Ruy Teixeira recommends the following article, “How Democrats Lost Obama’s Vision of American Identity by Ian Reifowitz, cross-posted here from The Liberal Patriot:

Ask people what single line they remember about Barack Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, and most will quote his words about unity, about there not being a black, white, Latino, or Asian America, but rather the United States of America.1But he also recognized the necessity of connecting the language of American unity to progressive policy goals. As Obama described his personal views:

[W]e are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother.

Barack Obama recognized that persuading people to back policies (or candidates like himself) that call for sharing resources with others first required convincing them to identify with those other people as members of the same community—namely the American people.

Obama’s soaring depiction of our country’s story, in which we’ve committed terrible wrongs in the past but also drawn upon our founding documents and values to make remarkable progress, resonated with enough Americans to elect and re-elect him to the presidency with commanding margins—a feat accomplished by none of the Democratic Party’s three subsequent presidential candidates.

It should be obvious that Donald Trump’s vision of America represents something like the antithesis of Obama’s. What’s less obvious but equally important is that Democratic politicians—influenced by far-left academics—have in important ways departed from how the 44th president talks about our history and our national identity in the years since he left office.

Obama’s approach centers on the need to actively inculcate a sense of peoplehood that unifies Americans of every kind, even as it makes space for identities based on race, culture, religion, and more. He understood that a healthy society requires a concept of America within which people of all backgrounds can find themselves. People need to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of identity, something that connects them to a larger purpose. A concept of Americanness—a liberal patriotism—that can connect Americans to one another across boundaries is crucial to countering Trumpism broadly and racial/ethnic tribalism more specifically. Obama’s integrative vision of our national identity provides an ideological foundation for what political scientist Robert Putnam called “bridging social capital.”

Invoking Dr. Martin Luther King, Obama, in his final State of the Union, called on Americans to reject “voices urging us to fall back into our respective tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background.” He called on us instead to be “inspired by those…voices that help us see ourselves not, first and foremost, as black or white, or Asian or Latino, not as gay or straight, immigrant or native-born, not as Democrat or Republican, but as Americans first, bound by a common creed.”

Where the Academic Left’s Critique of Obama Misses the Mark

Embrace of Race Essentialism

First, there’s the question of whether to highlight commonality across lines of race versus stressing the differences, the latter sometimes to the point of race essentialism. Obama constantly emphasized the former in a balanced way, as he did in his “A More Perfect Union: Race, Politics, and Unifying Our Country” address in 2008: “Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” Likewise, here’s the 44th president on December 6, 2024, at the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum: “Pluralism does not require us to deny our unique identities or experiences, but it does require that we try to understand the identities and experiences of others and to look for common ground.”

Obama’s approach sharply contrasts with the race essentialist mindset that characterizes the views of Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility. In a statement that reflects her core beliefs, she urgedwhite people to accept that “your race shaped every aspect of your life from the moment that you took your first breath.” Race is certainly an important influence on any American’s life, but DiAngelo’s statement flattens out the wide range of the lives white Americans live. Rhetoric and policy based on such ideas cannot help but fail to adequately address the real struggles of poor whites, who remain the majority of Americans living in poverty.

The Denial of Racial Progress

A second area of disagreement concerns the degree to which we have made progress reducing racism over the course of American history. In the “A More Perfect Union” speech, then-Senator Obama contrasted his view with that of his left-wing former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in terms that could also apply to the academic left in more recent years. The problem was not in calling out racism but instead in speaking,

as if no progress had been made; as if this country…is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In a sharp contrast, from its very first paragraph, The 1619 Projectlaid out its founding principle. It contends that the idea our country was born on July 4, 1776, “is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619”—when the first enslaved Africans arrived on our shores. At that point, “America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.” Subsequently, The New York Times, which published this collection of essays, softened this claim as well as other similarly provocative language after receiving pushback from scholars and others. Nevertheless, the core of the argument remains that the enslavement of Africans in what would become the United States—a truly horrific, despicable practice that has no doubt cast a long shadow and still matters today—is the single most important event in our history, more important than the act of creating the nation itself.

Leaving aside the accuracy of this highly questionable assertion, a Democratic Party seen as believing it has no chance of being entrusted with governing our country. The Brahmin Left, however, ate it up, and The 1619 Project, about which historians have raised some serious questions, won the Pulitzer Prize. Similarly, Ta-Nehisi Coates, expressing sentiments that stand diametrically opposed to Obama’s, asserted about black Americans: “We were never meant to be part of the American story.” He says this without qualification. The statement is totalizing and eternal. Coates’s words carry real anguish, caused by racism, that all Democratic officials should understand, but this view fails to acknowledge progress, and its complete embrace would leave the Democratic Party with a politically unpopular worldview that makes it less able to enact positive change through policy.

The Support for Racial Preferences

A third area of at least partial disagreement centers on the question of whether to support universal programs—which disproportionately benefit Americans of color—versus those that explicitly target Americans by race. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote, “An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn’t just good policy; it’s also good politics.” He also explained:

The only thing I cannot do is…pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks. I’m the president of the entire United States. What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those who are most vulnerable and most in need. That in turn is going to help lift up the African American community.

Compare this to what Ibram X. Kendi wrote in the first edition of How to Be An Anti-Racist, perhaps the ur-text of the race essentialist academic left: “Racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.” Kendi altered this section in a subsequent edition, after facing criticism. What he wrote provided the intellectual foundation for the push in policy for equity. It stands in direct opposition to what Obama expressed in the “A More Perfect Union” speech, when he called on Americans to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

Biden and Harris’s Move to the Left of Obama on Race

Academics and public intellectuals aiming to stir the conscience of their readers have goals and methods that must differ from those of politicians running for office, who seek the political power to make change. Such provocateurs can take positions to the left of mainstream politicians because, after all, they don’t need to win more votes than their opponent. But what’s especially notable here is that Democratic elected officials shifted to the left of Obama on race as well.

The Biden administration relied on several of the universal programs Obama championed, but Biden also adopted too much of the Brahmin Left’s positioning on race. His first executive order called for a government-wide focus on “equity” that, among other things, promoted DEI trainings in federal government agencies and offices. Biden’s Education Department, likewise, advanced similar thinking on race in its programming. In April 2021, the Biden White House promoted a program of grants for teaching civics and American history that both uncritically praised The 1619 Project and quoted directly from Kendi’s book.

Looking at funding, the American Rescue Plan included $4 billion of debt relief that would benefit indebted farmers of color—most of whom were African American—but excluded whites. White farmers sued on the basis of racial discrimination. This policy further entrenched the belief among some white Americans that a Democratic president and Congress—focused on equity of outcomes rather than equal rights—stood on the side of minorities and stood opposed to white interests. This was a far cry from Obama’s position that he would not pass laws that only helped black Americans. Struggling black farmers in Alabama are not better off because the government chose not to include struggling white farmers in Iowa. But the latter are definitely worse off for not getting that help, and the reason behind the policy might well lead those white farmers to resent both people of color and the Democratic officials who made that choice.

Furthermore, such choices weaken the multiracial coalition of the economically vulnerable that true progressive change requires, something Dr. King understood. In Why We Can’t Wait, he called for a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” that would include poor whites. Echoing Dr. King, Obama also tended to endorse universalist rather than race-specific policies.

Rhetorically, as well, neither Biden nor Harris decisively broke with the hard left, as Obama did when he forcefully distanced himself from Rev. Wright, or President Bill Clinton did when he distanced himself from Sister Souljah, a rapper who said after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”

Some might have expected that Biden and Harris’s more race-specific equity rhetoric would have resulted in increased support among voters of color. It did not. The reality is that the wealthy white liberals who proudly declare their devotion to the principles of DiAngelo’s White Fragility or Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist express positions on racial issues like policing or education that stand far to the left of most African Americans. The views of the Brahmin Left—which TLP’s Ruy Teixeira noted “have come to define the Democratic Party in the eyes of many working-class voters, despite the fact that many Democrats do not endorse them”—are alienating the very Americans most likely to face racial oppression. These groups also happen to include some of the fastest-growing segments of our voting population.

Democratic politicians must find ways to clearly distance themselves from the more extreme, unnuanced aspects of race essentialism, as Obama repeatedly has done. To be fair, President Biden and Vice President Harris on occasion employed language that echoed, at least in part, the Obama vision of America discussed here. Unfortunately, doing so does not have the same impact as putting it at the core of one’s worldview.

A Path Forward

Since Obama left office, Democrats have lost sight of the importance of his type of conception of America. He provided both an accurate picture of the country and showed an ability to win over sufficient numbers of working-class voters of every race—the overwhelming majority of whom are strongly patriotic. Democrats need to reembrace the Obama vision of America and avoid the more identity politics-based vision of the Brahmin Left if they wish to get a fair hearing from working-class Americans on policy prescriptions they propose.

Some intellectuals offer a path forward that differs from that proposed by Kendi, Coates, and The 1619 Project. Writer Heather McGhee has offered a compelling vision of how to talk about race along Obamaesque lines. She wrote:

The zero-sum story of racial hierarchy…is an invention of the worst elements of our society: people who gained power through ruthless exploitation and kept it by sowing constant division. It has always optimally benefited only the few while limiting the potential of the rest of us, and therefore the whole.

McGhee argues that Republicans pit racial and other groups against each other such that if one gains, the others must lose. That story is a false one. She notes that what she called the “race left” inadvertently contributes to this zero-sum vision by “focus[ing] on how white people benefited from systemic racism.” She argues that’s not an accurate story. Many whites suffered, rather than benefited, under the old laws of white supremacy, even as those laws harshly oppressed black Americans above all. For the most part, white people “lost right along with the rest of us. Racism got in the way of all of us having nice things.” Her key illustration is that when courts ordered desegregation of public swimming pools, some communities chose to fill in the pools rather than integrate them. Black people got hurt, but so did working-class whites. McGhee’s formulation is both accurate and politically persuasive to a broad audience.

Democrats need to move away from the language of equity, which implies that it would be acceptable to close the racial gaps in health or education by helping members of the disadvantaged racial groups improve while denying any help to lower-income whites. Obama understood this reality instinctively, as he made clear in his “A More Perfect Union” speech. He called on all Americans to “realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.” Like the 44th president did, today’s Democrats must talk along these lines regularly and weave these concepts into their communication about all kinds of issues, not just on special occasions.

To reorient themselves, Democrats must make some choices and offer newer, more inspiring alternatives than they have in recent years. Barack Obama brilliantly walked a middle path between extremes. He managed to acknowledge inequities and the need for more progress while also offering hope. Obama flatly rejected the faddish vision that, in the words of Teixeira, claims “America was born in slavery, marinated in racism, and remains a white supremacist society, shot through with multiple, intersecting levels of injustice that make everybody either oppressed or oppressor on a daily basis.”

Perhaps nowhere did Obama strike the balance better than in his speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March. Obama asked:

What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people—the unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many—coming together to shape their country’s course? What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this; what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

To right the ship, tell a credible and also inspiring story, and win elections, a new generation of Democrats needs to recapture this same spirit.

1 This article draws upon a longer report published by the Progressive Policy Institute, as well as from my books, Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012) and Riling up the Base: Examining Trump’s Use of Stereotypes through an Interdisciplinary Lens (Boston: DeGruyter Brill, 2025, co-authored with Anastacia Kurylo), along with my article, “How Progressives Talk about July 4 and Our National History in the Post-Trump Presidency Era” (Daily Kos, 2024).

Julianne McShane has a review of “Trump’s Week of Massive Legal Losses” at Mother Jones. Here’s an excerpt:

• Last Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that Trump’s reciprocal tariffswere basically illegal, as my colleague Inae Oh covered. (On Truth Social, Trump alleged the court was “Highly Partisan,” adding, “If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country.”)
• The same day, a federal judge ruled that the administration could not fast-track deportations of people detained far from the southern border. (White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called the ruling a “judicial coup.”)
• Last Sunday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from deporting hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children. (Miller alleged the “Biden judge” was “effectively kidnapping these migrant children.”)
• On Tuesday, an appeals court upheld a lower court’s ruling requiring Trump to rehire fired Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. That prompted the administration to ask the Supreme Courtto allow the firing to proceed.
• The same day, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles was illegal, alleging that the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” (White House spokesperson Anna Kelly characterized the ruling as “a rogue judge…trying to usurp the authority of the commander in chief to protect American cities from violence and destruction.”)
• On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that the administration broke the law when it froze billions of dollars in research funds to Harvard. (White House spokesperson Liz Huston called the decision “egregious.”)
• On Thursday, an appeals court ruled that Trump could not cancel billions of dollars in foreign aid without getting approval from Congress. (The administration already appealed the decision.)
• And on Friday, a federal judge blocked Trump from revoking the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants. (A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the ruling “delays justice,” adding, “unelected activist judges cannot stop the will of the American people for a safe and secure homeland.”)

Read more here.

To get up to speed on the possibility of a government shutdown and what Democrats can do about it, read “Shutdown talk heats up as Democrats insist on stopping health care cuts” by Kevin Frecking and Lisa Mascaro at apnews.com. An excerpt:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A deadline looming, Congress charged Monday toward a federal government shutdown as Republicans brush back Democratic demands to save health care funding from cutbacks, while Democrats are flexing a newfound willingness to play hardball, even if it means closing offices and services.

Republican leaders are ready to call the Democrats’ bluff, possibly as soon as this week, with a test vote before the end-of-the-month deadline to keep government running.

GOP leaders said they could tee up a vote on a short-term spending bill that would keep the federal government fully operational when the new budget year begins Oct. 1. It would likely be a temporary patch, into mid-November.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said the measure would include funds to boost security for lawmakers in the wake of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Additionally, the Trump administration said it’s asking Congress for $58 million in increased funding for the U.S. Marshals Service and security for the Supreme Court. And the Senate is considering its own proposals.

“I want everyone within the sound of my voice to understand: Members of Congress are safe,” Johnson, R-La., said Monday at the Capitol. “They will be kept safe. They have security measures now at their residence and personally. We can always enhance and do more and do better.”

In the past budget battles, it has been Republicans who’ve been willing to engage in shutdown threats as a way to focus attention on their priority demands. That was the situation during the nation’s longest shutdown, during the winter of 2018-19, when President Donald Trump was insisting on federal funds to build the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

This time, however, Democrats, facing intense pressure from their base of supporters to stand up to Trump and refuse to fund the administration’s policies, are taking a tougher position — even if it means halting funds needed to run federal offices.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said he and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries are united in opposing any legislation that doesn’t include key health care provisions.

They have particularly focused on the potential for skyrocketing health care premiumsfor millions of Americans if Congress fails to extend enhanced subsidies, which many people use to buy insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchange. Those subsidies were put in place during the COVID crisis, but are set to expire.

More here.

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

I was at the Abundance 2025 conference last week and overall I think it was a big success. There was a wide range of interesting speakers and panels and a pleasing sense of intellectual ferment. It seems likely that the discourse around abundance will continue to evolve in the future and play an important role in policy discussions. That’s a good thing.

But the politics? Ah, there’s the rub. For abundance to succeed as policy it also has to succeed as politics. And here there are some very big problems that will not go away easily and put limits on how far abundance policy can get.

1. Abundance is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for the Democrats. A key reason abundance has caught on in sectors of the Democratic Party is that they are desperate for something—anything—they can “stand for” besides opposing Trump. They are aware the party is at a low point in voter esteem and widely viewed, especially by working-class voters, as out of touch and ineffective. Abundance is something they can glom on to and say “see—we are turning over a new leaf and will be different in the future.”

A Washington Post article described what Democrats are embracing as “cutting back on the environmental reviews, strict zoning, labor rules and other obstacles that prevent government from efficiently building, fixing and fostering the things people want, from housing to energy.” An Axios article summarized the new approach as “respond[ing to governing failures in blue cities and states] by cutting excess regulations to build more housing, energy projects and more.”

This is fine as far as it goes and is undoubtedly needed. But notice what’s missing. There is no hint here of moving to the center on the wide variety of culturally-inflected issues—crime, immigration, affirmative action, DEI, trans, etc., etc.—that have come to define the image of the contemporary Democratic Party and are tanking the Democrats’ performance among working-class voters. Some Democratic abundance boosters recognize this problem but they are very much a minority voice.

Indeed, it is clear that for most, this is a way of eliding those uncomfortable issues. If we talk about this, we don’t have to talk about that. In this, they are not so different from their great rivals, the “fighting the oligarchy”/populist economics crowd, who also believe their economic approach will dispense with the need to confront and resolve Democrats’ profound cultural distance from normie working-class voters.

That hasn’t worked and won’t work. To believe otherwise is to disregard the clear message of the 2024 election, not to mention the Democrats’ Senate problem and population shifts that will make it ever more necessary to compete in culturally conservative red states. Abundance, in short, is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for today’s Democrats. Not even close.

2. Abundance for whom? So this abundance thing—who is it actually for? There is a distinct whiff of professional class coastal liberal preferences in the animating goals of, especially, Democratic adherents to abundance. They are heavy on infill urban housing, urban infrastructure, and building out renewable energy to stave off climate catastrophe. Indeed, in the seminal text of these advocates, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the book’s introduction waxes rhapsodic on their vision of a 2050 socially liberal ecotopia, where, to paraphrase President Trump (“everything’s computer!”), everything’s electric! Fossil fuels are but a distant memory; it’s all clean energy that is dirt cheap with towering skyscraper farms for food and drones that seamlessly deliver everything your heart desires.

This is catnip for the book’s (apparent) target audience of liberal Democratic-leaning professionals but for the rest of the population—not so much. Liberal abundance advocates are obsessed with the need for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy (chiefly wind and solar with a few nukes thrown in). They center “net zero” by 2050 as an urgent priority despite its profound impracticality. And they simply refuse to take seriously the major, undeniable trade-offs between overall energy abundance and a forced march to decarbonization.

That’s a big problem. Cheap, reliable, plentiful energy must necessarily underpin any abundance worthy of the name. Cheap energy enabled the rise of industrial society and remains essential for today’s standard of living. Without it, these advocates’ vision of overall abundance is nothing more than a pipe dream.

Such abundance cannot be achieved by wind and solar solely or even mostly. It means way more nuclear and, yes, more drilling for America’s massive endowment of fossil fuels, especially natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel.

Liberal abundance advocates struggle to accept this fact, instead choosing to market their agenda as the way that Democrats’ dream of a rapid renewables–based transition can actually be attained. But working-class voters have little interest in this rapid clean energy transition. These voters—exactly the voters the party needs to win back—do not share the zeal of Democrats’ educated voter base for restructuring the economy around “green” industries and the clean energy agenda that underpinned much of Biden administration economic policy. The last election should have made that, well, abundantly clear.

Too few liberal abundance advocates are willing to grapple with the ways in which their preferred agenda is incompatible with the views and priorities of normie voters, as opposed to people like them. Geoff Shullenberger has noted correctly that the abundance envisioned by advocates “already exists, at least in some form, for those who can afford it,” which just happens to include a huge chunk of the Democrats’ educated professional base. Josh Barro has chided Democratic abundance advocatesfor their support of “decarbonization policies that would make energy, and the aspirational suburban lifestyle, more expensive.” And that lifestyle, he points out, is what “abundance” means for most ordinary Americans. They want that nice house in the ‘burbs with all the gadgets and vehicles! Especially vehicles—as Arizona Democratic senator Ruben Gallego has memorably remarked: “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.” The contrast between what most liberal Democrats, including abundance advocates, want such voters to want and what they actually do want is a fundamental problem.

Abundance for whom is an obvious, glaring question that cannot be elided. And right now, way too many abundance advocates have answers that cannot generate the public support they need.

3. Abundance is under-powered as a political project. We live in a populist erawhere a politician like Trump has succeeded by pushing a bold, uncompromising vision to sweep away a broken, elite-dominated system. His crusade is emotional and visceral in a way that liberals loathe but engages tens of millions of working-class voters.

Against this, the technocratic-flavored abundance argument seems weak by comparison. Tweaking the current system to get better outputs assumes more faith in the current system than plausibly exists among most voters. They are more likely to see it as a well-intentioned but likely ineffective reform attempt than a crusade they want to sign up to. An emotional, morally-charged, and nationalistic drive to radically transform our failing system, promote a new era of national development and grand accomplishments and leave the Chinese in the dust is more like a crusade. But at this point such a crusade seems very far from the center of gravity of the abundance discourse.

Frankly, I don’t see how abundance gets very far until and unless advocates recognize its weakness as a political project and embed it in a broader project that can move tens of millions. Only then are their ambitions likely to be realized.

The following article stub for “Are Senate Democrats Growing a Spine?” by Robert Kuttner is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

Last March, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer embarrassed himself and his party by colluding with Senate Republicans to round up votes to block a filibuster over Trump’s budget cuts, and then getting absolutely nothing in return. The impoundments, rescissions, and deeper cuts continued, as did Trump’s general lawlessness.

As the government faces an October 1 shutdown unless Congress can make a deal for a continuing resolution to keep spending at current levels, there had been signs that Schumer was planning to rinse and repeat, fearing that Democrats would be blamed for any shutdown. A variant was the idea that Democrats would go along with Republicans in exchange for one high-profile Republican concession—keeping subsidies for Affordable Care Act policies at current levels.

But now, the signs are that Senate Democrats will hold out for a much stronger deal—or let Republicans take the fall for refusing to bargain and letting the government shut down for a time. Schumer seems to be cornered into doing the right thing.

Why? The context has drastically changed since March. Trump’s policies have become more extreme and more unpopular. The 2026 midterms are six months closer. Schumer has lost a lot of credibility with his caucus.

The emerging Democratic caucus position is that Republicans would have to agree to enforceable terms that would block further impoundments or rescissions; there would need to be drastic changes in health policy generally, and not just on ACA subsidies, which affect less than 10 percent of the population. Democrats will hold out for restoration of Medicaid and other health funds as well, as well as changes in vaccine policy.

If Trump’s multiple health cuts persist, they will affect not only those on Medicaid or with ACA-backed policies. Government health care spending and regulation indirectly subsidizes all private health insurance by covering or constraining some costs so that insurance doesn’t have to. Projections are that all policyholders face major premium increases after October 1. In demanding Republican concessions on a broad front of health policy issues as the price of a budget agreement, Democrats will make a huge deal of this risk.

Either way, Democrats win politically. If Republicans refuse to go along, they take the fall for allowing the government to shut down rather than agreeing to a compromise on issues that most Americans support. And if Republicans do agree to a deal, Democrats will have demonstrated muscle and principle on issues that resonate with most Americans. Even better, Republicans will have been backed into constraining Trump.

More here.

The following article stub for  “Polling Shows ‘American Families Are Trapped in a Cycle of Debt‘” by Jessica Corbett is cross-posted from Common Dreams:

Yet another poll exposes the pain that working-class Americans are enduring thanks to US President Donald Trump’s policies, the economic justice advocates behind the new survey said Tuesday.

Polling released in recent months has highlighted how most Americans don’t believe that merely working hard is enough to get ahead, a majority blames Trump for the country’s economic woes, and large shares are concerned about the price of groceries, housing, and unexpected medical expenses.

The new survey—conducted by Data for Progress less than two weeks ago for Groundwork Collaborative and Protect Borrowers—shows that “American families are trapped in a cycle of debt,” the groups said.

Specifically, the Data for Progress found that 55% of likely voters have at least some credit card debt, and another 18% said that they “had this type of debt in the past, but not anymore.” Additionally, over half have or previously had car loan or medical debt, more than 40% have or had student debt, and over 35% are or used to be behind on utility payments.

More than two-thirds of respondents said that the federal government’s resumption of student loan collections had an impact on their family’s finances, and almost a quarter said they would need a one-time infusion of cash, “such as from inheritance, lottery, government assistance, etc.,” to be able to pay off all of their debt.

More here.

The following article, “Redistricting Isn’t the Democrats’ Problem” by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

The redistricting wars are in full swing. Somewhat implausibly, Democrats claim they will match Republicans’ redistricting moves, as in Texas, with moves of their own that will cancel them out. But Democrats just have fewer places than the GOP to pull off these maneuvers and, even where they are in control of state government, are more likely to face institutional obstacles like nonpartisan commissions specifically designed to prevent gerrymandering. Therefore, the net results of these moves and counter-moves is likely to favor the GOP.

How badly could all this hurt the Democrats in 2026? In all likelihood, not very. As Nate Cohn has pointed out, other factors that make the midterm environment favorable to the Democrats will likely swamp the effects of any pro-GOP redistricting. As he notes, even with a Texas redistricting, the 2026 midterm map will still be less pro-GOP than the 2018 map—and we know what happened then.

So does that mean Democrats shouldn’t worry at all about redistricting shenanigans? No, but it does mean they shouldn’t hit the panic button about it. Their problems lie far deeper than that and go way beyond the marginal House seat in the 2026 election. Indeed the garment-rending about the GOP’s redistricting efforts misses the harm done to Democrats by the continuing concentration of their partisans in ever-less competitive districts, under the press of both redistricting and population sorting.

In the 21^st century, the number of Democratic-held districts that are considered competitive has declined steadily to only about a quarter of seats. The Democrats’ median district now has a double-digit partisan lean of +13D, meaning it is 13 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole. This means that Democratic Congressional representatives are under less and less pressure to deviate from party orthodoxy and take account of sentiment outside of their highly partisan supporters.

The significance of this is reinforced by ideological trends among Democrats. The simple fact is that today’s Democrats are remarkably different from the Democrats of yesteryear: they are far more liberal. Few people know today or would believe that moderates and conservatives used to far outnumber liberals among Democratic identifiers. As recently as 2008, moderates and liberals were evenly balanced among Democrats and conservatives were still over a fifth of the total. But today, those saying they are liberal or very liberal are by far the largest group among Democrats (55 percent to 34 percent for moderates) and conservatives have become an endangered species.

Put all this together and the incentive structure for today’s Democratic politicians comes into focus. They are far more likely to be rewarded by their voters for no-holds-barred liberalism than to be punished for their lack of moderation or willingness to compromise. This has left the Democrats in poor shape to course correct against the loss of moderate-to-conservative working-class voters in the age of Trump. Even if individual Democratic politicians wish to do so, the pressures to stay within the bounds of Democratic orthodoxy are enormous. Sticking with the true faith generates adulation from activists, favorable media coverage, and gushers of donations. Breaking ranks risks unhinged attacks on social media and accusations of helping the Right and undermining “democracy.” Not too many Democratic politicians want to take that risk.

This dynamic has led to what I call “the paradox of Trumpian overreach”: that the more Trump overreaches, the more Democrats, ensconced in their partisan bubbles, are pressured into the most histrionic, radical, ineffective responses to Trump, thereby enabling Trump to overreach some more and crippling the effectiveness of his opposition. In other words, the very scale of his overreach, which should make it easier to defeat him, actually makes it harder.

This is not a healthy dynamic and presents a far greater obstacle to future Democratic fortunes than aggressive GOP redistricting efforts. Consider how little Democrats have changed since having their hat handed to them in the 2024 election. After a brief flirtation with the idea that the Democratic brand must be profoundly transformed in response and move dramatically to the center, Trump’s over-the-top actions and rhetoric have inflamed Democratic partisans against any change in Democratic commitments. Democratic politicians, dependent as they are on these partisans, have duly responded and the momentum is now clearly on the side of those in the party who reject compromise of any kind.

Take immigration. Trump successfully shut down the border but has also been very aggressive in using ICE for deportations within the country, some of them with questionable justification. Democrats have responded with fury and denunciations of the Trump administration for turning America into a police state. In the process, any attempt by Democrats to portray themselves as having a new, tougher (but fair!) policy on immigration has been completely submerged. Aside from being against Trump’s deportations, is the Democrats’ current immigration policy at all different from what they stood for before (and what helped them lose the 2024 election)? Most voters would have no idea.

Or how about trans issues. The Trump administration has taken decisive action to get biological males out of female sports and to shut down pediatric medicalization for gender dysphoria. The abrupt nature of these changes has triggered Democrats into intransigent opposition, despite how lopsided public support tends to be for these changes and how much rigid support for the trans activist agenda cost the Democrats in 2024. Democratic politicians, in thrall to their liberal partisan supporters who want no change whatsoever, have been powerless to change the party’s image in this area. Very few have even tried.

Then there’s racial preferences and DEI. Trump has taken a draconian approach to eliminating DEI programs and rooting out racial preferences of any kind. The very lack of nuance in Trump’s approach has provoked Democrats into frenzied denunciations of white supremacy and a blanket defense of everything that Trump is attacking. Any attempt to dissociate Democrats from racial preferences and rebrand the party as a vehicle for universal uplift has been lost. Woe betide the Democratic politician who hints that there was anything wrong with the previous Democratic approach to these issues.

The same dynamic has affected Democrats’ response to Trump administration cuts to government and to university funding. The very intemperate and throwing-out-the-baby-with-the bathwater nature of the administration cuts has infuriated Democrats to the point where they deny these institutions need any reform at all and characterize Republican actions as strictly arbitrary and unneeded. If Democrats have any ideas for reform of government bureaucracies and universities, voters are completely unaware of them.

Finally, consider the Democrats’ energy and climate policy commitments, which defined their approach to economic policy under the Biden administration. Trump has taken a meat axe to the Democrats’ “green” agenda, gutting the renewable energy and electric vehicle subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act and, through a flurry of executive orders and other actions, firmly committing the U.S. to using its massive endowment of fossil fuels to achieve energy dominance. This is fully in tune with public opinion but outrage in Democratic ranks has prevented Democratic politicians from recalibrating their approach and admitting some of this needed to happen. These politicians have strayed far from the all-of-the-above policies of the Obama years, which were more popular, but imprisoned as they are by their ever-more-fervent, ever-more-concentrated partisans, they can’t find their way back.

This is the fundamental problem then, not GOP redistricting skullduggery undermining Democratic House seats. Because structural trends, including but not limited to ongoing redistricting, have made Democratic politicians ever more insulated from the median voter, the more radical forces in the party now hold the whip hand. They are determined to prevent the Democrats from pursuing an effective reform course that could truly isolate Trump. And, by and large, they are succeeding.

The following article stub for “Can Democrats Offer a New Vision for Labor?” by Justin Vassallo is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

As in recent years, millions of working Americans marked this past Labor Day with a sense of trepidation. While the holiday’s ubiquitous steep sales suggested that distributors and retailers haven’t yet passed on the full impact of Trump’s tariffs (recently jeopardized by a federal appeals court), Americans are afraid new price hikes are around the corner. And the pervasive discontent of the last fifteen years has hardly ebbed. A new Wall Street Journal poll finds that since the pandemic the percentage of Americans who believe they have a “good chance” to lead better, more prosperous lives has plummeted to a quarter. At the turn of the century, over seventy-five percent expected to get ahead. Millions either feel poorer or believe their minor pay bumps and savings have been vacuumed up by larger bills for routine goods and services.

Worse, the ability to counter any of these trends through politics or the workplace feels negligible. Modest gains, mostly reflecting phased-in minimum wage hikesinitiated last decade in several cities and states, have been outpaced by extraordinary housing costs, sharp price increases for basic groceries and modest family excursions, and higher credit card interest rates and monthly minimum payments. Yet the ongoing debate between Abundance converts, anti-monopolists, “care economy” progressives, and the tariff-friendly parts of the labor-left is more of an academic exercise than something that would yield a blueprint for action.

Currently, few elected Democrats are making an effort to clarify their top economic priorities following the sluggish response to “Bidenomics.” Struggling workers and cost-weary households don’t know who to turn to. Collective bargaining power remains stratified and has come under renewed assault by the Trump administration. Although the pandemic and its aftermath sparked an uptick in strike activity and organizing drives from Starbucks to Amazon to Uber, union households are typically older, concentrated in core legacy industries and the public sector, and comprise a dwindling fraction of the total workforce.

As the boomer retirement accelerates, the labor market is also undergoing a massive structural and demographic shift that Washington is plainly ill-prepared for. The share of Americans working as freelancers in some capacity has surged to over 64 million people, or nearly 40 percent of the working population, and is expected to grow as AI disrupts professional salaried work and spreads the demand for “labor flexibility” to fields in which expertise was once tied to greater employment security. Some of this growth reflects a genuine willingness on the part of workers to forge their own path and maximize the creativity and network power latent in the knowledge economy. Yet market fundamentalists would be mistaken to crow that this testifies to the march of individual liberty and the rejection of active government or collective agency. Unions enjoy their highest approval in decades, while consumers and small businesses are arguably attuned to the perils of monopoly power and anticompetitive practices at a level not seen since the Second World War.

Middle- and working-class Americans are clearly fed up with scraping by. Even so, many seem resigned to long-term labor market trends, believing American capitalism, more than ever, is a sink-or-swim system bereft of public goods and widespread upward mobility. Such pessimism about the dignity of work and the merits of trying to make an “honest living” is bound to affect how Americans approach core life decisions—and whether they take them up at all. That is a sociopolitical time bomb that, unaddressed, will make Trumpism’s extended pull seem like a minor affair.

Read more here.

The following article stub for “Democrats Keep Misreading the Working Class: Many in the party see workers as drifting rightward. But new data show they’re more progressive than ever on economic issues—if Democrats are willing to meet them there” by Bhaskar Sunkara, is cross-posted from The Nation:

“Zohran Mamdani won New York’s Democratic mayoral nomination with the most votes ever for a primary winner in the city. The democratic socialist did so with an agenda that spoke to the kitchen-table economic issues that, following the debacle of the 2024 election, Democrats generally acknowledge they have to get better at discussing. So what was the reaction of party leaders and the media echo chamber? A meltdown so severe that it has sparked widespread talk of a “civil war” within the party. On one side, the line goes, are younger, highly educated, pro-­Palestinian progressives who embrace economic populism; on the other, older Democratic stalwarts who are pro-Israel, economically moderate, in tune with the working class, and cautious about rocking the boat. But that’s not what the numbers say.

Advisers to House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries—who, like his counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, resisted endorsing Mamdani after the primary—referred to the city’s rising wave of democratic-­socialist-backed candidates as “Team Gentrification.” Yet exit polls reveal a different reality: Mamdani attracted support from a broad swath of New Yorkers by running a campaign relentlessly focused on working-­class cost-of-living concerns.

Unfortunately, top Democrats refuse to accept the notion that Mamdani’s economic populism is the key to his success. Or that the appeal of a boisterous tax-the-rich message might extend beyond urban progressive enclaves. Some go as far as Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, who says that Democrats need to stop demonizing rich people. But a recent report by the Center for Working-Class Politics(CWCP) upends Slotkin’s assertion. Analyzing data from three long-running national surveys, the report shows that working-class Americans have grown more progressive over the past two decades—not just on economic justice but also on immigration and civil rights. Today’s working class stands farther to the left than when it helped elect Barack Obama in 2008.

Why, then, do so many high-ranking Democrats imagine that workers are reactionary? Because the middle and upper classes are moving leftward at a faster pace, creating a perception gap. As higher-­income, college-educated voters embrace progressive positions on climate change, LGBTQ rights, and other issues, working-class voters—despite their own leftward shift—appear comparatively conservative. This distorted narrative misleads Democratic strategists and journalists alike.

Read more here.

The following article stub for “The Path to Defeating MAGA Runs Through the Working Class: Democrats must return to their roots as the party of the working class” by Dan Pfeiffer, is cross posted from The Message Box:

This upcoming weekend, elected Democrats will fan out across the nation to attend Labor Day picnics and parades, waxing nostalgic about the party’s long history of fighting for labor unions.

For as long as I’ve worked in politics, Labor Day has been a critical holiday for Democrats. It’s not just the kickoff of campaign season in election years — it has been an opportunity to draw a sharp contrast with Republicans. We were the party of the working class and union members; Republicans were the party of the rich and powerful corporations.

But this Labor Day, Democrats need to look in the mirror. Whatever story we want to tell ourselves, we are no longer the party of the working class. We are losing working-class voters — the core of our coalition since the New Deal — to a corrupt billionaire with a gold toilet, infamous for scamming workers and cutting taxes for the rich.

Fighting Trump and defeating MAGA extremism begins with Democrats thinking hard about how to rebuild the multi-racial working-class coalition.

A Dramatic and Disturbing Shift

For most of the last 75 years, Democrats were the party of the working class. That’s how we were known, and that’s who our policies were designed for. The path to the White House ran through cities and the industrial Rust Belt, and union members were central to our coalition.

So much has changed in a very short period of time.

In 2012, Barack Obama won voters making under $50,000 a year by 22 points. In 2024, Kamala Harris lost those voters by two points. In 2012, Mitt Romney won voters making over $100,000 by 10 points. Last year, Harris won them by 4.

Read more here.