The resulting system would amount to a major concession to the Islamic Republic, which didn’t collect any fees for permitting passage before the war. At least one vessel has already paid $2 million to pass. If that becomes the going rate, Iran could pocket some $70 billion to $90 billion a year, according to a JPMorgan estimate — in effect, obtaining through fees the reparations to which Tehran insists it is entitled for the destruction caused by the war. Hence, Karl’s question.

Trump’s response: “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Ponder the absurdity: a joint venture with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which just showed its capacity to unilaterally close the strait and thus cripple global energy markets. It’s the sort of bullshit — sorry, there’s no better word — that defines his rule, especially in his second term. Call it mad-king governance, in which the intellectual inconstancy, mercurial moods, and sheer gambling audacity of a single man are supposed to substitute for modern technocracy.

Except, mad-king governance is utterly exhausting for Americans and the world. And the process is so messy, the results so lousy, the risks so high, that the mad king is making liberal technocracy look better by comparison. One yearns to cry out: Bring back Hillary, bring back the Obamaian wonks, give us a thousand interagency briefing memos and think-tank white papers — policy formed in the pre-populist age may have been bad, but it wasn’t this bad.

I kid. Mostly. Pre-Trump technocracy, to adapt a famous adage of Mitterrand’s, contained in itself all the elements that made Trump’s rise inevitable. Above all, it removed important questions from democratic contestation; no matter which party voters elected, they got ruinous free-trade deals, pointless foreign wars, and open borders. In 2016, Trump got himself elected president precisely by re-politicizing the questions that voters had been told were beyond their ken.

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Trump, in other words, put his finger on a real crisis of democracy, and one that America had confronted going back to the beginning. Given its complexities, modern society requires complex administration. But in carrying out this function, administrative agencies can come to override the democratic will, often to the benefit of themselves and other elites. This, in turn, provokes backlash, with the popular classes sometimes elevating a brash figure to take on all the wonky bastards.  

The classic American case is the Second Bank of the United States. The bank was a pillar of the Hamiltonian state, designed to ensure the steady but disciplined flow of credit in the new republic as it set out to industrialize its economy. The BUS fulfilled this function with admirable effectiveness, as well as serving as a profiteering money-market actor in its own right.

Yet it also came to be seen, not unjustly, as a vehicle for the Northeastern commercial establishment and unfriendly to workers, farmers, and a rising class of small entrepreneurs in the South and West. Moreover, although the bank was established by Congress and partially funded by taxpayers, its leaders strenuously resisted democratic oversight and even used their financial might to bend election outcomes to their preferences.

The bank’s opponents found a champion in Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee militiaman who despised all paper money and saw the BUS as unconstitutional. Jackson, known as “Old Hickory” for his toughness, set out to destroy the BUS — and succeeded. Having failed to plan for the aftermath, however, the Jackson administration turned to local banks to serve as substitute depositories for government funds. 

The Jacksonians soon learned to their chagrin that small bankers were far more vulnerable to graft and mismanagement than the big federal institution. The immediate issue of the Bank War was a rash of wildcat banking and a recession, and a US banking system that for much of the 19th century was much more crisis-prone than those of comparable industrial states, like France and Britain, with more centralized banking systems. What the BUS needed was better democratic oversight. There were good proposals in Congress for ensuring this, which Jackson ignored, choosing instead a Hulk-smash strategy that ended up creating more problems than it solved. 

This fact pattern should be disconcertingly familiar. To be sure, Jackson was far more mentally disciplined and systematic than Trump. Indeed, Old Hickory doesn’t deserve the mad-king label. But Jackson’s flawed fight with the BUS also describes the self-defeating course of much Trumpian “reform.”

Consider tariffs and free trade. Trump identified a very real crisis, of course: a world trade system that profited Wall Street and China but sapped US manufacturing capacity and decimated working-class jobs and communities. But like the Jacksonians, the Trumpians could smash, but not design and develop. They imposed tariffs on certain Chinese goods in the first term, but it was left to the Bidenites to actually implement something like an industrial policy, especially focused on renewables and semiconductors.

Upon returning to office, Trump once more set out to restructure the trade system, with tariffs emerging as his only tool for doing so. Not even bothering with legislation in Congress, he used dubious statutory authority to impose across-the-board tariffs, derived using a cockamamie formula, on every corner of the Earth, including islands uninhabited by humans. It was unclear how imposing levies on bananas would revive manufacturing. Nor could the administration explain why all trade deficits, with all nations and in all sectors, had to be eliminated. Nor, finally, were the tariffs coupled with workforce development or industrial policy — the additional ingredients needed for a genuine manufacturing revival.

Then Trump went into mad-king mode, imposing and removing tariffs, raising rates and slashing them, based on pure caprice and in response to the gyrations of equity markets. Like Oprah dispensing prizes to her audience members, the mad king handed down tariff threats to every foreign country that dared to disagree with him, including some of Washington’s oldest and most reliable allies.

Eventually, the US Supreme Court held that Trump lacked the statutory authority he claimed for his tariffs. Manufacturing revival, the ostensible purpose of the policy, was all but forgotten. And indeed, it isn’t happening: in the first year of the second Trump administration, the United States lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs. And only about a third of voters approve of his handling of the economy, compared with nearly two-thirds who disapprove. Trump’s mad-king shenanigans not only failed to fulfill one of MAGA’s central promises, but may have even undermined the credibility of an important tool for protecting US industry.

It was his recent Iran war, however, that comprehensively sealed the debate on the dangerous folly of this kind of governance. As two administration officials, one current and one former, told me in almost identical words, with the Iran war, “there was no interagency process” — none of the usual compilation and exchange of views between different parts of the security and foreign-policy apparatus aimed at helping presidential decision-making. There was just the king and his favorite senatorial and Fox News jesters.

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Start with his rhetoric surrounding the conflict. Shut up, Trump effectively told those of his supporters jarred by his decision to join Israel’s war against Iran, given his 2024 campaign pledge of a “peace” administration. Wasn’t MAGA supposed to pivot away from Mideast wars? “MAGA was my idea,” he countered. “MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else.” Le MAGA, c’est moi.

The objectives were ever-shifting: changing the regime and putting Iran’s destiny in the hands of its people; degrading military capacity; stopping a nuclear program that had already been “obliterated” in the course of the earlier 12-Day War; reopening the Strait of Hormuz; not reopening the Strait of Hormuz, because we don’t need it anyway; you better “fucking open it, you crazy bastards,” otherwise America will “wipe out a whole civilization”; OK, how about we both run it in a joint venture?

Often, management of the war was based on the state of the stock market. It became a joke on Iranian state TV that Trump eased up on operations on Sundays to ensure the Dow could climb into the green on Mondays, then ramp up the war come the next weekend, when markets closed. If it were a true war of necessity, of course, the nation would fight it to the end, even if it meant destroying everyone’s 401(k)s. But only a mad king adjusts daily tactics in a war of choice based on equity values.

The upshot is a battered but strategically victorious Iran. The regime didn’t collapse, but hardened its internal position. Iran’s ballistic firing ability was judged to be improving as the war went on. Relief from sanctions and tariffs are on the way, per Trump himself. And above all, Tehran realized it doesn’t need a nuclear weapon when it can shut off one of the world’s economic arteries at will. And notice: Trump devoted nearly all of his remaining political capital to carrying out one of the long-time goals of the very hawkish “deep state” that had long sought his political destruction. Except he did it poorly, in mad-king fashion.

So what’s a better way? In the view of the American Founders, the answer is political contestation and compromise of the kind that’s supposed to take place, especially, in the legislative branch. But so long as Congress is more or less moribund, and American lawmakers see their jobs as auditioning for cable news, the country is fated to lurch between mad kings and imperious bureaucrats. Both are bad. Still, after what we lived through in 2025 and 2026, I say bring back the wonks.

No, I’m speaking not of President Trump’s plans for Greenland, but Andrew Jackson’s military campaigns in Florida that prompted the Spanish Empire to cede the territory to the United States in an 1819 treaty (Florida would become a state a quarter-century later). The historical parallels aren’t accidental. President Trump has long looked to Jackson — America’s seventh president, first national populist leader, and the co-founder of the Democratic Party — as an inspiration. 

The Greenland gambit is Trump’s most Jacksonian move. It’s also the clearest sign yet that Washington in the opening decades of the 21st century no longer views itself as the preeminent global hegemon, charged with upholding international rules and disciplining a handful of wayward “rogue states.” Instead, America increasingly sees itself as one power among others, locked in rivalry over land, natural resources, and material security.

That about describes the world in which Jackson, known as “Old Hickory,” operated. Trump and the wider Trumpian cohort have drawn what they see as the necessary conclusions and are pitilessly remaking US strategy to meet this new, old moment.

The shift shouldn’t come as a surprise. A year ago, I attended President Trump’s inauguration and one of the inaugural balls — and was struck by the Jacksonian vibes that gripped Washington. As I wrote in these pages, the second Trump inaugural offered “remarkable similarities” with Jacksonian democracy: the hard-charging nationalism, the anti-elite rhetoric (coupled with solicitude for pliant elites), the pledges of a coming golden age.

One step toward American renewal discussed in those early days was the takeover of Greenland. Such talk struck me as “preposterous” — the word I used to describe it in my UnHerd dispatch from the inauguration. I admit: I really didn’t think he meant it; surely, this was the opening bid in a negotiation that would conclude with Washington securing even better military-basing and mining rights than the existing agreement permits (and the current arrangements are extremely generous).

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But under the Jacksonian dispensation, no territory is truly secure without Old Glory planted on its soil. Which brings us to Jackson’s conquest of Florida in the years after the War of 1812. Jackson wasn’t president then. But he was famous as the Hero of New Orleans, the US Army general who’d repelled an invading force of some 8,000 redcoats before news of an Anglo-American peace treaty had reached the New World.

Afterward, Jackson emerged as an irrepressible advocate for the expansion and consolidation of US sovereignty across the North American continent. He found it downright offensive that the Old World powers should exercise any influence nearby. Doubly so when the Europeans conspired with the tribal “savages” — or when they failed, through weakness or neglect, to prevent the Indians from attacking the United States from European-controlled areas.

Spanish Florida presented the latter kind of problem. From it, the Seminole tribe mounted attacks on white settlements in the United States. And inside it, on the Apalachicola River in the northwest part of the territory, a group of escaped slaves had taken over an abandoned British fort heavily stockpiled with arms and artillery. The Negro Fort, as it became known, encouraged resistance to America’s “Peculiar Institution” and invited still more rebels and escapees.

The Monroe administration charged Jackson with suppressing threats along the southern border — but, crucially, without challenging Spanish territorial claims to Florida, unenforceable though they were. But Jackson couldn’t quite bring himself to accept the second half of his orders. And so he both suppressed the threats and took over Spanish forts in Pensacola and elsewhere, diplomatic niceties be damned.

He justified his actions as self-defense against Seminole raids and other threats emanating from Spanish Florida. “The Government of the United States,” he wrote at one point in the campaign, “is bound to protect her citizens, but weak would be her efforts and ineffectual the best advised measures if the Floridas are to be free to every enemy.” Earlier, US forces had already destroyed the Negro Fort, but Jackson’s subsequent campaign in 1818 extended this logic to the broader Florida frontier.

In other words: He believed that so long as the Spanish flag flew on the Florida territory, the American people couldn’t obtain the full measure of security to which they were entitled. And so the Spanish flag had to be removed. And so it was. Jackson’s overstepping of his military authority was initially embarrassing for the Monroe administration. Jackson’s critics there feared that unless Pensacola was restored to Spain, “war would result, the economy would crash, and the administration would be punished by the American electorate,” as the historian H. W. Brands sums up their view.

Outside critics pilloried Jackson’s apparent insubordination and his brutal ways in the campaign, not least his decision to execute two British officers (on the grounds that they had aided and encouraged the Seminoles against America). “We are fighting a great moral battle for the benefit not only of our country but of all mankind,” declared House Speaker (and Jackson arch-rival) Henry Clay. “Remember that Greece had her Alexander, Rome her Caesar, England her Cromwell, France her Bonaparte” — and America its would-be imperial despot, Jackson.

President Monroe returned the Spanish forts, but he refused to censure Jackson on the grounds that pathetic Spain had allowed Florida to become “the theatre of every lawless adventure,” and its rule over the territory was on its way to oblivion. He described it as a place “with little population of its own, the Spanish authority almost extinct [and] in a great measure derelict.” Jackson’s actions, then, merely ratified European weakness, and ultimately led to the full US takeover of Florida through the 1819 treaty negotiated by Secretary of State (and future President) John Quincy Adams. And the town of Jacksonville was so named in honor of Jackson’s military actions in the Sunshine State.

The resemblances to the current controversy are uncanny: the weak empire (Europe); the sparsely populated territory (the 30,000 or so Greenlanders); the Scotch-Irish disdain for European manners (Jackson’s and Trump’s); the threat of third parties endangering the United States through the contested land (China and Russia, in the current case). But above all: the rather expansive view of what it takes to secure the United States and a willingness to use light pretexts to extract lands from states incapable of defending them.

But there is one crucial difference: Most of Jackson’s actions, as a military chieftain and later as president, were either overwhelmingly popular or at least had a base of popular support. That can’t be said for Trump’s Greenland takeover, which is widely unpopular. Still, there is no denying that it is the Jacksonian foreign-policy legacy — both admirable and troubling — that Trump carries with him into the Arctic. “Every man combined with a gun in his hand,” Old Hickory himself wrote, “and all Europe combined cannot hurt us.”

 It was always hard to tell how serious Musk was about this venture. Once a Democratic-friendly billionaire, he fell into Donald Trump’s orbit after buying Twitter (renamed X) and became, by 2024, a prolific donor to the GOP and the Trump campaign. As a reward, Trump put him in charge of the ludicrously named DOGE on a Musk pledge to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about a third of annual outlays. DOGE made a mess of the federal bureaucracy (while only delivering a relative pittance in cuts) and proved unpopular. 

The relationship between Musk and Trump, with their titanic egos, was never built to last — the budget cuts were never all that compelling to Trump — and they broke up when it became clear that the Tesla boss was a political drag on the administration. For all the chatter about how they clashed over tax credits, the death blow for Musk was probably a hotly contested election for a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. Musk spent heavily to boost the Republican nominee and even campaigned for him personally; the Democratic nominee handily won anyway. For Trump, this was an embarrassment.

 The third-party bid, then, was probably Musk’s lame attempt to console himself. Yet the brief life of the America Party — notwithstanding its founder’s willingness to invest huge sums in the project — sheds light on why third-party politics are such a challenge in the United States. 

The Democrats and Republicans maintain the longest-lasting party duopoly in the world. Of the two, the Democrats are the older party, founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren to represent Southern and Western farmers, the emerging proletariat in the North, and grasping entrepreneurs everywhere who felt shut out by the Eastern establishment. The Republicans, meanwhile, were founded in the 1850s as a vehicle for Northern Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats and Free Soilers, and everyone else opposed to slavery. Since then, no sustainable third party has taken root. Many tried, to be sure, but they either dissipated or were absorbed into one of the two major parties.

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Much of this is structural. In a first-past-the-post presidential system that rewards, in every way, zero-sum politics, there will always be two dominant factions. The Electoral College renders third-party efforts mostly futile. In the 1992 presidential election, billionaire Ross Perot garnered nearly 20% of the national vote, a significant sum, against Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. In a proportional parliamentary system, he’d have been entitled to that share of the vote in parliament; instead, he won zilch, because he couldn’t carry a single state and was therefore awarded no electoral votes.

Due to ballot-access laws that vary from state to state, it can be very hard for third parties to maintain a long-term presence in either local or national elections. Take the Green Party, a small Leftist party best remembered as a vehicle for Ralph Nader’s presidential runs (and blamed for spoiling Al Gore’s chances in the 2000 election). In New York today, the Green Party no longer has a ballot line. Indeed, in 2024, no third-party candidates for president appeared on the ballot in New York — a first in the modern era. Voters could only choose between Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

 The two major parties in America are remarkably malleable and adaptable, able to survive even when they serve, within their own ranks, diametrically opposed regional and class interests. In Britain, the Conservative Party — the world’s oldest, if not the oldest continuous, party — is now threatened with extinction by Nigel Farage’s Reform movement, which is cutting deeply into the Tories’ base. 

If Britain’s intra-Right contest took place under US rules and conditions, the Tories would almost certainly swallow or co-opt Reform. That’s in essence what happened with Trump: he ran a populist, outsider campaign against the GOP establishment in 2016 and, instead of destroying the party, he simply remade it in his own image. The keepers of the older GOP consensus — foreign-policy hawkism, pro-business austerity — simply learned to push their agenda using Trumpian rhetoric (and often succeeded because Trump’s populism was skin-deep).

On the Left, a similar dynamic played out with Bernie Sanders, except Sanders could never beat the Democratic establishment in the same fashion. Rather than campaign as a Green or a socialist, Sanders — who doesn’t identify as a Democrat but caucuses with the party in the Senate — ran in the 2016 Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. He won many states and millions of votes, and was able to emerge as a significant political leader after the election. 

In the wake of this, the Democratic Socialists of America saw a huge boost in membership and became a budding political force in American politics. Unlike the Socialist Party of the 20th century, DSA doesn’t field candidates on its own ballot line. Instead, the DSA simply endorses Democrats who call themselves socialists and are willing to fight for their policies. In New York, this is how Zohran Mamdani won. He ran as a Democrat and beat back the Democratic establishment. Like Trump, perhaps, he’ll be able to reshape the party — at the local level, at least (full disclosure: Mamdani managed my own unsuccessful bid for the New York state Senate in 2018).

 What Musk, as deranged as he often is, did get right is that Americans are hungry for other options. Both parties are resented (centrist Democrats especially), and the nation isn’t so much polarized as negatively polarized, with voters defining themselves as much by the party they revile as the one they support. It’s rarer and rarer to hear an American declare they’re proudly a Democrat or Republican. The old political machines have withered. Americans have a weaker relationship with the Democratic and GOP apparatuses than they ever did before.

 To build a viable alternative, millions of dollars would be needed to secure ballot access and advertise the virtues of the new party to voters who are still used to only voting Republican or Democratic. And the party, in some sense, would have to be distinct enough to avoid charges that it’s simply siphoning ballots from the Democrats or the GOP in America’s zero-sum system. This was Musk’s fear — that he would end up a spoiler, abetting Democrats.

What Musk would probably have never gotten right is the policy platform of the America Party. Musk doesn’t understand the American electorate very well. DOGE, his great obsession, backfired, as even rank-and-file Republican voters rebelled against the idea of government programs they rely on facing devastating cuts. At heart, he is a globalist capitalist, and even his nativism is limited by his desire for high-skilled foreign workers to join his companies.

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A viable third-party movement in America would have to unite voters who feel underserved by the Democrats and Republicans. What kind of voter isn’t truly seen or served by either party? The answer is a socially moderate or conservative economic populist, a voter with a Bernie Sanders view of the economy who is more traditionalist on cultural issues and skeptical of immigration.

Trump’s GOP, on immigration, has plainly overreached. Americans wanted him to get control of the border, and on that count, he succeeded. But terrorizing ordinary migrants, dispatching hairdressers to a Salvadoran gulag for life, and removing student green cards over pro-Palestine op-eds was heinous. Trump’s approval rating is falling, including on immigration, and Americans now take a warmer view of immigration.

A third party, in this scenario, would advocate for a stricter border but a reasonable path to legal status for law-abiding migrants — the compromise once supported by Republicans like Marco Rubio. The dynamism of the United States derives from its inherent multiculturalism, its ability, again and again, to assimilate newcomers. If there’s a single politician who might embody what this theoretical third party movement would look like, it’s Dan Osborn, the former labor organizer running for the Senate again in Nebraska. Osborn is campaigning as an independent against the Republican incumbent, shunning both parties. He’s deeply critical of corporate power, like Sanders, and sympathetic to rural gun owners, like a Republican. He advocates for a “secure” border. And he’s got a shot at winning.

Osborn, though, isn’t helming any political party. There might be a universe in which a saner version of Musk attempts to use his cash to seed more Osborn-like candidates across America, building a movement around the America Party. That universe, though, hasn’t yet arrived, and maybe never will. Team Red and Team Blue are here to stay.

Yet here I am — still a loyal Democrat. Why is that?

I don’t love modern progressivism. I reject its yearning to reform not just institutions, but people’s souls. Indeed, Marc Dunkelman’s recent book Why Nothing Works has all but convinced me that modern progressivism has turned into a cannibalistic movement chewing to death any attempts at meaningful reform. And with every breath that brings me closer to age 40, I become more and more skeptical of the notion that public policy can right the crooked timber of humankind or alter the fundamentals of human nature.

Given all that, could it be that my loyalty to Democrats has to do with mere tribal identity? I hail from deep-blue New York, which codes entirely Democratic on cultural issues. To a great extent, my Democratic sensibilities can’t help but be shaped by the fact that everybody I knew growing up was Democrat. But tribal identity and teenage gut feelings aren’t solid guides to thoughtful, grownup political participation.

Luckily, there is a better answer, and it has to do with the historical role of the Democrats in America’s modern party system: the fact that in the 20th century, the party has stood for mature governance, warts and all, while the other, the GOP, has been and remains a party too often averse to government as such. When we support political parties, we choose people to govern us. It’s one thing to reject the progressive dream. It’s another to insist upon good governance. 

The Democratic Party was founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren as a vehicle for disaffected farmers and workers. If these groups’ interests didn’t always align, they shared a hostility to the Northeastern establishment, embodied in the Second Bank of the United States, against which Jackson waged war as fiercely as he carried out Indian Removal. As the young republic developed, and sectional tensions over slavery intensified, Democrats found themselves divided in a way that simply wasn’t true of the Republicans, a party explicitly founded in favor of “free labor” and in opposition to the South’s Peculiar Institution. 

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It wasn’t until the 1890s, then, that the modern party system in America really took shape. At that point, the US basically was a single-party state. Having supported secession, pro-slavery Democrats had discredited themselves, and the party as a whole, gifting Republicans with a 30-year run of near-total electoral dominance. The reconstituted Democrats emerged first out of a kind of a yearning for a splinter movement. Attempting to be cutting, a Republican surrogate in 1884 accused the Dems of being the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” but there were enough Catholics and rum drinkers around that the label stuck and became a rallying cry. The Democrats became once more, as in their Jacksonian roots, the party of the underdog and particularly of the urban disenfranchised. 

But that left the Democrats as merely a party of sentiment, not of ideas. The tossing-and-turning of the Grover Cleveland administration — a rare Democratic break in the GOP dominance of the Gilded Age — showed the need for a coherent political philosophy. Cleveland, a man of impeccable integrity, conceived of himself as a mountain of obstruction in the executive branch, scrupulously following the Constitution and vetoing everything that seemed out of bounds. And yet Cleveland was compelled, over the course of his presidency (especially in his second term), to abandon his entire political philosophy.

He sent the feds into Chicago to break a strike — with a number of strikers killed in the chaos. He laid groundwork for the annexation of Hawaii as much as he disliked territorial expansion. And he found himself turning the government into a kind of cash-for-gold program, stocking up gold reserves as much as possible and eventually turning to JP Morgan to bail out the Treasury. As Cleveland said of his reliance on the plutocrats, in a stinging rebuke of the populist wing of his party: “It never occurred to any of us to consult in this emergency farmers, doctors, lawyers, shoemakers, or even statesmen.… The prospect of what we needed might be somewhat improved by making application to those whose business and surroundings qualified them to intelligently respond.”

Every one of Cleveland’s decisions was almost certainly correct under the circumstances, but he left office as a pariah to his own party, at that time undergoing its Populist renovation. His GOP successor, William McKinley, planned to govern with traditional Republican values — above all, a protective tariff — but he, like Cleveland, found himself playing cards from a completely different part of the deck. He committed himself to massive territorial expansion, annexing Hawaii and eventually Puerto Rico, turning Cuba into a protectorate, and extending the US imperium as far as the Philippines. A president who had arrived in office anticipating enclosed continental borders was, by 1898, telling his staff, “it is evident that I must learn a great deal of geography in this [Spanish-American] war.” And protective tariffs — the cornerstone of McKinley’s governing vision — were all but forgotten as expansionism spurred free trade.

If the 1890s showed the incoherence of the governing philosophies of both parties, the 1900s helped to smooth them out. The United States came to terms with its expansionary role in the world — abandoning George Washington’s counsel against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address — recognizing it as a necessary adaptation to the era of high-seas navies, in which overseas territory not picked up by America would tend to fall to a rival. The new power of the executive branch was accepted in an era of heightened international exposure — and charismatically embodied in the almost universally popular Theodore Roosevelt. And the government could conceive of a new domestic role for itself: enforcing nascent antitrust legislation and curbing the monopolistic control of the trusts.

Having entertained William Jennings Bryan’s idiotic silver-standard movement, the Democrats straightened themselves through the Progressive Era, so that, as Dunkelman writes, the 1912 election would come down to “which version of Progressivism … would define the movement going forward.” Government was understood as what John Kenneth Galbraith would call a “countervailing power” checking big business, and an income tax was instituted to overcome the deeply unreliable revenue system of relying on tariffs (which, as often as not, had meant turning to Wall Street whenever there was a crisis).

This, then, is the heart of what the Democratic Party means to me: a robust conception of government, in which government, without ever sacrificing popular legitimacy, carries out executive functions, above all in exercising countervailing power to curb monopolistic practices and in running a coherent, far-sighted foreign policy.

Neither one of these is exactly enshrined in the Constitution, but what everybody in power in the early 20th century discovered was that the Constitution couldn’t solve all problems — that it was necessary to develop a more robust government to deal with new crises: global power politics, predatory business practices, and then the Jim Crow regime that protected itself in appeals to local government and separation of powers.

Republicans would gradually forget all this. In the Twenties, the Republican Party rebranded itself —  very far away from the party of Theodore Roosevelt — as isolationist, strictly laissez-faire in business, but with stultifyingly high tariffs and immigration barriers. That turned out to be exactly the wrong approach to an era of interconnected global crises, whether economic or political, and the result was not only a well-deserved 20-year loss of power for the Republicans starting in 1932, but the dominance of New Deal Democrats through the Sixties. 

The making of the midcentury Democrats involved a transformation arguably more dramatic than Trump’s remaking of the Reagan GOP. Going back to its Jacksonian roots, the Democrats were beholden to a Jeffersonian vision of independent yeomen which saw the Hamiltonian state as, at best, an evil to be minimized and tolerated — barely. There was virtue to this vision, but it failed to answer the problems of the industrial age, when American craftsmen and yeomen became wage-earning employees, who owned neither their own tools nor land, and who were lorded over by enormous oligopolies controlling their respective markets. Prices were no longer a pristine index of supply and demand or marginal productivity, as in the pre-industrial world — but an expression of sheer market power.

Against this backdrop, the Democratic Party managed to refound itself. It adopted a Hamiltonian vision that accepted the rational need for larger institutions. As Dunkelman writes, “these [Hamiltonian progressives] came to believe that the [Jeffersonian] vilification of ‘bigness’ was fundamentally off base. In their view, the salve wouldn’t be in eroding concentrations of power, but in establishing new nodes of public power to hold vast concentrations in check.” In other words, to protect the ideal of republican independence and dignity, it was necessary to wield the apparatus of the federal government: “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends,” in the famous formula of the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

And it was that basic conception that drove the recovery from the Depression, the successful execution of World War II, and the phenomenal achievements of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years. 

The tragedy of the 20th century is that at some point, the Democrats gave up on that political conception. In the Sixties, a progressivism emerged that was essentially nihilist, that believed in tearing-down all concentrated power, that mistrusted the very soul of America. I’m speaking, of course, of the decline of New Deal Democrats and the rise of the McGovernites and their ilk: the cohort that LBJ, the last New Deal Democrat, derided as “Harvard kids.” 

In a way, the acme of this shift was the progressive historian Robert Caro’s ferocious attacks against the legacy of New York’s legendary urban planner, Robert Moses. In his 1974 book, The Power Broker, Caro painted Moses as a liberal autocrat who tore through Gotham’s organic fabric in pursuit of large, rationalized infrastructure. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, representing a similar tendency as Caro, mounted a parallel attack. The enduring result was to delegitimize the Hamiltonian impulse in Democratic government. As Dunkelman puts it, the party’s “previous inclination to build power up had been replaced by an almost insatiable impulse to tear things down.”

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By Justin H. Vassallo

The result was paralysis and red tape everywhere. The Republican Party, having made its own peace with good government under Eisenhower and Nixon, had turned cannibalistic and libertarian by the end of the Seventies, demolishing everything in the American state that wasn’t the military. For their part, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party produced nothing but snarl. Anybody critical of Robert Moses’s excesses might pause to consider the 40 years it took, after Moses’s death, to build a meager extension to the Second Avenue Subway or the city’s utter inability to reconstruct Penn Station. Moses, by contrast, built up several enormous projects in far less time.

Which brings us to today’s Democratic Party. The party today still suffers from the damage wrought by its turn in the Sixties and Seventies. For example, the party’s 2020 assault on policing, now blessedly abandoned, was an echo of the same destructive tendencies that saw Democrats abandon New Deal models and New Deal patriotism in favor of McGovernite suspicion and Leftist excess.

Still, the Democratic Party retains enough muscle memory to be able — maybe, just maybe — to become once more the party of sound government. The movement for so-called abundance, spearheaded by the likes of Ezra Klein, promises to coordinate government and business in order to clear supply bottlenecks, lower prices, and promote the mass, middle-class prosperity that used to be the Democrats’ calling card. Some of this work is deregulatory and involves cutting the kinds of boutique environmental red tape that hinders development in the United States. Some of it, however, would involve — yes — proactive government where the market has failed: industrial policy, workforce training, and the like. 

Compare this to the chaos wrought by DOGE Republicans, as they slash through not just things that need to be slashed — but also funding for the sorts of basic research in the health sciences that form the foundations of US prosperity. This policy can’t but have long-lasting, and destructive, ramifications: researchers and academics leaving the United States in the kind of “brain drain” associated with Third World countries; economic uncertainty prompting other nations to look for new trading partners. 

Allies are caught in the lurch, not sure if they can rely on the United States to maintain its security commitments or even conduct a cogent foreign policy. The United States, whether it likes it or not, is an empire and a hegemon, and the nation owes it to the world to fulfill the imperial obligations it has accrued. That’s what both parties, actually, discovered in the crucial period when the modern party system developed, but the Republicans managed to forget all that and the Democrats almost have. But not quite as badly as the GOP.

So, yes, as much as Democrats drive me to distraction, I remain a Democrat. The party is flawed — deeply flawed — but the job of government, fundamentally, is to govern, and the Democrats are the only party of the two that still takes that task seriously.