Do the Democrats Know What Time It Is?

If not, how will they govern if they win?

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

---

Things are looking up a bit for the Democrats these days, largely because things are looking bad more generally. Even before the Iran War, the Trump administration’s radicalism and erratic behavior was making it increasingly unpopular; now we’re engaged in a war launched without any effort to win popular support, gas prices are up sharply, and the war itself appears to be drifting sideways, with no clear strategy for achieving goals that are themselves manifestly unclear. Betting markets now suggest the Democrats are strongly favored to take the House, and it’s a coin flip whether they’ll take the Senate. In consequence of these developments, debates between moderates and left-wingers about how the party needs to run have been largely shelved in favor of a comforting consensus that “we’re not Trump” will be enough in 2026, and possibly in 2028 as well.

This worries me. Not because it’s necessarily wrong, though I do worry about that too. November is a long way off, after all, which means 2028 is a political lifetime away, and the Democratic brand itself remains so damaged that on net voters still have a more favorable view of Republicans (though I suspect this is partly because of Democrats who will still vote for their party but are expressing their disgust in the meantime with the existing party leadership). But there’s also real wisdom in just getting out of the way while your opponent is busy destroying himself.

No, I worry more because if it isn’t wrong then Democrats might well win in 2026 and even in 2028 without having had any serious discussion about what they want to do, or having determined whether what they want to do has anything to do with what the electorate wants or the country needs. And if that is how they win, then what happens after they do?

Let’s start with foreign policy. The framework for talking about foreign policy that Democrats are most comfortable with—respect for international law and transnational institutions that were built by American leadership and are backed by American military might in the service of collective security—describes a world that no longer exists. We can debate whether the arrival of a truly multipolar world meant that it was always going to cease to exist, but in the wake of the second Trump administration I can’t imagine how anyone can believe that the next Democratic president could stand up and expect the soi-disant free world to salute once more.

Instead, what a Democratic president will inherit is a world of angry (European and North American) and anxious (East Asian and Middle Eastern) allies, a peer-competitor power (China) feeling the wind at its back, and a variety of other adversaries (Russia, Iran, North Korea) and other rising powers (India, Turkey, Brazil) who aren’t clearly friend or foe all playing for advantage rather than eager to join a team. NATO may or may not even still exist in something like its current form, and the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East may still be ongoing. There is no way the next president, of either party, will be able to satisfy every grievance outstanding from the Trump years, yet all those who are aggrieved will be strongly inclined to press their claims the minute President Trump is out of office. If there is serious discussion going on in Democratic circles about how the United States is supposed to navigate this tricky post-Trump environment, I haven’t really heard it.

More to the point, though, even if it is going on in circles to which I am not privy, I don’t think the Democrats have a language for talking about the world that actually exists, because that world is not as congenial to them as the language that they are used to. The last Democratic administration’s foreign policy was to a considerable extent rooted in Cold War nostalgia; the prior one’s was more forward-looking, but essentially none of its premises are valid any longer; and neither is, in retrospect, viewed as a foreign policy success. Who do they have on the bench who both knows anything about the world and also understands how it has changed? I worry very much that the next Democratic president will come into office without any coherent or communicable approach to our increasingly chaotic world, and will be cut off at the knees as that chaos consumes them.

The same is true, though differently, in domestic policy. Here Democrats have plenty of plans, and always have. They are comfortable proposing spending money on new or expanded programs. They are comfortable calling for regulations to prevent various kinds of malfeasance or to limit various negative externalities, and increasingly to direct the development of the economy (I’m thinking of some of the Obama and Biden administration efforts to promote a green energy transition). It’s not clear, though, how relevant any of this is to the world they will inherit. The budget deficit is wildly out of control, and inflation remains above target (and may rise further); if we want to bring interest rates down in a sustainable way, and thereby deliver on voters’ professed top priority of lower costs, we need to cut the deficit, not expand it. Even if that were not the case, though, most of the spending and regulatory plans that Democrats have historically advocated are neither particularly popular nor particularly timely. And to the extent that Democrats have begun to propose timely ideas—in housing deregulation, for example—they’ve also shown a pronounced tendency to sabotage their own efforts.

Some of their most popular ideas that are also comfortable for them, meanwhile, feel a little, well, Trumpy. Take their tax proposals. Democrats have long called for higher taxes on the very rich, but they’re increasingly pairing these with calls for tax cuts on everybody else—including substantial cuts for wealthy people who aren’t very wealthy. That’s likely to be a popular combination—but many of the proposals for a wealth tax are likely unconstitutional, even if they passed muster the combination with broad tax cuts might be budgetarily ruinous, and even if they weren’t their advocacy for broad-based tax cuts guts the very idea that we are all supposed to pay taxes to get government services, a very strange thing for Democrats to want to do. A government funded largely by the very wealthy will necessarily cater to the needs of the very wealthy. Is that what Democrats want?

Or take the recent proposal from Senator Bernie Sanders for a moratorium on building data centers until we pass comprehensive A.I. regulation. That could also be quite popular—quite a lot of Americans are leery of A.I. in general, and there’s a lot of local NIMBY-style opposition to data center construction. But it’s also the primary industry propping up the economy right now, and unless it is being insanely overhyped it is likely to be a crucial strategic industry. The Trump administration has set out to cripple alternative energy despite increased its importance to America’s competitiveness in the present, to say nothing of the future; are Democrats going to flip on that, but in exchange take a hammer to another key industry? And what, after repeated bouts of flip-flopping of this sort, will be left of America’s vaunted business climate?

Both the Biden and Harris campaigns were largely campaigns for normalcy against the abnormal, but that’s an inherently backward-looking way of thinking. It feels to me like that backward-looking quality remains fundamental to the Democratic outlook, even as the world has changed and continues to change, both because of Trump’s behavior and because of other factors. What’s the next Democratic administration’s approach to trade going to be, now that Trump has tariffed the whole world? Will the next Democratic president try to shore up the Fed’s independence, or pressure it in a left-wing direction? What will the next Democratic president do if, in the wake of the Iran War, the petrodollar system starts to unravel completely, and we start to see a fully-fledged Yuan-based trade and finance system in parallel to the dollar-based one? How will the next Democratic president work with the federal bureaucracy in a context where the courts have now made it clear that the next Republican president could simply order the bureaucracy to about-face? How will they handle relations with the courts now that the Supreme Court can be expected to be conservative-leaning for the indefinite future, with the appellate courts likely not far behind? On issue after issue, even where the Trump administration has failed to build anything lasting, it has already transformed reality to the point that anyone who comes after has to live in the world it made, and chart a course forward in a new direction from there.

I suspect to Democrats this all sounds terribly unfair, since the current administration is an agent of both international and domestic chaos, and appears to be making up both foreign policy and domestic policy on the fly, often on an outright corrupt basis. We’re living under a kakistocracy, rule by the worst people, in every sense. So I understand why Democrats might feel that the bar should be lower, not higher, that all they should have to prove is that they aren’t terrible and the voters should trust them with power again, and for a long time too. But fairness has nothing to do with it. Trump is in office in large part because an increasing percentage of Americans became convinced—for both fully legitimate reasons and for some much more questionable ones—that the folks with lots of knowledge and experience had no idea what they were doing, and therefore had lost their trust. I don’t believe people have changed their mind about that, even as they are increasingly appalled by what Trump hath wrought. So the party of government simply cannot afford to prove him and his disposition right yet again. If they do, they can expect the next iteration of the opposition party to be even more alarming, and even harder to dislodge.

The most important thing to realize is that Trump is not an aberration. Right-wing populist-nationalist movements are increasingly a fixture of the landscape around the world. They don’t always win and they don’t always hold onto power when they do win. But they have won power in India, Turkey, Israel, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Italy and the United States, and they have a reasonable chance of taking power in France before the next American presidential election. It’s a disposition that is not going away anywhere any time soon, and because of that it’s a disposition which will be shaping reality, the reality we all have to live in, for the foreseeable future. Democrats—and liberal democratic parties around the world—have to learn how to operate in a world where that is the case, at home and abroad, and not imagine that one victory, even a big one, will allow them to return to their comfort zone. Their comfort zone is gone. And it’s already past time to adapt to that fact.