After America’s Dumpster Fire: Regrow or Replace?

The Trump presidency seems hell bent, period. What can be done to minimize the damage and create the best opportunities for reversal? Resistance, of course, is an immediate necessity, and resilience will be required over the next few years. A third R, reform, is going to be needed to chop at the root of our current national crisis, and it will be by far the hardest to achieve.

Ken Martin, the incoming Chair of the Democratic Party has opined that the Democrats don’t have problems with their policy positions or overall message, just with their campaign and communications mechanisms. This strikes me as a profound case of willful blindness.

Democrats are in the grip of a schism between their more-lefty and less-lefty wings, and it hurt them badly in 2024. The party has 20 months before the next election to address this open wound. A reformation is needed.

Trump has been adept at tying all Democrats to certain unpopular progressive policy positions, and Republicans can be expected to continue to follow this playbook. The less-lefty Liberals have been reluctant to publicly break with the more-lefty Progressives on individual issues, in part because intersectionality is a strongly held progressive value: to be held in good standing by influential progressive groups, one must sign on to the full menu of progressive positions.

This standoff has made it easy for Republicans to convince swing voters that no Democrat can be trusted NOT to implement the full progressive agenda, no matter how immoderate it may seem, nor how moderate the candidate may seem. Looking ahead to the elections of 2026 and 2028, some Progressives advocate for a strong left-populist platform. Some of them believe that Bernie Sanders would have beaten Donald Trump in 2016, and some believe now that AOC would be the best nominee for President in 2028.

There’s even a slice on the left edge of the Progressive camp which now believes that AOC is not progressive enough anymore (since she endorsed first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris despite Gaza), so they advocate grassroots organizing by which purer progressives may choose a purer nominee.

In general, Progressives are hungry for fighters. They blame 2024 losses in down-ballot races on the lack of fighting populism by relatively moderate Democrats and often criticize the Blue Dog Democrats who have won in Republican districts such as Maine’s Jarrod Golden and Washington’s Marie Gluesenkamp Perez for their heterodox policy positions.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to blame losses in 2024 in part on how annoyed some voters were with certain high-profile progressive views: acceptance of trans boys in girls’ sports, support for open borders, condemnation of Israel over Gaza which struck some as overt anti-Semitism, and the various attempts to police language usage.

Unlike Progressives, Liberals believe Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jarrod Golden are political miracles, and that the Democrats should be recruiting more just like them in swing districts in hopes of eking out a majority in 2026. The central dilemma for Progressives is that America is, by global standards, a center-right country, and if the Democrats run a pure Progressive slate in 2026 they are likely to give Donald Trump a larger majority in Congress.

The central dilemma for Liberals is that if they break with Progressives to woo moderate voters they may lose too many progressive votes to win, but if they don’t break with Progressives, they may lose too many moderate votes to win.

The schism in policy positions is accompanied by a schism in assessment of how radical the cure should be. This is not unlike the “repair or replace?” question which confronts a car owner whose vehicle has just been in an accident.

The “replace” assessment of the crisis concludes that the venerable liberal consensus so beloved of Heather Cox Richardson and Doris Kearns Goodwin is, in fact, most sincerely dead. It has had a good run since FDR launched it, but Reagan put cracks in its foundation, and the Obama and Biden administrations were the last gasps.

In this view, the best way to oppose right-wing authoritarian populism is with a more truly working-class populist program from the left. Populism from the left struggles with one contradiction: populism appeals to people angry at the power structure; they resent what big government and big business are doing to them. However, the program proposed by the leftist activists proposes increasing the concentration of power in the hands of central government in order to tackle the climate crisis, persistent racism, and so forth.

As political historian Marc Dunkelman argues, progressives are in the grip of a schism-within-a-schism between their Jeffersonian distrust of powerful government and their Hamiltonian preference for the government to step up and solve big problems. The Progressives of Teddy Roosevelt’s era and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s era were ambitious Hamiltonians and built a lot of stuff.

Since the 1960s, Progressives have mostly been Jeffersonians, wary of concentrated power and more inclined to resist its exercise, even by themselves. They have focused more on blocking and preserving than on building. Nevertheless, since the Republicans’ approach to populism will be very kind to billionaires, leftist populism could be a politically fruitful path: fighting pseudo-populist fire with true-populist fire.

The greatest challenge faced by the “replace” faction is that chaos, once it gets rolling, isn’t easy to fine tune. Fighting fire with fire might lead to a conflagration which brings the United States, or even the whole modern world, to its knees. In a left-fire vs right-fire fight, the populace might well choose authoritarian populism from the right over what they might perceive as incompetent or anarchic populism from the left.

The “repair” camp sees the liberal consensus that has been dominant for decades as part of something much bigger—the long-curving arc of history that has been bending toward reason, liberty, tolerance, progress, equality, democracy, peace and justice ever since The Enlightenment which began nearly 400 years ago. In this view, liberalism has been slowly but surely pulling humanity away from poverty, brutality and misery toward an inevitably better future.

Along the way there have been setbacks, but Abraham Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature” win in the long run. Since the Republicans’ primary tools seem to be chaos and cruelty, it’s quite possible that the Republican rampage will quickly degrade the quality of life people have taken for granted during the sway of the liberal consensus. This could lead to a resurgent public enthusiasm for another round of The Enlightenment, featuring competence, tranquility, civility, and renewed appreciation for the principles of reason, liberty, progress and tolerance. That is, if they believe that today’s Liberals and Progressives can deliver these blessings.

The greatest challenge faced by the “repair” faction is that the very things they treasure—peace, prosperity, regulated markets, democratic politics and the rule of law—create an environment in which inequality gains purchase and grows worse over time. Meritocratic elites lock in advantages for their less-meritorious descendants at everyone else’s expense. As this lock-in hardens, it creates the frustration that feeds fuck-it-all populism. We’re there now. Accordingly, a lot of voters may not be ready to quickly return the old mandarins to power. Or if they do, it will be by narrow margins and easily reversed.

The twin schisms—between Progressives and Liberals on policy questions and between replace-and-repair as the best way to respond—are roughly aligned. Progressives are more inclined to fight fire with fire, liberals are more inclined to fight fire with water. Is there a third way? Sticking with the fire metaphor, can the left burn off the overgrown undergrowth without destroying the forest? Can it become, for a while, more Hamiltonian and thereby more competent? Can it do this in twenty months?

The challenge has several moving parts. Voters first must be persuaded that Liberals and Progressives can cooperate to govern competently, which means concentrating and exercising power in ways that actually achieve stated goals. Next, voters must be offered an attractive proposition—a coherent, appealing platform that can be readily communicated and understood. Each of these is no small challenge.

On “competency,” progressive-run cities such as Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco aren’t exactly advertisements for effective execution. Dunkelman’s unresolved contradiction between Progressive belief that government should tackle big hard problems and the conflicting Progressive distrust of concentrated power in all its forms plays out in these cities where, for example, addressing the issue of homelessness seems to tie Progressives in knots. Correcting people who say “homeless” because now they’re supposed to say “unhoused” may seem like a trivial issue, but many voters take it as being symptomatic of a deeper problem because the homeless remain unhoused.

A coherent, appealing platform that all shades of left and some shades of center can rally around is a tall order but there are some interesting candidates.

One is to embrace the notion of “abundance” as a policy north star. Abundance of energy, for example, with an emphasis on renewable energy would benefit just about everybody except those trying to sell energy at high prices. Abundance of housing would also benefit just about everybody except those trying to sell housing at high prices. Abundance of mobility is similarly very broadly beneficial, as is abundance of quality healthcare, especially preventative care. The list goes on.

Another candidate is to focus more on the unique aspirations and needs of people as individuals, and less on them as members of identity groups. Revive the fundamental Liberal faith in individual liberty. In the modern age, individual liberty depends on an expanded set of freedoms: freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from hunger, freedom from threat of violence, freedom from discrimination on the basis of any aspect of collective identity (race, gender, age, religion, gender orientation, sexual preferences, appearance, etc). This is an open-ended list, and the left should own it, but not by fracturing the beneficiaries up into interest groups nearly as much as was necessary sixty years ago.

A third approach would be to focus on competence at doing what government needs to do. This will be a hard sell because the left has not demonstrated a lot of competence lately. The only reason there’s likely to be an opportunity is that the chainsaw brigade is creating quite a nasty mess.

Pursuing any or all of these themes will require that Progressives and Liberals negotiate some kind of agreement about where the Democratic party should stand on the tradeoffs between centralized power and protection from power, where it should stand on the spectrum between populist energy and promise of competence, and where it should stand on the spectrum between fighting fire with fire and fighting fire with water.

Trump and Musk may take the country down in flames so badly that Democrats can return to power without addressing their deep schisms, but that would be a waste of a good season in the out-of-power wilderness. To reclaim power narrowly with schisms intact would likely lead to an unproductive term in power and the risk of a quick return to the wilderness.