Category: Coalitions and Strategy

Strategic thinking, with emphasis on reshaping the coalition that makes up the Democratic Party

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Go Ahead, Clown, Make Our Day

John Marshall of Talking Points Memo makes a persuasive case for letting Trump bully the Republican senators into deep-sixing the filibuster. Marshall writes,

As you’ve probably already heard, Donald Trump went on Truth Social …  and announced that the time had come for his senators to pass a clean “continuing resolution” to reopen the government with a simply majority vote by abolishing the filibuster. The only proper response to this is “bring it on.” It’s never good to cower, of course. “Give it your best shot” is always the proper posture. But if Trump is able to accomplish this (I’m skeptical — more on that in a moment), that’s great news.

This is such an important point that is worth itemizing the reasons why this is so. 

First, the senate filibuster is a core reason for the decline of trust in government over the last quarter century. The evolution of its use helped severe the tethers connecting election results and governmental action. A party wins an election and its promised actions never happen. The filibuster is both the cause of and excuse for gridlock.

Second, the filibuster provides an overwhelming structural advantage for Republicans, a big reason to be skeptical it will happen. (More on that in a moment.) Republicans want tax cuts and judicial nominations, neither of which the filibuster affects. To the extent Republicans want non-budget/tax legislation, it’s generally stuff like a national abortion ban that Republican leaders are happy for an excuse not to touch. They’re no more likely to pass something like that post-filibuster. The Democrats’ agenda is always legislation focused — actual laws that institute reforms, create services, safety nets, anything. It’s in the nature of being the party of government. The senate filibuster is a permanent bar for any Democratic legislation Republicans oppose, regardless of which party is in the majority. Remember that Obamacare only passed in 2009-10 because two successive wave elections had briefly — for about six months — given Democrats the now unimaginable margin of 60 senate votes. Anyone who tells you the filibuster affects both parties equally is either lying or has been sleeping for the last 30 years.

Third, because the filibuster is a permanent bar on any Democratic legislation, any reforms to protect the republic against Trumpism are all ruled out in advance. As long as the filibuster exists, it means any future Democratic presidency or trifecta is simply a replay of the Biden presidency, a short breather before the further advance of Trumpist autocracy.

None of the above is new. It applied in 2021-22 when Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refused any effort to limit or abolish the filibuster. These are the longterm, structural reasons why opposing the filibuster should be a litmus test for every Democratic senator. But there are also short-term and immediate reasons why, from the Democrats’ point of view, the timing is great.

Democrats refused to give their funding support for Trump’s autocracy and draconian cuts to health care. They’ve hung about as tough and as long as anyone imagined. That has inspired new confidence in their voters and prospective voters. It has also dramatically raised public awareness about the crippling cuts to health care Republicans chose to fund their mammoth tax cuts. It’s provided a monthlong spectacle of Republicans digging in, insisting on keeping the government shut down rather than just allowing people to keep their coverage. From a messaging and political standpoint it’s been a disaster for the GOP. In a revealing update this morning, the DC insider sheet Punchbowl pondered how it can be that voters don’t realize that the whole thing is Democrats’ fault and Democrats should take the blame. Their bafflement is a good reminder how much DC remains wired for the GOP. 

At this point it seems clear that Trump not only doesn’t want to compromise but doesn’t even want to engage. It’s less a hardball negotiating stance than a lack of focus. He’s consumed by his ballroom and domestic military deployments and foreign trips and barely seems aware the government is shut down at all. We’re also now days away from the new Obamacare price hikes being locked in. I’m certainly not saying Democrats should throw in the towel. My point is that they have already gotten most of the political gains they can get from this.

Indeed, if you’re inclined to be cynical you could say that in narrowly electoral terms it’s almost the best of both worlds for them. There was a debate leading up to the shutdown about whether it made sense for Democrats to demand that Republicans repeal or soften their health care cuts. Those cuts will be causing pain across the country throughout 2026. Voters will be looking for someone to blame. Why should Democrats use their political capital to save Republicans from the electoral consequences of their own awful actions, the argument went. And in narrowly political terms it was a pretty good argument. If this ends now with Trump forcing the abolition of the filibuster, Dems won’t have had to choose. They’ll have fought, never given in and also be in a position to reap the political backlash against Trump’s taking health care coverage from millions and hiking the rates for millions more.

Democrats don’t need to pine or anguish over what the moral choice is here: political benefit vs getting people back their health care. The choice is abstract and purely notional. Trump and Senate Republicans are either going to do this or not. Democrats have no input on the decision. I’m only noting that in political terms, it leaves them having their cake and eating it too.

Which brings us back to my skepticism that this will even happen. Senate Republicans know better than anyone that the filibuster is their secret weapon. Trump doesn’t give a crap about any of this stuff. But these senators care a lot and they have a longer time horizon than the next three years. We say that Trump gets everything he wants from the GOP. But that’s not entirely true. When there is concerted GOP opposition to something, he doesn’t get his way, at least not in more than a superficial way. That’s especially so here because the entire thing just isn’t something Trump cares much about. Tariffs, soldiers in cities — those things excite him. This is just his tenth idea for how to force the Democrats’ hand, along with DOGE 2.0, which mostly didn’t happen, threats to cut SNAP funding, hammering Dems over hating the military and a bunch of other things they’ve tried and failed over the last month. If anything this latest gambit should be a reminder to the gullible — which includes most of official DC — that those constant claims that this was actually all going great for the White House maybe weren’t true after all.

The key points remain the same. Trump will likely have a much harder time getting Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster than most people imagine. But if he does, it’s a good thing. No good future for the American republic is possible with the filibuster in place. And the short-term politics are pretty good too. So go ahead, clown, make every thinking Democrats’ day.

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Ed Luce: Trump’s “Genius is to Keep Pushing the Democrats Into a Reactive Defence of the Status Quo”

Ed Luce of the Financial Times writes,

America has a conservative establishment. Its formal name is the Democratic party. Whether it be the federal government, universities, welfare or the regulatory state, Democrats fight to preserve the world as it is or was. “America is already great,” liberals cry, which is another way of saying that things were fine until Donald Trump came along. Their lodestar was Joe Biden, who personified nostalgia. Much of the party is now nostalgic for Biden. You have to be imprisoned in old ways of thinking to believe this is how US liberalism will rebound.

An invigorated US opposition would now be making hay. Trump’s team maintains a “promises kept” tally sheet. To be sure, he has in effect closed the border, demolished DEI quota culture, assaulted the deep state and launched trade wars against the rest of the world. But a big chunk of those who voted for Maga saw these moves as the means of lifting their economic prospects. The opposite is happening, which is why Trump’s numbers are in steady decline. Yet the fall in Democrats’ approval rating is even steeper. In relative terms, Trump’s political dominance has thus grown. Do not bet on a weakening economy changing that picture.

Trump’s genius is to keep pushing Democrats into reactive conservatism. That, plus the average age of the party’s leadership, makes Democrats look like permanently outraged grandparents. Trump’s assaults on pretty much every constitutional norm are indeed terrifying and outrageous. But they are remarkably inoculated against political backlash. To all intents and purposes, opposition to Trump has been reduced to a default outrage machine.

What is the solution? Democrats are a party of America’s professional elites plus various interest groups. And given that Trump won a majority of blue-collar voters, they are no longer the natural home of the working class. Any Democratic recovery would thus start by grappling with the latter’s worldview. The practical difficulty is that the party is shaped by elite professions, particularly law, government, media and academia. Such types often have a hard time concealing their distaste for those who voted for Trump. This is a poor starting point.  

Democrats also face a deeper philosophical problem. Nobody knows how to reinvent 20th-century liberalism. In the US that was Franklin D Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal, with updates over the next couple of generations. FDR built that world with “bold persistent experimentation”. His would-be heirs are stuck in a timid, persistent conservatism. They do not “welcome the hatred” of financial and business monopolists as Roosevelt did. They are the party of corporate America. No party in history could ever boast of so many expert fundraisers and humane philanthropists.

Lack of fresh ideas and cloistered demography are definitions of conservatism. If Trump did not exist, would Democrats want to reform the US administrative state? They should want to reinvent it but are now its militant defenders. A system that is so riddled with veto points that it takes years to execute simple projects and requires a PhD to navigate the tax system does not deserve to be defended. The same goes for a housing market that has priced younger voters out of the American dream and elite universities that are biased towards the children of alumni and donors. If Trump is attacking something, it must be defended to the hilt.

That Trump’s actions are destructive is no excuse. As political scientist Ruy Teixeira recently warned, Democrats are placing their chips on the “fool’s gold of midterm success”. Rather than seeking ways of reinventing a system in which America has lost faith, Democrats are betting on Trump’s defeat in next year’s congressional elections. The odds are that Republicans will lose the House of Representatives in 2026 and retain control of the Senate. Such midterm success would be a pyrrhic victory for Democrats. Biden based his 2024 re-election bid on his party’s relative success in the 2022 midterms. Look where that led.

A second piece of fool’s gold is to wait for Trumpism to die out with Trump. Even assuming that he does not launch a coup in 2028, Democrats would be unwise to think their problem will end with Trump. Familiarity with other democracies — Britain’s clueless Labour party, Germany’s moribund Social Democrats, France’s withered Socialists — shows that there is nothing unique to American populism.

The challenge for Democrats is to do what they should be doing were Trump not to exist. His superpower is to stop them from reaching that epiphany. 

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Redistricting: Team Red Can’t Find Its Ass with Both Hands

I’ll leave the fine details to the experts, but here is the gist. If Team Red—or, of course, Team Blue—finds itself with a lot of extremely safe congressional districts, the partisan redistricting may be accomplished by spreading out those partisan voters, so that the team has somewhat fewer safe seats and a larger number of seats that it’s going to win by, say, only five percent or so. 

That works just fine if you can accurately predict which way the political win will be blowing, come next election. But what happens if the political wind starts blowing against you? 

If, let’s say, the wind unexpectedly blows against you—let’s say by seven percent in favor of Team Blue—then your bunch of five percent wins turn into a bunch of two percent losses. And you have well and truly shot yourself in the foot. 

You will recognize this situation as a corollary of the general rule that the straight edge ruler is not your best tool for short term and long term planning.

Down in Texas, Team Red—having partaken generously of Trump’s Kool-Aid—thinks that Orange Man’s popularity in the Lone Star State will continue from strength. In particular, they think the Latino community is overjoyed by the ICE arrests, and will reward Mango Mussolini in 2026 by increasing their support in congressional districts bordering on the Rio Grande. 

Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, His Most High Excellency has declared today that he will order his “Justice Department” to sue California for retaliatory redistricting on the part of Team Blue.

The Very Stable Genius did not, however, articulate a coherent legal principle that would condemn Team Blue in California while, at the same time, blessing Team Red’s efforts in Texas.

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Rahm Emmanuel Analyzes the Manosphere—and Lays Out His Campaign Platform for a Presidential Run

Rahm Emmanuel (Washington Post), What’s really depressing America’s young men: The U.S. has two overlapping problems: the housing crisis and despondency in young men. Emmanuel writes,

The United States today is engaged in two conversations that appear, at first blush, to be entirely unconnected.

The first focuses on men and boys. As Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has highlighted, younger-generation American males are increasingly despondent. The stereotype is of young men perpetually playing video games in their parents’ basements, too depressed and shut in to ask women out. But such exaggeration shouldn’t eclipse the broader and more subtle reality. You don’t have to be an incel to believe that the “system” is fundamentally broken and rigged against your success.

Separately, city and state leaders everywhere are focused on the housing crisis — specifically homeownership. Rents are too high, and even the most ordinary houses are astronomically expensive. Zoning is exclusive, interest rates are too high, and the legacy of redlining lives on. Worse, new home construction has dropped to a five-year low. We’re not building enough homes to keep up with demand, and even if we were, those just starting off wouldn’t be able to comfortably afford them.

These patterns are two sides of the same coin. Just 30 years ago, the median age of first-time home buyers was 28. Today, it’s 38. In 2000, the typical price of a single-family home was three times a family’s annual income; today, it’s six times. The effects are clear: In Germany and Spain, where real estate prices have climbed more modestly over the past 30 years, the percentage of young adults who report regularly experiencing worry, sadness and anger has largely remained steady. In the United States, however, where home prices have risen 85 percent, one-third of young adults now report a sense of despondency.

This is, of course, a problem for all Americans — men and women alike. But, unpopular as it might be to say in some quarters of my party, the crisis affects one gender with particular potency. Like it or not, American men are still raised to believe that their role is to act as providers and protectors. And when men whose self-worth is tied up in that aspiration realize they’ll never be able to buy a home, they’re bound to feel shame and anger.

The American Dream can’t live up to its name when only a tenth of the population has a shot at it. The dream has become unaffordable and inaccessible in a way that Democrats should declare unacceptable. Democrats talk all the time about democracy being on the ballot. But the solution won’t be found only in registering more voters or making mail-in balloting universal. The problem is that real generation-over-generation prosperity is harder to achieve today. This shouldn’t be some mystery: American democracy became unstable at almost exactly the same time the American Dream became unaffordable. And because that’s not a coincidence, we need to tackle the homeownership challenge head-on.

This isn’t a marketing problem. It’s not just a matter of Democrats finding our own Joe Rogan, or making better use of TikTok, or using more “authentic” language. Of the necessities for which prices keep rising — gasoline, groceries, health care — housing is first among equals. And if Democrats want to save our democracy while simultaneously fighting against economic inequality, we need to address the primary source of half the country’s humiliation and anger.

This challenge didn’t emerge overnight. To understand its roots, look no further than the 2008 financial crisis. As the mortgage bubble burst, millions of families lost their homes explicitly because Wall Street had rigged the system. And yet the bankers who participated in the rigging demanded their annual bonuses — and in most cases received them.

As White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, I advocated Old Testament justice. I wanted to hold the bankers who sold liar loans accountable. But my arguments on a Saturday afternoon in the Roosevelt Room were overruled, perhaps wisely, so that Democrats could first pursue health care reform. Though we later instituted the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, no one ever went to prison — adding insult to injury. You can draw a straight line from that outrage to the tea party and, eventually, to the candidacy of Donald Trump, who promised to be an instrument of “your justice [and] retribution.”

If there’s any silver lining to the housing crisis, it’s that, unlike so many of our national challenges, it’s solvable. Unlike the rise of China, or the specter of AI, or the scourge of global climate change, we don’t need a new batch of policy tools or institutions to help working-class families purchase their first homes. We’ve done this before.

A century ago, mortgages were unaffordable to the broad mass of potential buyers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal responded by engineering a system that made 30-year fixed-rate loans that amortized the principal accessible to most home buyers — an effort that then evolved to encompass Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Not long thereafter, the government enacted the GI Bill for World War II veterans. Details of the housing market are different today, but the fundamentals are the same. So let’s apply the lessons.

First, much as we treat veterans as a population apart when it comes to home-buying, we should treat first-time home buyers as their own class. To make it easier for them to reach that first crucial rung on the ladder to economic prosperity, we should reinstitute the Obama administration’s $8,000 homebuyer’s tax credit, triple it to reflect present market conditions and index the benefit to inflation. Second, we should explore ways to make it possible for first-time home buyers to take out mortgages at favorable interest rates.

Third, in learning from the recent successes Texas and California have had with state-level reforms making land cheaper and zoning more streamlined, we should champion federal policies that incentive housing production. Texas now allows housing on land zoned for commercial use statewide; California just enacted a bill making infill housing much easier to construct. As Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) have proposed, the federal government should be rewarding states and localities that embrace supply-side solutions.

Tackling homeownership head-on is poised to be the ultimate example of how good policy turns out to be good politics. As data expert David Shor found in his analysis of the 2024 presidential race, the best moment of Kamala Harris’s campaign coincided with the decision to air television spots focused on housing costs. Today, the stock market is near an all-time high, CEOs are paid nearly 300 times the wage of average workers, and the uber-rich are building personalized spaceships. Yet young couples can’t afford a down payment for their first home.

The vast majority of Americans once believed they could enter the middle class by working hard and playing by the rules. Now, a burgeoning percentage of young people feel as though they’re running in place and getting nowhere fast. The hope of owning a little slice of the future is woven deeply into our national psyche. And the Democratic Party’s success hinges on our ability to enable men in particular to realize that hope and ensure their own success.

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From David Ignatius’ Lips to God’s Ears

David Ignatius (Washington Post), Democrats ignored border politics. Now the consequences are here: To fight Trump’s excesses on immigration, Democrats need to show they are credible on the issue:

Democrats have gotten the border issue so wrong, for so long, that it amounts to political malpractice. The latest chapter — in which violent protesters could be helping President Donald Trump create a military confrontation he’s almost begging for as a distraction from his other problems — may prove the most dangerous yet.

When I see activists carrying Mexican flags as they challenge ICE raids in Los Angeles this week, I think of two possibilities: These “protesters” are deliberately working to create visuals that will help Trump, or they are well-meaning but unwise dissenters who are inadvertently accomplishing the same goal.

Democrats’ mistake, over more than a decade, has been to behave as though border enforcement doesn’t matter. Pressured by immigrant rights activists, party leaders too often acted as if maintaining a well-controlled border was somehow morally wrong. Again and again, the short-term political interests of Democratic leaders in responding to a strong faction within the party won out over having a policy that could appeal to the country as a whole.

When red-state voters and elected officials complained that their states were being overwhelmed by uncontrolled immigration over the past decade, Democrats found those protests easy to ignore. They were happening somewhere else. But when red states’ governors pushed migrants toward blue-state cities over the past several years, protests from mayors and governors finally began to register. But still not enough to create coherent Democratic policies, alas.

It’s open season on former president Joe Biden these days, and he doesn’t deserve all the retrospective criticism he’s getting. But on immigration, he was anything but a profile in courage. Security advisers including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkaswanted tougher border policies starting in 2021. But political advisers such as Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who sought amity with immigration rights progressives in Congress and the party’s base, resisted strong measures. Though Biden was elected as a centrist, he leaned left — and waited until the last months of his presidency to take the strong enforcement measures recommended earlier.

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump played shamelessly on public anxieties about the border. Some of his arguments, such as claims that hungry migrants were eating pets, were grotesque. They were simply provocations. But Biden and Kamala Harris didn’t have good answers, other than indignation. They had straddled the issue through Biden’s term, talking about border security but failing to enact it, and the public knew it.

Democrats finally came up with a bipartisan border bill in 2024 that would have given the president more authority to expel migrants and deny asylum claims, and more money to secure the border. Republicans, led by Trump, were shameless opportunists in opposing the bill. They didn’t want Biden to have a win. In the end, Democrats didn’t have the votes — or, frankly, the credibility on the issue. Biden took executive action in June 2024, limiting entry into the United States. But it was too late. He could have taken that action in 2021.

Since Trump took office in January, he has been building toward this week’s confrontation in the streets. ICE raids have steadily increased in cities with large migrant populations, as have nationwide quotas for arrests and deportations. Trump declared a national emergency on Inauguration Day that gave him authority to send troops to the border to “assist” in controlling immigration. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem seized every photo opportunity to convey a militarized approach to the coming clash. Over these months, the immigration issue has been a car crash skidding toward us in slow motion.

Since his first term, Trump has clearly wanted a military confrontation with the left over immigration or racial issues. Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, helped talk Trump out of invoking the Insurrection Act in 2020 to contain the unrest that followed the death of George Floyd. But this time, Trump faces no opposition. He is surrounded by yes-men and -women.

The saddest part is that Democrats still have no clear policy. Some blue-state mayors and governors have pledged to provide “sanctuary” for migrants, but they don’t have good arguments to rebut Trump’s claim that they’re interfering with the enforcement of federal law. In some cases, sanctuary has meant refusing to hand over undocumented migrants convicted of violent crimes, former DHS officials tell me. That’s wrong. The courts have limited Trump’s most arbitrary policies and his defiance of due process, but not his authority to enforce immigration laws.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) this week chose sensible ground to fight,  filing a lawsuitchallenging Trump’s authority to override gubernatorial power by federalizing National Guard troops when there isn’t a “rebellion” or “invasion.” There is no evidence of such extreme danger — or that local law enforcement in Los Angeles can’t handle the problems.

But Newsom’s smart pushback doesn’t get Democrats out of addressing an issue they’ve been ducking for more than a decade: Do they have the courage to enforce the border themselves?

Over the long run, taking border issues seriously means more immigration courts and more border-control people and facilities — and a fair, legal way of deciding who stays and who goes. But right now, it means Democratic mayors and governors using state and local police to contain protests, so that troops aren’t necessary — and preventing extremists among the activists from fomenting the cataclysm in the streets that some of them seem to want as much as Trump.

Yes, of course, we need new bipartisan legislation to resolve the gut issue of how to protect the “dreamers” and other longtime residents who show every day that they want only to be good citizens. But on the way to that day of sweet reason, Democrats need to oppose violence, by anyone — and to help enforce immigration policies that begin with a recognition that it isn’t immoral to have a border.