What The Hell America!

On issue after issue, Democrats have let opposing Trump guide them like a North Star. In some cases, this is a purely instinctual, visceral reaction. Some anti-Trumpisms lead to counterintuitive places and have serious political consequences. Take free speech, an issue long held sacred by and strongly associated with the broad left. It is also a popular political issue, with 91 percent of Americans saying that protecting free speech is integral to democracy.

There’s no political upside to ceding free speech to the Right — but that’s exactly what Democrats did as Trump elevated concerns about liberal censorship. Democrats responded by celebrating corporate deplatforming of their opponents, defending campus speech restrictions, and finding exceptions to their historic commitment to the First Amendment.

Now that Trump is targeting Palestinian solidarity activists for their political speech, the broad left has an opportunity to reclaim the issue. But we have our work cut out for us, given that Democrats have spent years dismissing civil liberties concerns and arguing in favor of cutting the mic.

For centrist Democratic Party legislators and strategists, there is a certain freedom in this moment. Pretenses can finally be dropped. For instance, Democrats have never been reliably antiwar, but their base has. Historically that contradiction has caused a great deal of trouble for party leadership, as at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Those contradictions have persisted into the twenty-first century. Liberals and leftists flooded the streets to oppose the invasion of Iraq, which many Democrats had voted for. After the Biden administration rolled over for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, dissent from the base played a role in the party’s 2024 electoral defeat.

If only there were some way to make the liberal base more flexible on issues related to war. Enter the combination of Trump’s erratic foreign policy positions and liberals’ negative polarization. Many post–Cold War liberals saw NATO as an outdated institution that should have been dissolved alongside the Warsaw Pact. They viewed the alliance’s eastward expansion as a way of maintaining American dominance rather than promoting democracy, inevitably leading to costly military commitments and dangerous tensions. In the face of this skepticism, more hawkish elements within the party were obliged to temper their rhetoric.

Now Trump’s appalling coziness with Vladimir Putin, his humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky, and his transactional approach to alliances have permitted interventionist Democrats to let their bloodthirsty freak flags fly. They can publicly extol the virtues of NATO without facing criticism from their own side, which is increasingly inclined to agree.

The negative polarization phenomenon also helps Democratic elites resolve long-standing contradictions around trade policy. It was the Democrats who passed NAFTA, while at the same time claiming to represent the blue-collar manufacturing workers and communities most negatively impacted by trade liberalization, as well as scores of other voters who were skeptical of its merits. Party leaders performed elaborate mental gymnastics to justify trade deals that their base correctly feared would harm American workers.

In this context, Trump’s crude protectionism has been a gift: now neoliberal Democrats can position themselves as the reasonable defenders of international commerce without blowback. They can dismiss neutral tools like tariffs as foolhardy meddling in exquisitely calibrated global markets. It is, for many neoliberal Democrats, surely a delight no longer to have to feign an interest in restricting the free movement of capital.

The story repeats itself on issue after issue. Corporate Democrats have long been financially enmeshed with major health care companies but haven’t been entirely free to openly defend them due to agitation from the base. For decades, the phrase “Big Pharma” has been associated with the Bernie Sanders–style left and associated causes like decreasing prescription drug costs and single-payer health care, decidedly uninteresting to Republicans. Now Trump’s head of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, is aggressively attempting to wrest the title of chief Big Pharma critic from Bernie Sanders — even accusing Sanders himself of being an industry shill. If Kennedy successfully tarnishes all critique of health care profiteering with his brand of anti-science quackery, it will be a comfort to mainstream Democrats in leadership or key committee roles, who routinely accept substantial sums from the major industries.

Likewise, the Democratic Party has long struggled to balance its base’s deep suspicion of the national security state with its own institutional investment in those agencies. Trump’s conflicts with the FBI and CIA have resolved this tension by casting intelligence services as heroic defenders of democracy. Historically Democratic voters have long been skeptical of the FBI, associating it with unsavory activities like illegal wiretapping and harassment of progressive movement leaders. Democrats and Republicans switched positions on the FBI between 2014 and 2017, coinciding precisely with the arrival of Trump on the political scene. Same story with the CIA, which lefty liberals long associated with coups, black sites, and torture. When the CIA determined that Russia had interfered to aid Trump’s victory in 2016, Trump declared war on the agency. Liberals’ and conservatives’ positions reversed that same year.

The irony of Democrats reducing their entire politics to opposition to Trump over the last decade is that, as a result, Trump now faces no credible opposition. Democrats have created a hollow, reactive politics that validates Trump’s centrality to American life while abandoning any semblance of independent political identity. With no anchor, the base is blowing listlessly in the wind, and whole segments are flying away.

The party’s Trump fixation is symptomatic of a broader refusal to resolve its own contradictions and develop a coherent, popular political program. What would genuine, successful political opposition to Trumpism look like? It would start with an internally coherent worldview rooted in easily explainable and morally defensible principles that speak to the values of average Americans. No party can fight and win without a consistent, legible politics that spans disparate issues and stands the test of time.

A successful opposition would articulate a vision of economic democracy that cuts through the cultural noise of our scrambled political moment. Positions would flow from the same underlying analysis of who holds power and how they use it. A principled politics would maintain that free speech is essential no matter who’s championing it, that unrestricted capital movement is predatory no matter who’s criticizing it, and that war is bad no matter who’s waging it.

A worthy opposition would speak to the material conditions that actually shape people’s lives, offering concrete solutions to housing costs, student debt, stagnant wages, and economic insecurity. It would unite people across lines of cultural difference on the basis that the vast majority of Americans, no matter how politically polarized, have similar problems and share similar common enemies: the economic elites who profit from their labor and prey on their misfortune.

Without an opposition like that, we’ll just be slapping on new bumper stickers every few years while nothing fundamentally changes.