In December 2019, I traveled to Hong Kong, where a heavy unease hung in the air. For months, young people had taken to the streets to protest the encroachment of the Chinese Communist Party on what was supposed to be a self-governing, democratic system. On walls they had scrawled: “Save Hong Kong! If we burn you burn with us!” All the protesters I spoke to knew their movement would fail; it was a last assertion of democratic identity before it was extinguished by a new order that saw democracy as the enemy within.
I met with a government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. “The nationalism in the U.S. and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this wasn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think — should we really follow a Western model?” We were sitting in a hotel lounge, the invisible forces he described surrounding us: capitalism, but not democracy; cultural elites cloistered away from the working class. “The nationalist movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model,” he added.
Everything I’d experienced told me he was right. Eight years serving in the Obama White House after the financial crisis felt like swimming upstream, against the currents of global politics. A radicalized Republican Party rejected liberal democracy at home, mirroring far-right leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary who spoke about installing “illiberal democracy” (a polite term for “blood and soil” nationalism) across Europe. In Russia, Vladimir Putin set out to undermine — if not dismantle — the liberal order helmed by the United States. In China, Xi Jinping began to shift Beijing’s strategy from rising within that order to building a separate one, drained of democratic values. Barack Obama’s political skills and cultural appeal allowed him to navigate those currents, but they didn’t always transfer to other Democrats.
Donald Trump’s first victory challenged my liberal assumptions about the inevitability of a certain kind of progress: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” For eight years outside of government, I have talked to opposition figures around the world and heard versions of the same story everywhere. After the Cold War, globalization chipped away at people’s sense of security and identity.
In the West, neoliberalism — that blend of free trade, deregulation and deference to financial markets — hollowed-out communities while enriching a global oligarchy. Meanwhile, a homogenized and often crass popular culture eroded traditional national and religious identities. After 9/11, the war on terror was embraced by autocrats such as Mr. Putin, who used it as a frame to justify power grabs while forever wars fueled mass migration. The financial crisis came through like a hurricane, wrecking the lives of people already struggling to get by while the rich profited on the back end. Then social media’s explosion offered a vehicle to spread grievance and conspiracy theories, allowing populist leaders to radicalize their followers with the precision of an algorithm.
The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts. Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.
The persistent anti-incumbent mood was so strong that it even (narrowly) swept Mr. Trump out of office in 2020, aided by his bungling of a pandemic. But even after the shock of Jan. 6, heavy unease hung over American politics: There was no return to pre-Trump normalcy.
As president, Joe Biden embraced protectionism, organized labor and industrial policy, and his administration made investments in hollowed out communities through executive orders and legislation. Democrats relentlessly communicated the threat Mr. Trump posed to democracy, with the removal of abortion rights as proof. When they fought a mediocre collection of Republican candidates to a draw in the 2022 midterm elections, many in the party — including Mr. Biden — drew the lesson that this approach was working.
Yet now Mr. Trump has decisively won back the presidency. I would never claim to have all the answers about what went wrong, but I do worry that Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions — the “establishment” — that most Americans distrust. As a party interested in competent technocracy, we lost touch with the anger people feel at government. As a party that prizes data, we seized on indicators of growth and job creation as proof that the economy was booming, even though people felt crushed by rising costs. As a party motivated by social justice, we let revulsion at white Christian nationalism bait us into identity politics on their terms — whether it was debates about transgender athletes, the busing of migrants to cities, or shaming racist MAGA personalities who can’t be shamed. As a party committed to American leadership of a “rules-based international order,” we defended a national security enterprise that has failed repeatedly in the 21st century, and made ourselves hypocrites through unconditional military support for Israel’s bombardment of civilians in Gaza.
Democrats told true stories about Mr. Trump’s unfitness, about the legislative achievements of the Biden-Harris administration, about bodily autonomy for women. But when talking about middle-class economics, it was often in the familiar poll-tested language of the consultant class.
As a former speechwriter, I am sympathetic to the challenge of weaving these threads together. But for all his many strengths, over the last four years, Mr. Biden — in part because of his age, in part because of social media — could not fill that intangible presidential role of narrating what was happening in our nation and world. Democratic leaders in Congress tended to be old hands who’d spent decades in Washington, making them imperfect messengers for an electorate demanding change. It is no coincidence that two outsiders as different as Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump have dominated politics for 20 years.
Kamala Harris brought new energy and remarkable discipline to the campaign’s final months, revitalizing the collaborative joy essential to Democratic politics. But her ties to an unpopular incumbent — and a global post-pandemic backlash against any incumbent — held her back. Democrats understandably have a hard time fathoming why Americans would put our democracy at risk, but we miss the reality that our democracy is part of what angers them. Many voters have come to associate democracy with globalization, corruption, financial capitalism, migration, forever wars and elites (like me) who talk about it as an end in itself rather than a means to redressing inequality, reining in capitalist systems that are rigged, responding to global conflict and fostering a sense of shared national identity.
Yes, this is unfair: Republican policies from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush did far more than Democrats to create this mess. But Mr. Trump’s crusade against the past elites of his own party — from the Bush family to Mitch McConnell — credentialed him with a public hungry for accountability, while the Harris campaign’s embrace of Dick Cheney conveyed the opposite message.
Donald Trump has won the presidency, but I don’t believe he will deliver on his promises. Like other self-interested autocrats, his remedies are designed to exploit problems instead of solving them, and he’s surrounded by oligarchs who want to loot the system instead of reforming it. Mass deportation and tariffs are recipes for inflation. Tax cuts and deregulation will exacerbate inequality. America First impulses will fuel global conflict, technological disruption and climate conflagration. Mr. Trump is the new establishment in this country and globally, and we should emphasize that instead of painting him as an outlier or interloper.
Out of the wreckage of this election, Democrats must reject the impulse to simply be a resistance that condemns whatever outrageous thing Mr. Trump says. While confronting Mr. Trump when we must, we must also focus on ourselves — what we stand for, and how we tell our story. That means acknowledging — as my Hong Kong interlocutor said — that “the narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed.” Instead of defending a system that has been rejected, we need to articulate an alternative vision for what kind of democracy comes next.
We should merge our commitment to the moral, social and demographic necessity of an inclusive America with a populist critique of the system that Mr. Trump now runs; a focus more on reform than just redistribution. We must reform the corruption endemic to American capitalism, corporate malfeasance, profiteering in politics, unregulated technologies transforming our lives, an immigration system broken by Washington, the cabal of autocrats pushing the world to the brink of war and climate catastrophe.
After he lost an election in 2002, Mr. Orban spent years holding “civic circles” around Hungary — grass-roots meetings, often around churches, which built an agenda and sense of belonging that propelled him back into power. In their own way, the next generation of Democratic leaders should fan out across the country. Learn from mayors innovating at the local level. Listen to communities that feel alienated. Find places where multiracial democracy is working better than it is in the rest of the country. Tell those stories when pitching policies. Foster a sense of belonging to something bigger, so democracy doesn’t feel like the pablum of a ruling elite, but rather the remedy for fixing what is broken in Washington and our body politic.
We are not living in Hong Kong, where a democratic movement could be extinguished. A midterm election looms. Mr. Trump is term-limited. The next four years will be trying and dangerous — especially for the more vulnerable among us. But if we understand the global trends that got us here, we can swing the political pendulum back in our direction and seize that moment with a new vision of liberalism and democracy.
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