As President Trump and Congressional Republicans use their slim majorities to try to foist a radical regime change on America, Democrats need to reckon with why they’re watching helplessly from the sidelines.
Having lost control of both the White House and Congress, and with Republicans marching in lockstep, there is little they can do to stop Trump’s drive to monopolize political power and rule by diktat. Only the courts are putting speed bumps in his way.
Democrats, yoked to the status quo, are extraordinarily unpopular. Less than a third of Americans view the party favorably, while 57 percent disapprove. Independents are even more likely to express negative views. During the Biden years, Republicans also erased the Democrats’ longstanding advantage in party registration.
Progressive activists nonetheless are pressuring party leaders to make a show of resisting the Trump-Elon Musk blitzkrieg on the federal government. This is tricky: Democrats are duty-bound to speak out against Trump’s unconstitutional usurpation of legislative power. But they must also avoid falling into the trap of defending a federal bureaucracy most Americans believe is badly broken.
The same risk applies to other key issues voters trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle — what to do about the economy, immigration, crime, energy and climate, schools and cultural friction around race and gender.
The Democrats’ challenge isn’t simply to fight the Trump cult’s hostile takeover of U.S. governing institutions but to offer a credible agenda of their own for political change and public sector reform.
That won’t be easy, because party leaders have yet to come to grips with the blunt message voters delivered last November: Democrats are on the wrong side of the new class divide that’s reshaping U.S. and center-left politics elsewhere.
The 2024 election confirmed the continued erosion of Democratic support among non-college Latino, Black and Asian-American voters. That’s severing the party’s last arterial link to working-class America and cementing its new identity as the party of highly educated professionals and cosmopolitan elites.
Non-college voters far outnumber college grads. That’s why the Democratic coalition is shrinking and retracting into its urban bastions, conceding vast swaths of the country to Trump and the Republicans. Trump won 31 states last year, to Kamala Harris’s 19.
To compete nationally, Democrats must rebuild a cross-class coalition. They won’t do that by consulting the same progressive voices that led the party into today’s electoral cul-de-sac. Nor can they rely on so-called centrist groups that cheered on the Biden White House as it pursued policies that deeply alienated working-class voters.
To win a new hearing among those voters, Democrats will need new ideas and new leaders unafraid to challenge the party’s Washington establishment.
It’s also time for Democrats to stop aping populists on both the left and the right and instead rediscover the tough-minded and pragmatic liberalism that has animated their party at its best, from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman to Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
These leaders believed America stands for equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. They embraced economic freedom and individual initiative, not the top-down dictates of democratic socialism. They stood firmly against protectionism and isolationism, and for social security and fiscal responsibility.
They weren’t for open borders, insisting instead that America is both a country of laws and a country of immigrants. They wanted equal justice for excluded and marginalized minorities, not group preferences. They believed America should be a beacon of freedom and democracy to oppressed people everywhere, and they were unreservedly patriotic.
Unlike Trump’s right-wing populism, which has made our country once again a house divided against itself, these liberal precepts and ideas are our common political inheritance and have the power to bring Americans together.
Drawing on this civic creed, Democrats should forge a new agenda for economic and social reform that puts ordinary working Americans first.
They don’t want handouts; they want abundant economic growth and opportunity that expands the middle class, not the upper class. They want policies that are pro-worker and pro-business, reward hard work, support stable families, encourage entrepreneurial risk-taking and keep America on the cutting edge of innovation.
Instead of “college for all” and student debt relief, Democrats should call for a dramatic expansion of apprenticeship and “learn and earn” education that helps the non-college majority get valuable skills and work experience to launch their careers.
Democrats paid dearly last year for the Biden administration’s failure to secure our southern border. A new party reform blueprint must include a tough but humane plan to suppress illegal immigration. It also should use E-Verify to crack down on employers (like Trump’s golf clubs) that knowingly hire illegal aliens.
Democrats also should distance themselves from climate activists more interested in demonizing fossil fuels than enlisting working-class support for a clean energy transition that doesn’t threaten them with energy scarcity and higher fuel bills. The party should call for more and better police and prosecutors to make crime-ridden communities safer. Amid growing public frustration with public schools, Democrats should resume leadership in reforming and modernizing our overly bureaucratic and centralized K-12 school systems.
Working Americans don’t trust the federal government to help them solve their problems. Having no serious plan of their own to reform government, Democrats have ceded the initiative to the Trump-Musk wrecking crew, which is going about it in the most uninformed, destructive and cruel way imaginable.
Democrats can’t beat Trump and the populist right with the discredited progressive playbook they’ve been following since 2016. Their prime imperative job now is to reinvent themselves as a pragmatically liberal party of change and reform.
Will Marshall is the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
