Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against,” the Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten wrote. “He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil.” A demagogue can become a tyrant, but it’s the people who put him

“Freedom,” Tocqueville wrote, “is not the chief and continual object of their desires; it is equality for which they feel an eternal love.” Americans would rather give up their political liberty than their feeling of being equals. “They will put up with poverty, servitude, and barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy.

The shining city on a hill was supposed to replace remote big government with a community of energetic and compassionate citizens, all engaged in a project of national renewal. But nothing held the city together. It was hollow at the center, a collection of individuals all wanting more. Free America measured civic health by gross domestic product.

After the McGovern convention in 1972, the Democratic Party became the home of educated professionals, racial minorities, and the shrinking unionized working class. The more the party identified with the winners of the new economy, the easier it became for the Republican Party to pull away white workers by appealing to cultural values.

The historical demand of the oppressed is inclusion as equal citizens in all the institutions of American life. With identity politics, the demand became different: not just to enlarge the institutions, but to change them profoundly.

Politically, Smart America came to be associated with the Democratic Party.

“White nationalist” comes closer. Throughout his adult life Trump was hostile to Black people, contemptuous of women, vicious about immigrants from poor countries, and cruel toward the weak. He was an equal-opportunity bigot. In his campaigns and in the White House he aligned himself publicly with hard-core racists in a way that set him apart from

The first big step is to repair the safety net so that workers and families are no longer at perpetual risk of falling through and drowning, as millions have in the pandemic. This means essentially extending the New Deal to more Americans in more areas of their lives: universal health care, child care, paid family and sick leave, stronger workplace

What do foreigners say about us? Exactly what we notice in our compatriots when we encounter them abroad, cringe, and head the other way, because we recognize ourselves. That we speak in loud voices, that we smile a lot, that we immediately use first names, that the answer to how we’re doing is always “Great,” that we make friends easily and have n

West Virginia, almost all white, was a Democratic state until 2000 (since that year it’s voted Republican in every presidential election). If you look at county-by-county national electoral maps, 2000 is the year when vast rural areas turned decisively and permanently red. Something more than just the Democrats’ principled embrace of the Black free