Undaunted by his predecessor’s failure to spark a manufacturing renaissance, President Trump also dreams of reindustrializing America. He won’t succeed either, because no president has the power to undo a half-century of post-industrial evolution.

Why have our two oldest presidents fixated on “bringing back” factory jobs? Both grew up in the ‘50s, when the United States bestrode a war-ravaged world like an industrial colossus. But the answer isn’t just nostalgia for a lost “golden age.”

There’s also a pervasive feeling that our country owes a promissory note to working families hit hard by deindustrialization. The disappearance of manufacturing jobs with decent pay and benefits — traditionally their ticket from high school to the middle class — has undermined their living standards and social standing.

Read more in The Hill. 

The Democratic Party faces a whole mess of problems today. But if its post-2024 shortcomings could be reduced to any single thing, it would be this: We’ve become more concerned with those who shower before work than after. Many of the Biden administration’s priorities—forgiving student debt, banning exports of cleaner natural gas, placating protesters chanting about the “patriarchy”—made us look like tribunes of the nation’s liberal elite. No matter the pains we took to verbalize our love for the working class, our actions spoke louder than our words.

Now, I don’t doubt that many Democrats are eager to win back the working-class voters we’ve lost over the last decade. But, as many of my colleagues and friends agreed at a recent conference organized by the Progressive Policy Institute in Denver—titled “New Directions for Democrats”—our party’s failure to focus on issues that directly affect working-class voters opened the door for MAGAism. To win those voters back, we will need to focus anew on the guys who return home from work drenched in sweat, and the women who stagger back from their hospital shifts burdened by exhaustion. That means changes in both our style and our substance.

Too often, we try to skirt the hard work that entails by focusing exclusively on President Donald Trump. I don’t care for him any more than the next guy—but the hard truth is that we’ll never make inroads by ranting against the “oligarchy” alone. Instead, we need to make clear what the Trump administration is doing to undermine the working-class American Dream. The specters of fascism, racism, xenophobia, and transphobia might draw crowds to rallies, but if we’re going to reconnect with working-class voters, we need to make their cause our primary concern. And begins by highlighting how Donald Trump is affecting their communities directly.

Read more in Newsweek.

As we approach Memorial Day, it is sobering to recognize that today’s young people are unlikely to respond as enthusiastically to a call to serve their country as members of the World War II generation did 80 years ago. Young people do not exhibit the high levels of patriotism and commitment to democracy found among earlier generations. However, I don’t blame young people.

Each generation must be taught, by word and deed, the genius of American democracy, and those of us who are older have failed to do so.

During World War II, Americans rallied around Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call to make America the “Arsenal of Democracy,” providing war materials to confront Adolf Hitler. Young men and women ultimately came forward to serve in U.S. military forces that would change history by defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Today, pride in America and belief in democracy are much lower among young people than among older Americans. In a 2023 Gallup poll, only 18 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds said they were “extremely proud to be American,” compared with 50 percent of adults over 55.

Read more in DC Journal. 

President Trump’s startling win in 2016 ushered in a new era of economic populism. Ever since, both parties have been vying to offer a new economic deal to blue-collar Americans, whose earning power had been declining for decades.

They could use a new deal. According to the Federal Reserve, real median earnings for non-college workers fell 14 percent over the past 40 years, while those for workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher have grown by 14 percent.

Opportunity in America looks very different to people on opposite sides of the diploma divide. Whereas non-college workers contend with downward mobility, the highly educated rise into tonier precincts of upper-middle-class affluence.

This disparity disfigures our society, and populists across the political spectrum are right to want to redress it. Unfortunately, they have proved better at posturing as working-class tribunes than at tangibly improving their lives.

Keep reading in The Hill.

These are anxious times for our country. We are assailed hourly by a belligerent president who treats America’s laws, courts and civil liberties with utter contempt and imagines he can rule a free people by royal decree.

Are Democrats fighting hard enough against President Trump’s malicious policies and rampant abuses of power? Progressive activists say no, and they’re even threatening to unseat Democrats they claim are afraid to mix it up.

This is asinine — a return to the politics of subtraction that has locked the party out of power, effectively disarming it in the struggle with a rogue president.

The party’s left turn in reaction to Trump’s rise since 2016 has been a fiasco. It’s identified Democrats with soaring prices and living costs, sclerotic federal bureaucracies that can’t get things done, unrestricted illegal immigration, permissive attitudes toward crime and an illiberal politics of race and gender essentialism.

That has left the Democratic brand badly tarnished. Only 27 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the party.

Keep reading in The Hill.

President Trump is having a grand time playing chicken with the U.S. economy, risking our prosperity to force other countries to submit to his protectionist diktats. It’s put him right where he wants to be — at the center of world attention.

But his vendetta against trade is alarming U.S. consumers, businesses and investors, and reawakening public doubts that he knows what he’s doing.

Most Americans don’t see the point in picking fights with friendly trade partners like Canada. Private sector leaders are aghast at Trump’s on-again, off-again threats to impose suffocating “reciprocal” duties on all imported goods.

While pausing those tariffs to stop the U.S. bond market from melting down, Trump has imposed an equally arbitrary 10 percent tariff on most of our trading partners. He’s also gone nuclear on China, raising tariffs to an absurd 245 percent and goading Beijing into levying massive retaliatory duties on U.S. exports.

Read the full piece in The Hill. 

Most Democratic operatives will tell you today that the Democratic Party thrives as a “big tent.” And truth be told, ours remains a remarkably diverse institution, with constituent elements from every part of the country that span a broad swath of ideological viewpoints.

In many cases, that diversity is the key to Democrats winning in conservative-leaning districts. For example, this past cycle, we saw 13 Democratic congressional candidates, nearly all of whom were backed by New Dems or Blue Dogs, elected in districts that supported Trump at the presidential level. Without being able to field candidates who differ ideologically from their more progressive peers, those seats would almost certainly have been lost.

But you wouldn’t necessarily know this listening to Democrats talk at the national level, including those enamored of the large crowds drawn by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). That’s because, in Washington, Democrats often cede too much political ground to the loudest and most organized fringes of our large coalition.

Keep reading in The Hill.