Liberalism Failed to Stop the Trump Realignment. Is There A Way Back?

It is a common assumption of the Trump era that America is undergoing a turbulent and protracted political realignment that could reverberate for decades. In the wake of the 2024 election, it seemed as though Trump’s GOP had gained a decisive advantage. Over three presidential elections, Trump flipped a preponderance of former Democratic strongholds and swing counties, and demographic trends suggest the GOP could have a firm advantage in the Electoral College by 2032. This turn of events, despite several omens, continues to stun the progressive mind: only a few years prior, it was an article of faith that a hegemonic Democratic coalition was a demographic inevitability.

And yet, it is far from certain the Trumpian realignment could last, much less deepen, beyond Trump’s second administration. For one thing, there is little evidence to suggest Vice President JD Vance or any other Trump loyalist could command support equal in passion to Trump’s. And that passion itself could be dissipating. Almost a year into his administration, Trump has not so much struggled but punted on delivering remotely “populist” wins on jobs and prices; unlike in 2017 and 2018, when the impact of the China shock was rawer and concerns over supply-chain inflation were subdued, his flailing tariff regime lacks the power of challenging stale orthodoxies. Relentless speculation about the lurid Epstein files and Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein also threatens MAGA’s unity to a degree previous Trump scandals hadn’t.

There are signs, too, that the Trumpian realignment is stalling for rather conventional reasons. Trump’s extraordinary comeback was made possible in part due to “nostalgia” for the pre-Covid Trump economy (an indictment, one might say, of the pace and scope of the recovery from the Great Recession under Barack Obama). But Trump’s approval ratings on inflation and the economy overall have plunged, several consumer and business trends augur recession, and Democrats, fresh off their recent election victories, exude, at last, a determination to win back party defectors and populist-leaning independents.

Trump’s steady disengagement from any positive ideas resembling “America First” gives Democrats a fresh opportunity to reframe the terrain of conflict. Some intuit it is better to paint Trump not as a strongman—an image he enjoys—but as weak, afraid, and miserly. Although they didn’t wring any big concessions from the Republican Congress during the government shutdown standoff, Democrats arguably succeeded in painting Trump as callous and indifferent to Americans unable to pay for food and health care. For the moment, politics in these jarring times has reverted to a familiar dynamic in which Democrats are once again summoning the discipline to reclaim the upper hand on “kitchen table” issues.

After a year of brutal autopsies, factional squabbles, and demoralizing polls, Democrats do seem remarkably energized for the midterms. To actually broaden their coalition and expand the map in 2028, however, Democrats must do much more than throw down the gauntlet over “affordability.” They must tend to their vulnerabilities on cultural issues, but more importantly, they must finally accept that Trump, an inveterate disruptor, displaced the fading conflict between “liberalism” and “conservatism” by co-opting the issues and resentments that mainstream leaders from both parties had neglected for years.

And to break his spell over Americans who are at turns angry and striving, Democrats must grasp that the new juxtaposition is not, in essence, between Trumpism and anti-Trumpism—an erroneous framing that magnifies the Democrats’ own ideological baggage while muzzling the politics of solidarity and shared progress. It is the choice between lies and boasts, which nevertheless speak to legitimate feelings of national decline and disenfranchisement, and a civic nationalism that measurably empowers ordinary Americans to build more rewarding and purposeful lives. Anything else is unapt to deal with how Trump has repeatedly defied his own historical unpopularity and transformed the party system over the last decade.

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To understand the task before them, Democrats must trace how the terms “liberalism” and “conservatism” have diminished profoundly in their capacity to reflect the preferences, aspirations, and fears shaping the post-Great Recession electorate. Not long ago the contours of party competition—the ideas, goals, problems, and constituencies over which the Democratic and Republican parties typically fought—were thought to correspond to this basic ideological conflict, forged between the Progressive Era and Great Depression.

Potent continuities within the parties with respect to the tendencies and values they stood for reinforced the strength of these organizing paradigms in the face of new challenges. Although the 1960s civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests had placed enormous pressure on New Deal-style liberals to adapt and consequentially mobilized new or previously repressed interests while pushing out Dixiecrats and others opposed to that era’s rebellions against authority and social conformity, liberalism as a fairly cohesive philosophy of active government oriented to material concerns and social uplift, like its “limited government” counterpart, remained legible. Notwithstanding new cultural “wedge” issues, an international crisis or economic shock, or other major world-historical event, the salience of class and the established cleavages over the state’s role in the economy and society were expected by most politicians, experts, and laypeople to endure.

A related source of continuity was liberalism’s dominance of American life even in times of electoral defeat. Politics revolved around its strengths and vulnerabilities, as reflected in the opposition it inspired: moralistic “movement conservatism” and neoliberal-libertarian economic thought. After setting the tempo of national politics for the better part of four decades, liberalism fell into a defensive posture amid the drift and stagnation of the Seventies. Neither political coalition, however, was able to fully dominate the party system between 1968 and 2014, a period of hastening technological and cultural change and “silent” revolutions in the labor market.

Despite the landslide presidential elections of 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988—all won by the Republican nominee—divided government was more common than not. Even during the high tide of the Reagan Revolution, split-ticket voting was significant, as demonstrated by the “Reagan Democrat” phenomenon. In addition, the rise of a Sun Belt-oriented Republican Party powered by white evangelicals did not result in regional polarization as we understand it today. In key elections, the battleground states numbered between 10 and 15, and the South continued to elect liberal-leaning Democrats, not just post-Dixiecrat “Boll Weevil” types, until the mid-1990s.

Underlying this era of supposed reaction was a hunger for pragmatism and rejuvenation. It seems laughably facile now, but the country responded best to leaders like Reagan and Bill Clinton, who painted the 21st century as one of imminent great leaps. Though industrial decline, offshoring, and corporate raiding were recurring themes, the electorate was far less pessimistic than it is today. Accordingly, the parties competed over suburban moderates who were generally pro-trade (including gainfully employed but price-sensitive “soccer moms”), entrepreneurial immigrants, and college-educated professionals poised to thrive in the ascendant knowledge economy.

This zone of competition had a “moderating” effect on both parties, but it was one that ultimately accelerated globalization and diluted class issues, to liberalism’s detriment. Democrats became ambivalent about their past achievements and uncertain over what to prioritize. The growing infatuation with Silicon Valley and global trade attenuated, in particular, their party’s pursuit of traditional social-democratic demands like full employment and national health insurance, while curtailing support for the economic nationalism of voices such as Richard Gephardt, David Bonior, Marcy Kaptur, Fritz Hollings, and Sherrod Brown—Democrats who understood the implications of outsourcing the industrial base and sundering ties with blue-collar workers.

Within Republican ranks the effect similarly weakened conservatism’s coherence. It is true, of course, that Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” pushed the party in a radically libertarian direction. But the imperative to remain viable with voters who benefitted from globalization, and had thus adopted a more “global” and culturally liberal outlook, also tempered the influence of the religious right and “paleoconservative” opponents of globalization. And it initially worked to the GOP’s advantage. In fact, it was the secret ingredient to a very different Republican majority envisioned at the start of this century, before the wreckage of Iraq, the foreclosure crisis, and the financial meltdown destroyed the GOP establishment’s credibility. Though George W. Bush was often derided for failing to live up to his promise to be a “uniter, not a divider,” his brand of “compassionate conservatism,” overtures to Latinos, and invocations of Harry Truman, FDR’s successor, to support his administration’s “War on Terror” and global trade agenda all reflected the conviction that modern conservatism had to deepen its appeal to voters’ aspirations, rather than exalt the past.

The pressure on both parties to court proverbial swing voters did not entirely suppress the old class divide, however. While the culture wars, D.C. scandals, and foreign policy debates routinely dominated the new 24-hour news cycle, the conflict between liberalism and conservatism could not be understood without its class basis. National Democrats who did not share Bill Clinton’s folksy charm were frequently lampooned for listless rhetoric, the byproduct of futile efforts to decipher the exact preferences of swing voters in a rapidly changing world. But members from all regions continued to cast the main choice in politics as one between help and opportunity for working families and the further enrichment of the country’s elites. Nearly forgotten now, the strength of the Democratic victory in the 2006 midterms was due to populist candidates who took a stand against offshoring, shareholder primacy, and the explosion in tax-sheltered global conglomerates.

That outcome reaffirmed a general rule of politics. Even though the age of globalization had succeeded the New Deal order, Democrats still needed to mobilize a large share of non-college-educated industrial and manual workers in order to win. To simply be a Democrat required this affinity, regardless of whether one identified as a “liberal,” “new,” “progressive,” or “independent” Democrat.

Democrats nevertheless took it for granted that, with a little effort, they could preserve their reduced but still vital share of the blue-collar vote. As the electorate diversified, manufacturing jobs disappeared, and social conservatism lost its appeal, it seemed that Democrats were favored to win by embracing economic openness, advance-degree holders, and multiculturalism—just as long as they continued to defend Social Security and other flagship anti-poverty programs against the anti-government zealots gaining force in the congressional GOP.

In hindsight, Barack Obama was the ultimate bridge candidate. His election in 2008 thrust young and college-educated millennials, then the country’s most ethnically diverse generation, into the political arena. But he depended on rallying enough of the old New Deal-Great Society coalition in counties and regions Democrats have since ceded to the GOP. Obama then famously won reelection amid a sour economy by tarring his opponent, Mitt Romney, as an unfeeling plutocrat. Still, most Democrats refused the populist “rebuild America” path that the 2006 results pointed to and that the 2008 global financial crisis and Wall Street bailouts had seemingly made urgent. Instead, they succumbed to the fatal habit of acting as the custodians of both government and globalization, an outwardly “progressive” but fundamentally conservative posture marked by a still more conservative suspicion of the neo-Jacksonian contempt for “crony capitalism” that was spreading across the political spectrum.

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The changes since catalyzed by Trump underscore that the parties no longer resemble the fundamental coalitions of yesteryear. Indeed, Trump’s arrival scrambled a number of battle lines while amplifying the party system shifts that were underway a generation ago. His 2016 campaign was laden with chauvinistic and reactionary rhetoric, yet he won the Electoral College by attacking globalization and the GOP establishment in ways that recalled the unheeded warnings of liberal and populist Democrats.

In substance, that victory did not overturn every tenet of neoconservative globalism, which had justified preemptive military action against “rogue states” hostile to American interests and pruning the last pillars of the New Deal-era regulation. But Trump either leveled or refashioned the policy networks that had cultivated the foot soldiers of the Reagan revolution and exiled many of the families and personnel who had dominated the party since then. Most significantly, he polarized the electorate over immigration in ways that forced Democrats to erase or renounce their past support for reforms anchored by tougher enforcement. Together, these moves forged a Republican base that was more blue-collar, populist, and isolationist in spirit, even as most Republican officeholders remained subservient to corporate lobbies.

The Democratic coalition, still roiled by the 2016 primary fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, underwent a conflicted transformation in response. Trump’s first-term priorities—his regressive tax cuts, attempts to repeal Obamacare, and aggressive curbs on immigration—galvanized strong opposition, linking older liberals and younger progressives taken to represent the Democrats’ “rising American electorate.” But Trump’s “America First” agenda also provoked Democrats to mistakenly try to combine two disparate approaches. One was to double down on the cultural and economic benefits of higher rates of immigration and free trade, as well as the inherent value of keeping the “liberal international order” intact (rather than reforming its architecture); the other was to get revenge on Trump by pursuing industrial and competition policies that might actually win back working-class voters drawn to his combative, anti-establishment message.

The results seemed to only intensify the fault lines in the electorate. Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, likely aided by the pandemic, yielded an administration that struggled to accommodate and synthesize different ideas of progressive change. Some may argue the problem lay more with an aging Biden and his inept handling of inflation than the policy mix on offer. But neither Biden’s scattered overtures to economic nationalists and anti-monopolists, nor his climate agenda, nor his forgiveness of five million Americans’ student debt, nor his elevation of identity politics and permissive border policy seemed to satisfy base Democrats, much less improve his party’s competitiveness in the swing states. Trump, without curbing his demagoguery and authoritarian instincts, then capitalized on the backlash to inflation, the border crisis, and the most militant demands of “woke” activists. The 2024 election produced the most diverse Republican coalition in decades, to the dismay of Democrats who thought demographics and ideology were on their side.

The last year has consequently seen many Democrats and liberal-leaning pundits agonize over what the party stands for. It is implicitly acknowledged that identity-driven progressivism, or “neo-progressivism,” gradually superseded liberalism on the false promise that it would mobilize untapped minorities and dramatically expand the Democratic fold. That strategy may have had a good intent, premised in part on continuing Obama’s original grassroots vote drive. But for all their professed concern over injustice, the neo-progressives were hamstrung by their dismissal of Rust Belt hardship. Despite their own justified fears of downward mobility, they struggled to fathom the strange despair of being a citizen without agency, idle in a world of change without hope.

Some party reformers wager liberalism can be reconstructed through a return to first principles. Others, though, have wondered if a return to traditional American liberalism is truly possible, or if it has entered its final throes, rendered impotent by its own betrayals and inconsistencies. Liberalism’s persistent challenge following the end of the New Deal order was to “conserve” its most popular programs while retaking the lead in being the primary political force of development and modernization. For a time, the path taken to manage globalization gave Democrats the impression they could reconcile these imperatives. Yet it was that very tendency to manage and contain expectations that belied their pretense of a greater vision at work. When that was no longer tenable, the belated answer to working-class voters who had left the tent was to serve up, under Biden, some version of liberalism’s greatest hits, with little of the political infrastructure required to make it stick and improve people’s lives.

Shaken from their stupor, Democrats are beginning to admit that to do great things, they must have a pulse in left-behind communities. But if there is one thing Democrats must do first to turn the tide, it is to abandon the politics of fear, which so evidently dictates their navigation of the Trump era. This fear is putatively about Trump’s threat to democracy, but it betrays a disbelief about the country as it is, a country that Democrats, in their characteristically self-defeating way, are reluctant to win. This peculiar form of arrogance helps explain why the party has grown so insular. Democrats are paralyzed by the thought they do not recognize the society they had hoped to shepherd into the 21st century, failing to realize that, for too many Americans, liberalism itself has become unrecognizable.

It will take more than a few happy warriors to restore the people’s goodwill. Democrats, still vexed over how to fight without alienating powerful interests, are haunted by their need for a Rooseveltian savior. And need one they may. Yet the leadership the party needs most is not a hidden force waiting to be discovered. It is something to be built in the hardest places, cultivated in the belief that there is a civic life and national purpose worth saving.