The following article, “DEI Is a Failure Because the Civil Rights Movement Wasn’t About Elite Diversity: The tide is turning against modern diversity bureaucracies. But that’s not necessarily bad news for progressives, at least if they believe in the goals of the civil rights movement” by Zaid Jilani, is cross-posted from substack.com:

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is being challenged, as President Donald Trump recently enacted an executive order that requires his administration to crack down on and remove diversity-oriented offices and policies across the federal government.

To many liberals, Trump’s order is distressing.

“I have to assume that ‘pursuing DEI efforts’ means hiring anyone who isn’t a white man?” asked The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie about the administration’s new initiative to crackdown on DEI.

Indeed, the term DEI has at times become a sort of racist shorthand for corners of the online far-right, where people who in some cases were elected to office by the voters are derided as DEI hires simply because they’re nonwhite Democrats.

But not every critic of DEI is motivated by white resentment. Many people criticize these programs because they have little positive impact on diversity, anyway, and there’s a bunch of evidence that diversity trainings can actually make people more prejudiced.

The outcomes of Trump’s maneuver, however, remains to be seen because the devil is in the details.

Does removing DEI from the federal government mean eliminating potentially discriminatory programs? Or will the order end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater as it guts organizations that do have some proven benefit, like government teams that help protect the rights of disabled employees?

I would argue that the anti-DEI efforts we’ve seen pop up across the country over the past few years are capable of doing both things, and only time will tell what the Trump administration ends up achieving with its new anti-DEI directive.

But something is lost in this debate, where you have conservatives on one side railing against programs and practices they believe discriminate against white men and promote mediocrity and liberals on the other side defending DEI as an extension of the civil rights movement that guarantees the rights of minorities.

The reality is that DEI is only tangentially related to the rights and opportunities of minorities. The civil rights movement was not about diversifying corporate or government offices with a few black or brown faces in places of power.

It wasn’t about diversity trainings where employees roll their eyes as someone hired by HR lectures them for three hours about their privilege.

It was about redistributing power to the masses of people who don’t have it, including white people.

Read more here.

Some messaging points from Frank O’Brien’s “Progressives: We Have to Drive Efforts to Confront the Working Class Disconnect” at progressivesonmessage.substack.com:  “People living paycheck to paycheck and feeling unheard and unseen by many Democrats aren’t wrong. In November, their frustration boiled over triggered by inflation….No messaging shift will work unless Democrats back it up with action. We must push for an economic populist agenda and against policies that stack the deck against hard-working people….We need Democrats who can give voice to the needs and aspirations of people struggling with economic uncertainty as easily as they represent people worried about climate change or the spread of authoritarianism. And they need to talk about economic hardship in a much more visceral, emotional way….We have to advance steps that don’t ask people to wait around for years before feeling the impact. And we have to aggressively sell that agenda….We didn’t lose by standing with trans kids dealing with outrageous harassment and heartbreak. We lost because we didn’t demonstrate the same kind of empathy and concern for working-class families worried sick about how to pay their bills, feed their family and carve out a brighter future for their children….Sure, standing up for peoples’ rights doesn’t mean taking the bait every time our opponents try to draw us into crazy conversations.”

At Roll Call, Daniela Altimari, Mary Ellen McIntire and Niels Lesniewski share some insights from recent polling, including “A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday brought bleak news for congressional Democrats: Just 21 percent of voters approve of the way they are doing their jobs. Democratic lawmakers are underwater even with their own base, notching a 49 percent disapproval rating among registered partisans….Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are enjoying a honeymoon of sorts, the Quinnipiac survey found. In the early days of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the GOP governing trifecta, 40 percent of voters give Republicans in Congress positive marks. Among Republicans, that number shoots up to 79 percent….Democrats in Congress have been here before. They endured a shellacking in the 2010 midterms and saw Republicans win full control of Washington in 2016. But since March 2009, when Quinnipiac first asked this question, their job approval rating has never dipped this low….The former leader of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party [Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin] released a blueprint this week for fighting Trump and regaining momentum. The plan relies heavily on winning back working-class voters by painting the president as an out-of-touch advocate for the ultra-rich.”

“Post-mortems of Democrats’ performance consistently referenced a political realignment in U.S. politics, which included a rightward shift in voting patterns, notably among working-class men of all demographics,” Tanner Stening writes in “Can progressives and moderates bridge the growing divide in the Democratic Party?” at Northeastern Global News. ” That shift is certain to have an effect on the losing party. Looking at global patterns, Johnson says that center-left parties generally slide further to the right as right-wing parties do well in elections….“I imagine they will primarily focus on economic issues and specific federal programs and be wary of focusing on the sorts of dramatic proposals or social issues with which the party’s progressive wing is associated,” she says…. But there is also the danger in overstating the Republican victories in 2024, says Costas Panagopoulos, distinguished professor of political science at Northeastern and co-author of “Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era.”….Panagopoulos and Beauchamp note that the momentum swings over the last several cycles still point to a narrowly divided electorate — and a sense that “anything can happen” over the next four years….In the 22 midterm elections from 1934 to 2018, the incumbent’s party lost 28 House seats and four Senate seats on average, data shows. Should the Democrats perform well in the midterms, it will help them build back a coalition capable of challenging the Republicans in 2028.”

In “To stop Trump, Democrats must reinvent themselves,” at The Hill, Will Marshall writes “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….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….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.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Democrats are roaming in the political wilderness and seem bewildered on how to find their way out. More resistance? More moderation? More lawfare? More denunciations of fascism/authoritarianism/lawlessness? Look for ways to compromise? Don’t look for ways to compromise? Shut down the government? Don’t shut down the government? Better messaging of Democratic positions? Actually change Democratic positions? It’s all so confusing!

It needn’t be. There’s one simple question—a sort of test—that would illuminate the path forward for Democrats.

What would the working class say (WWWCS)?

Let me explain.

The WWWCS test is not so hard to do but it does entail getting outside of the liberal college-educated bubble so many Democrats live within, particularly as experienced on social media, in activist circles and within advocacy, nonprofit, media and academic institutions. Look at actual public opinion data—not as summarized by someone you know or something you read. Look at focus group reports. Talk to actual working-class people—there are lots of them! Listen to your intuitions about how working-class people would likely react to policies and rhetoric currently associated with the Democrats —not how you think they should react. Think of family members or people you grew up with who are working class. Try to get inside their heads. They are less ideological, more focused on material concerns, more likely to be struggling economically, less interested in cutting edge social issues, more patriotic and generally more culturally conservative. All this makes a difference.

The “what-would-the-working-class-say” test can tell you a lot about whether Democrats are on track with their approach. If the test indicates that Democrats are advocating or saying something that is likely unpopular, off-putting and/or just lacks salience with working-class people, that policy or rhetoric is probably on the wrong track. Conversely, if the test indicates that working-class people are likely to view what Democrats are advocating/saying as desirable, in tune with their values and actually important to their everyday lives, that is a very good sign.

So that’s the test. Here’s why it’s so damn important.

As noted in an excellent new report by Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck:

For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class, determined by educational attainment. But in the intervening half century, the parties have switched places. Republicans once commanded a majority among college-educated voters while Democrats were the party of the working class. Now the majority of college educated voters support Democrats. Meanwhile, the troubled relationship between the Democratic Party and white working-class voters that began in the late 1960s now includes the non-white working-class as well, as populist Republicans are expanding their support among working-class Hispanics and an increasing share of African American men….

The sorting of partisan preferences based on educational attainment is bad news for Democrats, demographically and geographically. Fewer than 38% of Americans 25 and older have earned BAs, a share that has plateaued in recent years after increasing five-fold between 1960 and 2020. And so, it appears, has the Democratic share of the college graduate vote (57 percent in 2020, 56 percent in 2024) even as the Republican share of the non-college vote surged from 51 percent to 56 percent. Meanwhile, non-college voters still make up 57 percent of the electorate, a figure that rises to 60 percent in the swing states. [Note that the figures for eligible voters are actually quite a bit higher—RT]

If Democrats cannot build a broader cross-class alliance, one that includes a larger share of non-college voters, their future is not bright. At the presidential level, they could end up confined to states with high densities of college-educated voters, leaving them far short of an Electoral College majority. Although Democrats won all the states with shares of BA degree holders at 40 percent or higher in 2024, there were only 12 of them, none swing states. By contrast, Democrats won only one of the 29 states with BA shares at 35 percent or lower while prevailing in seven of the 10 states with college attainment between 36 and 39 percent. [Note that the only swing state in the 36-39 percent group, North Carolina, was carried by Trump—RT] And because ticket-splitting between presidential and senatorial races has become more infrequent, the new class-based politics bodes ill for Democrats’ U.S. Senate prospects as well.

Here’s the visual on the difference between high and low education states:

Notice anything different about the two maps? The point about Senate implications cannot be emphasized enough. My Liberal Patriot colleague Michael Baharaeen recently did a crackerjack job of running down the Senate maps for 2026-2030. The Republicans have abundant pickup opportunities in low-education, working class heavy states while Democratic opportunities are slimmer and generally involve knocking off Republicans in the same kind of low-education states. This is daunting to say the least.

Read more…

The following article, “How About a Daily Democratic Message?” by Robert Kuttner, is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

There’s an interesting idea floating around on social media about how to rescue the Democrats from a wilderness of mixed messages and relentless media stories of Democratic disarray. But actually bringing this idea about sheds light on the thorny structural challenges that the opposition party faces.

The idea is that “the Democrats” should designate a single spokesperson, or perhaps rotating spokespeople, to give a daily press conference with a few clear talking points. That would presumably become the day’s main political story and give Democratic opposition to Trump more focus and clarity. So far, so good.

A number of the social media accounts have suggested Pete Buttigieg, who is deft at articulating a substantively progressive message as just plain common sense. Trump’s wrecking crew provides a target-rich environment, to say the least.

But let’s play out making this idea happen. For starters, who are “the Democrats”? Who would appoint this spokesperson or -people, and using what criteria?

There is a Democratic National Committee, with a talented new chair in Ken Martin, but the DNC does not make this kind of decision. The Senate and House leaders, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, are the closest thing to national leaders.

Let’s assume that Martin, Schumer, and Jeffries meet and decide that this is a good idea. Then begins the problem of herding cats.

Schumer and Jeffries would have to get buy-in from their respective caucuses. Multiple demands would surface. Lots of different people with presidential aspirations would want the role of daily spokesperson. All would agree on just one thing. It can’t be just Pete Buttigieg.

Then the further mixed blessing of diversity in all its forms would kick in. There would be pressure to pick spokespeople from different regions, races, genders, ideologies. Instead of clarity, we’d get a circus.

Let’s make the heroic assumption that the party leadership could somehow surmount this challenge and pick just three rotating spokespeople.

My nominees would be Jamie Raskin, Gretchen Whitmer, and Pete Buttigieg. See the superb extended interview with Raskin in Politico. He is the most eloquent and best-focused anti-Trump Democrat we have. But I digress.

There is the further challenge of message. Do we just leave that up to the messengers, or must they clear it with some kind of committee?

The anti-Trump talking points are clear enough. He is putting your health at risk with fringe appointees and wreckage of essential public-health agencies. He plans to take away some of your health insurance and Social Security to finance more tax cuts for his billionaire cronies. He is wrecking the economy and inviting a stock market crash. He is destroying America’s most reliable alliances and helping global adversaries.

I wish that his trampling of the rule of law, his vindictiveness, and his cruel separation of immigrant families with Gestapo-style ICE raids were at the top of the list. They surely are for Prospect readers. But for the general public, alas, the more powerful message is how Trump’s crazy actions harm you.

A further challenge is the Democrats’ affirmative program. Yes, we need a few bold commitments that would help ordinary people directly and provide a vivid contrast with Trump. Our friend Tom Geoghegan, writing in The Nation and urging Democrats to keep it big and simple, proposes a 50 percent increase in Social Security benefits and a law prohibiting the firing of wage and salary workers except for cause. At the top of my list would be canceling student debt.

But here’s the problem with that tactic. The press would quickly point out that none of this stands any chance of passage, and many elected Democrats would distance themselves from Hail Mary pass proposals.

If the Democratic leadership could agree on a small rotating cast to provide a consistent narrative on the personal menace of Trump to ordinary Americans, that would be a possible start.

These aren’t the happiest days for Democrats, but the impact of so much wild lawlessness by Trump 2.0 should be offset a bit by indications the 47th president and his minions may be a bit over their skis, as I discussed at New York:

During the first month of his second term, Donald Trump’s popularity started out mildly positive but has slowly eroded, according to the FiveThirtyEight averages. As of January 24, his job-approval ratio was 49.7 percent positive and 41.5 percent negative. As of Thursday, it’s 48.7 percent positive and 46.2 percent negative, which means his net approval has slipped from 8.2 percent to 2.5 percent. The very latest surveys show a negative trend, as the Washington Post noted:

“Trump’s approval ratings this week in polls — including the Post-Ipsos poll and others from Reuters, Quinnipiac University, CNN and Gallup — have ranged from 44 to 47 percent. In all of them, more disapprove than approve of him.

“That’s a reversal from the vast majority of previous polls, which showed Trump in net-positive territory.”

Given all the controversy his actions have aroused, that may not be surprising. But he has some vulnerabilities behind the top-line numbers, mostly involving ideas he hasn’t fully implemented yet.

His proposals tend to be popular at a high level of generality but much less popular in some key specifics. For example, a February 9 CBS survey found 54 percent supporting his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict, but only 14 percent favoring his idea of a U.S. takeover of Gaza. Similarly, a February 18 Washington Post–Ipsos poll found 50 percent of respondents approving of his handling of immigration, but only 41 percent supporting the deployment of local law enforcement for mass deportations, and only 39 percent supporting his push to end to birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.

Across a broad range of polls, Elon Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy is relatively unpopular. A February 19 Quinnipiac survey found 55 percent of registered voters believe Musk has too much power. An Emerson poll gave Musk a 41 percent job-approval rating, and an Economist-YouGov poll gave him a 43 percent favorability rating.

But by far Trump’s greatest vulnerability is over his management of an economy where renewed signs of inflation are evident, and where his policies, once implemented, could make conditions worse. Already, his job-approval ratings on managing the economy are slipping a bit, as a February 19 Reuters-Ipsos poll indicated:

“[T]he share of Americans who think the economy is on the wrong track rose to 53% in the latest poll from 43% in the January 24–26 poll. Public approval of Trump’s economic stewardship fell to 39% from 43% in the prior poll …

“Trump’s rating for the economy is well below the 53% he had in Reuters/Ipsos polling conducted in February 2017, the first full month of his first term as U.S. president.”

And a mid-February Gallup survey found 54 percent of Americans disapproving Trump’s handling of the economy and 53 percent disapproving his handling of foreign trade. More ominous for Trump if the sentiment persists is that negative feelings about current economic conditions are as prominent as they were when they helped lift Trump to the presidency. The WaPo-Ipsos poll noted above found that 73 percent of Americans consider the economy “not so good” or “poor,” with that percentage rising to 76 percent with respect to gasoline and energy prices and 92 percent with respect to food prices.

Republicans and independents will for a time share Trump’s claims that the current economy is still the product of Joe Biden’s policies, but not for more than a few months. A particular controversy to watch is Trump’s tariff wars and their potential impact on consumer prices. As the CBS survey showed, sizable majorities of Americans already oppose new tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and Europe, with tariffs on China being an exception to low levels of support for that key element of Trump’s economic-policy agenda. And the same poll showed 66 percent of respondents agreeing that Trump’s “focus on lowering prices” is “not enough.” He may have forgotten already how he won the 2024 election.

 

Two of the surest ways to fail in national politics are to preside over high inflation or high unemployment. President Biden gave us an object demonstration in the political danger of inflation. Now, Trump seems to be maneuvering into position to do both. Ironically, he will likely get more benefit from Biden’s infrastructure initiatives than Biden got, because the employment bump will kick in in during the months and years ahead. But with his rash of government lay-offs, Trump-Musk have awakened new fears  of unemployment much larger than the actual danger of it. When sudden mass layoffs in any industry, including government, become the lead news story, the fear spreads and then the market trembles. He would be in much deeper trouble without the infrastructure upgrades Biden secured. It’s a bit early to blame Trump for rising inflation, since, in his own words, “I’m only here for two and a half weeks….I had nothing to do with it.” However as Ed Mazza reports at HuffPo, Trump bragged that “I will immediately bring inflation down on Day 1….Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down.” And it seems a safe bet that Trump’s mass deportations and blanket tariffs are not going to help keep prices down. We are not going to see a lot of guys in red maga hats bringing in the harvest. Nor will adding a surcharge on Canadian lumber help reduce housing prices. One of the post-it notes often seen on the desks of successful small business people says “Under-promise, Over-deliver.” For years Democrats have done the reverse and have paid dearly for it. Now it is the Republicans’ turn.

At The Guardian, Lauren Aratani reports that “A quarter of US shoppers have dumped favorite stores over political stances: A new poll also found that four in 10 Americans have shifted spending to align with moral views in recent months,” and writes: “Americans are changing their shopping habits and even dumping their favorite stores in a backlash against corporations that have shifted their public policies to align with the Trump administration, according to a poll exclusively shared with the Guardian….Four out of 10 Americans have shifted their spending over the last few months to align with their moral views, according to the Harris poll.

• 31% of Americans reported having no interest in supporting the economythis year – a sentiment especially felt by younger (gen Z: 37%), Black (41% v white: 28%) and Democratic consumers (35% v 29% of independents and 28% of Republicans).

• A quarter (24%) of respondents have even stopped shopping at their favorite stores because of their politics (Black: 35%, gen Z: 32%, Democratic: 31%).

More Democrats (50%) indicated they were changing their spending habits compared with Republicans (41%) and independents (40%). Democrats were also more likely to say they have stopped shopping at companies that have opposing political views to their own – 45% of Democrats indicated so, compared with 34% of Republicans….It is a sign that consumers with liberal views are starting to use their wallets in response to politics in the private sector.”

John L. Dorman reports at Business Insider: “When [Sen. Reuben] Gallego was asked why many voters concerned about the economy seemingly had little issue with an administration filled with the ultrawealthy, the Arizona lawmaker said personal wealth is aspirational for many voters….”People that are working class, poor, don’t necessarily look at the ultrarich as their competitors,” he said. “They want to be rich someday.”….He said those voters would give Trump, Musk, and their allies the benefit of the doubt until they were personally impacted by governmental actions….Gallego also predicted that Trump would face political backlash over the GOP’s long-sought tax bill, which could include $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and potential spending reductions for programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program….”That’s when you’re going to see people saying, ‘No, no, no, that’s not what I want,'” he said….Gallego defeated Lake last November even as Trump flipped Arizona red in his victory over then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the key swing state….The first Latino to represent Arizona in the Senate, Gallego outpaced Harris with Latino voters and male voters. The lawmaker attributed his success to his work to engage with voters everywhere, especially as it related to their economic concerns.”

In “America Needs a Working-Class Media: Catering to rich audiences is not serving us,”  Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, writes at the Columbia Journalism Review: “America needs a working-class media. It’s something that has preoccupied me for years. If we thought of it as precariat media, we would also include the falling middle class that I have called the middle precariat (including most freelance writers right now). After the 2024 election, the punditocracy has seemingly rediscovered the working-class voter for the second time—following Donald Trump’s first victory, when J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy emerged to “explain” the rage of those left behind economically. Neither time, however, did they “rediscover” the value of working-class journalists…. The identity crisis of the Democratic Party—and debate over the extent to which the party should identify with the working class—unfolds as I write this; see Bernie Sanders’s, Faiz Shakir’s, and other progressive politicians’ and media figures’ refrain that the party pursued donors and ignored the working class in the 2024 electoral campaign. And if that balance of power must change, the media should be similarly realigned….What would that media look like? It would be one where economic reporters are embedded in blue-collar communities and neighborhoods rather than financial districts, and source networks built around people with direct experience instead of outside analysts. Centering inflation coverage around wage stagnation rather than the stock market and written for people who live paycheck to paycheck. Healthcare reporting would be conducted by those who have experienced medical debt. Labor reporting that represents workers not as mute sufferers but as true experts. Housing that is considered from the perspective of the renter, not the landlord or developer….As Christopher Martin, author of the 2019 book No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, told me: “Media has increasingly centered on a class audience rather than a mass audience.”

Echoing some of the themes developed by Andrew Levison, Ruy Teixeira and Stanley Greenberg at this website and others, here is a 17+ minute Ted Talk video clip by Joan C. Williams, Distinguished Law Professor and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings:

For a discussion of Williams’ latest book, click here.

In his latest column, “Democrats, Trump has given you a mission. Accept all of it. The republic is under siege. What can be done?,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes that “However, disoriented Democrats may be, they have to understand that Trump has given them a mission. They need to accept it — all of it….Which means that a lot of what once passed for strategy is useless now. Democrats cannot pretend that business-as-usual behavior is appropriate to this moment. They cannot “choose their battles” because what’s at stake is not just this or that policy but whether we will endure as a free republic in which presidents recognize they are not monarchs. It’s absurd to say of Trump “we will work with him where we can” when the project on which they’d be “working with him” involves shattering the rule of law and making it impossible for government workers to do the jobs Americans expect them to carry out….Democrats who want to save the nation — and their party — need to end their malaise, mobilize their supporters and fight for something that matters. If our constitutional democracy doesn’t matter, I don’t know what does….Franklin D. Roosevelt built the New Deal coalition by opposing concentrated economic power and highlighting the human costs of a form of capitalism with weak guardrails and a paltry safety net. Ronald Reagan unraveled the New Deal coalition with his three antis — anti-government, anti-tax, and anti-communism. In both cases, the power of negative thinking created paths to sweeping affirmative agendas….Trump’s firings have disabled the National Labor Relations Board by depriving it of a quorum. It now has no way of enforcing labor law and protecting workers’ rights. That’s his reward to the many working-class voters who helped elect him….Republicans who control Congress should also be up in arms about the Trump-Musk incursion on their authority. But since they’re falling into line behind a surrender to the executive branch, Democrats have no choice but to make the Trumpist GOP’s going as difficult as possible.”

Dionne continues, “Trump’s obvious indifference to rising costs should, as party strategist James Carville has argued, be at the center of Democratic accountability efforts. Trump, after all, promised to “slash your prices” and bring down “the price of everything.” But his priorities — revenge, political control of the administration of justice, the intimidation of civil servants, and, for that matter, takeovers of Greenland and Gaza — have nothing to do with lowering what consumers pay for groceries, gas or housing. His tariffs will only make inflation rise….An alert reader might say that much of what’s being proposed here sounds a lot like “the resistance” to the first Trump presidency. That is precisely what is needed now — more, even, than the last time around….Sure, the term was a little precious, but what’s forgotten is that the first resistance was effective. It helped save the Affordable Care Act, end Republican control of the House, flip seven governorships, and elect hundreds to legislatures and local offices. Legions of smart lawyers repelled many of Trump’s abuses — and this time around, the legal profession has been at the forefront of the early victories against his maneuvers, including Saturday’s ruling restricting the Musk group’s access to Treasury Department data….Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist who studied the anti-Trump movement, noted recently in the New Republic that what worked the last time were the “persistent, community-based efforts by 2,000 to 3,000 grassroots Resistance groups in every town, city, and suburb across virtually all congressional districts.” The events of the past three weeks summon Americans again to diners, churches, libraries, union halls and taverns to organize, to pressure their elected officials (especially the 15 House Republicans who won last year by five percentage points or less), and to reach out to their friends and neighbors to warn them about what Trump is doing to their democracy.”

In “Former Sanders, Fetterman campaign consultants start new firm aimed at winning back working-class voters: They’re aiming to elect more nontraditional candidates with a populist, anti-establishment streak,” Holly Otterbein writes at Politico: “A group of Democratic strategists who worked for some of the biggest unorthodox names in liberal politics is launching a new firm….The consultants who helped guide Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and the winning Senate bids for John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego are branding their new company Fight Agency….They said they’re aiming to elect more nontraditional candidates with a populist, anti-establishment streak. They’re even open to fielding left-leaning independents who eschew the Democratic Party label altogether….POLITICO is first to report on their announcement….The strategists behind Fight Agency declined to share the names of any potential new clients, but said they expect to work in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential campaign….They have at points worked to elect more traditional candidates, including former President Joe Biden. But many of their past clients are known for their offbeat styles, willingness to speak off the cuff, and a propensity to ruffle the feathers of their own party leaders — an approach to politics the consultants plan to employ at their new venture….McDonald, who made ads for Dan Osborn, a left-leaning independent Senate candidate in Nebraska who lost but outperformed the top of the ticket in 2024, said “outsiders, working-class candidates, even a few independents — this is kind of what people want, and there should be a team that can help them.”….As Democrats grapple with how to win back blue-collar voters, Mulvey said Sanders, Fetterman and Gallego provide “clues” for their party. He said they “all have the ability to connect with working-class and independent voters” and represent “anti-establishment, economic messaging, populist messaging.”

According to Jennifer Bowers Bahney, writing at The Raw Story, a “Single Trump decision could be driving working-class Hispanics back to the Dems: analysis.” As Bahney explains, “Working-class Hispanic voters who turned their backs on Democrats to help elect Donald Trump may soon make a U-turn, according to an analysis in Tuesday’s New York Times….The report listed Trump policies that appealed to Hispanic U.S. citizens and which are currently being carried out: “raids and deportations; the opening of a migrant internment camp at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; the president’s attempt to end automatic citizenship to babies born on U.S. soil; tariffs threatened, then pulled back, on Mexican goods; and the U.S. military dispatched to the border.”….But, the report claimed Trump’s embrace of billionaire Elon Musk and the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could be the catalyst that drives Hispanic voters back into the arms of the Democrats….Sylvia Bruni, a Democratic Party leader, agreed that the party needed to focus less on issues like abortion and gender “if it wanted to win back socially conservative Latinos.”….Bruni said, “The Republicans kept telling voters: I promise you, eggs are going to be down to $1 a dozen. Economics is what did us in.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Over time, Democrats have been hemorrhaging working-class voters, including and especially in the last election. A resolute, unconditional defense of government bureaucracies does not appear to be a promising route to getting them back in our current populist era.

But oddly, Democrats seem to have decided that hitching their wagon to government bureaucracies is just the ticket they need to storm back against Trump and GOP. Nothing illustrates this better than how they’ve mounted the barricades to defend USAID and each and every dollar it spends.

As was widely-reported, all USAID programs except for “life-saving humanitarian assistance programs” were paused on January 20^th and all agency employees, except for a tiny handful, were put on administrative leave (some have subsequently been reinstated through court order). These actions are follow-ons to Trump’s Executive Order on “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.”

Democrats were outraged as well they might have been. USAID does much useful and important work and most of its employees surely deserve something better than being summarily laid-off during an audit of the programs they administer. Democrats took that outrage to the streets in a signature #Resistance move, where House and Senate Democrats rallied outside the USAID headquarters building and demanded to be let inside (to do….something), at which point bored security guards politely told them to get lost.

Of course, this got a lot of publicity but to what end? The truth is most Americans know very little about USAID and could care less about the USAID as an institution. And if you told them that USAID basically administers foreign aid programs, they would care even less.

The fact of the matter is that foreign aid is one of the least popular parts of the federal budget. Indeed, skepticism about foreign aid is one of the most consistent and durable findings of public opinion research. In a 2023 AP-NORC poll, 69 percent of respondents thought U.S. government spending in this area was “too much”; 20 percent, “about right”; and just 10 percent “too little.” In contrast, support for more spending in most domestic areas (healthcare, education, infrastructure, Social Security, etc.) is very strong.

And unsurprisingly, anti–foreign aid sentiment runs highest among working-class voters, precisely the people who have been defecting from the Democrats to Trump, and without whose votes the party cannot recover. Cutting foreign aid spending is about ten points more popular among voters without college degrees than among the college-educated.

Given these realities, it makes sense for Trump and Musk to go after foreign aid spending, as an exemplar of misallocated government resources that need to be “reevaluated and realigned.” This is particularly the case since it isn’t hard to find examples of USAID programs that appear to have strayed far afield from standard priorities like food, medicine and technical assistance. One example of many is a $1,500,000 grant to a Serbian organization called Grupa Izadji “to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities, by promoting economic empowerment and opportunity for LGBTQI+ people in Serbia.”

In fairness, these kind of grants do not take up a large portion of USAID’s budget but even a small number of them is enough to raise hackles among voters who are already suspicious that much foreign aid is either wasted or could be better-spent elsewhere.

OK, let’s recap the situation for which the outraged masses of Senate and House Democrats have taken to the streets.

1. Democrats are blanket defending an obscure institution in an anti-institutional era, where most institutions are regarded with intense suspicion. As David Axelrod remarked to Politico, apropos of the USAID situation:

[How] did the party of working people become a party of elite institutions?…Part of the problem for the Democratic Party is that it has become a stalwart defender of institutions at a time when people are enraged at institutions (emphasis added). And they become—in the minds of a lot of voters—an elite party, and to a lot of folks who are trying to scuffle out there and get along, this will seem like an elite passion.

Call it the institutions trap. Trump attacks an institution Democrats are identified with; Democrats feel obliged—pretty much no matter what it is—to defend it tooth and nail. But that simply reinforces Democrats’ brand as the institutional, establishment party, which makes them even more vulnerable to populist attacks and even less capable of defending those institutions Then Trump goes after another institution and the cycle repeats.

Reflecting this dynamic, congressional Democrats have rallied in several other places, including outside the Departments of Treasury and Education, implying that whatever auditing and attempted cost-cutting is taking place at these institutions is completely unjustified. That is their default assumption—the bureaucracies in question are doing a fine job. But the default assumption of the median working-class voter is that a good chunk of most bureaucracies are doing work that isn’t even needed and wasting considerable money in the process. Therefore, such voters are likely to have considerable initial sympathy for what Trump and Musk/DOGE say they’re trying to do.

Democrats should recall an important finding from New York Timespolling in the last cycle. Voters overwhelming believe that the political and economic system in America needs either major changes or to be completely rebuilt. Automatic, dogged defense of all institutional bureaucracies does not speak to that sentiment.

Not only that, Democrats are only succeeding in making themselves look ridiculous as they take to the streets in geriatric-led demonstrations to defend these bureaucracies….

….As Tim Ryan, former Ohio House member and Senate candidate put it:

Yes, it is a bit depressing and certainly altogether implausible that these antics will succeed in reaching the working class voters Democrats need.

2. In USAID, Democrats are not only blanket defending an obscure institution, it is an institution that does one of American voters’ least favorite things: provide foreign aid. How much sense does it make for Democrats to hit the streets to defend USAID and pump up the issue politically when most Americans are indifferent to hostile to the programs they administer?

Not much! Axelrod again:

My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight…When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.

Rahm Emmanuel adds:

You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch. And my view is—while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador—that’s not the hill I’m going to die on.

Words of wisdom, should Democrats care to hear them.

3. Finally, not only are Democrats blanket-defending an obscure institution that does something American voters don’t care about, they are defending without offering any hint of what they would preserve and what they would get rid of in terms of what USAID does. That implies that everything is working perfectly at USAID and all the programs are vitally needed, when clearly that is not the case.

Voters want big change in their institutions; it doesn’t make sense to insist that no change is needed, especially in an area like this. Bill Clinton once said: “Mend it, don’t end it” in a different context. That spirit of open reform is desperately needed here and elsewhere as Democrats try to resist Trump’s excesses.

And there will be many! Democrats should show some common sense in what they spend their political capital on as Trump ramps up his various institution-bending schemes. Given that even the most attentive political junkies are having trouble keeping track of all the things that are going on, we can safely assume that the typical working-class voter has very little appreciation for these intricacies—much less whether they amount to a “constitutional crisis”—and mostly knows Trump and Musk are shaking things up in government bureaucracies. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in their book, until and unless it starts to affect them personally.

That’s really the key and how Democrats can get out of the current “institutions trap” that brands them as the establishment party in an anti-institutional, populist era. Trump is pretty much guaranteed to do many things that are genuinely unpopular and impinge upon voters’ lives in a way that angers them in areas like health care, education, and the cost of living. Democrats should reserve their big guns for those situations. That should make them politically stronger over time and, paradoxically, make them better able to restore worthwhile USAID and other government programs over time and get many of those workers back to work.

In contrast, their current grandstanding on the USAID shutdown and other DOGE monkey business will likely do those programs and those workers no good. As that great American, Casey Stengel once remarked: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” We’re still looking Casey, we’re still looking.

There’s nothing that annoys me much more than the lazy habit of justifying bad conduct by the claim that “everybody does it,” particularly when the conduct in question is egregious. That’s why policing political false equivalence claims is important, so I wrote a ticket for John Letterman at New York this week.

One thing most of Donald Trump’s minions and their bitterest Democratic enemies agree about is that a constitutional crisis is brewing as the new administration asserts the right to remake the federal government by executive fiat (either via presidential executive orders or by power delegated to Elon Musk’s DOGE operation) and federal judges begin to push back. Most Democratic politicians, particularly in Congress (which is in danger of losing its control over federal spending priorities entirely), are using pretty stark language about the constitutional implications of Trump 2.0. Here’s Senator Ron Wyden in an interview with my colleague Benjamin Hart:

“The Founding Fathers said, ‘Look, here’s what Congress does. Here’s what the president does.’ This is what we have enjoyed for all of these years, and it has been something that has served us well. And now you have somebody in Elon Musk, who basically paid for an election, coming in and saying he runs everything. If you have unelected individuals breaking the law to take power, that about fits the definition of a coup.”

Meanwhile, Team Trump is arguing it’s the judges that are engaged in an attempted coup, as NPR reports:

“’The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges and liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during a briefing on Wednesday.

“Leavitt called the orders that federal judges have made against the administration’s agenda a ‘continuation of the weaponization of justice’ against Trump.”

Musk has called for an “immediate wave of judicial impeachments” to dispose of obstacles to his ongoing rampage through the federal bureaucracy.

But there’s at least one vocal dissenter from this consensus: Wyden’s Democratic colleague John Fetterman, who is basically saying there’s nothing to see here we haven’t seen before, as HuffPost reports:

“’When it was [President] Joe Biden, then you [had] a conservative judge jam it up on him, and now we have liberal judges who are going to stop these things. That’s how the process works,’ Fetterman told HuffPost on Wednesday, referring to nationwide injunctions of Biden’s policies by conservative judges during his presidency.

“The Pennsylvania Democrat called Musk’s actions shutting down agencies and putting thousands of workers on administrative leave without congressional approval ‘provocative’ and said they are ‘certainly a concern.’

“However, the senator rejected claims from others in his party about the country facing a constitutional crisis.

“’There isn’t a constitutional crisis, and all of these things ― it’s just a lot of noise.'”

Fetterman has taken a decidedly cooperative tack toward Trump 2.0 from the get-go, calling on Joe Biden to pardon Trump to get rid of his hush-money conviction, joining Truth Social, and making positive noises about DOGE (at least in its pre-inauguration form). But he’s opposed confirmation of Trump’s most controversial nominees, including Pete Hegseth, Russell Vought, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. His latest comment seems to suggest he’s carving out a role for himself as a Democrat who is not at all onboard with what Trump is doing but rejects any hyperventilation about it. At a time when most Democrats are under considerable grassroots and opinion-leader pressure to make more rather than less of what Fetterman calls “noise,” it’s quite the outlier position. Yes, he’s a Democrat who will be running for reelection in 2028 in a state Trump carried in 2024, but given what’s going on in Washington right now, 2028 seems far away and there’s no telling what the people of Pennsylvania will think by then.

From a substantive point of view, Fetterman’s “everybody does it” take on Trump/Musk power grabs isn’t terribly compelling. Yes, the Biden administration criticized the band of right-wing federal judges (mostly in Texas) to which conservatives resorted in battling Democratic legislation and presidential executive orders, and also criticized the conservative majority on the Supreme Court for its ideologically driven decisions, particularly the reversal of Roe v. Wade. There was even talk in Democratic circles of actions to restructure the Supreme Court (inevitably referred to as “court-packing” in an allusion to FDR’s failed 1937 proposal to expand the size of the Court) in various ways. But “court-packing” never got beyond talk, and in any event, Democrats notably did not talk about flat defiance of judicial orders as Musk and J.D. Vance, among others, are doing right now.

There are legitimate differences of opinion about exactly how far Team Trump has progressed down the road to a “constitutional crisis” over the relationship between the executive and legislative branches. Maybe strictly speaking we are dealing with a potential constitutional crisis that will formally begin the minute the administration openly refuses to comply with a judicial order. But where Fetterman is doing a disservice to the truth is in implying that the imminent threat — if not the reality — of an engineered constitutional crisis is just the same-old same-old that every recent administration has pursued. That approach normalizes this self-consciously revolutionary regime and also its worst impulses and excesses.