Yet a rude awakening awaits those who imagine that ending the Iran war or booting the GOP from power will end the inflation crisis. For much of this decade, inflation has been a problem for consumers and firms, and a salient political issue for voters. And although policy choices like the Iran war have no doubt played a role, today’s structural inflation has a much deeper cause: it is the unintended price of voters’ choice to end the model of neoliberal globalization that defined the post-Cold War period.

The process of deglobalization began under Trump I, accelerated during Covid and Biden’s tenure, and has become more destabilizing since Trump’s return to the Oval Office. It is greater and more challenging than any one policy agenda. High costs of living are thus likely to remain impervious to changes in policy or shifts in party power. 

Inflation is baked into deglobalization. Major revisions to global trade — whether stemming from war and sanctions, protectionist concerns, or efforts to combat climate change — entail major changes to production and distribution. These changes are far from seamless, since they involve finding new suppliers, retraining workers, or rebuilding factories. At each step, there is a risk of bottlenecks, shortages, and price spikes. 

Sweeping programs to reduce immigration likewise reverberate throughout the labor market, creating disruptions in critical sectors like home construction, food production, and health care. “Choke points” — a term that became ubiquitous at the height of the pandemic lockdowns — will continue to multiply, self-inflicted or not. Consequently, rising prices show no sign of abating, despite optimistic forecasts by the Federal Reserve that interest-rate hikes will bring inflation close to its 2% target by 2028.

Of course, the main driver of inflation at present is the cost of energy, brought on by US foreign policy — another dark irony, given Trump’s disdain for fuel alternatives and pledge of $2 gas. The high cost of energy affects not just home utilities and the commute to work, but nearly every system that furnishes the basic comforts to which Americans are accustomed. It also exacerbates the nationwide housing shortage: building becomes more expensive, as does borrowing (the latter prompting current owners to hold on to their current homes purchased at lower rates).

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But the Fed’s main method for taming inflation, rate hikes, afflicts workers and small businesses who have weathered messy tariffs and exploding health bills. As household debt continues to reach historic levels, higher interest rates mean heftier borrowing costs. Mortgages, car payments, and credit-card bills — all get more expensive to carry, so more of each paycheck goes to interest. Simply treading water in today’s economy will become more expensive, further diminishing purchasing power.

Yet a Democratic Congress is unlikely to generate a different and workable approach. The simple dynamic of divided government and mutual enmity with the White House is certainly one factor, as is the Fed’s insulated control over monetary policy. But there are deeper political reasons at play that inhibit Democrats from offering more than vague promises to crack down on price gougers, reclaim Congress’s authority over trade policy, and curb immigration raids.

For starters, the “easiest” solutions to inflation are the very policies that gave rise to Trumpian populism in the first place. That naturally has created some hesitation in the Democratic coalition to do more than attack Trump’s overreach and corruption. A return to “free trade,” for instance, would probably ease price pressures. Yet the bipartisan embrace of trade during the 1990s and early 2000s devastated America’s industrial heartlands, creating the working-class grievances that made Trump appear attractive beginning in 2015. While many former Trump supporters now bemoan his tariffs, this frustration doesn’t amount to a wholesale rejection of all protectionism — at least, not in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where Democrats have suffered the most humbling setbacks.

The same predicament is true of immigration. Labor shortages are real, prompting mainstream economists and business lobbies to urge a more liberal approach. But it would be politically untenable to resume a laissez-faire border policy akin to Biden’s, which not only worsened Democrats’ standing with traditional blue-collar workers, but fueled defections to Trump in normally blue, immigrant-heavy cities and counties in 2024. A majority of voters may now recoil at the inhumane methods employed by Trump’s deportation regime. Yet the preference for a tighter border overall will prevail so long as immigration flows are associated not with lower costs and dynamic growth, but new burdens on housing, public services, the safety net, and social cohesion.

In both cases — trade and the border — Democrats are chary of defending the pre-Trump state of affairs. In an electoral environment that could see the first major upsets in red states in a generation, Democrats don’t want to alienate Right-leaning independents and other swing voters fed up with incumbent Republicans. Surprisingly competitive Farm Belt states, such as Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, are emblematic: their electorates are unhappy with ICE’s unaccountable conduct and the high prices generated by Trump’s tariffs, but they aren’t keen to return to globalization, either.

As if that weren’t complicated enough for Democrats, they also have their “Brahmin Left” base to worry about. Mainstream Democrats, after all, once loudly touted the benefits, cultural and economic, of globalization. They thus can’t afford to be seen by the liberal base as capitulating to any aspect of Trump’s restrictionist agenda. Democrats, accordingly, are reluctant to thread together a set of proposals that may irk “woke” progressives in the short-term, even if such policies would help set the stage for a commanding Democratic victory in 2028.

The Right, meanwhile, seems paralyzed by Trump’s succession of own goals on inflation. Retreating from either protectionism or hard-line immigration policies is a political no-go as long as Trump leads the party. That has forced vulnerable Republicans to defend his record, even though many privately regret shredding the neoliberal order that Reaganite Republicans had pursued before Trump. Republicans are also afraid to break from the White House’s accelerationist position on the AI build-out, the energy demands of which are inflationary and probably unconstrained by high interest rates.

Meanwhile, for all the fanfare over the past decade about the GOP becoming a vehicle for the “multiracial working class,” fealty to corporate profits remains an article of faith across the party. A few individual Republicans may gesture toward collaborating with Democrats to tackle the cost of living, but when push comes to shove, the legislation and congressional votes never actually materialize. Deviating from the conservative donor class on this point is punished severely.

Partisan myopia also forces both parties into positions that prolong inflation. Neither party, for example, is prepared to reform the immigration system in a manner that would promote non-inflationary growth while also prioritizing social stability. That would mean some combination of external and internal enforcement (anathema to many Democrats) and a willingness to grant citizenship to long-standing residents and welcome foreign workers to labor-starved sectors (a nonstarter for Republican hawks).

Nor can the two parties agree on which sectors warrant tailored industrial protection and which would benefit from integration with traditional allies in Europe and middle-income states in Asia and Latin America. Silicon Valley’s unrivaled political influence is another dilemma. Democrats increasingly talk tough about Big Tech but are hardly unanimous about how and to what extent it can and should be reined in.

In short: having largely spearheaded deglobalization, America is saddled with its inflationary consequences due to a party system that failed to anticipate them.

To be sure, the Democrats’ recently revived antitrust tradition is, in part, about lowering prices (on the theory that consolidation allows sellers to set the price). And there have also been more radical proposals for targeted price controls. But such reforms aren’t realistically in the offing for the remainder of Trump’s term. Thus, Democrats’ affordability agenda in 2026 is really a pledge to confront high prices if their party is also returned to the White House — in two years. 

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Yet even assuming Democrats take back the White House and put their backs into it, the affordability effort will still likely fall short of solving persistent, elevated inflation through the 2030s. Unstoppable structural changes in the world economy, even more than dysfunctional domestic politics, present the biggest challenge to an inflation-weary America. Multipolarity — the rise of multiple nodes of global power — all but assures more unpredictable alliances and more exposed supply chains, with corresponding impacts on prices. And although the dollar’s hegemony shows no sign of collapsing in the near term, the prospect of “de-dollarization” is no longer quite so remote. But even if that challenge to the world’s reserve currency is forestalled, the average American consumer may nevertheless lose his place atop a global food chain that assured him a “comfortable lifestyle” even as his wages flatlined.

The peak years of neoliberal globalization — from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 2008 financial crisis — were predicated on a rosy formula that assumed ever-deepening economic integration between advanced economies and rapidly industrializing ones like China. Price stability could be achieved through anemic wage growth in the Global North and labor repression in the Global South; diversified supply chains with leaps in logistics that enabled “just-in-time” production and shipping; and unprecedented economies of scale that would seemingly keep essentials affordable even as massive conglomerates increased their market share (and thus their power to set prices as they saw fit).

That formula rested on many faulty assumptions, not least the notion that America would do everything possible to perpetuate the liberal international system it had constructed since World War II. Instead, Washington has instigated the system’s rupture. The arrangements that underpinned the unofficial bargain between America’s business elites and the rest of society — above all, the juggernaut trade relationship known as “Chimerica” — have been hammered and fractured by Trump without consideration of America’s underlying socioeconomic problems. Put another way: Trump gleefully broke Chimerica, without giving much thought to problems like infrastructure, workforce training, health costs, corporate power, and regional development.

Rapprochement with Beijing by either political party won’t inherently undo the damage. Worse, America’s image as a declining, volatile hegemon has led other countries to imagine a development path unyoked from the appetites and aspirations of American consumers. On top of more wars, more energy shocks, and more extreme weather events, that dynamic will make Trump’s inaugural boast of a “new golden age” all the more disconnected from the realities of the global economy and America’s fading stature within it.

Democrats are delighting in the possibility that Trump’s hubris may have finally caught up with him. Still, those who are alert to the broader fragmentation of the world economy should beware an empty triumphalism. Inflation is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Not since Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign has there been this much excitement on the American Left. And for good reason: Mamdani, a Ugandan-born democratic socialist, launched his longshot bid for Gracie Mansion a year ago, before soon achieving AOC-level fame and leapfrogging past his conventional Democratic opponents, past incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and past Cuomo, a scion of one of the most powerful liberal dynasties in the country. A victorious Mamdani would set the tone for Left-wing urban governance to a degree not seen in decades.

Yet Mamdani and his inner circle would be wise to temper their jubilation. The untested Mamdani could singly determine the course of American progressivism and its odds of countering the MAGA realignment: failure would carry an exorbitant cost. While the champion of affordability has promised to restore integrity to City Hall, there are worrisome indicators that Mamdani hasn’t grappled with the other causes of blue-city blues: namely, that crime and disorder appear to be festering once more following the historic lows reached early last decade.

It is hard to overstate the pressure on him. In a party largely bereft of compelling leaders, Mamdani has been heralded as the next great hope of progressive politics. But his opponents predict disaster as confidently as his supporters expect change. Mamdani, his foes charge, is an unabashed creature of the “woke” #DefundthePolice Left, animated by theories of criminal justice that are opposed to the common sense of ordinary New Yorkers. Mamdani and his allies have tried to parry these claims as slander, the fever dream of reactionaries who see a “loony” sectarian agenda in every  progressive cause.

Mamdani’s ground game and the media war suggest he has mostly deflected the blows. Still, his biggest challenge is not to convince ambivalent New Yorkers outside his base that his detractors are delusional. It is to demonstrate he understands unequivocally that ambitious reform and strong social trust must go hand-in-hand.

Since the June primary Mamdani has made a few efforts to telegraph as much. He has apologized for past remarks broadly condemning the NYPD, promised to “discourage” the phrase “globalize the intifada”, and met extensively with rabbis and other Jewish leaders. He has signaled that if elected, he would retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, one of Adams’s more respected appointees, who has combined a tough approach to crime with encouraging efforts to root out corruption in the force. 

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To be sure, some of the attackers exude noxious hysteria (about “Trotskyite” experiments and the rise of American-style “Islamo-gauchisme.” They traffic in sensationalist and bigoted rhetoric that makes Tea Party-era rumors about Barack Obama’s “foreign birth certificate” seem tame by comparison. Desperate and resentful, Cuomo himself has resorted to exploiting unease over Mamdani’s Muslim identity in a city whose Muslim population only modestly trails its Jewish one.

Even so, it would be unwise of Mamdani to dismiss more sober doubts about his ability to manage the city well and ensure public safety — two preconditions of lasting social-democratic reform. Millions of working- and middle-class New Yorkers are hungry for greater economic security and laws that reset the balance of power between the asset-rich and asset-poor. These same New Yorkers, however, also want a city that is safe and hospitable to families with children.

Such concerns aren’t rooted in bad faith. Since Covid, Gotham has been in limbo. It’s hardly the caricature painted by those who say the “bad old days” of the Seventies and Eighties are back, but the city nevertheless radiates an increasingly antisocial ambiance. While the pandemic-era surge in violent crime has mostly ebbed, felony assaults on public transit are up. A number of sadistic murders have frightened the public. Despite a recent decline, fatal drug overdoses are above pre-2020 levels. The city’s homelessness crisis — already severe under Adams’s Left-leaning predecessor, Bill de Blasio — hit new records in the last two years. Rough sleeping and panhandling are ubiquitous.

There is a more general sense that the city has grown indifferent to its own commons. The sight of feces and urine on buses and subways is a regular occurrence, even during school hours. Migrant children hawk candies and other goods in the subway and parks instead of attending school. The odor of synthetic drugs hangs in the air, while poorly regulated marijuana shops pop up close to school zones. Working-class and heavily immigrant neighborhoods have struggled with an explosion in prostitution and shoplifting. Vision Zero — a plan to eliminate traffic fatalities that was introduced in 2014 — backslid for most of Adams’s term.

It is easy to misinterpret distressing incidents and random violence as reflecting a broader trend. It is likewise easy to dismiss patterns that steadily erode the city’s quality of life. Amid President Trump’s threats to deploy more national guard troops to US cities, progressives are at pains to play down any and all worries about public order. Yet the decades-long effort to build a more cohesive and optimistic city seems to have plateaued, and may be unraveling. That may be an indictment of the city’s current administration and the establishment. But it doesn’t nullify the questions dogging Mamdani. Does he register what working families see with increasing frustration and alarm? And does he have the judgment to avert the dysfunction which threatens to pervade the city?

For all his thoughtfulness, Mamdani has not always conveyed that he does possess such sensitivity. He argues passionately that “New Yorkers have been betrayed by the politics of our city” – in which a corrupt and obsequious establishment has sold-out to the kinds of billionaires now racing to defeat him. And he is mostly right. Three decades of cowardly deference to the city’s wealthiest residents has favored the extravagance of the few over the common good. Preventing crime and low-level disorder requires greater poverty reduction, affordable housing, high-wage jobs, policies to reduce youth unemployment, investment in mental-health services, and intelligent programs to curb recidivism. Only through such efforts can the city fulfill its true potential as a beacon of pluralism and opportunity.

Mamdani has stressed this long overdue reform-minded agenda as the basis of his candidacy. His model, he insists, is New York’s legendary three-term mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a progressive Republican who championed workers, fought corruption and organized crime, and partnered with FDR to alleviate the Great Depression. Throughout his campaign, Mamdani has spoken eloquently of making sure “affordability” means genuine financial freedom for the 50% of New Yorkers who are rent-burdened. It’s an appeal to a greater freedom — to enjoy more family time, recreation, and community activities — that also draws inspiration from Northern Europe’s postwar social contract. As Mamdani allowed in a cozy interview on The View, he is like a Scandinavian politician, but “a little more brown.”

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Still, there is the occasional sign that Mamdani the reformer does not grasp the issues as working-class New Yorkers might see them. A case in point is his opaque stance on prostitution. When asked about his past support for decriminalizing sex work in a recent interview on Good Day New York, Mamdani emphasized there should be “no tolerance for [sex] trafficking” and violence against women, but that decriminalization is consistent with the recommendations of the World Health Organization and other international agencies. It was an answer that no doubt impressed the advanced degree-holders and NGO workers. But as during the mayoral debates, he missed a simple opportunity to reassure New Yorkers troubled by open-air prostitution and all that it signals. I’ll do everything within my power to get the girls off the street is what a strong leader who understood the ramifications of the problem should have said.

As final polls show Mamdani’s lead tightening, his team is naturally keen to keep the focus on bread-and-butter issues. His converts, moreover, would say that the notion that he, a practicing Muslim, is out-of-step with New Yorkers’ views of crime and public morality is baseless. His hyperbolic critics, they protest, are holding him to an absurdly different standard than Cuomo, who has been disgraced by far worse controversies and abuses of power. To look askance at some of his approaches to social justice and “harm reduction” is to miss the big picture and fall prey to the manipulations of vested interests who don’t want their dominance of the city challenged.

If he is to succeed, Mamdani’s allies must confront his weaknesses. His main mistake in the last days of the race has been to show he still bears the influence of the fringier elements of the Democratic Socialists of America at the very moment he ought to be assuming the mantle of La Guardia. By now he should know well enough the stakes are about more than him. Powerful organized interests want him to fail, for reasons beyond the enmity his campaign has sparked; indeed, a pall over a Mamdani administration would inevitably spread to progressive insurgents in other, more Trump-friendly parts of the country.

On the cusp of power, Mamdani’s greatest test awaits. His election would mark a sea change in city politics whose rumblings began 14 years ago, when Occupy Wall Street mobilized tens of thousands of New Yorkers fed up with what they saw as an insular and bankrupt liberal establishment. What he does with the excitement and good will he’s generated will reverberate long after his first months in office. There is little room for error.

Despite the uphill battle, Democrats desperate to see their party rebound in next year’s midterms regard Brown as a powerful asset. Since the Nineties, his aversion to neoliberal globalization and muscular advocacy for union households have been critical to preserving his party’s links to the New Deal tradition. Though flipping control of the Senate is a tall order — Democrats need to gain four seats and aggressively defend at least three — Brown remains one of the party’s few viable bridges to blue-collar Trump country.

Democrats undeniably need more voices like Brown, who can take on vested interests and connect with voters mistrustful of both political parties. The paradox of Brown, however, is that he is a capable political veteran who inadvertently highlights his party’s weaknesses. He is the quintessential candidate of “Trump Democrats” — voters whom most Democratic officials and bigwig liberal donors vilified for the better part of the last 10 years. That alone reinforces the notion that contemporary progressivism is hopelessly elitist. But Brown’s lonely stand for industrial labor also suggests the Democratic establishment has tacitly welcomed the so-called dealignment of working-class voters and the rise of regional polarization, phenomena which tend to attenuate social-democratic commitments to collective bargaining, a stronger safety net, and large-scale developmental projects.

Brown’s view of political economy encapsulates the road not taken by Democrats since the end of the Cold War. The Biden administration’s patchwork effort to fashion a national industrial strategy more coherent than Trump’s nodded to Brown’s convictions, forged during the first brutal wave of plant closures in the Seventies and Eighties. That was a bittersweet vindication for Brown and other red-state Democrats who were dragged down by Biden’s unpopularity on immigration and other fronts. Despite the long tailwind of nationalist populism and the sting of Trump’s 2024 triumph, influential Democrats still quietly put technological progress and the possibilities of a borderless world above Brown’s “Old Left” concerns.

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Brown’s re-entry to national politics could impose some much-needed discipline upon his party. His stature is arguably strong enough to set the tone for the Democrats’ midterm strategy. He embodies the kind of unflinching left-populism generally missing from Democratic ranks, even within the Rust Belt; younger Democrats like Rep. Chris Deluzio of neighboring Pennsylvania invoke Brown’s philosophy to chart a way forward. Brown’s unparalleled name recognition can’t be discounted, either. A “comeback kid” narrative would cement his legacy while perhaps granting Democrats a second chance in what was once America’s pivotal swing state.

Still, it is hard to argue Brown represents both the party’s heritage and its future, as was plausible when he first entered the House of Representatives in 1993, railing against the perils of free-trade. Brown may occupy unique ideological terrain in the Democratic coalition — he is a fierce critic of corporate power but also an economic nationalist who sees China’s manufacturing dominance as an existential threat to America’s future. A political outsider he is not. At this stage, his pitch may no longer convince an electorate pulsing with anti-establishment sentiment bordering on outright nihilism. 

Neither does Brown’s familiar face indicate that the Democratic establishment, divided between the Pacific Coast and the Northeast, has made any serious effort to rehabilitate their battered local party branches across the industrial heartland. Indeed, the fact that Brown had to be prodded out of semi-retirement by the hapless Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, simply underscores that Democratic elites have neglected rebuilding their leadership ranks in Ohio and other former swing states. No one from Ohio’s shrunken Democratic congressional delegation is tapped to be a future party leader, and unlike state parties in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that have managed to “nationalize” local races against right wing opponents, Ohio Democrats have struggled to draw sustained interest in reviving their fortunes. Under the circumstances, Schumer’s recruitment of Brown is less a hearty endorsement of left-populism than an admission of the party’s strategy malpractice.

Party officials might also overestimate the luster of his particular blend of progressive populism and nationalism, particularly for those Millennials and members of Gen Z who see no downsides to economic integration with China. Brown has ramped up the attacks on Trump’s tariffs, but he has always been a unions-first trade protectionist at heart. This raises the question of which voters Brown might court to regenerate his coalition. Ohio has seen slow population growth this century, and while it has gradually become more diverse, underwhelming turnout among minority and younger voters has been a persistent problem for Democrats.

Brown evidently did not counteract these trends in his vexing loss to Moreno. But even if he manages to mobilize irregular voters who lean Democratic, he will have his work cut out for him across the state. The Right-wing tilt of Ohio’s rural counties is a microcosm of Democrats’ regional woes, something Brown’s fundraising prowess and persistent outreach is unlikely to significantly reverse absent a sharp economic downturn on Trump’s watch. 

And there is the legitimate concern of whether Brown, aged 72, truly represents the change the party needs. In a party weighed down by plodding institutionalists and clueless figureheads, he is the rare Democratic elder despondent progressives could rally to. On the other hand, the party elite seems intent on throttling younger Left-wing insurgents like Zohran Mamdani or Omar Fateh instead of cultivating fresh talent, a problem which may eclipse Brown’s bona fides on workers’ rights and leave younger party activists uninspired by his campaign. Either way, a Brown comeback, however heartening for Rust Belt Democrats, wouldn’t exactly herald a passing of the torch. 

There are other aspects of the enthusiasm gap to consider, as well. Democrats’ silver lining in recent years is that they have overperformed in special elections and the last two midterms. But the face-off with Husted, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to fill Vice President JD Vance’s vacated seat, is not the rematch with Moreno that would galvanize grassroots activists. And in contrast to fellow Democrats Gavin Newsom, JB Prtizker, and Chris Murphy, Brown will almost assuredly have to tack in a different direction from those craving #Resistance 2.0.

Should Brown succeed, he will be in the unenviable position of having to check Trump and congressional Republicans while also pursuing an “Ohio first” agenda that might conceivably transcend party lines. Partisan Democrats will have to contend with the unsavory prospect that Brown might end up collaborating with Moreno, a businessman repeatedly accused of wage theft, as he did with Vance briefly following 2023’s disastrous train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

Finally, it is doubtful Brown can singlehandedly bend the Democratic coalition, now dominated by the Brahmin Left, to his way of seeing things. He is unabashedly for the type of constituencies and economic sectors that Schumer infamously wagered were worth letting go in favor of upscale suburbanites and knowledge workers. But losing to Moreno, who boasted on the campaign trail he would oust the “old commie,” was a bitter blow to Brown’s own theory of politics.

Brown’s champions in progressive media believed he could distance himself from the unpopular Biden-Harris administration while simultaneously capitalizing on the investments that Joe Biden’s signature industrial policies were beginning to bring to Ohio. That assumption proved overoptimistic. Brown touted the long-term economic benefits of policies his influence had at last helped bring to fruition, along with legislation he crafted that saved the private sector pensions of thousands of blue-collar Ohioans and restored Social Security benefits to thousands more public sector workers. Alas, the backlash to inflation, Biden’s lax border policy, and cultural progressivism neutralized these positive developments. 

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This highlights the challenge of being a “progressive” populist when progressivism has drifted so far from its origins. Over the course of his career, Brown has proved reliably liberal on key cultural issues such as abortion, and he generally adapted to the pressures of party activists, moving in a more lenient direction on border enforcement until 2023, when it became politically untenable. But Brown never seemed especially enthusiastic about his party’s unquestioning elevation of identity politics in the past decade. He has always emphasized the fight against a “rigged system” (albeit with an extended hand to firms who want to revive Ohio’s proud industrial heritage). Perhaps this time around Brown will feel emboldened to declare his independence; humbled by the public’s rejection of “wokeness,” it is possible, too, that progressive advocacy groups will grant his new campaign greater flexibility. 

Thus far, however, he has avoided explicitly criticizing how sectarian identity politics and niche cultural stances handicapped populist and labor-friendly red-state Democrats. Such is the predicament of all Left-leaning politicians trying to navigate the currents of this “post-liberal” or “post-neoliberal” moment. Brown implores his party to wake up to the central fight around economic power. Yet, wary of stoking an intra-party civil war, he appears reluctant to claim the middle ground on other issues that might be framed by neo-progressive activists as capitulating to the MAGA worldview.

The reason is simple: it is difficult in America’s hyperpolarized climate to stake out a nuanced position on anything Trump has routinely exploited for political gain. Most salient, of course, is immigration. Trump’s indiscriminate deportation regime has been executed with grotesque zeal, and lately it has cost him public support. Voters desiring an alternative still rooted in stronger borders and labor law nevertheless don’t trust national Democrats to manage the issue properly. 

Whether Brown can help earn back that trust remains to be seen. After countless reports magnifying how much their party has bled working class support across race and region, it is clear Democrats must stress the sort of “kitchen-table” issues Brown has long insisted the party embrace. By the same token, soak-the-rich populism isn’t the panacea for the Left that today’s progressives wish it were, and to succeed electorally Democrats will have to make difficult choices that will incense some of their single-issue activists. As much as he may relish playing the firebrand underdog, Brown will have to take risks of a greater magnitude if he is to lead his party to redemption.

Freedom of movement, multiculturalism, global economic openness, and affirmation of the historically marginalized: these are the core principles that have become synonymous with the Brahmin Left’s vision of progressive capitalism, and which California’s particular fusion of elite and activist driven politics has done so much to shape.

The problem for Democrats pining for a Golden State hero to slay Trumpism is that the strength of these convictions is indelibly tied up with a record of aloof misrule and beguiling hypocrisy.  While some state Democrats have been in an uproar this week over Newsom’s proposed budget cuts, the state’s deep-seated economic challenges extend far beyond decisions over any single social program. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger left the Governor’s office in 2011, Democrats have overwhelmingly dominated California’s state politics, enjoying a “supermajority” in the state legislature free of Republican influence for over twelve years. With 43 of California’s 52 congressional districts in their hands, they have also shifted the poles of Democratic politics from the Northeast and Midwest to the West Coast.

Some progressives might assume this performance is a tribute to uncompromising values and smart party-building. Yet in this period, California’s image as a beacon for those seeking reinvention and the American Dream has been gradually but unmistakably sullied, a challenge Newsom’s second term in office is unlikely to reverse despite his sudden interest in slashing red tape around development.

For the world’s fourth largest economy, the state’s major indicators of development don’t inspire much confidence. Nearly a third of Californians live in or near the threshold of poverty, and nearly a quarter of the U.S. homeless population lives in California. The future isn’t bright for the state’s youth, either. One 2023 report on educational attainment placed California in the bottom half, far below most other states dominated by Democrats.

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And the “California Exodus,” first identified in the early 1990s, shows few signs of abating. The UnHerd contributor Joel Kotkin, a former Bill Clinton supporter, has blamed California’s woes on a green, liberal “gentry” motivated by a suspicion of development and expensive energy policies. Thronged, purportedly, by self-serving public sector unions, NIMBY lobbies, and zealous climate activists, California’s Democratic Party has succumbed to its worst instincts around managing its existing coalition. With a monopoly on state power, it has rewarded inertia while amplifying a caricature-prone conception of social justice divorced from the very real material hardships of the working-class.

Kotkin’s unsparing portrait is undoubtedly meant to provoke progressives who sincerely believe California is a policy leader and agenda-setter for the Democratic party. Many would proudly contend that, with an assist from the party’s delegation in the Pacific Northwest, California Democrats have the set bar for regulating carbon emissions and extending protections to minorities, and that they are focused on improving wages in California’s all important hospitality sector. If the state’s affordable housing crisis is less than excusable, they would add, at least Newsom and his allies are waking up to the issue.

This apologia fails to appreciate that when national voters think of the merits of one-party rule under Democrats, they now turn to California’s underwhelming performance. And the disenchantment cuts across the ideological spectrum. Cultural moderates and blue-collar conservatives believe the party’s priorities are elitist and dogmatic, while Left-wing populists see the state as ground zero for government capture by Big Tech.

The air of elitism cannot be overstated. Too often, support for California’s progressivism, both within the state and from afar, betrays the exact dynamic Kotkin and like-minded critics take issue with: the entitled sense of “stewardship” that drives the modern Democratic Party’s approach to governance. Rather than focus on broadening the pathways to middle-class prosperity and setting bold targets for poverty reduction, California Democrats appear to be in the business of merely managing economic insecurity through means-tested programs like food assistance. Judging by the numbers, they haven’t succeeded, despite plenty of legislation attesting to their support for active government.

It wasn’t always this way. Between the original Progressive Era and the early postwar boom, California had a competitive two party-system inflected by agrarian populism, anti-monopoly politics, and a growing trade union movement. The Second World War and federal New Deal policies rapidly industrialized the state, consolidating California’s status as a cultural, economic, and political counterweight to the East Coast and a place with expanding potential. Despite some hotbeds of hardline conservatism, California overall seemed to testify to the efficacy and popularity of strong government and public investment. Indeed, its extraordinary growth and the population’s sense of upward mobility seemed largely driven by the New Deal order.

But the former governor Jerry Brown transformed West Coast progressivism. Big developmentalist projects and courtship of the working-class gave way to a watered-down version of “New Left” autonomy, wellness culture, and (often superficial) ecological consciousness. While the Golden State’s notorious smog eventually improved as a result of stronger environmental standards, prospects for the working-class were less encouraging.

Since then, California’s stark economic inequality has, for all intents and purposes, become a Democratic problem. Economic progressives point with good reason to anti-government, budget-slashing Republicans in Congress as a major reason for America’s pockmarked welfare state and wealth inequality. But the fact is that in deep-blue California there is no obstructionist opposition party to blame for its limited horizons. Indeed, although Trump noticeably improved his margins there in the 2024 election, the state GOP is essentially a rump party (ostracized for its aggressive stance on restricting immigrants, yes, but also a victim of its own chosen irrelevance).

This inconvenient fact of one-party rule is beginning to bear down on other California Democrats hoping to lead their party out of the wilderness. While Newsom still enjoys the highest name recognition at the national level, the evolving situation might be best described as the Ro Khanna dilemma, in which aspiring party insurgents are tethered to the very upscale, Brahmin Left constituencies they must distance themselves from. Since winning his first House term in 2016, Khanna has built a profile as both an “economic patriot” who advocates for industrial policy and a sometime-adversary of monopoly power, particularly in regard to the tech industry. He co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, and has become a prominent interlocutor between the party establishment and progressive activists. His near ubiquitous media presence during Trump’s first six months back in office suggests he is either planning to run for president or play progressive kingmaker in the hopes of catapulting himself to the VP slot.

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Yet Khanna also represents the richest congressional district in the United States — a symbol of just how comfortable the once-Republican dominated upper-class are with Democrats, and how much the once-populist Democratic Party has ingratiated itself among America’s 21st century oligarchs and cultural elites.

That image of following the preferences of society’s richest will be hard to shake. Many progressive Democrats still like to think of themselves as New Deal-style social democrats focused on workers’ interests. Yet as Trump’s “triple-trending counties” prove, many parts of the country don’t see them that way. Fair or not, overcoming that perception is the main task for the Democrats. The question is whether the party’s would-be leaders have the stamina and authenticity to do so.

As Khanna illustrates, however, it will take Trumpian levels of chutzpah for elite progressives to convincingly run against their ossified establishment. Whatever his true convictions, Khanna seems unlikely to transform into a veritable tribune of the left behind, whether they reside in California or Western Pennsylvania. Needless to say, the odds of the same happening to Newsom are even more remote.

That’s not to say a healthy intraparty rebellion couldn’t ignite further in California. But given the state’s reputation for dysfunction and drift, Democrats desperate for new blood and new ideas might reconsider the faith they once put in their California delegation. Jejune fantasies of a “Left coast” paradise can no longer distract from the hard truth: In the age of Trump, Progressive California has been a drag on building real working-class power.

Trump has been unfazed by such warnings, glibly stating that children will “maybe” have fewer “dolls” than they used to. And for those who believe Trump is playing four-dimensional chess, fundamentally shifting the makeup of the American economy, decoupling from China, and reducing the overall trade deficit — all this is worth the pain. This, even as few of these cheerleaders have indications of what it is that Trump wants America to produce more of, and fewer still have realistic estimates of how long it will take to achieve all these ends.

The problem is that stagflation isn’t a blip or temporary “market correction” from which it will be easy for the US economy to emerge with greater dynamism. Rather, it is a series of mutually reinforcing negative trends that sap the willingness of firms to expand while progressively exhausting purchasing power for household essentials. That leaves less money in the economy for hiring and training, innovation, and the productive risk-taking Trump purportedly wants. Unless he imposes price controls and leans on the 1950 Defense Production Act and other emergency measures — “statist” decisions which even a MAGA-fied GOP is likely to denounce — Trump has no Plan B to simultaneously restrain costs and compel industries to reshore.

Many, then, have remarked that Trump’s main economic policies will have the opposite of their intended effect of reinvigorating the US industrial base. But there is another irony here. Despite his unflagging drive to browbeat firms and the Federal Reserve into supporting reindustrialization, this radical “conservative” President may soon encounter what all progressive and Left-wing governments have feared since the “great inflation” of the Seventies: a capital strike. In other words, the CEOs and financiers who rallied to Trump in 2024 may decide his whims are too disruptive to stay onboard — and that his apparent indifference to their profit margins, logistics, and ability to reasonably plan investments aren’t worth the candle.

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The Left can’t go back to free trade

By Justin H. Vassallo

The darkening forecast for growth precipitated so single-handedly by Trump’s management and priorities certainly has no modern precedent in US politics. But the deep uncertainty at all levels of the economy also underscores how difficult it is to alter, much less dramatically reverse, globalization. It is much easier to transfer supply chains from high-wage countries to low-wage ones than the other way around.

During Trump’s first-term trade war, Vietnam, not the US Rust Belt, was the primary beneficiary of high tariffs on China’s exports. Unless Trump resumes some of the punitive rates he paused after his “Liberation Day” tariff formula was roundly maligned, capital expenditure will be rerouted to other emerging markets — some of which the Biden administration tried to cultivate as part of its own “friend-shoring” strategy of Chinese containment. Yet swinging back to a uniformly aggressive tariff regime could rock the global economy, needlessly punishing foreign workers in textiles, small appliances, toys, and other entry-level sectors while precipitating shortages for American consumers.

Trump’s isolationist tendencies — which aren’t congruent with a positive of vision of economic nationalism — are also impeding efforts to improve America’s global share of manufacturing. Trump needs the cooperation of allies he’s gravely alienated if he intends to effectively curb Chinese trans-shipment of inputs that he wants American firms to make. However, neither he nor his closest advisers appears temperamentally prepared to make that case. Likewise, it seems impossible for them to accept that “near-shoring” of key components with strict limits on Chinese content is preferable to China’s increasing command of critical supply chains.

In turn, Trump’s constant jaw-boning could result in fewer concessions of a strategic nature. Trade barriers without multilateral coordination that fosters “reciprocal” industrial policies and content standards among close allies will do more to isolate America than insulate it from practices which undercut its manufacturers. While some unfair trade practices can be addressed by eliminating loopholes like de minimis, which allowed Chinese producers to sell and ship goods valued $800 or less directly to American consumers, Trump still lacks a plan to persuade multinationals and mid-size firms to transition away from third-party suppliers that perpetuate dumping and other harmful practices.

The ostensible carrot in all of this is Trump’s insistence that lower corporate taxes and deregulation will lure foreign investors to build in America. On the face of it, the logic is quite simple: if major foreign competitors want to avoid tariffs, they should treat the US labor market as worthy of investment. But Trump has not pursued the types of industrial policies that Biden launched, which could convince more foreign firms of the benefits of doing just that. There are clear downsides to Trump’s approach, too. The risks posed to workplace safety and pollution standards are worrisome enough, but there is also the matter of business’s confidence in America’s domestic political stability and the skill-level of its workers.

Contrary to the libertarian notion that enterprise wants only a nightwatchman state, fanatical deregulation and slashing state capacity are not particularly encouraging for firms concerned with high-value-added manufacturing and standards compliance across the supply chain. In fact, the Left-wing school of thought which critiqued “corporate liberalism” delineated why a strong administrative state was integral to making and stabilizing modern American capitalism. While some government policies have made it onerous to build efficiently in America, new research indicates that DOGE’s actions and similar cuts to federal research and development are likely to retard growth and make Americans significantly poorer, compounding the near-term losses imposed by passed-on tariff costs.

All else being equal, that will have a chilling effect on long-term fixed investment. Many companies will doubt that the broader political economy, which already favors financial rents over productive investment, and which Trump seems unwilling to reform in this respect, will justify opening new plants and keeping them operational for decades.

Given the limited policy options the Trump administration is working with, there are few other levers to pull. Trump may create enough instability in the interim to significantly lower the dollar’s value, theoretically enhancing the competitiveness of American manufacturing. A possible analogue here is the 1985 Plaza Accord orchestrated by the Reagan administration, which temporarily boosted American exports, albeit at considerable cost to developing nations that had piled up debt to diversify their economies. However, America’s industrial capacity is far more diminished than it was after the 1981-1982 Volcker Shock and ensuing recession, again illustrating the “input” dilemma created by decades of offshoring. Trump wants to replace foreign inputs with American-made ones, but a weaker dollar would make plant investment more costly, since to some extent the country needs to temporarily increase imports of capital goods to efficiently rebuild domestic supply chains.

Some may counter that the dollar has long been overvalued, and that this has worsened inequality by rewarding short-term financial gains, favoring consumption of cheap imports, and eliminating the pathways to middle-class prosperity historically provided by American manufacturing. In fact, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other prominent voices on the progressive Left made these arguments in the last decade. Yet Trump has not signalled how a weaker dollar in the current context would reduce, rather than exacerbate, international supply chokepoints. Nor has he indicated in the slightest how it would translate into a less financialized economy. Tanking global confidence in the dollar — and US Treasuries as a safe haven — is not a recipe on its own for curbing speculative finance, which Trump has otherwise encouraged through his alliance with the libertarian Tech Right and support for cryptocurrencies.

In the meantime, it is possible the early phase of stagflation is already unfolding. In anticipation of broad price hikes from tariffs, consumers binged on spending the last two months, likely masking the extent to which a slowdown has been set in motion by Trump’s capricious strategy to boost domestic industry. Unease over supply costs, meanwhile, has further reduced manufacturing orders and output, according to the Institute of Supply Management, a leading industry association. On the positive side, the hiring freeze detected last year appears to be gradual, unemployment remains low, and the last two job reports were better than expected. But the long-term jobless still number 1.7 million people, or nearly 1 of 4 unemployed workers; that level, reached last November, is a half million more than a year ago.

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As falling consumer confidence underscores, spending is based on fears of rising inflation, rather than optimism about wages and spending power, and that tariffs are cooling, not spurring, plant investment. Historic levels of household debt also suggest necessities are eating into disposable incomes. That is not an auspicious sign for manufacturers worried about whether new investments will be met with stronger demand. Another consecutive quarterly contraction would officially mark a recession, which is increasingly accepted as a fait accompli by many analysts.

Trump, of course, mounted his unexpected comeback in 2024 due to widespread disgruntlement with Biden’s economic performance. Despite a suite of policies that fueled an uptick in plant investment and construction, Biden and his anointed successor, Kamala Harris, couldn’t escape the ire over the drop in real incomes from 2021 through mid-2023. Thus far, Trump’s policies promise another decline in real wages without either the Biden-era regional investments or the tight labor markets that helped the economy rebound faster from the pandemic. Considering Team Trump still partly frames tariffs as a tool for negotiation, it is conceivable they will eventually retreat on the basis of some symbolic concessions by major firms and trade partners to support more balanced trade.

However, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Trump will keep a stubbornly tough tariff regime in place and eventually force American firms and consumers to adjust. US Presidents, particularly Republicans, are caricatured as fearing experiments that spark market volatility and derail consumer sentiment. But the unfading populism of recent years has prompted leaders from both political parties to take protectionist risks considered irrational during an earlier, more painful stage of industrial decline in the late 20th century. That pattern is unlikely to change anytime soon, despite immense pressure from Wall Street to scrap radical changes to how America does business with the world.

That doesn’t mean Trump or his heirs will emerge victorious after the initial economic shock. Americans are paradoxically wary of major changes to the modern consumer economy and voting for politicians promising major disruptions to the status quo, and they may continue to punish incumbents for results that do little to improve their own sense of economic security. While Trump has taken an axe to globalization’s main pillars, it may be a Democrat who ultimately capitalizes on the outcome. The question, then, will be whether they try to turn back the clock or refine the unfocused autarky Trump has embraced.

There is much to lament about Trump’s reckless approach, not least his unsound and punitive formula for calculating tariff rates. But there is a reason we are here: the old trade order plunged millions of working-class Americans into misery and precarity, impelling a decisive share of them to elect Trump twice. As far as they’re concerned, there is no going back to a system that, in the words of United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain, turned once-proud industrial centers into “blast zones”.

Influential pundits such as Matthew Yglesias and prominent Democrats such as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis are bent on getting Democrats to reaffirm the superiority of “free trade”. But they are misguided about what this moment calls for. Instead of simply denouncing Trump’s agenda, progressives must stand for a holistic trade policy that reimagines development at home and abroad.

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Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ will fail

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Not long ago, progressives were clear-eyed about the fictions and concealed costs of liberalized trade and global economic integration. In the Nineties, labor unions, environmentalists, and anti-sweatshop activists warned against the “race to the bottom” of globalization without basic guardrails to limit pollution and prevent human-rights abuses. Distant, multi-stage supply chains portended ecological damage and the severe coercion of vulnerable foreign workers, including children, while unfettered import competition in an era of shrinking public investment threatened the foundations of working-class security at home.

These concerns usually met with indifference in Washington, despite growing evidence that new trade agreements disproportionately benefited powerful multinationals and were riddled with opportunities for exploitation. Echoing President John F. Kennedy, who believed deeper trade would bolster America’s Cold War alliances, mainstream economists assured that global growth would bring prosperity for all.

It was a utopian promise, backed by technocratic models and clever political stagecraft.

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The benefits, even to the developing world, were overstated. Remove China’s share of the global middle class, and poverty reduction over the last 25 years looks far less encouraging. While there are fewer “least developed countries” today than there were in the year 2000, the World Bank reports that middle-income countries, which include over 60% of the world’s total poor, are struggling to diversify their economies and improve their developmental outcomes.

The main obstacles are becoming more, not less, insurmountable. Although Covid restrictions, a strong US dollar, and higher interest rates have sunk expectations for global growth this decade, the People’s Republic’s massive export dominance is a central factor in this story. The “China Shock” — once thought to be an unfortunate byproduct of US-China trade limited to the American Rust Belt — has spread to other parts of the world, in some cases undermining the transition to advanced manufacturing. Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, this has led to what the economist Dani Rodrik calls “premature deindustrialization”. (Notably, this trend has no discernible upside in terms of lower greenhouse-gas emissions, biodiversity, soil health, and potable water.)

On the domestic front, meanwhile, Trump has shrewdly exploited the failure to create good new jobs to replace the ones lost to free trade. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama championed tech-driven global commerce. But the promised jobs boom in tech, professional services, and advanced manufacturing never materialized. Each recession since 1990 has resulted in a so-called jobless recovery, whereby lost skilled work is not made up for through new opportunities in emerging industries. Americans without college degrees, still over 60% of the electorate, are now predominantly underemployed or hold multiple low-wage jobs.

These developments markedly changed the country’s economic geography. While inequality in the United States has always had a distinctly regional dimension in addition to race and gender, globalization has amplified the concentration of economic power by class and zip code, rather than dispersing it. Small industrial cities and rural areas across the Greater Midwest and South have suffered the most, fueling populist resentment.

Conditions aren’t much better for America’s middle class, even within the perimeter of prosperous liberal-leaning metros. A college education — an increasingly unproven ticket to upward mobility — now costs a fortune, and debt-laden graduates have swelled the ranks of precarious service and gig workers since the Great Recession. Rent inflation and the housing shortage have all but transformed major coastal cities — the main engines of growth prior to Covid — into upper-income enclaves.

Deindustrialization and the country’s worsening trade deficit aren’t, in every instance, the direct cause of these crises. Deregulation and weak antitrust enforcement have played their part. But economic hardships stemming from trade policy are interwoven with most of the other factors driving inequality, including shareholder buybacks, short-term profit-seeking, needless tax breaks for the wealthy, and the clout of venture capitalists who increasingly determine when, where, and how business investment happens.

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Democrats are wasting a populist moment

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A progressive trade policy would dramatically overhaul a system that has privileged non-productive investment and upward redistribution. It would rebuild the country’s industrial base and create opportunities in places starved of them. But in sharp contrast to the current administration, such a vision would aim to eliminate financial loopholes, stop the use of tax havens, and enforce the labor, health, environmental, and safety regulations whose absence would revert America to the harsh industrial conditions of the Gilded Age.

Apologists for the new trade war claim that the “one-time price adjustment” Trump is imposing will be soon offset by a rollback of business and environmental regulations, thereby creating more favorable conditions for new factory construction. Their argument rests on this basic equation: excessive regulations have made it even harder for domestic industry to compete with cheap imports, and the regulatory obstacles to new investment outweigh the impact of dramatically raising the cost of foreign inputs and semi-finished goods via tariffs.

Ironically, the “abundance liberals” most vehemently opposed to industrial protectionism tacitly agree with the Trump administration that the permitting process is in desperate need of reform if America is to build more housing, bolster energy independence, and make it easier to grow small and mid-size businesses. To be sure, there are cases of regulatory bottlenecks needlessly delaying or preventing large-scale projects that benefit working-class Americans. Yet it is the broader pattern of outsourcing, short-termism, financialization, and regional disinvestment in worker training — not, say, clean air and safety standards — that are most to blame for the fact that it is impossible to produce an array of tradable goods in America.

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In contrast to a plan which would sacrifice US labor and environmental standards, progressive trade policies would have real teeth when it comes to international standards. Fair-trade advocate Lori Wallach, now director of Rethink Trade, a new think tank, has long maintained that many Left-of-center global policies — carbon restrictions, barriers to trade dumping, and laws against forced labor — amount to targeted tariffs.

This is neither extreme nor a measure of last resort. Sensible tariffs can directly and indirectly buttress a host of standards and norms that Western societies take for granted, and that trade unions over several generations fought for. The goal of trade policy should be to accommodate the right of poorer countries to develop, without undercutting modern taboos against forced labor, servitude, and reckless extraction.

Here, though, would be another opportunity to draw a distinction with Trump’s short-sighted and isolationist tendencies. As opposed to a massive tariff wall, progressives could deploy a mix of carrots and sticks similar to those used to stoke domestic reinvestment. Routine bad actors on child labor, for example, would be excluded from favorable trade relations, and antitrust law could be conceivably wielded against companies that try to circumvent “social” or environmental tariffs. But the US government would also recommit to supporting state capacity, the rule of law, and humane working conditions in countries that aspire to surpass the “millennium development goals” enunciated by the United Nations at the turn of the century.

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That would entail reversing DOGE’s life-threatening cuts to international aid. Yet it would also ideally involve other measures to restore US credibility on the world stage. If America is to repair the damage this administration has already caused, a future progressive government needs to demonstrate unequivocal support for renewable energy abundance (very much including nuclear power), food security, and workers’ rights in developing regions.

In spirit and name, this would be a chance to repudiate the country’s past support for policies which constrained and sometimes crushed movements for economic democracy in the Global South. At the same time, a new progressive trade paradigm must readily eschew the elitism and policy incoherence that have tainted the environmental movement in the eyes of ordinary Americans and working and lower-middle classes across the Atlantic. Following years of austerity, workers need to be assured that a different trade regime combining national economic priorities and global standards will markedly improve their livelihoods and communities, not lower their sights further.

Harmonizing these domestic and international goals has often eluded the US government in the past. The accelerating fallout from Trump’s abysmal international posture promises to make it more difficult still. Progressives, however, have little choice but to recognize the full complexity of trade policy — and to develop solutions to the disappointments and betrayals that have led to this stunning rupture of the postwar order.

Nothing less than global peace, prosperity, and democracy depend on it.

His solution is equally blunt. He and his advisers insist that aggressive, universal tariffs, combined with deregulation and corporate tax cuts, will render cross-border supply chains less lucrative and domestic investment attractive for business.

The problem is that virtually every other Trump action since Inauguration Day has undercut the state capacity needed to rehabilitate core industries and shepherd capital and labor towards new ones. Instead of leveraging state power on behalf of massive public-private projects, research and development, and workforce training, Team Trump has subjected government agencies to DOGE’s ruthless budget cuts, and frozen funds from or threatened to terminate President Joe Biden’s flagship industrial policies.

The Trumpians are plotting to privatize a host of government services, and have sent a chill through research institutes vital to breakthroughs in advanced medicine, technology, and manufacturing. Meanwhile, the administration has largely crippled antitrust enforcement, thereby favoring powerful monopolies that can withstand or circumvent trade barriers over mechanisms to coax healthy domestic competition and investment.

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None of these actions furthers the purported aims of tariffs and targeted export controls: to create good jobs for the forgotten working class and turn depressed regions into desirable places in which to work and live. On the contrary, slashing and burning state capacity will hinder these goals. Most damningly, the Hamiltonian tradition the Trumpians claim to champion is a powerful witness against the belief that a crippled state can boost manufacturing.

These shortcomings haven’t stopped some of Trump’s most vehement critics on the labor Left, not least United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, from conceding that he is partly right on trade. The bipartisan Washington establishment of the late 20^th century made a colossal mistake in offshoring millions of jobs on the naive assumption that high-tech innovation and services would replace manufacturing, the historic engine of American upward mobility and growth.

But despite being motivated by fear over China’s phenomenal rise, Trump’s strategy has proved mostly incoherent, not to say contradictory, sowing serious doubts over whether America, after decades of outsourcing and regulatory capture by major multinationals, has the institutional know-how to meet the new president’s promise of industrial renewal.

Trump’s approach isn’t merely myopic, though — it betrays the legacy of the GOP statesmen whom champions of his tariffs regularly invoke to defend the current administration.

The populist Right’s evangelism for Trump’s protectionist impulses has long rested on the notion that he is boldly reviving the “American System” school of economics. This tradition stretches from Alexander Hamilton in the founding era and Henry Clay in the early republic to the heterodox economist Henry Charles Carey, the influential lawmaker Justin S. Morrill (architect of Civil War-era tariffs), and Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. These Republican statesmen and thinkers espoused a doctrine of development premised on diversified manufacturing, vast energy sources, scientific progress, and spreading education in the “industrial arts”.

Scholars describe this doctrine as unabashedly mercantilist. Yet 19^th-century Republicans maintained that it furthered the country’s founding ideals of self-government and associationalism: the notion that an industrious, republican citizenry will form voluntary organizations conducive to promoting shared interests that transcend divisions by region, sector, or class.

Neither laissez-faire nor statist, the old GOP that supposedly inspires Trump fused support for large developmental goals from disparate parts of society — inventors, aspiring industrial magnates, prospectors, advocates of “scientific agriculture”, financiers, and tradesmen. The intent was to spread commercial hubs built on regional interdependence, raising manufacturing and agricultural output while also curbing demand for goods from competitors like Victorian Britain.

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Tariffs underpinned this system by pushing farmers, merchants, and consumers to purchase US-made goods and support local industries. Post-Civil War, tariffs underwrote pensions for Union Army veterans and their families (then a huge constituency of the GOP). Tariffs were also meant to lessen the competitiveness of imports made by foreign “pauper” labor, attracting the support of skilled workers who had few other avenues to stable wages.

Like Trump, the Republican leaders of a distant epoch believed high tariffs were a means to building national wealth and power. And their aversion to foreign competition ran deep. Cheap foreign goods were, in modern parlance, the real source of “market distortions”, because, unchecked, they made profitable manufacturing less viable and threatened the livelihoods of skilled workers.

Even Republican reformers who, like Theodore Roosevelt, were more attuned to the daily needs of thrifty households and worried that tariffs had given rise to unaccountable monopolies tended to believe that free trade was decadent. On the verge of America becoming a world power, Roosevelt remarked that “pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fiber”. Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was channeling the same sentiment when he asserted in a recent speech that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream”.

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But this is where the similarities end. In fact, depicting Trump as a descendant of the old protectionist pedigree misses an important dimension of past Republican thought. From the Lincoln era to Eisenhower’s, Republicans deployed a range of policies besides tariffs to stoke development and progress. The party’s Trumpian incarnation entirely ignores these other strategies, when it doesn’t undermine them.

Take the legacy of Morrill, the lawmaker who, in addition to protective tariffs, authored the legislation that created America’s exemplary land-grant colleges. Morrill well understood the relationship between education in fields like agronomy and engineering and productive innovation. The Homestead Act from the same period, which distributed public lands to frontier homesteaders for a nominal fee, likewise reflected the GOP’s belief in the importance of “decentralized” economic growth for a democratic society.

By contrast, Trump’s sweeping cuts to university grants, including for regional public universities that serve his rural base, disregard the country’s pressing skills shortage. Meanwhile, his lofty campaign pledge to build 10 “freedom cities“, still embryonic, evokes not so much the producer populism of westward expansion, but the dystopian “startup societies” dreamt up by Silicon Valley — or a Middle Eastern petrostate.

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The administration’s axiomatic contempt for regulation is also not in keeping with the GOP’s historical view. Reductive histories portray the GOP as always preaching “small government”. But the party once had vigorous debates about the purpose and scope of regulation.

Despite occasionally assailing corporate malfeasance and grilling feckless CEOs in congressional hearings, today’s Right-wing populists have yet to match the Republican “insurgents” from the party’s Roosevelt wing, including the likes of Sens. Hiram Johnson and George Norris, who pushed for corporate regulation, public works, public utilities, and direct democracy, and took a stand against corruption. Though they were rarely “redistributive” in the social-democratic sense, such positions aimed to prevent abuses by the politically connected and to give working people a material stake in democracy.

Earlier Republicans were also quite experimental in their time. President Herbert Hoover, forever marked by his loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt for failing to alleviate the Great Depression, was, during his earlier tenure as Commerce secretary, a consummate technocrat who sought to deepen cooperation between various government bureaus and business associations to make policymaking more scientific.

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In stark contrast to DOGE’s modus operandi, Hoover’s efforts to reorganize government were founded on a belief in expertise and the legitimacy of using regulation to make markets more rational; the development of America’s burgeoning aviation sector, improvements in radio technology, and national business standards for product sizes were among his achievements.

Hoover was hardly a central planner. Judged by the current GOP’s ethos, though, his record of bureaucratic oversight epitomized the growth of the modern administrative state.

Of course, the New Deal realignment, which hobbled the GOP’s support for a generation, cemented the popular view that Republicans regularly opposed active government. But until the Reagan era, most mainstream Republicans accepted the New Deal order, occasionally endorsed breaking up monopolies, and eagerly supported generous federal funding for science and technology, even as they ritually affirmed the principle of “free enterprise”.

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Most famously, the Eisenhower administration’s vast Interstate Highway System updated Republicans’ past support for “internal improvements” for the Cold War era, further propelling the rise in suburban homeownership that characterized the postwar boom. And progressives’ arch-bogeyman Richard Nixon, now frequently regarded as the last “New Deal president”, signed NEPA and OSHA, the country’s landmark laws, respectively, for environmental protection and workplace-safety standards.

In short, major players in the Republican Party adopted a more flexible and interventionist view of political economy than is commonly recognized. Most MAGA influencers today would no doubt dismiss such evidence as not reflecting “true” Republicanism. Partisan progressives would similarly concur, at most allowing that “progressive Republicans” are extinct because the Democratic Party became their natural home.

This is to be expected. A few conservative think tanks and public intellectuals have sought to create a genuinely “pro-development” and “pro-worker” agenda for Republicans. But the anti-government tirades of Newt Gingrich, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and their successors in the Tea Party movement did much to fix the partisan battle lines of the last few decades, few of which the MAGA movement has redrawn besides disavowing George W. Bush’s embrace of globalized trade.

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Trump’s GOP is thus fixated on slashing and burning its way through the state, rather than restoring faith in positive government. For a little while, even skeptics allowed that a new working-class base, plus rising tensions with Beijing, might push Republicans to embrace an industrial strategy that recovered some of their party’s authentic traditions of domestic progress.

That possibility has come to naught. While Trump proclaims “liberation” is imminent, the rapid loss of state capacity under his watch promises anything but. Tariffs excepted, there is little concrete government action to compel market forces to meet national economic objectives, and the GOP has bent over backwards to accommodate banking lobbies vociferously opposed to even minor restraints on financial predation.

One hardly needs to be a radical populist to see this doesn’t bode well for American society. As the most perceptive believers in the “American System” understood, an economy that fails to maximize its productive forces and promote workers’ well-being is destined to wither. If America is to avert permanent decline, it needs leaders determined to prevent the spread of servitude masked as “liberty”.

An opposition party with any sense of its populist roots would strike fast. The looming return of inflation is sinking consumer confidence. The job market is freezing up. And new data show that the richest Americans account for 50% of household spending. To “pay” for tax cuts, House Republicans are contemplating slashing Medicaid, which provides health insurance to more than 80 million low-income Americans; the GOP would sooner penalize its new working-class base than disobey its C-suite masters.

Democrats, in short, have a chance at redemption — provided they embrace a populist spirit to counter Trump’s billionaire-led pseudo-populism.

Yet enfeebled only begins to capture their coalition’s pitiable state. Instead of mounting a cohesive strategy, elected Democrats are rehashing their Trump I playbook, only more lamely, with protests staged by fired civil servants and lawsuits against executive orders that subvert or violate existing laws and regulations. Neither tactic has demonstrated real conviction. By their own admission, congressional Democrats are unfocused, torn over whom and what to stand for.

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The Left has forgotten its philosophy

By Justin H. Vassalo

It’s a dismaying symptom of how little progressives have learned from the 2024 election, and how they fail to see the populist opportunity. Consider the target-rich environment created by Musk and DOGE. The Tesla and SpaceX boss’s vast role in the new White House amounts to direct oligarchic capture of the American state. He is quite literally deleting agencies that could regulate his current and future enterprises or empower labor unions at his foundries.

But the Democratic leadership is still patently afraid of channeling Americans’ frustration with the system, as Trump did. They have become too dependent on fighting Trump through the courts and government agencies to truly seize the populist case against him: to wit, a majority of inflation-stung working-class Americans backed Trump in 2024 because he pledged to protect entitlements and to lower costs, and because he courted organized labor — not to deregulate Wall Street or cripple collective bargaining.

Democratic paralysis betrays a fear of the electorate. Ardent liberals still thrill to the promise of “enlightened” judges striking down Trump’s actions, viewing every ideological battle through the lens of what jurisprudence, not retail politics, can do to improve the nation’s moral fiber. A politics that leads by injunction, however, isn’t grounded in persuasion and popular mobilization. And it disregards the problems Trump exploited to win the election, from soaring living costs and rising consumer debt to progressives’ ill-conceived policies on migration and public safety.

Nor have they shown much desire to counter the impression that upscale cultural stances have supplanted the party’s focus on egalitarian development and progressive redistribution. Not exactly free of their own conflicts of interest, most Democrats sound stilted and insincere when it comes to discussing the role of power and money in US politics outside Trump’s orbit.

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It’s no surprise, then, that Democrats are plainly flailing in their battle to change “the narrative.” At this stage, formulaic denunciations of Trump and his most zealous appointees won’t do; on the contrary, the cartoon epithets and rehearsed preachiness offered by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the party’s congressional leaders, have only magnified the liberal establishment’s petrifaction over a dying order.

One wonders why Democrats haven’t revisited the formative speeches and ideas of liberal icons like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Robert F. Kennedy or populists like William Jennings Bryan, who sparked the party’s renewal in the Gilded Age. With the exception of Sen. Bernie Sanders — who, at 83, is barnstorming the Farm Belt — progressives seem to be waiting for another Covid-level crisis to torpedo Trump’s support.

That is yet another reminder of how insular modern progressivism has become. Restraining the executive branch through the courts is, to be sure, a time-honored tradition across the political spectrum. But to truly countervail Trump II requires unstinting support for more Americans’ active participation in civil society, including those citizens without college degrees. An older breed of progressives who won office through their alliances with small farmers, consumer-protection leagues, and trade unionists understood this well; a judicial blow against vested interests, malfeasance, and corruption, though important, wasn’t a substitute for arrangements and institutions that gave ordinary people a genuine voice in their community affairs.

In a bygone era, Democrats’ lawyerly instincts were directed primarily against monopolists, local magnates, and unscrupulous business practices. At the state and federal level, they recognized that the law could apply intelligent restraints against market power, while also stimulating the development that their downtrodden base demanded of them.

Later in the postwar era, Democrats joined with liberal Republicans to enact laws that codified principles of nondiscrimination on questions of race, national origin, sex, and disability. Although the corresponding growth of the federal bureaucracy served as a pretext for Reagan conservatives to roll back these social protections, Democrats were hardly the high-handed bureaucrats they were depicted as by their “small-government” adversaries.

In fact, until the mid-Nineties, when they began to lose their populist bona fides in the South and greater Midwest, Democrats tended to view Congress as the best vehicle to defend and advance the interests of working people from all regions. Their support of a strong federal government, whose departments for regulatory oversight and social insurance expanded between the New Deal and Great Society, was complemented and balanced by an understanding of each region’s needs. They didn’t, accordingly, view politics as a zero-sum contest that largely revolved around the legitimacy of decisions made by the executive branch and judiciary.

Since Trump’s ascent, however, the legal stratagems of Democrats and their media allies have allowed them to ignore the root causes of populist discontent, economic and cultural. This has had the unintended effect of aiding Trump’s claim that a multipronged “deep state” is undermining his authority, thwarting the will of the people.

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In turn, progressives have backed themselves into a corner, disconnected, even in deep-blue cities, from the very people they profess to serve. Thanks to their uncritical defense of all things branded “woke,” Democrats are now viewed by working-class voters of all races as litigious, censorious, and elitist. Indeed, the Democratic Party is seen as the very opposite of the one whose unifying thread, from Bryan’s heyday through the Seventies, was its respect for the dignity — and judgment — of the common man and woman.

It will take much more that clever rhetoric to change perceptions. Democratic allies sermonize about democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law at the same time that they repeat the self-defeating, self-righteous notion that all voters who have rejected the party’s Soviet-esque succession of leaders are rubes and bigots. Such attitudes are, in a way, akin to Trumpian defiance, but with none of the obvious political benefits.

A party that preys on its base’s fears of right-wing authoritarianism ought, at the very least, to be plowing money toward candidates who can speak to middle America. Yet Democrats are seemingly content to allow competitive elections to dwindle so long as they retain control of the nation’s largest urban and commercial centers (which, not incidentally, tend to have low turnout in local elections). This signals that Democrats are wary of being accountable to downscale and left-behind Americans. But disaffected workers, especially those who make a conscious decision to withhold their votes, aren’t foolish: they know the liberal establishment is much less concerned about democracy than it pretends to be.

The party’s deepening identity and ideological crisis also explains its strangely Janus-faced view of grassroots democracy. Democrats face a distinct burden as the normative “party of government” in an age of stark inequality, unabashed clientelism, and staggering corporate patronage. As social trust and approval of major institutions have plummeted in the last two decades, Democrats have failed to restore confidence in basic public administration at the federal and local level, much less inspire hope that government can once again implement reforms that directly benefit millions of citizens. The economic experiments of Bidenism excepted, today’s Democrats have become rather guarded about government’s purpose, even as they cry foul over Republicans’ indiscriminate attacks on social programs, civil servants, and scientific research.

The Trumpian assault on government as such may finally spur Democrats to confront all which ails American workers. Or not. Democrats and their professional-class base seem primed to relitigate the same battles over “big government” that were fought in the Eighties and Nineties, rather than uncritically examine why so many Americans, both rural and urban, feel disenfranchised.

Ever since becoming the favored party of the coastal establishment (and, until Trump’s 2024 campaign, Silicon Valley), Democrats grew too comfortable running a globalized economic system, playing both its cautious reformer and its custodian. That blinded them to the contradictions that now percolate their philosophy of governance, above all, the friction between the egalitarian aims that made Rooseveltian liberalism triumph and the party’s yearslong fixation with becoming — rather than taming — the American elite. Enthralled by esoteric beliefs about self-actualization, social justice, and cultural progress, many imagine they are part of a forward-thinking vanguard, even as the areas they govern show signs of acute distress.

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Attempts to check Trump will prove dismal so long as Democrats fail to confront why they are no longer seen as champions of the public interest. While blue-collar Trump supporters may soon rue the powers granted to an unreconstructed GOP, they aren’t necessarily confused or hypocritical in their desires.

Many Americans clearly long for more effective, transparent, and responsive government in a manner that doesn’t conform to the worldviews of either progressive or conservative intellectuals. Depending on the issue, it could mean more state capacity and oversight or more impartial respect for individual rights. Progressives, therefore, might consider actually engaging with the societal complexity in which they so often claim expertise, and immerse themselves, as few have, in the actual lifeworld of the forgotten and dispossessed.

Revamping the #Resistance along familiar lines is and will remain tempting. Trump’s betrayals and broken promises are already accumulating, and they should be attacked without fear at every opportunity. But this must be connected to a broader reckoning with the American crisis. Yet if the consultant class and the Democratic establishment had their way, the party would continue to ignore the rampant failures that have rekindled Americans’ Jacksonian mood.

Countering Trump ultimately requires an unflinching account of America’s precipitous decline — as well as a cogent vision of radical reform, and accountable governance, for the 21^st century.

Now the race for the next leader of the Democratic National Committee, to be elected on 1 February, is an opportunity to confront the party’s utter collapse in Middle America and chart a new course. Whether the Democrats will seize the chance turns on the resolve of the winner to buck the party’s subservience to donors and allocate resources to fresh candidates in former swing states.

The two most prominent contenders — Wisconsin party chairman Ben Wikler and Minnesota chairman Ken Martin — are workhorses adept at the art of coalition management. As Midwestern white guys, Martin and Wikler could help the party stanch the hemorrhage of Democratic support among their own demographic. But while they have sounded populist notes, their appetite for a shake-up has yet to be tested.

The backdrop is bleak. Progressives are demoralized over The Squad’s diminished size. Red-state Democrats are reeling from the loss of Sens. Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, and Bob Casey. And establishment liberals such as Chuck Schumer have rationalized defeat by explaining that workers “didn’t realize” how much Democrats “care for them”. Party activists can’t spot any would-be saviors in the distant horizon.

The job of the next DNC chairperson won’t be easy or glamorous. He or she will face the daunting task of rebuilding the Democratic coalition in nearly every part of America. Not only are Democrats on a backfoot in the Rust Belt and former Sun Belt strongholds like Florida, they must reckon with Trump’s surprising inroads among working-class voters and people of color in deep-blue areas.

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To be effective, the DNC leader will have to intervene forcefully in big debates over ideology and strategy. Grassroots activists, Left-wing intellectuals, and labor leaders such as Shawn Fain of the United Autoworkers are urging a showdown with the donor class and corporate power to compete with Trump’s GOP. Others who are close to the party elite are proposing a “common-sense” approach to economics, which some suspect is code for a Wall Street-friendly tack.

As the DNC’s 448 members gear up to vote, it’s far from certain that the victor will have a mandate to court the working-class voters who have defected to Trump since 2016. Still, there are hopes for serious change following the hapless tenure of Jaime Harrison, a friend of elite lobbyists who staunchly defended the party’s embrace of identity politics after critics blamed it for November’s humbling results.

At first glance, Martin and Wikler, the two frontrunners, seem well-positioned to oversee a “reset”. Each boasts of having overhauled his respective state party. Each enjoys the backing of labor unions, grassroots organizations, and reform-minded establishment figures. And both have bluntly stated that the party lost the working class this past election.

The basic assumption is that either of these two middle-aged white men from the Upper Midwest is suited to reconnecting the party with Gen-X and Millennial men without a college education — a demographic group that extended its shift to the right in November. A victory by either Martin or Wikler, the thinking goes, would install a competent leader bent on revamping the party’s message and cultivating down-ballot insurgents in states that have swung to the GOP since the Obama era.

Yet there are reasons to doubt the Democrats will be so easily led out of their morass. Most centrally, there is no obvious basis for a truce between the party’s Left flank and its more centrist members. Many progressives are unwilling or afraid to discipline “the Groups” — the professional advocacy organizations that are widely seen as responsible for the party’s unpopular and outré positions on race, immigration, gender, sexuality, drugs, and criminal justice. This reputation has overshadowed progressives’ support for a strong welfare state, consumer protection, and workers’ rights, limiting their appeal among workers who lean Right or simply hold mainstream views on cultural questions.

The “moderates”, meanwhile, comprise two factions that generally disagree on economic priorities: Rust Belt populists who shrink from the excesses of the “woke” Left, and neoliberals who once exploited identity politics but are now willing to muzzle “the Groups” if that means regaining control of the party.

Although both moderate factions have recently stressed the importance of tackling high prices, they are divided on tariffs, corporate oversight, and the need for long-term re-industrialization. Team Biden’s gamble on industrial policy failed to stir the electorate, leaving populists who supported such efforts without a clear framework to move forward. And they diverge from progressives on key questions such as border security, the pace of the green transition, and the economic threat posed by China. This impasse has emboldened neoliberals backed by major donors to discourage a push toward populist economics.

Bridging these divides while preventing a return to neoliberal orthodoxy will require clearheaded leadership. An effective DNC leader must bend progressives and neoliberals on the issues where they are most vulnerable. Given Martin’s and Wikler’s Midwestern backgrounds, it is reasonable to wager that both would favor the pragmatic populists. Neither contender, however, seems terribly inclined to force hard choices on the party’s dominant factions.

Take Wikler, whom pundits have depicted as more likely to excite the progressive base and who just garnered the endorsements of seven Democratic governors. While some high-profile commentators see him as bolder than Martin, he has embraced the same naked appeals to identity politics that have backed his party into a corner. Wikler has also been credited with “nationalizing” elections in Wisconsin to make them more competitive for Democrats. This involves attracting major media to lesser-known contests and mobilizing party activists behind local candidates whose election could have a decisive impact on Democratic priorities.

In the right context, this strategy can generate momentum and pool resources for progressive challengers to Republican incumbents. But as disastrous races elsewhere have demonstrated, it can also exacerbate perceptions in places typically ignored by Democrats that the party elite is only interested in flashy contests that fill up campaign war chests.

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Martin, meanwhile, may be too mild-mannered to forge meaningful compromises. A leader possessing sangfroid still must be able to throw a punch, particularly in the age of Trump. Avoiding gaffes that reinforce perceptions that Democrats are as much in the pocket of Wall Street as the GOP is also crucial. In a recent candidate forum, Martin appeared to astound himself when he blurted that Democrats will take money from “good billionaires … who share our values,” but not from “those bad billionaires”. Oops.

Still, there is some evidence he has more of an independent streak than Wikler. Martin has focused on strengthening the autonomy of local party branches and irritated the elite by establishing a group of state leaders that is separate from the DNC. For the sake of rebuilding local trust, such a strategy might be worth the price of angering consultants and grandees from the Northeast and California. Democrats are in desperate need of someone willing to clean house and keep the liberal establishment at arm’s length.

Whoever prevails, however, must do more than hone a new image. For Democrats to have any hope of winning back the working class, they need to recall the policies but also the party vision that gave succor to struggling Americans from their party’s founding in the Jacksonian era to the New Deal and the Great Society.

Egalitarianism, the vitality of a free society, and a belief that active government could spur national progress: these were the ideas that the Democratic giants of the past masterfully combined in their appeals to ordinary people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman could denounce injustice in plain language while arousing the spirit of optimism once considered inherent to the American experience.

In more practical terms, that meant adapting the original progressive tradition of the Midwest, predicated on reining in monopolies and forging alliances between workers, small businesses, and farmers. For decades, this approach to coalition-building was embraced by Left-leaning Democrats, from populists like Oklahoma’s Fred Harris to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. It flourished until the end of last century, when Bill Clinton’s commitment to globalization sundered his party’s ties with small towns and fading industrial regions.

Biden, to his credit, did draw on this older progressive tradition through his administration’s antitrust policies. Despite stark obstacles in the heartland, rallying the party once more to the anti-monopoly banner is probably the best way to revive its fortunes. The alternative is to court America’s wealthy suburbs — an approach that would close the door on New Deal liberalism for good and that may not even be worth the candle, judging by Harris’s campaign.

Yet with the exception of Howard Dean, a former presidential candidate who pursued a 50-state strategy in the mid-aughts, all of the party’s recent leaders have been careerists beholden to the donor class. This has deepened the sense among disenchanted activists that the obstacles to major reform also run through the DNC. To rebuild the Democratic coalition, the DNC will have do more than serve as the gatekeeper of critical campaign funds.

The overarching task of the next four to eight years, then, is to build the bridge to a new era that Biden himself couldn’t deliver. That demands identifying future leaders who speak to the common interests of American workers, while encouraging stances that serve America’s long-term security.

It also means resisting pressure to cede control of the party’s direction to powerful presidential aspirants. The 2028 field is already anticipated to feature ultra-wealthy players such as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and celebrity tycoons like Mark Cuban. A party leader intent on protecting democracy from oligarchy would do well to act as Martin has and defy efforts to centralize power in patronage networks that resemble Trump’s.

No matter how ambitious the next DNC leader turns out to be, stoking an anti-donor insurgency won’t come naturally. Democrats in the Trump era have become the party of institutions — so much so that they can’t see the powerful interests that have suffocated reform in the cradle. But if the party has a soul, its salvation begins with a revolution against its own monopolists. A venerable tradition calls out to those willing to take up the gauntlet.

As that similarity reveals, tariffs and other trade restrictions are divisive across the political spectrum. High-profile, California-based donors had hoped a Harris administration would snuff out Joe Biden’s policy experiments which challenged globalisation. But some union-aligned Democrats still believe that a more effective leader could salvage Biden’s vision of a domestic manufacturing renaissance. The evolving politics of protectionism is bound to scramble traditional partisan alignments in this volatile era of geopolitics.

The great irony of the tariff debate is that Trump’s signature issue was largely stolen from Rust Belt Democrats. Although Trump’s nativist rhetoric and broadsides against “cheating”, not just by China but close allies, has alarmed the liberal foreign policy establishment over the years, his fundamental critique of free trade is not so different from the stance adopted by earlier Democrats.

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Between the late Sixties and early Eighties, a number of New Deal-style liberals dropped the Democratic Party’s historical support for trade liberalisation and turned toward full-bore protectionism. On top of advocating aggressive trade controls, these liberals focused on reindustrialising the Northeast and Midwest. The argument was essentially twofold: postwar trade agreements were destabilising wages and employment in once-flourishing manufacturing sectors while doing little to improve the welfare of exploited “sweat shop” workers abroad. This system of trade integration — engineered by import lobbies, US-based multinationals, and their bipartisan allies in Washington — represented what progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren later dubbed a “race to the bottom”.

The final iteration of this Left-protectionist vision, considerably watered down by the rise of tech-obsessed “Atari Democrats” and policy advisors like the young Robert Reich, received two fatal blows. First, Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide re-election, and then Bill Clinton’s support for NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China. But Rust Belt Democrats persevered for a time. As the China Shock unfolded, rising Democratic stars like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, a “progressive” economic nationalist, proved critical to the Democratic Party retaking Congress in 2006 and staying competitive in the industrial heartland.

There was hope among economic progressives that Barack Obama would use his formidable 2008 victory to pursue fair trade. Yet momentum behind reforms to globalisation stalled abruptly under his presidency. After the 2009 auto bailout, his administration mostly resumed the path charted by Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush. And by 2015, the Trans-Pacific-Partnership, another technocratic free-trade agreement, was on the horizon. The opening was Trump’s to seize.

Of course, Trump’s haphazard efforts to reorder global trade occurred in a different economy than the one which had vexed old-school liberals. The new politics of protectionism also took place in a country much more polarised by region — and one in which the parties had largely swapped their geographical orientations, if not quite their policy commitments. That had a strange effect on how the parties responded to the tariffs introduced by Trump’s trade ambassador, Robert Lighthizer. Republicans who supported the old Washington Consensus on globalisation drew their strength from the Midwest and the South, regions that were now suffering the most from trade shocks. Meanwhile, the Democrats, once a vehicle for both the South’s development and industrial workers, handily dominated the Northeastern and Pacific coasts — affluent hubs that had long since turned the corner on industrial decline.

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The basis for a coherent industrial strategy was stymied by this evolution in the party system. Trump’s unique coalition of ex-Democrats and populist independents did not fit easily in either party’s tent. Although Democrats retained some loyalty in ailing manufacturing districts, they increasingly represented highly educated metro areas that had benefitted most from the tech boom and globalisation. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan’s Republicans, for their part, were reluctant to drop their faith in free-trade, even though the party’s new working-class base opposed it and even though the GOP historically had been the party of industrial protectionism. Despite working-class voters’ longstanding support for a new approach to trade, the dominant wings of both parties treated tariffs and similar measures as anathema to America’s global leadership.

These dynamics further constrained the rise of a protectionist bloc in Congress during Trump’s first term. While House Democrats worked closely with Lighthizer on the USMCA, NAFTA’s replacement, mainstream liberal discourse routinely mocked Trump’s declaration that he was a “Tariff Man”. Besides the political risks of “agreeing” with Trump on trade during the high tide of the “Resistance”, national Democrats were hesitant over whether to try to win back white industrial workers or harness identity politics to mobilise the so-called “rising American electorate”. Under Biden, the pendulum swung toward the former strategy. This vindicated Rust Belt Democrats like Senator Brown who had pleaded with the party establishment to revise trade policy and decisively counter China’s export model. By then, however, the architects of Bidenism were conjuring a New Deal electorate whose remnants no longer trusted Democrats to deliver on trade. Inflation, meanwhile, had irreversibly soured many voters on the economy, sapping the positive impact of policies decades in the making. Brown and a handful of other red- and purple-state Democrats were among the casualties on election night.

The odds of deeper collaboration between protectionist Democrats and the incoming administration are hazy at best. The ranks of the former are now diminished, while the Wall Street types jockeying for influence are plainly allergic to a populist, pro-manufacturing agenda. As signalled by his pick of hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to lead the Treasury Department, Trump may simply resort to using the threat of new tariffs as a bargaining tool, rather than building on Biden’s more interventionist approach to long-term investment.

If Trump flounders, Democrats may once more have a window to argue they have the vision and the policies to rebuild an egalitarian economy. A nascent group of younger House Democrats who managed to fend off the GOP in parts of the Rust Belt are turning up the dial on economic populism, arguing for both more corporate oversight and more support for manufacturing. Along with Minnesota’s Ken Martin, a populist contender to chair the Democratic National Committee, these Democrats have not disowned Biden’s economic agenda. But they have reproached the party’s liberal elite and media allies, whose blithe view of the economy’s true health betrayed a maddening condescension toward discontent workers.

Blue-city progressives, meanwhile, are at a crossroads: with the purported rise of the “Trump-AOC voter”, they must come to terms with a multiracial electorate that defies easy categorisation on cultural issues and economics. But it is doubtful they can simply shed their close association with doctrinaire identity politics, much as they might find it advantageous to ally with the Rust Belt populists and emphasise workers’ top concerns. For now, both factions are a minority in a party whose internal disagreements on trade and industrial policy cut across its Left and centrist flanks.

Ultimately, any potential reconfiguration of the Democratic Party toward Left-protectionism won’t be possible without an overhaul of its national political strategy. Yet, under its present, ageing leadership, the party’s geographical woes seem insurmountable. Establishment coastal liberals tend to recoil from tariffs, and their potential heirs, in marked contrast to both the populists and the progressives, are mounting a new defence of globalisation. Until a new crop of Democrats forcefully champion left-behind America, the party will remain embattled — and estranged from the liberalism which once gave it purpose.

Exacerbating this stalemate are debates over what type of reform is necessary: whether investments like reindustrialisation or more welfare programmes are most urgent; whether an active state can solve the crisis of development; and whether a global wealth tax is preferable to protectionist experiments in “deglobalisation”. Bidenomics seems to have had little ripple effect across the West, while Kamala Harris and Donald Trump make only vague promises about economic growth.

Our challenges are, however, only the latest iteration of an age-old problem. As captured in David Lay Williams’ new book, The Greatest of All Plagues, the social, political, and economic costs of gaping inequality have preoccupied an eclectic range of philosophers over millennia — from Plato to Marx via Jesus, Hobbes, Rousseau, Adam Smith and J.S. Mill. Broadly agreeing that it is both a material and spiritual problem, Williams’ thinkers confront us with powerful arguments against inequality: it degrades civilisation because it rewards greed at the expense of the community, ultimately destroying any basis for social cooperation and respect for the rule of law. Yet for nearly all of these philosophers, maintaining civic virtue and the public good must be central to any project that might fundamentally reduce inequality. This distinguishes them from many modern progressives, whose preoccupation with group identities and historical injustices ultimately precludes a coherent vision of what might reverse inequality’s baleful effects. If today’s reformers are to truly mobilise the public, they must identify, as these philosophers did, what it is about society that they aim to conserve.

Fear of disunity that spills into violent civil strife is a frequent theme throughout the book. When citizens no longer view the law as just and impartial, these philosophers warn, factionalism increases. Summarising Hobbes, who is not exactly known for trumpeting the holistic benefits of civic welfare, Williams writes that “a commonwealth tolerating needless hunger flirts with its own demise”. The deleterious effects of greed, or pleonexia, however, extend beyond the collapse of law and order. Rousseau observes that it destroys compassion, leaving the destitute yet more helpless and loathed. As he writes of the poor man: “all free assistance flees him when he needs it, precisely because he lacks the means to pay for it.” The poor, in turn, succumb to the same miserly outlook of those who rule unjustly.

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Here is one of the most important insights in Williams’ book: widespread resignation to these conditions amongst the working classes ultimately enervates the human desire for liberty. Some readers may point to modern-day philanthropy to suggest that all-consuming greed is not an inexorable force which destroys virtue among the elite. Yet according to Rousseau and Mill, the spiritual violence of extreme inequality isn’t mitigated by a spurt of good deeds. On the contrary, Rousseau writes that the poor lose their freedom when they become dependent on the rich. Similarly, Mill stresses that poverty breeds dependency, obstructing the talents which propel human development. This is a situation that cannot be easily remedied through compensatory measures.

Attempts to soften inequality through philanthropy must therefore be scrutinised: do they raise the general welfare whilst empowering the individual to make their own way, or do they place those desperate for work and bread at the utter mercy of elites? From Mill’s perspective, there were mental and moral benefits of individual achievement. Therefore, if he was immensely sceptical of private charity, regarding the Victorian economy as one based on “conquest and violence”, it is doubtful he would have endorsed state socialism of the kind experienced in Eastern Europe.

Instead, Mill advocated a mix of pragmatic and radical reforms, including estate taxes, widespread but decentralised education, worker cooperatives, property redistribution, and some form of guaranteed subsistence. His primary objective — to eradicate poverty and foster individual opportunity — reflected his utilitarian sentiments. This was a philosophy of broad enablement in a time of still rigid hierarchy. Unlike Smith, who believed the fruits of economic growth and doux commerce between nations would be enough to alleviate poverty, Mill thought active state policy was necessary. In these respects, Mill anticipated some of the guiding principles of New Deal liberalism and social democracy.

The appeal of such reformism has waxed and waned in our own era of slack growth. Many young people despair that the government appears unwilling or unable to reinvest in what the post-war generation took for granted. Drawing inspiration from Marx, some believe that only the threat of revolution can compel the government to once again subordinate vested interests to the public interest. But the modern Left’s ability to rouse the public has been largely ephemeral. A grassroots focus on inequality and austerity largely peaked in the middle of last decade, giving way to demands to centre identitarian issues that seemingly mattered most to a diversifying electorate. Needless to say, this course has not realigned Western politics in favour of a new, more egalitarian social contract.

Part of the Left’s ineffectiveness reflects the pessimism of our times. But it also stems from a deep reluctance, in the 21st century, to affirm the universality of the principles which Williams’ thinkers used to make sense of their world. In particular, the idea of the whole is as open-ended and contested as ever. As a kind-of revisionist, anti-Western outlook pervades the Left, it would appear many activists do not want to conserve much of anything. This contrasts with an older social-democratic tradition more in tune with Enlightenment thought. Consequently, few on the Left appear to agree on what a radically egalitarian economy would look like. Would it resemble, for instance, the autarkic community envisioned by Rousseau, or would such “withdrawal” from the world stage be inegalitarian in an already globalised and interconnected world? Would a “post-capitalist” economy affirm the republican freedom envisioned by Marx, or would it impose austere measures to limit climate change? And if the latter, would such a surveillance state in the name of global justice derail innovation while stifling development in poorer countries?

These are not merely academic debates. For example, industrial policy — the main way in which the Democratic Party has tried to address America’s socioeconomic divide, and which other centre-left parties such as Keir Starmer’s Labour have entertained — has antagonised parts of the Left due to its intrinsic economic patriotism. Some believe that China is now best poised to catalyse the global clean tech revolution, while others advocate a process of radical “degrowth” for the West that would make most households poorer. And yet, amid worrying signs of stagnation and low social trust, it would seem incumbent on policymakers to kickstart a new era of development.

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Of course, a national wealth tax as proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, or a global one, as envisioned by Thomas Piketty, would certainly go some way toward compressing wealth inequality. But there are legitimate questions over how such taxes would be best used to address the widespread decline in upward mobility and life chances. If they went toward a basic income, would that actually solve the social problems that are symptomatic of extreme inequality? Would that, in turn, lead to a new kind of political complacency over concentrated wealth and power? Charity, as Williams’ book underscores, does not address the root causes of indigence. There are sound reasons from a Left-wing perspective to be wary of solutions that do not facilitate the mix of freedom and development that both Mill and Marx advocated.

These are just some of the issues that loom for those who are inclined toward radicalism but still believe in democracy. As The Greatest of All Plagues suggests, tackling inequality is never so direct as levelling the power of the ultra-wealthy, even if a government were elected with this express purpose. It requires navigating the contradictions which have bred social conflict throughout history. Security, freedom, progress, and fairness: these are among the most essential values which continually animate politics, but they are hard to hold in equilibrium. This is especially true of modern liberal democracies, which, for all their flaws, have accommodated an unparalleled degree of change and pluralism.

Some observers may darkly wager that this pluralism is on the wane and that an age of oligarchy is already upon us. If the most extreme antagonisms theorised by Marx are to be avoided, then society must at the very least strive to balance liberality with common purpose. Still, the central lesson is as clear as day. Rebuilding that social trust unequivocally depends on a restoration of the public good, and thus putting an end to the extreme inequality which imperils all. A democratic Left that has any hope of realising a better world must not lose sight of this historical mission.

Taken together, several commentators believe these trends mark the end of neoliberal governance and the beginning of a different consensus in Washington — and in a narrow sense they are right. Biden’s policies do harken back to aspects of the New Deal and Cold War liberalism, while the populist Right have promoted their own vision of economic reform. But, for reasons intrinsic to America’s party system, neoliberalism’s final chapter has yet to be written.

There are real obstacles to consolidating a new consensus — and they go beyond the obvious influence of each party’s most prominent donors or the rulings of conservative justices. The current geographic division of political power in the United States between conservative red regions and progressive blue ones reinforces a status quo which greatly privileges economic elites in both party coalitions and curtails the possibility of faster action on urgent issues.

Compared with the latter half of the 20th century, when Democrats and Republicans contested a broad range of states and a handful of landslide elections took place, the strategies animating today’s party coalitions are primarily defensive. Bold incursions by either party into the other’s strongholds are now uncommon. And the Democrats’ big-tent posture under Kamala Harris is unlikely to disturb this balance of power.

The regional pattern of party dominance is reflected in the small set of swing states that have determined presidential elections since the 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. But it is illustrated just as much, if not more so, by the rise of one-party control in a majority of US states. Democrats currently hold “trifectas” (the governorship plus a majority in a state’s upper and lower chambers) in 17 states, while Republicans have a veritable lock on 23. In an echo of past “sectional” distributions of party control, geography would appear to denote ideology in the first decades of 21st-century America.

And this regional dynamic seems to go hand in hand with an accelerating political realignment or class “dealignment”. This phenomenon, wherein since the late Nineties the GOP has attracted far more working-class voters than it used to while the Left has won the vote of more and more upscale voters, appears to wary progressives and eager “New Right” thinkers alike as a harbinger of a generation-defining political realignment. But, while that is partly true, what is more salient is that the parties now coalesce support on the basis of identity-driven loyalties and deeply felt negative partisanship, and are then able to limit their economic promises, hewing instead to vague rhetoric about growth and opportunity. Campaign strategists continue to prioritise mobilising core supporters, rather than courting workers who are wavering in their partisan affiliation or engaging the country’s estimated 80 million disaffected nonvoters.

Consequently, the respective opposition party in key regions has become feeble to the point of being virtually nonexistent. Modern Democrats have been routed in several Rust Belt and Southern districts where New Deal liberals once swept the polls, while Republicanism, once a vehicle for Reaganite yuppies and wealthy suburbanites, has been reduced in the citadels of high finance and the multicultural elite to an ornery badge of non-conformity. In both cases, wage-earners who want a bigger share of the economic pie and more accountable politicians must contend with de facto one-party rule in much of the country. This is a situation that has rarely favoured more egalitarian outcomes.

The past 30 years might have altered the composition of the Republican and Democratic coalitions, but it has also calcified the power of regional and national elites. The political realignment has failed to catalyse any fundamental change of priorities in Republican strongholds. With few exceptions, Republicans, in spite of Trump’s 2016 foray into economic populism, remain beholden to big players in older extractive industries and a host of middle-men magnates. The combined lobbying efforts of these interests prevent local- and state-level Republican officials from reorienting their party branches to populist ideas. The GOP response to teachers’ strikes and unionisation drives at auto plants and Amazon distribution centres has predictably ranged from indifferent to hostile.

Conservative thinkers advocating substantive overtures to labour still have high hopes for Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, and a few other “anti-globalist” Republicans in the Senate. But remove the ever-churlish Trump from the equation and the GOP all but loses its insurgent garb. Belying Trump’s fading anti-establishment message, rising GOP leaders such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp have staked their reputation on attracting high-profile business investment and pet development projects. Ribbon-cuttings, not a showdown with American oligarchs, are what motivates them. Vintage Trumpian populism shows no sign of supplanting the traditional business conservatism that still guides local GOP elites.

By contrast, the Democratic Party certainly appears more attentive to the needs and hardships of its own lower-income base. Indeed, the party’s self-image as the vehicle of social uplift has endured despite attracting a growing share of wealthy and college-educated voters in  recent election cycles. Even though Democrats have haemorrhaged support from working-class whites, they continue to heavily draw black and other minority wage-earners as well as white progressives who want a stronger welfare state. On the basis of this alliance, it is hoped by the party’s reformers that if Harris wins the presidency she will continue to legislate in Biden’s “post-neoliberal” vein.

This optimism derives in part from stalwart Democrats’ rose-tinted view of the records of blue cities and states. As housing costs began to soar last decade, a handful of Democratic governors and mayors billed themselves as reformers ready to take on powerful real estate interests and build more affordable housing. They likewise tried to aid their working-class constituents through minimum wage hikes, paid sick leave, experiments in fare-free public transit, and efforts to raise enrolment in health insurance subsidised by the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s key social programme.

Scratch beneath the surface, however, and one finds little has been done in major US cities to alleviate economic insecurity. Whether due to permitting obstacles or vested interests, the housing shortage is now a full-blown crisis. And the problem is only bound to get worse. Nationwide, a record-breaking twelve million renters now spend half their income on housing while nearly seven million units need to be built for heavily rent-burdened low-income people. This shortfall stands in contrast to Harris’s plan to build just three million homes.

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Previous efforts to ensure wages kept up with living costs have likewise proved insufficient. App-driven gig work has become ubiquitous in large metro areas, testing Democrats’ commitment to full employment and pro-worker principles. From California to Massachusetts, Big Tech has successfully fought legislation that would classify gig workers as employees and have tried to resist industry-specific minimum wage bills. Despite the Biden administration’s investments in infrastructure and clean energy, urban economies continue to reflect neoliberalism on steroids: the pace of gentrification, pushing poorer residents to outer neighbourhoods, has put them at a further disadvantage when it comes to finding decent work.

These trends have heightened the perception that Democrats cater to affluent professionals while offering, at most, minor relief to the wage-earners who provide their margin of victory in major elections. That is bad enough for a party once considered to be the tribune of workers. Rather absurdly, however, the Democratic Party’s deference to tech, real estate, and finance has been accompanied by ham-fisted choices which have exacerbated quality-of-life problems for many working families. These range from radical misjudgements influenced by social justice paradigms to less obvious but still pernicious forms of incompetence.

Most notoriously, recent ill-conceived experiments in drug decriminalisation under the framework of “harm reduction” in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon eroded public safety enough to dampen economic activity in core neighbourhoods. Those case studies have since become a source of ridicule and embarrassment for Democrats trying to thread the needle between maintaining vibrant commercial centres and reforming the criminal justice system.

Unfortunately, other trends only underscore the ways in which blue-city governance has become strangely inept. Since the pandemic, truancy rates and learning loss in public schools have exploded — an outcome that more and more analysts attribute to extended remote-learning protocols in Democratic districts. Those decisions had a disproportionate effect on lower-income and nonwhite students whose family breadwinners were nurses, truck drivers and warehouse packers who by definition could not work from home.

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Urban Democrats’ handling of immigration politics has also compounded tensions in their coalition. During Trump’s term, it was a point of pride among progressives to live in a sanctuary city that shielded undocumented immigrants from detention and deportation raids. The surge in migrants since 2021, however, has strained municipal resources and working-class neighbourhoods due to the pressure put on scarce housing and already-overcrowded schools.

Some on the Left insist concerns about these burdens are inherently reactionary. But for others it is a matter of public trust and effective administration. In key cities, congested streets teem with overworked “deliveristas” yoked to those very gig platforms which fail to provide a living wage; migrant mothers and children hawk snacks and cheap toys throughout parks and subways; while municipal agencies turn a blind eye to the proliferation of illegal and unsafe flats. All this has snuck up on hopeless local politicians at the same time that homelessness and evictions have spiked.

Conservatives, of course, are more than happy to pin these various challenges on misguided progressives. Yet, far from being too ambitious, Democrats’ urban governance instead reflects the extent of “policy capture” in their party. Absent a GOP fit to govern large cities, many of today’s business titans have turned to an all-too pliant Democratic Party eager to build its donor network. That relationship is unlikely to fray anytime soon, whatever one makes of the party’s episodic populism under Biden.

The truth is that if Democrats had devoted less energy to cosying up to elites and committed themselves to grand public projects and social investments in the spirit of the New Deal, fewer of their loyal supporters would be contending with extraordinary rents, mediocre jobs, underfunded transit, and underperforming schools. And a genuine record of governing “for the people” would be resonating in places which have long slipped from the party’s grasp.

One might think, therefore, that the unity displayed at the Democratic Convention is shallow and that Harris is helming a coalition susceptible to fracture. But the current state of the GOP campaign suggests Trump is no longer poised to exploit discontent in the Democratic base over their party’s contradictions and shortcomings. Nor are Republicans making the barest effort to offer a positive alternative. On the contrary, it is the Democrats who remain at once the party of government and the agents of, well, limited yet “hopeful” change.

This returns us to the regional divide which constrains the advance of a post-neoliberal order. Even if Harris wins and sticks with Biden’s flagship policies, her mandate — and thus her obligation to deliver reform — will be determined by the scale of her victory. It is certain the result will relieve elites in both parties. In fact, trench warfare between Democrats and Republicans may well revert to battles over culture, identity, and values, muffling vital issues of economic power and life chances. Until one party wages an insurgency that rallies struggling Americans of all stripes, transformational change will remain out of reach.

An avuncular and sharp-witted persona, Walz ticks the right boxes when it comes to winning the Electoral College. He is a popular Democratic governor from the upper Midwest, a crucial battleground region, and has received ringing endorsements from the AFL-CIO, UAW and other trade union organisations. He is also a muscular surrogate who has already put Republicans on defence over J.D. Vance’s “weird” cultural views.

Perhaps most important, Walz is a white old-school liberal who speaks to the “kitchen table” concerns of working-class voters anxious over living costs and now the possibility of a recession. Though reliably progressive on issues such as abortion rights and LGBT equality, Walz seems to bask most in common-sense reforms like free school meals and paid family and medical leave that he and Minnesota’s Democratic state legislature passed into law. Well before he was a contender for the vice-presidential nomination, progressives of various stripes looked to him as an example of how Democrats should rebuild their brand outside the coasts

This record is an important asset for Harris. Throughout her term, she has struggled to lift public approval of the Biden administration’s economic agenda, reinforcing perceptions she is a lightweight on the administration’s signature industrial, trade and development policies. Many progressives, meanwhile, worry she is too enmeshed with the donor class and will wobble on Biden’s efforts to support organised labour and rein in monopolies. Walz’s presence at the very least assuages some of those concerns, even if vice presidents are hardly known for influencing an administration’s economic priorities.

At the same time, his elevation also provides some insight into how the campaign views the battleground states, particularly so-called Blue Wall states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and the Sun Belt. In 2020, Arizona and Georgia padded Biden’s final total in the Electoral College, but only by razor-thin margins in each case. Some progressive strategists nevertheless believed these victories were a sign of things to come, and that Democrats needed to expand their support in the diverse metro areas and affluent suburbs of the South and West to make up for expected shortfalls in an ageing Midwestern Rust Belt. But Biden’s standing in the Sun Belt, especially Nevada and North Carolina, took a beating from inflation. As Biden’s poll numbers lagged behind Trump this spring before his fateful debate performance, it became evident that some combination of Midwestern states and Pennsylvania offered the clearest, and perhaps only, pathway to victory. By early July, however, even those odds of reaching 270 Electoral College votes had dwindled.

Harris appears to be a determined realist on this front. By ultimately declining to pick Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, another top contender for the VP slot, she has signalled her campaign is laser-focused on the swing states most in reach. Despite the challenges she may face as a female and biracial candidate, she recognises that the industrial Midwest still exerts a powerful hold on the liberal-Left psyche. In addition to Walz, Harris is therefore still expected to be aided on the campaign trail by two of her other potential running mates: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who were feted by pragmatic progressives for repelling MAGA opponents in the 2022 midterms.

Of course, should Harris make up Biden’s lost ground in the region over the next couple of weeks, her fundraising will undoubtedly swell. That would allow her to divert some resources back to the Sun Belt and make a concerted effort to win Georgia, where Democrats still have the best chance of cobbling together an “anti-Trump” coalition in the South. That strategy, in turn, would likely bleed the Trump-Vance ticket of campaign cash in states that it still expects to win, while leaving Walz to venture deeper into Midwestern swing counties rich in working-class votes.

The selection of Walz is not foolproof, however. While he coasted to re-election in 2022 by a margin of almost 200,000 votes, his first term was rocked by the George Floyd protests, which led to extensive looting and property damage in Minneapolis. Conservatives are again claiming Walz did not deploy the Minnesota National Guard soon enough to contain the chaos, while some Left-wing activists remain angry over the limited policing reforms pursued by the state’s Democratic establishment. In an election that will be won on tight margins, Walz will have to quickly prove he can parry these sorts of attacks on the Right and the Left and keep the focus on Trump’s unfitness for office.

Another potential liability concerns the way blue cities and states handled the pandemic. Though many progressives adhered to stringent protocols, extended school closures and remote-learning policies in some cases put the Democrats’ traditional urban coalition of affluent professionals, black and Latino workers, and teachers’ unions under strain. In particular, wage-earning parents who could not work from home struggled to adapt to shifting policies, and research now shows that learning loss and absenteeism have been greater in those districts that did not resume in-school learning sooner. Although not an extreme outlier, Minnesota was also no exception to these challenges. Hence, as much as Walz was selected to bridge divides in the Democratic coalition and win over disaffected independents, the party which relies on robust turnout in all cities could suffer unexpected defections or poor mobilisation in key districts due to divergent experiences of the pandemic.

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To be sure, none of these vulnerabilities on their own are enough to drag down the Democratic ticket. Walz is the archetypal happy warrior of Midwestern liberalism, something the Democratic Party arguably needs more of. Still, it would be naive of progressives to discount the most obvious attack the GOP will deploy: that Harris is a “DEI” limousine liberal and Walz a feckless bleeding heart. Democrats are counting on Walz to deflect those volleys, but in the end the ticket will need more than Walz’s pugilistic talents to prevail in November.

In fact, Democrats should not overestimate the ways in which Walz “balances” the ticket. While Walz is expected to lend the campaign a much-needed everyman feel, the election will come down to the economic concerns that national Democrats have struggled to alleviate. Walz can help, but the top of the ticket needs to convey, with force, how it plans to tackle an across-the-board affordability crisis. As the party strives to unify a frayed coalition divided between pro-globalisation professionals, young identity-driven activists and progressive populists, it will take more than one man to show regular workers Harris has their interests at heart.