History Readings

because they are important progressive ideas, I think that anyone who identifies as a leftist or a progressive should vote for Democrats.

that doesn’t mean that Democrats’ agenda should be driven by those on the far left. A big-tent Democratic coalition needs leftists. But left-wing candidates are rarely winning tough elections, and too often, they’re not improving governance of the solidly blue places where they’re elected.

Democrats have allowed those on the far left to exert much too much influence over their policy agenda in recent years. Most elected Democrats are not, themselves, actually that far left, and when faced with acute electoral peril, they swiftly ditch ideas like defund the police or openness to unlimited asylum claims. But what they haven’t generally done is publicly disavow the kind of simplistic disparate impact analysis that leads to conclusions like policing is bad.

Similarly, the Democrats are not a degrowth party. When good GDP numbers come in, Joe Biden and his team celebrate them — they believe in taking credit for strong growth. But even without being a degrowth party, Democrats are heavily influenced by the views of major environmentalist organizations that do have a degrowth ideology at their core.

Critics on the right charge that Democrats are in the grips of radical ideology, but the truth is more boring: Many elected officials are just not particularly rigorous thinkers (think of how much backbench Republicans have shifted on various policies since Trump took over). Most only really understand a few issues and do a lot of going along to get along.

Which is why Democrats need to build a strong, explicit commonsense faction with institutions and leaders and think tanks and media. A faction that wins primaries and provides a staffing pipeline, that generates new policy ideas.

Winning elections is important, because if you don’t win, you can’t govern.

It doesn’t make sense to say Democrats have to do X to win — there are lots of ways to win, and dumb luck is very important in politics — but this is how I think Democrats should try to win.

these are the principles I’d like to see the Democratic party embrace:

Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.

Climate change — and pollution more broadly — is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.

We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, rejecting discrimination and racial profiling without embracing views that elevate anyone’s identity groups over their individuality.

Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.

Academic and nonprofit work does not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private business or any other jobs.

Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.

Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.

All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American citizens.

A big part of my intellectual project here at Slow Boring is making the case that there are, in fact, deep complementarities between the common sense reform project in the blue zones and the common sense electoral viability project in the red zones

When you lose fair and square — an experience familiar to Republicans from 2008, 2012, and, even if they don’t like to admit it, 2020 — you are truly beaten, and it feels bad.

I worry about all kinds of things, and I cannot assure anyone that things will be okay.

What I can do is reassure everyone that in retrospect, the mid-aughts were the most exciting and generative time in Democratic Party politics that I can remember.

Peril focused the mind, and leaders became more serious about tradeoffs and less indulgent of frivolity. Smart people grew bolder and less risk-averse. New institutions were created, and (some) old ones were re-invigorated.

New modes of communication came to the fore. New policy ideas came into play. We saved Social Security, we retook Congress, and the most brilliant political talent of our time “jumped the line,” beat the party establishment, and entered the White House.

A Harris administration would have continued the kind of straddle that has paralyzed Democrats since Bernie Sanders’ failed insurgency in 2016 — cycle after cycle after cycle of establishment Democrats giving enough ground to their leftist critics to stay in charge but not enough to satisfy those critics. In the process, many mainstream Democrats have completely lost their identity, going far enough left that moderate voters find them unrecognizable, while leftists still deride them as the same tired establishment.

This is a time for new blood and new leadership and a new round of frank argumentation. Do we want a sectarian party whose only chance of gaining power is for Trump to do something truly catastrophic?

The opening of the checkpoint that night was an accident.  But it was an accident made possible by human action. 

East Germans had chosen to leave their country.  They were protesting, and believed that they could protest in part because other people were doing so.  The largest and most effective protests were in neighboring Poland.  They went back to the foundation of a labor union, Solidarity, in 1980.  By November 1989, Poland had already formed a post-communist government.

the crucial thing to remember is what Poles did.  In the face of dictatorship they found concepts of cooperation and lived them.

The resistance to communism was a human story of cooperation.  Its dissidents stressed the need to work together.  Its most important organization was a union.  When a certain conjuncture emerged in 1989, it was these practices and traditions that allowed new political alternatives to emerge.

The human cooperation, called "civil society" at the time, was not enough in itself to change the world.  But when the world began to change in other ways, people were ready.  

When we imagine the Berlin Wall falling, as we will be summoned to do today, we are instructed that freedom is something that just happens.  The wall was up.  Bad.  And then it fell.  Good.  We think of freedom like that because it removes the responsibility from us.  And that is the wrong lesson, wrong historically and so wrong politically and morally.

Thirty five years ago today, the Berlin Wall did not fall. 

Thirty five years ago today, some people made history, amidst other people making history, thanks to some prior cooperation, and some good thinking about what freedom means.

It was a revolutionary power that wanted to end capitalism everywhere, not just in the Soviet Union but all over Asia and Africa, North America, South America. They were gaining a lot of support in the decolonizing societies of Africa and Asia. America was not confident in the ability of its economy to have a permanent recovery from the Great Depression.

When I teach young people today, it’s hard for them to grasp the magnitude and the seriousness of the Cold War and how it shaped every aspect of American life. And the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to the United States.

What coheres to the New Deal is that the Republicans eventually submit to it. And that happens when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower beats Senator Robert A. Taft. So tell me a bit about the counterfactual there that you think almost happened. What led to Taft losing prominence in the Republican Party, and what might have happened if he hadn’t?

he was slow to get on the bandwagon in terms of the threat of China, the threat of Communist expansion, and that opened up an opportunity for another candidate, by the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to enter the presidential race in 1952 and to present a very different vision.

He was a Republican in a classical sense — small central government, devolved power to the states, suspicious of foreign entanglements — believing that America was protected by the two vast oceans and thus did not need a strong standing army, did not have to be involved in world affairs. And he was opposed to the New Deal.

He thought it was a form of tyranny. It was going to lead to collectivism, Soviet style. And he was poised in the 1940s to roll back the New Deal, and he was looking forward to the postwar period after the war emergency had passed. Of course, the war emergency would require a very strong state to mobilize armed forces, to mobilize the economy for the sake of fighting a world war.

They needed foreign markets. America wasn’t sure whether it would have them. And the capitalist class in America was scared to death by the Communist threat, and it had to be met everywhere, and America mobilizes for the Cold War to contain Communism everywhere where it appeared. And that required a standing army in quasi-peacetime of a sort that America had never experienced before, and Taft was profoundly uncomfortable with this.

my counterfactual is that, absent the Cold War, the New Deal, which we now regard as such a juggernaut, would be seen as a momentary blip like so many other progressive moments in American politics. And we would see it as a blip and not for what it became, which was a political order that dominated politics for 30 years.

So there’s been this conventional story of the New Deal era, which is that the fear of Communism, the fear of being painted as soft on Communism or soft on socialism, leads progressives to trim their sails, moderates the sort of left flank of New Dealism. You argue that that story misses what’s happening on the right.

the imperative of fighting the Communists caused Republicans to make even larger concessions than the Democrats did.” What were those concessions?

Well, the biggest concession was agreeing to an extraordinary system of progressive taxation.

The highest marginal tax rate in the 1940s during World War II reached 91 percent, a level that is inconceivable in America of the 21st century. Eisenhower wins the election in 1952. He has both houses of Congress. And quite extraordinarily, Eisenhower maintains the 91 percent taxation rate

I think what mattered to him was the Cold War. The Cold War had to be fought on two fronts: It had to be fought militarily — international containment of Communism — and that required enormous expenditures on national defense, which meant not simply a conventional army but the nuclear arms race.

Eisenhower understood that in order to win the ideological struggle of the Cold War — which was not simply an American-Soviet struggle, but it was a global struggle to convince all the peoples of what was then called the Third World to come with the capitalist way, to come with the American way. In order for that to happen, America had to demonstrate that it could give its ordinary citizens a good life.

America had to prove that it had the better system, and that meant you could not return to unrestrained American capitalism — you had to regulate it in the public interest.

And the other aspect of that, which he appreciated, was that in the 1950s, it was not clear whether the Soviet Union or the United States could provide a better life for its average citizen. The Soviet Union was still doing quite well in the 1950s.

And that meant taking money from the rich and redistributing it, narrowing the inequality between rich and poor. It meant supporting powerful labor movement and not trying to roll back the Wagner Act, which the labor movement regarded as its Magna Carta, a very strong piece of federal legislation that gave it unambiguous rights to organize and obligated employers to bargain collectively with them.

He felt that this had to be the way that America went. Maintenance of Social Security — really all the key New Deal reforms — he ended up maintaining because he thought this would be a critically important instrument for convincing not just ordinary Americans but people around the world that this would prove the superiority of the American way.

That is why he acquiesced to the New Deal order.

It’s a pervasive recognition among America’s business class. You say, “The fear of Communism made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order.”

And you say it wasn’t just here; this was also true in many of the social democracies in Europe after World War II. Tell me a bit about that class compromise and the role the Cold War played in it.

It is often said that socialism was weaker in America than it was elsewhere. And in many respects, that has been true.

The corollary of that is that the American business class historically has been bigger, more powerful, more unencumbered than the business classes of other nations, especially in Western Europe among America’s industrial rivals. There was no shortage of labor protest in America, but rarely could labor achieve what it wanted to achieve because the resistance was extraordinary, the resistance was legal, it was extralegal.

The national security argument is crucial to getting large segments of the Republican Party on board. For them, the greatest threat, both internationally and domestically, was the Communist threat. And thus, they were willing to extend themselves beyond a point where they otherwise would have gone

I argue that it was the fear of the Soviet Union. And what did the fear of the Soviet Union represent? The expropriation of all corporate capital in the world. That was the Communist dream. And that was deeply felt. And it was felt not simply in a global setting. It was felt within the United States itself,

The history of industrial relations in America was very violent. The business class in America had a reputation of being very powerful and aggressive and unwilling to share its power with its antagonists. So what was it that got them to share that power?

it’s really remarkable to look at how closely the R. and D. state was designed and sold, in terms of its ability to keep America ahead for national defense. It has its roots in World War II, and it continues building much off that rhetoric.

so there’s this interesting way, I think we think of the New Deal in terms of Social Security. We think of it in terms of some of these individual programs. But it is this thoroughgoing expansion of the government into all kinds of areas of American life. And the thing that allows the Republican Party to get on board with a lot of that is this idea that if you don’t do that, well, the Soviets are going to do it

And the business class felt that it was in its interests to compromise with organized labor in a way that it had never done before. That was the grand compromise. It was symbolized in a treaty in Detroit between the three automobile makers, then among the biggest corporations in America, and the United Auto Workers — the Treaty of Detroit — purchasing labor peace by granting unions, good wages, good conditions, good pensions, good health care. Absent the threat of Communism, I think that grand compromise either would not have been arrived at or it would have been scuttled much sooner than it was.

they’re going to have the highways, or they’re going to have the technological or scientific superiority, they’re going to make it to the moon, etc., and then America is going to be left behind.

The vast education bills that are going to propel the tremendous growth of American universities in the 1960s and 1970s — which you mentioned about R. and D. — has a similar propulsion

the scale of this would not have reached the point that it did without getting a lot of Republicans on board. And the critical argument for them was national security, and a critical event was Sputnik, when Soviet Union shocks the United States by putting into orbit a satellite before the United States had done it.

that is a shocking moment: Oh, my God, America is falling behind. We must bend every muscle to beating the Soviet Union in every way, and that requires tremendous investments because of satellite technology and R. and D., and also that becomes the foundation of what is going to become the I.T. industry and the I.T. revolution — also a product of the Cold War.

How does that order end?

There are three factors that pull this order apart. The first is race, the second is Vietnam, and the third is the major economic recession of the 1970s.

Every political order has tensions within it in the United States. And the great contradiction in the New Deal Party of Franklin Roosevelt was the treatment of African Americans. In order to have a new political economy of a big state managing private capital in the public interest, Roosevelt had to get the South on board, and the South meant the white South.

And the entire promise of Western Europe prosperity and American university had been premised on the flow of unending supplies of very cheap Middle Eastern oil — most of them controlled by U.S. and British oil companies. And Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations in the 1970s say: No, these are our resources. We will determine how much is drawn out of the ground and the prices that they will be charged.

That was then complicated by Vietnam, a vastly unpopular war — inaugurated and presided over by Democratic presidents who were perceived by their own constituents to not be telling the truth about this awful quagmire.

It also inaugurated trade-offs between funding a war and funding Johnson’s beloved Great Society. Inflation began to take off.

the third element was profound changes in the international political economy. One of the reasons why America was able to enter its grand compromise between capital and labor and pay labor very high wages was that America had no serious industrial competition in the world from the ’40s to the ’60s.

Most of the industrialized world had been destroyed. The U.S. is actively helping the recovery of Western European economies, Japan, promoting development in Southeast Asia, and in the 1970s, these economies begin to challenge American supremacy economically. The symbol of that is the rise of Japanese car manufacturers

Roosevelt assented to that. But this was also a time, especially in the 1940s, when African Americans were migrating in huge numbers to the North, and they were becoming a constituency in the Democratic Party. This was the first point of crisis, and the Democratic Party found itself unable to contain the racial conflicts that exploded in the 1960s.

The quadrupling of oil prices leads to a profound economic crisis, along with competition from European nations against the United States. And this plunges the United States into a very unexpected and profound — and long — economic crisis known as stagflation. Inflation and unemployment are going up at the same time

None of the textbooks say this should be happening. The tools are no longer working. And it’s in this moment of crisis, the Democratic Party — this is the third strike against it — opens up an opportunity for alternative politics, an alternative party, an alternative plan for American political economy.

that sort of leaves out something that is happening among Democrats at this time. There’s a movement inside of liberalism. There’s the New Deal Democratic order, but you develop this New Left, and there is a movement of liberals against big government — young liberals for reasons of self-expression, for reasons of civil rights, for reasons of this feeling that they’re being fed into a bureaucracy and giant soulless organizations and eventually into the meat grinder of Vietnam

older liberals who are angry about the sort of reckless growth and the poisoning of streams and the building of highways through their communities and the sort of ticky-tacky rise of these suburbs. And this predates Reagan

Yes, the New Left erupts on university campuses in the 1960s, and the two primary issues in the beginning are race and Vietnam. But they also quite quickly develop a critique of the established order.

What was called at the time the system

what was the system? The system was large American corporations who were no longer under control. And one reason they were no longer under control is they were being aided and abetted by a large federal state that was supposed to manage them in the public interest

the system was meant to identify not just the corporations who were doing ill in America, but it was meant to identify a federal state that was birthed in the optimism of the New Deal and had been corrupted. So you have this fissure within the Democratic Party itself.

The other element of this is this profound search for personal freedom and autonomy that was intensely felt by members of the New Left.

The computers were these enormous machines, mainframes, and they were seen as stultifying to human creativity. The personal computer movement was born on — as part of the New Left. Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand imagined a personal computer that would be free of the IBM mainframe, free of big corporations, big corporate power — that it would be the authentic voice of only every individual who would be using that machine.

It was a profound expression of a desire for personal autonomy, individuality, expressiveness — unconstrained by larger structures. This cry, or cri de coeur, came from the left. It was a very powerful part of the New Lef

ne can see how it might suit the purposes of a rising neoliberal order because the rising neoliberal order was also intent on deregulating, freeing individuals from the grip of large institutions and allowing them to go their own way.

Neoliberals believe that the best economic program is one that frees capitalism from its shackles, that allows people to truck, barter and exchange goods, that gets the government out of economic life. And the only role for government is to ensure that markets can function freely and robustly. So it runs opposite to the New Deal. If the core principle of the New Deal was: Capitalism left to its own devices would destroy itself. The core principle of neoliberalism: Remove the shackles from capitalism. That will bring us the most productive and freest world we can imagine.

I have a shorthand for describing the neoliberal world that was envisioned by neoliberal thinkers and brought by policymakers into existence. It’s what I sometimes call the four freedoms of neoliberalism: freedom of movement, people; freedom of goods to move across national boundaries; the free flow of information; and the free flow of capital across all boundaries.

In a perfect neoliberal world, people, goods, information and capital are moving freely without constraint. If we can imagine a perfect world that The Wall Street Journal wants, this would be pretty close to it.

I do not want to suggest for a moment that the New Left intentionally created neoliberalism. But it turned out that the cries of freedom, personal freedom, personal autonomy that were emanating from them turned out to be very conducive to the economic philosophy of neoliberalism.

Jimmy Carter is an heir to suspicion of excessive federal power. But I also think he’s grasping at this moment a point of transition in the American economy and a sense that government policy as set forth in the New Deal was not working as well as it should have been. I think it mattered that he was an engineer and he was doing a lot of cost-benefit analysis: What kind of yield are we getting for the bucks that we’re investing?

so he’s open to this fertile moment of dissent. He’s channeling new thinkers and imagining a different Democratic Party that you are correct in saying precedes Clinton by 20 years. And the key figure in this movement is a man by the name of Ralph Nader.

I think as I evaluate the Carter presidency, I see a man really caught in the throes of a moment of transition, able to glimpse what is coming but unable to master what is coming

what defines his presidency, for me, is uncertainty, vacillation and, thus, failure. He’s a classical transitional figure, more controlled by than in charge of the moment.

Nader is a man of the left, but he doesn’t fit in the old left or the New Left.

We might call him a man of the consumer left. For him, the key figure in American society was the consumer, and he wanted to champion the consumer. And his contributions — in terms of automobile safety, occupational safety, food safety — were immens

But he also executed a profound shift in ideology, and I’m not even sure how aware he was of the consequences of what he was generating. Because in the process of making the consumer sovereign, he deflected attention, I would say, from what was and what remains the core relationship in a capitalist economy, and that is in the realm of production and the relations between employers and employees

And he was reluctant, in some respects, to challenge corporate power if corporate power was serving the consumer in a good way. He anticipates, in some respects, a profound shift in antitrust policy, and the key figure in this is going to be Robert Bork in the 1980s and 1990s.

It had been an article of faith in American history that no corporation should be allowed to get too large, because they would inevitably exercise power in an undemocratic fashion. So antitrust meant breaking up big corporations. Under Robert Bork, the question changed. Big corporate power was OK as long as it served the consumer with cheap goods.

he and his supporters and his organizations deserve a lot of credit for holding the government accountable and making vast improvements in a whole host of areas — regulating the environment and other matters, regulating food — and compelling government to do the service that it does.

But it also distracts from understanding part of that which powers the rise of large corporations and gives them the ability to control government and capture regulatory agencies. And I think the results of his attacks on government have been ambivalent, in terms of their consequences: in some respects really accelerating the process of delivering goods to the American people and American consumers that they want but, on the other hand, contributing to an atmosphere of thinking the government can’t really do much that’s right.

As you move toward Reagan, certainly part of Ronald Reagan’s appeal is his anti-Communism.So how do you describe the role of the Soviet Union in this period of political time?

The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 is one of the most stunning events, I think, of the 20th century and arguably much longer.

What were its consequences? First, it opened up the whole globe to capitalist penetration, to a degree that had not been available to capitalism since prior to World War I. And this generates a tremendous amount of belief and excitement and expansion and a good deal of arrogance and hubris within the capitalist citadel, which is the United States. So that’s one major consequence.

The second major consequence is: What does it mean for Communism no longer to exist as a threat? And what we begin to see in the 1990s is capital in America regaining the power, assurance, authority, belief in its unilateral power that it had, across the years of the Cold War, if not sacrificed, then moderated.

hat the Soviet Union had promised, what Communism had promised, was that private enterprise could be superseded by rational planning on the part of an enlightened set of rulers who could manage the economy in a way that benefited the masses in extraordinary ways.

That whole project fails, and it fails in a spectacular fashion.

Ronald Reagan had insisted that there was a continuum between Soviet government tyranny and what he regarded as New Deal government tyranny. They were on the same spectrum. One inevitably led to another. He and other Republicans, George H.W. Bush, the party as a whole take this as a great vindication of their core beliefs: that capitalism, which, under the New Deal, was sharply constrained, should be freed from constraint; its animal spirits allowed to soar; venture capitalists encouraged to go everywhere; investments made easy; lower taxation; let capitalists and capital drive America and the world economy, unconstrained by regulation.

these were the core ideas of neoliberals, which have been incubating for decades. And now suddenly these ideas seem to be vindicated. This is the moment of free market triumph.

it intersects in a very powerful way with the ongoing I.T. revolution, which is also bound up with the Soviet Union’s collapse. Because the Soviet Union was very hostile to the personal computer because it required a degree, at that time, of personal freedom that the Soviet Union wasn’t willing to allow what the I.T. revolution represented in the 1990s. And this is one of the reasons that Democrats get on board with it. What it represented was a belief that market perfection was now within human grasp, that there may have been a need for strong government in the past, because knowledge about markets was imperfect, it was limited, it took time for information about markets to travel, a lot of it was wrong, not enough of it was available instantaneously.

Well, suddenly in the 1990s, you have this dream, this vision of all economic knowledge in the world being available at your fingertips instantaneously and with a degree of depth and a range of statistics and figures that had been unimaginable, and a techno-utopianism takes hold

it’s the intersection of these two vectors — a sense that the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicates free market thinking and the I.T. revolution — that allows people to think market perfection is within our grasp in ways it never has been before, that pours fuel on the fire of neoliberal free market thinking.

You described Bill Clinton as the Dwight D. Eisenhower of neoliberalism. What do you mean by that, and what are some of the, for you, core examples?

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, no Democratic U.S. president had been elected since 1976. Sixteen years is an eternity in electoral politics in the United States. And the question becomes: Will he roll back the Reagan revolution of the 1980s — massive efforts at deregulation — or will he follow a path that Dwight Eisenhower followed in the early ’50s?

Clinton, in the beginning, is a little uncertain about what he is going to do. And he has some ambitious proposals in his first two years — most notably a vast program of national health insurance, which crashes spectacularly.

And then he gets punished for that venture severely in the 1994 congressional elections, which bring Newt Gingrich and a very right-wing group of Republicans to power — the first time that Republicans control both houses of Congress since 1952. It’s a huge achievement for the Republicans

Clinton reads that moment as signifying that the older Democratic Party of the New Deal, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, really had to be reworked and revamped.

the only way for him to win re-election, and the only way for the Democrats to hold on to national power and to regain it in Congress in 1996, is for him to acquiesce to some core Reaganite beliefs. And at the center of the Reaganite project was deregulation — which is a code word for getting the government out of economic affairs or curtailing government power.

Archived clip of President Bill Clinton: We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We know and we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.

so Clinton signs off on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which effectively deregulates the burgeoning I.T. sector of the economy, makes possible an unregulated internet. He signs off on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

The Glass-Steagall Act had divided investment from commercial banking and had imposed a kind of regulation on Wall Street that brought an end to the crazy speculation that had brought about the Great Depression in the first place. It was a core principle of the New Deal

He does not seek to revive the Fairness Doctrine, in terms of regulating public media, which had guided successive Democratic administrations: the idea that if a news outlet put out one side of a debate on a policy matter, they were obligated to give the other side equal access.

He becomes an advocate of deregulation and, in some respects, pushes deregulation further than Reagan himself had been able to do. And in that sense, he acquiesces to some of the core principles of the Reagan revolution rather than seeking to roll them back, and it is in that respect that I think it’s appropriate to think of him as a Democratic Eisenhower.

what one remembers most about those battles is how much Clinton and Newt Gingrich hated each other’s guts. And they were seen as being polar opposites.

Clinton, the representative of a New Left America: cosmopolitan, open to the liberation movements, looking for new ways of creating a new and diverse America, embracing sexual liberations — his embrace of gay rights was somewhat limited but still significant. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, representing traditional Victorian America, wanting to reassert the patriarchal, heterosexual family, men at work, women in the home, religious.

one of the surprises, to me, in working on this book, because I remember those days very well, was the degree to which they worked together — on telecommunication, on reform of Wall Street, on welfare.

Clinton would claim, and his defenders would claim, that he was triangulating. He was trying to make the best of a bad deal, that popular opinion was running with free markets, was running with the Republicans. And to some extent, that was true.

the lesson that I draw from that moment is that one must refrain from always getting sucked into the daily battles over cultural issues.

“cosmopolitanism.” Something that was fresh, to me, in your book was this argument that in neoliberalism, you’re looking at more than just what we typically think of it as, which is an economic theory. You argue that there is a moral ethic that came alongside it, that is part of it. You talk about it as, at various times, cosmopolitan, individualistic. Tell me about it.

“Neoliberalism” is often defined, as you say, simply as being about markets and freeing them up

And “neoliberalism” is also defined as something that’s profoundly elitist in orientation, and it’s a device and an ideology used by elites to implant market ideology on a society in ways that deepens economic inequality and has the ability to strangle the democratic rights of the masses.

I also say that in America, it had a profound popular base. Reagan was an enormously successful president, and by “success,” I mean he was able to excite the imagination of majorities of American voters, and his core message was freedom.

half the time he meant freedom in terms of a free enterprise economy, but the other half of the time he meant freedom in terms of giving individuals the autonomy to go their own way.

he was not a fan of the liberation movements of the ’60s. But when Clinton becomes president in the 1990s, he has a profound connection to those liberation movements of the 1960s — to feminism, to sexual liberation, to civil rights.

he detects in a world in which everyone can travel to wherever they want to go. He valorizes immigrants. He valorizes diversity. These are all values that are profoundly compatible with the neoliberal vision. The opportunity to travel anywhere, to seek out personal adventure, to seek out different cultures.

This is a world that neoliberalism makes possible, and it’s a thrilling moment for many people who have the opportunity either to mix in the world of American cities, which have filled up with immigrants, or to travel abroad and experience other cultures.

A single global marketplace enables and encourages the kind of cosmopolitanism that people on the left-center side of the political spectrum in America have so deeply valued.

you locate the end of this era in the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Why?

The promise of neoliberalism was that it would lift all boats. There was an acknowledgment about those who were freeing the energies of the market economy that it would probably increase inequality, the distance between the rich and the poor, but that the increase in inequality wouldn’t matter because the forces of production that would be unleashed on a global scale would be so powerful and so profound that everybody would have more and everybody would have a better life.

And what the 2008-9 financial crisis exposed was first a lot of the market freedom that neoliberalism had unleashed had led to corrupt banking and financial practices that had brought the world to the edge of financial abyss of unimaginable proportions. We ended up skirting that abyss — but not by a lot.

on the other hand, it brought into view a sense of how profoundly unequal the access to power was under the neoliberal regime. And here it’s not so much the financial crash itself but the nature of what governments did to promote recovery from the financial crash.

The object in the U.S. and also in Europe became to save the banks first. The culprits of this financial crisis were the ones who were bailed out first. If you were an American in 2009, 2010, 2011, who had assets in the stock market, you had pretty much recovered your position by 2011, 2012. If you were not one of those fortunate Americans and you were living week to week on a paycheck, your recovery did not occur.

You didn’t reach pre-2008 levels until 2016, 2017, 2018, and people understood, profoundly, the inequality of recovery, and it caused them to look with a much more scrutinizing gaze at the inequalities that neoliberalism had generated and how those inequalities have become so embedded in government policy toward the rich and the poor.

one of the identity crises in the Republican Party — one reason the Republican Party is not held together better — is that the Soviet Union was fundamental to what made its various factions stay in place. And it was also, I think, fundamental to what kept the Republican Party, which at its core has a real anti-government streak, committed in any way to real government.

hen I think there’s a sort of casting about for another enemy. I think they end up finding it after 9/11, or think they have, in what they try to turn into global jihadism, and then it falls apart — both as the antagonist and as a project and just feels to me like another part of the sort of wreckage of this period that opens a way for something new.

That new thing, I think, is more Donald Trump than it is anything else.

I think it discredits what had been a core project of the Republican Party, which was to spread market freedom everywhere. When I teach the Iraq war, I tell my 20-year-old students that this is the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history, that it’s going to take the U.S. and the world 50 years to recover from. And it’s imbued with a neoliberal hubris that everyone in the world is simply waiting for the wonders of a market economy to unleash, to be unleashed upon them.

OK, if that era ended, what is being born?

there’s also new zones of agreement that have emerged. When I think about the way I covered politics in 2010, the legitimacy of elections could be taken for granted, and the legitimacy of the Affordable Care Act could not.

I think it’s useful in this moment of acute polarization to look at some of what lies beneath the polarization.

you’re right: On a series of issues there are intriguing conversations going on between Democrats and Republicans. China and tariffs are one area of agreement.

Ironically, immigration is becoming another area of agreement, regardless of who wins the election. One can imagine that the bill agreed to in the Senate late in 2023 could easily be implemented in some form.

here is an area of convergence on antitrust. Josh Hawley and Lena Khan seem to like each other and are finding some common ground on that. And the national security hawks in the G.O.P., people like Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell, have converged with what we might call the industrial policy doves in the Democratic Party — people like Bernie Sanders — on the importance of reshoring critical sectors of manufacturing and on improving in dramatic ways the nation’s infrastructure.

we can see here a new political economy taking shape, one that breaks with the central principle of neoliberalism, which is that markets must lead and the only role for a state is to facilitate markets.

another element of that, which has been crucial to the ideological reorientation, is a new understanding of the relationship of free markets to democracy.

for the longest period of time, Americans and Europeans were willing to give China a blank check on their democracy, or on their violations of democracy, because of the belief that if market freedom and capitalist practices set down deep enough roots in China that people with economic freedom would want to add to that political freedom and that democracy would begin to flourish and that the Communist Party that rules China would either have to profoundly reform itself or see itself ushered from the political stage.

It’s hard to convince people now of how deeply rooted that belief was. No one in the Democratic or Republican Parties believes that anymore, and that has intensified the fear along with this “Oh, my God” sense that China is not simply producing ordinary goods. It’s producing very sophisticated goods. It’s cornering markets on electrical vehicles and batteries and solar panels that seemed unimaginable 15 or 20 years ago. And it has had the effect of profoundly shocking both parties.

that has completely transformed and the word “protectionism” is not being used because it’s such a negative term, but the sentiments that lie behind protectionism, which might be described more positively as fair trade, are profoundly with us and shape conversation about U.S. economic relations with China every day of the week.

So the change has been profound in both parties, and one of the surprises of the Biden administration, although in retrospect, it’s not so surprising, given the Biden administration’s commitment to industrial policy, is the continuity we see between Trump tariffs and Biden tariffs.

hey’ve also come, in many cases, to the view that we should have much more industrial policy: the sense that if you leave it to the market, China might, by using the government to foster and supercharge certain kinds of market pursuits in China, just lap us. I think it’s become the dominant view in both parties.

I would agree with that, although I think the Republican Party is probably more deeply split on this than the Democratic Party is. The Democratic Party arranged another kind of grand compromise between the left, represented by Bernie Sanders, and the center, represented by Joe Biden, which led to a profound commitment symbolized by Build Back Better, a $5 trillion project that was going to insert industrial policy into the heart of government economic relations in a way that marks the Biden administration as profoundly different from his Democratic predecessors, both Obama and Clinton.

I think the Republican Party does not have agreement on that to the same degree. And one of the interesting things to watch if Trump wins is how that internal fight in the Republican Party works itself out.

So the sort of ideological strain in the Republican Party that JD Vance is part of, this sort of more populist dimension of it: What they see markets and, particularly, free trade and trade with China and immigration as having violated is the strength of communities and families. They look around, and they see broken communities, hollowed-out communities.They see families where the male breadwinners have lost their jobs and lost their earning power, and so they’re not getting married, and there are divorces, and there are too many single-parent families

on the Democratic side, I think there’s some of the same views. There’s a lot of broken communities.

a huge part participant in this ideologically is climate change: the sense that markets would happily make people rich by cooking the planet. The market doesn’t know if the money is coming from, the profit is coming from, burning oil or laying down solar panels. And so once again, that some goal actually does need to be set. Markets can maybe serve our goals. They can serve our vision, but they can’t be assumed to get what we want right in the world.

And so the sense on both parties that you actually do need to define goals and define vision and that, ultimately, that is going to have to happen through government setting policy and making decisions — the primacy of that kind of dialogue now, the degree to which the first conversation is: What are we trying to achieve? That does feel different.

that speaks to the decisive nature of the election of 2016, which we will see the longer we get from it as a decisive inflection point, as really marking the end of the neoliberal order

It doesn’t mean that suddenly there are no more advocates of strong free markets. I think one of the questions now and one of the key questions for the Republican Party is: Can they get serious about this?

It requires them to have a serious program of political economy in a party that has lacked direction on political economy for quite some time.

You describe the sort of neoliberal era as bringing this much more cosmopolitan view of ethics, of morals and of America’s relationship with the world — a more sort of urbanist view. There’s a lot of connections between what it means to live in New York and to live in London and to live in Tokyo and to live in Hong Kong.

JD Vance is a good example of this — are much more skeptical of the individualistic moral structure that dominated here and that Republicans, for all the influence of the Christian right, largely left untouched.

it’s actually very complicated in both parties because Donald Trump is himself such a poor vehicle for a return of traditionalist virtue. But there is something happening here, a sort of questioning of not just government policy and industrial policy but: Did all this individualism work? Is a world where kids are on their smartphones all the time and families are having this much trouble — and did we get something more fundamental, almost spiritual, wrong?

he concern about the moral fiber of the American people is not new in the Republican Party. That goes back to Jerry Falwell, to some of the ministers who became popular in the 1990s and calling America back to moral virtue and identifying enemies of God.

The new element is a sense that one has to connect that concern for this kind of morality to a serious program of political economy, that it’s not enough simply to call on people to be virtuous.

t serious conservatives have to find a way to rebuild the economic foundation that lies at the root of so much immorality and so much despair in American life.

If that develops enough of a base in the Republican Party, then there becomes an opportunity to talk with Democrats about that, about family welfare, about the welfare of children, about creating institutions, both economic and social, that have the capacity to sustain communities in ways in which they have not been sustained.

There are some issues that run so deeply on questions of morality between Republicans and Democrats, it’s hard to see how they can find common ground. And probably the most important of these is on the question of abortion and reproductive rights. And to the extent to which JD Vance and his associates take their stand on this issue, the possibilities for developing a conversation about morality with liberals and Democrats are going to be very, very slim, indeed.

the things that I think would have once been framed in terms of Christianity are now framed in terms of classical virtue. There’s a sort of rediscovery of the Stoics, not the early Christians.

there’s something here where — obviously, efforts to remoralize America are not new — but this idea that we have gone wrong in modernity by becoming so individualistic seems to be gathering a fair amount of force.

My read of it is that the Christian right is just too weak and not sufficiently appealing to be the vehicle for it. And so these other aesthetic and ancient containers are being searched for, but there is some kind of pushback happening

I think you see a lot of interest among people in both parties around some of these tech regulations. But I think of that as sort of fundamentally moralistic.

he Christian right has become somewhat contaminated by its blind adherence to Trump and by its too great a willingness to plunge into politics with any messenger, no matter what moral qualities they’re exhibiting.

That there is a movement among conservatives to step back from that and to ground their morality in something deeper, more widespread, something that can appeal to a greater cross-section of Americans, regardless of whether they go to church or not

If there is a moral awakening underway that is not tied to instrumentalizing churches for strictly partisan purposes, which is one way of describing evangelicalism in the last 20, 25 years, then that would be new.

Sarah Igo, “The Known Citizen” — very different kind of book — “A History of Privacy in Modern America.” We’re talking about morality, we’re talking about community, and of course, social media has put the question of privacy and what constitutes privacy and what’s private and what’s public — such an urgent question in understanding America. And she gives us a wonderful hundred-year overview of how Americans in almost every generation have redefined the boundary between private and public, and I found that extremely useful in thinking about where America is at in the 21st century.

As Glasser noted, “It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be.”

“This election was a CAT scan on the American people,” Peter Wehner told the NYT, “and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption. Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.”

the election marked a dramatic failure by Democrats. But they were hardly alone. Herewith a litany of the major fails of 2024:

The GOP normies and other squishes

We are here because the Republican Party surrendered to Donald Trump in every conceivable way. This was a choice, and it was not inevitable. Many of the GOP suck-ups will now be rewarded for sacrificing their principles and their integrity.

The Justice System

History will record with a certain incredulity the utter failure of the criminal justice system (except for the hush money case) to hold Trump accountable for his crimes. Merrick Garland naively thought that he could dither and delay; and the Supreme Court put the lie to the illusion that no American is above the law.

The Media

Reports of the legacy media’s demise have not been exaggerated.Trump broke American journalism; and it is likely to get worse as power and influence shifts toward platforms that honor algorithms more than truth.

And, finally, and most important of all:

The American Voters

They were warned.

As my friend Tom Nichols wrote late last month, “voters have everything they need to know about this election.” There were no excuses. They saw Trump in Full — in all his effulgent griminess and bigotry. He is an adjudicated rapist, a serial liar, fraudster, and a convicted felon. A seditionist who tried to overturn an election. A man described as a “total fascist” by his top general; a demagogue who peddled conspiracy theories and racist lies about migrants eating cats.

Voters, we are told, were upset about inflation, the border, and about “woke” politics.

But they were, apparently, not bothered by Trump’s crimes, his incoherent economic plans, his appeasement of Vladamir Putin, his embrace of a “rough hour” of police brutality, or the Great Replacement theory. Nor were they put off by Trump’s empowerment of an anti-vax nutjob like RFK, Jr., who may gut the nation’s health care safety net.

There are several possibilities here. Voters who backed Trump: (1) Never heard any of this because they exist in an alternative reality(2) Heard about it but didn’t believe it, because they preferred his lies (3) Knew about his reckless dishonesty and bigotry, but didn’t care, or…(4) Actually, liked it all.

I know that it is now unfashionable to criticize the wisdom and sagacity of American voters, but this ought not be sanewashed as a normal choice in a rational or sane democracy.3 When we are done flagellating other institutions, we need to admit the possibility that something is profoundly broken in the American psyche and character.

For decades we have told ourselves stories about American exceptionalism and leadership — a beacon of freedom and democracy to the world. And, indeed, we remain the world’s greatest superpower.

But we found out last week that we are a profoundly unserious country.

Four decades ago, Neil Postman prophesied an apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media. “When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” he wrote, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

Even though he could not have imagined the tsunami of nonsense, vitriol, and mind melting that have accompanied the Age of Trump and Elon Musk’s X, I don’t think Postman would be surprised to find that tens of millions of Americans are entertained rather than outraged by the predations of an absurdist clown like the GOP’s prospective nominee.

In other words: Our national idiocracy was a pre-existing condition just waiting for the coming of a cynical demagogue like Trump. Our guardrails and norms proved to be far more fragile than we imagined, because they had been hollowed out and dumbed down.

We worry about fascism and Orwellian authoritarianism, but Postman argued that the real threat was more insidious.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, he suggested, was a more accurate prophecy of our time than George Orwell’s 1984. He wrote:

we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

Exit take: Maybe, just maybe, both of them were right. And we are about to live through what they merely imagined.

Vladimir Putin can’t restore the old superpower parity with the US, but he can make European democrats fear Moscow again. He can proselytise for a vicious strain of authoritarian nationalism that suffocates liberal norms and undermines multilateral institutions wherever it takes hold

That malevolent spirit has usurped orthodox conservatism as the driving force of rightwing politics on both sides of the Atlantic

If it works, Trump’s inauguration will be remembered as the setting of a sun that rose over Berlin 35 years ago. The ideas that won the cold war will no longer prevail in Washington. The Trumpian right still sometimes identifies itself with something called “the west”, but in its mouth it is a crusade to protect white Christendom from mass migration, not liberal pluralism or the rule of law.

Trump will enter the Oval Office with a more systematic programme of constitutional subversion than he had the first time around. He has tech oligarchs onside. He can nobble referees in the information arena.

The governing doctrine of the new administration will be a hybrid of ideological faith and corruption, held together by favours, a personality cult and paranoia. It will be a dogmatic kleptocracy where people who know how to spout the right beliefs to the right people will get lucrative jobs and contracts. Such regimes normalise the hypocrisy of plundering a nation while claiming to make it stronger. There are no contradictions or shame when submitting to the will of the leader is synonymous with doctrinal correctness.

American democracy won’t suddenly perish. The system that put Trump in power can remove him, as it has before. Resistance to tyranny is enshrined in law and embedded in US culture, but fastidious political vandalism can dismantle those protections.

The abrasive reality of a post-west America will take some getting used to. It represents an acute crisis for Britain, which counts the US as its paramount defence and security partner, while relying on European trade for its prosperity.

Once upon a time, that was a geopolitical balance with huge benefits. The UK was Washington’s best friend in Brussels and Europe’s hotline to the White House. Surrendering that status made Brexit a terrible idea in 2016. It hasn’t aged well.

It leaves Britain badly exposed in the trade war that Trump is poised to start. He will also make Europe less secure. The variables are quite how little he cares for Nato, how much he will appease Putin, how spiteful he will be to EU leaders and how contagious his politics will be in continental elections.

This puts Keir Starmer in an invidious position. Powerful currents of realpolitik demand intimacy with any US administration, regardless of how repulsive the incumbent president might be. Righteous decoupling is not a serious option when national security interests are densely interwoven. But as the price of keeping that relationship sweet, Trump will demand vassalage, which will complicate Starmer’s ambition for closer European ties.

Britain could carry on pursuing a new security deal with the EU, while grovelling for special exemption from US tariffs. Maybe Starmer has steady enough hands to thread that needle. But just the hint of alignment with Trump will sour any conversation about easing UK access to the single market.

there is a cost to pretending that not much has really changed. No one buys it. Labour’s foreign policy blew up on 5 November. Plan A was a version of the old mid-Atlantic bridge role that wasn’t wholly convincing to begin with. It relied on the pretence that Brexit was something that happened once in the past, a page that has been turned. In truth, it is a nagging, self-aggravating injury to the country’s strategic position. Without some acknowledgment of that reality, it is impossible to give a meaningful or honest account of the choices that lie ahead.

Trump’s victory reinfects the wound. It leaves Britain looking friendless in the post-western world. The shortage of good options isn’t a reason to pretend there isn’t an emergency. Squirming and cavilling around Britain’s biggest strategic blunder in a hundred years is not a sustainable path.

in recent years, the rate of college enrollment has plateaued and begun to fall:

tuition soared even as the earnings boost from a college degree shrank substantially, making college a less attractive value proposition. A lot of this had to do with colleges themselves boosting spending on administrators and facilities, and having to charge students more to pay for it.

Unless Dems can figure out how to win back those non-college voters, they’re likely to be at a huge electoral disadvantage for the foreseeable future.

winning back those voters would require the educated professional types who make up the backbone of the Democratic base and the progressive movement to figure out how to connect rhetorically with the less-educated masses, addressing their concerns, speaking to their values, and just speaking their language in genera

The most important disconnect between educated professionals and the rest of America is about the problems they face on a day-to-day basis. Practically every problem that Trump voters cited is something that hits the working class harder than the professional class.

Why did Trump win?

any attentive reader of the more sophisticated forecasters in the game should have known that Tuesday’s outcome was one of the likely scenarios. As Silver emphasized throughout, polls have historically been off by an average of about three points—and given how close the race looked in many swing states, a three point miss in one or another direction would likely hand a clear victory to either Harris or Trump.

That is pretty much exactly what happened. And so anyone who now claims that forecasters did not consider Tuesday’s results a realistic possibility has failed a simple test of reading comprehension.

I’m a center-left Democrat with lots of degrees. I’m aghast and frightened by Trump’s victory. But I think it’s due to the opposite of racism and misogyny and transphobia. I think he won because of anti-anti-racism and anti-misandry and love of children combined with acceptance of gays.

Normies not overeducated out of common sense rejected identitarian politics. DEI departments, struggle sessions, Robin Angelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates, quotas limiting Asian-Americans, literacy and math as white supremacy, buying a fixer-upper in a poor neighborhood as settler colonialism, all of it.

Men—a rainbow coalition of them—finally got fed up with decades of rhetoric about toxic masculinity, testosterone poisoning, rape culture, patriarchy. They saw that for most men in this country, the reality was poor results in school, lousy job prospects, inability to form a family, and a culture in which dissing any identity group is a capital offense unless it’s men you’re dissing and then that’s fine.

And regular folks not caught up in the strange mania to over-treat the normal nuttiness of puberty with life-altering chemicals and surgery said stop—confusion is fine, it’s not a disease, and didn’t we recently decide that homosexuality is okay, so why are doctors suddenly trying to cut it out of children?

Revulsion at these things is viscerally powerful, existentially clear. Trump’s unfitness for office is more abstract, more distant. The calculation for many was he will mess up Washington, DC and the rest of the globe but it’s more important to save myself and mine. Voting for more of the same will just lead to more of the same. And enough of that. Enough.

I will tell you why I voted for Trump. My wife and I are masters/PhD educated Brooklynites who work in academia. Several weeks ago my wife was teaching a class and a student very proudly mentioned they would never willingly collect anything produced by a white man. It’s not that this was said, it’s that this is a common and acceptable position for democrats even though you’ll say it isn’t. I’m tired of the hypocrisy. What the democrat worldview says reality is like is neither true nor morally supportable.

many NYT comments the other day that said things like “Trump and Musk are the true elitists.” No, guys. No they’re not. It’s not about money. It’s about who gets to tell you what to say and who gets to break “the rules” and who doesn’t. It’s about what you can talk about and what you can’t. It’s about laws for some presented as if they’re for all. It’s about what you’re allowed to see. It is a fundamental, hypocritical rot that is just so clearly there

But it is a huge gain compared with 2020, when Trump lost the popular vote by nearly five points.

it matters where the mood of America is moving, and the popular vote tells us more about that than the few hundred thousand voters who swing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

So what’s behind Trump’s gain? One theory is that this is the postpandemic, postinflation, anti-incumbent backlash. We’ve seen it in country after country. Whoever was in power in 2021 and 2022 is getting annihilated in elections.

As Matthew Yglesias wrote, if you look at this internationally, the interesting question might be why Trump didn’t win in a landslide. If Nikki Haley had been running, she probably would have.

But Trump didn’t just win this election. Democrats lost it. President Biden, at 81 years old and hovering beneath 40 percent favorability in most polls, should never have run for re-election. And for months and months and months, the leaders of the Democratic Party, with very few exceptions — shout-out to Dean Phillips — refused to say that.

It ignored its own voters, to say nothing of the voters it was going to need to win in 2024.

I was one of the people arguing, beginning back in February, for some kind of competitive process: a mini-primary leading to an open convention.

The hour was late. The party was scared. It had wasted so much time. And in wasting that time, it had refused to face up to a core problem: Biden wasn’t just too old. Voters were unhappy with his administration, with the wars abroad and the prices at home and the absence of leadership that made them confident that the people in charge knew what they were doing.

The line in the Democratic Party was and is that Biden’s record ranks him as perhaps the greatest president since Franklin D. Roosevelt

But Americans did not and do not believe that — and Democrats never reckoned with that fact or came up with an answer to it. That, more than any other reason, is why Kamala Harris lost.

Harris was dealt a bad hand. She had no time to set up her own campaign. No time to work out its themes or policies or personnel. And she was running, inevitably, as the champion of an administration people were angry at. She could not separate herself from Biden without being accused of disloyalty.

I think she ran a strong campaign, given how little time and how little room she had to build it.

she faced a very difficult problem: A popular incumbent can run on her record. A challenger can promise change. Harris could do neither.

She ultimately ran as the guardian of the institutions. A candidate with Liz Cheney on one side and Liz Warren on the other. But she took for granted the worth and health of those institutions. Was the endorsement of the Cheneys — and the enthusiasm with which it was embraced — a sign of the Democrats’ big tent or a sign of its internal confusion?

And Harris was burdened by all that had come before her. The Democratic Party had spent years kicking people out of its tent.

If you wanted to beat Trump, you wanted to win over people like Rogan.Liberals got so angry at me for that, I was briefly a trending topic. Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, a racist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not chat with.

liberals don’t get to choose who is marginalized. Democrats should have been going on “Rogan” regularly. They should have been prioritizing it

On YouTube alone, Rogan’s interview with Trump was viewed some 46 million times. Democrats are just going to abandon that? In an election where they think that if the other side wins, it means fascism?

now we’re here. Trump got the win in 2024 he could see only glimmers of in 2020.

Emotionally, there are two ways Democrats can respond: contempt or curiosity. I’ve seen plenty of contempt already

There’ll be a desire to retreat, to hunker down, to draw the boundaries of who is decent and who is deplorable ever more clearly.

Trump seems to have made huge gains among voters making less than $50,000 a year. The Democratic Party is losing voters who lie at the core of its conception of itself.

Democrats have to go places they have not been going and take seriously opinions they have not been taking seriously

When voters are this unhappy with the way you’ve wielded power, you have to want to know why. That work has begun in the Democratic Party — you saw it in the Biden administration’s eventual pivot to border enforcement — but it was clearly too little and too late.

But Bush’s win in 2004 was not the beginning of a Republican realignment. It was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it.

To win again, they would need to become more like what had defeated them.

There’s another part of the 2004 comparison that I’ve been thinking about. Immediately after that election, Democrats became obsessed with winning back the heartland

ecause what liberals believed about Bush was true. His administration was a disaster, and within a few years, nearly the whole country would agree

the Bush administration’s overreaches, failures and scandals left the reputation of G.O.P. elites so absolutely smashed that the stage was set for Trump’s eventual takeover of the party.

Trump is surrounded now by people who are more relentlessly focused on carrying out his will and their own. Republicans have the Senate and the Supreme Court and may well win the House.

Maybe JD Vance and Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bring judiciousness. I think it is as or more likely that they egg Trump into ideological overreach. And my God, the corruption we are about to see. So is this the beginning of the Trump realignment, or will this end with Trump’s name and reputation as tattered as that of the Bush dynasty he destroyed?

But Democrats need to admit that they are at the end of their own cycle of politics. The Obama coalition is over. It is defeated and exhausted. What comes next needs to be new. That means going to new places and being open to new voices. A politics right for the next era will not be a politics designed to win the last election

Finding what is next, amid the pain of what is about to come, is going to require a lot of conflict and a lot of curiosity.

Mr. Trump, who blames environmental regulations for hampering a variety of industries, including construction and oil and gas drilling. During his first term, Mr. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations. President Biden restored many of them and strengthened several.

Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are even discussing moving the E.P.A. headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C.,

“Lee Zeldin is a great pick,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the E.P.A. under the first Trump administration. She wrote a section on the E.P.A. for Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for re-engineering the federal government. In it, she recommends slashing the E.P.A.’s budget, ousting career staff, eliminating scientific advisers that review the agency’s work and closing programs that focus on minority communities with heavily polluted air and water.

He was a member of the House’s Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and earned a 14 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group. It is a low mark from the environmental advocacy group, but it was nevertheless higher than nearly any other Republican.

When Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York criticized Mr. Zeldin for opposing the climate law, he responded on social media, saying “I just voted NO because the bill sucks.”

“Being that it raises taxes, adds 87,000 new IRS agents, & spends hundreds of billions of dollars our country doesn’t have on far-left policies our country can’t afford, I’m not surprised you’d blindly endorse it,” he wrote.

During Mr. Zeldin’s tenure in the House, he voted against clean water legislation at least a dozen times, and clean air legislation at least half a dozen times, according to the League of Conservation Voters scorecard.

Mr. Zeldin has also taken some votes that the group supported, including prohibiting oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. He also voted in favor of a landmark conservation bill that passed with bipartisan support and was signed by Mr. Trump. It guarantees maximum annual funding for a federal program to acquire and preserve land for public use.

He voted for a bill that would require the E.P.A. to set limits on PFAS, which are a family of man-made chemicals that are persistent in the environment and the human body. The E.P.A. under the Biden administration has set strict limits on the chemicals in drinking water. In 2020, he voted against legislation that would have slashed E.P.A.’s budget.

“It would be productive if we could get to what is real and what is not real,” he said. “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”

Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights

But over the past half century that basic impulse underwent two great distortions. The first was the rise of “neoliberalism”, an economic doctrine that sanctified markets and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity. Power shifted away from the places that hosted the original industrial revolution to Asia and other parts of the developing world.

The second distortion was the rise of identity politics or what one might call “woke liberalism”, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like. State power was increasingly used not in the service of impartial justice, but rather to promote specific social outcomes for these groups.

In the meantime, labour markets were shifting into an information economy. In a world in which most workers sat in front of a computer screen rather than lifted heavy objects off factory floors, women experienced a more equal footing. This transformed power within households and led to the perception of a seemingly constant celebration of female achievement.

The rise of these distorted understandings of liberalism drove a major shift in the social basis of political power. The working class felt that leftwing political parties were no longer defending their interests, and began voting for parties of the right.

Thus the Democrats lost touch with their working-class base and became a party dominated by educated urban professionals. The former chose to vote Republican. In Europe, Communist party voters in France and Italy defected to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni

With regard to immigration, Trump no longer simply wants to close the border; he wants to deport as many of the 11mn undocumented immigrants already in the country as possible. Administratively, this is such a huge task that it will require years of investment in the infrastructure needed to carry it out — detention centres, immigration control agents, courts and so on.

The Republican victory was built around white working-class voters, but Trump succeeded in peeling off significantly more Black and Hispanic working-class voters compared with the 2020 election. This was especially true of the male voters within these groups.

There is no particular reason why a working-class Latino, for example, should be particularly attracted to a woke liberalism that favours recent undocumented immigrants and focuses on advancing the interests of women.

It is also clear that the vast majority of working-class voters simply did not care about the threat to the liberal order, both domestic and international, posed specifically by Trump.

what is the underlying nature of this new phase of American history?

The real question at this point is not the malignity of his intentions, but rather his ability to actually carry out what he threatens. Many voters simply don’t take his rhetoric seriously, while mainstream Republicans argue that the checks and balances of the American system will prevent him from doing his worst. This is a mistake: we should take his stated intentions very seriously.

Trump is a self-proclaimed protectionist, who says that “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the English language. He has proposed 10 or 20 per cent tariffs against all goods produced abroad, by friends and enemies alike, and does not need the authority of Congress to do so.

As a large number of economists have pointed out, this level of protectionism will have extremely negative effects on inflation, productivity and employment.

Donald Trump not only wants to roll back neoliberalism and woke liberalism, but is a major threat to classical liberalism itself.

It will have devastating effects on any number of industries that rely on immigrant labour, particularly construction and agriculture. It will also be monumentally challenging in moral terms, as parents are taken away from their citizen children, and would set the scene for civil conflict, since many of the undocumented live in blue jurisdictions

He has vowed to use the justice system to go after everyone from Liz Cheney and Joe Biden to former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley and Barack Obama. He wants to silence media critics by taking away their licences or imposing penalties on them.

Whether Trump will have the power to do any of this is uncertain: the court system was one of the most resilient barriers to his excesses during his first term. But the Republicans have been working steadily to insert sympathetic justices into the system, such as Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, who threw out the strong classified documents case against him.

Trump has privately threatened to pull out of Nato, but even if he doesn’t, he can gravely weaken the alliance by failing to follow through on its Article 5 mutual defence guarantee. There are no European champions that can take the place of America as the alliance’s leader, so its future ability to stand up to Russia and China is in grave doubt. On the contrary, Trump’s victory will inspire other European populists such as the Alternative for Germany and the National Rally in France.

East Asian allies and friends of the US are in no better position. While Trump has talked tough on China, he also greatly admires Xi Jinping for the latter’s strongman characteristics, and might be willing to make a deal with him over Taiwan

At the end of his term, he issued an executive order creating a new “Schedule F” that would strip all federal workers of their job protections and allow him to fire any bureaucrat he wanted. A revival of Schedule F is at the core of the plans for a second Trump term, and conservatives have been busy compiling lists of potential officials whose main qualification is personal loyalty to Trump. This is why he is more likely to carry out his plans this time around.

critics including Kamala Harris accused Trump of being a fascist. This was misguided insofar as he was not about to implement a totalitarian regime in the US. Rather, there would be a gradual decay of liberal institutions, much as occurred in Hungary after Viktor Orbán’s return to power in 2010.

This decay has already started, and Trump has done substantial damage. He has deepened an already substantial polarisation within society, and turned the US from a high-trust to a low-trust society; he has demonised the government and weakened belief that it represents the collective interests of Americans; he has coarsened political rhetoric and given permission for overt expressions of bigotry and misogyny; and he has convinced a majority of Republicans that his predecessor was an illegitimate president who stole the 2020 election.

by the time it invaded Ukraine in 2022, disillusionment with Western liberalism had gone so far that President Vladimir V. Putin’s tirades against the supposed decadence of the West enjoyed wide support among far-right nationalist movements across Europe, in the United States and elsewhere.

The curious resurrection and resounding victory of Donald J. Trump amounted to the apotheosis of a long-gathering revolt against the established order. No warning of the fragility of democracy or freedom, no allusion to 20th-century cataclysm or Mr. Trump’s attraction to dictators, could hold back the tide.

“The Sleepwalkers” was the title of Christopher Clark’s book on the onset of World War I. They appear to many to be afoot once more.

With nationalist and anti-immigrant political currents strong throughout the continent, Mr. Trump will have more levers than during his first term with which to undermine the 27-nation European Union. The possibility that Europe will splinter, with each nation cutting its own deals with Washington, appears real.

many Americans believe that Mr. Trump, at heart a businessman for whom foreign policy is merely a matter of transactional resolve, will usher in an era of prosperity incompatible with the turbulence of war. During his first term, he forged the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and four Arab states.

Speaking as Germany’s coalition government collapsed and uncertainty loomed before a general election next year, he added that Mr. Trump’s victory was particularly troubling because “the German Federal Republic is a creation of the United States of America, the fruit of postwar enlightened American policy.”

For the international system, a Russian victory in Ukraine would affirm a principle of might over right, and for Europe it would pose a direct threat.

“There is no possible good outcome in Ukraine today,” said Ms. Bacharan, the French political scientist. “Trump wants the war over and, with Putin, will do whatever it takes.”

To this mire will now be added the chaotic, impulsive, high-risk approach to foreign policy described with near unanimity by Mr. Trump’s top aides during his first term, as well as his expressed contempt for NATO and the European Union, anchors of postwar Western security and stability, and his threats of confrontation with China in the form of punishing tariffs. A turbulent world and a turbulent personality make for a dangerous mix.

“As a nation we don’t have a way to deal with a world where every country is only looking out for itself,” Mr. Bagger said of Germany. “We nurtured the idea of an international community because it was the only post-Nazi way to think of ourselves. So where we turn in Trump’s world is unclear.”

The BRICS group of emerging market nations is now a powerful counterweight to the West, as illustrated at its meeting last month, hosted by Mr. Putin. Entrenched Russian and Chinese hostility toward the United States will complicate Mr. Trump’s every foreign policy endeavor.

India, at once a BRIC member with close ties to Russia and a close friend of the United States, enjoyed good relations with Mr. Trump during his first term. Jawed Ashraf, the Indian ambassador to France, said he expected that to continue.

But Mr. Ashraf added: “We are in a state of the world where people are seeking new answers. There’s a lack of belief in the future. Economic models unable to deliver, unfettered social media, and global volatility lead to taking it out on immigrants and questioning of democratic systems.”

In societies atomized by the overwhelming pace of technological change, and marked by growing inequality, Mr. Trump had simple answers that resonated.

Those answers were the border and the pocketbook, the former too porous and the latter too empty. He would fix both.

“It was the fight-fight-fight backlash,”

“No more complex diagnosis, no more delicate decisions.”

“God spared my life for a reason,” Mr. Trump said at his victory speech early Wednesday. The possibility of a sense of divine mission, backed by a clear electoral mandate, could make the likelihood of balanced policy more remote.

People want strength,” he said then. “We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty,” he said. He got the blood up. Many dismissed him as a buffoon. But with his uncanny political antennae, attuned to humanity’s fears and resentments, he was onto something.

China was rising; American power ebbing; Afghanistan and Iraq were graveyards of American glory; millions of struggling Americans felt forgotten or invisible; and the establishment had not understood the fact-lite theater of the contemporary world.

It was the perfect storm for rabble-rousing. Far from an anomaly, Mr. Trump now looks like an inevitability, the answer, not once but twice, to the shattering of hopes for liberal democracy that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Donald Trump played to the irritation of many Americans disgusted at being regarded as insensitive for talking the way they’d always talked. At rallies, he referred to women as “beautiful” and then pretended to admonish himself, saying he’d get in trouble for using that word

One thing that makes Democrats great is that they unabashedly support groups that have suffered from inequality. But they have to begin avoiding extreme policies that alienate many Americans who would otherwise be drawn to the party.

Democrats learned the hard way in this election that mothers care both about abortion rights and having their daughters compete fairly and safely on the playing field.

A revealing chart that ran in The Financial Times showed that white progressives hold views far to the left of the minorities they champion. White progressives think at higher rates than Hispanic and Black Americans that “racism is built into our society.” Many more Black and Hispanic Americans surveyed, compared with white progressives, responded that “America is the greatest country in the world.”

Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the party needs rebranding. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” he said. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

The Trump campaign’s most successful ad showed Kamala favoring tax-funded gender surgery for prisoners. Bill Clinton warned in vain that she should rebut it.

James Carville gave Kamala credit for not leaning into her gender and ethnicity. But he said the party had become enamored of “identitarianism” — a word he uses because he won’t say “woke” — radiating the repellent idea that “identity is more important than humanity.”

“We could never wash off the stench of it,” he said, calling “defund the police” “the three stupidest words in the English language.”

it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom everybody admired.

Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats.

By comparison, here is Barack Obama in 2016, describing to Bloomberg Businessweek his affinity for the private sector: “Just to bring things full circle about innovation — the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”

It would have been nice if the Democrats could have triangulated their way into the hearts of enough educated and affluent suburbanites to make up for the working class voters they’ve lost over the years, but somehow that strategy rarely works out

For a short time in the last few years, it looked as if the Democrats might actually have understood all this. What the Biden administration did on antitrust and manufacturing and union organizing was never really completed but it was inspiring. Framed the right way, it might have formed the nucleus of a strong appeal to the voters

Speaker after speaker at the gathering in Chicago blasted the Republicans for their hostility to working people. There was even a presentation about the meaning of the word “populism.” At times it felt like they were speaking to me personally.

The administration’s achievements on antitrust were barely mentioned.

Then, once Ms. Harris’s campaign got rolling, it largely dropped economic populism, wheeled out another billionaire and embraced Liz Cheney.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, put together a remarkable coalition of the disgruntled. He reached out to everyone with a beef, from Robert Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk. From free-speech guys to book-banners. From Muslims in Michigan to anti-immigration zealots everywhere. “Trump Will Fix It,” declared the signs they waved at his rallies, regardless of which “It” you had in mind.

clucking liberal pundits would sometimes respond to all this by mocking the very concept of “grievance,” as though discontent itself was the product of a diseased mind.

Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.

I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.

Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage.

It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals.