They discuss Dr. Page’s journey in becoming the 8th President of Stillman College, as well as how she sees the role of HBCU administrators in higher education evolving in today’s environment.
Centre-left governments around the world are facing challenging re-elections as populist right-wing candidates and political parties make ground with a discontented electorate. This article draws on research for a project I direct on centre-left renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), offering some preliminary insights into the forces at play in the recent presidential election in the United States and learning points for the Labour government in the United Kingdom. The research finds that the Democrats lost the presidential election largely owing to the loss of working class voters amongst the ethnically White, Hispanic and Black American population, who turned away from a Democratic Party they felt was not offering the country the change of direction they were seeking. In particular, the failure of former President Biden’s extensive economic programme to win support amongst the voters it was aimed at holds important lessons for centre-left parties aiming to replicate similar approaches.
News that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally invited The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Cabinet-level group chat discussion where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth uploaded plans for U.S. military strikes in Yemen ought to prompt the resignations of both officials.
It’s irrelevant that Signal, the messaging app used by the group chat, is a secure platform; the personal phones on which Trump administration officials likely ran the app most certainly are not. If a foreign intelligence service can access one of these officials’ personal phones, it can access their Signal chats. At least one member of the group, Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff, was in Moscow at the time the discussion took place, while another, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, admitted under questioning that she was overseas as well.
As a breach of security, the Signal group chat is unprecedented in its negligence. What’s more, the group chat also likely violates a number of laws relating to the disclosure of sensitive national defense information and federal records retention — Waltz had apparently set the group’s messages to disappear after one to four weeks.
This incident only reinforces the impression that President Trump has assembled a squad of inept amateurs for his national security team. Though Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, DNI Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were all included in the chat, for instance, none thought to even ask why they were discussing the details of an upcoming military operation in an app on their unsecured personal phones. That suggests that such informal deliberations are a standard operating procedure for Trump’s national security team. Indeed, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, suggested as much in a recent hearing.
Congress should mount a serious and thorough investigation into the Trump administration’s wider use of personal phones and messaging apps, encrypted or otherwise, to plan military operations and discuss sensitive national security matters. At minimum, however, National Security Adviser Waltz and Secretary Hegseth should immediately resign for their roles in this debacle.
For his part, Waltz carelessly added a journalist to a group chat that he organized via Signal, a secure app installed on insecure personal phones. Whatever the reasoning behind this move, it likely contravenes the spirit and letter of laws meant to safeguard sensitive national defense information and preserve communications involving senior federal officials. Waltz cannot remain as national security adviser, given his apparent disregard for laws and rules regarding sensitive information and records retention.
Hegseth, already unqualified and unfit for his position as secretary of defense, should resign for his cavalier disclosure of plans for impending military operations in the group chat, presumably via an insecure personal phone. According to Goldberg, Hegseth revealed details including “the specific time of a future attack, specific targets, including human targets, meant to be killed in that attack, weapons systems, even weather reports… It was a minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen.” The fact that the Pentagon itself had warned against using Signal in a building-wide email just after the group chat took place puts Hegseth’s eagerness to share these details in an even less favorable light.
Neither Waltz’s nor Hegseth’s resignations will repair the damage done by their careless and reckless handling of sensitive national security information. Nor will it address the Trump administration’s wider use of messaging apps to discuss defense and foreign policy issues. But they are an important first step toward accountability.
If there is one lesson that centrist Democrats have taken from Donald Trump’s startlingly broad-based victory in November, it is that their party will never return to majority status unless it regains the trust of working-class Americans. Those voters — nonwhite as well as white — rejected the language of race and identity that they associate, fairly or not, with the Democrats. So it’s no surprise that the party has scrambled to develop a “credible working-class message” that will “win them back,” in the words of one super PAC that plans to invest $50 million in the effort.
Enter Richard D. Kahlenberg, who has been arguing for virtually his entire adult life that our race-based system of affirmative action pits the white working class against Black people, and aligns the Democratic Party with middle-class or well-to-do beneficiaries of color against Americans who see themselves as the losers in a zero-sum game. His ship finally came in two years ago when the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action violated the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Kahlenberg’s new book, “Class Matters,” is his personal history of the debate, his victory lap and his spirited argument for a liberal politics of class rather than race.
That victory lap is hard to begrudge: Kahlenberg writes that he has been laboring in the vineyards since he wrote his senior thesis at Harvard in 1984 on Robert F. Kennedy’s attempt to forge a cross-racial working-class coalition in the 1968 presidential election. Kahlenberg found that Kennedy opposed even mild forms of racial preference in favor of economic programs that would benefit all working-class Americans. I was as surprised to learn this now as Kahlenberg was then, though as a biographer of Hubert Humphrey I know that the devastating loss in 1968 sent Humphrey on the same trajectory.
A politics in which elite liberals told ordinary white Americans that they had to make sacrifices — from which elites themselves were largely exempt — in order to compensate for historical injustices was an invitation to disaster.
Elon Musk’s call to privatize Amtrak should surprise no one. He owns a car company, has recommended that tourists from abroad not ride passenger rail in the U.S., and according to his biographer “the idea (for the Hyperloop) originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system,” which he viewed as too costly and too slow.
But supporters of passenger rail in the U.S. should not dismiss the notion of redefining Amtrak’s role in running our nation’s intercity rail network, including privatizing some of its operational responsibilities. Rather, they should use this moment as an opportunity to debate the best way to leverage private investment in passenger rail.
Born out of necessity, Amtrak was never intended to be the long-term solution to providing passenger rail in the U.S. The collapse of privately-owned and operated passenger rail in the 1960s led to the government corporation’s creation in 1971. Amtrak’s operations greatly expanded in the mid-1970s when it took over the Northeast Corridor (NEC), which accounts for over a third of its passengers and is operationally a money maker. Since then, Congress has been fairly divided about Amtrak’s vision. Many Democrats support more government funding of Amtrak while large swaths of Republicans have called for the public corporation’s dismantling and the sale of the NEC to private interests. Partly as a result of this partisan divide, Amtrak has been unable to access a stable source of funding to invest in its rail infrastructure, leaving it with billions in deferred maintenance and little money for investments in high-speed rail.
The new momentum behind Constitution comes as Democrats reckon with voter defections in low-income communities grappling with high energy costs, as detailed in a February report by the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank. It highlighted how energy costs were a significant concern driving votes in poor, predominantly Black communities in the Boston area, where Trump notched gains in November.
“If you’re a poor resident of public housing in, say, Boston or Dorchester and Roxbury, it’s really hard for you to see the benefits of tax credits for heat pumps” or other policies aimed at curbing fossil fuel use, said Elan Sykes, the report’s author. “This is really something that we as Democrats need to recognize.”
While campaigning in the late summer of 2024, Donald Trump wooed voters with this declaration: “When I win, I will immediately bring [food] prices down, starting on Day One.” But even before Day One arrived, he was already backpedaling, declaring, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”
Indeed, it is. In the best of circumstances, presidents don’t have the power to unilaterally reduce prices. Yet Trump is adopting policies that are overtly inflationary. Aggressive import tariffs, for example, will drive up prices for food and other essential commodities. And the U.S. agriculture and construction sectors are particularly dependent on the immigrant workers Trump promises to deport. All of this will increase working Americans’ already high cost of living.
Still, if Trump were serious about fulfilling his campaign pledge, there is a policy tool he could use to help drive down the prices that most hurt working-class Americans. Namely, he could actively enforce the U.S. antitrust laws.
To understand the opportunity before him, consider that market power is a major factor in driving high prices for goods and services that matter the most to working American families.
From our Budget Breakdown series highlighting problems in fiscal policy to inform the 2025 tax and budget debate.
When the Trump administration moved this week to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development, which is responsible for producing objective research on a wide array of environmental pollutants, it claimed to do so in the name of improving government efficiency. But the long list of cuts to federal science funding pursued by the administration will ultimately undermine one of the government’s most successful endeavors and leave the country ill-prepared to maintain its position as the world’s leader of innovation.
Alongside the EPA, several other federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and NASA, have all been targeted for budget cuts. While many of these cuts have been mass layoffs of federal scientists, including nearly 1,200 of the EPA’s biologists, chemists, and toxicologists, some have been policy changes impacting the broader research ecosystem. At NIH, the administration has moved to cap support for “indirect research costs,” which cover expenses ranging from facility fees to administrative costs, at 15% of a grant’s value.
The research ecosystem in the United States is far from perfect. Many universities have increased administrative bloat over the past several decades that risks cutting into the efficiency of genuine research activities. Several university grant recipients have routinely negotiated reimbursement for indirect costs as high as 70% of the grant’s overall research value. Although some of these indirect costs include critical funding for maintaining high-tech laboratories and other legitimate expenses, high overhead diverts resources away from dollars that could have been used more efficiently as true R&D spending. A thoughtful audit to ensure that taxpayer money is being effectively allocated toward research activities, rather than avoidable administrative costs, is absolutely warranted.
But these rapid and sweeping cuts are far from this measured approach, causing unnecessary chaos, jeopardizing projects that may have otherwise led to vital breakthroughs, and indiscriminately eliminating skilled researchers. For example, the 15% cap at NIH is only around half of what grantees typically negotiated in the past. In response, top research universities and institutions have frozen hiring, laid off staff, and even trimmed research projects on cancer and Alzheimers. Meanwhile at NOAA, the hundreds of positions eliminated at the National Weather Service risks compromising the accuracy of weather data that everyone from researchers to local weather channels rely upon.
The federal government’s support for research is foundational for innovation from businesses. While the private sector often funds “applied” research and development, which can be quickly commercialized and profited from, the government’s primary responsibility is to fund “basic” research, which forms the foundation of knowledge for all other technological and scientific progress. This type of research often requires sustained long-term investment and the benefits can often accrue to entities other than the one that funds it, which often makes it too risky for private companies to pursue on their own. Federally funded research has been a critical building block for countless innovations, including mRNA vaccines, the internet, GPS, and even Ozempic. In addition, the government can enable research even when not directly funding it by collecting and sharing vital information, such as weather and disease data.
These federal investments drive economic growth and improve American lives. According to one study by the Dallas Federal Reserve, every federal dollar invested in non-defense R&D yields between 140% and 210% in economic benefits. In certain projects, these returns are even higher: One study of NIH’s Human Genome Project estimated that it generated an astonishing $178 for every $1 spent, resulting in nearly $1 trillion of additional economic growth.
Instead of further cuts that undermine this innovation and growth, policymakers should be working to reverse the decline in federal R&D investment, which has dropped precipitously over the past few decades when measured as a share of the overall economy. Today, public R&D spending is only around half of its historical average and nearly a quarter from its peak set during the space race.
Continuing to cut support would risk losing that status to competitors such as China, which over the past few decades has been increasing R&D spending at a much faster rate than the United States. Already, both China and Europe are seeking to capitalize on the administration’s decisions by enticing top science talent to join them abroad. The United States has long been a global leader in research and innovation, but if Trump continues to make reckless cuts to the science ecosystem, we risk watching that leadership slip away.
This week, the Federal Reserve gave its first updated economic projections since Trump came into office. Due to the impact of tariffs and increased economic uncertainty, Fed officials projected that real GDP growth this year would be much lower than expected — only 1.7% compared to the 2.1% predicted in December — while inflation and unemployment would be higher.
More from PPI & The Center for Funding America’s Future
Stumping for president a quarter-century ago, George W. Bush posed the immortal question, “Is our children learning?” Although his bad grammar elicited much condescending mirth, Bush at least seemed passionate about improving public schools.
Today’s national leaders, not so much.
Last month’s federal election in Germany, which took place at a moment of significant global tension, has attracted international attention. What the new German government, under the leadership of Chancellor Frederich Merz, says and does now on Ukraine, and on the changing relationship between the United States and its oldest allies, will have immediate and long-term repercussions for the global geopolitical picture. Merz’s early comments that Europe will have to have “independence” from the U.S. as the Trump administration increasingly abandons its historic allies, and his willingness to loosen Germany’s “debt brake” to fund ramping up defense spending, have made headlines over the world.
The election was also significant because of the electoral swing from left to right, a result that has important insights for the global center-left, including U.S. Democrats, at this critical juncture as they continue to suffer declines with working-class voters.
| Disapprove: | 71% |
| Approve: | 29% |
* CNN/SSRS, March 6-9, 2025
WHAT THEY MEAN:
What do Americans think of the Trump administration’s tariff binge? As a point of departure, here’s the “Chapter One” pledge from last fall’s Republican party platform:
“The Republican Party will reverse the worst inflation crisis in four decades that has crushed the middle class, devastated family budgets, and pushed the dream of homeownership out of reach for millions. We will defeat inflation, tackle the cost-of-living crisis, improve fiscal sanity, restore price stability, and quickly bring down prices.”
We noted at the time that promises to cut prices and to raise tariffs – that came four notches down, in “Chapter Five” — contradict one another. (Lewis Carroll’s White Queen might happily believe six impossible things before breakfast. Alice knows they’re impossible nonetheless.) A hypothetical Trump administration, we predicted, would have to choose between them.
The actual administration now appears to have chosen. Here’s the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, telling Americans they’re wrong to care about the cost of goods, and the administration’s policy will likely bring prices up, not down:
“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream. … [shift to mumbling voice] Can tariffs be a one-time price adjustment? Yes.”
Insights from three different sources — consumer confidence surveys, public opinion polls, and House of Representatives debate — give some sense of what Americans now believe tariffs do, whether they like the administration’s approach, and how strongly they may feel.
First, the Conference Board’s February consumer-confidence readout and the University of Michigan’s March survey find Americans expecting prices to rise and believing they know why. The Conference Board summary:
“Average 12-month inflation expectations surged from 5.2% to 6% in February. This increase likely reflected a mix of factors, including sticky inflation but also the recent jump of prices of key household staples like eggs and the expected impact of tariffs. References to inflation and prices in general continue to rank high in write-in responses, but the focus shifted towards other topics. There was a sharp increase in the mentions of trade and tariffs, back to a level unseen since 2019. Most notably, comments on the current Administration and its policies dominated the responses.”
Second, March public opinion polls suggest that Americans put more value than Mr. Bessent on cheap goods (see below for why this might be) and aren’t persuaded that tariff hikes will bring them much good in exchange. One, a CNN/SSRS poll done between March 6 and 9, asks about Mr. Trump’s handling of tariff policy. Reuters/IPSOS (March 3 to 5), meanwhile, asks about tariff increases in the abstract without mentioning Mr. Trump personally. Findings:
CNN/SSRS: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling tariffs?”
| Approve | Disapprove | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| All respondents | 39% | 61% | |
| Political independents | 29% | 71% | |
| Republicans | 80% | 20% | |
| Democrats | 6% | 93% | |
| Non-college | 41% | 59% | |
| Under 35 | 28% | 72% | |
| Over 45 | 45% | 54% | |
| Men | 39% | 60% | |
| Women | 39% | 61% | |
| Earns less than $50,000 | 38% | 62% |
Reuters/IPSOS:
| Agree | Disagree | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| “It’s a good idea to charge tariffs even if prices increase.” | 32% | 53% | |
| “When the U.S. charges tariffs, American workers come out ahead.” | 31% | 49% | |
| “Increasing tariffs will do more harm than good.” | 53% | 31% |
Both show the administration (a) nearly four fathoms “underwater,” (b) holding a core Republican vote but not persuading anybody else, and (c) losing the “swing” and “non-white working-class” voters who last fall thought Mr. Trump would at least try to “quickly bring prices down.”
Third, political-system reactions — specifically, debate last week in the House of Representatives — cast some indirect light on the intensity of feeling. House Democrats, guided by Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Greg Meeks, requested a vote last Wednesday to terminate the “emergency” declaration Mr. Trump is using to threaten tariffs on the energy, cars, groceries, home-building materials, medicines, and so on Americans buy from Canada and Mexico. Rather than defend this, their Republican counterparts dodged by writing a surreal “House Rule,” declaring the last 9½ months of 2025 to be a single “day.” Mr. Meeks:
“‘Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day.’ What? If you don’t think that makes any sense, neither do I. House Republicans are declaring that the days are no longer days and that time has literally stopped.”
It doesn’t make sense. But in the arcane ‘House Calendar world’, it does prevent a debate and avert a vote. That day’s Congressional Record reports 23 comments on tariffs by House Democrats and none by Republicans. Rule of thumb: House members have a keen sense of local reaction to issues. When they don’t want to talk about something, there’s a reason. At least for now, the administration’s choice to abandon its “bring down prices” pledge, and raise tariffs instead, doesn’t seem one many Americans like.
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
In this spirit, the Congressional Record for March 12 (pp. H1083 – H1183) records an honorable day for Rep. Meeks and House Democrats. They are right on policy, to keep costs down for hourly-wage Americans trying to manage family budgets and to oppose unprovoked attacks on America’s neighbors and friends. And they are right on principle: Congress, not the president, has authority over “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises”, and attempts by presidents to bypass this and impose tariffs by decree are fundamentally anti-Constitutional. We applaud.
Public opinion:
CNN/SSRS on Mr. Trump’s handling of tariffs, budgets, the economy in general, and more.
Reuters/IPSOS on the same topics, without attaching them personally to Trump.
Quinnipiac (March 6-10) on Mr. Trump’s approach to trade with China, Canada, and Mexico.
The Conference Board (Feb. 25) finds consumers losing confidence and worried about tariffs and their price impact.
… and the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey gets similar results.
Meanwhile:
As Americans worry about price increases, retaliations against American exporters are piling up. Current status:
So far, they have chosen to use tariffs hitting American manufacturers and farmers. More inventive things with wider target ranges are ahead:
And last — Tariffs, the hedge-fund alum, and the single mom:
Back to Mr. Bessent: “Cheap goods are not the essence of the American dream.” Without wealth-bashing for its own sake, that’s kind of easy for him to say …
Tariffs are taxes on purchases of physical goods, incorporated in store prices for shoppers and in production costs for goods-using businesses like manufacturers, restaurants, farms, and building contractors. That means they’re toughest on people who spend a lot of their money on goods. Who might these people be?
The BLS’ Consumer Expenditure Survey finds that in 2023, America’s single-parent families spent 40% of their $52,462 post-tax median income on food, clothes, home furnishings, and other goods. This is twice the 20% of income that the top-decile families (median post-tax, $259,432) spent on goods. Put more directly, tariffs hit the waitressing single mom twice as hard as the law firm partner. Mr. Bessent, a hedge-fund alum whose income comes from real estate rentals, royalties, and capital gains, is an extreme case even in the top decile, probably spending closer to 1% than 20% of income on physical, tariff-able goods. So he may personally have trouble seeing why anyone would care if food and clothing prices jump.
For better analysis and policy advice, Treasury can turn to Laura Duffy’s It’s Not 1789 Anymore: Why Trump’s Backward Tariff Agenda Would Harm America. As she explains, tariffs — though a defensible choice among the bad revenue options available to 18th-century Americans, or to the present-day governments of extremely poor and/or unstable countries — are a poor form of taxation and badly wrong for modern America: can’t raise enough revenue; non-transparent; regressive and inequitable; severe downstream harm.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
Donald Trump has one thing right about the war in Ukraine: the sooner the killing stops, the better. Done right — a fair and lasting peace — this would be good for Ukraine, the U.S., our allies in Europe and ordinary Russians, if not Vladimir Putin and his murderous circle. But that doesn’t mean we should seek peace at any price.
What Trump doesn’t seem to understand: just how cunning and aggressive an adversary he’s facing. In fact, it’s not clear he understands Putin is an adversary, intent on exalting and expanding Russia at the expense of the West, which he views as an implacable enemy, to be vanquished by any means necessary, including not only brutal conquest but treachery, deceit and all the other underhanded tactics he perfected as a career KGB agent. It’s also apparently lost on Trump that Putin is playing him for a fool, flattering, manipulating and pretending he wants to be America’s friend.
So what is the best approach to ending the war?
The month of March marks the five-year anniversary of the event that forever changed U.S. K-12 public education: the COVID-19 pandemic. The immediate effect of the President’s COVID-19 emergency declaration was that public schools closed their doors and went into lockdown mode. This lockdown produced long-term consequences for K-12 education.
One of these consequences is how dissatisfied Americans are today with public education. From 2019 to 2025, Gallup’s annual public satisfaction survey shows that the percentage of adults who report feeling dissatisfied with K-12 public education increased from 62% to 73%, with those who felt satisfied at the lowest level since 2001.
Another consequence is the learning loss disaster COVID-19 produced for our nation’s young people, especially the most vulnerable. (There also are other negative pandemic-related social and emotional consequences that befall young people.) To be fair, some of the pandemic’s distressing effects result from school closures, while others predate the pandemic but were made worse by it.
Something surprising and significant is happening among the Democratic Party’s rank-and-file progressives. After decades of drifting toward protectionism, President Donald Trump’s taste for tariffs is doing more than prompting mainstream Democrats (a group that tends to support free trade) to see the merits of low tariffs. Even many independent socialists — a group that has often been vocally skeptical of “free trade” policies — are similarly denouncing high tariffs.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and often speaks for the party’s left wing, declared that Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico are “most likely illegal and most definitely harmful” to ordinary families. The independent socialist Jacobin Magazine bluntly predicted tariffs would lower ordinary Americans’ standard of living. Even though some powerful unions are lining up to back tariffs when they can aid their specific industry, a pair of aviation unions, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the National Business Aviation Association, are pointing out that these tariffs will hurt their workers at the office and in their pocketbooks.
The concerns about Trump’s tariffs are not mere predictions. Now that Trump is actually implementing some of his steep tariffs (albeit erratically), key trading partners like China, Canada and Mexico are either retaliating or threatening to retaliate with punitive tariffs against us; products from agricultural goods to aluminum and steel will be impacted. American business leaders report feeling “frozen” and suffering significant setbacks because of price increases and the overall climate of uncertainty. North of the border, Canadians are protesting American tariffs by venting their ire in both traditional and creative ways, from assembling before the US consulate in Vancouver to renaming Americanos as “Canadianos.”
At a time when Democratic and non-Democratic liberal leaders are regularly blasted for lacking courage, speaking up for pro-trade policies at a time when Trump wants tariffs to be chic is not just brave; it puts the party on the same policy trajectory as millions of North Americans. More important, though, it is consistent with an idealistic, politically successful, and deep Democratic party tradition of supporting trade, and doing so in a way that resonates with the voters Democrats need to win elections.
Indeed, if Trump’s pro-tariff trend continues, history suggests only good things for the Democratic Party. As Trump attempts to revive isolationism, Democrats are returning to their internationalist, export-enthusiastic, anti-tariff roots. Throughout the 20th century, Democrats stimulated prosperity and won elections (and liberal hearts) by advocating lower tariffs, export-based growth, and economic integration coupled with social safety nets. Though the party has sometimes wobbled in its commitment in recent decades, its history repeatedly shows that this approach is often the path to both political success and substantial policy achievement.
Vasyl Talaylo, 35, can still remember the heady day last August when his unit was among the first Ukrainian troops to cross the Russian border into the Kursk region, spearheading a daring gamble to divert the enemy from the all-but stalemated fighting on Ukraine’s eastern front. An elite company, mostly engineers tasked with electronic warfare—jamming and spoofing Russia’s radio signals to confuse its drones and artillery operators—Talaylo’s unit is often among the first to enter contested territory and the last to leave, an essential shield for the rest of the army.
Seven months later, the excitement of the Kursk incursion has evaporated. The last Ukrainian troops are retreating from the region as I interview Talaylo in a hospital in Kyiv. “Yes,” the wounded fighter recalls, his face twisted with emotion, “it seemed promising then. But we left a lot of young lives on that narrow strip of land. We didn’t achieve much, and we paid a heavy price.”
Talaylo’s wife holds his hand—the arm that isn’t in a sling—as we talk in a nurses’ staging area outside his dingy hospital room. A crude gauze patch covers his left eye; under the sling, a tangle of metal rods holds what’s left of his left hand together. It’s not clear if he will recover use of either hand or eye. A soft-spoken, gentle man in mismatched black sweats, he’s not complaining, just eager to see the kids—a daughter, 10, and a son, 6—he left at home in a village in western Ukraine, where he worked as a driver before enlisting a year ago. But his weeks in the hospital have given him time to reflect on the war and the U.S.-brokered ceasefire taking shape as he lies in bed, and like several soldiers I’ve spoken to in recent weeks, he’s not optimistic.
In the era of Donald Trump, many liberals understandably look back with fondness at the time when Republican moderates recognized that racial diversity strengthens institutions.
Such nostalgia can include favorable feelings for three Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices who, over the course of nearly four decades, provided the crucial swing votes to sustain racial affirmative action in higher education. Nixon appointee Lewis F. Powell Jr. did so in the 1978 Bakke decision. Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor did so in the 2003 Grutter ruling. And another Reagan appointee, Anthony Kennedy, did so in the 2016 Fisher case.
But what if that view is wrong? Looking back today, after the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, which struck down racial preferences, a very different picture emerges. Many (though not all) colleges have managed to preserve previous levels of racial diversity by adopting new programs to admit more low-income and working-class students of all races.
In light of this emerging evidence, the efforts of moderate Republican-appointed justices to fortify racial preferences takes on a different light. After all, the old admissions regime tended to benefit well-off Black and Hispanic students, and it provided political cover for a larger system of preferences for the mostly white children of alumni, donors, and faculty that is now coming under attack. What if the Republican moderates weren’t so much champions of racial justice as economic elitists who fulfilled the worst stereotypes of Republicans from that era?
