For the Democrats, now comes the hard part

Democrats won a historic victory in Tuesday’s election. It was the best possible outcome — Donald Trump has made so many mistakes, engaged in such flagrant corruption, and committed such egregious acts that for his party not to have been punished at the polls would have boded poorly for America’s future. But as it is, I’m cautiously encouraged — normal Americans reasserted control, delivering a rebuke to the extremists who had used a moment of division and chaos to seize the commanding heights of power in our country.

It was the biggest midterm wave in half a century. Obama’s midterm loss in 2010 and Trump’s in 2018 don’t even come close. You have to go all the way back to 1974 and 1976 to find wipeouts like this:

Wait…1974 and 1976? 1974 was the year Nixon resigned due to Watergate, and 1976 was the year Jimmy Carter was elected president. Did either of those election victories herald an era of Democratic dominance in America? No, they did not. In fact, the GOP bounced back shortly afterwards, dominated American politics in the 1980s, and pulled the country to the right for decades.

So before they go patting themselves on the back for winning everything, forever, Democrats should think about that history of brief success followed by long-term failure, and ponder how to avoid a similar outcome this time. After Hannibal won a great victory, one of his generals is said to have told him: “You know how to win a victory, Hannibal; you do not know how to use it.” The Democrats must figure out how to use their victory.

That’s a tricky question. Democrats now control Congress, but that doesn’t mean they’re in power; Trump can and will veto most legislation they pass. With their limited capabilities, the Dems have to do the following, all at once:

1. Block as many of Trump’s bad policies as possible
2. Keep the spotlight on Trump even though he’s now a lame duck
3. Demonstrate a clear ideology and a clear plan to the American people despite not being able to pass much legislation

That’s possible to do, especially if — as seems very likely — Trump keeps being corrupt and making mistakes and alienating the country. The Dems won the 2006 midterms, and went on to put Obama in the White House two years later. Trump seems like he’s on a similar track:

But it doesn’t always happen — the GOP lost to Obama in 2012 after their big midterm wave in 2010, and the Dems barely eked out a victory over Trump in 2020 (with a lot of help from Covid) after winning the midterms in 2018.

If Democrats are going to translate midterm success into presidential victory — to say nothing of long-term partisan dominance — they’re going to have to work hard at rebuilding their brand, their sales pitch, and their policy platform after the disastrous years of 2016-2024.

This was a center-left victory

One important point, which a lot of other people have already made, is that the big Democratic wave was mostly won by moderate Democrats. Here’s the NYT:

For much of the midterm campaign, progressive Democratic insurgents commanded the spotlight…But the path to Democrats’ sweeping victory this week, when they seized control of both chambers of Congress, was paved overwhelmingly by moderates who had spent months persuading voters in Republican-leaning states and competitive congressional districts…The scale of moderate gains was reflected in the growing ranks of the centrist groups on Capitol Hill. The Blue Dog Coalition, a caucus of moderate and conservative Democrats in the House, announced on Wednesday that it had added at least 14 to its ranks, nearly doubling in size, and other centrist groups including the New Democrats and Problem Solvers strengthened their numbers substantially.

Some of this is purely mechanical. Far-left types tend to win by unseating moderate Dems in primaries in deep-blue districts and states, while moderates tend to win in swing districts and states; thus, when a wave is bigger and the Dems win more swing districts and states, moderates tend to do proportionally better than leftists.

However, there are signs that this election cycle actually represented a broad endorsement of moderate center-leftism. Ballot initiatives have rejected various leftist policies all over the country, and leftist candidates have been losing to center-left ones in deep blue strongholds:

And leftist candidates have generally performed more weakly at the ballot box:

What’s more, many of the most prominent Democrats who won high-profile races this year have explicitly endorsed centrist positions on key issues:

Nor have many prominent Dems done the kind of “woke” cultural signaling that they regularly did in 2020 and 2022.

There are two parts of the basic story here. First, the “woke” cultural wave of the 2010s, which peaked in 2020-21, continues to slowly recede. You can see this in continued voter support for conservative positions on cultural issues like trans sports:

Second, voters have not yet embraced the socialist movement, as demonstrated by the relatively weak performances of Bernie Sanders-endorsed candidates and the failure of the billionaire tax in California.

That means that Democrats understand that this 2026 midterm victory is a contingent and fragile one. Normal Americans have risen from their apathetic torpor and their jaded hyperpartisan paralysis, and are prepared to punish extremists of either party:

The normie uprising has brought center-left Dems to the fore, and it has also forced more progressive Dems to tone down or strategically compromise their more extreme positions.

But moderation itself is neither an ideology nor a policy program, and herein lies the big challenge for the Dems over the next year and a half or so.

The headless Dems

Right now, my assessment is that most Democratic voters — including Independents and swing voters who lean toward the Dems — aren’t thinking very hard about how the country ought to be governed or what the future of America should look like. They’re simply thinking short-term thoughts about the immediate threat. They hate Trump and MAGA, and they want them gone, and it’s really as simple as that.

Nate Silver calls this “Heather Cox Richardsonism”, after the extremely popular Substack politics-and-history blogger Heather Cox Richardson:

What is Heather Cox Richardsonism?First, it was Blueskyism. Now, it’s “Heather Cox Richardsonism”? Given the changes to the algorithm, tweets don’t really …Read morea year ago · 1248 likes · 228 comments · Nate Silver

Silver wrote:

The third faction [of the Dems is] Richardsonism or a term I’ll treat as synonymous with it: #Resistance Libs. They’re older, with extremely high educational attainment, predominantly female, and very highly politically engaged. This is the audience for a cluster of political activism encompassing things such as the No Kings protests and some highly popular anti-Trump Substacks along with certain prominent podcasts and much of Bluesky.

Nate has a bunch of criticisms of “Heather Cox Richardsonism”, most of which I disagree with. I like Heather Cox Richardson. I like suburban moms who listen to NPR all day and who feel physically ill when they see Donald Trump on a screen. Their instincts are good. Trump is an extremely bad president — and not just bad, but uniquely bad, in ways that are degrading the long-term stability and effectiveness of the United States itself. It’s eminently reasonable and understandable to be mad about this, even to the exclusion of all other political viewpoints and causes. As for the No Kings protests, they seem to line up perfectly with — and probably contributed to — this week’s midterm results.

And for most regular people, being mad about Trump is enough. Most citizens are not political philosophers or movement leaders or intellectuals. It’s not reasonable to ask them to think about where the country should go after Trump, or what ideologies and ideas should guide us in the absence of such imminent threats.

But someone has to think about those things. Otherwise Democrats will prove just as unable to govern as Trump was — well, maybe 70% as unable to govern, which will be bad enough. And our politics will continue to be an endless series of backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash, as each party focuses all its energy on getting to the day of the revolution and none of its energy on what happens the next morning.

Right now, the problem with Resistance Liberalism is that it’s headless. In Trump’s first term, the Resistance was animated by various identity movements, unified by the idea of a struggle against structural racism, misogyny, and so on. Hillary Clinton made a conscious choice to frame her 2016 campaign as a battle of antiracism versus Trumpian racism, Kamala Harris did something similar in 2020, and Joe Biden quietly let his administration push what would have previously been considered extreme versions of various identitarian social causes.

In fact, the American public still thought those versions were extreme, and punished Democrats in the polls accordingly. The end of the woke revolution lopped the head off of the Resistance — it left them with all of the same rage, but without a vision of a future America.

As I see it, there are basically three factions vying to replace identity politics as the guiding ethos of the Resistance. These are:

1. The leftists — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and so on
2. The Warrenite progressive intellectuals
3. The Abundance movement

Each of these has deep flaws that I think will end up basically disqualifying it.

The leftists are organized, purposeful, disciplined, and driven, and they probably want the job of leadership more than the other factions. But their movement has some fatal weaknesses that make it a bad choice to lead the Dems. First of all, the leftists are intensely factional, focusing relentlessly on knifing the Democratic establishment rather than building a big tent.

Second, their policies tend to be so extreme that they overreach and backfire. The failure of the California billionaire tax is a case in point. Americans want to tax the rich more, but the billionaire tax was so extreme and poorly designed that voters didn’t just reject it — they approved a competing ballot proposition forbidding such taxes in the future.

Third, leftists instinctively ally themselves with bad people and bad causes. Leftist streamer Hasan Piker has praised terrorists and supported Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea, incoming leftist congresswoman Darializa Avila Chevalier founded a group claiming to be dedicated to “the total eradication of Western Civilization”, and so on.

And fourth, although leftism is sometimes viewed as an alternative to wokeness, leftists themselves tend to be very woke. Just for fun, check out the famous footage from the 2019 DSA convention, or watch this widely mocked display from Representative Ro Khanna:

These shortcomings ought to prove fatal to the leftists’ chances of taking over the American left — and they probably will.

The second faction vying to take over the Resistance are the Warrenite intellectuals, who are laser-focused on attacking the rich — specifically, the rich people in the tech industry. Although Warren failed to catch fire in 2019, her faction had great success putting its people into positions of power during the Biden years.

But it kind of backfired. The New Antitrust movement got little done in a practical sense, and more fundamentally it failed to advance any kind of rewrite for our antitrust law. Years of frothing with rage against Mark Zuckerberg and the old FAANG companies just ended up looking silly when AI came along and disrupted their business models. The intellectual movement to “steer” the development of AI toward more pro-worker technologies (whatever that would even look like) is going nowhere.

In addition to being composed primarily of a bunch of egghead intellectuals who routinely fail to catch fire with voters, the Warrenites have a fatal flaw — they’ve chosen the wrong target. Democrats are entirely focused on hating Trump, while the Warrenites are focused on hating Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Americans just fundamentally aren’t that mad at the fact that Zuckerberg and Bezos are rich. They generally despise Elon Musk, but only for his right-wing activities and his online attitude — when he was just a businessman selling electric cars and reusable rockets, they didn’t mind his billions.

The Warrenites are simply never going to convince the nation that the billionaire techbros, rather than the rightists of MAGA, are the biggest threat to our way of life.

Anyway, the third faction is Abundance. Of the three, this would definitely be my choice if I had to pick, since I really like what the Abundance movement stands for. Abundance policies, like the bipartisan permitting reform bill now making its way through Congress, are both smarter and more politically feasible than almost all of what the leftists and Warrenites want to do.

The problem with Abundance is that it’s primarily an intellectual movement, not a political one. It’s all about policy — about whispering in the ears of princes, rather than marching in the streets. Abundance’s leaders are nice guys like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson who just want to see everybody be happy and get a puppy.

And all of the Abundance ideas, to a rounding error, are good ones. Many of them are going to get implemented, especially concerning housing and energy. But they will do so because elites — including some leftists and some Republicans — will be intellectually convinced that they are good things to do, not because they have the ability to harness and direct years of pent-up anti-Trump anger. Abundance will win, but it will not win all the things the Democrats would need it to win.

The Democrats need something more than any of these movements has to offer. They need an ethos that both inspires popular passion and has a chance of pragmatically working. They need something that will give regular, normie Americans — the voters who just rose up to throw out the GOP — a reason to believe in the future, and a reason to believe that the Democrats can take them to that future.

That ideology exists. It was harnessed by FDR and his successors a century ago, first to fight the Depression, then to win World War 2, and finally to build the modern society that came after the war. I’m talking about liberal nationalism:

Here’s what I wrote in that post half a year ago:

In the 20th century, America had an ideology that was committed to forging a single national identity from a dizzying array of backgrounds. That ideology was liberal nationalism…

FDR ended forced assimilation policies for Native Americans, and gave them greater autonomy on tribal lands. He maintained a group of Black advisors, created plenty of programs to help Black people economically, created cultural programs to publicize Black achievement, and preserved the testimonials of former slaves. He created campaigns promoting interfaith understanding and cooperation, helping to reduce America’s traditional anti-Catholic prejudice as well as antisemitism. His Federal Writers Project employed writers to document America’s cultural diversity…FDR also strongly promoted the notion of America as a nation of immigrants — an idea that still deeply holds sway over the American psyche, despite rightists’ attempts to get rid of it…FDR and the liberal nationalists were not modern multicultural progressives. They strongly believed in national unity. This obviously meant patriotism, respect for American institutions, and a shared sense of national purpose during World War 2, but it also meant a lot more. FDR and the New Dealers — and especially the Office of War Information — advanced the notion that America had a unifying culture, set of democratic ideals, sense of history, and way of life that transcended Americans’ different backgrounds. The history of the New Deal is littered with examples of attempts to forge American-ness into a sort of shared civic religion.

The Democrats can have liberal nationalism back if they want. Moderate figures like Jon Ossoff and James Talarico can use Rooseveltian pluralistic patriotism just like Barack Obama did, in order to go beyond good-governance centrism and opposition to Donald Trump. The intellectuals of the Abundance movement can use liberal nationalism to add passion to their policies — after all, isn’t it precisely because we’re Americans that we deserve material abundance?

Right now, Americans hold a bunch of basically Rooseveltian beliefs, and many Democrats still have the Rooseveltian instincts they’ve inherited from their party’s past. But we’re still not to the point where liberal nationalism has filled the vacuum of passion and inspiration left by the demise of “Woke 1.0”. The Democrats have a year and a half to resuscitate that vision.

Doing so will require some clashes — with leftists who believe that America is an evil empire, with Warrenites who want to destroy big tech companies instead of harnessing them to the national purpose, and with identitarian activists who believe that promoting a unified national culture is a form of racist oppression. But if this is not undertaken, the Democrats will either continue to drift aimlessly from backlash to backlash, or fall under the sway of highly suboptimal captains.

Building the future in opposition

There’s also the more pragmatic question of what Dems should actually do over the next two years, while they hold Congress but not the presidency. This is an inherently difficult problem, because Trump can just veto almost any legislation the Dems pass. The usual tactic here is to just obstruct anything the president wants to do, hoping that making the president’s term in office look like a failure will help the opposition in the next election.

But I believe Democrats can do better than this. First of all they can, and should, investigate Trump and his family and friends for corruption. Corruption turned out to be a huge issue in these midterms — even more important than I realized it would be.

Even in opposition, Democrats can shine some sunlight on the Trump administration’s seemingly endless parade of dirty deeds. And in fact, it looks as if this is going to happen:

Corruption topped the list of concerns for voters who ousted Republicans…Now, the newly empowered Democratic Party is putting the issue front and center…Senior Democrats in both chambers of Congress have vowed to marshal the subpoena powers and larger investigative staffs that come with their soon-to-be majorities to probe what they say is the self-enrichment that President Donald Trump and people in his orbit have done at the public’s expense…House Democrats are preparing a vast oversight agenda to look at how Trump and his family have become wealthier since he returned to office…Garcia, the top Democrat on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has outlined five priorities, including Trump family business dealings, the administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, said he wants to dig into Trump's White House ballroom and other construction projects, as well as the Trump family's role in mineral deals…In the Senate, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who is expected to become the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said his panel will want to look into Trump's real estate projects around the nation's capital and his crypto dealings with special envoy Steve Witkoff.

This is great. But other than this, and perhaps some bipartisan deals and some obstruction and oversight of Trump’s worst abuses, what can the Dems in Congress do?

What they can also do is to workshop their economic policy program under low-stakes conditions. America has two big economic challenges looming — the out-of-control national debt, and AI. Dems can start demonstrating — and at the same time, start figuring out — how they’d address both of these challenges if they had the presidency.

The debt is actually the much harder piece of this in political terms. Deficit reduction is inherently painful, as it involves some combination of spending cuts and tax increases — both of which tend to be unpopular with the electorate. If Dems submit budgets that go all-out with spending cuts and tax hikes, Trump will just veto those budgets, and Americans — who have not yet been forced to reckon with the need for debt reduction — will praise Trump for it.

Instead, Dems will need to introduce only parts of their ultimate deficit reduction plans. Sunsetting the Trump tax cuts on pass-through businesses is one good idea — there’s basically no reason for people like me to pay lower taxes than Americans with W-2s, just because we’re self-employed.

AI is ultimately the thornier policy challenge, because we really don’t know how AI is going to affect the economy. But putting in place measures to protect human labor from the inevitable disruptions — flexible welfare programs, employment incentives, social wealth funds, and the like — has little downside, and it offers Democrats a way to sell a vision of harnessing the benefits of technology for the public good. The Dems can observe how these ideas go over with the public, and make the popular ones part of their candidate’s platform in 2028.

This midterm blowout was the first step toward building a better country and putting the chaotic, shameful Trump Era behind us. But there’s a lot of work to be done, both on the ideological side and in terms of crafting a policy program. The morning after the revolution is always when the hard work begins.