Democrats once understood the importance of economic growth. That’s because growth, particularly productivity growth, is what drives rising living standards over time. Democrats sought to harness the benefits of growth for the working class, not to interfere with the economic engine of progress. They believed in the future and the possibilities for dramatic improvement in human welfare.

Democrats’ 21^st century project has, at its core, been dedicated to other goals. They now prize goals like fighting climate change, reducing inequality, pursuing procedural justice, and advocating for immigrants and identity groups above promoting growth. For example, the “Deciding to Win” report analyzed word frequency in Democratic Party platforms since 2012 and found a 32 percent decline in the appearance of the word “growth” compared to a 150 percent increase in the word “climate,” a 1,044 percent increase in “LGBT/LGBTQI+,” a 766 percent increase in “equity,” an 828 percent increase in “white/black/Latino/Latina,” and a 333 percent increase in “environmental justice.”

This is remarkably short-sighted. The key to substantially rising living standards for the working class—once the Democrats’ prized goal—is precisely more economic growth, especially higher productivity growth. You cannot make up for that by redistribution nor by simply spending more money on government programs. A fast-growth economy provides more opportunities for upward mobility, generates better-paying jobs, creates fiscal space for priorities like infrastructure projects, and, as Benjamin Friedman has argued, has positive “moral consequences” by orienting citizens toward generosity, tolerance, and collective advance. Slow growth has the opposite effects.

It is therefore completely unrealistic for Democrats to think they can accomplish their goals and build support without centering the goal of economic growth. Attempts to elide this problem have resulted in heavy reliance on chimerical projects like a rapid green transition which have not and cannot deliver the benefits of overall growth. Or, as in the Biden administration, just spending money on various party priorities and hoping for the best. (“Make Spending Money Great Again,” did not work.)

With that in mind, it is instructive to examine the Democrats’ latest economic proposals and see where they fall short—and frequently massively so.

Start with “affordability”—the Democrats’ mantra of the moment. One does not have to be a cynic to see that affordability is not a program but a slogan, designed to take advantage of voters’ strong dissatisfaction with the Trump administration’s economic management. They feel the prices they pay for key commodities are no better aligned with their incomes than they were under Biden (perhaps worse)—and they weren’t happy about it then.

Hence the slogan “affordability.” If voters don’t feel things are affordable, well, we’ll promise to make things affordable. Of course, that’s not much of an economic program and, by definition, has nothing to do with growth. The result has been a grab bag of price caps and controls, subsidies and new regulations that may or may not do much to make everyday life more affordable but at least signal that Democrats want to do something about the problem. Long-term beneficial effects on the economy are neither claimed nor likely.

Nearly as popular as affordability—and frequently twinned with the affordability pitch—is a populist denunciation of the rich and big companies who are alleged to be responsible for high prices and nearly everything else that’s wrong with the economy. As James Talarico, Democratic candidate for the Senate in Texas put it:

What I would say is that the only minority destroying this country is the billionaires…We are all focused on the wrong 1 percent...Trans people aren’t taking away our healthcare. Undocumented people aren’t defunding our schools…It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians.

Countless Democratic politicians have made variations of this claim. But such claims have no logical connection to a coherent economic program and certainly have nothing to do with economic growth. What they do connect to is, well, taxing the rich. In particular, there is now a vogue for wealth taxes in Democratic circles including the notorious “billionaires tax” in California, a ballot initiative that would levy a 5 percent tax on net worth over $1 billion using estimates inflated by voting control rather than economic interest.

Going further, Democrats on the national level have twinned taxing the rich with free money and that old Republican favorite, tax cuts. The Bernie Sanders-Ro Khanna proposal would go California one better and makes the 5 percent wealth tax annual rather than a one-time levy, directing the revenue toward, among many other things, “a $3,000 direct payment to every man, woman and child in a household making $150,000 or less — $12,000 for a family of four”. Free money—now that’s an economic program!

The Van Hollen proposal taxes income rather than wealth and imposes escalating surtaxes on incomes over $1 million, starting at 5 percent and topping out at 12 percent on incomes over $5 million. In this proposal, the revenue raised will be used to eliminate federal income taxes for about half of working Americans ($46,000 individual income; $92,000 if married and filing jointly). Take that, Republicans. We may have no idea how to promote economic growth but we can beat you on tax cuts!

A more promising Democratic idea, with more serious economic content, is the idea of “abundance.” A Washington Post article described the abundance approach as “cutting back on the environmental reviews, strict zoning, labor rules and other obstacles that prevent government from efficiently building, fixing and fostering the things people want, from housing to energy.” An Axios article summarized the new approach as “respond[ing to governing failures in blue cities and states] by cutting excess regulations to build more housing, energy projects and more.”

There has been some movement, at least on the state front, in implementing this approach. But resistance has been fierce from key sectors of the Democratic Party. After all, those most directly connected to the regulations, procedures and bureaucracies that the abundance approach wants to attack, not to mention the countless NGOs that defend them, are by and large Democrats. They’ve got a lot of power within the party and are exerting it to the maximum to protect their self-interest.

A bigger problem is the ultimate goal of this approach. There is a distinct whiff of professional class coastal liberal preferences in the Democratic vision of abundance. That vision is heavy on infill urban housing, urban infrastructure, and building out clean energy to stave off climate catastrophe. Indeed, in the seminal text of the Democratic abundance movement, Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the book’s introduction waxes rhapsodic on their vision of a 2050 socially liberal ecotopia, where, to paraphrase President Trump (“everything’s computer!”), everything’s electric! Fossil fuels are but a distant memory; it’s all clean energy that is dirt cheap with towering skyscraper farms for food and drones that seamlessly deliver everything your heart desires.

This is catnip for the book’s target audience of liberal Democratic-leaning professionals but for the rest of the population—not so much. Democrats have not yet grappled with the fact that the goals of their abundance approach are linked to a concept of abundance that does not line up well with the preferences of actually-existing working-class voters. These voters, quite simply, want to be richer and have more stuff. Abundance Democrats, on the other hand, seem to have in mind a socially liberal ecotopia that is highly appealing to educated, upper middle class liberals but much less so to the working class. As Josh Barro has noted Democratic abundance advocates tend to support “policies that would make energy, and the aspirational suburban lifestyle, more expensive.” And that lifestyle, he points out, is what “abundance” means for most ordinary Americans. Arizona Democratic senator Ruben Gallego underscored the issue: “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.”

That connects to an even more profound limitation of the Democrats’ abundance approach. As an economic program, it is not really a growth program but rather one that promises to deliver more of what Democratic liberals want. But what the country really needs—and what most voters want—is to become richer faster. And that can only be delivered through economic growth that outstrips population growth (rising GDP per capita).

Of course, promoting economic growth at this level is challenging. It depends above all on promoting sustainable, strong productivity growth. This in turn depends centrally on technological change and its incorporation into the economy, typically linked to the rise of new general purpose technologies (GPTs). Think electricity, the internal combustion engine, semiconductors/computing and so on.

Might such a GPT be on tap today? Of course there is: AI. AI boosters are not wrong to claim that AI is, in fact, a new GPT. If so, the effects on productivity growth could be game-changing and era-defining.

Democrats, however, who have long had a streak of techno-pessimism, are not reacting terribly positively to this development and its enormous growth potential. Indeed, the evolving reaction seems to be downright negative. Senator Chris Murphy, a reliable barometer of party trends, had this to say:

The cultural and economic impact of AI is going to be the biggest issue in politics over the next decade…There is going to be a growing appetite from voters to support candidates that are going to help them manage the potential coming disaster as AI poisons our kids and destroys all of our jobs.

Murphy made this judgement on AI back in December. Democrats’ views on AI have not improved since then. The current favorite trope is to bash data centers linked to AI and call for regulatory measures ranging from a mortarium on new ones to insisting that data centers provide and pay for their own power. Other proposed regulations aim at AI companies directly around issues of online safety, especially for minors.

Leaving aside the likely policy efficacy (or lack thereof) of these measures they have nothing to do with maximizing productivity growth from AI and channeling the benefits as widely as possible. They are, instead, measures to take advantage of public fears about AI, which are considerable. Blue Rose Research recently found that a fire-breathing AI-specific populism maximizes political benefits for Democrats. An example from their research of such an approach:

Within 5 years, AI is projected to eliminate 75 percent of our jobs. The biggest change in human history is here. Your job, my job...they’re on the line. What happens next is a choice. Their choice? Let mega-corporations fire everyone, keep all the profits, and leave you with nothing. A future of mass unemployment, foreclosures, and chaos.

I don’t doubt that such an approach could be politically effective in the short-run, especially as we approach the 2026 election. But is is woefully inadequate as an approach to AI as a new GPT that could make the country and its workers richer. For that, you’d need a growth program and Democrats don’t have one.

Subscribe now

Share

We’ve documented numerous times the collapse of voter trust in government and public officials, a problem that has only intensified as national politics turns ever more polarized and dysfunctional. New data from YouGov shows that in early 2026, there are only two agencies in the entire federal government that most Americans say are trustworthy—the National Park Service (NPS) at 57 percent and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at 52 percent. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) are viewed as trustworthy by more than four in ten Americans, and the rest of the agencies on the list receive paltry trustworthiness marks.

Parks and rockets are the only two government functions that Americans reliably trust, along with some minor love for weather reports and support for the elderly and disabled. That’s it.

This is a truly pathetic situation that goes well beyond partisans yelling, “It’s Biden’s fault!” or “It’s Trump’s fault!” Years of neglect and incompetent management by both parties have left Americans across the divides deeply distrustful or uncertain about the trustworthiness of the public sector in areas ranging from health and education to justice and national security.

Partisans, of course, have their favorites and least favorites: e.g., Democrats are much less trusting of ICE, DHS, CBP, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department than Republicans, while Republicans are much less trusting of USAID, the EPA, and the CDC than Democrats.

But beyond the expected dislike of certain government functions that don’t fit each party’s respective ideological biases, it’s much more concerning that Americans overall don’t seem to trust much of anything carried out or released by the government, even basic information. Other data highlighted by YouGov shows that only 23 percent of U.S. adults believe that all or most of the statistics reported by the government are “reliable and accurate”—down from 36 percent just a year ago. Similarly, if you look at the chart below, you’ll see at most only around one third of adults deem a range of specific government statistics from population counts to crimes to the number of COVID-19 deaths to be trustworthy information.

Although there are expected partisan divides on many of these measures given who is in power at any given point, the much bigger question is whether government in the public interest is even possible anymore—at least in terms of whether Americans themselves will ever again view its work as reliable, trustworthy, and valuable independent of who is in charge.

My guess is that most Americans respect and value the hard work and dedication of those civil servants who help keep our country safe, clean, healthy, secure, prosperous, well-educated, and orderly. Sure, there are constant hits on layabout bureaucrats and “government fraud,” with many of these complaints being legitimate grievances, but the work of the public sector and government agencies is often grueling, underpaid, and subject to constant whiplash by wealthy members of Congress and presidents trying to score political points.

Federal workers do the business of the American people mostly well and mostly without complaint. We need genuine leadership from the legislative and executive branches to back up these workers and ensure that the activities and services of the federal government are unmatched in their excellence. The government should never settle for mediocre services or throw up its hands and say the system is what it is and can’t be fixed. The government should aim higher to achieve the levels of public backing and support that many private sector companies receive from Americans based on the quality of the services and products they supply—and their responsiveness to consumers. This will require far more transparency from government agencies plus constant internal reviews and upgrading of techniques and methods used to carry out the people’s work.

Likewise, Congress should pay its bills and stop using shutdowns of agencies and threatened defaults to make meaningless ideological points. We’ve had two federal government shutdowns in a mere six months, basically for no reason and no discernible outcome other than partisan spite. Programs and agency budgets that are superfluous or out-of-date should be eliminated through the legislative process, and money saved should be used to reduce deficits or shifted into other proven projects that people need to live a good life or get ahead.

Finally, vital information released to the public on the state of the economy or our overseas commitments or public health or national emergencies must always be viewed as truly neutral facts and advice, entirely free of partisan interference by outside political actors trying to defend their positions and from internal managers trying to achieve some ideological goal. If public officials can’t or won’t adhere to these standards, they should be promptly removed and replaced by others who will.

America is a fantastic nation that faces an array of manageable economic and security challenges that can be overcome if we put our minds to the task more cooperatively and end the ridiculous partisan degrading of the public sector. We need a federal government and workforce better managed and operated and ready to work in partnership with private businesses and civil society to keep improving the lives of all Americans and maintain a robust national economy.

If politicians in the two parties would rather preen on social media than work in concert to help build a high-functioning governmental system, then they should retire from public life or expect to be voted out by citizens and replaced with officials genuinely interested in making government work better for the people.

When it comes to the federal government, trust is a one-way street. The government must earn the trust of Americans, not expect them to go along with shoddy services, poorly designed programs, and surly or entitled attitudes from politicians.

Subscribe now

Share

Until the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran took center stage, Trump’s unyielding faith in tariffs had become his party’s chief liability heading into the midterms. In some ways this was unsurprising, given their broad scope and negative impact on grocery prices and other household goods. Yet the discontent also reveals the growing chasm between the allure of economic nationalism in the abstract and support for its practice à la Trump. Trump, it must be remembered, owed his rise to the liberal establishment’s conflicted response to the twin forces of deindustrialization and globalization. On top of his pledge to radically curb immigration, he successfully campaigned on overturning the global trade order in 2016 and did so even more emphatically in 2024.

Many economists warned that his agenda threatened to reignite inflation, scramble supply chains, and raise input costs for domestic manufacturers. But it was to no avail. Despite the Biden administration’s attempts to piece together its own “post-neoliberal” trade and industrial strategy, millions of Americans—not least younger men who had no memory of the debates over NAFTA and China joining the WTO—appeared willing to try Trump’s brasher approach, regardless of the turbulence and complications likely to transpire.

Trends since Trump’s return to office suggest the appetite for such experimentation has waned precipitously. Sixty percent of Americans “strongly or somewhat approve” of the Supreme Court’s ruling against Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to a recent YouGov survey; a new survey commissioned by The Guardian shows seven in ten Americans believe they are paying higher prices because of tariffs. Other polls similarly indicate around two thirds of Americans oppose Trump’s handling of trade policy, with strong pluralities reporting they don’t think it will revive manufacturing at all. Trump’s base has become restive, too. In recent weeks, Trump has received some of his lowest approval ratings among working-class whites since he first galvanized their swing to the GOP.

Trump remains defiant, boasting his administration will find ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s decision and impose levies as it sees fit. But as the sharp decline in consumer confidence underscores, his main economic policy besides corporate tax cuts has exasperated many of the same voters who gave him the benefit of the doubt. Combined with the calamitous energy and fertilizer price shocks inflicted by the new war, angst over Trump’s tariff gamble is very likely to fuel Democratic gains in November.

It may also have a more lasting effect on US politics and the direction of the Democratic Party as it attempts to shift the political terrain. The deepening unpopularity of tariffs, the main weapon of protectionism, amid a spiraling war of choice suggests industrial policy may no longer be so salient—that after years of shaping party competition, support for economic nationalism is actually fading among American voters. While it is perhaps too soon to say definitively, the votes that propelled Trump to victory in key industrial states seem in hindsight to have been the “last wave” of a losing, fifty-year battle against a fundamental, irreversible reorganization of the American economy. If that is the case, policymakers hoping to formulate a social democratic alternative to Trump’s erratic and increasingly empty vision of industrial renewal must think anew about how to build economic agency in an age where all of life’s anchors are under threat.

The notion that sympathy for economic nationalism is plummeting may seem counterintuitive at first. Trump didn’t conjure an “America First” movement out of the blue but tapped into something that had been brewing for many years (and had largely sprung from the Old Left at that). Since the early 1970s, in fact, each decade has seen a period of intense activity, usually led by labor unions, in favor of import quotas, targeted tariffs, tougher labor and environmental standards in trade agreements, buy-American requirements in federal contracts, and complementary ideas to preserve domestic manufacturing jobs and induce fixed reinvestment. Although many of the subsectors that made these demands have virtually disappeared from domestic production, the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, and Teamsters continue to support some combination of protectionist measures and exert political influence in this policy area.

Generational change had not dampened the backlash to globalization either, as politicians from both parties had blithely expected at the turn of the century. Instead, the severe contraction in manufacturing jobs and union membership, which the China shock and Great Recession hastened, intensified the hunger among blue-collar households for the “old” Fordist system and the relative stability it provided. Towns and small cities convulsed by the shattering of their economic anchor intuited correctly that advanced tech and tourist-driven hospitality jobs wouldn’t miraculously follow. Their link to the national economy was broken, and they yearned for a political champion who would read the riot act to multinationals, the shareholder class, and “trade cheats.”

In the event, Trump has not by any stretch of the imagination jawboned his way to better prospects for manufacturing workers. His actions have narrowly aided steel producers in some cases, and he insists he’s secured several big “concessions” from trade partners and foreign corporations pledging to build in America. But the latest estimates suggest 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since Trump returned to office. His tariffs, at once haphazard and sweeping, pushed up input, wholesale, and retail costs, much as experts warned, while his vindictive rollback of Biden-era incentives for renewable energy has stalled or eliminated projects that would have advanced the same workforce objectives “heterodox” conservatives profess to care about.

Still, dashed expectations aside, concerns about America’s industrial base have been eclipsed by the intractable crisis of affordability. While increasing the range of good-paying jobs matters to blue-collar voters, their impatience with tariffs—which can be experienced as both an explicit tax and as an opaque passed-on cost—shows they don’t think Trump’s economic nationalism is working out. They’re right. The anemic job creation of the last fourteen months makes clear that the vote of confidence many Rust Belt communities placed in Trump has not been rewarded through policies that restore their economic foundations. They have contended with more of the same, except with even fewer opportunities to stretch their paychecks and provide their dependents any semblance of middle-class comfort.

All these setbacks, combined with nationwide dread over the labor market effects of AI, have drained Trump’s strategy of support. Stagflationary conditions weren’t inevitable, however. Although Trump critics hardly expected otherwise, Trump could have considered a different combination of policies, in which carefully targeted tariffs played a more auxiliary role, to stoke manufacturing jobs. A new effort led by his US Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, to deter trade in goods made with forced labor hints at what a more disciplined, genuinely pro-worker strategy might look like. Still, as on other fronts, the raw stubbornness that has thus far defined Trump’s course of action and seemingly undergirded his political fortunes may ultimately be his Achilles’ heel. A decade on from Trump’s first campaign, industrial decline appears insurmountable because Trump has shown no interest in addressing the larger problems perpetuating it: financialization, monopoly power, the boardroom obsession with quarterly profits, the multi-decade campaign to sabotage collective bargaining, and the worsening skills gap.

Trump’s obstacles, however, are not merely self-inflicted—they reflect the structural constraints of the current party system as well. The same dynamic that allowed Trump to exploit rage over industrial decline—regional polarization—has also impeded his ability to impose a “collective” national endeavor, just as Joe Biden and his progressive allies could not rally the electorate to a scaled-down Green New Deal. Indeed, polarization has fed mistrust of government (or, more precisely, an ultra-partisan bureaucracy and regulatory capture) even as many voters across the political spectrum desire a level of state intervention in the economy not seen since World War Two. As a result, neither party has been able to convince a decisive majority that their respective plans to “rebalance” the economy genuinely put the country first.

This highlights one of the primary contradictions of our extended populist moment. Economic nationalism is typically understood as the key ingredient to achieving a political realignment due to its presumed resonance with left-behind counties and voters without a college degree. It elicits powerful emotions by channeling popular grievances and aspirations for a society in which Main Street’s interests override Wall Street’s. In theory, that could unite working-class voters across the country, from coastal service hubs to rural factory towns.

Yet when acted upon, it arouses fresh concerns about who stands to benefit most and whether it will devolve into a new form of crony capitalism. The average voter might agree in principle on the need for an industrial base that can withstand global shocks and the developmental benefits of value-added manufacturing and world-class infrastructure. Support wavers, however, once the main types of policies thought to achieve these objectives are introduced.

On the left and right, voters are suspicious of special tax credits, trade restrictions, and other de facto subsidies as well as “mandates” that spur sectoral change, especially if they reflect a strong ideological orientation. This skepticism, however, doesn’t solely reflect negative partisanship—that is, a fear that industrial policy in the hands of the other party will only reward its allies and powerful lobbies. Disagreements over how to kickstart a new era of development are also a constant source of intraparty conflict. Within progressive circles, there are endless debates over what mix of new regulations and regulatory reforms might simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions, create high-wage jobs, build housing, relieve consumers of escalating energy costs, and help poorer countries attain sustainable development. Trumpian conservatives, meanwhile, oscillate wildly between statism and libertarianism—a function, undoubtedly, of their inconsistent view of when and how markets should serve the “national interest.” Put another way, even Americans of the same tribe can’t reach any consensus over what a proper industrial strategy should entail.

The very process of globalization has further attenuated faith in collective action and common solutions. Americans don’t like to think of themselves as ungenerous and hyper-individualistic, but as their economic agency feels increasingly tenuous and superficial, and upward mobility becomes harder to attain, many have grown doubtful of sacrifices in the name of the whole. They are wary of “top-down” tools that in any way alter consumer behavior and threaten their purchasing power. And because of this mistrust, it is very difficult to make the case for either a “traditional” program of industrial renewal or a rapid energy transition.

This would very likely be true even if someone less divisive and impulsive than Trump occupied the Oval Office. After a quarter century of falling life chances, ordinary workers understandably resent the idea they might have to make do with less—whether through taxes, lifestyle changes, or a devalued dollar—to serve hard-to-measure ends like reclaiming economic sovereignty or preventing ecological tipping points. Overburdened by debt and inequality, many are simply disinclined to make new sacrifices for uncertain gains.

The cynicism is so ingrained that America’s warring political tribes can barely reach an accord over existing priorities like the federal budget. Each side accuses the other of picking winners and losers—as well as misguided prescriptions and misdeeds that have led to stagnation. Red state legislators caterwaul about blue states and their advocacy networks using regulation to strangle “free enterprise” and industrial expansion; blue state leaders increasingly inveigh against the red state “socialism” that is made possible through higher blue state tax contributions to federal programs, which red state residents disproportionately benefit from. Under the circumstances, it is hard to conceive of a New Deal-scale vision of national redevelopment earning broad acclaim, despite many Americans longing for a nation on the march once more.

The lack of good-faith dialogue over what would put the country on a sounder economic footing bodes poorly for our future. But there is also the troubling question of what can be created that is “competitive” in a globalized economy that has also become more multipolar and less dependent on the American market. The Biden administration hoped it could nurture a comprehensive EV sector and other “clean tech” industries through strategic protectionism. Yet between Trump’s disdain for climate policy and China’s stunning technological advances and exploding market share, the window for America to produce EVs, solar panels, and related goods that American consumers will buy and that other countries want is quickly passing.

Unfortunately, as the disruptions from AI begin to accelerate, neither political party has an answer for what comes next. Even if there were a sudden transformation in US governance that emulated China’s state capacity and fueled a renaissance in American innovation, it is highly improbable the changes would support the mass production jobs that accompanied the age of America’s industrial primacy. Almost invariably, the new sectors would be highly specialized and thus unsuited to resolving the socioeconomic difficulties faced by millions of Americans.

Do all these constraints mean industrial policy is destined to fail? Is it a perpetual boondoggle, rather than the antidote to decades of rising inequality and disinvestment? Chastened by the failure of “Bidenomics” to lift Americans’ hopes, Democrats have refrained from unveiling new plans to tackle America’s developmental challenges, preferring instead to lambaste Trump’s tariff folly. It would be better, though, if Democrats tried a new tack, one that cleverly dispenses with both Fordist nostalgia and the unpersuasive “Green New Deal” framing while still articulating a vision of economic empowerment that finally beats “nationalist populism.”

Indeed, as the ominous fourth decade of the 21st century nears, perhaps the best “industrial policy” is downstream from a people-first agenda. Democrats don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But it is imperative that they finally raise the federal minimum wage, aggressively eliminate monopoly choke points, build abundant family housing, invest in vocational training, provide targeted wage subsidies and regulatory relief for new small businesses, use progressive taxation to fix our aging infrastructure, and actually secure our energy independence. While these actions won’t solve all of America’s economic imbalances and strategic vulnerabilities, they will go some way to restoring faith in the country’s potential.

In the face of multiplying crises, Democrats must do everything possible to get their chance—and not fumble it again. The cost of failure has already been too high.

Subscribe now

Share

One of the biggest buzzwords in politics over the past few years is “heterodoxy.” It’s a dead-on (if jargony) term precisely because of its religious origins—to be heterodox means you hold beliefs or opinions that go against official, or orthodox, positions.

“No, the Eucharist is not actually the body and blood of Christ.” “Blasphemer!” That sort of thing.

Every major religion, sect, and denomination in world history has experienced intricate and abstract theological disputes about what counts as the “real” position of their respective faith traditions and what should be labeled as heresy with its adherents punished, excommunicated, or otherwise ostracized by the community. In addition to dense doctrinal debates, orthodoxy versus heterodoxy in religious and historical terms frequently involves schisms over who or what is the “true” leader of a particular church or movement—and who is a heretic. For example, communist politics in the 20th century was chock full of arcane and violent debates about Marxist-Leninist theory and praxis and who exactly embodied its true meaning and purpose and who was deviant. Economists later picked up the term to label academics and practitioners who held divergent views from mainstream or “neoclassical” economics. Today, there are entire think tanks and academic centers dedicated solely to heterodox economic ideas that seek to challenge neoliberalism and free market orthodoxy.

In American politics, “heterodoxy” typically signifies individuals, leaders, or movements within Democratic and Republican circles that hold economic or cultural views significantly at odds with either (1) party leadership, elected officials, and donors or (2) other voters and activists in the party, along with ideological enforcers in the media, who sustain orthodoxy through personal network effects and routine denunciations of apostates.

For modern-day Democrats, an example of heterodoxy on the cultural front would be someone saying, “Men can’t become women and boys shouldn’t be allowed to play in girls’ sports,” or “We should restrict all forms of immigration.” Why is this heterodox? Well, because nearly every Democratic elected official, donor, and activist group in the country holds the exact opposite view on both these matters, thereby embodying and enforcing orthodoxy on trans and immigration issues. Alternatively, economic heterodoxy among Democrats could come from the more social democratic and labor side of the party in the form of someone arguing, “We should have a fully nationalized health care system paid for by a VAT,” or “Strategic tariffs and oil production are good for America”—policy ideas that deviate significantly from the accepted and allowable views of mainstream party officials, donors, consultants, and policy institutions.

Perhaps more pertinent to recent party debates, ideological enforcers on both sides of the Israel divide in the Democratic Party are desperately seeking to create a new orthodoxy and set of policy “litmus tests” to patrol the issue—either Israel should be cut off, morally shamed, and labeled as an “apartheid state” that committed genocide in Gaza, or Israel should be unequivocally supported financially and militarily no matter what its national leaders choose to say or do. Of course, rather than admit that they are seeking to create and enforce these new orthodoxies in electoral and policy-making terms, both the anti- and pro-Israel sides proclaim to be the true heterodox voices facing persecution by the other side, which is full of establishment stooges or extremists who don’t allow for differences of opinion and conflicted views about the U.S.-Israel relationship. Meanwhile, the average Democratic voter, who basically doesn’t care about these fights over Israel, is constantly poked and prodded to pick one side or the other and signal the correct choice with the appropriate language and social media postings—or else face partisan opprobrium, anonymous denunciations, and community snubbing.

For modern-day Republicans, heterodoxy mostly indicates someone who says, “I disagree with Donald Trump.” At one point, Trump himself represented the heterodox. Then he gained power, and like an ancient priest or holy emperor, Trump emerged as both the definer and enforcer of Republican orthodoxy: “President Trump is MAGA, and MAGA is President Trump,” his spokesperson announced. Behavioral shifts toward the new orthodoxy are exemplified by once stalwart free traders and free enterprise Republicans arguing in favor of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and his direct interference in various American businesses. Why? Because Trump acted on them and told everyone to support him without question, at least until the Supreme Court invalidated most of them. A more acute potential orthodoxy-heterodoxy schism among Republicans is emerging on the Iran war. Where Trump and the entire MAGA movement once decried foreign interventionism by their opponents and said America should instead focus on the home front, now the president and nearly all his followers have morphed into ardent war proponents and supporters of Trump’s interventions in Venezuela and Iran and his attempts to strong-arm Denmark into giving him Greenland. Old-school MAGA media personalities don’t like this shift, but they are dismissed as “not smart enough” to understand what he’s up to on foreign policy.

The treatment of existing heterodox politicians by both parties highlights these recent ideological developments—DINOs and RINOs are seen everywhere in their respective parties, waiting to be tagged and shipped off for re-education by orthodox officials and their enforcement units. Anyone who deviates from the party line will be punished, demoted, “primaried,” and attacked nonstop on social media.

As Michael Baharaeen outlined nicely in a post last week, look at the Democrats’ apoplectic reactions to Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman on any number of issues, including immigration, crime, and primarily Israel. Democrats absolutely hate Fetterman for his heterodoxy while independents and many Republicans in his home state kind of like him. Similarly, notice the activist and media savaging of the handful of congressional Democrats who voted against the Iran war powers resolution, or perhaps those like Jared Golden who may have supported some aspect of Trump’s economic plans or those in the Senate who voted to end the government shutdown back in the fall. All pilloried by the Democrats’ orthodox militia. On the Republican side, you’ll see Trump’s and MAGA’s denigration of heterodox right-populists like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie—people who took stands against the president and then were cast out and labeled as heretics for daring to disagree with Trump’s foreign policy agenda and his administration’s handling of the Epstein files.

Heterodoxy among voters is a slightly different issue where voters themselves either hold ideologically inconsistent or contradictory positions (e.g., we should reduce deficits but not cut spending or raise taxes; America shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, yet we should still attack Iran) or they hold a mix of views that are not represented at all by traditional party institutions arranged along the left-right axis (e.g., pro-gun and against religion in politics; anti-illegal immigration and pro-immigrants’ rights; “Medicare for All” but no welfare fraud; support deregulation of business plus a strong safety net for the poor.)

Increasing numbers of Americans are heterodox in either one of these two ways, and many also would support a heterodox legislator from the same or opposite party in their local voting district and state. Unfortunately, these voters and candidates don’t get a lot of backing from the two parties. Perhaps if America had a more democratic party system—e.g., proportional representation and a multi-party Congress—independent Americans would feel better recognized and more inclined to participate in politics and policy deliberations.

But since these politically abandoned and heterodox Americans lack serious representation nationally from either Democrats or Republicans, they mostly keep their heads down, stay out of politics, and avoid partisan battles over orthodoxy as the priests and clergy of the two parties bless the true believers and denounce the dissenters.

Maybe the heterodox really are the smartest sect around. “Splitter!”

Subscribe now

Share

Among the most ubiquitous refrains in progressive politics in the long Trump era is some variant of the expression, “Democrats are going to have a huge mess to clean up.” It was sounded heavily during Covid—Joe Biden predicated his campaign on ending the chaos and safely reopening the economy—and has become routine again in the wake of the DOGE experiment, Trump’s politicization of multiple government departments and agencies, other abuses of executive power, and now, the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

This lament naturally doubles as a call to action. For many on the left, the antidote to Trump’s second-term legacy must be nothing less than a full ideological counterpoint to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s infamous organizing document for Trump 2.0. What Democrats need, activists and policy wonks wager, is a “Project 2029” that reverses everything Trump and the Republican Congress have pushed through and advances, in turn, the bold reforms merely glimpsed in the Biden and Obama presidencies. They appear to be getting their wish: last month, the nascent organization with just this mission announced its executive director, joining a plethora of groups jockeying to shape the Democratic platform and general election strategy well before the next presidential nominee has been determined.

Like my compatriots, I believe Democrats must develop clear policies that build economic democracy and strengthen existing laws meant to protect ordinary citizens from fraud and exploitation. Working families are not interested in piecemeal measures that do vanishingly little to increase their economic security and the prosperity of their communities, nor are they supportive of new wars for regime change overseas. I agree wholeheartedly, too, that the consequences of the cronyism this administration has indulged will not simply disappear with a changing of the guard. There will undoubtedly be many instances in which the next Democratic administration will have to restore administrative integrity, root out regulatory capture, and otherwise clean house.

I’m not so confident, however, in the idea that Democrats, proverbial red marker in hand, must tally up every Trump offense and respond in-kind through an all-encompassing concept like Project 2029. Project 2029 is premised, in part, on reengaging voters who think Democrats have been timid about confronting the nation’s challenges. Democrats insist they want to flip red districts. Yet, while it may energize the party’s educated base, there are reasons to think Project 2029 is not suited to solving Democrats’ regional woes—that it will inevitably carry strong “culture war” connotations that do nothing to attenuate the pattern of fruitless political combat that has defined the better part of this century, in which no epochal majority coalition has been formed. Indeed, neither Project 2029 nor any of its equivalents is likely to fix the party’s image with working-class voters who associate Democrats with professional-class elitism and “woke” dogma.

The average voter, furthermore, just isn’t that interested in a preponderance of white papers and policy briefs generated by the center-left’s advocacy networks. This, however, isn’t because voters are ignorant or incapable of thinking through how public policy affects their life chances. It is because these documents have proliferated since the Great Recession without a commensurate impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. Working-class voters, accordingly, are skeptical the Democrats’ would-be “brain trusts” can actually make a difference when given power. They aren’t wrong: when all was said and done, the last batch of “landmark” legislation congressional Democrats passed barely altered the fundamental dynamics eroding the American dream, despite a few promising steps by the Biden administration to bolster unions, consumer protection, fair competition, domestic supply chains, and renewable energy.

To be clear, some of the ideas that could constitute Project 2029 are laudable and worth pursuing. Progressives committed to rebuilding shared prosperity and worker power are right to want to figure out how to do things better the next time around after the disjointed reforms and disheartening inefficiencies of the Biden years. The impetus to increase pressure on Democrats to show some spine, name the forces that have gamed the system, and stand up for Congress’s constitutional rights and duties correctly recognizes that Democrats have too often vacillated when given the chance to highlight the shallowness of Trump’s “populism.” To be effective, the core message in 2028 must be frank about the threats to the American dream and unflinching about what is needed to save it—not a banal promise to make life a little more affordable.

Still, if Democrats are intent on truly reforming their party, shaking up the party system, and competing boldly in forbidding regions, they should try an experiment. Instead of drawing up a panoply of progressive wish lists dubbed Project 2029, Democrats should ask themselves: can they fit the heart of their agenda on a one-page memo without resorting to vague platitudes? Can they home in on a handful of pledges that would resonate from greater Boston to St. Louis to South Texas? Could they, in the case of projects that are for entirely appropriate reasons tailored to specific economic sectors or demographics, engender a spirit of reciprocity and mutual goodwill in the American people that depolarizes society? In short, can they sow belief that government can be a real instrument of economic progress and that revitalized communities will beget more?

I believe such questions are worth asking of a party that imagines it aspires to milestones but is so often mired in disappointment, evasion, and acrimony. Knowing, too, that Democrats are presently benefiting more from discontent with Trump’s GOP rather than an unequivocal surge in voter trust, it is important that the party find the discipline to enunciate how they will make up for the failures and capitulations of the past. While no platform is going to convert the most hardened Trump supporters, Democrats ought to consider an agenda along these lines:

1. Close the Wealth and Pay Gap. America, through the power of unions, public investment, and progressive taxation, built an unprecedented middle class after World War II, with CEOs earning no more than twenty-one times the average worker. Today’s gulf is unsustainable, unpatriotic, and threatens the very foundations of American dynamism and community wealth. Public policy must therefore prioritize inclusive growth that improves the living standards of each new generation as well as laws that effectively tame the political power of the wealthiest.

2. Build 20 Million Middle-Class Homes by 2035. America has a shortage of four to seven million housing units, depending on the estimate; however, some reports suggest that up to 20 million need to be built as the rest of Gen Z enters the workforce and parts of rural America continue to depopulate. At the same time, America has a dramatically falling birthrate. If the country’s young people are to build a future, put down roots, and invest in their communities, we need a resurgence in middle-class home ownership that encourages family formation.

3. Fix the Safety Net for a Changing Workforce. Approximately 40 percent of America’s 170 million workers are freelancers or independent contractors, and this share is expected to rise steadily in the next decade. As traditional workplace benefits become obsolete, and as AI threatens to eliminate job opportunities across multiple industries, social insurance must be restructured and expanded to prevent hardships arising from illness, family emergencies, technological disruption, or economic downturns.

4. Reform the Entire Health Care System. Soaring health care costs and medical debt are destroying the purchasing power of American households. American life expectancy is also declining. The system needs to be overhauled to control costs, prioritize preventative care, and increase R&D that yields medicines that actually cure major and costly diseases.

5. Crack Down on Conflicts of Interest. Too many elected officials and government employees have financial motives and ties to lobbyists that compromise the integrity of their respective offices and their duty to serve the public free of undue influence. The next Democratic administration should pledge to zealously curb, without partisan favor, conflicts of interest, self-dealing, insider trading, and other sources of corruption that undermine the rule of law and social trust.

6. Prevent Monopolists from Controlling the Power to Invest. The single greatest impediment to rebuilding the middle class is the concentration of wealth and ownership, which effectively dictates where and when livelihoods are created (or destroyed). Antitrust laws, in conjunction with fiscal and place-based industrial policies, must be harnessed efficiently to ensure that productive enterprises and remunerative jobs are fostered in every corner of the nation, as leaders from Jefferson and Madison to Lincoln and FDR intended.

7. Prevent and Punish Major Forms of Economic Predation. In different ways, wage theft, financial scams, “drip pricing,” surprise fees, and highly restrictive noncompete and “stay-or-pay” contracts cost ordinary Americans billions in annual financial losses. Democrats must stand unequivocally against coercion and deception in the market and prosecute wrongdoers.

8. Promote Peace and Development in World Affairs While Rebuilding at Home. The decision to go to war must always be one of last resort. After twenty years of both parties betraying Americans’ desire for fewer foreign entanglements, Democrats must pledge a different national security strategy that reduces conflict and poverty abroad while ensuring America has the industrial, agricultural, and energy capacity to withstand future global economic shocks.

9. Enforce the Nation’s Borders, Reform DHS, and Fix the Nation’s Immigration System. Immigration has divided the country more than any other issue in recent years, yet in many respects America has also become a more tolerant and pluralistic society than it was at the end of the 20th century. While no reform is bound to fully satisfy every constituency, Democrats must demonstrate they are committed to regulating immigration in a manner that is consistent with public opinion and public safety while pursuing fair and humane reforms that respect the rights, dignity, contributions, and community ties of those who have already built lives here.

This list doesn’t come close to distilling every aim that reform-minded Democrats might consider essential. There are certainly many other goals that could be highlighted, from resurrecting the PRO Act to investing in family policy to repairing our public water systems. There is no mention, meanwhile, of climate change or the national debt, nor of the cultural liabilities that Democrats must address in order to forge the strongest possible coalition. To some extent the nation’s challenges cannot be met through domestic politics alone. A wealth tax and other legislation that eliminates tax loopholes that favor the ultrarich are required for any reform program worthy of the name. But as in matters of war and peace, such measures will require much firmer international cooperation in order to be truly successful. There is, finally, the risk that even if reforms that are Rooseveltian in scope are passed, they will be overwhelmed by the transformations AI is catalyzing. In that case, a “new tech social contract,” as Representative Ro Khanna has called for, would take center stage—though even that may not be enough to answer what is coming down the pike.

Democrats are notorious for factional squabbles that lead to weak consensus and dispiriting compromises. But the case for a radically simple yet bold agenda should be evident. As they contemplate the story they want to tell to the American people, it is imperative that forward-looking Democrats have the candor and courage to identify the grave challenges ahead. Trump’s support may soon disintegrate, and his potential heirs may face dismal odds come 2028. Democrats, however, will remain at a disadvantage in too many parts of the country if they cannot, in plain, direct language, communicate a powerful vision to heighten the agency and aspirations of working Americans.

At this pivotal moment, Democrats ought to fearlessly examine the contrast they’ve drawn with their adversaries—and consider whether it has any hope of realigning our politics toward the common good. A fatigued and demoralized public deserves an opposition party that can.

Subscribe now

Share

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D–N.Y.) faltering and uncertain performance at last week’s Munich Security Conference is more than a sign that she is not yet ready to run for president. It’s also a sign that the progressive movement as a whole needs to think about foreign and defense policy as much as they have considered economic and social issues.

AOC garnered unfavorable headlines for her factual errors about Venezuela and her inability to answer a question about whether she wants the United States to defend Taiwan if attacked by China. No, Venezuela is not south of the equator, as she implied while criticizing President Donald Trump for seizing that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. Nor is it “the long-settled policy of America” to come to the beleaguered island’s defense if invaded, as she stated.

In fact, America has long pursued a policy of “strategic ambiguity” over whether it would go to war to protect the self-governing, democratic island’s de facto independence. American officials rushed to correct President Joseph Biden at least three times when he stated, contrary to official policy, that America would defend Taiwan if attacked. One would think that AOC, or at least her staff, would have been aware of this continuing controversy as she took the stage at what is called “Davos with guns.”

But in retrospect, that massive failure is not at all surprising. One struggles to think of any prominent progressive figure or thinker who has advanced a comprehensive and persuasive critique of American foreign policy or provided a clear alternative. Using “a class-based internationalist perspective” as a touchstone principle for foreign policy, as AOC did in Germany, is a facile and naive way to view America’s responsibilities to its allies. Its implicit pacifist non-interventionism would make British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 sell-out of Czechoslovakia look like bellicose warmongering in comparison.

Sure, we know where progressives stand on Israel and its conflicts with Hamas and other Arab states. They minimize the horrors and sheer barbarity of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israeli Jewish citizens and call Israel’s response “genocide.” They increasingly call for America to stop selling offensive weapons to the Jewish state and support a two-state solution to the dispute with Palestinians, despite the fact that there is no current democratic majority within Israel itself for that to occur.

But what about America’s relationship with NATO? What about China? Can anyone really say that we know what a progressive president would do with either of these strategically crucial matters?

The use of force to settle disputes seems to be ruled out, given that many progressives rushed to criticize Trump’s shocking—and massively successful—seizure of Maduro. AOC followed that line herself as she said he should not have been “kidnapped” even though he was an anti-democratic ruler.

That disposition, however, fails to take account of global facts on the ground. America’s allies would prefer a clearer statement that Trump is offering that we will use military force to protect them, as our longstanding defense treaties with many require. They will not look kindly on a leading candidate who gives the impression that their approach to any global conflict will be to “give peace a chance.”

Progressive foreign policy thinking also runs the risk of giving off the scent of anti-Americanism. AOC criticized Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s widely acclaimed speech by attacking his invocation of “Western values” and by saying those values do not take the interests of “the global south” into account. That is at best disdainful and at worst in opposition to the American heritage that most, even most Democrats, believe in.

But that again is perhaps not surprising. A recent Gallup poll found that only 36 percent of Democrats are extremely or very proud to be Americans. A Pew Research poll released this week finds that 31 percent of Americans who do not identify with the governing Republicans mentioned something negative rather than positive when asked what makes them feel proud of their country. The data do not break these attitudes down further, but one would not be surprised if those views are more common among progressives than among other Democrats.

Other polls clearly show a lack of patriotism or love of country among liberal Democrats. An Economist/YouGov poll from July 2025 found that 30 percent of Harris voters and 42 percent of self-described liberals were either not very or not at all patriotic. Perhaps most tellingly, a 2021 Pew Research poll found that between 63 and 75 percent of the most progressive factions within the Democratic coalition—groups they labeled as ”Outsider Left” and “Progressive Left”—thought that there were “other countries better than the United States,” even when given the option of saying that America is “one of the greatest countries in the world, along with some others.”

If you don’t like your country or feel patriotic about it, it’s not surprising that you haven’t given much thought about how to defend it from its genuine enemies.

That’s going to cause any progressive Democratic nominee endless problems in a presidential election should they not overcome their blind spot beforehand. Most Americans do like or love America, and they expect their president to share that sentiment. Americans may be leery of being the world’s policeman, but they do not want a president who will bend over backward to avoid conflict with even the worst global leaders imaginable.

This is not simply a Republican or “white” concept. Polls generally show that Hispanics—a key voting bloc for Democrats who want to reverse Trump’s popular vote win—are turning against President Trump as they weigh his performance in office. But they also show that Hispanics favor Maduro’s seizure. It seems that even many Americans who don’t approve of Trump generally like the strategic and limited use of force that has typified his foreign policy over the past year.

Older Democrats remember how Republicans used the party’s reputation for weakness to eviscerate their nominees during the 1970s and 1980s. President Richard Nixon ran a devastating television ad against Sen. George McGovern (D–S.D.) in 1972 attacking McGovern’s proposed defense cuts. Ronald Reagan also savaged President Jimmy Carter and former Vice President Walter Mondale in the 1980 and 1984 campaigns for their purported inability to stand up to the Soviet Union.

Reagan’s Vice President, George H.W. Bush, also used foreign policy as a cudgel to smash his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Repeated attacks led to Dukakis’ legendarily bad photo op of him driving a tank, an attempt at damage control that instead made him a laughingstock. The Bush campaign even used the footage as the background to an ad detailing the myriad weapons systems he had opposed.

President George W. Bush also used allegations of weakness to defeat Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry in 2004. Kerry, a decorated officer during the Vietnam War, knew that could be a problem. He even started his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention by saluting and saying, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.” But that was to no avail when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked his war record and the Bush campaign used footage of Kerry windsurfing in an ad to show his changes of vote on the Iraq War and defense spending.

It is likely not a coincidence that these races are the only times since 1956 that Republican candidates have won a majority of the popular vote.

Progressives are on the upswing within the Democratic Party and will likely become even stronger as this year’s primaries progress. A failure to rectify their lack of serious international policy thinking, however, could make those successes turn into a poisoned chalice in 2028.

Subscribe now

Share

In some ways, you feel bad for Presidents Trump and Biden. Both presidents had to preside over a global pandemic, the subsequent economic crash, and the eventual reopening and rebuilding of the country—a series of events that could have gone completely haywire. Yet it did not. While many countries around the world came up short and are still lagging economically, America, relatively speaking, came out well in terms of rebounding growth, business activity, jobs, and wages. Of course, the U.S., like other nations, did end up with a sustained period of inflation that was both inevitable, given supply chain and manufacturing restrictions plus the Russian attack on Ukraine, and fueled by massive government spending under both presidents. But all that fiscal spending undoubtedly helped the U.S. economy get back on its feet in terms of output and jobs, especially compared to other nations that did not inject massive amounts of money into their economies.

Partisans will predictably defend their guy and bash the other one in terms of their economic policies and governance. Yet, in political terms, the results are similar: both Biden and now Trump have ended up in roughly the same place with Americans, receiving poor marks for their handling of the economy and inflation. Trump is currently 15 points underwater on his economic job approval (total approve – total disapprove) and 24 points underwater on inflation, according to the RCP average. In comparison, Biden ended his term 21 points underwater on the economy on average and 29 points on inflation.

Compounding problems for Trump, American economic confidence at the beginning of 2026 hit a 12-year low, as the Associated Press reported:

U.S. consumer confidence declined sharply in January, hitting the lowest level since 2014 as Americans grow increasingly concerned about their financial prospects.

The Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index cratered 9.7 points to 84.5 in January, falling below even the lowest readings during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A measure of Americans’ short-term expectations for their income, business conditions and the job market tumbled 9.5 points to 65.1, well below 80, the marker that can signal a recession ahead. It’s the 12th consecutive month that reading has come in under 80.

Consumers’ assessments of their current economic situation slid by 9.9 points to 113.7.

“Confidence collapsed in January, as consumer concerns about both the present situation and expectations for the future deepened,” said Dana Peterson, the Conference Board’s chief economist. “All five components of the index deteriorated, driving the overall index to its lowest level since May 2014—surpassing its COVID19 pandemic depths.”

In fairness to the Trump administration, it’s not as if the overall economic indicators are all that miserable today, even with his erratic tariff policies and often confusing public pronouncements. Growth is solid, employment is stable (for now), inflation is easing, and the stock market is rolling. So why is American economic confidence at its lowest point in more than a decade?

The answer lies in a mix of economic reality and human psychology. On the reality side, Americans are not at all pleased with the high cost of living, particularly for the “hard” goods and services in modern life, including housing, energy, health care, childcare, education, household goods, and things such as car payments, insurance, and maintenance. Even with decent wages and income and prospective tax cuts, working- and middle-class families do not feel particularly solid when they open their banking apps. A middle-class life that once seemed attainable and sustainable seems out of reach to many younger people and increasingly precarious for more established older Americans. Cheap televisions, ubiquitous phones, endless entertainment, and fast internet won’t make up for people’s inability to pay their health care premiums or save enough for a down payment on a home or retirement.

This leads us into the human psychology side. Rafts of economic indicators and rah-rah speeches from presidents and their allies will not persuade most Americans that the future looks sunny. Given profound distrust of politicians and government, these political acts may in fact signal to Americans the reverse—that our leaders are hiding something and it’s about to get worse. Throw in non-stop “doomscrolling” and partisan broadsides on social media along with constant media chatter about the potential collapse of both blue- and white-collar employment from AI, and you have the makings of a potent stew of worry, agitation, and fear among Americans.

Widespread economic uneasiness among voters is where things stand today. Workers are justifiably concerned about the financial “squeeze” they are feeling in terms of wages and incomes not keeping up with essential costs. They are right to be worried about losing their job or facing income reductions in the future—and the real possibility of not finding new work or adequate replacement income if they do lose employment. Concerns about the “K-shaped” recovery with the wealthy prospering more while everyone else falls behind are well founded. Young people’s frustrations about doing the right things in terms of education and skills training and still not being able to fully enter work and family life are understandable and reasonable.

The problem for our political class, including presidents and other leaders in both parties, is that they almost uniformly do not face any of these same economic pressures. Many of them are already rich and have nice houses; they receive guaranteed pay and benefits, including affordable health care and pensions; and they have opportunities to build wealth in the stock market and save additionally for retirement. In terms of their economic and class position in American life, they are nothing like the people they ostensibly represent.

So, politicians’ remarks about the economy doing well or affordability being a “fake narrative” or America being the strongest economy in the world often fall flat—and will continue to do so regardless of economic statistics and political bravado. “Bidenomics” was a flop, and Trump’s boasting about America being “great again” rings hollow to many voters.

As the parties gear up for another round of midterm fighting and candidate jostling ahead of the 2028 presidential primaries, the ideological faction or leader who figures out this economic reality first—and responds genuinely and empathetically to Americans’ psychological worries about their finances—will be well positioned for success, at least temporarily.

Subscribe now

Share

Democrats do love a good government shutdown—though this time it’s just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE, that would be deprived of funding. Last time around in October, they said the government shutdown was over the price of health care, one of their best-polling issues with voters. That fight fired up their base and may have helped them win big in elections in New Jersey and Virginia.

This time they may shut down the government agency responsible for immigration enforcement, one of their worst-polling issues in recent years. Put this way, the Democrats’ strategy doesn’t seem to make sense.

But it does make sense to Democrats today and for a very simple reason: the Trump administration has managed to take an issue Republicans have dominated for years and turn it into a big loser for the GOP on multiple fronts.

Public approval of Trump’s handling of deportations, and specifically his use of ICE, has plunged precipitously. Trump now polls heavily net negative on the immigration issue, not far off his overall net negative job approval. As Nate Silver points out:

On average, over the course of his term, Trump’s net approval on immigration has been about six points better than his overall rating; it had been his least-bad issue. Now, that gap has mostly evaporated.

To be clear, the public hasn’t completely changed its mind on the issue of illegal immigration. Far from it. There’s still majority support for deporting all illegal immigrants back to their home countries, as shown by recent polls from Cygnal (which was taken after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis) and from Marquette University. Significantly, the Marquette poll, which was taken after the killing of Renee Good but before that of Pretti, showed essentially no change in support for deportation from their November poll.

Consistent with this, the Cygnal poll shows majority support for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcing federal immigration laws to remove illegal immigrants from the U.S.” And according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, voters still prefer the Republican party over Democrats when asked who would better handle immigration, and especially border security. This is confirmed by the even more recent Marquette poll, which showed Republicans preferred over Democrats by 18 points on “immigration and border security.”

But that’s the theory. When it comes to the Trump administration’s practice, as instantiated in ICE’s real world activities, voters are strongly negative on the results. Approval of ICE has plunged precipitously. In The New York Times’ latest poll, approval of ICE has sunk to just 36 percent compared with 63 percent disapproval—a net negative approval of a whopping 27 points. Among the critical independent voter group, disapproval has hit a remarkable 70 percent. Even the fringe view that ICE should be abolished is getting a more sympathetic hearing from the public.

As to specific tactics, voters in the poll overwhelmingly feel ICE has gone too far—61 percent versus 26 percent who think they’ve been about right and 11 percent who think the tactics haven’t gone far enough. Other polls have similar results. These views are likely to get even more lopsided in the wake of Pretti’s death.

It wasn’t so long ago that the idea of actively and aggressively resisting immigration enforcement belonged to a small slice of the activist left. That is no longer the case. Thanks to how severely the Trump administration has overplayed its hand, resistance to enforcement has been mainstreamed and receives tacit support even from many who believe the Democrats are not trustworthy on immigration, and who still support the overall goal of cracking down on illegal immigration.

President Trump has staged a master class in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It underscores a lesson neither party seems interested in learning. Both have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters, who would never vote for the other party anyway, over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way. They have not operated as institutions geared to construct broad coalitions and win large general-election victories. Instead, they have focused on fan service—satisfying their most partisan and loyal constituencies.

Ironically, America’s 50-50 political divide has made it difficult for either party to break out of this pattern. You might think that two minority parties would each feel pressure to expand their coalitions and construct a majority, but actually, both have behaved as if they were the rightful majorities already. Each finds ways to dismiss the other’s wins as narrow flukes and treat their own as massive triumphs. Indeed, each has responded to close election losses with various forms of denial.

This is sustainable only because elections are so close. Politicians learn big lessons from big losses or big wins, so neither party has learned much in a long time, and neither can grasp that it isn’t popular and could easily lose the next election.

Breaking this pattern must start by acknowledging a truism: Bigger majorities are possible if and only if the parties seek broader support. That sounds obvious, yet it has eluded America’s leaders for a generation, because it requires seeing beyond our age of deadlock.

This is what the Trump administration has failed to understand. They haven’t broken the pattern; they are trapped in the pattern. They persist in believing that since they won the last election and voters seemed to support them on issues like immigration, they can push the issue as far as they feel like and voters will reward them.

Not true. In this era, voters’ support is always provisional, and they will turn on you in a second if they believe you’ve gone too far. Immigration for the Trump administration has become a perfect example of that dynamic.

No wonder Democrats feel they can charge ahead on shutting down DHS and are, for now, not nervous about the sometimes militant street tactics of their supporters. We shall see if things work out as well as they expect or whether Trump’s recent attempts to rein in ICE overreach manage to somewhat defuse the current backlash. This has included withdrawing his hapless Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino from Minneapolis and sending in Tom Homan, his more experienced border czar. Homan just announced this Wednesday that he is withdrawing 700 ICE personnel from Minneapolis. And Trump the same day said in an interview with NBC News “I learned that maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch” (though he quickly added “but you still have to be tough”).

But either way, Trump and ICE have let Democrats back in the game by, of all things, undermining the big Republican advantage on immigration. Can the GOP recover by sticking to a more moderate course? Can Democrats resist the pressure to overreach on their side by caving to the quasi-open borders forces now energized within their party?

The latter is very much an open question. Between their outrage at what ICE has already done and the apparent climbdown of the Trump administration in Minneapolis, these forces are likely to press their perceived advantage. In Civiqs data, 76 percent of all Democrats now support flat-out abolishing ICE; it must be virtually unanimous among the activist set in the party. Reflecting this dynamic, it has become increasingly common for Democratic politicians, particularly those who want or need to court progressives in the party, to express support for ICE abolition. Graham Platner, progressive Democratic candidate for the Senate nomination in Maine, has cheerfully observed that “dismantling ICE is the moderate position.” Perhaps reflecting this sentiment, progressive New York House Democrat Jerry Nadler has upped the ante to armed struggle.

What is really the major problem in this country today is the fascism in our streets. The attacks on American citizens, by masked hoodlums. If you were attacked by a masked person, you might think you were being kidnapped. You’d be justified in shooting the person—to protect yourself.

Sorry Jerry, it’s a little too late to join the Weathermen! Naturally, progressive celebrities (what would we do without them?) have been joining in the ostentatious display of militance. At the Grammys, Billie Eilish felt impelled to say:

Nobody is illegal on stolen land. We need to keep fighting and speaking up. Our voices do matter…fuck ICE!

Thanks for that Billie. However, you might want to consider the wise words of Noah Smith in his recent excellent piece on an actually effective liberal immigration enforcement policy.

“[S]tolen land” rhetoric makes it look as if progressives don’t believe that America is a legitimate country at all. If you don’t think that American citizens have the right to collectively, democratically decide who gets into the country and who doesn’t, you’re telling American voters that their democratic will is illegitimate. And that’s not going to sit well with voters outside of the most progressive circles.

But Eilish got a standing ovation at the Grammys while Smith’s sensible suggestions about how to do deportations effectively and humanely are likely to draw little interest.

Stay tuned. Recent history does not suggest that a durable, coalition-expanding approach is likely from either side. Democrats may very well go farther down the street militance/“abolish ICE” road and do whatever they can to halt any and all deportations, without clarifying in any way how they would actually handle the problem of illegal immigration. If so, expect momentum to swing right back.

Subscribe now

Share

In the wake of continued public backlash toward the actions of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the apparent execution of U.S. citizen Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the Trump administration appears to be backing down on continued deportation operations in Minnesota. Opponents of the administration’s broader immigration agenda now feel the wind at their backs, with many embracing radical measures such as abolishing ICE. Unfortunately, Democrats’ justifiable ire about these abuses toward immigrants and U.S. citizens has only further delayed the party’s necessary reckoning on the many immigration traps that twice handed Trump the presidency.

Although a plurality of Americans (46 percent) currently supports abolishing ICE, voters continue to believe that Republicans will do a better job than Democrats on both immigration and border security, by five and fifteen points, respectively. Outside of ICE, little to no effort has been made by elected officials to communicate exactly what—if any—of Trump’s immigration policies would be preserved or reformed by a future Democratic administration. The net result is many voters rightly fear that the next Democratic president will enable another free-for-all at the border.

Democrats appear poised to ride a wave of anti-incumbent backlash against Trump and the GOP in November and possibly in 2028. If, however, they are serious about winning and ultimately retaining working-class support, they should look beyond any individual election and enact a durable, pro-worker immigration agenda—one likely to irritate much of the party’s college-educated base. The groundwork for such a platform lies in making clear to voters that Democrats will champion humane but overwhelming enforcement against both illegal immigrants and the firms that exploit them. They should also embrace asylum reform and a points system modeled on neighboring Canada. Finally, Democrats should promote regional development in concert with pro-worker leaders abroad.

E-Verify, Amnesty, and First Principles on Immigration

The progressive worldview on immigration can functionally be described as a secular religion: Immigration is in all places and at all times a net good—except, of course, in cases where it undercuts college-educated professionals that just so happen to vote Democratic. In reality, whether it’s South Asians on H1B visas or illegal immigrants from Central America, the effect on native workers is the same. If you have a group of workers lacking basic rights that are also willing to work harder and for less pay than peers, the inevitable result is resentment from native labor.

Progressives contend hypocritically that non-college workers suffer no detriment from illegal immigration on account of the undocumented laboring in “jobs Americans won’t do.” They likewise cite neoliberal economics they would otherwise condemn, arguing that any immigration—legal or otherwise—is a net benefit to GDP. In reality, U.S. citizens work alongside illegal immigrants in countless fields, from agriculture to services to construction. The fact that the native workforce within these industries has declined in recent decades speaks to the devastating impact of neoliberal policies like mass illegal immigration on their respective wages. Employers benefit from both illegal labor and additional consumers, leading to higher GDP growth. But, like free trade, this doesn’t mean that the benefits of illegal immigration are spread equally, including abroad.

In 1990, the share of illegal farm workers in the U.S. was just 12 percent. Just ten years later, it rose to roughly 50 percent, where it has remained steady since. The decade coincided with the pinnacle of free trade fundamentalism: the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA facilitated the exploitation of cheap labor south of the border by outsourcing manufacturing jobs to Mexico. It also, however, devastated Mexican small farmers, who couldn’t compete with subsidized U.S. agriculture. The resulting mass of rural indigents migrated north into the open arms of American agribusiness—the very same responsible for ruining their livelihoods.

The root cause of illegal immigration is neither a lack of border walls nor ICE agents but rather employer demand. Yet Washington has consistently refused to hold employers accountable to the fullest extent of the law. In a landmark analysis at Phenomenal World, Michael Macher found that corporate prosecutions of immigration crimes have rarely exceeded fifteen annually (per data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and Duke University’s Corporate Prosecution Registry). Immigration-related worksite investigations currently sit near a record low, with worksite arrests skewing overwhelmingly towards employees over employers. As Macher writes:

The U.S. immigration system runs not on the enforcement of immigration laws, but on their selective non-enforcement. Employers have relied on the state to ignore the exploitation of undocumented labor while holding the credible threat of deportation over workers. This has had the effect of strengthening employer bargaining power generally against all workers—lowering wages, weakening unions, and shifting the politics of work away from collective bargaining and wage-and-hour regulation. The interest in labor that is weak and disorganized has driven U.S. politicians, consciously or not, to adopt the role of petty bosses, threatening the deportation of significant portions of the U.S. workforce.

Routine amnesty for illegal immigrants—as just occurred in Spain—is moral to the degree that it formalizes the lives of individuals who are undocumented. Labor restrictionists, however, are also correct that it encourages further illegal immigration, perpetuating a broader system of mass exploitation benefitting “millionaires, billionaires” and credentialed professionals that employ undocumented maids, nannies, and landscapers.

Conversely, nativists’ ongoing performative, costly, and sadistic attempt at deporting every last illegal immigrant is ultimately ineffective and empowers mass migration advocates. In 2008, current Republican Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach made a compelling case against a Gestapo-style deportation effort, arguing that it would be cheaper and more efficient to punish employers of illegal labor under a rigorous, national regime of E-Verify; predictably, Kobach has not held a formal position in either of Trump’s administrations, although he did offer advice on immigration during the 2016 transition.

An electronic verification system of employees’ immigration status created in 1997, E-Verify, as previously suggested, has been actively sabotaged at the state and national level by carveouts as well as poor and selective enforcement resulting from employer lobbying. Given sufficient political will, closing loopholes and stiffening enforcement would cost just over $600 million over the next five years under Kobach’s proposal compared to Trump’s 2025 $85 billion ICE budget. Illegal immigration by economic migrants would drastically decline in the long term, and large numbers of recent arrivals would self-deport for lack of employment options. An effective populist president could campaign on punishing employers that undercut native labor and subject undocumented workers to abysmal conditions.

While eminently desirable, a strict, national regime of E-Verify would still fail to eliminate the totality of an undocumented underclass. Longtime illegals—particularly spouses and parents of U.S. citizens—are unlikely to self-deport regardless of enforcement. Even at current rates of removals, moreover, it would take at least two decades to deport all undocumented thought to be in the country. A one-time pathway to citizenship for longtime undocumented thus becomes the most practical and moral remedy. Once again, however, any pathway to citizenship is ultimately counterproductive in the long term without including overwhelming penalties towards those who employ illegal labor.

In effect, the current iterations of the MAGA right and progressive left merely act as shock troops for a regime of mass exploitation. Some progressives argue that the solution instead is to grant status to every illegal upon entering the country. This, however, ignores other grievances from workers and legal immigrants towards illegal immigration, including strains on services and circumventing the formal immigration process. Indeed, the following section illustrates the shortcomings of a variation of this proposal.

Defending Asylum by Embracing Deportation

The modern asylum system in Western countries traces back to the end of World War II. Prior to and during the war, many refugees fleeing the Axis powers, including Jews, were returned to their countries of origin where they were ultimately put to death. Amid post-war concern for the plight of refugees, Article 14 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights established:

1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

In the United States, asylum was subsequently established as applying to claimants of five protected classes: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a specific social group. Some courts have expanded their interpretation of these classes to include those fearing reprisal from criminal groups such as gangs and drug trafficking cartels.

The issue beginning in the neoliberal era of free-flowing goods, capital, and people is that increasing numbers of economic migrants have since sought to fraudulently claim asylum in the hopes of settling in countries throughout the Global North. Negative attitudes towards immigration across a host of developed countries are strongly correlated with concurrent spikes in asylum claims and illegal immigration. Relatedly, most countries also experience backlash towards low-skilled legal immigration. On the latter, the U.S. was comparatively tolerant towards mass, low-skilled, legal immigration—with the exception of conservative Republicans—up until recently.

Like America’s peers, however, illegal immigration has been consistently unacceptable to a majority of voters for the past two decades (even in March 2025, Gallup found 63 percent of Americans saying they were personally worried about illegal immigration a great deal or a fair amount). Progressives instead gravitated towards the foolhardy solution of legalizing illegal immigration through open asylum. In the 2020 cycle, nine out of ten candidates in the Democratic primary pool pledged to decriminalize border crossings—a position that more or less became government policy when Biden assumed the presidency in 2021.

An overly generous interpretation of asylum law allowed virtually anyone who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border to claim persecution and stay within the U.S. over a course of years while their claim was processed. The result in equal measure was mass human trafficking and mass asylum fraud. Removals at the southern border jumped to record highs under the pandemic-era Title 42, though in some cases, many such deportees solicited a later entry via the “CBP One” app for an asylum screening.

The problem, moreover, was that new arrivals—whether through an asylum claim or otherwise—ran virtually no risk of deportation once inside the country. Under Biden, removals from beyond the U.S.-Mexico border fell below 50,000 a year compared to around 100,000 a year under Trump and 200,000 a year during Obama’s first term. Considering that the number of immigrants without legal permanent status grew by at least 8 million, it’s fair to describe the former administration’s posture towards interior enforcement as one of utter dereliction. During Kamala Harris’s now infamous visit to Guatemala in 2021, she may as well have told migrants, “Don’t come (but if you make it past the border, we won’t deport you.)”

While it’s hard to say exactly how many asylum claims are fraudulent due to the politicized nature of the issue, defenders should note that Senator Rubén Gallego found cases of abuse reported by his Latino constituents to be compelling. Having worked as a social worker in immigration under Biden and conducted interviews with migrants in the Darien Gap, I myself found that the vast majority of claimants I interacted with lacked a credible fear of persecution in their home countries.

Progressives contend that the only remedy needed for Biden’s border policy was hiring additional judges to process a multi-million-person backlog of asylum claims. While it’s certainly true that more judges would have benefitted the backlog, the problem—as shown—is that fraudulent claimants faced, at best, a dubious risk of deportation. The obvious reason for this is that many Democrats, and especially progressives, consider interior enforcement of noncriminal undocumented to be illegitimate. Consequently, many restrictionists of all stripes now advocate for revoking the right to asylum outright—in practice this is currently the case save for white South Africans.

If Democrats wish to preserve asylum, they must be willing to subject the process to limits with penalties for fraud—meaning deportation. In June of 2024, Biden issued an executive order barring migrants from soliciting asylum after daily border encounters exceeded 2500 per day. This sensible measure decreased border crossings by 80 percent yet wasn’t campaigned on due to a progressive outcry over “fascism.” What critics failed to comprehend is that stiff interior enforcement ultimately helps asylum seekers. If economic migrants believe that they are certain to be deported for fraudulently claiming asylum, total claims necessarily fall, benefiting claims by actual asylees. As it stands, the 2024 limit set by Biden still translated to roughly pre-pandemic levels of yearly border crossings.

An apt complement for a more credible asylum regime is the “Remain in Mexico” policy as well as other “Safe-Third Country” agreements from the first Trump administration. The former forced asylum seekers to process their claims in Mexico before entering the U.S. while the latter encouraged them to first submit claims in respective third countries. MAGA 1.0 was, in fact, correct that international law stipulates that refugees should apply for asylum in the first country they flee to.

Conversely, MAGA 2.0 and progressives are respectively incorrect that the entirety of Mexico is a cartel wasteland unsafe for asylum seekers and in need of military intervention; ironically, strikes would produce a torrent of actual refugees at the border fleeing American bombs. Numerous states and cities across Mexico including the capital, Puebla, Nuevo León, and Monterrey are relatively safe and host to millions of foreign expats, tourists, and international immigrants. Asylum seekers have previously waited out claims in metropolises like Mexico City or elsewhere before traveling to the U.S. through a safe, legal point of entry; a portion of claims could likewise be processed in each country. Here, close cooperation, mutual respect, and benefit for both countries would be vital.

A broader conversation on asylum reform should be had on the center-left. Above all, it must be acknowledged that no asylum or immigration system can possibly be expected to function without a credible threat of deportation. Many progressives currently championing abolishing ICE are performing a sleight of hand that deliberately obfuscates the role of deportation in a hypothetical post-ICE future. Deportation should be neither deliberately cruel nor ignore migrants’ constitutional rights to due process. Yet as former representative and civil rights icon Barbara Jordan once argued, “For the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.”

Immigration in the National Interest and Development Abroad

The broader purpose of immigration should not serve corporate, family-based, or ostensibly humanitarian interests but instead serve the flourishing of workers. To that end, a points system prioritizing skills, language, and education should take precedence over family reunification. While conservatives obsess over the culture of many Catholic, Evangelical, and frequently neoconservative Latinos, the evidence shows that Latin American, Asian, and even Middle Eastern immigrants are assimilating at comparable rates to prior waves of European immigrants. This stands in stark contrast to many countries in Western Europe, where concerns over cultural differences and many immigrants’ lack of assimilation are well founded.

Nonetheless, it’s abundantly clear that decades of historic, low-skilled, legal immigration have fed a strong nativistic current within the modern Republican Party. It should be noted that neighboring Canada has experienced a higher proportion of overall immigration than the U.S. under a points system and airtight regime eliminating employers’ ability to contract illegal labor. Yet no comparable nativism exists within any of the country’s major political parties. A points system in the U.S. should likewise end the current model of employer-sponsored immigration. The use of H1B and H2A visas is effectively a form of indentured servitude where, as with the undocumented, the tacit threat of removal is a vital mechanism of coercion over workers; last week, the Trump administration announced it aims to double issuance of H2As for 2026.

Finally, Democrats should seek to stem emigration in migrants’ home countries by partnering with leaders that champion job creation, workers’ rights, and national development. Leaders such as Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and Claudia Sheinbaum have promoted poverty alleviation, wage increases, unionization, and infrastructure improvements under a sound framework of fiscal responsibility. As a result, Mexican emigration has fallen to record lows in the past decade after soaring during the 1990s and 2000s.

Sheinbaum has even proposed expanding the Yucatán peninsula’s 966-mile Maya Train into Central America in the hopes of creating jobs and fueling investment in Mexico’s disadvantaged southern neighbors. Democrats would do well to reexamine the Kennedy administration’s Alliance for Progress. Rather than the microcredit startups peddled by today’s NGOs, the initiative once sought to deter communism through the promotion of labor and development in the spirit of the American System. Both admirers of “New Deal” America, AMLO and Sheinbaum lauded the Alliance for Progress and have called for a similar proposal in the region.

An Endless Cycle of Cruelty and Exploitation

Ask any progressive how much influence they exert within the Democratic Party, and they will regale you with tales of impotence and betrayal by a hostile centrist elite. While it’s certainly true that leadership has routinely sabotaged popular proposals like raising the federal minimum wage and creating a public option for health care, progressives have dominated Democratic policy on energy, public safety, and especially immigration—with catastrophic results for workers.

For all their talk of class politics, progressives consistently omit class as a lens for analyzing attitudes toward immigration. Non-college workers are more likely to view high levels of low-skilled and especially illegal immigration as a detriment to social cohesion, straining benefit programs and schools, and increasing competition for housing and blue-collar jobs. In contrast, college-educated professionals are more likely to view mass, low-skilled, and illegal immigration as enabling cosmopolitanism, atoning for past wrongs in the Global South, and offering a cheap source of informal labor. The cold, hard truth about the Democratic surge in indifference towards illegal immigration is the fact that large numbers of non-college workers have left the party.

Democrats must embrace an immigration agenda that diminishes the issue’s electoral importance and alienates credentialed elites in favor of non-college workers.

The party is likely to make gains against a GOP that is increasingly championing extreme nationalism and “blood-and-soil” politics. Simply winning by default, however, is almost equivalent to not winning at all. Worse, a reversion to a quasi-open borders policy will only deliver further cruelty and exploitation towards the undocumented at the hands of another, future nativist administration. Barring reform, the continued casualties of employer greed, self-righteous cosmopolitans, and nativist sociopaths will be workers and illegal immigrants.

Juan David Rojas is a journalist specializing in U.S. and Latin American politics. He is a frequent contributor to Compact, The Liberal Patriot, and American Affairs.

Subscribe now

Share

The capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro was an impressive feat by the American military but could prove to be a distraction from more pressing geopolitical concerns. President Trump’s decision to seize Maduro, and the attention he must now pay to Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere in the aftermath, makes it likely that the administration could take its eye off a far more powerful adversary: China. Confronting the military of a rival superpower is a much more daunting task than swooping in and arresting one dictator, even with the superb execution of that mission.

On March 9, 2021, Admiral Philip Davidson, then commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, addressed the Senate Armed Services Committee. Pointing to Chinese military preparations as evidence of the People’s Republic’s ambitions, he warned that China would likely be ready to invade and conquer Taiwan by 2027. The long-anticipated confrontation between the U.S. and China over the island was looming on the horizon, he warned.

Since then, the “Davidson window” has been used in national security circles as the timeframe the U.S. has to prepare to fight China for the freedom of Taiwan. It has informed debates over how the American military (especially but not exclusively the Navy) should be structured, what equipment it should purchase, and where its assets should be based. American service members are preparing to give their all to defend a fellow democracy.

Less attention has been paid, however, to preparing Americans outside the military for the effects of war. If the U.S. should come to blows with the PRC, the effects will be felt in many areas of American life, including the economy. With the Davidson window closing a year from now, America’s leaders need to level with the people they serve about what it will cost to keep Taiwan free, should that decision be made.

Preparing for War

Wargames carried out by American experts provide a mixture of hope and worry about the outcome of such a war over Taiwan. While there is a good chance the U.S. would prevail over China, it would do so at a significant cost of its military assets: America is estimated to lose hundreds of aircraft and dozens of warships, including one or more aircraft carriers. If a carrier were to be sunk (something that has not happened to an American carrier since World War II), it would be a severe blow to American prestige even if Taiwan remained free.

The good news is that the last few years have seen an encouraging renewal of awareness of how important maritime strength is for the United States. In a possible war with China to keep Taiwan from totalitarian tyranny, the U.S. Navy will play a leading role; keeping it strong and ready is clearly a bipartisan priority. Under both the Biden and Trump administrations, the Navy has developed plans for dramatically expanding the size of its fleet, which has shrunk drastically since the 1990s.

Such a conflict would have enormous repercussions within the U.S., though, effects that would ripple throughout many sectors of the civilian economy as well as American national security institutions. A war may well be a long one, and the American people may not have the stomach for a long conflict. The sooner American officials begin preparing the domestic economy for the shock of a war over Taiwan, the better. While it will take time, any wiggle room achieved this year can help.

Of the many economic areas that would be hit by a U.S.-China war, three in particular stand out as areas in which the government should begin increasing resiliency:

• Replacing vital manufactured goods that the U.S. would lose access to during a war;

• Ensuring the military has enough oil to fight China without disrupting domestic supplies; and

• Preparing for Chinese cyberattacks in an attempt by Beijing to weaken American resolve.

Manufacturing

Much of the debate surrounding trade with China concerns blue-collar American jobs lost during the last quarter century, rightly so. In reaction, many of America’s major imports from China have plummeted in volume since 2018 due to tariffs under both the Trump and Biden administrations and to an increasing American desire to decouple economically from a rival great power. But it is not only Chinese goods whose flow would be disrupted by a major war.

Taiwan manufactures 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors, including more than 40 percent of the most sophisticated logic chips the U.S. imports. When the price of these chips goes up—say, in response to constricted supply during a war in which a vital exporter of this technology is cut off from the world economy—the prices of multitudes of other goods will go up including computers, tablets, phones, cars, and TVs. In preparation for such an event, the more chips the U.S. can manufacture on its own soil, the better able it will be to withstand such shocks.

In 2022, President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, which authorized $39 billion in federal aid for semiconductor development on American soil. Companies have responded positively to these incentives: they have made large investments in U.S. manufacturing and related research and development, and a boost in production has created at least 15,000 jobs. While Trump initially derided the CHIPS Act upon returning to the White House, he later signed an expansion of tax credits under the act. There are additional measures the government can take to increase production, such as scaling back environmental permitting rules around manufacturing facilities.

There is also an ongoing push for a revival of the shipbuilding industry along similar lines. The bipartisan Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure for Prosperity and Security (SHIPS) for America Act would encourage major investments in American shipbuilding to reverse the sector’s decline that dates back to Ronald Reagan’s ending of federal subsidies for the industry in 1981. Congress should pass this law, and Trump should sign it.

China’s current dominance of global shipbuilding currently gives it enormous leverage. As Jerry Hendrix, a former Navy captain and longtime defense expert who now heads the Shipbuilding Office at the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in The Atlantic in 2023:

The lack of civilian ships under our own flag makes us vulnerable. Today we remember the recent backlog of container ships in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but tomorrow we could face the shock of no container ships arriving at all should China prohibit its large fleet from visiting U.S. ports.

Government incentives to increase semiconductor manufacturing and shipbuilding will both take time to reach their full effect. But the mere fact of Washington taking both these industries seriously would be a signal, both to American consumers and to America’s trading partners, that if the U.S. suffered economic blows from a conflict with China, the pains it suffered would be temporary. The world would have good reason to believe that America would bounce back.

Oil

There is a common saying in military circles: amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. In an era replete with ever-advancing technology, including videos and games that might give civilians some sense of being in a battle without facing any physical danger, it is easy to think of warfare only in terms of shooting. But the far less glamorous role of logistics—getting personnel, platforms, ammunition, equipment, and supplies from point A to point B—is equally important to a war’s outcome. And when it comes to military logistics, energy supplies are critical.

In 2021, Andrea K. Orlowski, deputy director of engineering at the Navy’s Military Sealift Command, wrote an article assessing the Navy’s inadequate oil supplies for its ships and aircraft. She warned that in a U.S.-China naval war over Taiwan, the U.S. would most likely run out of oil first, partly due to a shortage of refining capacity on the U.S. West Coast. The imbalance seems even more striking considering that Russia, whose oil has been sanctioned by the West for the last four years while it militarily batters Ukraine, exports much of its oil to China, giving the PRC a reliable supply from America’s other great power rival. The U.S. could try to shift the balance in its favor by interdicting Chinese oil imports from the Middle East, but sustaining this operation could take too many military units away from either the fight with China or the deterrence of Russia.

The U.S. military’s need for oil is already vast. The Department of Defense is the largest consumer of energy in the U.S. and the top bulk purchaser of fuel among federal agencies. Military oil consumption will increase even further during a full-scale war, such that it may be necessary to take oil out of the civilian economy, potentially raising its price.

Established in the wake of the surge in fuel prices that followed the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is America’s stockpile to guard against spikes in oil prices. The government purchases oil when prices are low, and presidents can sell it back into the civilian economy when prices are high. The SPR came to public attention in 2022, when President Biden tapped into it in response to high oil prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Filling the SPR is consistent with Trump’s desire to boost American oil production. He recently ordered the purchase of one million barrels for it, but this is a truly tiny amount. The SPR is authorized to hold up to 714 million barrels, and as of November 26, 2025, it held 411 million. The administration should go much further than a mere one million barrels.

Cyber

On May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline, the largest provider of refined petroleum products in the Eastern U.S., was hit with a ransomware attack. Long lines formed at gas stations in the Southeast, and Colonial was forced to temporarily shut down all its operations. This was the largest-ever cyberattack on American oil infrastructure.

This attack was carried out by criminals looking to make money. Imagine if another attack, doing even worse damage to critical American infrastructure, was perpetrated by China in the middle of a war over Taiwan. How long would Americans put up with disruption—to commerce, to the supply of critical goods, to their own peace of mind—before public opinion would turn against defending Taiwan and in favor of cutting a deal with Beijing?

Chinese cyberespionage against the U.S. has increased in frequency throughout the early 21st century. Victims have included government agencies, major corporations, and millions upon millions of ordinary users and consumers. In all likelihood, China would launch every cyber weapon at its disposal at the U.S. during a full-fledged war.

There is worthwhile legislation before Congress that would bolster America’s cyber defenses against China and other hostile actors. Trump should also reverse his confusing decision from last December not to sanction China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), Beijing’s spy agency and the perpetrator of a major cyber breach of U.S. telecom companies in 2024. As noted by Morgan Peirce in Just Security, letting China off the hook for its cyber aggression undermines Trump’s attempts to get America’s allies to bear more of the burden of their own defenses: “If the world’s largest economy will not confront China’s cyber operations, how can it credibly ask Indo-Pacific allies—who have far less leverage over Beijing—to step up?”

It is not completely guaranteed that China will invade Taiwan in 2027. It is always possible that American deterrence will be so strong that Beijing will conclude that the cost of war is not worth the benefit of conquering the island. It is also possible that China will opt for means other than conventional war to bring Taiwan under its thumb, such as attempting a complete air and sea blockade to isolate the island from the world. Likewise, Russia’s quagmire in Ukraine during the past four years may give Chinese admirals and generals pause about waging a normal war.

Conditions within the United States, however, give Xi Jinping hope that he can subdue Taiwan with enough patience. Americans are so polarized politically and culturally that consensus on anything is difficult for them to achieve. Even war may not be enough to bring our people together. Xi may well bank on Americans’ unwillingness to fight for long as the factor that will give China the ultimate edge in an all-out conflict, especially if America’s leaders don’t prepare citizens to withstand it even as they take steps to prevent it.

Michael D. Purzycki is an analyst, writer, and editor based in Arlington, Virginia. He writes The Non-Progressive Democrat on Substack. Follow him on Twitter at @MDPurzycki.

Subscribe now

Share

When Zohran Mamdani beat former governor Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral election last November, it was broadly assumed his ambitious agenda would struggle to gain traction in Albany. Most of Mamdani’s signature proposals require approval from the state legislature and the governor’s office, and although Democratic governor Kathy Hochul endorsed him seven weeks before the election and even attended a Queens campaign rally featuring Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the feelings of mutual goodwill were contingent at best. Mamdani got his start on the dogmatic, identity-driven wing of the Democratic Socialists of America, while Hochul, who says she is a “staunch capitalist,” was a former upstate congresswoman seemingly versed in the triangulating machine politics of yesteryear. Once Mamdani entered Gracie Mansion, some analysts predicted, Hochul would unsentimentally tame him, much as Cuomo frustrated Bill de Blasio’s progressive mayorship last decade.

The budding partnership between Hochul and Mamdani during his first weeks as mayor has challenged that thesis, raising hopes they might overcome New York’s notoriously prickly upstate-downstate dynamic. On January 8th, the unlikely duo announced the first steps toward universal child care in New York, a $4.5 billion plan that includes “2 Care,” an expansion of existing New York City programs, and new pilots in other counties. That fiscal commitment by Hochul may have been an easy layup to boost her popularity with Mamdani’s coalition. But all the same it was shrewd of the “mom from Buffalo.” Depending on the type of service, the annual cost of child care in New York City typically ranges between $18,000 and $26,000, according to the city’s comptroller. New York is emblematic of America’s middle-class squeeze, and with health insurance premiums exploding statewide, young and prospective families are in desperate need of policies that offset that burden.

It’s possible, of course, that sheer political convenience is driving the mayor’s and governor’s camera-ready affinity. Both are hungry for headline-grabbing policy wins, and tackling child care access and costs had already been one of Hochul’s top priorities. Still, this auspicious collaboration could soon extend to other fronts. And the way each influences public policy—and, to some extent, party rhetoric—could prove to be a two-way street. While Mamdani’s sunny populism has increased pressure on Hochul to govern more boldly, she seems motivated to leave her mark in ways that might likewise help progressives improve trust in government.

In fact, Hochul has underscored her commitment to helping the mayor deliver on his vision of “affordability” while touting her own increasingly broad-minded developmental agenda. Like other New York Democrats, Hochul has awakened to the housing shortage and introduced plans to remove construction bottlenecks. In her 2026 “State of the State” address, she unfurled her “Let Them Build” agenda, which would reduce lengthy environmental reviews seen by supply-side progressives and advocates of mixed-use development as a thinly veiled tool of NIMBY litigation. Granted, the policy blitz is helping to lay the groundwork for Hochul’s reelection campaign. Still, to her credit, she had been moving in this pro-development direction well before “abundance” had become a policy buzzword. She first won plaudits in 2022 for throwing her support behind constructing the near-mythical Interborough Express—a long-awaited mass transit project that will connect underserved neighborhoods across Queens and Brooklyn—and has excited transportation advocates with fresh plans to extend the Second Avenue subway. Among her newer supporters—many of them Millennial policy advocates keen to revitalize blue state governance—steps like these show that Hochul is an underestimated workhorse focused on big projects that recall the heyday of midcentury liberalism.

In that regard, Hochul has also emerged as a champion of reviving nuclear power, tacking ahead of other national Democrats on an issue that has divided environmentalists but is seen by others on the left as essential to advancing a viable energy politics that reduces emissions while containing long-term costs. Last June she announced she was directing the New York Power Authority to build a new advanced power plant, emphasizing that energy self-reliance was crucial to strengthening regional manufacturing and supply chains.

This, too, could be an area of agreement between her and Mamdani. Despite the Brahmin left’s ingrained suspicion of nuclear power, Mamdani signaled in a pre-election debate that he supported “exploring” its expansion upstate. It’s a pivot worth watching, given the implications for how progressives discuss climate policy. Hochul, moreover, may help lead Democrats out of the wilderness on an issue that has often exacerbated working-class defections. The left-wing energy analyst Fred Stafford notes that she has hitherto been an unsung proponent of the type of New Deal industrial policies that can and are winning the support of blue-collar voters. Her pragmatic approach, which stresses energy “abundance,” now offers progressives discouraged by the public’s tepid support for climate action a template to move forward amid the Trump administration’s harmful cuts to renewables-based projects.

Admittedly, the notion that Hochul will be key to rehabilitating the Democrats’ national image might strike party activists as a bit far-fetched. Hochul is hardly the most popular governor in the country; despite a steady stream of proposals and actions to change perceptions of what 21st-century New York can accomplish, her so-so poll numbers have only moderately improved in the last year. Other up-and-coming “pragmatic progressives,” such as Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, are dominating the limelight, and Hochul is an unlikely contender for the Senate or a top cabinet position in a future Democratic administration.

The depth of her support among core Democratic voters is also questionable. Hochul has signed some notable reforms, including bills to ban algorithmic rent-setting and moderately beef up the attorney general’s ability to enforce state consumer protection laws. But her progressive detractors, citing her refusal thus far to raise income and corporate tax rates, still view her as either a lightweight or overly deferential to wealthy interests, particularly big tech and the fossil fuel industry. Climate activists were angered that she greenlit a new gas pipeline last fall, while others were disappointed that she diluted, at the last minute, New York’s new AI safety law. For those already skeptical of her progressive bona fides, Hochul’s boasts that she is reducing “red tape” for business investment and infrastructure upgrades reflect a politics of caution that is seemingly at odds with Mamdani’s vision of active government.

Hochul’s record is nevertheless an intriguing example of what it looks like when a Democratic administration pursues a “liberalism that builds”—an approach to governance that Mamdani seems increasingly keen to be identified with. Mamdani’s allies and critics alike have been surprised by his own enthusiasm for trimming regulations for mom-and-pop businesses and housing construction. Following Hochul’s proposal to reform the State Environmental Quality Review Act, the mayor’s office jumped on the bandwagon, releasing a video in support.

That is a notable shift from the late 2010s, when the left was practically allergic to any “pro-growth” rhetoric. And it shows that pragmatism is not a smokescreen for inaction. Reflecting both the abundance framework and the neo-Brandeisian focus on eliminating market chokeholds, New York’s “new era” promises to challenge the dysfunctional interest group politics that enervated blue cities and states in recent years.

Of course, whether or not the Hochul-Mamdani partnership endures will depend in large part on Hochul’s appetite for reform and her determination to implement changes efficiently. Mamdani, mindful of the toxic effects of the Cuomo-de Blasio rivalry, no doubt understands this; regardless of his Obama-esque star power, he will have to stay in Hochul’s good graces and avoid publicized disputes that lead to inertia and hurt Democratic unity at the midterms.

But Hochul plainly needs him too. While she has a strong chance of retaining the Democratic nomination and beating her Republican opponent this November—presumed to be Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman following Representative Elise Stefanik’s abrupt departure from the race—her victory margin over Lee Zeldin, now Trump’s EPA administrator, was narrow and seen as a harbinger of blue state discontent heading into 2024. Some Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, even blamed Hochul’s middling campaign for the GOP’s victory in the 2022 midterms. Since then, the impression that Hochul is an underperforming Democrat with no definable, passionate base has been hard to shake.

That might explain why Hochul has warmed to Mamdani and been measured about their disagreements. While a number of Democrats who are strongly pro-Israel or Wall Street-friendly have withheld their support, his charisma and enthusiastic base are otherwise the envy of most national figures. Mamdani, however, has yet to fully reciprocate Hochul’s support by formally endorsing her reelection campaign over Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, who declared last summer he is challenging Hochul in the Democratic primary. At the risk of being ungracious, it’s possible that gives Mamdani some added leverage over Hochul on his other priorities, like expanding tenant protections and deterring monopolistic price discrimination. And she may well tack further in his direction. As columnist Mara Gay observes, Hochul needs to court Mamdani’s base to drive up her urban turnout and mitigate the conservative tilt of Long Island and upstate New York.

At the same time, Hochul must govern in a manner that boosts New York’s three most vulnerable House Democrats and increases the odds of flipping the seat held by Republican Mike Lawler, a moderate conservative weakened by the expiration of ACA subsidies. Given the Democrats’ perceived disadvantages on sociocultural issues, that raises the odds that she will continue to take a much tougher stance on crime and public safety than Mamdani has. In a less volatile national climate, this difference might not put their relationship to the test. But the Trump White House is a rogue factor whose actions, particularly in the realm of immigration enforcement, threaten to inflame intraparty tensions over how to best fight back while still winning over swing voters critical to a blue wave in the midterms.

Indeed, the partnership’s greatest vulnerability concerns the question of how to handle federal immigration law while protecting law-abiding immigrants with community roots. At the moment, Mamdani and Hochul appear to be united in opposing Trump’s latest threat to rescind federal funds for sanctuary cities. Yet their long-term differences over immigration policy highlight one of the key schisms roiling the Democratic coalition.

Whereas Mamdani embraces New York’s status as a “sanctuary city” and is backed by activists who fervently oppose any municipal-federal-state cooperation that toughens enforcement, Hochul has zig-zagged on immigrants’ rights throughout her career. Upon becoming governor in 2021 following Cuomo’s resignation, she said she had “evolved” on issues such as drivers’ licenses for migrants. But she sparked a backlash among immigration activists when she said after Trump’s 2024 victory she would be “the first one to call up ICE” to deport immigrants “who commit crimes.” Now, as protests against ICE’s aggressive deployment in Minneapolis escalate in the wake of the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent, Hochul has pivoted again by backing legislation that allows New Yorkers to sue ICE officers who “act outside the scope of their duties.”

That move might be in tune with a public increasingly disturbed by ICE’s behavior—57 percent now oppose its approach to enforcement—but it won’t contribute much to solving Democrats’ thorny dilemma over how to be compassionate while meeting the public’s overall desire for stronger borders. Nor, unfortunately, does growing public outcry relieve Hochul and Mamdani of the tightrope both are walking with the White House. Although Mamdani’s charm offensive in December may have blunted Trump’s desire to undermine him, his rise has put the city and state under the microscope as never before. Any local crisis that fuels allegations of “blue state disorder”—however sensationalist and ungrounded—could quickly dissolve the trust Mamdani and Hochul have built with each other, diminishing both in the process.

Nonetheless, Democrats have reason to hope Mamdani and Hochul can avoid such pitfalls. Mamdani is unusually talented and perceptive in ways that have compensated for his inexperience, while Hochul comes across as the rare moderate who refuses to be cowed. And unlike their listless counterparts in Congress, fellow New Yorkers Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, they are not caught in the headlights, stunned by Trump’s endless shock and awe. Instead, they appear determined to implement popular policies that expand their respective mandates and the Democratic tent. As Democrats search for a blue state model that inspires confidence and pride, the Empire State, against the forecast of cynics, could once more lead the way.

Subscribe now

Share

Back in 1956, Elvis Presley recorded his massive hit “Don’t Be Cruel.” With all due respect to the King, this great song has many virtues but providing a guide to policy isn’t one of them. Yet it appears to be dictating Democrats’ current approach to the red-hot immigration issue despite its profound inadequacy in the policy realm.

Consider that Democrats have been unremittingly hostile to Trump’s immigration policy since he began his second term, despite its undisputed success in completely shutting down the southern border to illegal immigration. Instead, Democrats have focused relentlessly on the question of interior enforcement—that is, the activities of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) aimed at detaining and deporting illegal immigrants currently living within the United States. The general approach has been to portray all ICE actions as essentially illegitimate, arbitrary and, well, cruel.

Conspicuously lacking has been any recognition that, in fact, interior enforcement against illegal immigration is an entirely legitimate law enforcement operation and that ICE is the government agency charged with these legitimate activities. Therefore, what ICE does is presumptively legitimate not illegitimate.

Democratic treatment of ICE has turned this on its head; their activities are presumptively viewed as illegitimate and if there are any legitimate ICE actions, Democrats are being mighty quiet about it. Instead, characterizations of ICE as a modern-day Gestapo, Nazis, an occupying force, etc have become so common as to be unremarkable. This attitude has led Democrats down a path where their policy on interior enforcement against illegal immigration seems to amount to: “Don’t do it! Don’t be cruel!”

Of course, there is much not to like about how ICE has gone about their business, all of which has been copiously documented. This has been red meat to those sectors of blue America and their political representatives whose revealed preference is not to deport anyone. Think about those ubiquitous “In This House, We Believe” signs in liberal professional-class neighborhoods.

The ICE/interior enforcement issue hits the Daily Double for the “In This House, We Believe” crowd. No human is illegal. Check. Kindness is everything. Check. These may be utterly useless as guides to effective, sustainable immigration policy but they sure do get the juices flowing.

That’s why, from Los Angles to Minneapolis, Democratic activists have felt completely justified in interfering with ICE activities and Democratic politicians in refusing to cooperate with a duly constituted federal law enforcement agency. And that’s why, especially with the tragic recent death of Renee Good, calls of “Abolish ICE!” are beginning to ring out across wide sectors of the Democratic Party. There is no good ICE, only bad ICE. There is no legitimate ICE, only illegitimate ICE.

This is the logical terminus of an attitude that starts with no human being is illegal and kindness is everything. Since ICE’s remit is that illegal immigrants are, in fact, illegal and that the law must be followed, even if the outcome is not particularly kind, it only makes sense to get rid of the agency.

This is a terrible idea in so many different ways. As a very useful new memo from the reform Democratic group Searchlight points out:

[S]aying you want to “Abolish ICE”…means that you support getting rid of the agency responsible for enforcing immigration and customs laws, creating a lawless system where people who enter the country illegally can stay here indefinitely, leaving no agency charged with finding and removing them. This will, inevitably, incentivize others to come to the United States illegally. “Abolish ICE” is not some proxy for more humane immigration enforcement, or to change ICE’s culture to adhere to due process, or to impose accountability on rogue officers. It’s advocating for an extreme.

Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws within our borders, and you want to increase illegal immigration, you should not say you want to abolish ICE…[W]e will always need a federal agency charged with deporting people who are in the United States illegally.

That’s clearly correct as a matter of policy. Democrats need to reflect that in how they talk about ICE or the momentum will continue to shift toward those in the party who simply want to get rid of the agency entirely.

And that would be a disaster. The reasonable—and popular—desire to reform ICE practices would inevitably be subsumed in a contentious debate about abolishing the agency. This is not likely to turn out well for the Democrats despite the solid basis in public opinion for some reform and pullback of ICE activities. Abolishing ICE will likely never be generally popular, despite its sky-high popularity with Democrats where there has been a recent spike in support.

Instead, as the Searchlight memo points out, Democrats will be setting themselves up for a rerun of the “Defund the Police” debacle, also driven by a viral incident (and also in Minneapolis!). A maximalist demand like “Abolish ICE” will serve only to signal a lack of Democratic commitment to immigration enforcement, just as defund the police signaled a lack of Democratic commitment to public safety. This is highly undesirable both for the Democrats politically and for the general cause of reforming ICE practices.

A further lesson from the recent past is provided by the Democratic reaction to Trump’s border crackdowns in his first administration. Seizing on some well-publicized excesses, Democrats pilloried Trump for being cruel and inhumane and promised to be different. And they were! They were kind and humane—and also completely ineffective at controlling the border and preventing abuse of the asylum system once they got back in power, producing the huge wave of illegal and irregular immigration that discredited the Democrats and helped Trump win the 2024 election. “Don’t be cruel” didn’t work out so well then and it won’t work out so well now, either in or out of power.

Democrats instead need to get beyond mindless slogans like “Abolish ICE” and blanket opposition to everything ICE does and embrace what I have termed immigration realism. That approach means taking on board the following realities of immigration into this rich country of ours:

1. Many more people want to come to a rich country like the United States than an orderly immigration system can allow.

2. Therefore, many people are willing to break the laws of our country to gain entry.

3. If you do not enforce the law, you will get more law-breakers and therefore more illegal immigrants.

4. If you provide procedural loopholes to gain entry into the country (e.g., by claiming asylum), many people will abuse these loopholes.

5. Once these illegal and irregular immigrants gain entry to the country, they will seek to stay indefinitely regardless of their immigration status.

6. If interior immigration enforcement is lax, such that these illegal and irregular immigrants do mostly get to stay forever, that provides a tremendous incentive for others to try to gain entry to the country via the same means.

7. If you provide benefits and dispensations to all immigrants in the country, regardless of their immigration status, this further incentivizes aspiring immigrants to gain entry to the country by any means necessary.

8. Tolerance of flagrant law-breaking on a mass scale contributes to a sense of social disorder and loss of control among a country’s citizens, who believe a nation’s borders are meaningful and that the welfare of a nation’s citizens should come first.

9. There is, in fact, such a thing as too much immigration, particularly low-skill immigration, and negative effects on communities and workers are real, not just in the imaginations of xenophobes.

10. If more immigration is desired by parties or policymakers, from whichever countries and at whatever skill levels, then immigration should be regular, legal immigration and approved by the American people through the democratic process. Backdooring mass immigration over the wishes of voters because it is “kind” or “reflects our values” or is deemed “economically necessary” leads inevitably to backlash. Wheelbarrows full of econometric studies on immigration’s aggregate benefits will not save you.

Obviously, the current Democratic vogue for treating all ICE activities as illegitimate and susceptibility to dumb maximalist slogans like “Abolish ICE” points them in precisely the wrong direction for dealing with the thorny and complex realities of the immigration issue. They’re just setting themselves up for future failure.

In short, it’s time to stop coddling the “In This House, We Believe” crowd and adopt a serious, grown-up approach to immigration and immigrants. “Don’t Be Cruel” isn’t gonna cut it.

Subscribe now

Share

In the run-up to the new year, political observers were struck by the degree of public feuding in MAGA’s camp. Some even ventured that there are serious fissures in Donald Trump’s coalition, particularly over what constitutes “America First” and who is welcome among their tribe. Much of the drama, though, revolved around the Epstein files, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s stunning break with Trump, and the GOP’s internecine battles over the influence of extremist right-wing commentators like the antisemite Nick Fuentes—battles that hadn’t necessarily redounded to the Democrats’ benefit in the polls. The question as 2026 began was whether Democrats could find ways to exploit these growing discontents while maintaining their newfound focus on affordability.

The potential fallout from the U.S. military’s audacious capture of Venezuela’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, on January 3rd under Trump’s order (without consultation of Congress or a formal declaration of war) could soon embolden Democrats to challenge Trump on his own ideological terrain. So far, Trump’s decision—justified as fighting “narcoterrorism” but evidently motivated by personal animus and a stated desire to take control of Venezuela’s oil—has polled poorly with independents and reinforced the general public’s perception that Trump is increasingly divorced from their everyday concerns. Based on Trump’s bellicosity, we also have reason to fear the Venezuela intervention is the opening gambit of a predatory doctrine euphemistically called “flexible realism.” While Trump has unabashedly declared he, as commander-in-chief, is bound only by his “own morality,” many Americans are certain to oppose this further concentration of executive power.

Indeed, there should be little doubt that any concrete commitment to expansionism would prove massively unpopular outside of Trump’s most ardent supporters. And the ire that such an atavistic strategy is likely to elicit from voters fed up with military adventurism, endless wars of choice, and gargantuan, opaque defense budgets presents Democrats with a clear opportunity to cast Trump’s second term as a parade of betrayals. Perhaps more than any other event, the Maduro affair symbolizes the disjuncture between the issues that expanded Trump’s coalition in 2024 and a record that has already disenchanted his “soft” and “shy” supporters. At this precarious moment, Democrats shouldn’t hesitate to frame Trump’s gamble—a reversion to Cold War-style meddling liable to yield major and unanticipated consequences—as putting ordinary Americans dead last.

These tremors of a new era don’t require Democrats to overhaul their midterm strategy. Foreign policy usually doesn’t determine elections on its own, and bread-and-butter issues remain paramount to the public. Nevertheless, in pessimistic times a sudden increase in military action can highlight for disillusioned voters how their priorities have been neglected or betrayed. Democrats should act accordingly. As several center-left reports have stressed, courting MAGA’s more tenuous followers—especially those who hoped Trump would follow through on rebuilding at home and ceasing costly foreign entanglements—will be key to winning back the House and improving the Democrats’ competitiveness in the Senate and Electoral College. And Trump, by deposing Maduro, threatening more interventions, and antagonizing U.S. allies like Denmark, Canada, and Mexico, has provided another foil for Democrats on top of a weakening economy.

To fully take advantage of this moment, however, Democrats must face up to why voters previously opposed to Trump came to see him as more credible than Joe Biden—not least in the realm of foreign affairs. Trump’s comeback, after all, was driven by a basic promise to deal with inflation but also to reduce government dysfunction and global chaos. Though it sounded patently infeasible to progressives, Trump even boasted he would play the “peacemaker.” Biden’s record didn’t make it easy to counter this narrative. Instead of the return to normalcy Biden had pledged, prices, the border, and international conflicts spiraled out of control on his watch.

More than Democrats care to admit, that acute sense of drift on the world stage played into Trump’s hands. As in domestic affairs, Biden assured he would reaffirm America’s leadership abroad. Although Biden had fashioned a reputation over his Senate career as a foreign policy expert, many Americans doubted his command of the issues as president. As 2024 progressed, Americans increasingly felt his Ukraine and Middle East policies were either overextending America’s foreign commitments with no convincing endgame or compromising the nation’s moral authority. While Biden’s mounting foreign policy woes didn’t tip the election, they likely contributed to last-minute defections to Trump and dampened Democratic turnout in left-leaning cities in key states like Michigan.

That messy legacy underscores that there are hazards of duking it out with Trump over foreign affairs without a clear and strong countervision. Older ghosts from the Cold War and “War on Terror” linger too, unfortunately. Democratic leaders still struggle to connect strategic restraint with resolve; they are perennially afraid of looking “weak” and “indecisive” on national security, even when interventionism courts disaster and national decline. That inhibits their ability to adapt and reform their Wilsonian tradition for an age of multipolarity and formulate a consistent and honorable alternative to more militant interpretations of “peace through strength.”

In fact, many party elites remain wedded to a paradigm that tacitly endorses America’s role as a global policeman—one that doesn’t offer a compelling contrast to Trump’s, or at least his original concept of “America First.” Liberal internationalists believe the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” is precipitating the final rupture with the postwar order, which the Biden administration had tasked itself with saving. Yet for many understandably weary voters, particularly younger Americans who reject American exceptionalism and see the “rules-based order” as stained with moral hypocrisy, that was an obligation no longer worth carrying. Now, to the dismay of those who champion America’s global leadership, warnings that Trump’s amoral power politics will only embolden Russia and China in their own “backyards” no longer seem to resonate much with the electorate.

However dispiriting, that dynamic suggests it is better in the short term for Democrats to attack Trump for abandoning what he was ostensibly elected to do: to drive down costs and lessen America’s geopolitical burdens. Still, there is no guarantee it will work. Scandals and transgressions that would have destroyed past presidencies have been met with public indifference or resignation, and Trump’s own sprawling foreign policy may end up a sideshow to other issues. Democrats, moreover, have little appetite to address their own longstanding divisions over how to wield American hard power. Despite their professed alarm over Trump’s actions, they may choose the safer course and make the 2026 midterms a referendum strictly on the economy.

It’s also unclear what, at this stage, could truly drive a wedge between Trump and the MAGA faithful. In an unexpected reproof of the White House, five Senate Republicans, including Missouri’s Josh Hawley, a right-populist heretofore loyal to Trump, have backed a new war powers resolution advanced by Democrats. But the dissent on the right has otherwise been muted, even among deep skeptics of regime change. According to Politico’s Ian Ward, prominent right-wing thinkers and influencers linked to the administration have flipped the script and argued that military raids and uninhibited saber-rattling conform just fine to “America First” principles. While they may be taking their cues from above, there has been no rebellion from below to prompt them to act otherwise. Partisan Republicans have strongly approved of the Venezuela intervention in post-raid polls and interviews, praising, in particular, the operation’s swift and sophisticated execution. In these respects, Democrats have few obvious avenues to profit from pointing out “America First” has lost whatever coherence it once had.

And yet, a good deal of 2024 Trump voters—as well as his more regular supporters in the Rust Belt—plainly didn’t vote for this. Nor did they vote for a year’s worth of escalating air strikes in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean—over 600, according to a new report. Much as Trump’s newer converts didn’t think they were voting for federal cuts to the safety net or needless tariffs on basic food imports, they didn’t expect him to resurrect the discredited interventionism of the George W. Bush years. They had hoped, however naively, that Trump’s strongman instincts would be channeled toward corporate jawboning and international dealmaking that improved their economic prospects.

Such assumptions weren’t completely unfounded, however. Trump, it should be remembered, repeatedly postured as a different kind of Republican, coldly unmoved by moral arguments about America’s global responsibilities but also circumspect about the use of force. During his first term, expert opinion varied as to whether he was a misguided isolationist, a Russian asset, or a tinpot warmonger; between bouts of jingoistic bluster, Trump tried to forge an image as an iconoclast willing to engage “rogue states.” In a highly symbolic move in September 2019, he fired John Bolton, his third National Security Advisor and an arch hawk historically loathed by the left, over a series of policy disagreements. Among America Firsters as well as the “Trump-curious,” that action proved Trump would refuse to be shackled by the empire-obsessed “foreign policy blob.”

Of course, the fantasy of “Trump the dove” was fairly preposterous. It was based on a selective reading of events that downplayed, among other things, his expansion of drone strikes. Since returning to office, Trump’s capacity for radicalization, already revealed on January 6th, 2021, has become more palpable still, as demonstrated by the ruthlessness of his immigration crackdown; it took a certain credulousness to think his volatility and need to look tough wouldn’t eventually lead to conflicts he was entrusted not to pursue.

Democrats hoping to woo voters let down by Trump must nevertheless approach them humbly given the trust deficit they too must overcome. That should be doable provided the overtures are sincere. The thornier challenge is figuring out how to effectively communicate that the “Donroe Doctrine” invites all sorts of trouble when Democrats have already exhausted the “No Kings” rhetoric. While some Trump sympathizers might hope the Maduro affair is a surgical one-off and not a preview of misadventures and occupations to come, Trump’s brusque admission in a New York Times interview that his proposal to “run” Venezuela could take “much longer” than a year cannot be dismissed as mere theater. It is, rather, another way of asserting he is unbeholden to any set of norms or constraints, including voters who expected a much different set of priorities. The unenviable task for Democrats is to impress upon cynical voters that this time is different and more dangerous.

Granted, to assail Trump’s lack of fidelity to principles and voters might seem a fruitless endeavor. More Trump voters will bend to whatever Trump says “America First” is than not, and Democrats have struggled in the past to cast Trump’s mercurial nature as a fundamental weakness. Attempting to convince Trump-leaning voters that the Venezuela intervention marks the start of an ugly new chapter in American militarism might not be worth the effort.

Yet, if there is any throughline in the MAGA movement besides hardline immigration restrictionism, it is a neo-Jacksonian outlook tempered by the excesses of neoconservative globalism. Adherents are still willing to punch adversaries hard and dispense with “the niceties of international law,” as historian Walter Russell Mead remarked at the turn of the century. But today’s breed—extending from paleoconservatives and Obama-Trump Democrats to socially conservative immigrants and “politically homeless” voices once aligned with either the old anti-war left or Ron Paul’s libertarianism—is arguably far more skeptical of flimsy justifications for regime change and myopic “gunboat diplomacy” than prior Jacksonians were. It is these less martial Trump voters who are very likely concerned by what the “Donroe Doctrine” portends and whose continued support for the GOP is conditional on Trump actually sticking to his original “America First” pitch.

Democrats, accordingly, ought to court these and other disaffected voters on the same terms Trump did. He spoke relentlessly of broken promises, linking offshored jobs and unraveling communities to the same unaccountable “swamp” that had prosecuted and funded, through mountains of national debt, poorly justified wars fueled by ideology and mission creep. The Democratic overture to spooked Americans may be equally straightforward: Trump promised and failed to put pocketbook issues first and is now recklessly pursuing the same military interventions he swore to scale back.

Still, any Democratic strategy to confront the new Trump doctrine will only succeed if it extends beyond raw criticism. Democrats need to convey in no uncertain terms that voters are right to be angry with Washington’s endless policy capture, that their party will do everything to reassert powers Congress has virtually abdicated, and that they will renew the vision of prudent defense and domestic reinvestment that animated Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Above all, though, Democrats must map a path to security, peace, and prosperity that speaks, with conviction, to American ideals—and relieves the country of the folly and tragedy that have damaged America’s standing in the 21st century.

Subscribe now

Share

As Trump’s first year back in office comes to a close, it is clear most voters think the economy is in poor shape and that prices for essentials have become unbearable. This pessimism isn’t limited to Democrats and disgruntled independents. According to a new Politico poll, over a fifth of self-identified MAGA Republicans think Trump’s tariffs, his main policy to restructure the economy and reshore industry, are causing short- and long-term harm.

Headline-grabbing holiday shopping numbers, boosted by the proliferation of “buy now, pay later” plans, are unlikely to reflect a more hopeful outlook for 2026. While consumer sentiment has lifted slightly since November’s notable drop, it is doubtful holiday spending can be taken as a useful gauge of how Americans feel about their economic security, considering the blow to household finances that is about to be dealt to millions by the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies.

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s team remains bullish about growth. While Trump has conceded that voters aren’t happy in a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, he and his advisers have mostly swatted at news that underscores affordability is the public’s central issue. Still, a steady drumbeat of discouraging economic trends on top of elevated grocery prices and health care costs clarifies that consumer distress isn’t part of the episodic “vibecession” or, as Trump more often asserts, a crisis fabricated by Democrats. Excluding the Covid shock of 2020, layoffs for the year have reached their highest level since 2009. The share of jobless Americans suffering long-term unemployment has ticked past twenty-five percent. Manufacturing has contracted for nine consecutive months, undercutting Trump’s boasts that international firms are lining up to invest domestically. Although still below pre-pandemic levels, foreclosures have increased this year at the same time that building permits have all but stalled and 75 percent of prospective buyers can’t afford what’s on the market.

This is not the stuff of a “new roaring Twenties”—at least not for paycheck-to-paycheck America. The so-called K-shaped recovery, which economists initially warned of as the economy reopened after the pandemic, has indeed transpired, resulting in an economy even more bifurcated than last decade’s. That is, the country is undergoing a marked divergence between very wealthy asset holders and those with declining purchasing power and increasing indebtedness, with little else occurring to signal it is in any respect transitory.

The K-shaped dynamic should concern all policymakers and elected officials intent on avoiding the anemic conditions of post-Brexit Britain, Italy, and Europe’s many other stagnant economies. Primarily due to Trump’s extremely injudicious use of tariffs, economists have warned nearly all year that America is lurching toward a stagflationary environment resembling that of the 1970s. But the underlying fundamentals that have made the K-shaped economy possible suggest our current trajectory could prove comparatively worse. The post-Covid era has introduced novel financial pathologies and algorithm-driven squeezes that most experts and policymakers, fixated on standard barometers of “good times,” seem determined to minimize. Indeed, despite abundant signs working families are treading water, Washington seems content to do nothing but watch Americans perpetually borrow their way out of pinched budgets.

The K-shaped economy can be summarized as the latest demoralizing phase in a decades-long trend toward greater inequality. Still, what makes inequality post-Covid that much harsher than in prior decades is the extent to which middle- and working-class “thrift”—neither pleasant nor good for growth—has become harder to pull off. In lean times, every household tottering on the brink has had to resort to austere choices to keep its bills from outpacing income. Now, however, it has become commonplace for households that are stable on paper to feel as though they are hostage to an unending game of Russian roulette.

Instead of scoping out a steady stream of deals and sales—once the go-go promise of a digitalized market that was supposed to teem with competition—one must dodge insidious markups while avoiding any kind of costly emergency. The “gamification” of the economy, typically associated with beguiling inconveniences like surge pricing on rideshare apps, has seeped into every type of transaction, creating market pressures and “incentives” that leave few businesses and consumers any real way of opting out.

This is a situation in which the mainstream economics profession increasingly grasps for relevance. Over the last few decades, the regressive shift in income distribution and, perhaps more importantly, how disposable income is used by nominally middle-class households has diminished our ability to judge traditional macroeconomic indicators with much confidence. But the disconnect between how economists evaluate the economy and how ordinary Americans navigate it has become far more pronounced in the pandemic’s aftermath.

Take the employment rate—probably the most important metric to social democrats besides the Gini coefficient, and one which also happens to animate Trump. Normally an economy with several years of unemployment below five percent and modest wage growth would be considered fairly healthy, assuming roughly 50-60 percent of workers’ paychecks wasn’t going to housing and food. Yet in many parts of the country—not just coastal hubs with perennially tight housing markets such as San Francisco, New York City, Boston, and Seattle—regular workers and middle-class families are spending this much on the bare essentials. Even worse, they are increasingly financing these non-discretionary monthly bills as though they were big-ticket items—a practice Americans could have scarcely imagined a generation ago.

The precarious state of Americans’ financial health is bound to be exacerbated by soaring health care costs. Come January, the tsunami of exorbitant health insurance premiums, which in many cases are set to double absent a deal to extend ACA subsidies, virtually assures one of two patterns. We can expect either a tremendous softening in spending on recreation, “self-care” services, entertainment, travel, dining out, and the extracurricular activities of school-age kids—meaning lasting repercussions in sectors that disproportionately support local entrepreneurs, decent wages in big metros, and freelance professional opportunities—or a phenomenal spike in borrowing, and thus higher credit card interest rates, to simply meet existing needs.

Neither situation may prove catastrophic right away. Still, the former would significantly raise the odds of a recession next year, contrary to the Fed’s cautiously optimistic growth forecast. While layoffs at large corporations are the most obvious warning sign of a downturn, one can be grimly certain that when smaller businesses reduce operations, pare back staff, and cut hours for remaining employees, economic pain and uncertainty are spreading across the system. The alternative—in which households earning less than, say, $100,000/year hold their noses and take on more debt—would probably delay a harsh contraction, albeit by propping up the system through unsustainable choices. One way or another, stunted demand among the 3rd and 4th income quintiles, forced by escalating credit card repayments and the likely increase in out-of-pocket health care fees, will bring down the curtain on a recovery whose foundations have always been chimerical.

There are few discernible ways in which the ensuing pain might be mitigated, at least under the current administration and Republican Congress. To begin with, it is dubious that the GOP tax cuts, which go into effect next year, are going to even modestly ease middle-class financial burdens. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that two-thirds of American households will receive less than a $500 tax cut, or barely a quarter of what the average two-parent household is expected to spend on holiday shopping. Energy deregulation, which is increasingly touted by the right as the best way to curb inflation besides politically unpalatable interest rate hikes, is also unlikely to help. While Republicans anxious about the midterms might take comfort in the fairly low cost of gasoline, the surge in the cost of natural gas for heating and cooking, as well as the overall jump in electricity prices due to the energy demands of AI data centers, is bound to neutralize that minor benefit to working families and small businesses.

Other tinkering largely leaves price cuts up to market players that have grown accustomed to padding their profits. Tariff relief on select foodstuffs, a rare admission by Trump that the breadth of his trade regime is deeply unpopular, depends on the motivation of importers and distributors to pass on savings precisely when working-class households are about to scale back on premium goods and devote more of their budget to packaged staples, produce, and other basic commodities.

Bigger quick-fix remedies that were first introduced during the pandemic certainly beckon. Last month Trump seemed to commit more concretely to a $2000 tariff rebate in 2026, an idea he has repeatedly floated to quell consumer angst. But even if he managed to cajole Congress to follow through on this proposal, the refund would in most cases be swallowed up by less than one month’s health insurance premium.

This highlights an inconvenient fact about fiscal policy’s diminishing impact on growth and consumer confidence. The problem that Washington in general is afraid to concede is that one-off fiscal transfers, even “sizable” ones, have become a drop in the bucket of necessary annual household expenditures. That is unfortunate enough, but what is more pertinent here is that by design such transfers don’t fundamentally alter the price-making power embedded in our data-mined economy. Indeed, whether framed as “stimulus” or “relief” checks, the effect is the same if there is no mechanism to contain non-wage-push inflation, which is the kind of price growth we have been seeing since Covid initially and temporarily contracted the labor supply. Making the matter seemingly more intractable, large tariff rebates, in addition to regressive tax rates and multi-billion agriculture bailouts, run the risk of worsening inflation by ultimately increasing the interest payments on U.S. national debt.

Of course, the Trump administration is putting a lot of stock in a much-anticipated, AI-assisted breakthrough in productivity to buoy the public mood and retire stories about the affordability crisis. Perhaps, too, a downturn driven by spiraling health care costs or another blow to purchasing power won’t come to pass. Yet even if middle-class professionals are, against predictions, spared a wave of AI-induced layoffs and growth picks up beyond the AI sector, perceptions of the economy may not improve to Trump’s liking.

It’s easy to understand why. As illustrated by the well-documented disparity between productivity gains and wage growth that gathered pace in the 1980s—a source of mounting discontent whose impact could only be deferred until the Great Recession through lower cost imports, a stronger dollar, and the threat of further outsourcing—growth in and of itself doesn’t inherently eliminate the factors that fuel economic anxiety and downward mobility. Fundamentally, if wage growth isn’t generating significantly more disposable income for either savings or greater material comforts, and fixed monthly expenses and groceries are steadily increasing without any perceptible non-monetary improvement in consumer welfare, then GDP growth will fail to sustain Americans’ ebbing faith in democratic capitalism.

It would be a mistake, then, to assume growth or a tightening labor market will simply alleviate today’s economic pessimism. As Biden’s advisers discovered, it is entrenched, the consequence of cumulative pressures that neither targeted anti-poverty programs nor tax cuts can permanently remove. Ultimately, such discontent will become a fetter on development in its own right, as fewer Americans will believe they can afford to start a family, buy a home, or take professional risks that build wealth or contribute to innovation. Policymakers who understand the implications for our already warped social contract must not hesitate to take their case to the public.

Subscribe now

Share

Hardly a week goes by without hearing about Americans’ lack of trust in Washington. While some assert that the public’s distrust of government is a recent development coinciding with Donald Trump’s first term, the trust deficit is decades old. Fixing this problem will be nearly impossible given the structure of government, the direction of our politics, and the limitations of traditional public opinion surveys.

There have been only three periods since the 1970s when the familiar question about trusting the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” ticked up, and in each case, it didn’t last long. In the mid-1980s after a deep recession, it was “Morning in America,” and Americans felt better about themselves and their government. The Iran-Contra scandal put the brakes on that. Trust in Washington again rose briefly toward the end of the Clinton presidency when the economy was humming. And after 9/11, responses to the familiar question inched up further.

But these interludes did not reverse a decades-long low-trust environment for several reasons.

First, the larger historical context about why the public distrusts the government so much was nicely outlined by my AEI colleague Charles Murray more than a quarter century ago in a December 1997 Wall Street Journal op-ed. Murray wrote that prior to the Great Society there was an “unstated compact” between Americans and their government. Washington didn’t do much, and in return, people didn’t criticize Washington much. Once the government’s activities started expanding in the 1960s with Great Society programs, Americans found more to criticize. In a 1959 Gallup question that asked about the biggest threat to the country’s future, 14 percent said big government, 41 percent big labor, and 15 percent big business. When Gallup repeated the question in 1965, big government took the lead, as it has in every poll since.

Today, Washington’s reach, fueled by the public’s own desires for the federal government to play a major role in many areas, is vast. The title of a 2022 Pew Research Center report said it all, “Americans’ Views of Government: Decades of Distrust, Enduring Support for Its Role.” There is no avoiding it—bigness is a problem. There is a lot more of the government around to criticize.

Murray also pointed out that the rise of big government changed the relationship ordinary Americans had with Washington. The federal government’s involvement in many moral issues has, predictably, alienated some people, perhaps permanently. Think about the abortion, gay marriage, or transgender debates. Additionally, given Washington’s reach, individuals or businesses can easily run afoul of government regulations and mandates in daily life, eroding trust. Subsequently, since 1987, when the question was first asked by Pew, majorities have said the federal government controls too much of our lives.

Second, I would add to this argument that expanding the size and scope of the federal government creates more opportunities for malfeasance and scandal when government activity is far-flung and oversight difficult. For more than 50 years polling has shown that large numbers of Americans believe the federal government is wasteful, inefficient, and full of bad actors. For example, the staggering sums lost to pandemic-era fraud deeply reinforced public skepticism of Washington. Government is also maddeningly slow (only 44 EV charging stations were set up during the Biden years under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program and no broadband service was established in rural areas after passage of the infrastructure bill). Federal procurement is a mess. And the media’s relentless negativity (though in many cases legitimate criticism of government performance) and partisan polarization reinforce this growing distrust on a daily basis.

A third reason we won’t reverse the trust deficit any time soon, one that our founders understood, is that the public sees some utility in its distrust. Although 64 percent of Americans in a 2018 Pew poll said low trust makes it harder for government to solve problems, the public knows politicians pay attention to polls showing a trust deficit, and thus their negative attitudes may encourage better performance or at least greater attention to the matter. Americans’ weak pro-state tradition also means Americans are disposed toward skepticism of government.

What Now?

While polls gauging trust in Washington may move up a few points, absent a crisis or an economic renaissance, the levels of public trust prevailing decades ago are unlikely to be restored any time soon. Distrust of government is our default response. Both parties muddle through with fumbling responses to crises—like the 9/11 attacks (2001), Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Great Recession (2008), and Covid (2020)—and wonder why Americans don’t like the federal government.

On the more technical side, pollsters’ repetitive questions about trust in government aren’t yielding any new insights about the dimensions of distrust or how to fix it. But, there are better ways to understand and measure the depth of public concerns that may be emerging.

As alluded to upfront, the most familiar trust question was asked first in 1958, when the University of Michigan asked people how much of the time they thought they could trust the government in Washington to do the right thing. Sixteen percent answered “just about always,” 57 percent “most of the time,” and 23 percent “some of the time.” There is no record of any mention of “none of the time” or “never.” How times have changed. In a recent national poll, one percent trusted the federal government just about always, 16 percent most of the time, and 64 percent some of the time. Eighteen percent chose the “never” response.

We need to look at additional measures, and a few pollsters have pointed the way towards new models. In 2003, Gallup began to ask the public to rate the job being done by seven different departments; in 2024, they asked about 16. In its 2015 study “Beyond Distrust: How Americans View Their Government,” Pew built on questions asked by Roper in the 1980s and targeted them on 17 specific agencies. Similarly, the Kaiser Family Foundation is asking whether several health agencies provide reliable information to Americans.

Regularly updating these questions and comparing the results of their different wordings is important. Many pollsters inquire about individual agencies occasionally, but usually only when the agency faces a scandal or serious difficulties. For example, the 2013 allegation that the IRS was scrutinizing conservative groups’ activities at a higher rate than those of liberal groups produced nearly 80 polling questions in the Roper Center’s poll archive compared to six general questions in 2012.

Pollsters soon charge ahead to the next headline problem, and we have little information about whether an agency has recovered its standing. During Covid, the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Tracker assessed the CDC regularly. The CDC got high marks initially, but as time passed, trust declined. The CDC has embarked on a reset, and time will tell if it can recover its high levels of trust. So, too, the Secret Service, whose Gallup rating dropped 23 points after the July 2024 Trump assassination attempt. It is now in recovery mode. Performance matters, and these polls measure it.

It is only by looking at trends over time in perceptions of performance of specific functions that we can fully understand the levels of trust Americans have in government. The work Gallup and Pew have done should expand. Pollsters should track well-known entities. Opinion on little-known ones only measures vague name identification. The pollsters’ questions need to be asked at least yearly, and, ideally, the questions should include a response, “I haven’t followed it closely enough to say,” which will give us an indication of attention paid to government work. The government itself should not be involved. Philanthropies could support the work.

No polling measure is perfect, but assessing individual agencies regularly in addition to the familiar question about the public’s trust in government to do the right thing will provide a much clearer picture of how Americans view their government. It is time to put more effort into measures that will yield better impressions, and time for politicians to put more effort into delivering competent governance and restoring public trust in government policies.

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute.

Subscribe now

Share

It was a momentous occasion in the history of passenger rail in the United States. On August 28th, Amtrak’s next-generation Acela departed from Washington D.C.’s Union Station on its first commercial trip to Boston’s South Station. As the only high-speed rail service currently in operation in the Americas, the new Acelas can run up to 160 miles per hour (mph), a 10 mph increase from their predecessors. Its state-of-the-art tilting technology facilitates turns at higher speeds, allowing for increased passenger comfort along the Northeast Corridor.

But as any regular passenger of the Acela—or any other Amtrak service for that matter—can tell you, the technical specs of a given train are much less than they’re chalked up to be. By the time the train arrived in Boston around seven hours later, it was almost an hour behind schedule. In practice, the new Acelas are no faster than their predecessors. Indeed, of the 457 miles that run the length of the Northeast Corridor, the Acela can run at top speed for less than 10 percent of the route, or 35 miles.

Why then is public passenger rail in the richest and most powerful country in history so inadequate?

It’s worth noting the broader history of rail in the United States and its role in the creation of Amtrak. In the latter half of the 19th century, the U.S. was the world’s premier sponsor of passenger travel, commerce, and territorial expansion by train. After World War I, the railroads were increasingly torn between the divergent interests of a shrinking share of passengers and commercial freight, particularly following the mass popularization of the automobile.

For its part, freight faced its first outside competition after World War II from trucking companies that benefited from the construction of interstate highways. Trucks began moving myriad goods from scattered, exurban factories to cities and ever-expanding suburbs, with freight struggling to match the flexibility of their automotive peers. Rail, however, continued to dominate heavy freight as passenger service increasingly succumbed to the almighty car.

Prior to the creation of Amtrak, iconic lines such as the Empire Builder—which remains a scarce source of transportation for a handful of towns in Montana and North Dakota—remained in operation via mandate from the Interstate Commerce Commission despite costs far outpacing revenues. During the Progressive Era, the ICC finally reined in abuse by rail companies by preventing them from abandoning unprofitable routes that remained vital to the public interest, particularly in rural communities.

While necessary, by the middle of the 20th century, this mandate saw the industry on the verge of bankruptcy. Outdated regulations stipulating, for instance, excessively large crew sizes for mostly riderless routes only compounded passenger rail’s decline. The Department of Transportation came to the logical conclusion that a public corporation would service passenger rail while rail companies would retain control over their more profitable freight operations. Thus, Amtrak was born in 1970 following the passage of the Rail Passenger Service Act. Initially conceived as a for-profit public enterprise, the logic from policymakers saw potential in profitable routes such as the Northeast Corridor and conceived that immediate investment would lead to the service breaking even in the short term.

Rail companies subsequently ditched unprofitable lines and underwent a process of consolidation enabled by weakened antitrust enforcement, leading to an oligopoly dominated by Norfolk Southern, BNSF Railway, CSX Transportation, and Union Pacific. Amtrak, on the other hand, failed to turn a profit and was plagued by abysmally slow service and chronic delays. Yet despite how maligned Amtrak has been in its more than half-a-century existence, the heart of its woes largely boils down to its not-so-symbiotic relationship with private-sector freight.

Just three years after Amtrak’s creation, the service and freight companies were locked in an intractable dispute over who held priority to existing tracks, leading Congress to pass the Amtrak Improvement Act of 1973. The law itself is clear, with the pursuant section stating:

(e) (1) Except in an emergency, intercity passenger trains operated by or on behalf of the [Amtrak] Corporation shall be accorded preference over freight trains in the use of any given line of track, junction, or crossing, unless the Secretary has issued an order to the contrary in accordance with paragraph (2) of this subsection.

(2) Any railroad whose rights with regard to freight train operation are affected by paragraph (1) of this subsection may file an application with the Secretary requesting appropriate relief. If, after hearing under section 553 of title 5 of the United States Code, the Secretary finds that adherence to such paragraph (1) will materially lessen the quality of freight service provided to shippers, the Secretary shall issue an order fixing rights of trains, on such terms and conditions as are just and reasonable.

Naturally, freight companies have spent billions lobbying Congress and the Department of Transportation under the subsection’s second paragraph to ensure that freight virtually always receives preference over warm-blooded passengers. Amtrak, in turn, has spent the past five decades protesting authorities’ blatant disregard for the law. Between 1979 and 2024, the Department of Justice lodged only a single lawsuit against freight companies over track preference. On its official website, Amtrak provides a .pdf noting the number of hours passengers are delayed each year as a result of authorities’ deference to freight.

Indeed, deregulation in freight rail has itself worsened Amtrak’s condition over time. Freight companies became obsessed with misguided metrics that have compounded delays and consequently travel times for both parties. Gross tonnage per train, for example, presumes that adding more cars reduces per-unit operating costs, leading companies to build increasingly lengthy trains over time. The problem, however, is that while each individual train is superficially more profitable, the totality of existing rail infrastructure is rendered increasingly dysfunctional.

In order to load such serpentine trains, rail firms focus on transporting bulk commodities and consolidating operations, leading to fewer routes. The historic scam of so-called “clean coal” and outsourcing in manufacturing offer illustrative case studies. As concerns over pollution shifted demand from Appalachian mines to “cleaner” western sources, rail became the most viable method for transporting western coal to eastern power plants.

Similarly, as manufacturing migrated overseas, consumer goods arrived from Asia via shipping containers from western ports. The node-to-node model between exurban manufacturing communities vanished in favor of a hub-to-node model from major ports. This concentration of high-volume traffic created a nightmare for rail infrastructure writ large. Interminable, slow-moving trains are now so long, they’ve rendered most rail sidings—meaning the shorter tracks used to allow faster trains to pass slower ones—defunct.

The irony is that deregulation has produced comparable dysfunction to the outdated regulations that produced the current system in the first place. To give an idea, an analysis from Open Secrets found that freight companies spent $654 million dollars over the past 20 years lobbying Congress against safety regulations, antitrust, and track preference enforcement. Indeed, deregulation has contributed to faulty safety standards and understaffed freight trains of the kind that have led to hundreds of freight derailments, including in East Palestine in 2023, which spilled toxic chemicals, including vinyl chloride.

For all its limitations and sabotage endured by freight companies, regulators, and capricious legislators, Amtrak has defied each of these challenges and delivered quantifiable, incremental results. Lackluster as the launch of the next-gen Acela may have been, the company’s preceding 2024 report found something remarkable: annual ridership hit record levels at almost 33 million riders with a projected 35 million riders in 2025. Further, after nearly breaking even in 2019, Amtrak is once again nearing profitability for the first time in history with a $700 million net loss in 2024; for perspective, Florida’s private and single-route Brightline saw a comparable loss of $550 million last year.

Unsurprisingly, of the service’s three route categories, the Northeast Corridor and state-supported routes comprised virtually all growth, while long-distance routes remained mostly stagnant. Indeed, state-supported regional routes now represent around 40 percent of ridership thanks to strategic, long-term investments. These are routes that are operated by Amtrak but proposed by individual states, leading to increasingly creative partnerships in recent years, mainly by expanding service on existing routes.

Virginia has relied on Amtrak for passenger operations since 2009, beginning with a Washington-Lynchburg extension, followed by D.C.-Richmond service in 2010. When ridership immediately exceeded expectations, the state doubled down. In 2012, Virginia extended Richmond service to Norfolk. A year later, plans emerged to extend the Lynchburg line to Roanoke. Then Virginia committed to constructing a Potomac bridge that broke ground in 2025—a project that may eventually double total passengers.

In the Midwest, Amtrak launched the Borealis line in 2024 in collaboration with the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Connecting Chicago to St. Paul via Milwaukee, the service averages barely 55 mph over its slow, seven-and-a-half-hour journey. Yet ridership nearly doubled projections, with passenger counts remaining steady on the long-distance Empire Builder that shares the route. To many’s surprise, the mere act of adding new lines to existing routes has boosted ridership.

Naturally, Amtrak has limited control over state-led expansions given that it can only operate and support such routes. Another story is the uniquely profitable Northeast Corridor, where Congress has granted the corporation considerable leeway. Yet here too, Amtrak’s strategic tinkering has stimulated growth. In 2024, the service added a million seats to the Northeast Regional and also added four weekday services between New York and D.C., a morning Philadelphia-New York run, and a weekend Philadelphia-Boston trip. And while delays are still rampant, the increased capacity once again boosted ridership to a record 14 million.

Amid the sudden collapse of passenger travel during the pandemic, in 2021, Amtrak conjured a five-year plan worthy of a CCP congress. The corporation committed to detailed investments in new rolling stock, network expansion, and updating aging infrastructure—all of which benefitted from the fortuitous passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. Not five years later, America’s national disgrace has fulfilled each of the goals set out within its own plan.

The new Acelas, while severely limited by existing infrastructure, are nonetheless a technical marvel. In 2022, routes like the Empire Builder were upgraded with the faster and cleaner ALC-42 locomotives, while Virginia’s aforementioned Potomac Long Bridge is already under construction. Most significantly, however, the long-planned Frederick Douglass Tunnel began construction, providing a much-needed alternative to the B&P Tunnel connecting Baltimore Penn Station and BWI, a major bottleneck on the route.

Shockingly, each of these projects has thus far been (mostly) uninterrupted during Trump’s second term; in April, the White House terminated a grant for a high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas. Indeed, the administration has shamelessly taken credit for projects it played little to no role in—such as the next-gen Acelas—under the slogan “Make America Build Again.” Still, the fact that the administration has, for the moment, chosen not to gut crucial investments such as the Frederick Douglass tunnel is a welcome sign of partisan neutrality towards Amtrak.

Amtrak’s simultaneously chronic failings and quiet successes offer stark lessons for the past and future of passenger rail in America. Regulation, for instance, is both necessary to the public interest and can also unduly crater specific industries, particularly when existing safeguards are no longer apt for the time. In the same way that outdated regulations contributed to rail companies’ near collapse in the 1960s, so too has subsequent deregulation contributed to freight companies’ degradation of existing rail infrastructure, Amtrak’s delays, and abuse towards freight workers.

To that end, the latter items have finally garnered relative action in recent years. In 2024, the Biden administration sued Norfolk Southern over undue track preference, noting that just 24 percent of passenger trains along the Norfolk-owned Crescent Route between New Orleans and New York City arrived on time. A year later, Norfolk agreed to give Amtrak the “highest priority” over freight in a settlement with the Justice Department. In the wake of the East Palestine derailment, former Ohio senators Sherrod Brown and JD Vance introduced the Bipartisan Railway Safety Act, strengthening regulations over the transport of toxic chemicals and mandating two-person crews. Sadly, the legislation has yet to pass; the Biden administration also crushed striking rail workers in 2022.

Anti-trust efforts from both the Biden and Trump administrations have seemingly also floundered against freight companies. While it’s certainly true that antitrust can be counterproductive in industries reliant on economies of scale, such as semiconductor manufacturing, the same is not true of business models reliant on the use of existing infrastructure, whether real-world or digital, such as freight transport or online ticket sales. Subjecting freight companies to competition would help dynamize the sector by deprioritizing counterproductive metrics such as gross tonnage per train.

Of course, the most logical recourse, simply improving Amtrak, would entail the construction of nationwide dedicated tracks such that passenger trains no longer share lines with freight. Naturally, this has been the approach of rare but successful state lines such as Maryland’s MARC trains between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. A fleet of Acelas could easily glide between Boston and Washington, D.C., in under three hours, while slower trains would make the journey in five. Such a move, however, would entail an unspeakable crime in American politics: spending hundreds of billions on passenger rail run by Amtrak.

Time and again, the unwavering constant of passenger rail in America is policymakers’ aversion towards appropriating taxpayer dollars. To give an idea, former Amtrak board member John Robert Smith has noted that in some years, the federal government has spent more money collecting roadkill than funding its own public rail service. The sad and only reason why private ventures in passenger rail such as the Brightline exist is on account of the bold-faced lie that their construction and operation will come at no risk to taxpayers. Considering that the 230-mile Brightline is currently as unprofitable as its nationwide and public counterpart, Amtrak stands as a herculean testament to the grit and strategic thinking of its long-term management.

Until such time as policymakers muster the will to spend a fraction of the taxpayer dollars on passenger rail as on dropping bombs in mindless foreign conflicts, Amtrak will remain both a national disgrace and a quiet success amid half a century of sabotage.

Juan David Rojas is South Florida-based writer specializing in U.S. and Latin American politics. He is a frequent contributor to Compact, UnHerd, and American Affairs.

Subscribe now

Share

It’s easy to campaign on angry sentiments about the economy and affordability. It’s another matter entirely to produce policy that brings down prices—and is perceived to help voters cope with high costs in a timely fashion and reduce overall anxiety.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans seem capable of doing this in a sustained manner.

Since the global rise of inflation following the Covid pandemic, American politics has been stuck in an endless cycle of partisan blame and talk about “doing something” to address rising prices on everything from groceries and energy to housing and education. Trump returned to office in 2024 on the backs of voters justifiably mad at Biden and Harris for not doing enough on inflation after spending wildly as costs soared and touting the miracle cures of “Bidenomics.” Voters didn’t buy it, and Democrats were dumped.

Now, more than a year later, voters are still mad about inflation and the overall state of the economy, giving Trump and Republicans poor marks for promising to do something about prices but not delivering with either the “one, big, beautiful” tax cut bill passed on party lines or with the inexplicable tariffs that the administration is now reversing.

Trump’s job approval on inflation is 28 points underwater according to RCP’s running average—almost exactly the same (poor) position as Biden at the end of his term.

In the recent off-year elections, both populist Democrats like Zohran Mamdani in NYC and centrist ones like Mikie Sherrill in NJ and Abigail Spanberger in VA campaigned successfully on “affordability,” promising voters that they will tackle high housing and energy costs and expensive childcare. Democrats also shut down the government over expiring subsidies for exorbitant healthcare costs, which might eventually be reinstated in some form, and more likely than not will campaign on the issues of inflation and affordability next year to help retake the House and maybe even the Senate.

If things don’t improve in the minds of voters after the midterms, it is conceivable that Democrats could ride a wave of voter anger about the economy to yet another reversal of White House control in 2028.

Given modern communications, constant scrutiny of politicians, and online venting about all public matters, we’ve reached a point in American politics where the government cannot keep up with voter expectations, particularly on the economy. It’s far easier for political parties to stoke populist anger and anti-establishment sentiments about inflation and the economy than it is to produce economic policies that quell this anger—and measurably improve people’s lives.

Democrats and Republicans both overpromise on affordability and reducing costs to win elections. They then fail to bring down costs to a level that pleases voters and addresses lingering economic uncertainty. Then the opposition harnesses economic anger to produce a change election. Rinse and repeat.

Is there a way out of this doom loop? Eventually, hopefully, I don’t know. As the country has experienced, it takes time to bring down inflation system-wide, and it’s not even clear that the government itself can do all that much these days other than not making it worse with too much partisan spending or self-inflicted wounds like tariffs. As Greg Ip astutely summarized in the Wall Street Journal:

There is nothing any elected official can do to “solve” the affordability crisis reliably. As Biden learned, people don’t want lower inflation (i.e., prices to rise more slowly); they want prices to fall. Trump promised they would. Overall prices haven’t fallen and almost certainly won’t. For prices merely to stop rising for a year (i.e., an inflation rate of zero), would probably require a deep recession. Overall prices haven’t fallen materially since the Great Depression.

Individual actions such as reduced regulation on energy production and infrastructure and capping certain drug prices will help at the margin, but tariffs do the opposite (as Trump seems to have acknowledged by rolling some back).

Housing is especially hard to solve. It has become much more expensive since the pandemic. From 2008 through 2021, mortgage rates were abnormally low, a product of very low inflation and aggressive Federal Reserve policies, which boosted home prices. Mortgage rates have since returned to pre-2008 norms, but housing prices haven’t yet adjusted downward, so monthly payments remain high, especially for first-time buyers.

That is slowly changing. New-home prices have slipped for the past few years, existing-home prices have stopped rising, and mortgage rates are down half a percentage point in the past year.

Housing affordability is now slightly below its pre-2008 average, according to the National Association of Realtors, so room for improvement is limited. Trump wants to stack the Fed with loyalists who will slash interest rates, but that wouldn’t return mortgage costs to prepandemic lows absent a much-worse economy. And a politicized Fed would ultimately lead to higher inflation and rates.

As things sort themselves out, expect a lot more anger from voters, more rage from populist and mainstream candidates running on affordability but not being able to do much about it, and shifting partisan control of government in response.

Subscribe now

Share

Editor’s note: The Liberal Patriot newsletter will not be published tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving!

The ubiquity of hunger has become an unremarkable fact of 21st-century America. Like homelessness and the ceaselessly mutating drug crisis, it is duly registered in the media to little effect. Stories of hardship that magnify worrisome trends routinely circulate and undoubtedly evoke distress that is less and less alien to middle-class American families or their relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Such proximity to hunger is not an exaggeration. According to the USDA and Feeding America, the country’s largest food bank network, one in seven Americans are food insecure, meaning they are regularly skipping meals and have diets deficient in healthy options due to cost. When narrowed to children and adolescents, the severity of the problem is even more damning: approximately 13.8 million youths, or one in five, experience some degree of food insecurity.

For needy families, the challenge of providing nourishing food has become a source of existential dread. Lashed by the recent government shutdown and the temporary delay in SNAP transfers, many recipients of federal food assistance were reportedly frightened by how close they felt their lives were to unraveling. Still, a bizarre resignation defines the national mood in this era of protracted inflation and lowered hopes. Though the alarm is occasionally sounded by workhorse liberals in Congress, and progressives broadcast their food drive volunteer efforts on social media, food insecurity has become yet one more problem for the administrative state, voluntarist networks, and the private sector to merely manage, not eradicate for good.

This shameful trajectory is not one most members of either political party would have deemed probable in the “golden age” of capitalism. Back then, innovation, state capacity, and rising incomes assured there would be no return to the condition of acute hunger, which many middle-aged and older Americans had experienced or witnessed in their lifetime. Hunger amid affluence, in turn, was understood as an impermanent social ill that primarily stemmed from untreated poverty, underdevelopment, and the cruelties of Jim Crow. All that was needed to remedy it was a little more political courage, sparked by a reawakened civil society.

To be sure, the depth of the problem was grossly underestimated in postwar America. In the mid-late 1960s, liberal Democrats such as President Lyndon Johnson, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings commanded public attention over the issue of modern hunger, highlighting Depression-like conditions, child malnutrition, and disease from upper Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta. Such destitution startled a middle-class electorate accustomed to believing that the engines of postwar production and the cheap cost of food had ensured that even the poor could afford to eat. But this was still an era of resolve and optimism, invigorated by JFK’s calls to public service and Johnson’s Great Society vision. The solution, then, was to combine new federal programs with the efforts of fledgling community action agencies and other nonprofits, an approach backed by the assumption that the continuance of postwar development would help prevent the circumstances that gave rise to hunger in the first place.

Conditions, as it turned out, would not prove so auspicious. After a period of gradual expansion, full implementation of the means-tested Food Stamp Program (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on a national level amid the harsh 1974-1975 recession quickly found unmet need exceeded original projections. According to the USDA, the first participation milestone was reached in 1976, when 18.5 million qualifying people, or roughly 8.5 percent of the population (according to my calculations), received food stamps. This was a genuine lifeline in a time of high unemployment and rampant plant closures, but it also bespoke a crutch future liberals would struggle to shake.

The shortcoming of midcentury liberals is they did not foresee how their plans to end hunger could be hindered by larger economic trends, including financialization, trade shocks, and the transition to a “postindustrial” economy. And their successors became susceptible to the very complacency they had taken great pains to discourage. Throughout the ensuing ideological skirmishes over how generous federal food assistance should be, well-intentioned liberals (as well as many begrudging conservatives) came to quietly accept that food stamps were part of the permanent architecture of adjusting to “jobless” economic recoveries.

Whatever its original design and ends, food stamps came to exemplify the “compensating the losers” strategy of political economy. Although enrollment contracted in the late 1990s, food stamp usage once again steadily climbed during the mid-Aughts. This growth belied the Beltway obsession with welfare reform and balanced budgets, but it served an unspoken purpose: it was a social program that helped smoothen the processes of globalization and subdue grassroots opposition. Similar to the expanded earned income tax credit and the first glut of Chinese imports, food stamps, while quite modest, stabilized the purchasing power of working-class and low-income households contending with stagnant wages and the loss of full-time jobs with benefits.

Washington was nevertheless unprepared for the lasting increase catalyzed by the Great Recession. SNAP enrollment jumped from 28.2 million in 2008 to 47.8 million by 2013, and though it subsequently fell by around 12 million in the years before Covid, this decade augurs no comparable decline. Today approximately 41.7 million people, or about one in eight Americans, are enrolled in the program, despite four consecutive years of unemployment below five percent. Enrollment could fall by over a million in the next few years due to enhanced work requirements and eligibility restrictions imposed by the GOP Congress and the Trump administration in their signature budget legislation of last summer. But these ostensible efforts to root out “fraud” and “waste” following the Biden administration’s 2021 increase in SNAP benefits fail to obfuscate that millions of Americans are no longer able to live off their labor. Obsessed with curbing “dependency,” parsimonious conservatives ignore the fundamental ignominy that hunger is pervasive, rising, and now afflicting Americans who work full-time.

The question of dependence, however, cannot be entirely dismissed by conscientious reformers intent on treating the root causes of poverty. Democrats roused to defend SNAP emphasize that it is among the nation’s most effective anti-poverty programs. Yet the net increase in participation over the last two decades is best understood as a story of amelioration in a larger context of policy failure. The efforts of a vast public-private network to combat hunger notwithstanding, food insecurity has failed to abate by every core metric. To make lasting reductions—indeed, to make hunger truly rare—Democrats must dare to probe why so many Americans now count on aid.

Unfortunately, addressing hunger in America has evolved into an overly reactive, not preventative, approach. One reason is straightforward politics: opening up SNAP to critique from the liberal-left could embolden anti-government fanatics on the right. A graver explanation is that without SNAP the basic social order would buckle. Setting aside concerns about its mixed impact on public health—supporters aren’t even in agreement over whether it should be thought of as a nutrition program—SNAP undeniably prevents hard-up Americans from losing control of their lives. It keeps low-income families less distracted by painful and desperate choices, ensuring that fed children have energy to learn at school and that struggling parents can make it through the workweek or afford clothes and transportation for job interviews. And to the extent SNAP recipients can make healthy choices and maximize their benefits—factors that depend greatly on access to greengrocers as well as nutrition guidance from pediatricians and other healthcare professionals—they are better equipped to instill good habits in otherwise disadvantaged kids.

SNAP growth, however, has also correlated with market trends that have been a distinct drag on social and economic development. Environmental factors beyond household stability determine whether growing children have enough proper food to thrive, and many caring parents who qualify for SNAP simply lack solid community resources to limit their stress over food. In the poorest urban neighborhoods, rural counties, and hollowed-out factory towns—areas likely to be designated as food deserts—the rate of food insecurity among children ranges between 25 and 50 percent. These are places where quality produce and other nutritious food are harder to get and more expensive, in large part due to disinvestment, consolidated supply chains, and a loss of competitive local markets. Participation in SNAP doesn’t remove these barriers. Although it may help keep fridges and pantries from running empty, the program doesn’t guarantee struggling parents have access to provisions that lead to markedly better health outcomes for themselves and their children.

SNAP, of course, was never meant to counter the regional decline in diversified markets and deconcentrated market power. Yet the persistence of food insecurity in places where SNAP enrollment is high illustrates the program’s limits. Defenders of the program, naturally keen to counter the distortion that SNAP is “government charity” without any attendant economic benefits, emphasize that it isn’t just a pivotal anti-poverty tool but a countercyclical “fiscal multiplier” that boosts demand during downturns. In an economy that hadn’t been transformed by the twin ills of offshoring and unfettered mergers—trends that concentrate pricing power and inhibit market entry, with downstream effects for local food production and distribution—that argument could be taken at face value. But SNAP purchases aren’t distributed evenly among tens of thousands of independent and family grocers; as with people’s meager incomes, a disproportionate share of SNAP spending gets vacuumed up by a shrinking pool of dominant food companies with a record of various anticompetitive practices.

In recent years, reformers alert to this weakness pushed to integrate more farmers markets and cooperatives into SNAP, school lunch, and food pantry programs, an effort the Trump administration’s USDA cuts have since compromised. But the larger point stands: in countless locales that have become utterly reliant on dollar store chains and oligopolistic monoliths such as Walmart, SNAP inadvertently furnishes a captive customer base, thereby perpetuating a cycle of underdevelopment. This is an overlooked aspect of the dependency debate, voiced by critics of “corporate welfare” who observe the safety net effectively subsidizes regional and national monopolies. Such companies typically lack full-time positions and pay low wages, but because of their size and market leverage, they are able to periodically offer enticing deals on so-called convenience foods, many of which are ultra-processed and lacking in real sustenance. That practice, in turn, virtually assures that the multinationals behind “Big Sugar” and artificial ingredients, whose addictive properties are frequently blamed for the epidemic of childhood obesity, diabetes, and similar maladies, enjoy steady sales (and may even see their market share increase during recession).

The challenges that have stunted left-behind America underscore that SNAP is primarily a bulwark against dysfunction, its developmental benefits contingent on the impossible demand that recipients make flawless choices amid suboptimal conditions. Only in tandem with stronger competition policies and place-based industrial policies can its potential to do more than manage poverty be realized.

Ultimately, though, the efficacy of federal food assistance and voluntary efforts to alleviate hunger must be judged within the context of the broader cost-of-living crisis. Here, too, public policy has proved wanting. Grocery prices are up by 30 percent since 2020, far outpacing the modest wage gains some low-income workers saw at the start of the pandemic. While Democrats beat the drum of “affordability,” squeezed Americans are urged to mistrust their own eyes by the mainstream economics profession. Food prices still aren’t reflected in core inflation measures, even though Americans’ ability to eat well determines virtually every other metric of economic well-being and productivity.

The “new normal” of unbounded food prices, soon to be exacerbated by the spread of “dynamic pricing,” is a radical and destabilizing deviation from the historical trend. In the early 20th century, popular belief in an “American standard of living” rested on the ability of working Americans to spend less on food and have more of their paychecks left over for small comforts, new consumer durables, and family recreation. Far-sighted market governance and market-crafting, as well as strong unions, eventually made this promise a reality. By 1970, food-at-home as a share of household expenditures had fallen to 10 percent and reached under six percent in the mid-Aughts. In hindsight, that was no small triumph. In an era otherwise shadowed by rising inequality and diverging regional outcomes, it was proof living standards could still rise from one generation to the next.

The spiraling cost of groceries in post-Covid America crystallizes why so many feel the economic system is broken. Wages no longer cover the basics, even in municipalities that have phased in minimum wage increases more than double the woefully outdated federal minimum wage. The damage is at once economic and psychological: dreams of upward mobility are considered naïve, if not wholly disconnected from reality.

Inevitably, Scrooge-like voices will respond that in a culture that has elevated food into a status symbol, ordinary Americans hold an unrealistic view of what they should be able to eat on a regular basis. But the gap between what working people need and what they can afford isn’t because the majority are making frivolous decisions. It is because economic trends have steadily eroded the last pillar of middle-class expansion: access to inexpensive but decent food. This access—an implicit part of America’s social contract since the Second Industrial Revolution and Progressive Era public health reforms—no longer describes what the typical working family faces.

As paycheck-to-paycheck America warily eyes the cost of staples this Thanksgiving, the ramifications for long-term economic development couldn’t be clearer. When families are taking on debt to meet the government’s own middling food plans, they don’t have disposable income leftover for local businesses, parent-teacher associations, and community fundraisers, let alone college savings or home improvements. Businesses subsequently cut back on inventory, reinvestment, and payroll, with all the cascading effects that implies. Simply put, the indignity and burdens of food insecurity sap the economy’s lifeblood.

Policymakers hoping to do better than the Trump administration’s broken promises must reject the apathy that has allowed food insecurity and food inflation to become entrenched. Its origins long preceded Covid, the bitter fruit of a changing political narrative that concluded preventing hunger in the world’s most prosperous nation is somehow utopian. What this moment thus calls for, which the War on Poverty’s crusading architects could not anticipate, is the resolve to confront the rent-seeking that has subverted the fight against privation and made it one without end. Perhaps then our politics will transform the underlying conditions that have made food insecurity omnipresent in American life.

Subscribe now

Share

Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor-elect, waged one of the most impressive outsider campaigns in modern politics on a relentless message about the affordability crisis sapping America’s largest and most thoroughly global “superstar” city. No less remarkable than his victory over former governor Andrew Cuomo is the transition he pulled off on the campaign trail. Having won the highest vote total since 1969, Mamdani proved he could mostly shed his image as a creature of the ultra-woke wing of the Democratic Socialists of America and style himself as a thoughtful reformer capable of building a broad coalition beyond the ranks of the city’s Brahmin left.

The exhilaration of his supporters, however, is about to give way to fresh anxiety about Mamdani’s ability to meet the expectations of cost-burdened New Yorkers and defy his critics’ (often histrionic) predictions of failure. And what some strategists hail as his “Mamdate” should neither be exaggerated nor squandered on symbolic fights that don’t yield better conditions for regular New Yorkers. Although Mamdani has proven to be a charismatic and unusually gifted communicator, there is an inescapable asymmetry between the grassroots excitement his campaign generated and the actual political capital he will possess when his mayoralty begins on January 1st.

Mamdani’s biggest challenge ahead of his swearing-in is to arouse a spirit of collaboration that ushers in a new era of development. One of the ways he can do so is by demonstrating he is thinking holistically about how to govern well amid a worsening macroeconomic outlook. Nationally, layoffs are at their highest level since 2020, and the city, a bellwether of the country’s economic health, is no exception to the monthslong hiring freeze. The impact could prove severest for the young adults Mamdani mobilized. According to the state comptroller, youth unemployment in 2024 inched above 13 percent and was nearly a quarter for young black residents. The trajectory is likely to worsen: since the pandemic, a third or more of public school students have been chronically absent.

The ranks of underemployed and unemployable New Yorkers could soon extend beyond this emerging lost generation. Despite a record number of small business openings under the departing mayor, Eric Adams, the retail sector’s stubbornly high vacancy rate and flatlining job growth are telltale signs of softening demand. Still more fundamental sectoral problems threaten to surface. As fears mount over a potential AI-induced “bloodbath” in the city’s critical tech, finance, and media sectors, there is an overriding sense that the city’s overly hyped post-pandemic recovery has reached a critical impasse.

Unmet, these are all challenges whose attendant consequences—small business closures, shrinking municipal revenue, and rising crime and addiction—could consume any mayor. But they would be especially devastating for an anti-establishment idealist such as Mamdani, whose legacy will depend on translating “affordability” into a fulfilling standard of living for the 60 percent of New Yorkers who currently lack economic security. This is precisely the moment, then, to convey how his incoming administration intends to boost business confidence, help reinvent struggling sectors and empty commercial space, and keep unemployment low.

That, in turn, requires policy development that goes beyond the catchphrase proposals that catapulted Mamdani to fame. His platform was famously dominated by simple, memorable pledges to deliver subsidized services and freeze the rent for roughly two million rent-stabilized residents. It was smart politics in a city highly exposed to Trump’s tariff gamble and beleaguered by an acute sense of declining real purchasing power. Mamdani’s invocations of Nordic social democracy and Fiorello La Guardia, by most counts the city’s most progressive mayor in history, also helped rebut spurious claims that his social welfare ideas are highly unorthodox and untested. Although they will almost assuredly require higher taxes on the very wealthy, proposals like fare-free buses, Scandinavian-style baby boxes, and universal child care for children age five and under are hardly the road to state-command socialism.

Mamdani’s vision, nevertheless, could be more ambitious. This, however, is not because his ideas are insufficiently “socialist” or “redistributive” according to the DSA’s rubric. Rather, it is because they are mostly ancillary measures that don’t get to the root of New York’s developmental obstacles in the 2020s.

To both Mamdani’s foes and his allies, this critique might sound counterintuitive. His Achilles’ heel, it is widely assumed, is that his agenda is already a heavy lift, dependent on the approval of Democratic governor Kathy Hochul, an upstate-reared pragmatist, and a state legislature notoriously reluctant to raise taxes on top earners. No doubt, Mamdani needs to forge a much tighter partnership with Hochul than the measured endorsement he secured in the weeks before the election to implement any of his current priorities. But the real underlying issue is his platform’s relative deficit of pre-distributive ideas, including steps to offset the city’s slide into a pre-recessionary stage. Notwithstanding his plank to build affordable housing, his platform tilted toward the theme of price relief. Transformative projects, long-term reallocations in the labor market away from low-wage work, and measures to recruit and incubate more productive enterprises: the stuff that made a mayor such as La Guardia historic is generally missing from Mamdani’s vaunted mandate.

That tight focus may have suited the campaign’s logic. The contrast between the cheerful populism of Mamdani, the underdog, and an out-of-touch establishment had to be relentlessly amplified at every possible moment. And yet, while New Yorkers know Mamdani adamantly wants “a city we can afford,” they know much less about what he envisions for the New York of 2040 or 2050.

Understandably, the scale of the affordability crisis and its salience to a Democratic revival tend to dwarf such questions. In New York as elsewhere, decreasing the financial burdens of working families is crucial, whether it is done through capped and slashed fees, minimum wage hikes, preventing wage theft, or in-kind provision (such as the universal school meals bill recently passed by Hochul). Following the Biden era, Democrats of all stripes have also doubted the political benefits of stressing industry and infrastructure. Hammering costs is safer terrain, even as the party wrestles over which mechanisms would best lower them.

Nonetheless, if he is to achieve his vision of a fairer, more solidaristic city, Mamdani needs to channel his inner developmentalist and increase New Yorkers’ sense of possibility. And he should do so without hesitation, free of any dogma that might diminish his command of the bully pulpit and the public’s confidence in him.

Above all, Mamdani ought to take very deliberate steps to promote a “countercyclical” economic climate that bucks the stagflationary trends spreading across the country. That means pursuing an agenda that radically expedites housing construction, eases small business formation and expansion, ramps up vocational training (particularly in school districts with weaker high school graduation rates), welcomes socially beneficial innovation, and continues to upgrade the city’s mass transit system. Mamdani’s inner circle should therefore evaluate judiciously every possible policy lever to spur fixed investment, encourage high-wage job creation, and uproot supply chokepoints.

After a triumphant rebuke of the status quo, some of these endeavors may seem downright prosaic. No one in Mamdani’s corner, though, should doubt the primacy of being a mayor who builds and integrates—as well as one who can enlist key business interests to advance his cause. Mamdani will need all the allies he can get. While New York enjoys a dynamism that has sadly eluded many heartland cities, there are sections whose challenges remain essentially unchanged since the 1980s. Before the federal government shutdown, 25 percent of New Yorkers were in poverty, an uptick that ignominiously rivals London’s rate. These are indictments of the status quo that can’t be solved merely through social assistance, much as it might alleviate the ambient cruelty of unhappy choices.

Encouragingly, his new transition team, co-led by Lina Khan, the former FTC chair and leading light of the neo-Brandeisians, seems poised to embrace this shift in emphasis toward development. As she and other anti-monopolists have underscored, more productive and deconcentrated markets, along with policies that weed out corruption and deter price discrimination, are key to fostering the jobs and commercial diversification that lift up long-neglected neighborhoods.

There are hints Mamdani himself is now leaning in this “productivist” direction. On election day, he finally revealed he was voting in favor of ballot propositions to effectively curb the city council’s veto power over housing construction, a signal he understood the urgency of building more at a rapid clip. He could go a step further and underscore his office will make every effort to ensure new housing puts young and growing families first. Working families with three or more children have steadily decamped for other regions in the last decade—a new form of urban flight driven overwhelmingly by housing costs that now range from one-third to one-fifth of a typical New Yorker’s income. Unfortunately, the dearth of three- and even two-bedroom units in new buildings suggests the city’s elites have yet to reckon with the implications of this dynamic. Efforts to reverse it, perhaps more than anything else, will determine the size of the city’s indigenous middle class and its ability to thrive over generations.

The future of housing policy gets to the heart of the city’s character and the looming demographic consequences of intense wealth polarization. Indeed, the composition, allocation, and geographic distribution of new housing stock will show whether the city is oriented to helping young families put down roots and build wealth or is structured to favor itinerant professionals, upscale singles and childless couples, and luxury real estate interests. Still, it is one piece of the “supply-side” puzzle that Mamdani could more forcefully address. Occasionally he has spoken of how his administration would aid entrepreneurs. Prior to the June primary, Mamdani touted a policy memo detailing how he would cut administrative fees and other red tape for new small businesses. Cleverly timed, it offered a preview into his emerging approach to market governance. While his critics still insist he will create a regulatory environment that strangles enterprise, Mamdani instead seems intent on supporting local businesses, streamlining their operations, and diversifying the sources of community wealth.

Much more can be done, however, to aid popular local businesses as well as foster commercial growth and value-added production in food and transit deserts. In some cases, entrepreneurs could be won over by “pro-competition” regulation, such as the proposal for a commercial rent guidelines board that was recently introduced in the New York State Senate. In fact, the cultivation of an anti-vacancy bloc within the city’s larger YIMBY movement could be key to Mamdani’s first-year success. As anyone who has lived in the city long enough to see celebrated neighborhood institutions and promising new businesses suddenly vanish can attest, out-of-control commercial rents are jeopardizing the fruits of the city’s turn-of-the-century renaissance.

At the same time, Mamdani’s team should identify other ways to curtail barriers to market entry, particularly for firms that are likely to boast living-wage positions and cluster other remunerative companies with desirable products and services. And they should do so with an eye toward the net effect on economic empowerment and mobility, rather than tending to whatever might feel ideologically consistent in the abstract. As his team is surely aware, a stultifying preoccupation with procedures and interest group management has damaged the credibility of the liberal-progressive establishment over the last fifteen years. Mamdani, having promised transparent and efficient government, will be afforded little grace if he is seen as similarly dithering on issues that could profoundly affect the city’s resilience.

The leap from running an insurgent campaign to ensuring the next generation of New Yorkers has a brighter future does not mean Mamdani has to suddenly appease every city tycoon and bank CEO. America’s top ten percent has accounted for almost fifty percent of all new U.S. consumer spending in the last two years, and the city’s rate is surely comparable if not more lopsided. This is yet another disturbing indicator that upward mobility and the American dream are patently unfamiliar to a growing share of Americans born after 1980 (as well as the city’s some 3.4 million immigrants). Reports on the city’s “true cost of living,” moreover, suggest that one in two working-age households lacks a living wage. A galloping middle class, as witnessed in the first decades of the postwar era, would be claiming a far greater share of the pie.

Still, to realize the city’s untapped economic potential, Mamdani must extend a hand to all who are drawn to the liberties New York is thought to embody. Through thick and thin, New York has remained a magnet for entrepreneurs, creative types, and ambitious people of all backgrounds, trades, and stations. Even at its lowest points, such as the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the crime wave of the 1980s, its unquenchable spirit of reinvention had assured a verve and optimism unmatched by most other U.S. cities. That breadth of vitality, so essential to urban character and development, is now under threat precisely due to how expensive it is to simply pay for the basics of food, housing, and energy. Mamdani, though he easily outshone his rivals, won with the margin he did because he spoke convincingly about what is on the verge of being lost. He captured the indignities that cumulatively smother what makes earning a living in New York—and making a life as a New Yorker—attractive and rewarding.

This disenchantment is the essence of the Mamdani vote. He was carried to victory not just by a squeezed middle class, but by those who sense they are increasingly unable to chart their lives on their own terms. Whatever his critics make of his policies, they should not mistake that feeling of enervation as a passing phase. It is a warning sign that democratic capitalism, in America’s quintessential global city, is no longer creating the conditions that sustain a free but purposeful society.

The solution, however, is not to be found in the facile dichotomy between government and the market. It is to be forged through policies that promote enablement and rising economic agency, as these are the very things that actually deepen people’s stake in the system, their associational bonds, and their belief in the common good. Of course, for Mamdani’s left flank, this might sound like the hoary language of public-private partnerships, part of the Third Way’s discredited gospel. For them, talk of opportunity is a distraction from the untenable gulf between the ultra-wealthy and the rest. Yet the erosion of countervailing power, steadily reflected in rising monthly costs and the discontent it stirs, is in large measure about economic opportunity. It is about the opportunities that fall out of reach because it has become too risky to do anything but settle for a meager existence.

As he prepares for his mayorship, Mamdani would be wise to recall that every effective and fondly remembered social democrat and American liberal embraced some version of this philosophy of enablement. They did so not because they abandoned their conviction that certain freedoms from the market were the mark of a civilized and humane society; on the contrary, they very much believed there were public goods that had to be divorced from the profit motive. But they grasped that modern society consciously exercised, to a great degree, its sense of liberty through markets. Accordingly, the most far-sighted among them reasoned that protection from exploitation, though a sound and central principle of market governance, must be continuously accompanied by measures that also make bustling communities and more fulfilling lives possible.

Mamdani does not have to sacrifice his principles to win allies and pacify his foes. But to be a mayor who truly builds—who leaves behind a topography of greatly broadened prosperity and economic empowerment—he must nurture the spirit of freedom and ambition that the best American leaders have always kindled and that has always made New York New York.

Subscribe now

Share

Big bills are hard to sell.

GOP lawmakers have wrestled for months on how to best pitch the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), their wide-ranging tax and spending legislation that extends Trump’s 2017 income tax cuts, introduces new populist tax proposals that Trump campaigned on such as no tax on tips or overtime, and cuts spending. But convincing voters about the merits of the OBBBA is proving to be an uphill climb: polling in the aftermath of passage showed that roughly six in ten Americans opposed the bill and opinions have not improved since then.

Even President Trump has admitted that the bill needs a rebrand.

In a late August cabinet meeting, he conceded, “That [name] was good for getting it approved, but it’s not good for explaining to people what it’s all about. It’s a massive tax cut for the middle class.”

Perhaps Trump expected that many of the new, populist tax cuts would be catchy and easy to pitch. Voters will associate them with Trump, who actively campaigned on “no tax on tips,” “no tax on overtime,” “no tax on Social Security,” and “no tax on car loan interest”—all included in some capacity in the legislation. Yet each is limited by eligibility and income requirements, which will dampen their reach.

History tells us a name change may not be enough to campaign on the passage of the bill in the 2026 midterms for two reasons: the GOP’s vulnerability on healthcare and moderate retirements resulting from the passage of the bill.

The current government shutdown over an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies reflects the Democrats’ desire to highlight the GOP’s healthcare exposure heading into the election year. Medicaid cuts in the OBBBA, plus the failure to extend the subsidies, they say, are evidence of a broader Trump administration and Republican desire to cut government spending even if it hurts popular programs that voters rely on.

The healthcare issue will ripen in the approaching midterm elections, which are increasingly nationalized referenda on the sitting president. Even popular presidents typically face losses in congressional seats. But President Trump is not widely popular, and GOP retirements in vulnerable swing districts and states—several related to the OBBBA’s passage—could harm the party’s ability to maintain their narrow congressional majorities.

In the meantime, the Trump administration is hedging its bets. The GOP House majority may well hinge on Trump’s pressure campaign on GOP-led state legislatures to redistrict away as many swing districts as is politically and legally possible.

Was it a tax bill or a healthcare bill?

The greatest political liability of the OBBBA is that it extends far beyond tax cuts. For example, to pay for the tax cuts, the OBBBA shrinks the social safety net, cutting more than $1 trillion in federal government spending on Medicaid, other healthcare programs, and food stamps (SNAP).

The Trump administration is aware of how these cuts might hurt them with voters. To minimize it, Trump and congressional leaders have defended the Medicaid cuts as merely addressing waste, fraud, and abuse. More importantly from an electoral perspective, Medicaid cuts will not take effect until after the 2026 midterms.

Yet, there is recent historical precedent for an unpopular healthcare vote harming the GOP’s re-election chances: the 2018 GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In the midterms that followed Republicans’ failed attempt to repeal the ACA (or “Obamacare”), 41 percent of voters ranked healthcare as their most important issue. Three-quarters of those who said healthcare was the most important issue facing the country voted for Democratic congressional candidates in their districts.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has warned privately that the deep Medicaid cuts contained in the final OBBBA could cause him to lose the House majority. The 2018 midterms, in which swing district Democrats successfully attacked Republicans over their willingness to vote against healthcare coverage for people with preexisting conditions, provide a template for campaign attacks. Democrats are using the current government shutdown as a test run.

Exodus of the moderates

It is possible that by the November 2026 midterms, a tax cut bill that passed in July 2025 could feel like old news. The news flow could be dominated by Trump’s frequent executive-led policy changes, and to focus on taxes and spending cuts in one bill may feel out of touch next year.

If the bill falls flat as a potent direct campaign attack for the Democrats, the most consequential part of the bill then could be the retirements that resulted from its passage.

To pass the tax cuts with tiny congressional majorities before Trump’s July 4 deadline, the White House and congressional leadership used a combination of threats and cajoling of its own side. Threats of primary challenges or retaliation from a uniquely powerful executive branch made it difficult for lawmakers across the political spectrum to oppose the package.

Not all lawmakers got in line.

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), the incumbent who was set to defend North Carolina’s highly competitive Senate seat in the 2026 midterms, retired after a confrontation with Trump over the Medicaid cuts in the bill.

The North Carolina Senate seat was and remains arguably the best pickup opportunity for Democrats, and incumbency historically helps parties keep seats. Tillis likened the Medicaid cuts to President Barack Obama’s once-unpopular Affordable Care Act and refused to vote for the bill. His public disavowal of the cuts was met with backlash from Trump, who wrote on Truth Social that he had spoken with “numerous people” about primarying Tillis. Tillis announced his retirement a day later. The OBBBA almost certainly contributed to his decision, which leaves a Republican-held, swing-state Senate seat more vulnerable than it already was.

In the House, moderate Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), one of three Republicans who represent districts where Kamala Harris won in 2024, also announced his retirement on June 30, just one day after Tillis and two days before final passage of the OBBBA. While Bacon did not explicitly blame the bill, he, too, criticized the deep Medicaid cuts in the Senate version.

Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and moderate Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) were the only House GOP lawmakers to vote against the bill. Fitzpatrick, who voted “no” but is far less openly critical than Massie, has so far escaped a primary challenge. Trump’s refusal thus far to endorse a primary challenger to Fitzpatrick may reflect an increased awareness of the tight Republican majorities’ midterm vulnerabilities.

Massie—a notorious and singular thorn in Trump’s side during his second term—has not been as lucky, though he currently sits in a safe red seat.

Republicans’ saving grace—redistricting?

Given the scant attention that Trump has devoted to selling the OBBBA relative to other policy priorities such as tariffs and immigration, and the heavy focus on gerrymandering safe Republican districts, the Trump administration’s goal is to ensure none of these vulnerabilities matter and that swing voters are an afterthought as they mobilize their own voters to protect the majorities.

The Trump administration successfully urged the Texas state legislature to pass a redistricting plan that could net the GOP five additional seats. Similar efforts that could net Republicans additional seats are underway in North Carolina, Missouri, Kansas, Ohio, Indiana, and Florida. The Cook Political Report estimates that despite Democrats’ attempts to counter with redistricting efforts of their own so far (e.g., California’s Proposition 50 campaign), Republicans are likely to gain in the high single digits of House seats through redistricting initiatives alone.

In an era of midterm elections in which the pool of competitive seats has shrunk to around two or three dozen, and large swings toward one party or another are virtually unheard of, such an advantage could prove decisive without a highly effective Democratic mobilization effort and message.

Politics in the Trump era has upended many past assumptions about the ability of public policy to determine elections. But, if things are to shift toward the opposition next year, the OBBBA’s healthcare vulnerability and the retirement of congressional Republicans because of it will certainly play a critical role in Democrats mobilizing independents and other voters in whatever competitive congressional seats remain.

Ava Kelley is the U.S. Director at Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm.

Subscribe now

Share