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Elaine C. Kamarck is a senior fellow in Governance Studies and the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings. William A. Galston holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Governance Studies program at Brookings.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Elaine Kamarck, and William Galston explore why the Democrats aren’t building long-term coalitions, how the Democrats lost the working class, and how centrists in the party can create a compelling offer for voters.
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I want to read to you from something I read last night. It says: “The Democratic Party must choose between two basic strategies. The first is to hunker down, change nothing, and wait for some catastrophe—deep recession, failed war, or a breach of the Constitution—to deliver victory. This strategy has the disadvantage of placing the party entirely at the mercy of events. It puts the party in the position of tacitly hoping for bad news—a stance the electorate can smell and doesn't like. And it is a formula for purposeless, ineffective governance. The other strategy, active rather than passive, is to address the party's weaknesses directly. Thus the next nominee must be fully credible as commander-in-chief of our armed forces and as the prime steward of our foreign policy; he must squarely reflect the moral sentiments of average Americans; and he must offer a progressive economic message, based on the values of upward mobility and individual effort.”
The authors of those lines are Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston. And it sounds to me like they were written a few months ago. When were they written?
Elaine Kamarck: 1989.
Bill Galston: 36 years ago.
Mounk: I’d always read about this famous paper, “The Politics of Evasion,” and I'm obviously well acquainted with both of your work, but I must admit that I hadn't read it until yesterday, and I just fell out of my chair reading the paper, noticing how similar the situation after Democrats lost to George H.W. Bush in 1988 was compared to how you might analyze it today. Take us back to that moment and explain to us what the problems were that you were analyzing in “The Politics of Evasion.”
Kamarck: We'd lost several presidential elections in a row, even though the party was still quite strong at the congressional level and at the local level. So we were living in a sort of a myth that really nothing was wrong. It was just that Ronald Reagan was so charismatic, et cetera. Then we lost to George H. W. Bush, who was anything but charismatic. We really had to have a “come to Jesus” moment, as we say. And we had to look at the party and say something's really wrong here. Of course, what was wrong was something that we've seen since, which is that the Democrats were fundamentally out of step with most of the country on values. And they were turned off by the national Democrats, even though at that point in time, they continued to elect Democrats to the House and to the Senate. So there was this need for the party to take a hard look at itself.
Galston: One of the things that masked the problems was the Democrats' commanding position in the Congress of the United States. The Senate was somewhat variable, but the Democrats in the late 1980s had held the House for more than 30 consecutive years and would go on to hold it for another six years. We warned in “The Politics of Evasion” against what we called “the myth of the congressional bastion.” That is that Democrats could remain strong in the Congress indefinitely, even if they'd lost credibility at the national level. So we were dismayed, but not entirely shocked, when Democrats did lose control of the Congress. And of course, we had lost and then gained and then lost again control of the Senate. It was clear that the ice was breaking up and that it was no longer thick enough to stand on. But the question of what to do was by no means obvious.
Mounk: One of the things that's striking to me in that paper is that you go through a number of excuses that Democrats told themselves for why they didn’t have to change anything. You call one “the myth of liberal fundamentalism”—that if only we really went to the true liberal, the true progressive positions, then everything would be fine. Another is “the myth of mobilization”—that the only reason why Democrats lost is that the true party faithful, its base in ethnic minority groups, in people who are less likely to turn out to the polls, hadn't shown up, and that if they did, then they would win big. Again, it struck me that all of that discussion in the paper, including a reference to occasional podcast guest and Persuasion contributor Ruy Teixeira, could have been written in the last months.
Kamarck: Absolutely it could have. In fact, Bill and I are getting a little bit older—as you can see by Bill’s gray hair and my attempt to cover my gray hair—and we keep joking that we need somebody else to write this paper because we’re not going to be able to write this paper for very long unless the Democrats really have a change in how they look at themselves and how they understand the nation.
One of the things that was happening back then was something like a realignment. We'd never quite seen this before. What was going on in the South especially was that members of Congress were changing parties. In the ‘70s and in the ‘80s we had a sort of regular drumbeat of people changing political parties because they didn't think they could really belong in the national Democratic Party anymore. That should have been a warning sign that something was happening. And of course, now the southern states are almost completely Republican, almost at every level.
Galston: This is a familiar historical story now. Democrats as late as the 1960s inherited the New Deal Coalition, which was a somewhat ungainly coalition of Northern and to some extent Western liberals on the one hand, and Southern conservatives, especially conservative on racial issues, on the other. As the familiar story goes, the civil rights movement blew that up. But it didn't happen all at once. As Elaine said, there was a steady drift in the South away from the Democratic Party, in part through people transferring themselves from one party to the other and in part through a series of defeats of Southern Democrats at the hands of Republicans. And at the same time, liberal Republicans—who were so important in politics—all but disappeared. They became Democrats. This realignment, it turned out, had a series of negative consequences for Democrats, including the fact that Democrats lost control in many small states (which elect just as many senators as big states) leaving us with an increasingly steep hill to climb to get to a majority in the Senate—and that hill has only gotten steeper in recent years.
Mounk: Another parallel to today was your stance on economic issues. As the quote that I cited earlier indicates, you worried that perhaps Democrats were not talking enough about rewarding individual initiative and weren’t aspirational enough, didn't talk enough about people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum really hoping to live the American dream. That didn't surprise me so much.
But I always remembered the famous phrase coined, I think, by James Carville: “It's the economy, stupid.” And that's not what your paper sounded like. You were arguing against those who thought it’s all about the economy—that actually, cultural issues were just as important, even at the time. Tell us about why cultural issues were so important even in the runup to what turned out to be Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, and why that was widely overlooked.
Galston: Elaine and I came to regard cultural issues as a kind of credibility threshold. That is to say, unless people thought that you shared their sentiments and values, they wouldn't really give you a hearing for your economic message. There is a kind of economic fundamentalism that's at work in a lot of progressive thinking. And to use familiar language, the idea is that economics is the base and culture is the superstructure. And that economics does a lot more to shape the culture than culture does to shape the general mindset of the electorate. And the more we thought about that, the more we concluded that that was just wrong, that that might be true for progressive intellectuals, but by and large it was not true for average Americans. A party that didn't understand that was a party that was going to get into trouble, even if it had a more credible economic message than what we had in 1988—which was nothing.
Kamarck: Yeah, and it's very simple. Look, the cultural issues are emotional. They scare people, they frighten people, okay? It's something they don't like. Emotion will always trump intellect. To understand the economic issues, it's sort of an intellectual process. Well, okay, what will stop inflation? Will this stop inflation? Will that stop inflation? You cannot, in fact, imagine getting an economic message through to an electorate that is terrified by a changing culture that they don't understand and they don't agree with. That’s just human behavior.
Mounk: Once again, it strikes me that what you call a threshold of credibility, I've talked about in a contemporary context as a sort of permission to speak. Yes, Democrats may hope to win elections on the economy, but in order to do so, they need to at least make it clear to people that they care about their interests, that they don't judge them, that they have a basically similar view of the world. And if you fail on that, they are not going to listen to your economic message. So again, it's a striking parallel, think.
You've also written widely and extensively about the situation the Democrats find themselves in today. So draw out those similarities. A lot of people are saying, Kamala Harris inherited the nomination late in the game. She had a lot of headwinds like the high inflation which was a problem for incumbents generally. Nobody could have won under those circumstances. Therefore, as Ken Martin, the newly elected chair of the DNC said, we have the right message. There's nothing really we have to change. Therefore, as Tim Walz, Kamala Harris's running mate—remember him?—said recently, the problem is that we didn't defend wokeness and DEI enough. We need to double down on those issues and that's how we're to win in 2028. Why are Ken Martin and Tim Walz wrong in your estimation?
Kamarck: Well, let's go with the three big issues. Inflation, immigration, and culture. Culture was encapsulated by the war over wokeness and over transgender issues. With inflation, the administration was simply too slow to talk about it. And it was a reflection of something that we haven't spoken about yet, which was new to this election: in the years since we wrote the first “Politics of Evasion,” the class basis of the American parties has flipped on its head. And the Democrats are now the party of college-educated and well-to-do people and the Republican Party is the party of people who are not college educated and are not very well-to-do. The way I put it to people who understand it is, look, the college-educated people will walk through the grocery stores without adding up what's going into their grocery carts. Everybody else, especially in times of inflation, will be adding up in their head or sometimes on their phone or whatever exactly what's going into their grocery carts because those things matter. We miss that completely.
Immigration is an economic issue, but it is also a cultural issue. It runs deep into fear: fear of the other, fear of losing, fear of being taken over by people you don't know. And of course, Trump played on that absolutely beautifully. And then there’s the transgender issue, which the Trump campaign used as a sledgehammer through the five weeks of the campaign, running it every single time they could. It also evoked fear of the unknown. Somehow people were convinced that something was going to happen to their children because other children had, or other adolescents had, gender dysphoria. The whole thing was on an emotional level which the Democrats did not understand and completely missed, and their policy prescriptions were neither here nor there, because each one of those things had an emotional impact on voters and it was really a shame.
Galston: Well, it's hard to improve on Elaine's summary, but just a couple of footnotes. First of all, while I absolutely agree that cultural issues are deeply emotional, I think we should not forget about the emotional component of economic issues. And this is what all of the economists that Elaine and I associate with just didn't get. For many Americans—and we saw this very, very clearly during the Carter inflation period—inflation is a metaphor for things getting out of control. It's also a metaphor for unfairness, which is deeply resented because people think that they have earned what they get, and then inflation is taking it away from them. So that generates a deep sense of being wronged by forces that you don't understand. That's point number one: when the Biden administration restated favorable statistics over and over again— jobs, GDP, you name it—all of that was true, but it wasn't relevant. Because as a matter of fact, it sounded evasive. And people resent being told that the problems they think are the real problems are not really the real problems, and that we've solved other problems that are the real problems. That verges on adding insult to injury.
The second point I would make is that it wasn't just the overall valence of the party's stance on transgender issues. It was also some of the specific policy positions that the party had taken. We found ourselves in the position of defending transgender women's participation in women's sports. That’s what the politicians call an 80-20 issue—80% opposed to that and only 20% in favor. You have to think very, very hard before adopting an 80-20 position. We also found ourselves in a situation in which we were defending, in effect, what Democrats call gender-affirming surgery for minors. And that really gives Americans the willies. We can have a long policy discussion as to whether that's the right or the wrong position. Americans are willing to give a pass on adults making decisions for themselves, but performing hard-to-reverse surgery on 11-year-olds and 12-year-olds is, I think, viscerally very hard for most people to swallow. So, it was specific policies with which the party was associated as well as a generally unpopular issue.
Mounk: Now, one obvious difference between 1989, 1990, and eventually 1992 and today is that George H.W. Bush was in power. And Democrats had good reason to disagree with some of his policies. And Democrats always have a tendency to say that whatever Republican is in power is somehow dangerous and irresponsible and so on. George H.W. Bush sort of comes as close to being a moderate establishment Republican as we have in the modern political era. Donald J. Trump is a very, different beast. He clearly believes that the refutation of Democrats’ ideological positions is an embrace of Republicans ideological positions, many of which are also 80-20 issues, on which Republicans are on the losing side. He is attacking democratic institutions in a very different way from anything you could possibly say about George H. W. Bush. And of course, he is wreaking havoc, for example, on the economy with “Liberation Day” in a way that a conventional Republican certainly wouldn't. What difference do you think that makes? Does that make a case for those who say, this is a different environment. We're not dealing with a strong Republican Party. We're dealing with a deeply ideological project that's going to go off the rails, that's going to make itself unpopular. All we need is the oligarchy tour of Bernie Sanders and AOC going around and lambasting Trump as strongly and as vocally as possible. Let's do that rather than getting bogged down in ideological debates where our coalition might splinter and people are going to be unhappy.
Kamarck: One of the things that we say in our recent paper—and that we said in the paper 30 some years ago—is that one way of dealing with the difference between the two parties is to sit back and wait for the other party to just screw up. That's not a bad strategy right now. Trump does seem to be screwing up pretty, pretty big time. He seems to be perhaps leading us into a recession. This tariff stuff is all over the place and I think people are very nervous about it. So, that's a strategy and it certainly has worked. Bush gave us the Great Recession and that was a big deal. Trump failed at breeding confidence about the pandemic and so we got a Democrat. So, yeah, we can sit around and not change much and wait for the other party to screw up.
The problem with that is that there is never any lasting progress. It's always this back and forth and back and forth and back and forth because, fundamentally, when we're in office they don't like us. They don't like Democrats. They don't like what Biden was doing. They didn't like the stuff that was coming out on the cultural side from the Biden administration. They thought he was not sensitive to inflation. And, my god, on immigration. If he had done in 2022 what he did in 2024, which was to basically dramatically change the rules of the road at the border, we would have had entirely different elections. So, we're at this point where, yeah, we might win. We might take back the House in 2026. We could even win the presidency in 2028 if they keep screwing up like this and we're in a recession, et cetera. But that doesn't solve the problem. It only gives us more of this back and forth and back and forth. We still go in with some deep, deep problems.
Mounk: That seems to me exactly right, in particular from the perspective of democracy. Democrats don't just need to win an election every now and again in order to pass some policies. They really need to build a big and lasting majority that forces Republicans back to the table, that forces Republicans to moderate so that they actually appeal to a broader set of Americans, forcing them therefore to give up on some of that extremism. Lambasting Trump for being extreme when people mistrust you might be enough because he's the one who's in office and he's more extreme and he's doing lots of bad things, but it's not going to be enough to build that kind of lasting majority. So if you're actually understanding the stakes of this political moment, you need to A) want to build this more lasting majority, and B) to want to maximize your chances in 2028. Anybody might win in 2028 if things go sufficiently off the rails, but to rely on that seems to me to be a mistake.
Galston: Yeah. You may think, Yascha, that we have only written this paper twice. In fact, we've written it four times. 1989, and then after the 2008 election, where we very unpopularly suggested that Barack Obama could not be the second coming of FDR, however many pundits thought he could be. But the third time we wrote this paper was in February 2022. And in that paper, we not only argued that President Biden's immigration policy was the road to ruin for his administration and for the party, we also said this: What's looming in the wings is not the second coming of George H.W. Bush. It's the second coming of Donald Trump. And the second time will be worse than the first. Therefore, it is the principal political duty of the Biden administration to conduct itself in such a way as to minimize the chances that Donald Trump would ever darken the halls of the Oval Office again. That's what we said then. That's what we meant. And it was the truth, damn it. That was their prime duty. Not pursuing various avenues that are sensible to people who have spent their lives in progressive think tanks—who were not scarce on the ground in the Biden administration.
But here's the clinching point. The Washington Post-Ipsos Reuters poll taken just a couple of weeks ago was really bad news for Donald Trump. But the news was just as bad for the Democratic Party. When people were asked, well, who do you trust more to solve the nation's problems? Donald Trump or the Democrats? Despite everything that has happened in the first 105 days of the Trump administration, it was Trump 37, Democrats 30. We can fool ourselves into thinking that there's a sort of a political hydraulic process at work here so that if Trump goes down, Democrats necessarily go up. But that's not true. In fact, Trump is in the process of losing the credibility that Democrats had already lost. I don't want to think about what 2028 looks like if we have two political parties who are viewed as not credible by the American people. That will be an invitation to political chaos, which means that the most important task of the Democratic Party over the next three years is to organize a debate that leads up to a coherent new offer to the center.
That is our job. And that's the way we ought to think of the task of party renewal over the next three years. And it doesn't mean anointing anybody. It means setting the stage for the most robust debate that Democrats have had in a generation about what the party requires and, even more important, what the country needs at this particular point.
Mounk: So let's go a little bit deeper into what party renewal would actually look like and entail. And I want to do that in two steps. The first step is what is the actual substance? And then perhaps later we can talk about what the process would look like.
What is a message that Democrats can give on the economy, which is true to their longstanding ideals, which tries to make America a more equal place that tries to give more opportunity to those who are locked out of it at the moment, that tries to give more decent and humane lives to those who are poor, those who are struggling, those who are worried about accessing health care or paying the bills at the end of the month? And what is the message on culture, which stands in the tradition of civil rights, which stands in the tradition of wanting to be an inclusive and diverse country that treats everybody with fairness and respect, irrespective of who they are, but that doesn't end up on the wrong side of issues that are 80-20?
Kamarck: I don't know the actual answer to that, but I know how to think about it. On the cultural side, we have to go all the way back to Bill Clinton, who was a genius at this stuff. And when he ran as a New Democrat, he had various formulations, which said to the electorate, yes, I am a Democrat and I have the Democratic Party's values, but I understand your critique and I will act on it. So the line that was as popular as you can get in the 1992 campaign was, end welfare as we know it. That said—to the people who were very, very distrustful of the welfare system and thought it was giving their tax dollars to a bunch of lazy people who didn't want to work—it said, we get you, we understand what you feel about this. However, we're going to fix that. We're not going to let people starve in the streets. We're going to keep a welfare system. But it's going to be a fair welfare system. And that welfare reform, by the way, has not been undone in 30-plus years. He hit the right note there.
I think that we need to look for that when the issues come up, when it's the transgender issues with whatever the new cultural issues are that come up. We need to come up with that third wave formulation that Bill Clinton was so very, very good at. And I think it's possible, but I don't have it right now. But I think that's the way we look. Remember that end welfare as we know it had the same oomph in the ‘92 campaign that the tagline, Kamala is for they/them, I’m for you, had in the 2024 campaign. Same oomph. They ran it, they saw how it moved voters. Whenever they were in trouble, they ran the same ad. So that's what we're looking for. I don't have it. I wish we had Frank Luntz working for us, not for the Republicans, because he's a Republican pollster who's very, very good at the wordsmithing part of politics. But we need something that is in that basket.
Galston: I would add that we need a new way of thinking about the economics of upward mobility that focuses in very concrete ways on what people are now not getting and don't have access to. Let me give you an example. The classic path to upward mobility in the United States is home ownership. But we have an entire generation now of 35-year-old adults who've been renting all their lives, but now they have two kids and are looking at problems of education and good places for kids to have access to parks and other amenities. So they're looking to move out of that rental apartment into their first home. They can't buy it. They simply can't buy it. There are lots of homes on the market for people like Elaine and me.
But if you're a young couple making the median family income, say $85,000 a year, looking to buy a home, you probably can't, because the multiple of the median home price relative to the median income has soared from about two to about seven over the past 30 years. That is not just an economic statistic. That's a mobility blocker. And we have a shortage of millions of homes that should be the first homes for people trying not only to move out of their apartment, but move up the economic ladder. What are we going to do about that? I hope that there will be a task force over the next two years of Democrats who are willing to throw away the old playbook and just ask themselves, okay, we have the greatest technology in the world, we're not a crowded little country, right? We have vast stretches of territory. What the heck can we do to generate three or four million new homes fast that young people can buy?
I would recommend as a heuristic going through the basic building blocks of an upwardly mobile young couple's life and asking, what can we do consistent with the way markets operate, consistent with government's well-known flaws, to at least make lives easier for them, if not altogether solve these problems? Because it only takes two or three ideas like that to capture the public's imagination. They won't respond to abstract theories of macroeconomics or a new third way economics, et cetera. If those abstractions can be given life and definition by concrete solutions to key problems, then I think we'll have something to talk about. And to the best of my knowledge, in 2024, we didn't have anything like that to talk about. And people sensed that they would get the status quo if they voted for Kamala Harris and they preferred taking a chance instead of voting for the certainty of the status quo.
Mounk: I'm somewhat torn on this issue. There's obviously a larger debate about an abundance agenda. And on the substance, I very much agree with it. It is absurd that housing prices are as high as they are, not just in the most densely populated parts of Manhattan, which are always going to be particularly desirable and of a particular economic opportunity. And so it's natural that they also command a certain amount of economic premium, but in places that really could very easily build the additional housing that would allow people to partake in their economic opportunities. I'm particularly struck by certain affluent small towns in New England or in parts of the Pacific Northwest that are just surrounded by fields, surrounded by woods, surrounded by places where you could very, very easily build housing. But because of longstanding zoning laws and other restrictions, it is just impossible to do that. And that has a really bad impact on the quality of life of people in those communities. If you don't stand to inherit a home in those places, you cannot afford to live in the place you grew up. If you talk to anybody who works in a coffee shop there, who works in a restaurant there, they commute for at least an hour in order to get there because that's where they can afford to live. This obviously also has an impact on the dynamism of the American economy as a whole because people from other poorer parts of the country can't afford to move there.
As a question of substance, I agree with you completely. As an intellectual strategy, I'm much less certain because most Americans own homes and for a very significant share of Americans, that is the primary source of wealth they have. And so they might want to trade up to a nicer home, they might be worried about the children not being able to afford homes, but they’re also really worried about the value of their specific home going down, since that is where a lot of the net worth is bound up. People may want to have more economic opportunity, but they're also really worried about the character of their neighborhoods in ways that are sometimes somewhat puzzling to me, but it is a very, very live concern for people.
In an electoral battle you have the yimbies, the Yes In My Back Yard crowd that I very much see as my ideological compatriots, and the nimbies, the Not In My Back Yard crowd—I don't want to allow this evil developer to come in and build a three-story home that might allow more families that perhaps are a little bit less affluent to move in our neighborhood, and perhaps there'll be a little bit more traffic. Ideologically, I know which side I'm on. In terms of showing the Democrats can govern 20 years down the road, I know that it's a winning proposition to actually make sure that California is a thriving state, not just Texas. In terms of the next election, I'm much less certain about whether or not that is a winning proposition. What do you both think?
Galston: I’m not in favor of federal preemption of state and local zoning laws. I think that's the wrong way to go about this. Suppose you're trying to run forward and there's a wall stretching out in front of you, and you can either run straight into the wall or you can look for a way of running around it, right? And I don't think any more than you do that Democrats should be in the business of going into suburbs as they now exist, and forcing people to place the value of their houses at risk. But that's not the way we have to do it. As you yourself pointed out, there are vast stretches of land in and around major cities that are not currently occupied. And we just need to think more creatively, it seems to me, as a party and as a country, about the way of bringing back to young couples the kind of opportunity that they enjoyed at the end of the Second World War. Is that mission impossible? I don't think so. But it's the problem we have to think about.
Kamarck: I think this is a huge problem. I think there's a bigger one. And it's the problem that Bill and a guy named Mark Muro, who works at Brookings, talked about in a paper in 2018. And it's about the forgotten places. There are places in the country where the engine of economic dynamism just doesn't exist. They've just gone away. There's forgotten towns all over the country. There's places where there aren't any jobs. And the kids who manage to get out of very mediocre high schools by doing well, they move. They move. They leave their parents there and they move. Right here in Arlington, Virginia, there are apartments and houses all over the place. The prices are sky high and there's young people here. There's young people and they've come here. Why? Because I can look out of my window and I can see Boeing and all sorts of other big companies, not to mention Amazon, right here.
So the concentration of economic activity and high-end and good jobs has created a problem that we never really had before. If you read old novels from the 19th century, the towns, the guy who owned the factory lived in the town where the factory was. He lived on a hill. He lived in a big house. There's lots of drama written about those class differences within the towns. These days, the guy who owns the factory lives in Manhattan, or lives in L.A. or someplace else. They don't live in the towns. And so, let me just say, as a member of the party that cares about people who are in bad economic circumstances, I don't think there are any easy answers to this one. I really don't.
Now, maybe you could sort of do some tax things to encourage businesses to move there, but look, businesses don't move to places where the workforce has been decimated. And they just won't. So this is a problem that I think Democrats have to think about because we're not going to win back the Ohio's of the world. And Ohio is perhaps the poster child of this problem. We're not going to win them back until we have an economic proposal that says, we can give you economic growth in a way that you have not had since the 1970s and 1980s.
Galston: I think it's an interesting question: which state is the closest to the symbol of the party's problems? And so let me just pose the following question. Is it Ohio or is it Florida? Those are two states that have moved out of the Democrats’ reach over the past 15 years. Obama won both of those states at least once, but now they are way down on the Democrats’ list. Why has Florida, so to speak, gone south? And the answer, at least to a first approximation, is that we lost touch with Hispanic voters in Florida, as indeed we did across the country. Now, Elaine said something 15 years ago, based on her ethnic heritage, which has turned out to be prophetic. And that is that Hispanics would be the Italians of the 21st century. And that is exactly the way things are working out. They are culturally moderate. They're entrepreneurial. They are twice as likely to start small businesses as other groups.
If the Democratic Party is seen as a party in touch with the private sector at all, it is seen as being in touch with big business, but not small business. If you're talking about upward mobility, small business is the path for many people, especially aspiring minorities, recent immigrants, who have a tradition of strong families and therefore can create small businesses based on pooled family labor that provides all sorts of advantages. Question for the Democratic Party. What are we doing? What can we do to make it easier for these aspiring entrepreneurs to do their business and to move up to expand their wellbeing? We will have an opportunity to try out that message because, as we're finding out from the newspaper every day, the tariffs are a problem for big business. They are a catastrophe for small businesses, many of which have already begun closing their doors. So I think that there is a major political and intellectual opportunity for the Democratic Party over the next two years, in preparation for the presidential primaries, to ask itself new questions that it should have been asking for the past 10 or 20 years, but hasn't, but must now if it wants to regain its relevance as a national.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha, Elaine, and Bill discuss who might run in 2028, and why the Democratic Party is facing the same issues it did 36 years ago. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
