How Democrats Can Refine Political Conflict

After months of struggling to turn the page on the 2024 election, the Democratic Party is experiencing a tentative “vibe shift.” Much of this stems from the public souring on the Trump administration’s combination of overreach and underperformance. Still, the near-instant unpopularity of the Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill” and three consecutive months of lousy job growth on Trump’s watch have given populist Democrats an opportunity to set the tone for the midterms. Although many top Democrats and their media allies equivocate over how badly they diverged from the priorities of most working-class voters in recent years, younger officials and insurgent candidates exhibit a toughness and clarity of purpose that had been sorely missing from the party under Biden’s ailing leadership. Economic populism is in, and identity politics is, well, muted—or so we are to think.

An unwavering focus on making life more affordable would certainly be a step in the right direction. Even better would be explicitly identifying which forces and interests stand in the way of shared prosperity, housing construction, and national redevelopment (hint: some of them exercise veto power in deep blue districts). Some healthy, frank acknowledgement of the “unmentionables” that proved wildly out-of-step with reasonable public opinion is also overdue. While conventional wisdom, reinforced by Trump’s constant defiance, suggests it is never smart to publicly admit error in politics, it is even riskier to come off as clueless, priggish, or aloof. At this stage, individual Democrats have to be able to assert their independence from fringy neo-progressive cultural stances if they are to claw back seats lost across the South and Rust Belt and rebuild economic power for disenfranchised Americans.

The path out of the wilderness nevertheless requires something more fundamental to the art of politics. As political scientist Lee Drutman argues in a new essay, Democrats continue to allow Trump to select and define the most salient conflicts on the national stage. And they are mistaken about how to change course. Democrats’ first obstacle, Drutman writes, is that they are obsessed with messaging while failing to realize they have slipped into an entirely reactive position. They struggle to regain the offensive not due to Trump’s seemingly indomitable personality or the stubborn refusal of blue-collar workers to hear their overtures. Democrats are hindered because they repeatedly conflate fighting back with advancing new framings more captivating than Trump’s.

The more energetic messages Democrats have tried—“protect democracy,” “no kings,” and the like—still come across as purely defensive and scripted. These fall short of offering a new frame for political conflict, as they don’t identify an adversary or major national challenge besides Trumpism’s malevolent hold. Crucially, regular voters are not invited to partake in a project to make the country better. A clear destination for dispirited Americans—and the fight necessary to get there—is missing from the picture.

Indeed, most of the time Democrats have merely offered some insipid variation of “America is already great.” (It hasn’t helped, of course, that vocal sectarian activists have simultaneously declared the country has no great achievements to be proud of or can never overcome its past sins.) In turn, the inability to introduce frames that tell a different story and identify a more urgent battle than those picked by Trump intensifies the perception among disaffected voters and former supporters that Democrats have become a small-c conservative party fearful of change. The defensive posture also tells voters outside the progressive base that, to be a Democrat in good standing, certain topics are off-limits and certain opinions are illegitimate. Any kind of partial “agreement” with Trump on the downsides of globalization or other issues that have polarized the country—even if entirely unintended and not the result of exposure to MAGA influencers—is tantamount to being a closet Trumpist. This helps explain why millions of voters tuned out the #Resistance framing rehashed by the Harris campaign. Despite Trump’s manifest flaws, it felt hollow. And it conveyed that any verbalized concern over Biden’s cognition, his record, or the governance of blue cities amounted to aiding the enemy.

Democrats will counter that, nearly nine months into Trump’s second term, the stakes couldn’t be any clearer. That Trump has proven to be the ultimate crony capitalist and acted with ever greater disdain for the country’s separation of powers. Yet finding new ways to describe how horrible Trump is (or relentlessly mock him, as Gavin Newsom now does) won’t materially alter the dynamic Drutman describes. Trump has a preternatural ability to determine the terrain of conflict, and he picked issues—America’s industrial decline and China’s rise, historically high rates of undocumented immigration—that capture what many citizens believe to be true: that the country is adrift and poorly governed, and that major institutions, public and private, are impervious to popular demands for real accountability.

These judgments may make many elected Democrats and progressive activists uneasy, but that doesn’t make them any less relevant to how Democrats move forward. Democrats are petrified of ever conceding a point Trump has raised, as if serious discontent over the issues Trump monopolized wasn’t permeating the electorate long before his volleys against “the swamp.” Ten years on, their response—even after Biden did more than Trump during his first term to rewrite the rules on trade and industrial policy—is to mostly declare Trump is wrong and imply that voters who disagree with the progressive cultural agenda that grew ascendant last decade are unworthy of Democrats’ engagement.

This, in a nutshell, is the Democrats’ recurring blunder. The way they approach conflict perpetuates a vicious cycle in which they forfeit persuadable voters instead of tackling vulnerabilities that might then open up new terrain favorable to reviving inclusive development, worker power, and fair competition. Historically, these priorities were critical to Democrats’ greatest electoral triumphs. The party’s identity and purpose would be superficial without them. Yet over and over the party has been diverted by the culture wars and Trump’s character, even taking imprudent stances without Trump’s goading—all of which has played into MAGA’s hands.

One does not necessarily have to believe Trump is a full-blown authoritarian to understand the consequences for democracy are quite real. The problem, however, goes deeper than lumping together millions of voters with through-and-through bigots. When national Democrats fail to show up for years in counties that Democrats as different as LBJ and Bill Clinton swept, it shows that they, like their Republican counterparts, are afraid of being held accountable. By now, though, it seems implausible that this cycle of bleeding working-class support is solely the result of ineptitude and unconvincing talking points, although these are surely factors. As I have argued before, a strategy to win back blue-collar workers that oscillates between halfhearted outreach and barely veiled condescension willfully limits the regional scope of political competition, thereby belying Democrats’ own commitment to “defend democracy.”

And that, ultimately, is damaging to citizens’ sense of political agency and belief in democratic participation. Quoting political scientist E.E. Schattschneider, Drutman writes, “The people are powerless if the political enterprise is not competitive.” Democrats, whether due to the insularity of their geographically concentrated base, a reluctance to drop cultural purity tests, or an aversion to conflict that challenges privileged interests, are not yet in the business of improving their competitiveness.

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Let’s assume, though, that Democrats now want to dramatically improve their standing in every region of the country. What frame might break through the noise, particularly if Trump’s promised “golden age” leads instead to recession? Drutman essentially recommends synthesizing aspects of anti-monopolism and the abundance paradigm through a “builders vs. extractors” frame or something similar. He has the right idea. An approach that shifts the focus from Trump’s character and highlights the ways in which a whole range of Americans want to build a stronger country and stronger economy but are impeded by privileged interests could help reset the boundaries of political contestation. Importantly, this doesn’t have to shrink from distributional conflict. If anything, the “builders vs. extractors” frame ramps it up compared to the party’s tepid jabs at Trump’s “billionaire buddies” because it also takes on lobbies that have snarled housing and plant construction or effectively raised the cost of capital for worthwhile community businesses (obstacles that correspondingly favor quick financial returns and current asset-holders over productivity and upward mobility).

Democrats, of course, should still assail Trump and his hypocrisy at critical moments. As part of their evolving anti-corruption message, they could link him, as Drutman suggests, to the “extractors” robbing hard-working Americans of a dignified life. The emphasis, however, needs to be on creating the conditions that ensure more opportunity and less desperation. That means taking seriously the importance of eliminating supply choke points for vital goods, infrastructure, and jobs, but also recommitting to the fight against non-competes, wage theft, junk fees, and other predatory practices that are detrimental to the social fabric.

There is nevertheless one major sticking point that Drutman avoids and which Democrats must solve before they can truly remake the terrain of political conflict. By now there is abundant evidence that a lot of Americans feel as though their sociocultural concerns and disagreements with neo-progressivism have been dismissed out of hand. This cannot go on for a party ostensibly determined to regain the trust of ordinary workers. Nor can Democrats simply vow they won’t repeat the missteps and outright failures of the recent past. Within their own ranks, Democrats have to aggressively discourage the theory that all Trump voters harbor the basest, most bigoted sentiments, as well as the notion that voters who sat out the 2016, 2020, or 2024 elections are fools for doing so.

This doesn’t mean Democrats have to discard their commitments to a pluralistic society in which people of all backgrounds can lead a dignified life free of discrimination and harassment. But Democrats have to quit the delusion that neo-progressivism hasn’t driven away countless voters, deepening the very pessimism the party must overcome. For the sake of the country’s future development and the “enterprise” of democracy itself, Democrats must rapidly bridge the divide they helped create.