Politics and Crisis
Mid-terms are local and highlight Democratic divisions, but the 2028 election will take place against the backdrop of crisis in several areas, forcing a new politics on a party in need of rebranding.
Since I wrote the first part of an essay about Democratic Party politics, focused on DSA victories in New York, I have been working on the meatier question of what some of the major forces are behind schisms in the party, focusing especially on demographics and generational change, and the ways in which these have created a new context in which past assumptions may no longer apply.
I’m still working on that—there’s a lot of technical detail and data that I’m still checking, and Platner’s crash and burn and what happens next in Maine require some rewriting, since the backstory on how he was selected adds the element of a certain amateurism on the left that was concealed in other victories.
But all the time I have been working through some of these details and making sure my analysis holds true, I have been brooding about the larger question, which is that the party and whomever winds up as its nominee will face a set of crises, or at least critical issues, that nothing in the politics of the mid-terms comes close to registering.
Adam Tooze uses the word “polycrisis” to describe the situation—multiple crises emerging simultaneously, interconnected in ways that may not be visible until they break into the open in full-blown crisis. None of these are new with Trump, though his mishandling of the presidency has greatly weakened the U.S. in some areas, and left others almost disregarded.
I’ll take these in no particular order, starting with global conflicts and then focusing on AI and the economy, before ending with a few notes about climate. All of these, taken together, give me to believe that we’re at one of those American moments, like 1860 or 1932, when the old order has broken, and the quality of national leadership will be tested in ways that it hasn’t been since the most dangerous periods of the Cold War, at best, and perhaps much more severely than that.
Iran War
If the current conflict reaches some form of relatively enduring stability in the next year or two, it will almost certainly be to Iran’s advantage. There’s no happy ending to our misadventure, and while the final realignment of power is unclear, the question of what future role the U.S, will play in the Middle East is certainly on the table.
The question of what the U.S.-Israeli relationship should be, while good for polemics and slogans, carries profound strategic weight, but the more important question may be how tolerant various Gulf states will be of the continuing American presence on their soil.
Trump demonstrated the weakness of American power by using it, and the price tag for rebuilding those bases runs in the billions. Kuwait and Bahrain may have a different calculus than Saudi Arabia, and U.A.E. and KSA are fighting on opposite sides in Sudan, so there’s that, too. The common enemy does not necessarily imply an alliance, as various nations choose their patrons.
It’s easy enough to say the war should end, but now that Trump has broken our strategic power, what comes next? Between them, Iran, Russia and China control a substantial amount of the world’s energy and production capacity, and nations everywhere are opening relationships with China as a hedge, while Pakistan now has a barracks in KSA.
Having a good, testable theory of what the U.S. stance toward Iran and in the Middle East more generally seems like something the party will need to settle on at some point, and it’s not as simple as cutting aid to Israel. The U.S. has been the dominant force in the Middle East since the fall of the Soviet Union, and now that our limitations are clear, the question of how we adjust will have ramifications that extend far beyond the Gulf.
Are we at something like Britain’s post-Suez moment, and it’s time to start bringing our soldiers home? How would that work? If not, what is the theory for keeping them there?
Russia’s War in Europe
Russia’s war on Ukraine has stalled and Ukraine has taken the war to the homeland, striking oil refineries as far away as Siberia and leaving toxic clouds of smoke drifting over Moscow. The Economist this week has a long feature on one of the most powerful Russian industrial oligarchs, along with an interview in which he lays out a variety of bad outcomes for Russia if current trends continue.
Russia is just as dangerous losing a war as it would be if it were winning, and maybe even more so. It can’t easily stop fighting, and not just because Putin can’t afford the loss. Demobilizing hundreds of thousands of troops and sending them back where they came from is a recipe for social unrest, and war production has driven the increasingly precarious economy. There’s no easy transition to a peacetime economy.
With stalemate in Ukraine, some Western analysts are warning that Putin might turn his focus to Northern Europe, where it has a history of invading—think Finland, Poland, and the Baltic States. Russia has already been fighting a covert wat of sabotage and assassination, and with Trump’s disdain for Europe and NATO, may feel inclined to test the alliance’s resolve.
Trump’s threats to decouple from NATO along with the obvious threat Russia poses have driven a steep increase in European defense production, and it would be natural for any Democratic candidate to reassert the primacy of NATO and our strategic commitment to Europe. At the same time, our forward projection in Europe represents a substantial part of the military budget, and any argument for significant increase in social spending depends on budget cuts elsewhere, with defense the biggest slice of the pie after debt service.
The reasons to act as a deterrent to Russia in Europe seem obvious to me, and it is a terrible thing that Israel has enough antimissile systems to protect itself but Kyiv does not. The Iran war exposed how thin the U.S. armory is when it comes to the most important weapon systems and also demonstrated how ill-prepared we are for the kind of drone warfare in which Russia is now expert, along with Ukraine and Iran.
Trump’s victory in 2024 demonstrated how tired Americans were of foreign entanglements, and recent elections have demonstrated in general what a peripheral issue national security is—that Hilary’s old 3AM phone call ad wouldn’t work today, and it didn’t then.
That has been an American luxury for half of my lifetime—not to have to worry about what the rest of the world was doing. Anti-imperialist as any of us may have been, we all benefited from a world in which the U.S. maintains at least 128 military bases in various nations around the world, with as many as 700 “base sites” representing smaller deployments.
We kept the peace, and our cut was the protection money we earned by having most of the world’s commerce denominated in dollars and U.S. treasury bills serving as a safe haven for foreign capital, along with the natural advantages of free markets, abundanet resources, a premier educational system, and a diverse population drawing from around the world.
That time is ending now, though U.S. financial hegemony is weakened, not ended, and we still have by far the most expensive and extensive military in the world. We can certainly maintain superpower status by investing in it.
The likelihood that Putin will escalate rather than retreat poses the question of how committed the U.S. will be to Europe’s defense against any overt revanchist attacks from the Russian bear, a question that may be engaged while Trump is still president and that will likely continue to be on the table in 2028. Here again, the pressure to maintain our traditional military posture will be in direct conflict with the goal of addressing social and economic needs.
China’s Ascendence
What should U.S. policy be on Taiwan, and toward China’s ongoing attempt to assert its power in the Pacific? Trump’s stupidity started a trade war that ended with the U.S. weaker, when Xi explained the problem of “rare earths” to him and forced him to back off. The summit with Xi was an embarrassment, further demonstrating China’s leverage and ending with new uncertainty about America’s commitment to Taiwan’s independence.
U.S. military strategy for the past decade has focused on deterring China in the Pacific and being positioned to manage conflict elsewhere while engaged in full-scale military conflict with China. Even Trump’s current military doctrine, the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), puts China at the center of military strategy while proposing less attention to Europe and the Middle East.
The Iran war created significant strains in U.S. stockpiles of munitions and caused a substantial redeployment of military assets from the Pacific, and it also expended what little American energy is left for open conflict. The posture of “strategic ambiguity” bolstered by years of deployment and war-fighting exercises has not changed, but China has increasingly flexed its power around Taiwan and in the Indo-Pacific in general.
Without going into the complexities of the military situation or ongoing trade conflicts, almost everything Trump has done has weakened the U.S. in Asia and caused nations allied with us to hedge their bets with the rival great power.
Defining a strategy and policy for dealing with competition and conflict with China is another challenge the Democrats face for 2028, and even more for leadership after they take the White House. Xi has reportedly marked 2027 as the year that his armed forces would be ready to invade Taiwan, and there are actions short of that, such as a blockade, that could force the issue.
War In General
The last couple of years have seen a spike in armed conflict around the world, far great than when Trump first took office in 2016, and rivaling by some measures a level of warfare not seen since World War II.
Wars in the Middle East and Europe carry the most strategic import, while wars in central Africa and in Sudan have the most civilian casualties, along with Gaza. But state-based conflicts in general have risen high above the previous post-Cold War norm, with 49 states experiencing armed conflict in 2024, including five major conflicts (more than 10,000 deaths) and 19 high-intensity conflicts, with more than 1000 deaths.
Pax Americana is clearly over, and drone warfare, robotics, and AI in general have changed the battlefield in ways as fundamental as previous technological advances did in earlier wars. While U.S. ability to project power is unrivaled, Iran has demonstrated our vulnerabilities, and Trump’s defense budget proposal carries a wartime sticker price and faces an uphill battle in Congress.
The longer the U.S. remains bogged down in the Middle East, the greater the advantage to our two global rivals, and particularly China, which faces its own internal pressures but so far seems content to wait as the U.S. flails about. The situation any candidate faces in 2028 calls out for national leadership—including the need to re-educate the public about global realities.
It’s a hard question to answer: what should the U.S. role in the world be, and what kind of military force is required to maintain it? We’re in an arms race right now, one that bleeds into trade and commerce, since it is also an AI race, all layered on the background of China’s rapid technological advances.
It is easy enough to talk in soundbites about these matters, and Trump cornered the market there in 2024. Saying that the Iran war was wrong and talking about defense department bloat is different from having a vision for America’s role in the world and what that means in terms of national security and defense.
It’s not clear that any of the current likely crop of 2028 Democratic candidates has much to say about these issues, and maybe that won’t matter in 2028, given how small a role foreign policy has played in recent elections, and the almost certain focus on the economy.
But the old international order is broken now, and the question of how the U.S. will manage and mend its weakened position in the world will be an essential factor in whether the next presidency succeeds or fails. In any case, the Democratic Party and its brand need to account for current global reality, and a Democratic president is unlikely to be re-elected if they don’t have a good plan.
AI Futures: Trouble Ahead
AI is a driver of international tensions as well as the most important domestic challenge that we face. It doesn’t help that the challenge itself has yet to be clearly defined, although several of its main directions are clear. It is very hard to create a scenario in which the ongoing development and deployment of AI does not cause some form of crisis.
The main thing is the scope. The level of capital investment in AI is unprecedented, as are the stock valuations, and various applications of AI are already hardwired into military and national security systems, along with being an increasing element within corporations and other organizations. AI is basically here now, but only partly integrated, and what its advent means is unclear.
The level of investment, and the stock valuations that depend on return on investment, have enormous risk baked in. SpaceX’s IPO valuation held price to earning ratios that are unheard of, and it will be part of the market basket that makes up the NASDAQ index, meaning that anyone who owns an index fund owns part of the risk.
OpenAI is planning its own IPO, with a similar gap between company valuation and Capex expenditure and actual revenues. It seems perhaps the most likely to fail, with Anthropic, which is also planning an IPO, at least reaping respectable returns on its enterprise business.
The situation looks like a classic bubble, kept aloft by investors who have FOMO or else are doubling down on prior bets, but the promise is that AI will eventually replace most current human economic activity, providing enormous increases in productivity and savings.
AI has already demonstrated its ability to make huge scientific advances, and at some point it will be good enough at coding to create its own future models without human participation. It’s capacity and potential are matters for sharp dispute, but no one who has used it intelligently would scoff at its power. Anyone who has followed the progression of new models since the first ChatGPT went public has to be aware of how quickly models are advancing, with no sign of slowing down.
There are plenty of skeptics who point to difficulties that businesses have in integrating entirely new systems, and issues of how autonomously AI can act without a human review raise questions about how real the productivity gains will be. Questions of control and sovereignty, along with the more fundamental question of where the sweet spot lies between cost and effectiveness, make the future landscape of how AI will be integrated and who will win the arms race increasingly uncertain.
Still, AI will be as common as the internet within a short time, and it is already layered into such basic functions as Google. AI can handle a large array of tasks currently handled by entry-level and midlevel employees, and it promises to bring the same disruption to the professional classes that NAFTA and offshoring brought to manufacturing and stable working class jobs.
There are two crisis scenarios, and neither may happen, or both may happen. If AI accomplishes what the oligarchs who lead its development have promised, then massive job dislocation and at least temporary unemployment will take place. In a scenario like this, the share of labor vs. capital in GDP might drop as low as 20 percent.
The political and economic crisis this would represent would be as deep as the one FDR faced in 1932, and it undoubtedly would require the same boldness in policy planning and execution. The crisis already seems to be showing up in reduced job prospects for new college graduates, and it would unquestionably be felt most by the young, although older midlevel managers would suffer, too.
An entire professional class that has been relatively insulated against economic precarity finds itself facing a threatening future, and the pressure to slow down the full roll out of AI is likely to grow stronger. It may well play a central role in the 2028 election.
In many ways, the DSA program already contains the kind of policy approaches that make sense in an economic context where about 80-90 percent of the population suffers severe wage compression while the top part reaps huge rewards. The question of what share of ownership or what kind of taxation would be involved in regulating big AI already rhymes with the theme of taxing billionaires.
That’s not the only way to look at AI’s ascendence, and the “abundance” focus lies more in the potential AI has to transform human society in positive ways, which is the way that most poorer nations are looking at it right now—a cheap way to add capacity and solve problems. The U.S. is unusual in the sense of threat expressed by the populace.
The question of what a good approach to AI should be is partly held in abeyance right now, because AI is new here and there is a lot of noise in the system, including the degradation of federal data collection. The question of AI’s impact on employment is contested, and right now the political focus is more polemical than policy-based, but the connection between AI and economic dissatisfaction has been clearly drawn.
In itself, that may pose dangers leading to the second potential AI crisis, which would not necessarily exclude the first, and that’s the possibility that the bubble will burst before the money starts coming back. Public opposition to data centers and the general anti-AI sentiment within the populace both promise potential disruptions in the smooth workings of commerce.
Whether or not public anger over data centers damages AI’s expansion, the gap between investment and returns is such that at least some companies are likely to fail, and the question is probably more whether it will result in a correction or an all out bust of the AI-dependent stock markets.
The massive amount of capital expenditure greatly exceeds cash flow, essentially amounting to the creation of a public “utility” like railroads or the telephone, while monetization is still largely theoretical and contingent. The interdependent nature of various elements of the system—data centers, GPUs, networking and power—provides the potential for cascading failures.
The system is being built out fast, and the steep increase in global equity valuations over the past three years has mainly been concentrated in a handful of companies. About half of the valuation of both the NASDAQ and the S & P 500 is driven by major AI firms and related companies. The addition of SpaceX to the NASDAQ poses particular risks, with its P/E ratio of -117 per share.
Much of what passes for economic health in the U.S. right now is based on the stock market, with the top ten percent in wealth and income driving 50 percent of consumer spending. Apart from COVID’s brief interruption, it has been a bull market since the 2007-2009 recession, and the market itself has demonstrated how jittery is, with both tariffs and the Iran war, though Trump succeeded in jawboning away the drop in each case.
Sudden bad news about AI could hit the market hard, and the economy is already somewhat fragile, dealing with the consequences of the Iran war and heightened inflation. It is at least possible that the economy will be facing the same kind of burden of repair that Obama faced in 2008. If AI succeeds in disrupting employment while crashing the stock market, the situation would be even worse.
The American economy perpetually reminds us of its resilience, and it seems possible that neither disruption will be cataclysmic. Companies may be slower to get rid of employees than currently assumed, and maybe the new productivity gains will be layered onto the existing economy in ways that keep the markets chugging along and stave off any threat of an AI crash and recession.
But even then, AI promises to change both society and the economy in fundamental ways, and government has a role in shaping what these will be. So far, the politics of AI have mainly centered on resistance to data centers and a general concern about the oligarchs, some of whom are loathsome, behind the money grab that promises to decimate the workforce.
The underlying mood of the electorate is anger, and these are easy focal points, along with hikes in electricity costs, environmental concerns, the threats of AI-enabled surveillance, policing, and warfare, and the overall vague sense of potential displacement that AI heralds for many—something to resist in favor of the human.
At the level of government, AI is a national security issue and we are in a race with China for dominance, and the main war is fought along lines of freedom vs. regulation. As is typical in the Trump White House, that question is being answered piecemeal, in a way that seems more personalized than thought through.
The temporary ban on Anthropic’s Mythos 5 for foreign individuals, including the company’s own personnel, forced a two-week halt, and it was forced to suspend offering its Fable model as well. These demonstrated an assertion of governmental authority, but the regulatory structure for it has yet to be decided and legislated.
The arms race between China and the U.S. is the primary driver of the apocalyptic warning the AI Futures Project provided in AI 2017, and now the same group has produced AI 2040: Plan A, which offers an alternative pathway, based on shared agreements between the U.S. and China and the Cold War premise of mutually assured destruction, as a way regulating AI’s development at the global level.
The political situation on the ground makes the current basket of issues the right ones, since the goal is to win elections right now, not confuse the electorate. But the real stakes involved are systemic, not local. The right approach to AI is likely to be one of the biggest issues by 2028, and right now the Democratic Party presents only chaos when it comes to where it stands on the issue.
Climate Change Is Here
Europe’s summer heat wave is no longer exceptional, but looks to become an annual event, and this year promises a super El Nino wreaking havoc in floods and droughts worldwide. The world seems to be getting hotter more quickly than expected, and various systems essential to the current global climate are changing more rapidly than expected.
Trump sidelined the climate as an issue and set about eliminating every government element promoting steps to ameliorate global warming, including scientific agencies responsible for monitoring and tracking climate change, as well as any green initiatives that Biden left behind. And windmills, and solar, and electric cars except for a red Tesla.
In a way, that might be a good thing, since when we start talking about climate again we should start with the fact that the climate has already changed and is not the same as it was a decade or two ago. No reasonable person doubts the science, and even if you do, you can just look out the window to see the change. Stopping the pace of that change is a vital international necessity, but dealing with the immediate consequences is critical, too.
The old climate battles were waged along lines of right and left, and climate extremism is a moral stance among many younger people on the left, while stupidity and denial constitute the Republican Party platform, which makes it hard for any kind of center to emerge. But that’s what is required, since the weather affects everyone, and the weather is different now than it used to be.
It’s not clear what needs to happen to declare a national or global climate emergency. Maybe a California wildfire that no one can put out for weeks, or a flood in Bangladesh killing millions. The better hope is that the sheer accumulation of anomaly forces a paradigm change in the way that people look at the weather.
Acknowledging that the climate has changed and that the human impact of energy generation and agriculture is behind it doesn’t imply any particular pathway toward what to do next, but it does suggest that serious planning needs to be done to ameliorate the impact of what is going to happen inevitably, no matter how much we reduce carbon emissions today.
Climate is an inertial system with a lot of feedback loops in it, so none of the changes we’re seeing now can be arrested, simply slowed as we move toward a new equilibrium, if we ever do. Accounting for rising sea levels, hotter summers, droughts and floods and wildfires is a multiyear process and present systems are inadequate to it.
I hesitated to list climate among the various crises that will define the larger political environment in 2028, because part of the problem with climate change is that it is chronic and largely invisible, easy to contest for anyone who mistrusts the scientific method. It’s not like the price of gas.
I put it there because I am guessing that maybe by 2028 there will be enough evidence that something has truly changed—a climate-based crisis—that whoever is running for office will need a good way to talk about it, in ways that supersede ideology and force an acceptance of what is happening and a focus on what to do right now.
Politics and Crisis: What Comes Next?
I started thinking about these critical areas as the context the Democratic Party faces as it looks to redefine its brand for 2028, but in a way none of them go directly to the question of branding, which depends on an emotional appeal that is personal in nature.
You think of a political party (if you do at all) and you think, is this party for me? Does it represent my interests? My beliefs? For a substantial minority of voters, the Democratics will never be that party, because the party is too deeply rooted in inclusion and racist nativism is still a dominant motivation for about 30 percent of the nation and shows no sign of disappearing any time soon.
Republicans have had a lock on that vote since Wallace was shot during the 1972 campaign and Nixon’s southern strategy, and while the party had plans after Romney’s loss in 2012 to expand its appeal to nonwhite voters, Trump demonstrated an alternative approach, and the party of Romney and Bush is gone now.
The quickest fix for a broken brand is a candidate like Obama or Trump, whose personality transcends party. Reagan and Clinton were the same way, too. It is possible that one of the current Democratic candidates will be able to generate that same sort of appeal, though it seems equally possible that an unexpected candidate might emerge whose main qualification is charisma, much as Obama did in 2008,
Trump well illustrates the problem for a political party when it replaces its general brand with a persona, and the post-Trump era is likely to be unsettled for the party, which is already positioning for it and will have difficulty winning back the marginal voters that Trump was able to fool.
I think that it is fair to say that Obama had something of the same effect on the Democratic Party. His brilliance as a politician was married to a genuine vision of the United States as a positive force in the moral universe, but the deal he cut with the Clintons in 2008 guaranteed Hilary as his successor, who lacked his political gifts and was not able to sustain the momentum Obama had created.
The failures of the Democratic establishment since 2016 have given us a decade dominated by Trump, and left the party weak and factionalized, with pressures both generational and leftist now in open conflict with the center. The likelihood that this dissensus will be settled by personality rather than a wholesale reinvention of the party itself makes it possible that this election will be more like 1976 than 1932.
Between the Old and the New
But it could be like 1932. We’re in a period of crisis—there’s no disputing that. The summaries I have written here are worrisome, and while national resilience and the intrinsic strengths of the U.S. may mean that we muddle through the coming period successfully, the world has demonstrably changed and the new world order is unstable and deeply conflicted, with challenges that admit of no simple solution.
Since Trump’s second term started I have seen various commentators use that quote of Gramsci’s about the old world dying and the new world waiting to be born, and “now is the time of monsters,” which tracks well since Trump is monstrous. But the actual quote is more subtle: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms occur.
It is perhaps more useful to see Trump as a morbid symptom rather than cause of the current crisis, since each of the challenges I have covered here would exist without him, though he certainly has made each of them worse. In any case, eliminating Trump and reestablishing democratic governance in the White House solves nothing by itself.
When I see the quote the focus is on the monstrous present, but it might be more useful to interrogate the clause “the new cannot be born,” which implies stasis. Is that really the case, or is the new actually in the process of being born right now?
To say that the old is dying seems literally true, if you look at politics right now—it’s my generation’s turn to leave the stage. The world order has changed three times in the past century—first the depression, rise of fascism, and the war, and then the Cold War, and then the brief end of history when the Soviet Union became Russia again, a gangster kleptocracy, leaving the U.S. alone for a while on the world stage.
That era is gone now, and Trump’s war on Iran is an inflection point, hastening a change that was inevitable in any case, with the rise of China. Andrey Mir says that AI represents the furthest extension of the new communication technology that began with harnessing electricity and the telegraph, and that the Gutenberg Era of literacy has ended now. That seems impossible to dispute.
In the new, post-literate age, a theme of post-liberalism has also emerged, with China’s success offering an alternative to liberal democracy in its undemocratic, state-managed market-based system, and key intellectual figures on the American right, including a few prominent AI oligarchs, making a similar political argument for a post-democratic polity.
Peter Thiel said “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel is the co-founder of Palantir, which integrates AI into surveillance and war-fighting systems and has major contracts with the U.S. military and security agencies, with especially deep penetration within the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.
JD Vance was essentially created by Peter Thiel, and the likely next Republican presidential candidate. The nativist version of the American character, as rooted in blood and soil, has been coupled under Trump with significant movement towards forms of state socialism, with the use of tariffs being the most obvious example, along with Trump engineering state investment and part ownership in specific companies like Intel.
Whatever label one wants to attach to it, the trajectory of Vance’s version of the Republican Party is toward social control through surveillance and state partnership with major industrialists and financiers against a backdrop of national security exigency caused by national or international crisis. If the world doesn’t furnish a crisis a president can also create one of their own, as Trump has proven.
That’s one vision of the new, and to paraphrase Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, one can say that no matter how dreadful the fascist vision may be, at least it is coherent. A lot of polling suggests that rising generations don’t have the same level of attachment to democracy that those who grew up in the shadow of the second world war have.
Those who attack the DSA and the rise of “socialism” point to the post-liberal nature of the party’s underlying creed, which is quite clear that its ultimate goal is public ownership and democratic control of the means of production, though in a liberal democratic political system rather than a one-party or authoritarian state.
Free-market capitalism and democratic political freedoms are not incompatible and their coexistence in much of the world since 1945 has brought unprecedented global prosperity, but they are not intrinsically compatible, either. Bad economic times put pressure on both systems—inflation causes cries for price controls, and economic instability makes people look for a champion, not a politician.
They also have the potential to force corrections in the system when its dynamics are unbalanced, as the New Deal did in a much darker economic time. It’s hard not to think that the corrective this time will need to be equally comprehensive and deep.
It is easy to worry that 2028 will just bring new morbid symptoms, and that the new will have to wait a while—or worse, that the new will arrive in the form of the same kind of system that WWII was fought to destroy. But one can imagine the alternative as well.
The idea that every crisis is an opportunity is a bit pollyannish, since most crises really are just disasters, but the crisis of instability and broken systems does force the opportunity to make substantial changes.
We’re at an historic moment where a compelling, achievable vision matched with equivalent postliterate communication and networking skills could marshal the discordant and unsettled energies of the moment and coalesce it into a new politics.
To someone on the ground in NYC, that’s what Mamdani looks like, and it is also easy to point out that New York is a unique laboratory, and the DSA experiment there may not be replicable at scale, or in other regions. Bur that may be mistaking the surface for the underlying structure.
A lot of the dissensus in the Democratic Party lies at the policy level, and that’s the critique of using Mamdani as any sort of example for the party—his message won’t play in Kansas or Iowa. But that seems like surface to me. The underlying structure of his win involved the way he embodied an appeal to diversity and common interests across boundaries, while obviating the role of identity as a political driver.
Leftist economics are rooted in the idea of serving the social good in the broadest sense, and the appeal of that brand is to the common voter, the worker, individuals and families with aspirations rather than those who are already comfortable.
Mamdani’s politics might be described as “post-woke”—not a turning against, but an obviation. Identity matters, and culture definitely matters, but everyone rides the bus and has children who need childcare, so let’s start there. “Sewer socialism” downplays the actual merit of a politics focused directly on common needs—what about “AI socialism,” given that AI is now a public good, or close to being one.
For a long time, the Democratic Party has pursued a demographic approach to victory, which included assumptions about how nonwhite voters would support the party that no longer are accurate. The party has nothing to show for the past ten years, with whatever successes Biden might have had obliterated now. The party is leaderless, too, with Schumer and Jeffries under pressure and the DNC under Keith Martin a pathetic joke.
The golden apple for the party is framed as the white, male working class voter, and the benighted decision to pull Platner from central casting and run him in Maine shows the party’s worst instincts—in this case, it was the DSA substituting surface for substance, but it is a general theme with the party.
The alternative is to celebrate diversity without privileging any particular form of it, and instead focus on the underlying idea that government exists to make life better in general for the people that it serves, and what that would look like in practice.
Being able to do that in a way that also recognizes that the energy of American capitalism is the source of America’s nearly unrivaled prosperity seems important, as does recognizing that the sense of economic precarity so many people experience is real and has specific causes that can be addressed directly.
Instead of designing a message to fit the electorate, the new politics will be born when the message creates the electorate to fit it, as FDR did with his mastery of radio, and Reagan did with TV. Maybe that’s impossible now, but the idea hasn’t really been tested.
Something will emerge from all of this, and I have no idea what it will look like. Because I think history has a sense of humor, my best guess is that a politician from Georgia with a fresh, honest face and barely known to the public will emerge to face the vice president of a disgraced former president and win by a narrow margin, just like 1976.
That doesn’t mean that history will repeat itself, and maybe it won’t be Jon Ossof, but whoever it is won’t have long to act, and they had better be ready for it. Winning the election against the failure of Trump’s second term is the easy part. Leading in crisis and making the right moves are the key to a second term, which is what matters.
It will help if the party itself has come together, too, and reinvented itself in the process. The real election, that one that will matter even more than 2028, is coming in 2032. Will it be like Roosevelt’s second term, or Carter’s?