Democrats must choose

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Your guide to what the American elections mean 2024 for Washington and the world

What should Democrats do? It is a huge question now, not only for the party, but for the United States. Regardless of the Senator in Vermont Bernie Sanders, who travels throughout the country to try to mobilize people against Donald Trump in the city’s halls, on television, and the Sinteror in the similar thinking, a few Democrats justify loudly. Even fewer than that can install any kind of political resistance to the American president.

There was no strong challenge to the policy of non -coherent tariffs, or the effective anger of the proposed tax cuts of the wealthy and companies that would put the country in a Less sustainable financial position. Unlike Democrats, bond markets appeared to be alarm on that front.

Even the studied Republicans are concerned about the inability of Democrats to stand up to Trump, especially given the risks that the country’s economic strategies can lead to recession. At a recent gathering at the Yale Business School by CEOs, there was a great interest about his plans and deep interest in the economic future of America.

Former discourse writer Ronald Reagan Baiji Nonan summarized it: “If the Democrats are not wisdom, Mr. Trump and the Republicans will know that there is no major party to slow them down, hide them, and stop them. This will not be good. They need to be deducted. The Democratic Party that does not report is dangerous.”

However, some liberals claim this completely. In an opinion article, veteran strategic expert James Carville argued that Democrats should “play dead” and allow Trump to collapse. Others suggest that progressive should “immerse the region” and control the attention economy in a more combat way, as Trump does.

But both sides miss a decisive point: Democrats cannot successfully communicate with the public until they have a coherent political position. Currently, they do not do so, because they have not yet chosen the economic populism or a slightly updated version of new liberalism. Will Franklin Dr. Roosevelt their northern star? Or the old Carville president, Bill Clinton?

While some, such as Sanders, Murphy, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, want to walk on the popular road, it seems that the party leadership and the majority of the democratic donor base want to return to a copy of the neoliberalism dating back to the Obama era. This focused on identity instead of the class, pushing free trade for its interest and focused on the industrial strategy (with the interests of workers), but on making the government itself more efficient.

The latter is the line that journalists Ezzra Klein and Derek Thompson pushed in their new book, abundanceThis is what he argues in a large part that many of the organization are what turned people against Democrats. They have any number of good examples about how to do not organize excess, inefficiency and horrific interests. It is impossible to do things such as building high -speed rail networks in California (where everyone mainly wants) or to repair the crisis of the ability to afford housing costs. They argue that Democrats need to go out on their way and make it easier for the government to do things.

There is a lot that can be said about this advice, but it also skills as I think it is the main economic defect in the American economy today: the lack of consistency of power. The private sector, especially a handful of major companies, has a lot of money and power-something that it embodies an unprecedented proximity to ELON Musk to Trump and billionaire billionaire in the installation of the president-while workers have very little.

At the same time, although wealth and population are mostly concentrated in a handful of coastal urban areas, the electoral college structure means that the center of the country is very important in terms of voters ’results. This is a major reason because many regulations in California or New York were not related to Trump’s victory. Instead, it was a matter of the fact that people in post -industrial societies in three sinking states voted with historical numbers, and they were not correctly thinking that he would protect their jobs.

As long as this electoral structure exists, and if you believe that the unrestricted markets fail to provide major public goods, you should think about the real economic populism – not the fake Maga type – the winning form of Democrats will be. But this means that the wealthy liberals should think exceeding their interests.

This tension is painfully clear in the party’s failure to fight Trump’s tax cuts, which, if Democrats, are ever regained, they will put financial restrictions and budget on their ability to accomplish anything. They did not speak enough in 2017, because wealthy donors are like tax cuts.

Likewise, the populists and the new fryers are divided among those who want a preliminary strategy that focuses on the upper Middle West (where Trump’s commercial wars with Canada can raise energy prices for manufacturers), and those who prefer to focus on the south, where you can talk about sweat but to a large extent avoid major economic problems.

The ordinary readers will know the direction it preferred. But the important point is that Democrats should make a clear choice. To do, they will not have any message to be transferred.

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