on both sides of the Democratic Party tend to harm their own causes and the collective cause of defeating fascism by fighting each other rather than Republicans.

Progressives and moderates have conflicting theories of victory. The former believe conviction in defense of the little guy sells—if it doesn’t persuade, it at least earns respect; the latter believe public opinion comes first, and is more or less the whole ballgame. They view each other as existential obstacles to national power. But in their stridency and zero-sum attitude toward one another, they each lapse into inauthenticity.

What is authenticity?

As I mentioned to a couple weeks ago, I think it’s reasonable to define authenticity as the synthesis of self-knowledge and comfort in one’s own skin. Not necessarily charisma, but confidence and fearlessness. A person is authentic if they know what they believe, why they believe it, and can defend it without wilting or lashing out.

This can be faked, politicians try to fake it all the time. But only a really talented, intelligent, cynical actor can pull off the performance of authenticity without the sincere belief that’s supposed to reside at the heart of it. Even Obama struggled. His poker face was poor. And this is why factional fighting over questions like what to do about trans sports tends to leave most Democrats looking like caricatures of themselves. Progressives, like people pandering to interest groups; moderates, like people striving to impress the masses by triangulating against their own coalition partners. Hippie punching.

The right-wing wedge is a federal ban on trans participation in girl’s sports.

The left-wing counter is civil-rights protection for trans athletes.

From there the position-taking race is on, but few seem to really believe what they say. They lead with their inauthenticity. Emphasis on the word “few.” There are, in particular, progressives who hold the maximalist line fearlessly, without flinching, even at the risk of losing elections. Even at the risk of losing primary elections. They are authentic.

But there is a reason so many Democrats and progressives get tripped up on debate stages or as witnesses at congressional hearings. They are conflicted internally, and it spills out into the public. They know they’ve been cornered into a position that requires them to either grapple with an uncomfortable tradeoff or deny it. Their well-developed, well-intentioned reflex to side with the little guy comes into tension with the reasonable concerns of other little guys.

Centrists fall into a mirror-image trap. They are, ostensibly, members of a pluralist and tolerant party. When they echo Republican talking points without qualification, they seem out of place; like they know they’re stepping on vulnerable people demonstratively, as a branding exercise. They’re angling, or seem like they’re angling, for the sweet-spot of public opinion, rather than expressing sincere belief. They believe that politics is a game that can be solved by seizing the center on salient issues, and they validate their alignment with the majority by demeaning leftists who stand on unpopular principles.

It’s a hash. And it’s all before we get to the fact that the Republican position—an enforceable ban on trans participation in opposite-sex sports—would be a civil-liberties nightmare.

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The Republican view on same-sex marriage in 2008 was also a nightmare: It was not just that the state should refuse to recognize same-sex couples, but that it should deny them rights reserved only for heterosexual couples. From tax benefits to hospital visitation.

Obama may have been inauthentic in his traditionalism on this issue. But he wasn’t doctrinaire about his position-taking, either, and he did not try to showcase his independence by attacking progressives and (through them) gay people.

It’s infuriating that in our warped discourse, every right-wing culture provocation requires an answer, and that the right answer is so often presumed to be: find a vulnerable person and kick them in the teeth.

But I also don’t understand why Obama-like answers that maximize empathy across the population have fallen out of favor across the factional divide.

There’s a soccer field near my house, and at least once a week I walk past with my dog as boys and girls play soccer together. Everyone’s always having a great time. And since there is obviously no problem with this arrangement, it just as obviously wouldn’t matter if one of the girls was trans.

But as they age, things will change. Most of the boys will grow taller, stronger, and faster than the girls. I can’t imagine ever feeling compelled, then, to call in the government like a meddling tattletale. But I can imagine a near future when playing those same kids against each other would seem or simply become unfair.

That is the mass intuition Republicans exploit. It’s their cudgel. It’s why those debate-stage Democrats get tripped up on the question to this day. They want to be kind to the trans girl who’s bigger and stronger than the cis girls, but desperately wants to fit in and play with her peers. And so they struggle to acknowledge differences that would be uncontroversial to them if the trans girl were a cis boy.

Does this make them radical? No. It means they’re acting on a lovely, humane impulse. And since the dilemma arises so infrequently, they ask themselves, subconsciously, “what’s the harm in a little hand waving.” But lovely and humane as the impulse is, even a hint of confused thinking can strike an equally kind-hearted person as uncanny. Insensible. Perhaps even “inauthentic.”

That’s the bind. But in no sense does political expediency requires Democrats to flip all the way around to the Republican view. This is too many words to fit on a bumper sticker, but it’s not too many words for some candidate on a debate stage: The trans-sports controversy reflects a rare but heart-breaking dilemma. One kid who wants to play with her friends and peers; another who feels they can no longer compete on a level playing field. However the dilemma gets resolved, someone will feel like they got a raw deal. And sometimes, it will be a trans child. But when these situations arise, we need mature adults—teachers and parents and coaches and principals and league officials to decide what’s fair under what circumstances and resolve the conflict. And whatever they decide, they need to do it in a way that’s kind to children; to not bully them or make them feel like they don’t belong. By the same token, anyone who raises this issue angling for political advantage through cruelty to children is beneath contempt. Leave that vileness to Republicans.

This more or less encapsulates my authentic belief. I suspect it’s Obama’s, too. But unlike in 2008, when he feigned opposition to true civil equality for same-sex couples, the middle position here isn’t just a calculated hedge against the risk of blowback and backsliding. I tend to doubt the maximalist position on this issue will ever become the popular consensus1. Because in this case, there’s actually a dilemma. Hard as aughts conservatives pretended that same-sex marriage would cause marriage itself to dissolve as an institution, no interests were actually butting up against one another. The dilemma was fake. This dilemma is rare—but it’s real. And so we’re going to just have to figure out how to accommodate one another, and be neighborly about it.

I’m not a talking points writer. But I think this view would carry with the broad public, its conflicting opinions, and its apparent hunger for authentic leaders.

I explain/confess at the top of the video why I opted for the live format this week. In this case it was more out of necessity than anything else. But I do enjoy the added spontaneity of the live mailbag as a departure from the sometimes-tort…

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Keep your eye on nursing homes. Maybe particularly in Wisconsin and Texas, but really everywhere.

On Monday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly rescinded standing guidance—first issued in October 2020, then renewed ahead of the 2024 election—reminding nursing-home owners that their residents have the right to vote “without interference, coercion, discrimination, or reprisal” from their long-term care facilities, and that they “are required to support residents in the exercise of their right to vote, such as assisting with absentee or mail-in voting or transporting residents to polling locations or ballot drop-boxes in a safe manner.”

Qso 24 21 Nh Rescinded 2026 07 20

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Why would the Trump administration withdraw a memo that a) restates federal law protecting vulnerable patients (most of whom are senior citizens) from politically motivated manipulation, and b) suggests best practices for ensuring residents who want to vote can register and cast ballots?

Well, there are facially obvious reasons: Donald Trump doesn’t want to help anyone vote unless he knows how they intend to vote; he suspects the only nursing-home owners who’d coerce nursing-home residents, or discriminate and retaliate against them over their voting decisions, would be his own supporters; and that this kind of federal support for ensuring nursing-home residents can vote likely redounds to the benefit of Democrats.

But if you remember the aftermath of the 2020 election, and dig a little deeper, you’ll find another, related motive at work. The administration rooted its decision to withdraw the memorandum in lies about the 2020 election, and Trump’s appointees are now citing those lies as a basis for intimidation. In this case, they want election officials and social workers and others who help nursing-home residents vote to fear that their lives will be ruined, and they might be imprisoned, for even registering these vulnerable citizens.

But the threat is generalizable: If you’re in the business of helping anyone vote, for any reason, the federal government wants you to be scared.

When I was alerted to the rescinded guidance, it rang a bell, because I recalled this episode from several years ago, when Trump suggested high 2020 turnout among nursing-home residents in Wisconsin was suggestive of fraud.

In reality, nursing-home turnout in 2020 was basically in line with overall turnout, but Trump fixated on it anyhow, because the state’s election commission changed the rules that year in order to send absentee ballots to nursing-home residents who wanted to vote. The 2020 election unfolded at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, before vaccines were available, and nursing-home residents were particularly vulnerable. Wisconsin would normally send special voting deputies to nursing homes to allow residents to cast ballots “in person” at their facilities, but COVID-19 made that protocol excessively risky.

When Trump lost, he folded this change in process into his larger lie about the theft of the election. And then he just never stopped lying.

Six years later, this lie (or sub-lie) helps form the basis for withdrawing the 2020 and 2024 guidance.

In a new memorandum, replacing the withdrawn ones, CMS warns that efforts to help nursing-home residents vote, “should not violate federal or state voting laws.”

Unfortunately, in recent years, we have become aware of several allegations of instances in which resident rights were unlawfully violated.

In Texas a social worker was charged with 134 felony counts involving election fraud for unlawfully registering residents of the Mexia State Supported Living Center. Texas Attorney General Paxton said, “Registering citizens to vote or to obtain mail ballots without their consent is illegal. It is particularly offensive when individuals purport to be champions for disability rights, when in reality they are abusing our most vulnerable citizens in order to gain access to their ballots and amplify their own political voice.”

In Wisconsin, Sheriff Christopher Schmaling and Sgt. Michael Luell investigated a case in which they alleged that eight men and women whose mental capacities had diminished due to age or disease sent mail-in ballots from Ridgewood Care Center.

Qssam 26 04 Nh Original Release 2026 07 20

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Set aside the irony that Ken Paxton stands credibly accused of fraudulent voting. Note the qualifiers CMS uses: “charged,” “investigated,” and “alleged.”

Why not “convicted”? Why “allegations of instances” instead of just “instances”?

Because nobody’s rights were unlawfully violated in these “instances,” nor did they result in any fraudulent voting. In Texas, Paxton scapegoated a social worker named Kelly Brunner, who made technical errors in determining which nursing-home residents at the State Supported Living Center in Mexia were eligible to vote, and how to register them. Election officials caught the errors, and nobody was improperly registered, nor did any resident cast an invalid ballot. But Paxton was in the business of propounding lies about election fraud on Trump’s behalf. He charged her with 134 felonies, and tried to make her infamous. Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, blasted her case out to a million followers on Twitter. They ultimately bullied her into a plea deal that sentenced her only to probation, but nevertheless ruined her life.

And the Wisconsin allegations? Trump-loyal election deniers hoped they’d lead to the prosecution and imprisonment of members of the state’s election commission.

But every prosecutor with jurisdiction rejected them. “Several claims have been raised surrounding potential fraud in the balloting process. There does not appear to be any support for such propositions,” wrote Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Matthew Westphal. “Claims have been made that residents who did not request a ballot voted because someone requested a ballot on their behalf and voted on their behalf. There has been no evidence submitted that any of the individuals who received ballots did not request them.”

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What’s the damage here?

A CMS spokesperson did not respond to written questions or a request for comment.

It’s probably safe to assume that most people who work as state election officials, or overseeing nursing homes, won’t be deterred from helping residents vote, as required by law. (A spokesperson for the Wisconsin Election Commission did not respond to a request for comment.)

But it’s also fair to say that if it reaches nursing homes, Trump’s desperation to suppress turnout in 2026 is unbounded.

Citing these incidents—which involved no intentional wrongdoing, and resulted in no fraudulent votes—in guidance to state officials who oversee nursing homes sends a clear message: We will be watching. If you, or social workers, or nursing-home employees try to help nursing-home residents vote, we will scrutinize every action, and if we have even a thin basis to investigate criminally, we will do so.

That’s a message Trump wants everyone doing election administration work to hear. Nobody would mistake intimidating nursing-home workers for savvy politics; but if the goal is to menace, it makes perfect sense: You’re not safe from harassment even if you do god’s work.

Bernie Sanders has been railing against the oligarchy for much, much longer than Donald Trump has been a politician, but I think it’s safe to say that the thing he had in mind when he began warning the country about the formation of an American oligarchy wasn’t exactly what’s taken shape since.

Here he is in 2014 telling ABC News, “You have today in America more income and wealth inequality than any time in this country since 1928 and more than any major country in the world. So, you got the top one percent owning 38 percent of the wealth in America. Do you know what the bottom 60 percent own? 2.3 percent. You know what that is? That’s called oligarchy.”

He said basically the same thing on the House floor in 1994! “I think that the most important trends within our economic system are in fact not honestly addressed or faced and that is that to a very great extent the United States of America today is increasingly becoming an oligarchy. An oligarchy. A nation in which a small number of people control a significant part of our wealth and also control a great deal of the power in our country.”

Here’s a sharper version of the same warning, from an appearance at the Brookings Institution in February 2015.

It appears that one family, the extreme right wing Koch brothers, are prepared to spend more money than either Democratic party or the Republican party in the coming elections. In other words, one family, a family which is worth about $100 billion, may well have a stronger political presence than either of our major parties.

I know that people are not comfortable when I say this. But I want you to take a hard look at what’s going on, take a deep breath, and you tell me whether or not we are looking at a democracy or whether or not we are looking at an oligarchy when you have one family that has more political power than the Democratic Party, than the Republican Party, which can spend unlimited sums of money not only on campaigns, but on think tanks and media, I worry very, very much about the future of democracy in this country.

You don’t hear all that much about the Koch brothers these days—or their dark money spending, or their lavish underwriting of think tanks and pseudo-think tanks. And that speaks to the way Trump represents a break with the status quo ante, or (at the very least) a rapid accelerant and intensifier of something that was barely detectable a decade ago. I think it’s fair to say that Sanders has been spectacularly vindicated in the broad sense, but not in the specific sense.

What he was concerned about, before Trump took over the GOP, was something structurally different than what’s emerged: a combination of economic inequality and unregulated political influence that would result in ideologically or selfishly motivated billionaires buying elections and transforming government it into a marionette show. They and their senators, congressmen, presidents and judges would proscribe industrial regulation, but across industry. They’d crush the tax base and flatten the tax code, but up and down the income spectrum.

That would be bad whether or not you think the right term for it is “oligarchy.” And things were already headed in that direction when Sanders began issuing these warnings. Fifteen years ago, the Rich Guy Community (then centered most densely in and around Wall Street) played an outsized and destructive role in shaping post Great Recession economic policy. They were a big part of the reason why Democrats got fixated on budget deficits rather than stimulus, and why Republicans decided to hold the global economy hostage to a policy of huge social spending cuts and no tax increases. Total lunacy, under the circumstances—but rich guys owned the Republican Party and dominated elite discourse, and so that’s what we got.

Sanders was alarmed and rightly disgusted by, e.g. regulatory capture of the Treasury Department, and that Republican congressional leaders were essentially handmaids of hedge-fund billionaires. But I don’t know that Sanders was particularly worried that, say, Paul Ryan’s buddy Stanley Druckenmiller might spend $500 million to deliver Republicans a governing trifecta, in exchange for Ryan allowing him to write all House legislation, and deliver himself government contracts, and benefit personally from a lawless tariff policy.

That kind of thing required a level of gangsterism unique to Trump.

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What we got instead was an exceptionally partisan, criminal oligarchy, much more like the Russian oligarchy than an American “legal corruption” vintage.

I think there’s basically no denying that Elon Musk is an oligarch. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Donald Trump (in apparent violation of campaign-finance law, at times) and now sits above the law and the market. His donations, his control over the social media platform X, and his ability to wield his money and influence as both threat and bribe, bought him a six-month stint as shadow president—a role he apparently abused to steal reams of sensitive data about Americans in order to build his personal wealth and power. He does not fear committing crimes. He does not have to worry about regulation. When he violates the law in ways that destroy the environment in poor communities, the federal government of the United States intervenes on his behalf not just to protect him in one case, but to strip the entire American public of the ability to vindicate their legal right to environmental protection in court. The biggest threat to Musk’s power came when he had a spat with the president and observed that Trump was in the Epstein Files. But the two chose to reconcile rather than embark in a power battle that would leave both men damaged and weaker.

We have an oligarch, ergo we have an oligarchy. But Musk isn’t the only one. The Ellisons are oligarchs. The billionaires and centimillionaires in Trump’s cabinet are oligarchs, largely free to shape policy in their self interest rather than the public interest. Musk’s crew of pathetic yes-men and hangers-on are at least oligarch-ish. Below them, you have centibillionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos who would love to be Trump oligarchs, but are too pathetic (and were too thick, in the past, with liberals) to be invited into the inner circle. They do favors for Trump sycophantically, but get little in return.

Then at the lowest-but-broadest tier, you have the organized-crime culture that the Trump oligarchy has created, or at least allowed to fester. Where super rich people who aren’t part of the inner sanctum buy pardons or business favors; where all of Wall Street says nothing as Trump privatizes and trades on market-moving presidential communication for personal gain, then sells professional investors early access to that insider information so that they can rip off chumps.

What Sanders has been decrying as “oligarchy” for the past several decades still exists below the Trump oligarchy. The old Koch-funded institutions limp along. The aughts-era machinery of political influence is still in place, humming quietly, but poised to snap back into full effect if the Trump regime collapses. And then below that there’s a big population of extremely rich people in America who either aren’t terribly politically active, or contentedly free-ride off their class peers.

I think this taxonomy is important, because, to meet the moment, post-Trump reform will entail serious conflict with the entire class, including those who could credibly plead innocent as to the erosion of democracy in America. And it will be helpful to the political cause to draw fine distinctions.

So let’s try to distinguish between Trump oligarchs; the “oligarchs” Sanders had in mind; and the ultra-wealthy most generally.

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That’s how Democrats will regain the trust of their own voters. It’s also essential for the survival of liberal pluralism. There will be no recovery or rebuilding from the Trump era if Democrats are too fearful to wield power confidently.

But that’s about partisan politics—how best to beat Republicans and revive democracy in America. At the moment, the Democratic establishment is agonizing internally over whether and how to fight the leftist operatives and candidates building power within the party. In a sad irony, that’s the one ground where certain moderate Democrats are willing to show fight.

But if Democratic leaders and frontline members actually want to marginalize the new new left as a political faction, they would ironically be better off demonstrating a bit of intra-coalitional weakness and surrendering to progressives on the issue of Medicare for All.

Maybe not by committing to every letter of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill; and maybe not by proposing an immediate rather than gradual transition to Medicare for All. But on the concept and the goal: That the uninsured rate in America should be zero, at least among U.S. citizens, and the government should guarantee it.

There’s no news peg for this article. It’s just something that’s been on my mind for a while. Medicare for All is arguably the main propellant of the American left. Sanders thrills already-progressive people with his class critique of U.S. politics, but truly universal health care is the appeal that draws mainline liberals into the Sanders faction. If Obamacare had been Medicare for All, or had at least included a strong public option, it’s hard to imagine Sanders building the movement he did. Neutralize that issue and the left will have a harder time sustaining and growing the same movement after he bequeathes it to successors.

Progressives vie for influence within the Democratic coalition by asserting that class-based politics would deliver Democrats an unbeatable multi-racial coalition of working Americans. It would be great if this were true, but the evidence for it is thin; what is true though is that if Democrats embraced class politics particularly on the issue of health care it would reduce friction significantly within the broad and fractious left.

And, if undertaken with care, it could be done in a way that pleases the broader public, too.

This isn’t a breezy suggestion, and it’s not a small ask. It may seem breezy, because I support Medicare for All as a policy objective. And it may seem small, insofar as some congressional Democrats only oppose Medicare for All because they’re scared of backlash, or because health-industry CEOs and corporations fund their campaigns. But the real inertia in health policy isn’t entirely or even mostly a byproduct of big money in politics.

Speaking very broadly, and on the basis of rhetoric, the left does not really grasp the existence or nature of community-level skepticism of Medicare for All—or really any significant health-care reform. They caricature health-care politics as a simple battle between the worst executives in the country and the little guys, all of whom naturally support Medicare for All as a matter of common sense. Or so they imagine.

But this is not close to the truth. It is why, in a world where the Democratic establishment agreed to let the left take the lead on the health care issue, the left would have to make a big concession of its own: The fantasy version of Medicare for All, where we go to the doctor whenever we need to and never have to touch our wallets, is not a system progressives could create overnight, or even in the span of a presidential term—if only moderate Democrats would get out of their way.

They would have to open their minds to subtle political complexities, and open their hearts to dreaded liberal technocrats.

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This is why I think it’d be genuinely useful for more young leftists to spend a year or two covering district-level congressional politics as journalists. The complexities of all politics, but particularly health-care politics, become much more apparent from the vantage point of a disinterested observer.

The root of it is that there aren’t enough health-care resources at hand to pass the Sanders plan and expect everyone to be thrilled. We currently spend enough money as a society on health care to afford a universal system, but redistributing that money straight away would create losers relative to the status quo, not just winners in the form of newly and securely insured Americans. By the same token, spending as much money as the Sanders plan envisions would require significant tax increases, and would run into resource constraints: who’s going to provide all this new health care, with what, and where?

An easy way to grasp the challenges these dilemmas create is from the perspective of a generic congressional representative. Every district has at least one hospital, but most have several. Some of these are owned by large hospital corporations. Others are community based. But when Congress debates health-care reform, resistance doesn’t arise entirely from trade associations and lobbying shops in Washington. The executives, physicians, nurses, lab techs, and orderlies, who are for the most part just regular constituents, become…concerned.

Not necessarily opposed. There is, obviously, no shortage of right-wing doctors and hospital executives (and nurses and techs and orderlies) who oppose universal health care for the same reasons Republicans do. But you’ll also find plenty of progressive health-care providers who hate that members of their communities are uninsured. Doctors of all political persuasions would, for less charitable reasons, be relieved not to haggle with multiple insurance companies over procedures and billing.

They have other concerns, though: They don’t want their hospitals to become overrun all of a sudden—insuring 30 million uninsured people doesn’t magically increase the capacity of the health-care system. And, of course, few of them want to accept a pay cut. This attention to self-interest isn’t the loveliest of human qualities, particularly when we’re talking about six-figure earners in working- or middle-class communities. But it’s also completely understandable, nothing at all like the villainy of health-insurance corporations.

And so when Democrats in Congress convey misgivings about Medicare for All, it’s often because some of the most sympathetic and respected members of their districts have expressed alarm. And that’s just the baseline. It doesn’t account for the fact that most people are already insured, and most of them are basically fine with the health insurance that they have. Or that a lot of pharmaceutical and medical-device manufacturing takes place in blue districts.

If implementation doesn’t take these concerns into account opposition will be severe, backlash will be furious, and the law may not survive.

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But accounting for these challenges, the politics of health-care reform don’t have to be as grueling as they’ve proven in the past. A more gradual transition would give hospitals and the broader industry time to build out capacity, and would allow physicians to evolve away from the current system rather than face immediate pay cuts.

A unified party could pass and implement Medicare for All (or a Medicare-powered public option that would become Medicare for All over the course of a few years) with reasonable ease, particularly if they were willing to move quickly.

Medicare for All is already popular as a generic concept. If the Democratic Party unified behind it, its popularity might actually increase, and it would maintain support more durably than (say) the Affordable Care Act, as Republicans weaponized the details.

I would call it “Open Medicare,” rather than the unwieldier “Medicare For All Who Want It.” For it to land well politically, everyone across the party would be well advised to cooperate in describing it as a common sense reform rather than as radical change. And they would be wise to root the appeal in terms of both fairness and partisanship. People in the richest society in history shouldn’t suffer or die because they can’t afford health care. And we can’t always be one election away from Republicans throwing 30 million people off their health plans. Ergo, we need to get as many Americans as possible integrated into the same insurance system.

If they did that, and legislated quickly, they’d accomplish something everyone in the party could be proud of, and the factional health-care fight would lose most of its force. Left-wing leaders would have to attract new supporters with other appeals.

They do have other appeals, of course. But none has the lasting, broad, emotional draw of universal health care.

Climate change has deep emotional resonance to politically engaged progressives, particularly young ones. But the Green New Deal does not strike the same chords with the general public, particularly when unemployment isn’t near crisis levels. And as the reality of climate change becomes impossible to deny, the politics of rapid decarbonization ironically become more of a trap. The imperative to do something feels stronger, but the returns on policy do not feel like progress. They feel instead like the slowing of deterioration. We’d tax fossil fuels and disrupt settled arrangements—and still get blanketed in smoke or pummeled by increasingly severe weather. It’s the politics of underpowered economic stimulus: Think how much worse things WOULD have been if we’d done nothing. A recipe for people to lose heart.

Clean-energy investment, by contrast, is essential to both mitigating the severity of climate change and making life in a hotter world more stable and tolerable. But there’s already a lot of common ground between left and center on that point.

The left and the center can fight forever over the federal minimum wage, because shifting goalposts is trivial. Want to be the most progressive candidate in a race? Add a dollar or two to the minimum wage your opponent supports, et voilà! But the salience of the issue has shrunk. Something like 90 percent of workers already earn more than $15 per hour; and only about one percent of workers earns the federal floor of $7.25 per hour, or less.

By contrast, I suspect the left and center can come to terms on taxation and questions of oligarchy. Between the conduct of the tech-elite in the Trump era, and the genuinely precarious macroeconomic situation Trump will bequeath his successor, there will be a larger-than-usual appetite in 2029 for taxing the bejesus out of the ultrawealthy. For similar reasons, Democrats across the party have found they can’t in good conscience, or for any strategic purpose, offer unqualified support to Israel.

But health care touches everyone; the health-care policy divide between left and center remains quite large; and the left has the better of the moral argument. As long as that gap remains, a liberal electorate desperate for clarity and vigor will increasingly align with candidates who support Medicare for All. The best way to close that gap is to close it.

With the valence of its most resonant issues diminished, the left will find itself standing for more marginal priorities, or things that are too radical to appeal broadly. They will thus pose a decreasing threat to the party mainstream over time. If that’s what the Democratic establishment really wants, this approach seems sounder than intensifying factional war, and tearing the party apart.

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Donald Trump makes it hard to imagine the future of Republican politics, because he’s such an inimitable figure. Before he was a politician, he was a celebrity real-estate developer—an inheritance he plied into hosting a hit reality television show premised on the notion that he was a decisive board-room executive.

His pathological shamelessness feeds a kind of charisma. Without charisma he wouldn’t have become a celebrity; without celebrity, he wouldn’t have become understood in the culture (wrongly, it happens) as a talented deal maker. His gift for building and maintaining a fandom made him a natural demagogue; his unearned reputation lent him credibility among voters who expect competence from their leaders. Then, of course, he became president, and normalized himself. He became self-perpetuating.

But he’s terribly unpopular on the whole, and will eventually die.

So we’re left to wonder: Will his successor have to replicate most or all of these traits, and (if so) can anyone in Republican politics actually do it? Conventional wisdom leans respectively toward the answers “yes” and “no.” He won’t allow his insurgency to be reversed by a person with more rectitude. Yet candidates who try to mimic Trump underperform in their elections, and lose in the swing states he’s won twice. Nobody’s got the same aura. Not his sons, not his allies in Congress, not his loyalists (or erstwhile allies) in right-wing media, and certainly not his vice president. The Republican Party is now wired to follow the example he’s set, but the example he’s set is a loser when followed by a typical charlatan or fanatic.

Democrats don’t really have this problem. They have a different problem, in that their party’s brand is toxic. Their own supporters want new leaders to emerge. But waiting in the wings, even within the party mainline, are plenty of elected officials who overperform in their races, and raise a lot of money. They just aren’t closely associated with the congressional leadership, or the Biden administration.

But progressives, mounting an insurgency of their own, might have this problem. It’s something they should take seriously, insofar as they want to enhance their own political viability, gain power within the Democratic Party, or even elect a president. And it’s something frustrated moderates should keep in mind as they lick their wounds from a bruising primary season. What seems ascendant now can always shed its wings.

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The analogy isn’t perfect. But it’s good enough! At least for the purposes of looking ahead literally one cycle. The future is much murkier.

The progressive ascendancy that began (depending when you want to start the clock) in the Occupy movement, or the 2016 election, owes a lot of its political durability to Bernie Sanders.

Sanders was not exactly a pop-culture icon before the 2010s, and certainly wasn’t a billionaire. But in-the-know progressives have viewed Sanders as a role model for a long, long time. This is perhaps a bit overdetermined, because I attended college at U.C. Berkeley, but I’d heard of Bernie Sanders before I had any kind of developed politics. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, campus activists were proud that our representative, Barbara Lee, was the only member of Congress to oppose a military response, but it was a small scandal and disappointment that the only self-described socialist in federal office didn’t join her. At least that’s how I remember it 25 years later.

In any event, Sanders capitalized on that cult following in Barack Obama’s first term, when he spoke for eight hours on the Senate floor, protesting a measure to temporarily extend George W. Bush’s regressive tax cuts. That speech snowballed in real time, building an audience large enough to crash the Senate’s livestream. It resonated widely enough that he repurposed the text into a book called The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class.

Sanders threatened to primary Obama, in the manner that he would eventually challenge Hillary Clinton’s coronation, in order to channel progressive frustration with Obama’s economic policies. Obama advisers, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, talked him out of it. They were, perhaps, less surprised than most when his 2016 campaign didn’t flame out as many pundits expected it would.

This made him the undisputed leader of the new new left, the most important socialist in America since Eugene Debs, a distinction he maintains to this day.

He is also 84 years old. He is almost certainly not going to run for president again. He has endorsed a number of House and Senate candidates this cycle, including candidates who challenged incumbent Democrats. Some of them have won their primaries. But this cycle will be over soon, confronting his movement with a pivotal question: And Then What?

Here’s where the similarities between MAGA and the Sanders Revolution begin to break down. The MAGA movement is composed of weird and nasty reprobates, almost to a person. Trump is more mentally ill and corrupt than most of them, but (somehow) also among the most likable. The left comprises a hodgepodge of eccentrics, dirtbags, young radicals… and genuinely inspiring people. Most of Sanders’s acolytes could not fill his shoes. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could. So could Zohran Mamdani.

MAGA has little content beyond Trump and reactionary hatred of pluralism. It won’t likely have a new leader with cross-cutting appeal and an inspiring vision. But the left will! The ugly firmament of Trumpist institutions will persist, but if MAGA flames out with JD Vance or Tucker Carlson at the helm, they’ll decay into zombie organizations or simply die off. The left, by contrast, has real ideas—some more popular than others—and its organizing hubs will benefit from the charismatic leadership of Sanders’s best disciples. At least in the medium term.

But what about the near term?

Mamdani was born in Uganda; he’s a naturalized citizen. The Constitution—one provision of it, at least1—says he is ineligible for the presidency.

I believe AOC will eventually run for president. And you can see in the way that she’s drawn down her involvement in factional fights2 that she’s eyeing higher office. But she’s not preparing a presidential candidacy right now, at least not as conspicuously as many other household-name Democrats.

From there, the bench begins to thin.

I wouldn’t count out Ro Khanna (though he represents Silicon Valley) and there’s a real if somewhat slender chance that Abdul El-Sayed will win his Michigan Senate race and situate himself to take the baton from Sanders.

But this may just as easily be the first open Democratic presidential primary since 2016 without a marquee progressive on the ballot—someone who can count on receiving a third or more of the vote by default. What happens then?

My guess is Normal Politics.

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To hear factional moderates tell this story, you’d think they were on the verge of extinction, unwilling or perhaps unable to stand up for themselves as leftists mount a merciless takeover of the party. Progressives organize and prop up candidates while ostensible moderates like Josh Shapiro sit on their hands.

But as the AOC example suggests, it’s in the nature of an aspiring party leader not to wage factional war. It is inapt to draw a contrast between Sanders (or Mamdani) and Shapiro; the correct comparison is to the handful of moderate factional figures who have endorsed Seth Moulton in his primary challenge to Ed Markey from the right. It just feels like a weak comparison because moderates don’t have (perhaps can’t have) a leader figure like Sanders. They could try! They might feel less despondent if they tried to build movement-style popular support. But they shouldn’t despair about the fact that mainline presidential hopefuls are opting out of the factional war.

It will fall to whoever emerges as the Democratic Party’s true leader late next year or early in 2028 to forge a peace between the factions. To reconstitute the truce that allowed Joe Biden to run for president without confronting a large population of dead-enders, the way Hillary Clinton did.

That person will be less interested in vindicating any particular policy idea or vision than in pulling factional leaders together and asking questions like “what can we do, together, about the 30 million uninsured people?” Unless Democrats win majorities so large that Blue Dog-types become irrelevant, moderates will have a say in the answer to questions like that.

Fifteen years ago, when the far right in America insisted that Republicans repeal the Affordable Care Act, some “moderate” Republican members of Congress were not on board. They hated Obamacare, but they couldn’t abide zeroing out every provision of the law. Reimposing discrimination against sick people; kicking 25-year-olds off their parents’ health plans. Leadership bridged the gap with a promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. They eventually came within one vote of pulling it off.

The Republican opposition to the ACA was ignorant and aggrieved. But parties and political leaders exist to do work like this. There will be a factional divide in the Democratic Party over what to do about ICE that can be bridged in an analogous way.

Eighteen years ago, when progressives wanted Democrats to advance their agenda without accounting for every penny, and moderates were freaking out about the debt, leaders alighted on the idea that they should front-load a lot of spending, and pay for it slowly but cumulatively in the out years.

There will be a factional divide in the Democratic Party over what to do about the tension between energy-cost politics and climate change that can be bridged in an analogous way.

Etc. Etc.

Everyone involved will find this process frustrating. And if Democrats win with thin margins, it’ll be especially frustrating for progressives, who may find themselves with the same weak hand they held in 2021, when Joe Manchin refused to meet them in the middle.

But it’ll be normal politics. And if Democrats don’t repeat the big mistakes of the past 18 years—if they abolish the filibuster and expand the court—they’ll accomplish a lot more than they did in Biden’s term, in a much more lasting way.

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CORRECTION: Due to my own boneheaded error, I wrote that Mamdani was born in Zimbabwe; he was born in Uganda. I have updated the article accordingly.

Michael: Brian, I want to challenge you on the implications of your argument that Alito might seek and gain electoral advantage for the GOP by retiring in September. I think your story of how this would happen is very plausible. The GOP has been using SCOTUS as an issue to drive out its base for decades and it has been very effective for them.

But in other contexts you have (I think) argued that Dems should pack SCOTUS at the earliest opportunity.

Given the GOP track record of effectively wielding SCOTUS as an electoral issue, isn’t packing SCOTUS just going to be a recipe for massive electoral backlash?

I honestly don’t know whether SCOTUS is still the great electoral issue it was for the GOP pre Dobbs, Trump imunity, many other bad rulings, etc. But if you tell me thatt the GOP, with help from Sam Alito, can ride that issue to midterm success (at least in a relative sense), then what makes you think Dems could both pack the court and retain power (withotu which the court would very quickly be repacked by the GOP)?

Personally, I’d feel way better about the potential for court packing or other reforms if Sam Alito announced his retirment in September and the GOP tried to run on it and got spanked, than if it turned out to be an effective tactic that allowed the GOP to cut its losses and maybe hold the Senate.

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There is a tension here, in that Democrats, as the party of constitutional softball, frequently use rhetorical wiggle-room as an offramp from confrontation, rather than as means of throwing Republicans off the scent of their plans. Strategic vagueness can be a tool for advancing reform without attracting controversy; it can also be a tool for pandering to your own supporters without actually pledging to do what they want. This is why advocacy groups and activists are always at pains to nail Democrats down to specific public commitments, which are much harder to walk away from.

So, it’s true, I want Democrats to expand the Supreme Court at the first opportunity. I’m also sensitive to the fact that waging a presidential campaign on a big open promise to expand the Supreme Court may not be the most strategically sound way to win power.

This is why, in the past, I’ve suggested Democrats could make somewhat vaguer threats and commitments—that there will be a “reckoning” for the theft of the court, and its subsequent abuses, etc. etc. The problem is: see paragraph one. This is a dilemma that arises from losing the trust of your own voters. And you can see how it might create a doom-loop of defeat: To win back trust, Dems might make more controversial promises, which in turn make them likelier to lose, which in turn erodes trust further.

The good news is, there’s 2.5 years to go until the earliest possible opportunity to reform the judiciary. It may be that Democrats defy 18 years’ worth of expectations between now and then, and begin acting like a dignified opposition party, such that Democratic voters feel comfortable taking a flyer on a campaign pledge that’s less concrete than “I will add four seats to the Supreme Court.” The court is also badly discredited already; by 2028, there may be enough of a clamor for reform that Democrats no longer have to fear backlash.

That seems to be what believes. He’s been talking pretty openly about court reform in recent weeks (though a few things he’s said make me question his commitment to reforming the court as a matter of immediate business—perhaps I should reach out to him for a clarifying discussion).

Either way, point is, we have time before Democrats have to make any major strategic campaigning decisions. This is a question for 2028, not for the midterms.

And this is partly why I’m a bit indifferent, personally, as to whether Alito and Trump attempt or even complete such a naked power grab—so long as Democrats don’t simply resign themselves to defeat, as they did when Mitch McConnell stole the Scalia seat in 2016. I want Schumer to do what I argued he should do at the bottom of that piece. To begin jawboning now, before Republicans can set any scheme in motion. If it doesn’t “work” in the literal sense of deterring the power grab, it will still hearten voters in the Democratic electorate, and strengthen the case for expanding the court down the line. It may actually be salutary, in some sense, for Alito and Trump to run such an outrageous Hail Mary play, because it would underline the moral and political imperatives of court packing, and circle them in red ink.

I often get accused, by people with more conventional strategic views, of prioritizing expressive politics (e.g. jawboning) over substantive politics. I think it’s basically an unfair charge—literally false, based on a false dichotomy, and, frankly, a difficult allegation to parse. Politics without “expressive” politics would be incomprehensible. If you think perception matters at all in politics, then adopting an attractive or respectable posture is essential, even when there are no obvious stakes.

But it’s also true that rhetoric often serves as policy change even in the absence of new rulemaking or lawmaking. Wonks who recoil at the notion that Democratic politics should entail much more “expressive” partisan brawling understand this perfectly well in the context of, say, monetary policy. Communication from the Federal Reserve has a real if invisible mechanical effect on market behavior.

Something highly analogous happens when a political leader speaks with authority about his party’s intent. If Chuck Schumer were to say, credibly, that Democrats will not provide votes for the September budget unless the legislation proscribes Trump’s efforts to subvert the election, that changes politics. Substantively, it anchors negotiations in a clear place, which should tend to shape the outcome. It also elevates an important issue—Trump’s open but arcane efforts to cheat in the midterms—and puts Republicans in a bind: Do we stand up to Trump? Or do we go into the midterms with the government shut down, on the principle that Democrats must fund their opponent’s coup d’etat?

The same thing holds on the “expressive” side of judicial reform politics. If the Democrats’ express position is that there will be a reckoning for the theft of the court, it gives the bad actors on the court something to think about when they’re deciding whether and how to abuse power.

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Ellis Weiner: SCOTUS has given Trump unusual powers. If (/when) a Dem wins the White House, how should he or she demonstrate that turnabout is fair play? How should they use those powers to advance a liberal agenda? Even assuming this crap Court might find a way to rule, “Oh, sorry, we only meant that for Trump or another Republican,” what should this Dem POTUS at least try?

Magnifying the contradictions like this will ideally be unnecessary because H.R. 1 will become law in January 2029, and it will add four seats to the Supreme Court. At that point, Democrats could just govern as envisioned in a democracy, free from the anti-constitutional John Roberts-era encroachment, in which the Court serves as standing Inquisition against all Democratic policy.

Speaking of Buttigieg, though, he said something recently that bears on the question.

“To me, the executive branch needs to become both more and less powerful. It needs to become more capable when it comes to things like confronting inequality and standing up for the little guy and addressing fraud and misbehavior by powerful organizations and corporations. And it needs to become less powerful when it comes to things like surveillance and intimidation and monitoring and restricting speech.”

This caught my eye, because what he’s describing would essentially invert this court’s partisan and unprincipled view of executive power, which they’ve inscribed as binding constitutional law.

The Republican justices have saddled us with a unitary and immune executive, but largely stripped the executive branch of the power to make progressive policy. Buttigieg is describing something like the opposite: an accountable and well-checked president, who oversees a much nimbler bureaucracy.

The challenge is that inverting the status quo would require changing precedent, which would in turn require expanding the court. If the votes weren’t there, a Democratic president would have to either resign themselves to failure, or else start getting imaginative.

Under standing precedent a huge range of activity that liberals and progressives expect of government—from business regulation to democracy promotion—is illegal; but it’s perfectly kosher for the president to harass executives and state-government officials with threats of imprisonment and blacklisting into adopting the same policies envisioned under “illegal” federal policy. So a Democratic president could endeavor to improve environmental or health-care outcomes by sending FBI agents to seize materials from fossil-fuel and insurance companies and their executives. A president could shower allied interests with money in violation of the Antideficiency Act—a statute with criminal enforcement penalties—shielded from accountability by the immunity precedent in Trump vs. United States.

To be clear, I’m spitballing: clever lawyers with the appropriate DGAF attitude could do a better job devising stratagems. But, yeah, either we reform the system or what’s sauce for the goose has to be sauce for the gander.

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Charles Stone (via email): Hi Brian,

A lot of this resonated but in the spirit of seeing the world as it is not as I wish it to be:

1. What about the evidence that more moderate candidates do better in swing states and districts? As a NC voter for the past 22 years, I’ve not found much evidence for the theory that more left wing candidates outperform center left ones in elections in our state. I don’t think a more Sanders style candidate would have outperformed Roy Cooper for governor, for instance.

2. How does the party’s greater willingness to embrace (whatever their normative merits) ever more objectively unpopular cultural stances in the decade leading to 2024 sit with your analysis that everything was paint by numbers/moneyball messaging? Allowing, for example, Biden administration public health officials to testify in front of Congress using the term “birthing persons” instead of “mothers” can’t have been a result of timid poll testing.

Defending democracy means winning elections. The theory of the case that says that centrist policy positions and choosing what culture war fights to pick (which is different than defending existing gains) is not dead to me.

Though we don’t always agree, I appreciate what you write.

And I appreciate respectful pushback!

Starting where you ended, defending democracy obviously requires winning elections (cf. 2024). I think it’s reasonable from the vantage point of 2026 to say that rebuilding democracy requires winning elections. But this is almost tautological. It’s a bit like saying defending a title requires defeating the next challenger. It can’t be the beginning and end of the analysis. It begs questions, in the formal sense, about how best to do that, and at what potential costs.

One could endeavor to win an election in counterproductive ways, and thus set back the cause of defending democracy. Likewise, one could endeavor to play it so safe, set standards so low, that democracy loses its appeal as a system that can deliver prosperity and freedom to people. Democrats could save “democracy,” but a form of it that has lost most of its value.

This is why I wrote the piece as an endorsement of constitutional hardball, rather than of the left-wing insurgency per se. I agree with you that the insurgents are engaging in self-serving and cavalier thinking: You lost, ergo to win we need to shimmy the ideological center of the party in our direction. They have theories about why socialism will prove more appealing than old Democratic Party hat. But they are just theories, and absent evidence, this argument—“it’s our turn now”—is just a non sequitur.

And as you say, the evidence if anything points in the other direction. Run the policies that win primaries in New York on a general election ticket in North Carolina, and you’re probably going to lose.

The point of my piece was that voters are flocking to leftists because Democrats lost the trust of their voters; and they lost the trust of their voters (and arguably lost actual elections) because their aversion to hardball politics put them behind the eight ball in just about every high-stakes partisan conflict of the past two decades.

So I’m not saying Roy Cooper should ditch what’s working and adopt the Sanders agenda. He seems to be doing just fine. What I am saying is that if Cooper had drawn a Sanders-backed primary opponent, he might have been in some trouble. And I think the solution for Democrats anticipating this bind isn’t to guard their left flanks by embracing the progressive catechism. It’s to disavow the wimpy politics that got the party into this mess.

Moderates in reach states and districts are constantly at pains to distinguish themselves from the national party; they almost always use policy disagreement as a proxy for independence. Guns, or the border wall, or whatever. And hey, if it works, great. But I would eventually like to see some more visionary candidate try something like this:

• In 2009, Republicans invented an unconstitutional veto power over all legislation, and Democrats did not respond. As a result, Democrats delivered worse health care and fewer jobs than they would have if they’d been more willing to stand up for themselves—and for you. Many analysts believe that the slow recovery from the Great Recession created the public discontent that allowed Donald Trump to consolidate power and unravel democracy.

• In 2016, Republicans asserted the unconstitutional power to steal a Supreme Court seat. The constitution instructs the Senate to advise and consent, Republicans wiped their ass with it. Democrats did not respond; they did not try anything creative to force Republican hands, effectively acceding to the theft. They lost the court for a generation.

• In 2021, Democrats quickly abandoned efforts to hold Donald Trump accountable for attempting a coup and inciting an insurrection; as before, they also continued to allow Republicans to veto legislation, making democracy reform impossible.

• In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and, for all of the above reasons, Democrats were unable to respond—not by codifying the right to abortion, certainly not by stripping the court of its power, which it went on to abuse in sabotaging prosecutions of Donald Trump, and granting him immunity from criminal law.

• This is what has to change about the Democratic Party. It has to be willing to unrig the system so that government can function at a rudimentary level. If we don’t do that, we won’t be able to deliver you better health care, or cleaner air, or a viable immigration system. We won’t be able to get money out of politics or make corrupt officials answer for their crimes.

• My friends on the left think the solution is for the party to adopt a more uncompromising national agenda. But they are wrong. They’re wrong because they haven’t figured out how to sell progressivism in the conservative states we need to win to govern. And they’re wrong because they are putting the cart before the horse: If they charge ahead without first joining this fight to save democracy, they will run into all the same roadblocks the establishment did over the past 20 years; they will fail, too, but leftishly.

So that’s point one.

As to the point about Democrats embracing unpopular cultural stances from 2014-2024: My view is that this was less “Democrats” than progressive cultural figures, and to the extent it was Democrats, it was mostly rhetoric (as you note, they used language designed to signal affinity with progressive interest groups) rather than legislation.

But I don’t think I’ve ever suggested Democrats, in their current formation, are incapable of overreaching or of losing popular touch or, crucially, of misjudging the power of Republican propaganda. Adopting language like “birthing persons” surely struck them as a low-cost or cost-free way to manage intra-coalition tension, without causing any change to policy or material conditions. If elections ultimately turn on those substantive things, the risk of being a little bit rhetorically weird must be pretty low. That was probably a miscalculation. It militates for: 1) more plainspoken rhetoric; and 2) more effectively countering GOP propaganda. They’ve made some strides on the former; many fewer on the latter.

When I say Hillary Clinton ran a conventional moneyball campaign, what I mean is she poll-tested her actual agenda, consulted polls to gauge her performance, and, convinced of a lead, became complacent. She ran the ads message testers told her to run in the markets they told her to run them in. She trusted her technologists to have a precise bead on where to deploy GOTV resources.

What she didn’t do is savage Trump as ruthlessly as he sabotaged her. She tried a bit clumsily (though appropriately) to refer Trump’s Russia ties to federal authorities; but I don’t think it would ever have occurred to her to ask her friends Barack Obama and Harry Reid to make what they knew public. To play constitutional hardball, in other words. And so they bent to pressure to keep their mouths shut.

Trump welcomed foreign hacking; he and his allies in the FBI and Congress prevailed on James Comey to insert himself into the election. Democrats did not respond. Obama did not contemplate firing Comey for insubordination in July of 2016. He decided not to alert the public about the cooperative relationship between Trump and the Russian government. And the election was lost.

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Before we get to all of the diarrhea, let’s talk about how Republicans did politics even before Donald Trump transformed bad faith from a right-wing method into a badge of honor.

The basic idea was to ridicule liberal priorities sight unseen, impede liberal governance irrespective of merit, lay every social and economic challenge at liberal feet, while asserting ownership of every source of national pride.

Bill Clinton’s economic boom was actually the fruit of Ronald Reagan’s policies; George W. Bush’s recessions were actually Clinton’s fault, or the fault of bleeding-heart federal policies to reduce racial housing inequality.

John McCain would mine spending bills for grants he could depict as frivolous, without devoting a moment’s effort to understanding the projects they funded. He’d tweet them out disdainfully or use them to fill “reports,” meant to fan public perception that government is hopelessly wasteful. "$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi." McCain wrote about one program. "How does one manage a beaver?"

(The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act hired people to dismantle beaver dams, which in turn cause significant flood damage to infrastructure and farmland.)

McCain spawned imitators. Louisiana’s then-governor, Bobby Jindal, stole from the McCain playbook. In his 2009 response to Barack Obama’s first joint address to Congress, Jindal complained that the stimulus bill contained “$140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’”

(One month later, Alaska’s Mount Redoubt erupted, creating enormous ash clouds that caused flight cancellations and airport closures in Anchorage, significantly disrupting local commerce.)

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The GOP’s deceptive methods went beyond opportunistic know-nothingism. Republicans went to lengths to obscure ownership of governing outcomes—the essential ingredient in democratic accountability. How can the public punish leaders for failure, or reward them for success, if they aren’t certain where responsibility lies?

When Obama announced the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Republicans were at pains to spread credit as thin as possible, and even claim some for their own party, denying Obama an unalloyed achievement.

At a Capitol press conference the next day, then-House Speaker John Boehner concluded his remarks, “I…want to thank President Obama and President Bush for all their efforts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.” (Emphasis added, but only kinda.) As if to underscore that this was a talking point they wrote with intention, and were determined to drive home, then House GOP Whip Kevin McCarthy celebrated “the work that President Bush did and that President Obama did,” precipitating the covert raid.

(Bush famously undermanned the mission to capture Bin Laden, and when Bin Laden escaped, Bush turned his efforts to an unrelated war of choice in Iraq.)

Of course, when things went wrong, failure had a single father. When the U.S. economy didn’t return immediately to trend, Republicans blamed “Obama’s failed stimulus.” When the Deepwater Horizon exploded in 2010, threatening the habitat and economy of the entire Gulf region, they called it “Obama’s Katrina.”

If anything that was an artifact of right-wing policy. As Obama later wrote in his post-presidency memoir, the industry was ripe for crisis, because the Minerals Management Service “wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters [to] do whatever the hell they wanted to do.”

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So there’s the template: Claim credit; assign blame, mock mercilessly.

As an epistemic matter, this is well beneath the standards of journalism or any kind of reasoned discourse. I’d argue it pushed boundaries enough to strain the functioning of democracy. Years before Trump took over the GOP, it was clear to many of us that if something didn’t change (if the “fever” didn’t “break,” as Obama put it) the democratic aspects of our system would seize up and politics would become rooted more deeply in propaganda than in ground truth.

So the idea here is not that Democrats should adopt Republican methods wholesale. It is, rather, that these methods are fair game when facts support them.

Now to the diarrhea.

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Catching up with post-vacation news over the weekend, I happened upon this somewhat mortifying story about NPR’s veteran Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, who reported (incorrectly, it turns out) that Samuel Alito had announced his retirement. (There but for the grace of god….) Totenberg quickly retracted the report and apologized to readers and Alito in a manner befitting the magnitude of the error. But it stands to reason that she and the rest of the Supreme Court press corps were unusually primed to make an error like this, because so many people expected Alito to retire now, while Republicans control the U.S. Senate.

Two weeks later, we’re well into the court’s summer recess, and some progressives are (cautiously, tepidly) breathing a sigh of relief: Neither Alito nor Clarence Thomas seem poised to retire before the election. Thus if Democrats win handily enough to claim control of the Senate, they’ll have the entire right wing in a bind.

Alito is 76; Thomas is 78; They’re both reportedly eyeing retirement, but both also clearly want to be replaced by younger, partisan Republican justices. Yet if Democrats control the Senate, they can embargo Trump’s judicial nominees—deny them fair hearings just as Republicans denied a fair hearing to Merrick Garland in 2016.

Then if Democrats win the presidency in 2028, those guys will have to hang on for dear life, well into their eighties, through 2032 at the earliest. If both were to retire or die when Democrats control the White House and Senate the balance of power on the court would flip from 6-3 Republican to 5-4 liberal. Incumbent Democrats would feel relieved of their moral obligation to expand the court.

Maybe figures as nakedly political as Alito and Thomas would roll the dice like this. But my strong hunch is: no they fucking wouldn’t, not even if they knew retiring strategically would result in immediate and painful death. I simply do not believe that either man, let alone both men, would take such a huge risk, tempting such a huge strategic error. We know enough about each justice’s character—Thomas’s bribe-taking and proximity to insurrection; Alito’s vicious, millenarian partisanship—to suspect subterfuge. At the very least we should suspect they’ve been given assurances that they’ll be replaced by hook or crook before Republicans lose power; but it’s not crazy to wonder whether they’ve struck an even deeper collusive bargain.

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The sense of false comfort is rooted in norms that Donald Trump and the modern GOP simply don’t honor.

We’ve become accustomed to “strategic retirement” wherein justices time their departure from the court to ensure they’ll be replaced by ideologically aligned successors. This is what Stephen Breyer did, and he was replaced by his former clerk Ketanji Brown Jackson. In Anthony Kennedy’s case, he reportedly pressured the White House to replace him with his former clerk, Brett Kavanaugh.

But both Breyer and Kennedy, per custom, announced their retirements in a “normal” manner: Kennedy at the end of the court’s annual term in late June; Breyer in January, but with his actual retirement deferred until the summer, and the confirmation of his successor. This norm allows a retiring justice to make a clean break, with no cases pending, and typically ensures that confirmation fights don’t become too entangled with electoral politics.

But nobody has to honor those norms. God didn’t honor them when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020; Donald Trump didn’t honor them when he nominated Amy Coney Barrett to replace her less than two weeks later. And Mitch McConnell didn’t honor them when he and the Senate GOP confirmed Barrett less than a month after that, just days before Trump lost his campaign for re-election.

Which is another way of saying the Senate GOP knows how to get a Supreme Court confirmation done in less than six weeks, which is in turn shorter than the lame duck period between the November election and the seating of a new Congress.

You see where I’m going with this: If Alito or Thomas or both men want to maintain optionality—maybe serve for another term or two—they can await the results of the election. If Republicans hold the Senate, they can stay on the bench for the time being. Thomas can become the longest-serving justice in history. But if Democrats win—and Republicans can’t manage to overturn their victory—either man or both men can retire in November, and give way to 40-year-old MAGA justices before Christmas.

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But I wouldn’t put it past them to be even more mischievous.

What if Alito thought he could time his retirement announcement to help Republicans get out the vote?

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When the former FBI Director Robert Mueller passed away earlier this year, Donald Trump repulsed all decent people by celebrating the occasion. “Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” Trump wrote. “He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

This was an obscenity for two reasons: First, because it is generally (though, ahem, not always) antisocial to rejoice when people die. Moreover, the greater one’s position of power and responsibility, the more imperative it is to be circumspect about these things, and the weaker your claim to being treated with dignity in death. There is a big moral difference between the masses celebrating the death of a tyrant, and a public figure celebrating the death of a rival or subordinate.

Second, more importantly, it was rooted in a lie. Trump’s implication, clear to all, was that Mueller had been a dirty cop.

You don’t have to bow at the altar of the security state or the FBI or even Mueller himself to note that this is false. Mueller was born into privilege but did not exploit it for personal advancement or to live an easy life. He enlisted in the Marine Corps during Vietnam, and became a decorated officer, awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for valor. He spent most of his legal career in federal service.

Someone who investigates and prosecutes crimes for decades will almost invariably “hurt innocent people” in the course of things. People are imperfect, as is “the system.” But by all accounts Mueller conducted himself with unusual professionalism. Insofar as the country is going to have a national police force, we are better off when it’s run by someone who follows rules and places the law over ideology, than when it’s run by a fanatic or a partisan operator.

Trump smeared Mueller because Mueller brought that ethic to bear as special counsel investigating ties between Trump’s first presidential campaign and the Russian government—an appointment Mueller accepted from Trump’s own Justice Department. Mueller did that job with arguably too much rectitude, and Trump hates him, because he exposed so much scandalous and illegal behavior.

But what if it were the other way around? What if Trump’s grievances were well founded? If Trump had done nothing wrong and Mueller was just out to get him? Would Trump, with the world watching, have been justified in pissing on his grave?

Because Trump is president, I think the answer is no. But under circumstances like those, Trump would’ve also been under no obligation to honor Mueller in any way. He would have been perfectly justified in saying nothing at all.

As luck would have it, we can point to an analogous, real-life example:

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Though we largely agree on the premise, I thought it’d be sportin…

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You can read what follows as an after-action report on the Graham Platner saga—but that episode is a microcosm of something larger and more profound.

The Democratic Party has lost control of itself more completely than at any time I can remember.

Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 was the precipitating incident. It caused Democratic voters to experience a crisis of confidence in the party’s leadership, which, to rough approximation, hasn’t really turned over in decades. The leaders accelerated the collapse in trust by cowering for months as Trump and the GOP—through largely criminal means—remade the United States government into a right-wing autocracy.

As politics like nature abhors a vacuum, the void filled from the left. This faction (comprising a hodgepodge of politically liberal progressives and more genuinely radical actors) has fielded candidates strategically, in a manner designed to gain power within the Democratic Party, but without taking huge risks in reach states and districts, where losing races would undermine their movement1.

This has been an opportunistic endeavor, but I don’t use that term in a derogatory sense—at least not entirely. Progressives want more power in, if not control over, the Democratic Party for ideological reasons. The only way to obtain that power is to defeat incumbent Democrats, who in turn select the leadership. If the Democratic base is suddenly fed up with the party machine, it’s fair game in politics to channel that energy toward factional causes or candidates—so long as those candidates credibly promise to wage the fight Democratic voters are actually demanding, and don’t do and say things that make them losers in the eyes of the general electorate.

But that’s not what happened in Maine. It’s not what’s happened in at least a couple other, lower-profile congressional races.

Democrats are thus on the cusp of doing at the congressional level what Republicans did in the Obama-era midterms: winning, but suboptimally, losing certain pivotal races for dumb reasons.

Maybe they’ll pull together by November, in Maine and elsewhere, and this comparison will seem foolish in hindsight. We should also note that Republican disarray in the Obama years didn’t exactly turn out to be the death knell of the GOP.

But in either case, all of this chaos and bad blood gives rise to the question of why. What made rank-and-file Democratic voters decide to roll the dice with untested politicians rather than place their trust, once again, in candidates supported by the national party? The backstory here is very long—the length of a magazine feature. But I hope you’ll read the whole thing, in installments if necessary, and then sit with it. I don’t think it’s possible to make sense of the anger coursing through the Democratic electorate without this context.

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We know why the American far right rebelled against the GOP establishment, starting almost two decades ago: Barack Obama won the presidency with an approval rating that hovered around 70 percent, but the lagging 30—a good proxy for the Republican base, and for today’s terminal Trump loyalists—regarded Obama as an interloper. Possibly Muslim, certainly black, and—according to the right-wing influencers of the time—quite likely born in Kenya.

How could Republicans, the party of Real America, lose to this?! And then how could they do it again?!

Without resorting to birther-style calumny, today’s anti-Trump majority asks a strikingly similar question of the Democratic Party: How could you lose, twice, to such a manifestly horrible person? In contrast to the Tea Party, though, today’s resistance lacks clear and satisfactory answers. George W. Bush’s presidency ended in a multi-front disaster. His failures, which were the Republican Party’s failures, allowed Democrats to win back-to-back landslides, in 2006 and 2008. Republican leaders responded to these failures not by forging a synthesis between conservative cultural values and rigorous, fact-based governing, but by pretending their failures were about something else entirely. They’d let deficits get too big! They’d grown government when they were meant to shrink it!

They thus remade their party in the image of scoldy plutocrats rather than, say, Actually Compassionate Conservatives™️ and into the void—from the right, but down the escalator—flowed Donald Trump and kleptocracy and fascism.

For the pre-Trump GOP, then, there was a moment—an easily identifiable moment—when the music stopped. Democrats lack an analogous moment. The discrediting of the party leadership isn’t rooted in one obvious failure, but in multiple cumulative ones—pivotal moments, when Democrats could have exhibited what we now call “fight,” but decided otherwise. This is my attempt to weave them all into a single story, because they all stem from the same defect.

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The key inflection points came in 2008, then in 2020-2021, and finally in 20252.

If you were following politics as an outsider during the Bush years, you bore witness to an antidemocratic tide rising on the right. Republican operatives staged a small riot in Florida to stop vote counting in 2000. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a partisan ruling that effectively selected the incoming president, rather than allow voters the final say. The winner of the popular vote, and—most likely, in a full recount, the Electoral College—ran out of options and was forced to concede. The judicially installed president would go on to cement Republican control of the courts for another decade at least. Meanwhile Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, discovered that standing filibuster rules could be abused to create, in effect, a supermajority requirement to pass anything or confirm anyone.

These developments, no less than the Iraq war, formed a backdrop for the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Democratic candidates made ambitious promises in that race, and were thus pressed by a subset of activists and liberal intellectuals to articulate a so-called “theory of change.”

John Edwards appealed to their passions, promising he’d overcome GOP obstruction by rallying the public in red states. Under enough pressure from their own constituents, Republicans would have no choice but to legislate in good faith.

Obama appealed to their better angels, by insisting he’d win with such a mandate, in such a cooperative spirit, with so much public support, that partisan obstruction would simply melt away like ice in the sun.

Hillary Clinton, who’d been the frontrunner for most of the race, appealed to their minds. She scolded her rivals for pandering to voters with the procedural equivalent of what we today, in the policy context, call “slopulism.”3 Republicans would be obstructive, and her job would just be to grind her way through it, slowly and methodically.

It can’t go without saying that Clinton’s appeal was the only credible one. By 2008, and really well before that, American politics had become polarized enough to know that sending a Democratic president on the hustings to Texas or Kentucky or Georgia to pressure Republican senators to support a new health-care program would increase Republican opposition to the program. It was also clear by 2008 that McConnell was more calculating and ruthless than Obama was beloved and persuasive.

But Clinton’s realism wasn’t terribly satisfying. What was striking to those of us on the outside was that none of these candidates, and no one else in the race, would even gesture at the most straightforward theory of change: that in a democracy, majorities should govern. In 2008 it was too early to foresee that a corrupt Republican judicial putsch would eventually necessitate farther-reaching democratic reforms. But the legislative crisis was already upon us. If Democrats won the election, and grew their congressional majorities, they should be prepared to change the Senate rules and simply legislate their plans into existence. With Republican cooperation if offered, but on a partisan basis if necessary.

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The skeptical activists were predictably vindicated. Obama’s first two years in office were marked by an enormous step-change in procedural obstruction. How much more could Obama have accomplished without the filibuster? How much more quickly would we have recovered from the Great Recession if Obama and his majorities could have scaled up stimulus as needed to hasten a return to trend? How much less receptive would progressives have been to Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in a climate of full employment? Would Sanders have even run for president?

In fairness to Obama and Clinton and Edwards, they could at least claim to be buffeted on all sides. Filibuster reform was, at the time, a new and radical idea. For every Democratic senator who might have been receptive to the idea there were perhaps 10 who’d have dismissed it out of hand. For every activist who worried that the filibuster would be Obama’s undoing, there was another who worried about what would happen when Republicans returned to power. What would a Republican trifecta mean for reproductive rights, and organized labor, and civil liberties?

But wherever we stand on the big strategic questions of the moment, we should be honest with ourselves about this much: the biggest impediment to democratic reform has been elite reluctance, mostly arising from the center. Sure, legislating freely with a trifecta sounds fun, but it would also empower the party’s progressive wing. For years and years, through frustration and indignity, reformers made only incremental progress toward advancing this theory of change, in large part because “the establishment” didn’t want the center of power in Democratic politics to shift 10 votes to the left.

The leftists making a run for it today would cite this as a smoking gun: This just proves our point! The establishment serves donor and corporate interests, and its hostility to democratic reform was, and is, entirely an artifact of legal corruption. So we must defeat the oligarchy and its handmaids in Congress before we can talk about reform of any kind.

There is a kernel of truth to this critique, but only a kernel; the reality is much more nuanced, and the concluding inference—that progressives must take over the Democratic Party to make democracy reform possible—is false. It wasn’t just the establishment that opposed filibuster reform back then. It was also the aforementioned activists contemplating a national abortion ban and other horrors. It was also Bernie Sanders.

The more accurate distillation is that the Democratic professional class had been overtaken by a cargo cult of temporarily embarrassed mathematicians, lazy theorists, and self-interested consultants (some with big-money corporate clients) who applied to filibuster abolition the same analysis they apply to everything else: If the pivotal vote is the 50th senator rather than the 60th, policy in Democratic governments will shift to the left. If policy shifts to the left the “median voter” will notice, and become less inclined to support Democrats.

Obama and his advisers found utility in the fact that the Senate rules required him to get senators from Nebraska, Louisiana, and Arkansas to sign off on legislation, because if the pivotal member represented Colorado or Virginia, and was reasonably pliable, Democrats might “overreach” and doom themselves in subsequent elections.

This represented an enormous failure of imagination.

In their schema, ideological polarization mostly represented a threat to Democratic electoral prospects: A plurality of the country identified as conservative. A similarly sized chunk identified as moderate. But only a small one identified as liberal or progressive. Ergo, if the Democratic Party ceded more power to its liberal wing, it would lose the center. They thus embraced multiple means of keeping that wing of the party in check—including anti-democratic ones like the filibuster.

But the bigger threat polarization posed, even in foresight, wasn’t to Democrats. It was to democracy. Remember, a large number of Republican voters held a positive view of Obama at the outset of his presidency, but 30 percent of the country viewed him as a usurper on the basis of nothing. Lies. Conspiracy theories. Skin color. Thirty percent of the country, when clustered into one party, is a majority of that party.

We didn’t quite have the language for it at the time, because we couldn’t predict how easily and totally the right would embrace strongman politics. But if a majority of the Republican base was unapologetically, antidemocratically right wing—if it could not abide a popularly elected liberal on the basis of collective fever dreams—it would mechanically gravitate toward, or simply produce, Republican politicians who’d agree with their premise: that liberal rule is per se illegitimate.

In light of those incentives, the proper response—almost as a matter of game theory—was to radicalize for democracy. Sometimes Democrats would advance liberal policy, sometimes they’d advance moderate policy, sometimes they’d support Republican policy. But they would take an uncompromising view on the democratic nature of our system. Majorities win, winners govern, losers concede—but they live to fight another day.

Tip jar

Between 2008 and 2020, Democrats made plenty of tactical mistakes that didn’t help. Many were rooted in unearned certainty that Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump, and then in the belief that Trump was a passing storm. The Obama administration knew quite a lot about the nature of the Trump campaign’s cooperation with Russian election subversion, but chose to sit on it, because Mitch McConnell threatened to throw a hissy fit. Clinton clearly understood the threat Trump posed—just go review their debates—but her campaign was, in most ways, the same old statistician-driven moneyball operation she would have mounted against Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Nancy Pelosi abjured fighting Trump through proper oversight.

Some of these errors were symptomatic of the problem I’m describing here4. And they were definitely important. But they were, again, tactical. They didn’t really implicate the architecture of politics. Trump lost the 2020 election notwithstanding Pelosi’s soft touch opposition.

The next pivotal error, or family of errors, began in 2020. Joe Biden entered that cycle’s presidential primary palpably diminished to everyone who’d followed his career5. But influential centrists—and, eventually, establishment Democrats—concluded it’d be dumb to rally behind anyone else. Biden was the most moderate candidate in the field. He polled perhaps one-percent better than other candidates in the head-to-head with Trump—a name-recognition effect his supporters imbued with immense significance: Science dictates that he’s the safest bet.

They didn’t lose the bet, but they set the country on course for catastrophe. A man of his age and moderate temperament was reasonably well suited to win one election, but terribly adapted to defeating Trump and his movement for all time. And it mostly follows that the party’s incumbents, so relieved to run with Biden at the top of the ticket, were similarly maladapted.

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In an undisclosed location, hiding from a violent mob on January 6, 2021, a small number of well-adapted House Democrats began drafting articles of impeachment, in the hope of passing them immediately following the certification of the election.

The leadership rebuffed them. Pelosi adjourned the House. Democratic senators were largely relieved or indifferent. Speaking for the center, Joe Manchin urged the House not to act. “There’s no rush to do this impeachment now.”

Even Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, a liberal-minded senator and avid filibuster reformer, wanted to move on as if nothing had happened. Asked, “What is the argument that the President… should not be impeached and removed from office in the next two weeks?” Merkley responded, “I think we need to put all of our energy into the transition, and preparing to take on the issues facing America. To take these critical few weeks and spend them on a President who is going to be removed on January 20th would be a disservice to our nation.” (A day later, amid mass outcry, he largely reversed himself.)

House Democrats did, belatedly, impeach Trump, a week after the initial shock of the insurrection had worn off. The Senate did not convene his trial until almost a month later. By then most Republicans had closed ranks around Trump. And as before, Democrats’ instinct was to preemptively yield to their assumptions about what Republicans would and would not do. There was no point in extending the trial; in forcing more evidence loose; in doing literally everything within their power to protect the country from the risk that Trump would re-constitute his movement and mount a comeback.

Senator Chris Coons summed it up infamously: “The jury is ready to vote,” he told the House impeachment managers. “People want to get home for Valentine‘s Day.”

Coons wasn’t just speaking for incumbent Senate Democrats. As a senator from Delaware, and a fixture of Delaware politics, he was Biden’s dear friend, surrogate, and closest ally on Capitol Hill.

Biden wanted to pull the plug, too, and not just on the impeachment business. He didn’t want Trump to become the main character of his presidency, or for his presidency to be remembered for partisan rancor. He snuffed out a fledgling advocacy shop called the Trump Accountability Project. The White House started referring to Trump as “the former guy.” Biden wanted to be remembered the way other great modern presidents are remembered—for changing laws6.

That, in his mind, made Merrick Garland—a chief circuit court judge—doubly, triply, maybe even quadruply suited to the role of attorney general. Garland was an eminence of the clubby, bipartisan appellate-law bar, whose members (the liberal ones, at least) prize prudence and perceptions of reasonableness over decisive action and swift justice.

Nominating Garland would make soft amends for the way Republicans mistreated him when Obama nominated Garland to be a Supreme Court justice. That’s one. If Garland were to vacate his seat, Biden would be able to replace him with a younger judge. That’s two. Garland’s long judicial career might even carry weight with his friends on the Supreme Court, where Biden’s laws and executive actions would invariably come under GOP challenge. That’s three. But four—and most importantly—Garland would not pursue Trump with the zeal of a freedom fighter.

At the outset of the transition, the top political reporters at NBC News wrote Biden had “told advisers that he doesn’t want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor”—specifically of Trump’s tax crimes, and abuses of the pardon power. One adviser told them Biden "just wants to move on."

Subsequent reporting by two of the best-sourced Justice Department reporters in the country would confirm it: They let him go.

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The establishment motive for preserving the filibuster—the impulse to marginalize the left—became clearer than ever around the same time, when the two right-most Senate Democrats, Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, formed a firewall in its defense. Their explicit purpose was to keep power rooted in the center. It may be the case that there was nothing Biden and Schumer could have done to prevail on them. And even if those two had changed their minds, it might have simply shaken loose wider opposition: Manchin and Sinema were, according to many sources, heat shields for several other members.

But, again, they did not really try. The priority was roads and bridges (most of which would not be built in Biden’s term), health-insurance subsidies (which would expire shortly after it), and industrial policy (benefiting workers in red America who remained in thrall to Trump).

Democracy protection would have to wait. There would be hearings. There would be speeches. But the architecture would not change. The official substantive Democratic response to decades of legislative nullification, the theft of the Supreme Court, and a failed coup would be nothing.

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This left Democrats unable to respond when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—when they still held congressional majorities. The court’s right-wing majority was thus free to make its allegiances clear—by granting presidents (but specifically Trump) wide-ranging legal immunity for criminal abuse of power, and by accelerating the right-wing attack on the pillars of multiracial democracy.

Shaken as many of us were by the mounting toll of Democratic passivity, these choices were not the last load-bearing bricks. Many of the rank and file Democratic voters who now demand change still had faith (or at least grudging trust) that the establishment knew what it was doing. Obama won twice. Hillary Clinton lost because our system—the one in need of reform—doesn’t always allow majorities to win, let alone govern. But she was the people’s choice. And Democrats bounced back quickly. They won the 2018 midterms in a landslide, reclaimed the White House decisively in 2020, and fought the 2022 midterms to a draw.

But they lost to Trump outright in 2024. They’d given the country full employment, lower inequality, rising wages, but lacked the confidence—the fight—to declare it morning in America. Work left to do, but oh what a mistake it would be to re-empower the party that keeps leaving the country in ruin. Their democracy appeals fell flat—but of course they did! If democracy was under such urgent threat, why did Democrats keep deprioritizing its protection?

To add insult to injury, they continued deprioritizing it. After Trump won, they had much to say about the price of beef and eggs. But they were less interested in creating a unified front against autocracy. It is true that they opposed Trump’s nominees more vigorously than any minority has ever opposed a president’s nominees. Yet no other president has required all of his nominees to propound lies about the results of an election as a condition of federal service. The correct number of Democratic votes for these nominees was and remains zero.

And then, when their votes were needed to fund the government, when the question before them was, “Should we help pass an enabling act—should we provide months of budget authority to a president shredding the constitution, including the provisions governing the budget?” their response was “yes.”

Things have gotten better—a little bit better—in the months since that betrayal.

But this is why Democratic incumbents and establishment candidates are endangered.

Most Democratic primary voters can not recite this history chapter and verse. Some were children when it began. But we can all see that passivity has delivered Democrats setback after setback, without winning hearts in the middle. We all have experience with unwanted conflict. Most people aren’t political junkies, but everyone’s had a high school bully or a bad neighbor or an abusive boss or romantic partner. We all know what it’s like to be in a bind or crisis and then reason or fight out of it. If you’re physically strong you might fight with your fists; if you have a lot of friends, you build a posse; if the law is on your side, you hire a lawyer. Nobody puts their finger in the wind and performs high-mindedness, expecting the masses to rally to their side organically.

Contra my Politix cohost Matt Yglesias, this is why Democratic primary voters believe incumbent Democrats and the “establishment” don’t fight. It is not because they want Democrats to repeat Green Day chants or be generally more “expressive.” It’s because those Democrats don’t take uncompromising stands, then deploy their power maximally, even when the most important things in the world are on the line.

This is why Democratic voters are sniffing out fresh blood, and, in some cases, finding candidates who have no business serving in Congress: If one faction promises to fight the oligarchy, and the other promises to win by inching closer to common ground with Trump, which one is the primary electorate going to side with?

It’s also why I regret that I, and other people who assess the problem the same way, didn’t do a better, more organized job steering primary voters toward candidates who could espouse credible theories of power, rather than ones who use the word “fight” as window dressing for whatever factional ulterior motives they have in mind.

The problem now is that it’s basically too late. There is no going back in time, and there are few procedural levers within reach that would help the dread establishment regain the trust of voters before the election.

But if Democrats wanted to signal that they get it, I could think of a few gestures that might help:

• They could remove Schumer from the leadership and replace him with someone like Chris Van Hollen7 now.

• They could lay out strict conditions for their votes on the next federal budget now.

• They could embrace what you might call caravan-style politics—named in honor of the GOP’s established practice of creating lurid spectacle before elections. The world is currently struggling to contain the worst Ebola emergency in history, in large part because Trump and Elon Musk gutted U.S. capacity to address global health crises. Republicans including then-citizen-celebrity Donald Trump won the 2014 midterms in large part by blaming Obama for a far-off Ebola outbreak. Why can’t Democrats return the favor?

• Same screwworm; same measles; same cyclosporiasis. Democrats never invested in partisan media (a topic for another day) but they could send creators to the epicenters of these crises to produce reams of scare content.

• They could cut AIPAC loose altogether, and promise that the next Democratic government will reassess its relationships with Trump-aligned regimes the world over—including Israel’s.

• Trump has lost a war, and now lost a ceasefire, but somehow is not the subject of constant ridicule. And because the press is more afraid of Republicans than of Democrats, it insists on reporting that the ceasefire has been “tested” rather than that it has “failed.” Democrats could change that! They could demand Trump’s resignation over this debacle. They could assert that the failure of this war is not clear to the public because the mainstream media has a pro-Trump bias. And when Republicans scoff at the notion, as they invariably would, Democrats could say it again.

• Just for fun, they could start and fan a Musk birther craze, and promise to investigate his citizenship pursuant to Congress’s valid legislative purpose in overseeing the government’s solicitousness toward South African nationals.

More generally, they could act like you or I would act when we’re beset on all sides in our own lives. The things that Dems find frustrating about the unfairness of the political system? Yes, sure, bore through them like hard boards. But make clear that they are intolerable, and that underlying impediments will be removed. Tell the public things will get better—but that it’ll first require unwinding the right-wing autocracy and building a better, stabler democracy than we had before.

Or don’t! Or continue along the trajectory of the past two decades. Maybe it will all work out. Maybe a combination of luck and Republican failure will save the country without Democrats ever having to fight the way their voters wish they would. But that is a recipe for more Graham Platners. The insurgency will continue until morale improves.

Whether you were excited by, skeptical of, or angry about Zohran Mamdani’s involvement in New York’s primaries surely turns on 1) what his ends are, 2) whether you support them, and 3) how well or poorly you think he advanced his own objectives.

Everyone agrees it was a ruthless demonstration of political power. The candidates he endorsed swept their races, ousted multiple incumbents from office, and burnt some of the bridges he’d built to other powerful New York Democrats. His critics and allies are simply arguing over whether this was wise.

So the first question is, what was the point?

Mamdani’s trying to shift the balance of power in the Democratic Party (at both the federal and state level) to make it less solicitous of Israel— at least as it exists in its unenlightened state under Benjamin Netanyahu—and more intent on redistributing income downward. He wants to do this both directly—by replacing fairly progressive New York Democrats with Democrats further to their left—and through indirect force, demonstrating to other officeholders in the state and region (including the House’s top Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries) that if they don’t change their own politics, they might lose their jobs, too.

This much is pretty obvious. But you don’t have to intuit Mamdani’s motives. He has said as much. On Wednesday, he told the MSNOW host Chris Hayes that the races he’d taken sides in, “were about clarity. They were about conscience. They were about conviction.”

“New Yorkers,” he said, “want to see people who are willing to not just stand up to the federal administration, but also stand for a vision of working people at the heart of it.”

He said he’d used his political capital “to ensure that the people who will fight hardest for that same agenda are going to be there, whether it’s in Albany or whether it’s in DC,” and that the agenda should be “much closer to what we used to see from our party in the days of FDR than what we’ve seen in a time when our only vision seems to be a responsive one to Trump as opposed to one that goes beyond that.”

I admire the confidence and the conviction. Few Democrats are willing to show, rather than say, that they’re not kidding around. He’s here to play, and everyone is on notice. I also think his objectives are worthy, at least in the abstract. What’s an FDR-like agenda for the post-Trump 21st century? Basically all of the details are TBD, but Democrats will be better served by ambition than by timidity when Trump finally departs the scene.

But as to question three: I don’t think what he did reflects a carefully calibrated theory of power. It was both front-loaded, and inward looking: A bid to make as much change as possible to the factional balance of power within the party, given an opening. The biggest possible swing he could’ve taken. But that’s a bit like entering a chess tournament and bringing your queen into game one on move two.

It might work out okay in the long run, but you’re likelier to lose early. Political fortunes turn fast. Right now Mamdani has everyone’s attention. But six months from now he, and this gambit, might look more like a cautionary tale.

The most controversial Mamdani-backed nominee is Darializa Avila Chevalier, a DSA candidate who has had some…interesting things to say over the years. Not just familiar-but-maximalist progressive views on borders or policing or Israel that stem from some raw conception of justice. Things like “Fuck Kamala Harris,” Joe Biden is a “rapist,” and COVID-19 had origins in France, not China.

Mamdani also had interesting things to say before he became a household name—none this inflammatory, but many of which he walked back for pragmatic purposes on his way to becoming mayor. Perhaps Chevalier will demonstrate similar pragmatism. Perhaps she now sees that posting every stray thought isn’t a good way to husband power. That’s what she tried to convey to MSNOW’s Ali Velshi. But it’s striking, and surely not a coincidence, that Bernie Sanders did not join Mamdani in this endorsement. Sanders endorsed Brad Lander; he endorsed Claire Valdez. But he seems to recognize that live-wire DSA shitposters aren’t worth the risk. That it’s not necessarily wise to flip every possible seat from deep blue to green. That some of his factional allies could do more damage to the Democratic Party and the cause of building left-wing power within the Democratic Party than simply leaving well enough alone.

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You’ll notice that Mamdani, in explaining his theory of power, glossed over the part of the equation that pertains to defeating fascism, and skipped straight to the ultimate ends of enacting a social-democratic post-Trump agenda.

This is consistent with DSA politics in general, which tend to beg the question of how to build a national majority. You can see it in the fact that, as Sanders acolytes, they organized themselves around the term “socialism,” which, whatever they mean by it, is freighted and toxic in most of the country. This may sort itself out in the long-run—if Mamdani, and Katie Wilson, the socialist Seattle mayor, and other incoming left-wing leaders govern well, they might prove preconceived notions wrong. But they’ve put the cart before the horse. They stand in contrast to America’s fascists who don’t call themselves fascists or national socialists—they instead adopt monikers like Tea Party or America First, that, textually, are meant to assuage rather than repel the center, while winking at their fellow travelers.

Racing ahead to the policy revolution is also putting the cart before the horse. Those steps Mamdani skipped are actually the most important ones: How to fight Trump in the here and now, how to impose accountability on him and his coconspirators after he’s defeated, and how to reform the political system to make it responsive to the anti-Trump majority. Whiff on these, and the rest of the theory won’t matter. A Democratic supermajority, dominated by democratic socialists, can sweep to power in 2029, but without a well-developed theory of power, their agenda will die. If not by billionaire and trillionaire propaganda, then by filibuster; if not by filibuster then by juristocracy; if not by juristocracy then by nullification and tyranny of the minority.

This faction of the Democratic Party has fairly well-developed views on how wealth transmutes into intolerable political power inequalities: they believe that this excess wealth must be taxed, and the political influence it’s meant to purchase must be regulated.

They are not wrong. But this facet of our political-economy isn’t the only or even the greatest impediment to policy change. It is usually a safe assumption that a democratic socialist will be a more committed fighter than a moderate, because their policy ambition is sincere, and when they encounter obstacles, they will be inclined to surmount them. But they often seem to be charging forward without a map.

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I’m focused principally on DSA and DSA-aligned factional Democrats here because they’re having a moment. But the liberal establishment still runs the Democratic Party and their theory is, if anything, worse.

In the mainline, you’ll see influential figures who decline to endorse nominees to their left, or even threaten to leave the party when primary voters make choices they don’t like.

You see a strategic approach to building power and checking Trump that begins and ends with winning elections and padding margins. Winning is obviously the predicate of all political power building—but it is also table stakes. And in the establishment, the approach is rote and reductive: It’s to support primary candidates who poll best head-to-head against Republicans, which typically means throwing support to the most moderate, most change-averse candidate in every primary field.

But to what end? When a party selects for wallflowers, the ambition for reform of any kind—procedural or substantive—will be shallow. It will build a big majority that makes peace with the post-Trump status quo; that hopes people can be hypnotized—with antiseptic policy ideas and promises of normalcy—into treating Trump-era wreckage as a new baseline.

The Democratic elite is biased toward candidates who are struggling in many primaries not because the Democratic base across the country is unified behind a specific foreign policy or anti-oligarchy agenda, but because these candidates do not behave as though we’re all living through the same traumatic episode. The Venn diagram of authenticity and fighting is a circle at the moment, because every Democrat in America sees what the Trump regime has done to the country and feels, authentically, in their guts: “fuck these horrible monsters.” But they rarely see that sentiment reflected in Democratic officialdom, which is guided by the assumption that manifesting outrage at the GOP loses the center.

At best, we’re stuck with a party that can sometimes be counted on to react when Trump and the GOP seize more power, but never disproportionately, and certainly not proactively. It is better than not that Gavin Newsom canceled out Trump’s Texas power grab by gerrymandering California in equal measure. But this is not deterrence. Deterrence is achieved when an adversary believes a bad act will backfire. The Dem proposition was to match Republicans seat for seat, which, from the GOP perspective, was a green light: Worst case scenario, we preserve some version of the status quo. But if Dems come up short anywhere in the country, then we win.

Sure enough, a partisan state Supreme Court majority in Virginia threw out a retributive gerrymander, and state Democrats folded. Republicans won.

If Democratic leaders had a better-developed theory of power, they would have gerrymaxxed. This isn’t just hindsight speaking. It’s what Beto O’Rourke advocated when I asked him last summer. There are some Democrats, though precious few, who get it.

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The Democratic presidential primary field is undeveloped, but there is little indication that any clear contenders have theories of power that are better calibrated than Mamdani’s.

The glimmer of hope I’ll leave you with comes from somewhere unexpected.

It’s from Pete Buttigieg, who told the reporter Alex Roarty that his experience as Joe Biden’s transportation secretary “radicalized” him in favor of institutional change.

I’m an ideological moderate, but when it comes to our institutions, I think that what I saw was just how hard it was to get even common-sense things done. How many layers of bureaucracy delayed the delivery of a new bridge or airport?

…

I believe that there needs to be a more restrained executive branch, but I think we’re asking the wrong question if we’re just saying, “Should the executive branch do more or do less?

To me, the executive branch needs to become both more and less powerful. It needs to become more capable when it comes to things like confronting inequality and standing up for the little guy and addressing fraud and misbehavior by powerful organizations and corporations. And it needs to become less powerful when it comes to things like surveillance and intimidation and monitoring and restricting speech.

This is admittedly not much to go on, just as gesturing to FDR is not much to go on. But what he’s saying here makes no sense unless he’s made peace with the need for significant democratic reform. Including court expansion. Because what he’s describing here would essentially invert the current Supreme Court’s partisan and unprincipled view of executive power.

The Republican justices have saddled the country with a unitary and immune executive, but largely stripped the executive branch of the power to promulgate rules, and erected myriad other governing obstacles—to progressive reforms, uniquely. Buttigieg is describing something like the opposite: an accountable and checked president, but who oversees a much nimbler and more muscular bureaucracy.

The key inference here is that no leader could advance this vision without first disempowering the court’s Republican justices. Under their recent precedents a huge range of activity that liberals and progressives expect of government—from business regulation to democracy promotion—is illegal; but it’s perfectly kosher for the president to instruct federal agents and prosecutors to intimidate executives and state-government officials into adopting the same policies envisioned under the “illegal” federal action.

It should obviously be the other way around. The courts should be weaker; the president, as a person, should be constrained, and the people supreme—but the state apparatus should be stronger.

If someone like Buttigieg leads Democrats to victory and realigns state power in this way, but in pursuit of moderate policies, leftists may howl. They may call him a sellout. They may regret not waging factional warfare more aggressively. But they will be missing the point. Because a reformer like that will leave behind a system that allows people to govern themselves; that gives them a fair shot at finally, one day, building the social democracy of their dreams.

Eric Max: I want to help Democrats win, but I want to push them to fight harder. Donating to Democratic funds like the DCCC feels like rewarding bad behavior. Where would donations or volunteering move the needle? Avenues I consider include “Run for Something” to accelerate generational change in the party, or “Our Revolution” to directly support progressive candidates.

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We’re quickly approaching the end of primary season, at which point my advice will be: Give to candidates in swing territory, or the organizations supporting them. Be on the lookout, especially, for credible candidates who happen to be underfunded, either because they’re unknown, or because the pseudo-quants in the Democratic Party have decided to cut them off.

For a mix of pragmatic and ideological reasons, establishment Democrats are bummed that Matt Dunlap won the primary to represent Jared Golden’s district in Maine. And they have a point, insofar as Dunlap is probably a bad ideological fit for that district in a typical cycle. But there are many reasons to think this will be a blue-wave cycle, and wave elections typically sweep several reach-candidacies to victory. Then they become incumbents and their odds of holding these seats improve. Eventually another wave will come from the other direction and sweep them back out. But they’ll sweep out a bunch of “well-calibrated” reps as well.

Dunlap may have no problem fundraising, so I’m not saying whip out your checkbook for him right now. I’m just using him as a case in point. If national Democrats take their toys and go home in Maine’s second district, the grassroots should step in. “Smart money” will walk away from candidates who could ride the wave to victory, and they could use backup. Then, next year, Maine Democrats can redistrict their state (which, despite being blue, and trending bluer, is effectively gerrymandered for the GOP).

But the question makes me realize that I (or likeminded people who actually work in the campaign and fundraising worlds) probably should have established Fight Scores, or something along those lines, to evaluate Democratic primary candidates on accountability and Democratic reform grounds.

Ideology is a decent proxy for fight. But it’s not perfect.

There are plenty of ideologically progressive candidates who are hungry to fight within the party (over issues like Israel, oligarchy, etc.) but have a weak grasp of the procedural levers Democrats can pull to fight Republicans—whether they’re in the minority, in divided government, or in a post Trump world.

Separately, there are (or were) candidates like George Conway who have conventional or even center-right views on things like executive power and taxation, but who are desperate to fight Trump and have a clear sense of how to do it.

And, of course, there are a ton of old-guard Democrats who aren’t terribly offensive to progressives or moderates in policy terms, but who are wedded to a sucker’s conception of politics, where the cardinal priorities are comity and bipartisan cooperation. Where there’s no point in imposing pain on Republicans for their degenerate political choices, because what’s the point, and also everyone wants to go home for Valentine’s Day. That’s where the primary energy ought to be focused, whether the challengers are “left” or “moderate” on an ideological spectrum.

At this point, we’ve won the argument, insofar as every Democrat running in every primary will claim to be the best “fighter.” But talk is cheap, and I and people in my orbit should have done a better job steering voters toward candidates with the most well-developed theories of power. It was a big oversight in retrospect.

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Denis Markell: Two questions:

1) It seems the mainstream media (I’m looking at YOU NY Times) is more interested in writing either yet another hit piece on Platner or whining about Mamdani, rather than looking at Ken Martin - the “autopsy” took up some oxygen, but he rode it out and I don’t hear ANYTHING about what a mess he’s making of things. Do you hear anything from your sources in the party to indicate that there’s any movement in getting rid of him? I have PTSD from the Biden years and the “It’s too late to put in anyone else...”

2) Is there ANYTHING Talarico or his people can do to get Paxton to debate him? I see no downside in this. I understand Paxton will do anything he can NOT to do it, but there must be some way to make it impossible for him to say no. Send someone in a chicken outfit to all his campaign appearances? I realize that the only way he would do it (that I can think of) is if the polls show him really behind, and then it would be a scorched earth kind of thing. Your thoughts?

Second question first. Obviously nobody can force Paxton to do anything, but I would actually recommend pretty strongly against the typical tactics candidates use to try to bait their opponents into debating.

The key is that the candidate avoiding debates is almost always winning. They may be scared to debate; they may be refusing to debate on risk-averse terms. But they’re communicating “I don’t need to waste my time with this.”

And so the baiting tactics underdogs use tend to scream desperation. They’re pleading, and the frontrunners are refusing. The last thing Talarico needs right now is to start acting like an ineffectual weakling.

But the key in this race is that Talarico’s holding his own. And we all anticipate Paxton will duck debates because he always does. So I’d encourage Talarico to carry himself as though (or even simply say) he anticipates no debates because Paxton hasn’t manned up for a debate in many years—but that he doesn’t need a debate to expose Paxton’s lies and corruption, and will win the election, debate or no.

It’s hard to tell from out here in DC, but my sense is that Talarico is following cookie-cutter advice to float above the fray while Paxton mocks and belittles him unanswered. If you’re on the ground in Texas and think I’ve got this wrong, let me know in the comments. But my thought broadly is he should get on the front foot and try to stay there.

As for the DNC, yes, there is some scuttlebutt…

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When Barack Obama signed the JCPOA with Iran and other global powers in 2015, his critics wailed that the deal was bad, but also too short.

It echoed the Annie Hall joke: What terrible food—and such small portions!

But these malcontents did have an argument about why bigger would be better. Taken at face value the idea was that Iran could bide its time, submit to an intrusive inspection regime for 15 years, then revert to form when the terms expired.

“It is only a deferral and a delay,” bellowed the hawkish critic Leon Wieseltier. “Every pathway is not cut off, not at all. The accord provides for a respite of 15 years, but 15 years is just a young person’s idea of a long time.”

People in this camp feared, or claimed to fear, that in the ensuing decade and a half, Iran would amass wealth through oil markets, invest proceeds in conventional military, then cut bait. They’d break the deal late in the game, or comply through the term, but refuse to modify and extend it. They’d expel IAEA inspectors, knowing international sanctions would snap back into place, but then reconstitute a nuclear-weapons program as a middle power, which would likely make the risks of preventative strikes or regime-change war too great.

Somewhere in their minds, though, this was always about steering the U.S. toward regime-change war. And the tell was that these critics would never stipulate what, in their minds, would constitute a satisfactory term. What’s a suitably long time? What’s the longest inspections regime a sovereign nation might conceivably accept? Twenty years? Thirty?

No state would submit to a permanent affront to its sovereignty. One might quibble at the margin with 15 years, but it was not absurd on its face.

Hungary lost and regained democracy in 16 years. Germans elected Adolf Hitler, lost World War II, and reconstituted as a constitutional democracy over the course of 16 years. Fifteen years on from 2015, Ayatollah Khamenei (then 76) would have been 91 years old, or (more likely) deceased. From the vantage point of 2015, nobody who signed the deal could have known with certainty how much oil the world would be demanding a decade and a half later. Fifteen years is more than enough time for cynics and fanatics to see the light, or be overthrown by popular uprising. It’s long enough for a regime, or at least the character of a regime, to change. It may be a young person’s idea of a long time, but it’s a presumptuous man’s idea of a predictable time horizon; and an old man’s idea of a blink of an eye.

The JCPOA provided a reasonable window for reassessment. If Iran reneged, the sanctions would snap back into place, and Iran would return to pariah status. But if Iran upheld its end of the bargain, conducted itself acceptably in its international affairs, and sought an extension on more lenient terms—that would represent real evidence of normalization. Diplomatic success! It would suggest Iran was no longer a rogue regime, and perhaps never was.

In any case, under the terms of the JCPOA, which Donald Trump voided, we would have reached that crossroads in 2030.

Under the terms of the mess Trump has made, his vice president now says, “we feel with extraordinary confidence, if [the Iranians] did everything that they could to build a nuclear weapon, they couldn’t do it during this administration.”

This administration ends in January 2029.

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First and foremost: Fuck these people. Having behaved so recklessly, and caused so much damage, the Trump administration can now only promise to wipe its hands of Iran and leave the nuclear proliferation challenge for another administration. This is their tell, and their tell is that—having started and lost a war, rather than honor or revive the JCPOA—their top priority is making this someone else’s problem. Someone they won’t hesitate to attack and smear and saddle with blame from the cheap seats, if Iran becomes a nuclear power a few years from now.

But as a close second: this is worse than it sounds.

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