The Democrats Face An Impossible Task

Can they unify around a new leader?

Jun 03, 2025

My latest article in The Spectator’s print mag — I hope you’ll read and share:

“Why is the Democratic party viewed as toxic by so many? Even people inside the party acknowledge that,” journalist Tara Palmeri recently asked the Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania on her ominously titled Somebody’s Gotta Win podcast.

John Fetterman’s answer was blunt: “I think their primary currency was shaming and scolding and talking down to people and telling them, ‘Hey, I know better than you’ or ‘You’re dopes’ or ‘You are a bro’ or ‘You’re ignorant or you know it, don’t you’? You know, ‘How can you be this dumb?’ I can’t imagine it. And then, by the way, ‘They’re fascists, how can you vote for that?’ When you’re in a state like Pennsylvania, I know and I love people that voted for Trump and they’re not fascist.”

For decades, Democrats deployed the “our enemies are evil” rhetoric. They demonized “Bushitler.” They suggested John McCain was an unhinged warmonger. They framed Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as people who wanted to push wheelchair-bound grandmas off cliffs.

This was accepted as mere campaign hyperbole by most Americans, extreme language that could be cast aside as soon as the presidential opponent left the stage. Sure, Joe Biden may have said Romney was going to put black people back in chains. Nobody believed he meant it, though.

These days it’s very different. Trump’s return was heralded as a dangerous fascistic triumph, not just by those in remote corners of the internet or progressives who attempt to convince people of their opinions by writing messages on cardboard and carrying them in the streets (yes, still in 2025) but by major publications like the Atlantic and by members of Congress themselves.

Such language has a demonstrably negative social effect: a recent poll suggests that a large majority of self-identified liberals report ending relationships with those who support Donald Trump. And the “lost friends” problem is worst among the Democrats’ strongest voting cohort – college-educated women.

With this great coming apart, it’s no wonder Democrats are struggling to find a candidate for 2028 who can champion their values while bridging the political divide. The political wilderness has raised a host of critics, not just Fetterman but Barack Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who described the Democratic brand to the Wall Street Journal as “toxic” and “weak and woke.”

As popular radio host Charlamagne tha God put it, “If [the Democrats] make it a class issue, they win this next election… but they’re afraid to do that because a lot of them are in the pockets of the billionaire class and the corporations, so they make it about identity politics.”

Billionaire Mark Cuban, sometimes touted as the left’s answer to Trump, had an equally gloomy prognosis: “If you gave the Democrats a dollar bill and said, ‘You can sell these for 50 cents,’ they would hire 50 people and then would not know how to sell the dollar bill for 50 cents… I’ve learned the Democrats can’t sell worth shit.”

The fundamental problem Democrats face is that they have gone too far left for the median voter in the country – one reason even cultural progressives such as Gavin Newsom, the California governor-turned-podcaster, have started sounding off against transgender athletes.

Unfortunately for the party, such moves spark immediate backlash from the loudest and most active members of its base, the same base that has elevated the likes of New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett to the top of the very early presidential polls. They are not in the mood for moderation, ranking their progressive warrior maidens well ahead of more centrist choices such as Governors Wes Moore of Maryland and Andy Beshear of Kentucky.

The central question Democrats need to resolve is what image of the party they want to present as an alternative to the widely anticipated coronation of J.D. Vance on the Republican side. Even if Vance is not the eventual pick, the possibility of any 2028 nominee emerging from outside the Trump administration seems absurd.

On the Democratic side, the idea that anyone who was a member of the Biden administration has a shot at the champion role seems equally ridiculous – hampered not just by association with an unpopular presidency, but by the now all-too obvious lies told to the American people concerning Biden’s health and capacity to govern.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats are still dogged by their ever-present age problem. In the House, of the 20 oldest members elected last year, 16 were Democrats; 11 of the 14 senators over 75 are members of the party. For any Democrat going up against a 44-year-old father of young kids such as Vance in 2028, the contrast in vigor could be a central issue of the election – especially with Biden’s decrepitude in the immediate rearview.

Democrats will also have to navigate the challenges of race and gender in a party whose ongoing conversation seems dominated by such concerns. Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, addressed the problem openly at – where else – Harvard’s Kennedy School: “I was on the ticket quite honestly, you know, [because] I could code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck, that I could put them at ease. I was the permission structure to say, look, you can do this and vote for this. And you look across those swing states, with the exception of Minnesota, we didn’t get enough of those votes.”

Of course, a smart coalition would court those votes far more effectively than Walz did with his bizarre behavior on the campaign trail. But that might end up offending the same people who dominate the party discourse. In a recent townhall, Representative. Crockett accused the party’s donors and leadership of already gearing up to back a white male candidate: “You know what? Like, let’s go look for the white boy who is the safest.”

But that may be what winning requires for a party that lost men, college educated or not, in the last election. Walz’s camouflage hat and “code talking” certainly weren’t enough. You can’t just manifest energy to win white male voters when the bulk of your party is devoted to the idea that it’s only privilege and past discrimination that give them value in American society.

For all that, Democrats have faced similar challenges before – and within Vance’s lifetime. No one could have expected Arkansas’s Bill Clinton to emerge from scandal and controversy as a centrist-minded, populist-coded nominee capable of taking on a patrician politician as established as George H.W. Bush was in 1991. The untested and youthful Obama skipping ahead to topple the Clinton machine in 2008 was just as surprising.

Democrats have a way of stumbling across natural political talents at key moments when they seem down and out. For 2028, the party must hope it can do so again – even if that seems impossible right now.

More here from Patrick Ruffini: The Collapsing Turnout of Democratic Voters

What the Ukraine Drone Attacks Mean for the War

WSJ:

Ukraine said its Sunday attack damaged or destroyed more than 40 aircraft, while experts have documented about 14 strikes on Russian bombers—a huge setback for Moscow either way.
One question is whether the spiraling attacks will spur the administration to engage more deeply in the peace process—or walk away, as U.S. officials have repeatedly threatened to do. Trump last week appeared to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a two-week deadline, threatening to “respond a little bit differently” if he concluded the Russian leader was stringing him along.
Trump’s vow to walk away from the war is unrealistic, some analysts said. “Walking away extends the fighting,” said William Taylor, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine during the George W. Bush and first Trump administrations. “It would be an admission of failure.”
Putin still appears to be calculating that Trump has no appetite for siding more closely with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and would rather disengage from the conflict than impose long-threatened additional sanctions on Moscow’s oil experts or revive large-scale U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine.
Zelensky is in a tighter spot given his sometimes tense relationship with Trump, which resulted in a brief cutoff of U.S. intelligence and military support after a disastrous Oval Office meeting in February. He has sought to show the White House he is ready for a truce even while rebuffing Putin’s draconian demands.

More here:

Europe’s Cultural Identity Crisis

Lionel Shriver in The Spectator:

What does it mean to be German? The British are familiar with this variety of tortured interrogation, illustrated earlier this year by the difference of opinion between former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson and podcaster Konstantin Kisin over whether former British prime minister Rishi Sunak is legitimately “English.” The frequency with which Europeans are asking themselves what defines who they are betrays a rising insecurity and bewilderment. Rattlingly tectonic demographic change, little of which locals asked for, has triggered a continent-wide identity crisis.
Surely there’s still such a thing as quintessential Englishness, more broadly Britishness, as well as Germanness, Irishness, etc. While these elusive clusters of attributes aren’t implicitly genetic, they do have an ethnic and ancestral component. National characters are sensibilities, textures, demeanors. They’re hard to pin down, but you know them when you see them. For outsiders, Englishness summons reserve, diffidence, reticence, politesse, a certain precision, a reluctance to complain and a sense of honor – a civilized version of England’s inhabitants that’s grown increasingly archaic. To me, Germanness summons orderliness (if not rigidity), fastidiousness, boisterousness, vigor, resolve, mastery, exactingness. Wurst and loaves of health bread that would double as shotputs. Compulsive cringing over World War Two. Pedestrians’ insistence on not crossing against a red light though there’s no traffic.
These semi-ethnic designations needn’t be absolute. If I may borrow from gender ideology, embodiment of a national gestalt is a spectrum. For example, Fraser and Konstantin are both right. Born and bred in England, with the manner and manners to match, Sunak is exquisitely English. Yet as a practicing Hindu whose Indian parents emigrated from East Africa in the 1960s, he’s inevitably an increment less English than a counterpart whose English forebears go back a thousand years. Why is that observation inflammatory? What shouldn’t be up for grabs is that Muslims born in Syria or Afghanistan, raised on flatbread and hummus and praying five times a day facing Mecca, don’t seem especially German, even if they land in Homburg as adults. Yet now that the continent’s leaders have welcomed millions from the culturally far-abroad – nearly a quarter of Germany’s population has an “immigrant history,” according to its own stats – Europeans are being forced to adopt an American conception of their peoples. After all, it’s a truism that “anyone can become an American.” These days, then, anyone can become British, if not English. Anyone can become German, and claiming that genuine Germanness can’t be conferred by mere bureaucratic abracadabra makes you an “extremist.”
Believe it or not, there was once such a thing as Americanness. Europeans used to make fun of it. In broad strokes, Yanks were seen as open, trusting, innocent, gormless, guileless; a little stupid, or at least ignorant; optimistic and heartbreakingly credulous; sometimes irksomely likable; unsophisticated, loud; insensitive, if often unwittingly; not very funny, but quick to laugh; badly dressed, before everyone was badly dressed; fat, before everyone was fat; easily awed and jarringly direct. But that portrait is growing as dated as the reserved one of the English has become, and I don’t mean there’s a new version. There’s no version. After the onslaught of tens of millions of immigrants from every point of the compass in only the last 30 years – newcomers decreasingly inclined to assimilate – my country grows ever more incoherent. Any quality or behavior seeming “awfully American” is a notion of yesteryear. The US is a geographical location and, as its politicians love to boast, an “idea,” an abstraction. The country less and less connotes a people.
Until recently, most Americans had European roots. That civilizational commonality is finished. The American model of nationality is being tested to the utmost. As Europe embraces the same formula – any freshly arrived foreign resident, presto, is as German as Oktoberfest – national identity becomes an empty suit. “Culture” is one of the hardest words in English to define. Maybe it’s easiest to grasp what a culture is when you’ve lost it.

Josh Hawley and the GOP’s Labor Pivot

New Yorker:

Earlier this year, a member of the Federalist Society posted an article raising the alarm about an ambitious proposal to reshape federal labor law. The proposal, titled “A Pro-Worker Framework for the 119th U.S. Congress,” calls for introducing civil penalties to deter employers from engaging in unfair labor practices. It advocates banning so-called captive-audience meetings—gatherings that employees are forced to attend—that companies have used to spread anti-union messages. It also outlines ways to expedite union elections and the implementation of collective-bargaining agreements, which employers frequently delay. With Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, the odds of enacting such union-friendly reforms may appear remote. But the blogger at the Federalist Society was concerned because, as he noted with dismay, the author of the proposal is himself a prominent Republican, Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri.
Back in 2021, a photographer snapped a picture of Hawley as he raised his fist to salute protesters outside the Capitol on January 6th. (After some of them stormed the building, Hawley, in video later released by the January 6th Committee, was seen fleeing for cover.) That image, and Hawley’s subsequent refusal to certify the results of the Electoral College, would permanently tarnish his reputation, many observers thought at the time. But Hawley, like Donald Trump, was returned to office in the last election, one in which Trump carried working-class voters (defined as those without a college degree) by a fourteen-point margin. Along with Vice-President J. D. Vance, Hawley now appears to be positioning himself as Trump’s heir, a right-wing populist who can appeal to voters in the MAGA base. On April 15th—Tax Day—Hawley published an op-ed in the Washington Post that called for expanding tax relief for families who don’t earn enough to qualify for benefits such as the mortgage-tax deduction. A few weeks later, he published another op-ed, this one in the Times, assailing “corporatist Republicans” who have insisted that Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax-and-spending bill must include large cuts to social-insurance programs, including Medicaid.
“That argument is both morally wrong and politically suicidal,” Hawley wrote. Instead of slashing a program that millions of low-income families rely on, he affirmed, Republicans should be pushing to cap prescription-drug costs. To achieve this goal, Hawley had joined Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, to introduce a bill that would impose financial penalties on pharmaceutical companies that sell products in the U.S. at prices that exceed the average in countries such as Germany and Canada, where drugs are far cheaper. Hawley is also the co-sponsor, with Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, of the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which would amend the National Labor Relations Act to require employers to begin negotiating with newly unionized workers within ten days. The bill would also send disputes to binding arbitration if a contract is not reached within a hundred and twenty days.

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