Democrats Must Discover Their Unique Selling Proposition
They’re the party of government. They should start acting like it.
At Persuasion, we talk a lot about the values of philosophical liberalism and the need for cultural moderation. But one of the big questions raised by the recent transformation of American politics, and the breaking up of an older economic consensus, is what a coherent economic vision for the next decades might look like. Addressing himself primarily to the debate within the Democratic Party, Sam Kahn makes a case for a populist economist rooted in the burgeoning antitrust movement. Over the coming weeks and months, we will also feature many other voices, including ones that argue for an abundance agenda or address how the Republican Party can genuinely transform into party of the multiracial working-class. I hope you join us for these important debates.
This month’s election was not just a defeat for the Democrats. It was the end of the Democratic Party as we know it. The one conclusion that everybody seems to share in common is that the Democrats, to reconstitute themselves, need to make some bold moves. But almost nobody has any idea what those bold moves are.
The initial smart election analysis came from people like centrist Democratic Senator Chris Murphy who, on X, wrote, “Real economic populism should be our tentpole. But here’s the thing—then you need to let people into the tent who aren’t 100% on board with us on every social and cultural issue, or issues like guns or climate.”
That seems basically right—cut off the left when it gets too radical, tack to the center, and win on bread-and-butter issues—but it struck me at the same time as too small, as the Dems simply imitating the MAGA playbook. After all, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris both played hard to the center and ended up with little to show for it.
The Democrats need, truly, to go back to the drawing board, think through what the base of their party can be, what the winning coalition is that they need to obtain, and, above all, identify a narrative that can cut through to a divided, embittered country.
Years of exile—when you have no power to cling to—are the perfect time for an exercise like this. It may be useful to think somewhat analogically and somewhat historically.
At the moment I am teaching an advertising course—a bit hilariously, since I have never worked in advertising and don’t know anything about it—but this has had the benefit of putting me in contact with the very useful idea of the Unique Selling Proposition (USP). It’s what every advertiser looks to do with their product—to identify what the core quality is of a product that distinguishes it from the competition and then to relentlessly emphasize that quality in one’s marketing.
In American history, winning coalitions have tended to emerge because talented, charismatic politicians identified a narrative—a Unique Selling Proposition, if you like—that could appeal to a broad coalition. In modern American history, those USPs have been Theodore Roosevelt leading the Republican Party out of its staunchly pro-business position to embrace a robust antitrust platform; Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushing Keynesian economics and sweeping government spending to alleviate the Depression; Richard Nixon identifying conservative social values that set large numbers of Americans in opposition to the perceived excesses of the ‘60s; Ronald Reagan developing a curious platform of robust military spending combined with laissez-faire economics; and now, Donald Trump using protectionist rhetoric to appeal to hinterland voters left behind by globalization.
Say what you will about any of those programs, they all represent a Unique Selling Proposition and they all worked. Most of them emerged out of a period of political exile, when the parties had a chance to formulate their message.
So what is the Democrats’ Unique Selling Proposition?
The party is in a particularly sorry situation because, for over a century, Democrats have, at core, been the party of unions, and unions, politically speaking, are now a dead letter in the United States. The first conceptual move that the Democrats have to make, then, is to acknowledge that the old union base is gone—as symbolized by Democratic losses all across the “Blue Wall” this election cycle—and that there is no reason to think it is coming back. Over the last decades, the Democrats triaged their loss of union voters by appealing more towards elites—by becoming the party of the coasts. This coalition—call it the Jon Stewart party—narrowly won a handful of elections, but the weaknesses of that party have become gradually apparent. Simply put, there aren’t enough elites in the country to compensate for the widespread rage in the hinterland. As another conceptual move, the Democrats will have to shed that iteration of the party as well.
It won’t work for the Democrats simply to mimic the Republicans and declare themselves the adversaries of government. That would be moving too far off-brand and violating the historical Unique Selling Proposition of their party. So the Democrats start by identifying themselves as the party of government. That’s the sacred tradition. They speak for the social contract by which government conscientiously uses tax dollars and improves the lives of its citizens. For the party to have a clear USP, there can’t be any hedging about that.
The next point is obvious enough. The Democrats need to identify themselves as the stalwart adversaries of anybody who violates the terms of the social contract. That is, above all, the corporations. The Democrats need to hone in on the point that, for instance, Amazon pays vanishingly little in taxes relative to its revenues (some years paying no federal income tax at all), that Warren Buffett’s secretary has a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett does—that the tax code is so riddled with loopholes and corporate giveaways that the average taxpayer is squeezed by a bevy of taxes while the corporations freely loot the economy. It’s deeply unjust and it should make everybody mad.
The main reason that the Democrats have been unwilling to flag corporate giveaways as their core issue is that the party is hopelessly indebted to corporations as their donor base. But the 2024 election demonstrated the limitations of money in elections. The Democrats outspent Republicans by $460 million in the presidential race and it got them nothing. A coherent message is well worth a sacrifice of funding.
What’s more, a great deal of the donor base is already shifting into the Trump camp. Elon Musk donated $118 million to the Trump campaign. Jeff Bezos pulled the plug on The Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris in order—one can’t help but assume—to curry favor with Trump. That kind of oligarchic fecklessness is the Democrats’ opportunity. They owe nothing to people like Musk and Bezos, and that gives them the freedom to run against them—to wage a populist campaign against tax loopholes and the corporate raiding of the economy.
In particular, Musk’s alliance with MAGA gives the Democrats a golden opportunity. The party has largely been on the fence when it comes to tech regulation—allowing Republicans to take the lead in regulating TikTok while cultivating friendships with platforms like Meta and the previous owners of Twitter. There is little left for Democrats to gain from these relationships. X is run by Musk. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly distanced himself from Democrats. And widespread concern about AI and cell phone addiction turns Big Tech into a political issue that is ripe for the picking.
The issue is so new that there is some work to do to identify where Democrats will stand on it. The intelligent policy would be to continue the antitrust agenda that started in the Biden White House. Antitrust, under Biden, was a kind of wonky, under-the-table program identified with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan—with the government challenging transactions by companies ranging from Microsoft to Meta to Penguin Random House; and with the FTC issuing rules against corporate practices as diverse as employee non-compete clauses and duplicitous techniques to prevent consumers from canceling online subscriptions. But Khan’s reforms impressed those who were paying attention, and the Democrats can embrace that agenda and give it wider purchase.
It’s worth quoting here a recent Harper’s piece by Barry C. Lynn on antitrust. Lynn writes of Google:
[Google has assembled] a vast maze of online corridors designed to enclose as much of our digital lives as possible. This in turn enables them to establish the corporation as the middleman, or gatekeeper, between us and almost anyone who wants to sell us some good or idea. … One or another of Google’s platforms today stands between you and your parents, between you and your children, and between you and your friends. Between you and your doctor, your druggist, and your therapist. Between you and your mayor and your representative in Congress and your president. You and your co-workers and professors. You and your car, electricity, and airlines. You and your movies and sports.
The thought of that makes me just as angry as the fact that Amazon pays no taxes. And, like the fact that Amazon pays no taxes, it strikes me as a campaign issue. If running against Google or Amazon seems like not exactly a poll-tested position—or a manifestation of the popular will as it currently stands—keep in mind that the breakup of Standard Oil initiated by Teddy Roosevelt in the 1900s would have seemed similarly far-fetched, if not imponderable, until the government actually knuckled down and did it, at which point the inherent merits of the antitrust position became obvious to large numbers of voters.
What is missing in what I have offered so far is a comprehensive economic theory—and the Democrats, if they are to eventually produce a winning coalition, need to come up with one. I’m not being facetious when I speak in those terms. Keynesianism was untested economics until FDR adopted it as the economic ideology of the New Deal. The “Chicago School” was mostly esoteric until Reagan took its precepts on in his trickle-down economics. A great deal of Donald Trump’s political success has to do with an economic theory of his own devising—which he often seems to be concocting on the campaign trail—and which involves high tariffs, as inspired by William McKinley(!), and, at last count, a repeal of the income tax.
The Democrats can do better than what’s currently on offer. The latest iteration of Democratic economic theory—as laid out, for instance by Jake Sullivan in his celebrated Brookings speech—emphasizes protectionism and a renewal of industrialization and sounds a lot like Trump-lite. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’ “opportunity economy” sounds like nothing at all.
For my money, a better approach is to be found in the writing of people like Michael Lind, a journalist and writer at the University of Texas at Austin, and Sohrab Ahmari, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Compact. One of their key points is that other countries—as America did at the height of its prosperity—have “stakeholder capitalism,” in which corporations are answerable to wage boards, labor, and elements of society: to “stakeholders” broadly construed. In the late 1970s, however, the Anglo-American world made a radical departure to “shareholder capitalism,” in which shareholder value—or the very dubious morality of “shareholder ethics”—became the sole economic determinant. It always was questionable as an economic theory and, as Jack Welch, one of the architects of shareholder value, later put it, “Strictly speaking, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.”
If Jack Welch can see the error of his ways, we can too. A turn back towards “stakeholder capitalism” would help to rectify the rampant inequality of American society and is a comprehensible concept that fits the Democrats’ “brand.” It is, essentially, an overriding economic theory to attach to the agenda of closing corporate tax loopholes and pursuing antitrust. What certainly won’t work is for the Democrats to enter a new election cycle with the tattered quilt of economic positions that they currently have—a soft neoliberalism combined with lip service to fading union values.
The Democrats actually do have a golden opportunity here to reconfigure their party and to come up with a winning ticket while in the wilderness. Whatever else will happen during the Donald Trump administration, we can safely assume that it will be volatile and that lots of opportunities will emerge for Democrats to gain back some of their lost ground. What is important, though, is not to get caught up in tactical skirmishes that play into Trump’s overriding narratives. The Democrats have the chance now to develop a master strategy that can result in a long-lasting, enduring coalition. To do that, though, they have to be smart and to think about their underlying USP. The clock is already ticking.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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First and foremost, you have to like, respect and be truly curious about the people you're trying to win over. It is evident to over half the country that Democrats really don't like them, care about their concerns or think they could possibly know anything about anything. When I read pieces like this, I can't help feeling like it's an effort to find the right 'narrative', the right things to say, the right policy formulation but I don't get the feeling there is genuine concern or interest towards the average American other than as recalcitrant objects to 'set straight' and boy do Democrats think they are the ones to do it. They do not like or respect 'not progressives' as they constantly make abundantly clear. Until they adjust their attitude, they will wander in the wilderness.
"After all, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris both played hard to the center and ended up with little to show for it. "
Telling someone you love them after you have punched them in the face is only persuasive to a very small number of people. Most will not buy your new stance.