How to Build Political Optimism in Dark Times

ICE’s terrifying actions in Minneapolis have brought the country to an inflection point like no other since January 6, 2021. Two citizens have been killed by federal agents, the constitutional rights of citizens and immigrants have been repeatedly violated, and journalists were temporarily arrested at the order of Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bloomberg reports that ICE has begun to purchase and convert warehouses into mass detention centers in several states, while a new Financial Times analysis of democratic backsliding shows a faster decline under the second Trump administration when compared to similar precedents in Russia, Venezuela, Hungary, and Turkey from earlier this century.

As ever, the Trump White House has shown zero interest in creating an air of impartiality, choosing instead to smear and demean protesters as “agitators,” “insurrectionists,” and “domestic terrorists.” For those who warned “it can happen here”—that is, a police state akin to the Cold War-era dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Pinochet’s Chile, or something even more chilling—the evidence is now overflowing. They implore their skeptics: What else do you need to declare this cannot go on if you want to preserve American democracy?

This is a moment in which the choices before the country, as well as the institutions tasked with upholding the rule of law, couldn’t be starker. Perversely, though, the anti-Trump coalition had been plagued, before this precipice, by the sense it has lost its ability to persuade. While the tremors in Trump’s coalition grow by the day—polls show Trump is now underwater with voters on immigration, formerly his number one issue—it isn’t guaranteed the new backlash to the administration’s rogue actions will become permanent. After ten long years of warning about MAGA’s potential to inflict lasting damage—the kind that not merely denigrates decorum and norms or rolls back progressive programs but shreds basic civil liberties—it can seem futile trying to make the same arguments more urgent and clarifying for the unconvinced. And so, even the most fearless denunciations carry notes of despair, a fear that it is all for naught.

Lest there be any doubt, would-be authoritarians feed off such resignation. While they pounce at the opportunity to describe their foes as “hysterical” and “extreme,” they delight even more in the possibility that, for fear of overreacting, their opponents plead for reasonableness and restraint, as if no fundamental duties of the government to its citizens have already been breached. It is an ugly Catch-22 for all who are aghast at the steady erosion of individual liberty and our constitutional protections. A decline in outspoken but peaceful dissent would be a terrible omen, particularly if such opposition relented merely on the promise of cosmetic change. At the same time, the Resistance, no matter how vocal, cannot evolve into something more powerful—to become a genuine movement to save the Constitution—if others do not similarly see their rights and the integrity of American values at stake.

To avoid paralysis, the Resistance, in the broadest sense of the term, needs to fulsomely commit to three tasks in the weeks and months ahead. They will strike many as unglamorous and nonconfrontational. Nevertheless, they have strategic value that may yet broaden and reinvigorate the coalition necessary to extinguish MAGA.

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The first is to aggressively encourage decisive, efficient, and impressive governance in all blue cities and states. Above all, that means pursuing the kind of pro-development policies that foster ample, sustainable population growth. While this might sound like an antiseptic recommendation from the most risk-averse policy wonk, it is crucial: without a rapid reversal in population trends, key blue states, as well as Midwestern toss-up states that have historically composed the “blue wall,” are on track to lose congressional seats, and thus Electoral College votes, after the 2030 census, leaving the GOP with a distinct electoral advantage. Any hope of preventing this will at the very least require measures that ramp up housing construction, attract residents who want to start families, reduce the financial burdens of child-rearing, ease business formation, control health care costs, and aggressively diversify economic opportunities beyond key talent hubs.

Accordingly, Democrats must govern in the states they think of as reliably liberal with the same mix of shrewdness and broad-mindedness that will be required of swing-state insurgents intent on attracting independents and disenchanted blue-collar Trump supporters. Put another way, Democrats must model governance for a national coalition that puts a premium on competence powerful enough to make people vote with their feet (or put down lasting roots). That might sound far-fetched, but what began as a trickle last decade accelerated in the aftermath of Covid, when it seemed as though blue municipalities had grown dysfunctional and indifferent to public safety and inflation. The current trajectory isn’t inevitable if steps are taken now to match blue states’ still enviable share of national GDP with substantial improvements to the quality of life they once banked their reputation on.

This point about Democrats needing to meet expectations for decent living standards—resoundingly affirmed by New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, as well as a growing crop of swing state insurgents—can’t be emphasized enough. Democrats—perhaps due to a generational dearth of strong, genuinely pragmatic Republican challengers in blue states—not only grew complacent about the magnetism of their “superstar cities” but also fatally proud. Prior to the Covid shock, national Democrats like Hillary Clinton, blue state governors, and congressional Democrats obsessed with SALT (state and local tax) reform on the East and West Coasts crowed about how much GDP their districts produced and griped, in a rather reactionary manner, about how much blue states subsidize federal welfare programs and infrastructure spending in red ones. They also continue to blast red states for usually having higher violent crime rates per capita. Empirically they were and are right on all counts. But sounding these notes is a political loser, especially as long as core blue states and the seaboard megalopolises that run through them fail to live up to their New Deal-style promises of plentiful middle-class salaries, sufficient family housing, advanced (not just moderately reliable) infrastructure, and genuine social security that prevents long-term, structural poverty.

The numbers, sadly, speak for themselves. Millions of younger professionals, descendants of the Great Migration, well-integrated immigrants, and middle-class families have been pushed out of major blue zip codes. They have decamped not just to the New Jersey suburbs (also expensive), southern New Hampshire (ditto), the moderately gentrified parts of suburban Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, or, in the Pacific Northwest, to the outer rings of Portland and Seattle. They have moved south, to Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida, and to the interior Mountain West, without yielding a commensurate turn toward either populist or culturally liberal “purple politics” in these regions (Georgia being a very partial exception). Whatever else may be going on—these transplants could be social conservatives exhausted by progressive identity politics, but it is highly unlikely in the majority of cases that this is more than epiphenomenal to factors related to costs and opportunities—the pattern is not inducing the favorable changes in political geography that Democratic activists have pined for since Barack Obama was president. If Democrats want to do well nationally, they need fewer—really zero—people leaving for red states bearing the message to their new neighbors, “I just couldn’t make it work back home.”

At the same time, Democrats need a surplus of high-quality candidates in working-class red districts who can distinguish themselves as they see fit from a national brand tarred by elitism. This is the second imperative they need to swallow posthaste. While it has been advised many times since 2016, too often the DNC and party grandees have backed the wrong horse based on a fetish for fancy credentials or an insipid, Beltway-massaged notion of what it means to stand up to Trump. Not every insurgent candidate necessarily has to have a hardscrabble background, but they should have an intimate connection to their communities and be unafraid of the concerns and tribulations of their prospective constituents.

They must be similarly free to tailor their message in locales where anti-establishment sentiment is endemic. In particular, such candidates, like those backed by The Bench, a new party organization, need to be able to say, “I respect my fellow party members and know that a new generation of leadership is working hard to deliver for their districts and represent the values of their constituents, but I’m running to represent you and ensure we finally have a voice in Washington—not just to squeeze deals out of the federal budget that throw us a lifeline, but to ignite investment that actually provides our young men with dignified jobs, repairs our broken health care system, and makes our small towns and cities great places to raise a family.” In case any progressives are about to quibble over this message, yes, these independent Democratic candidates, male and female, need to talk, compassionately, about men learning responsibility, skills, and the intergenerational value of enablement. That is a positive, pro-freedom message that gives directionless young men a leg up and one more reason to shun the incels, groypers, and manosphere hucksters wasting their lives peddling self-pity and despicable fantasies.

This brings us to the third task, which is for Democrats to rediscover the language of freedom by focusing foremost on the rights codified by the Constitution. Doing so would perhaps be the single most important sign that Democrats are prepared to reclaim the common ground and jettison divisive identity politics, which, pushed to their logical extreme, are incompatible with the liberal ideal of America as a creedal nation. It would also show Democrats are ready to return to first principles and not merely exploit fears of authoritarianism, as they did between 2021 and 2024, when party leaders raised enormous sums off of every danger Trump posed but failed, inexcusably, to expand their coalition.

Democrats should therefore make a more substantive and concerted attempt to find common cause with libertarian, Tocquevillian, and religious conservatives spooked by Trump’s right-wing statism—a model that is increasingly antithetical to traditional American conservatism. Indeed, if Democrats are to stop the indefensible, they will need not just judges in the mold of Patrick Schiltz and Fred Biery, but Americans from all walks of life declaring the administration’s solution to immigration is rending the country in two.

Admittedly, forging this coalition will be anything but easy. And Democrats, after Biden’s lax immigration policies, have more than their work cut out for them on the question of how they would enforce the border while eliminating the rot at the DHS. Democrats must nevertheless try, with an ardor that was conspicuously absent for most of the Trump era. Ultimately, without an emphatic reclamation of the electric cord that has given America its strength, character, and capacity for renewal, we will soon be living in a different kind of country.