I keep checking the results for the special Congressional race in California’s East Bay to fill the remaining months of the seat vacated by Rep. Eric Swalwell. State Senator Aisha Wahab holds a narrow two-point lead over transportation official Melissa Hernandez with 62 percent of the vote counted, and mail-in ballots still to be tallied. Why should anyone outside of Hayward, California care? It’s because the country’s foreign policy and its political morality -- if I can use such a term -- are at stake.

In the first round of the primary last June, Wahab led Hernandez, the nearest challenger, by 26 points, but because she failed to get a majority among the four candidates, she and Hernandez had to hold a run off last Tuesday. Both candidates are Democrats, but Wahab, who supports programs like Medicare for All, is closer to the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. But the election last Tuesday didn’t turn on healthcare policy.

In the last weeks before the run-off, AIPAC and affiliated groups aligned with Israel’s government pumped $6.3 million into the race attacking Wahab. That’s more than they have spent this year on any House race. American foreign policy had not figured in the race except during a debate among the four candidates where they were asked to raise their hand if they thought Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Wahab did and Hernandez did not. Herandez said Israel had “a right to defend itself,” but she added that the destruction in Gaza “had gone too far.” That was enough to spur AIPAC’s United Democracy Project into action.

But AIPAC and Bold America didn’t run ads defending their support for unconditional aid to Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu government. Their ads didn’t mention Israel. Instead, they attacked Wahab for obscure stands she had taken as a state legislator. Wahab and all the other Democrats on the state’s Public Safety Committee had opposed a bill on sex trafficking because it was written too broadly and could target people who were not engaged in trafficking. Wahab, one ad said, “led that effort, making teenage girls more vulnerable to predators.” Another mailer attacked Wahab as a “radical socialist,” which she has not identified herself to be.

Wahab’s life story is worth noting. She was born in Queens, New York, the child of Afghan immigrants who had fled the Soviet-Afghan war. Soon after her birth, her father was murdered, and her mother died. She was raised by foster parents in Fremont, California and earned her bachelor’s degree, an MBA, and a Ph.D. in social work. She served on the Hayward City Council and in 2022 won a state senate seat. It’s a great American success story, but if it’s up to AIPAC and its despicable allies, it will have a chapter with an unhappy ending in the 14th district congressional race. To be noted: whoever wins this run-off, there is likely to be a rerun in November for the Congressional seat.

UPDATE: Wahab has been declared the winner. She leads by six percentage points with 95 percent of the vote counted.

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In The New York Times today, you can read about how Florida, once a swing state -- Barack Obama won it twice -- has become a “Republican juggernaut.” Republicans, the article notes,

hold every statewide elected office and supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature. They have also drastically swung voter registration in the state: In 2018, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by about 250,000 voters. Today, Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 1.5 million voters.

The article describes the Republican advantage as “structural,” and if you are talking about redistricting, that’s certainly the case. But the reason that Florida, in contrast to West Virginia or North Dakota, turned solidly Republican, was not “structural.” It was a strictly contingent event. It was because two billionaires decided to intervene in the 2018 governor’s race to the detriment of the Florida Democratic Party and its future. The new Republican governor Ron DeSantis, who should have been easily defeated that November, took the story from there. I wrote about this in the new defunct Liberal Patriot (which will reincarnate as The Long View), and I reprint it here in case anyone is interesting in why and not simply how Florida’s politics have changed:

Florida Man Turns State from Purple to Deep Red

The 2018 election was a turning point for Florida politics and for little-known congressman Ron DeSantis. While Democrats enjoyed a spate of victories that year in House races, including in Florida, DeSantis won the governor’s race, and has been able to use that position to strengthen the Republican hold over Florida and to enhance his own political prospects. He is now the main challenger to Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination and could conceivably become the next president of the United States.

His victory in 2018 was by no means foreseen. He was aided by an effective Republican organization. But he also received unexpected and unintended assistance from two Democratic billionaires, Tom Steyer and George Soros. They helped provide him with an opponent that he could beat—even in a year that favored Democratic candidates. It’s a story of the untoward sway that individual billionaires hold over our campaign finance system.

As the campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor began in early 2018, the favorite was former congresswoman Gwen Graham, the daughter of former governor and senator Bob Graham. In 2014, Graham had been one of the few Democrats to unseat a Republican incumbent in a Tallahassee district. Her main opponent, it appeared, was former Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine, a multimillionaire who would spend $29 million on his campaign. Another opponent was Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, who, with an August 28 election pending, was running fourth in one mid-July poll with only seven percent of the vote. He was given little chance of winning.

Gillum was an effective speaker. An African-American, he was also running as the “progressive” candidate by championing Medicare for All, the abolition of the United States Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), and, perhaps most important of all for what was to come, the impeachment of Donald Trump. Gillum’s candidacy caught the eye of hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, a key figure in the Democracy Alliance, a super-wealthy group that sought to boost and shape the Democratic Party.

In 2013, Steyer had established his own group, NextGen, to advocate on climate change and aid political candidates. In October 2017, Steyer started another group, Need to Impeach, and launched a $10 million television campaign to impeach Donald Trump. (This was well prior to Trump’s attempt to use American aid to Ukraine to his own personal political benefit.) Based on constitutional grounds that had failed to sway Democratic officials, this campaign reflected Steyer’s opposition to Trump’s policies and person. It would become his preoccupation, and he later announced that he would not donate to any Democrat who did not support impeachment.

Steyer told The New York Times that he liked Gillum because “he’s a fierce gun control person, he’s been a climate champion. He’s called for the impeachment of the president.” Other candidates had similar stances on gun control and better records on climate change, but what probably stood out for Steyer was Gillum’s support for impeachment. As a Tallahassee official, moreover, Gillum had backed a coal-fired power plant. The only other factor that may have swayed Steyer was that Gillum was, in his words, a “young African-American.”

Starting in July 2018, Steyer poured $1.4 million into Gillum’s primary campaign. George Soros, a Democracy Alliance colleague, joined these efforts and pumped $700,000 into Gillum’s PAC. Steyer also put NextGen to work rounding up voters for Gillum. With money for television, Gillum surged in the polls. On the eve of the primary election, he stood second to Graham, and on election day he edged her out by three percentage points. Without the intervention of Steyer and Soros, it’s fair to say that Gillum would not have won the primary.

The early favorite in the Republican primary race was former congressman and Agricultural Commissioner Adam Putnam. But DeSantis pulled ahead in the polls in March, aided by an endorsement from President Trump. In his ads, DeSantis played up Trump’s support. In one late July spot that received widespread attention, DeSantis was seen showing his toddler daughter how to build a wall with blocks and how to say “Make America Great Again” as well as reading Trump’s Art of the Deal to his four-year-old son.

DeSantis bested Putnam by twenty points in the primary, but potentially faced a stiff test in the general election. While Trump was popular among Florida Republicans, he was not popular with independents and, of course, with Democrats. In the initial post-primary polls, Gillum consistently ran ahead of DeSantis. But Gillum had some severe weaknesses that hadn’t seemed to bother either Steyer or Soros or Democratic primary voters but would cost him the election.

The first was Tallahassee and Leon County’s crime rate under Gillum, which was higher than that of any Florida city and county; DeSantis and the Republicans would highlight that fact in their ads. The second was Gillum’s extreme positions on ICE, Medicare for All (which entailed large tax increases), and Trump’s impeachment (which was not yet popular except among partisan Democrats). Third, and most important, was the cloud of corruption swirling around Gillum, which was very well known in the state and national political circles before his primary win.

In June 2017, Floridians had learned from grand jury subpoenas that the FBI had been investigating corruption in the Tallahassee government while Gillum was mayor. Gillum’s brother and an old friend who had served as his campaign treasurer were reportedly under scrutiny, and the FBI had interviewed Gillum himself. Gillum, it was suggested, had received favors from FBI agents posing as developers soliciting city business, including a luxurious trip to Costa Rica and $1,000 in Hamilton musical tickets during a trip to New York. Gillum denied that he was himself under investigation. He claimed ignorance about the Hamilton tickets and stated that he paid cash for the $1,400 a night Costa Rica hotel stay.

All this information was widely reported before the primary. As Ben Wilcox, research director for Integrity Florida, told the New York Times the day after the primary, “I don’t think anybody expected Mayor Gillum to be the nominee, but now he is, and all of this stuff is going to come under really close scrutiny.”

DeSantis, the Republican National Committee, and the Republican Governors Association ran repeated ads highlighting Gillum’s ties to the corruption inquiry. Gillum denounced the ads and threatened to take legal action against the stations that ran them. He charged that in raising this issue, the Republicans playing the race card against him. “The goal is obviously to use my candidacy as a way to reinforce, frankly, stereotypes about black men,” he said.

On the basis of polls, it looked in early October as though Gillum, with the aid of over ten million dollars from Steyer, might pull through and win the election. But two weeks before the November election, another shoe dropped in the corruption inquiry: the Florida Ethics Commission had begun an inquiry of its own. Materials handed over to the commission by Gillum’s former campaign treasurer included text messages and emails from Gillum that suggested he was aware that one of the agents posing as a developer was paying for the Hamilton tickets. “Awesome news about Hamilton,” Gillum texted his friend who had texted him the developer, “and the crew have tickets for us.”

Gillum played down the revelation. “We got 99 issues, and ‘Hamilton’ ain’t one of them,” he said. But the texts and emails raised more general questions about Gillum’s integrity and cast a long shadow over the last two weeks of the campaign. When DeSantis edged out Gillum, the corruption charges against Gillum proved decisive. “A substantial portion of the electorate do not like politicians who have a reputation of being in it for themselves,” Jon Ausman, the former Democratic state committeeman and former chair of the Leon County Democratic Party—and a donor to Gillum’s campaign—told the Tallahassee Democrat in its post-election analysis.

It’s likely that Gwen Graham would have won the election. That’s my opinion, but it’s also shared by Florida political commentators. Writing last year for Florida Politics, Joe Henderson speculated that Graham would have won. “She likely would have run a better campaign than Gillum,” he wrote. “And while Donald Trump endorsed DeSantis, it’s worth remembering that independent voters decide these races, and Trump had big issues there. The odds are good that Graham would have beaten DeSantis. Had that happened, Florida would likely have remained a purple state instead of the crimson-hued place it is today.”

If Steyer and Soros had not stepped in to rescue Gillum’s failing primary campaign, then, Graham would likely have been the Democratic candidate for governor. Steyer and Soros, who can afford armies of consultants and advisors, must have known about Gillum’s vulnerabilities as a candidate—and if they didn’t, they should have. These weaknesses were reported not only in Florida newspapers and television, but in the New York Times and Politico. But the two billionaires decided to tip the scales in favor of Gillum.

Gillum himself has not fared well in the aftermath of his defeat. Three years ago, Gillum was found by police in a Miami Beach hotel room with a man who had overdosed from drugs, along with remnants of the drugs. Gillum, who according to the police was too drunk to talk to them about what had happened, later underwent treatment for alcohol abuse and depression. He is about to go on trial in a federal court in Leon County on charges that go back to his time as mayor—including lying to FBI agents in 2016 about his New York trip and fraudulently soliciting around $57,000 in political contributions. Gillum has pleaded not guilty. “I am unequivocally innocent of the gross allegations being made against me,” he wrote.

If found guilty, Gillum could end up in jail on these charges. DeSantis, who, if not for the intervention of Steyer and Soros, might not have been elected governor, could end up as the next president of the United States.

[My Update: Gillum’s trial on charges of federal conspiracy and wire fraud charges having to do with campaign donations ended in a hung jury in 2023 and he was acquitted of charges that he lied to FBI agents. Most recently, he has been in trouble with the law in Alabama on what may be flimsy drug possession charges. DeSantis dropped out of the presidential race in 2023 and endorsed our current president.]

As far as Hong’s politics go, I hope the leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as the rank and file, of which I am a lowly, inactive dues-payer, learned something from Hong’s defeat. DSA can’t put its candidates and elected officials in a position of having to defend what the leadership calls “aspirational” demands to throw open the countries’ borders, abolish prisons, get rid of the police, and eliminate the Senate. These are issues for study groups to deliberate. The organization should stand for political and economic democracy, the defense of nation and the support for stability and human rights internationally. DSA should consign its new program, “Workers Deserve More,” to the dustbin. No candidate should have to answer for it. If a candidate or a DSA member believes in open borders, fine.

I see Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned for not endorsing Hong. If their failure to endorse helped ensure Hong’s defeat, they did democratic socialism a favor, as well as aiding the other Democratic candidates who would have had to answer for Hong’s views on Thanksgiving or White Supremacy. Sanders and AOC and other leftwing Democrats should not be required to endorse anyone who calls themselves a “democratic socialist” any more than a socialist organization should be required to send “friendship delegations” (as DSA has!) to any regime that calls itself “socialist.”

One final, but related, point: I also read the same people criticizing AOC for declaring that “woke 1 was crazy,” referring presumably to the ideological excesses of the left during 2020. Here, too, she is doing the left and herself a favor. I wrote an essay that year for American Affairs, “Mayhem and Mania: The Political Psychology of the Pandemic,” which I will try to insert on this site. I’d also commend the column in Financial Times by Janan Ganesh, “Why must a socialist also be woke?

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First, politics aside, why is it a good idea? In his column today, Paul Krugman makes a strong case that the federal government and state governments already pay directly through Medicare and Medicaid and indirectly through tax subsidies for much of our health insurance. He argues that our healthcare system is better described as only “partially privatized” rather than partially socialized. Is the private role of insurance companies useful or would Americans benefit from having the system socialized under Medicare for All? Krugman writes:

And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care?

The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare.

Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients.

What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites.

A national health insurance system, if properly managed, could hold down costs far better than our current patchwork system of regulation -- or lack of regulation. Consumers might still run into service denial and inadequate responses to their queries and complaints, but from my experience with Medicare and with private insurance, the country would be better with a government plan. Private insurance is fine until you end up in a hospital. In my case, I had to spend a year and a half fighting an insurance company that after approving an expensive surgical operation, reneged on paying for it. (I was rescued finally by a lawyer from Senator Van Hollen’s local office.)

An extensive survey three years ago by KFF found that

A majority of insured adults (58%) say they have experienced a problem using their health insurance in the past 12 months – such as denied claims, provider network problems, and pre-authorization problems. Looking at responses by health status, two-thirds (67%) of adults in fair or poor health experienced problems with their insurance, compared to 56% of adults who say they are in at least “good” physical health. ... Nearly half of insured adults who had insurance problems were unable to satisfactorily resolve them, with some reporting serious consequences.

Why not improve the Affordable Care Act, as some Democrats propose? Unfortunately, Obamacare has proven to be easily degradable. According to one report

On the ACA marketplaces, enrollment has fallen in 49 of the 50 states since last February, landing at nearly 19.2 million, or a decline of 12%. This year alone, eight insurers have already announced that they will stop offering marketplace plans nationally or in specific states after the 2026 plan year amid the declining enrollment, a deteriorating risk pool and the expiration of the enhanced subsidies at the end of 2025. So far, insurers offering coverage next year have pitched a median rate increase of 14% for 2027, the second year in a row of double-digit premium hikes.

A Medicare for All system could also be undermined, but as the experience of social security and Medicare show, it is much harder politically to undermine a universal system. Try it, and you’re likely to suffer defeat in an election. The proposal for a public option might suffer the same fate. It would not become a credible and cheaper alternative to private plans -- and in this respect a kind of Trojan Horse that would lead to Medicare for All -- but a funds-starved dumping ground that would offer even worse service than the private plans. Like Obamacare, it wouldn’t enjoy the political cover of a universal program. And it wouldn’t solve the patchwork regulatory mess that is the Affordable Care Act. Combine that, too, with the fate that Medicaid has suffered under state legislatures and a Republican Congress that are indifferent to the poor or poorly paid.

But what about the politics? To date, state proposals to impose a single-payer system have not fared well. With Sanders’ enthusiastic backing, some Colorado Democrats put a state system on the ballot in 2016. Its prospects initially looked good, but after a barrage of ads warning of higher taxes to pay for the plan, it lost by 80 to 20 percent. There are, however, a bunch of polls that suggest Medicare for All could be a viable issue this year in Senate races and in the 2028 presidential race. One poll, by the left-leaning Data for Progress, is optimistic. In a poll last November, they find 65 percent support a Medicare for All plan. They found that even when in addition to the arguments for Medicare for All, they heard that it “would raise taxes and give government more control over the healthcare system,” it was still favored by 58 to 34 percent.

Polling this June by the more centrist Searchlight Institute, in conjunction with Tavern Research, got more equivocal results. When it asked respondents whether they would support a plan that automatically enrolled them in a “government-administered health insurance plan,” 52 percent strongly or somewhat supported it and only 20 percent somewhat or strongly opposed it. But when they added to the question that “all Americans would receive comprehensive insurance with no premiums, deductibles, or copayments, and the program would be funded through significantly increased federal taxes,” support dropped to 40 percent and opposition rose to 30 percent. The rest of the respondents were unsure.

Nationally, I buy the more equivocal Searchlight results. Besides worrying about taxes, voters who already have employer insurance plans, as my former colleague Jonathan Cohn has written, worry about an uncertain future under a government-run plan. One can imagine the current enthusiasm about Medicare for All dissipating, as it did in Colorado. But as voters, and especially the young, have become increasingly unsure about their future in an AI-driven economy, support for Medicare for All has risen and has become, perhaps, less susceptible to arguments about “big government,” taxes, and the shock of the unknown.

In May, I visited Ohio, where former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is mounting a strong challenge to current Republican Sen. Jon Husted. President Donald Trump has won Ohio by significant margins in the last three elections. As two Youngstown State professors explained to me over lunch at the Golden Dawn Restaurant, his appeal, at least in the Mahoning Valley where Youngstown is located, was both economic and cultural. “He was rough and tumble,” Paul Sracic, a politics professor, told me. “The very things that make him despised in mainstream Washington, D.C., and places like that, are why he’s loved here.” He added, “Well, and the economic message, right? I mean, even though none of it has come true.”

But now Brown has a chance to upend that dynamic. In fact, he might be the only candidate who could pull this off. He’s a genuine populist who, better than most national Democrats, understands why so many blue-collar voters have abandoned his party. “Democrats don’t talk to workers enough, and don’t listen to workers enough,” he told me in a Zoom interview after I had returned home. Brown is more widely known in Ohio than Husted — who was appointed in 2025 to fill the seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance — and has a far more compelling persona. He lost his Senate seat in 2024 by just three points, while Trump carried the state by 11. Brown and his supporters believe the national Democratic ticket cost him the election, and there is some truth to that.

I didn’t find evidence of widespread defections among Trump voters in the Mahoning Valley or in suburban Toledo; some acknowledged, in the words of one small businessman from Warren, Ohio, that Trump can be a “boorish ass,” but they still like him and don’t care for Brown. Yet I suspect that some Trump voters will decide to stay home in 2026 for lack of enthusiasm. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers regional head Austin Keyser, who is based in Youngstown, told me that members who voted for Trump “probably aren’t going to be real excited to come out and vote for a Trump-endorsed candidate.”

Brown, meanwhile, should benefit from growing Democratic support in Ohio’s suburbs like those adjoining Cincinnati and Columbus. Cincinnati’s Hamilton County was once solidly Republican, but most county officials are now Democrats. One of the last holdouts — Anderson Township, a suburb of Cincinnati — elected Democrats to two of its three Board of Trustee positions this April. “The Democrats have been motivated,” Tom Hodges, one of the two winners, told me. “Probably primarily anti-Trump. So, they have had energy on their side to get organized and get things done.”

I left Ohio convinced that Brown should be favored to win. (The Real Clear Politics polling average has Brown slightly ahead.) And looking across the country, he isn’t an outlier. In other states where the Republicans are defending Senate seats — North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Maine, Alaska and Nebraska — Democrats (or an independent candidate aligned with Democrats) have at least a fighting chance. Many Democrats already assume, given Trump’s unpopularity, that they will take the House. Now, the surprisingly favorable storylines surrounding some of these Republican-held seats have led to predictions that Democrats could take the Senate too — a sentiment that seemed to accelerate after scandal-ridden Ken Paxton won the Republican Senate nomination in Texas. “Democrats Suddenly Have a Real Shot at Flipping the Senate,” declared a New York magazine headline. “It could change, but currently it’s setting up to be a wipeout,” said veteran political commentator Mark Halperin.

And therein lies the essential paradox of 2026 — and beyond. The strong prospects for some individual candidates like Brown are real, but they are also masking the overall picture, which is far more complicated. Democrats could win a number of upsets in red states yet still fail to take the Senate. Part of the problem is that, while they appear to be enjoying momentum in some races for seats held by the GOP, they are in danger of losing one Democratic seat. There is also a bigger underlying problem, which is that Republicans continue to hold insufficiently appreciated advantages in American politics. Those advantages aren’t going to make daily headlines, like the twists and turns from Ohio, Texas and elsewhere. But they may well help Republicans hold the Senate, could conceivably help them very narrowly hold the House, and — whatever the results in 2026 — are likely to forestall any Democratic dreams of a major shift toward their party in the post-Trump era.

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Democrats can take heart from the fact that in midterm elections, the party that does not control the White House usually wins seats. The party in power has increased its House majority only twice in the last century — in 1934 and 2002 — and that was when a popular president was dealing with a national crisis. Presidents and their parties invariably accumulate grievances that favor the opposition. That’s how you get results like the 2010, 2014 and 2018 midterms.

In 2026, these advantages will be amplified by Trump’s extreme unpopularity, which stems from voter dissatisfaction with the state of the economy and from his administration’s excesses in social and foreign policy. In 2018, when Democrats won back the House, though not the Senate, Trump’s approval rating was 40 percent. Now, according to Real Clear Politics, the average is 39.3 percent. That’s also close to George W. Bush’s approval rating in 2006 when his party lost the House and five Senate seats. Trump’s popularity (measured in approval minus disapproval) is negative in every state except West Virginia, North Dakota, Idaho and Wyoming. To make matters worse for Republicans, Trump has continually intruded into House and Senate elections, anointing candidates like Paxton who will have difficulty appealing to moderates and independents.

Democrats should also enjoy a turnout advantage in most states. In the North Carolina primary in March, for instance, 800,000 Democrats voted, compared to 626,000 Republicans — even though registered Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state. According to a Washington Post analysis of House primaries through mid-June, Democrats cast 12.6 million votes compared to 8.6 million by Republicans. That’s partly because of Democratic anger and waning enthusiasm among Republicans. But it’s also the result of a change in party coalitions. Democrats, once the party of the working class, have become the party of college-educated professionals and white-collar workers who live in large metropolitan areas. They are more likely to vote, especially in special elections and midterm elections, than the blue-collar, small-town and rural voters who migrated to the Republican Party over the last 50 years.

All of this, however, is partially offset by significant Republican advantages. Essentially, those advantages boil down to political geography: the shape of House districts and, in the case of the Senate, the places where core Republican voters live.

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The story of the GOP edge in the House goes back to 2010, when Republicans won full control of a majority of state legislatures — a majority they have maintained ever since. That allowed them, on the heels of the 2010 census, to draw House districts that were largely favorable to GOP candidates. Democrats, too, engaged in partisan redistricting in a few states like Illinois, but in other states they took a good government route and opted for nonpartisan commissions.

During that decade, Republicans netted 19 seats due to gerrymandering. This created the possibility that Democrats could win more votes nationally, but Republicans would still win control of the House. And that’s exactly what happened in 2012 when Democrats outpolled Republicans by a percentage point in national House totals, but Republicans won 234 seats to 201 for the Democrats.

Republicans also gerrymandered state legislature districts — protecting the state-level control that allowed them to continue to redistrict U.S. House seats. Now, prodded by Trump and encouraged by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which limited the application of the Voting Rights Act in redistricting, Republican-controlled states have engaged in a new orgy of redistricting. The Democrats countered in California, but in Virginia, the state Supreme Court blocked their plans. The end result of the redistricting wars is that by November, Republicans will have netted about ten additional seats.

That’s a major impediment to Democrats winning back the House. Consider that according to the Cook Political Report, Democrats would have to win 13 of 18 tossups to win a majority. Before the most recent spate of redistricting, Cook estimated that the Democrats would only have to win a single tossup to take back the House.

In the Senate, Democrats face difficulties stemming from the composition of the Republican and Democratic coalitions. Because of the Great Compromise between less-populated and more-populated states that shaped the U.S. Constitution, states elect two senators regardless of their population. That gives voters in small states more power in dictating the make-up of the Senate, and small states are disproportionately rural. There is strong overlap between the list of smallest states and the list of states with the most rural and small-town registered voters: Of the 25 smallest-population states, 18 have a higher percentage of rural voters than the median U.S. state.

This situation benefited Democrats during the era of their New Deal majority, from 1932 to 1968, when they performed well with rural voters in the South and across the country. But since the 1970s, rural America — with a handful of exceptions, now largely confined to New England — has become heavily Republican. Of the 25 states with the highest percentage of rural voters, 20 are completely dominated by Republicans, with no Democratic senators. In addition, in larger states that are not dominated by huge metropolitan centers like Chicago, political geography also favors the Republicans. In Ohio, Missouri and Indiana, for instance, the pro-GOP trend among the large number of rural and small-town voters has undercut the Democrats’ appeal in cities like Cleveland, St. Louis and Indianapolis.

There are a host of reasons why rural areas and small towns have turned Republican. Many are laid out in surveys conducted by Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea for their book “The Rural Voter” and in Kathy Cramer’s reporting for “The Politics of Resentment.” Voters in these areas tend to be whiter, older and less college-educated than those in big metro areas. Many are evangelical Protestants who view the Democratic Party as ungodly. Many are gun owners. Many depend on resource extraction for a living and reject the Democratic injunction to reduce the use of fossil fuels to halt climate change. West Virginia, once a diehard Democratic state, went Republican in 2000 when Democrats endorsed the Kyoto restrictions on fossil fuels. North Dakota had two Democratic senators until 2010 when the oil and gas boom occurred.

Many of these voters reject what they see as big-city mores. They see themselves as upholding traditional views of marriage and the family, race and social mobility, and nation and flag. They recoil at the idea of illegal immigration. In Midwestern states, where much of the industrial base is in small towns and small cities, voters blamed Democrats for selling them out on trade. After the 2024 election, Art Cullen, the editor of Iowa’s Storm Lake Times Pilot, wrote, “If you have a D behind your name in Iowa it’s at least a 10% drag on performance. That’s because rural voters feel that urban, highly educated elites look down on them and do not share the spoils of wealth created by bloodied and bruised hands. The whole free love/free trade thing is for the duped. The rest of the county is waking up to the idea that the heartland is frustrated, that a great realignment is underway.”

Democratic presidential vote 1976-2024 among rural and small-town voters Graph by F. Nicholas Jacobs

The advantages Republicans have enjoyed in state legislatures and the House also trickle up to the Senate. With fewer Democrats able to win state legislature and House races, Democrats often face a difficult time finding candidates to run for the Senate who have already held office and achieved some prominence. In South Dakota, for instance — home to one-time Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle — Democrats this year are running a poorly funded state-trooper-turned-businessman against Republican Sen. Mike Rounds. In Arkansas, the home of Bill Clinton, Democrats failed to field a candidate in 2020 against Sen. Tom Cotton. This year, they are running a businesswoman-farmer with no political experience.

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The Senate is currently divided between 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats plus two independents who caucus with the Democrats. Democrats need to net four Republican-held seats to reclaim a majority. On the surface, that might seem doable, given that there are 22 Republican seats and only 13 Democratic seats up for grabs. But 21 of those 35 seats are in states that are among the top 25 in registered rural and small-town voters, and, according to the Cook Report, 15 of those 21 seats are either “likely” or “solid” Republican. In other words, political geography has dramatically narrowed the opportunities for Democrats to take back the Senate.

That said, if Democrats are to have any shot at a Senate majority, it would hinge on the results in eight races:

In North Carolina, Democrats have an excellent chance of winning the Republican seat being vacated by Sen. Thom Tillis. Democrats have long held their own in this state, because of support in the Research Triangle (Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh) as well as Charlotte and its increasingly upscale suburbs. Five of the last six governors have been Democrats, and one of them — two-term governor Roy Cooper — is now running for Senate against Michael Whatley, who was briefly Trump’s designated chairman of the Republican National Committee. Cooper currently leads Whatley by 14 points. Even if this were not a midterm election with an unpopular Republican president, he would be favored to win.

In Ohio, as I noted, polls show an even race, but a simple calculation has convinced me Brown should win. If you look at the geographical composition of the vote from the 2022 midterms when Republican J.D. Vance defeated Tim Ryan in the Senate race, and transpose that onto Brown’s percentage of the vote among rural, suburban and urban voters in 2024 Senate election, Brown would have defeated Moreno. In other words, Brown’s defeat against Moreno in 2024 could largely be attributed to Trump’s popularity in the state and to the composition of the vote that year, which saw small town and rural voters composing 30 percent of the electorate as opposed to only 16 percent in 2022. If you give Brown an expected edge in the composition of the midterm turnout and a boost from Trump’s unpopularity, he should be expected to win in November.

In Texas, Democrats saw a glimmer of hope in former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s strong showing in 2018 against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. This year, Trump is once again unpopular with Texas voters, and Republicans have nominated a scandal-ridden candidate who owes his nomination to Trump’s intercession. And Democrats may benefit from another factor too: As Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende contended in a 2021 study, Texas’s big metro areas (including the adjoining suburbs) are becoming more Democratic. At the same time, the share of the Texas electorate that lives in big cities has increased over the past two generations.

Graph by Nicholas F. Jacobs

Texas Democrats suffer, however, from the Republican dominance of high offices, which dates to the redistricting strategy of former House leader Tom DeLay in the early 2000s. The Texas Democratic Party is “in a shambles,” famed Austin-based community organizer Ernesto Cortes told me. For a Senate candidate in 2026, the Democrats could not come up with a former governor or even longtime House member to run against Paxton. Instead, they chose a state representative and aspiring Presbyterian minister, James Talarico — a charismatic politician who generates enthusiasm among his supporters, but who also espouses views on gender and white supremacy that put him at odds with many, if not most, Texas voters. That includes Texas’s Hispanics and Tejanos, many of whom, as Democrats should have learned when they ran abortion rights crusader Wendy Davis for governor in 2014, are conservative in their social outlook. Talarico “just has too much culture war baggage,” Trende told me via email, “but then I look at Paxton and YIKES! An absolute mess.” In current polls, Talarico enjoys a slight edge, and Paxton has yet to equal him in fundraising.

In Iowa, where Republican dominance is relatively recent, Democrats nominated a Paralympics champion, state Rep. Josh Turek, to face Rep. Ashley Hinson for a seat vacated by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst. Turek has celebrity on his side, plus Iowans’ farm woes, which many voters blame on Trump’s tariffs and on the rise in gas and fertilizer prices in the wake of the Iran war. Trump is at minus-19 disapproval in Iowa. Andrew Green, a political scientist at Central College in Pella, Iowa, told me that 2026 could look a lot like 2018 — when Democrats won three of Iowa’s four House seats. Still, in the average of recent polls, Hinson has a .7 percent edge over Turek, and Republicans enjoy a significant advantage in voter registration.

In Alaska, Republicans dominate all the main state offices, but by registration, 64% of voters are independents. Broadly speaking the state’s voters are more libertarian than conservative. This year, Democrats have nominated Mary Peltola — who served one term as the state’s lone representative in the House — to face incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. Peltola lost her seat in 2024 by only 2 points while Trump won Alaska by 13 points. In contrast to Alaska’s other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, Sullivan has fully embraced Trump’s agenda. That has earned some voters’ ire and could contribute to an upset, but in the latest poll, Sullivan enjoys a two-point edge.

In Nebraska, former union official Dan Osborn is making his second attempt to unseat a Republican incumbent. As before, he is running as an independent with tacit Democratic support. In 2024, he lost to Deb Fischer by 7 points while Trump won the state by 20 points. Trump is currently at -11 in Nebraska, and Osborn could benefit. But his opponent, Sen. Pete Ricketts, is a popular former two-term governor who, as the son of a billionaire, will have unlimited wealth at his disposal. And Republicans, University of Nebraska political scientist Kevin Smith reminded me, have “an overwhelming advantage in party registration.”

In Maine, the senate campaign was upended by the withdrawal of the Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, who faced charges of sexual abuse. The party nominated former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson to replace him. Jackson has Platner’s populist views but lacks his charisma and has to be build an organization from scratch. But unlike Platner, Jackson, a former logger, comes from a modest, small-town background, and could stand a better chance than Platner of appealing to the state’s rural voters who, like those in neighboring New Hampshire and Vermont, are more libertarian than hardline conservative. Democrats also enjoy an edge in voter registration, and the state has voted for Democratic presidential candidates in every election since 1992.

But Republican incumbent Susan Collins won’t be easy to unseat. Maine has elected a succession of moderate Republicans to the Senate, from William Cohen to Olympia Snowe to Collins. And Collins has proven to be a formidable candidate. In 2020, after running behind in the polls, she defeated her Democratic opponent by 10 points. According to exit polls, 58% of Maine voters disapproved of Trump that year, but Collins got 23% of their votes. Collins can be expected to distance herself from Trump. She has already vowed to oppose the confirmation of Trump’s nominee for Attorney General Todd Blanche. In the only current poll, Jackson leads by three percentage points, but the election has not really begun.

Even if Democrats were to win most of these races, their hopes of taking the Senate could be upended in Michigan, where they need to hold the seat of a retiring Democrat. In this month’s primary, Democrats narrowly nominated public health office Abdul El-Sayed in a bitterly fought contest against Rep. Haley Stevens. El-Sayed, a harsh critic of Israel, attacked Stevens for her support from AIPAC, which has unconditionally backed Israel’s government, and which provided Stevens with $32 million of misleading advertising that didn’t mention Israel. The primary has opened wounds from Kamala Harris’ failure to win Michigan in 2024, where El-Sayed led the uncommitted slate. These could carry over to the general election.

In facing former Congressman Mike Rogers, El-Sayed will benefit from a huge 20-point advantage in Democratic registration. Trump, who won Michigan in 2024, has also become very unpopular -- his net disapproval is 25 points. But Rogers could prove difficult to beat. In 2024, he came within a half percentage point -- 19, 000 votes -- of defeating Democrat Elissa Slotkin in the Senate election. Trump endorsed Rogers in 2024 and this year, but Rogers is not known as a “MAGA Republican.” He was, for instance, a critic of Trump’s “stop the steal” efforts after the November 2020 election. He could attract moderate suburbanites as well as Michigan’s small town and rural voters, who, one imagines, will not take a liking to a leftwing Muslim.

To win, El-Sayed may have to assemble a slightly different coalition from the one that carried Slotkin to victory in 2024. Slotkin defeated Rogers primarily by winning college-educated voters and piling up huge majorities among blacks voters, while winning a respectable 40 percent of rural and small-town voters. Amazingly, she lost the 18-to-29-year-old vote to Rogers, as well as losing the sizeable Arab-American vote and barely holding her own among Latinos. Those results probably carried over from Trump’s showing among the young and among Arab-Americans and Latinos. By my estimate, El-Sayed will be lucky to get 30 percent of the rural and small-town vote, but he should rout Rogers among young voters and do well among the college-educated and sweep the state’s Arab-American vote. El-Sayed’s fate may rest on whether he can come close to duplicating Slotkin among black voters, many of whom backed Stevens in the primary. They will have to vote and vote for him. There was some indication during the primary, Jonathan Cohn reported in The Bulwark, that their reluctance to support him stemmed from ill feelings between the black and Arab communities.

Ultimately, Democrats’ chances in November — in both the Senate and the House — may depend on whose fallibilities overshadow whose. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats did well where voters were angered by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s Dobbs abortion decision, while Republicans did well where voters fretted about Biden-era inflation. If the elections this year are about Trump’s blunders and misdeeds and about rising prices, Democrats are likely to win the Senate tossups. That will be particularly true if the Iran war drags on and gas prices stay high. Democrats may also win House seats that are currently seen as “lean Republican.” But if Trump can admit defeat and end his and Israel’s war with Iran and allow the global economy to rebound, and if the elections are about Talarico’s belief that God is nonbinary or Democratic past candidates demands to defund the police or current proposals to abolish ICE, the Democrats could lose winnable races.

***

Whatever the results in November, Democrats face daunting challenges in the years ahead based on political geography. I am not running a political consultancy for Democrats, but there are several things the party can do to address this challenge. First, they must pursue aggressive redistricting themselves. They can dream about passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which prohibits partisan gerrymandering, but in the meantime, gerrymandering is legal. And to set themselves up for redistricting success, they must find a way to compete effectively in state legislature and gubernatorial elections across the country.

Democrats may get a boost in November from winning Republican-held governorships. In the Ohio gubernatorial race, Democrats are running Amy Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Health. She carries the stigma of having been in charge of the state’s COVID-19 lockdown, but her opponent — former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — was foisted by Trump on the state’s Republicans after being ousted from DOGE. Ramaswamy will have to explain to Ohioans why he moved his business from Columbus to Dallas. In Iowa, Democrats are running their only statewide elected official, auditor Rob Sand, who is popular in the state. If the Democrats win these governorships, they can begin rebuilding their state parties.

It’s particularly important that Democrats regain at least a partial foothold in Texas and Florida, the second and third most populous states, which are also primarily urban and suburban rather than rural. The decimation of Democrats in Florida was not inevitable: In 2018, they had a very good chance of winning back the governorship by nominating a moderate candidate to run against the then-little-regarded Republican candidate, Ron DeSantis. But two out-of-state billionaire donors intervened to boost the candidacy of a scandal-implicated left-wing candidate, who won the nomination but lost to DeSantis. In Texas, Democrats were victimized by DeLay, but also by national Democratic stands on fossil fuels and the border. In 2026, however, Democrats have an opening in Florida’s governor’s race as well as in Texas’s Senate race.

But the most difficult task ahead for Democrats may be to find a way to win back a significant share of rural and small-town voters. To do that, the party probably will have to change its national reputation from the top. One need only look at what Trump’s candidacy did for Republicans. In states like Iowa, Missouri and Ohio, the most dramatic shift in geographical voting patterns occurred in the wake of Trump’s successful campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. That campaign reinforced and expanded the geographical gulf between Democrats and Republicans — to the Republicans’ advantage. If Democrats want to alter the national identity of their party so that candidates who share their views can run as Democrats instead of as left-leaning independents in Nebraska or Montana, they must nominate a presidential contender who can campaign and then govern in such a way as to bridge the geographical divide.

Trump, to be sure, has handed the Democrats a major gift by governing so incompetently. His unpopularity may well help them retake the House this year, and the Senate is not out of the question. And in 2028, Democrats could certainly win the White House by tarring their Republican opponent with Trump’s failures. But if Democrats want to build an enduring majority — one that outlasts whatever resentments voters feel towards the current administration — they will have to solve the problems posed by political geography.

Given his background, Rahm Emanuel’s recent speech to Israelis at Tel Aviv University earlier this month is a significant departure. “Unconditional support” by the United States, Emanuel argues, “has allowed you to deny food and medical relief to innocent Palestinians suffering in Gaza, leaving the world to conclude that Israelis not only want to kill the Palestinians but that they are completely indifferent to their death, destruction, and suffering. Unconditional support has girded a political coalition in the Knesset that learned it can burn Palestinian farmland in the West Bank and terrorize Palestinian families without consequence. Given all of this, we need a fundamentally new and different approach to the alliance.“ Those are strong words.

Emanuel also endorsed J Street’s “23-state solution.“ The plan is based on the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002-7, which traded Arab normalization of relations with Israel for Israel’s agreement to the creation of a Palestinian state. That is currently the only conceivable way of achieving a two-state solution. So far so good. What seems retrograde in Emanuel’s speech is the way he frames past attempts to reconcile Israeli Jews and Palestinians and the particular way he describes a 23-state solution. As I was writing this I saw that my former colleague Peter Beinart had similar complaints, although I suspect Peter might reject the 23-state solution outright.

Emanuel begins his speech in Tel Aviv with a history of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that suggests that the Palestinians, not the Jewish Israelis, are to blame for the failure to achieve a “two-state solution.” He echoes former Israeli UN Ambassador Abba Eban’s quip that “the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” That understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is regularly used to justify the continuation of the Occupation. Here is what Emanuel says, with the relevant statements in bold:

And as many of you know, my father, of blessed memory, was born in Jerusalem and fought in the war of independence. I had the honor, while working for President Clinton, of inviting him to witness the moment Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Arafat shook hands and signed the declaration of principles on the south lawn of the White House. But not only did the peace not materialize, Israel’s reward for extending that olive branch was a wave of unrelenting violence: bombings at sites including Dizengoff street, Ramat Gan, and the Mahane Yehuda market.

I was still advising President Clinton from Chicago when Prime Minister Barak offered Chairman Arafat 98% of what the Palestinians were seeking, but he refused to sign. And what did Israel earn for offering sovereignty in exchange for security that second time? The Intifada. Prime Minister Olmert made a similar offer to the Palestinians in 2007. But President Abbas walked away yet again, sparking another wave of horrific violence. Three times since the early 1990s, you have offered the Palestinians sovereignty in exchange for your security—and three times your offer was not only rejected, but you were attacked as a direct consequence. In the United States, we have a saying: “fool me once, shame on you. fool me twice, shame on me.” I understand all of that.

First of all, none of the three negotiations that Emanuel cited offered the Palestinians “sovereignty.” None. The Oslo Accords of 1993 did not even mention a Palestinian state. They set up the Palestinian Authority with control of purely civil matters in one part of the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s proposals at Camp David in 2000, which were never formally issued, gave Israel continued control over the West Bank’s airspace and electromagnetic spectrum. The new Palestinian state would be denied its own military.

A nation without national defense is basically not a nation. But a lack of control over its electromagnetic spectrum is equally significant. By controlling the spectrum, Israel can monitor all internet and cellphone activity. Its military can track whatever individuals it wants. Israel can also limit the strength and reach of the signal. Until very recently, the West Bank was limited to 3G coverage. Now it has 4G, which still leaves it less able to communicate than neighboring countries, and cripples its telecom businesses and Palestinian technological development.

Add these limits to disagreement between the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators over the status of East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians have long sought to be its capital, and the continued presence in the proposal of the Israeli military on the border with Jordan. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s proposal in 2008, which was also not formally drafted, echoed these terms. These were, in effect, proposals for a satellite or subordinate province rather than for a sovereign nation.

Secondly, the 2000 negotiations were slapdash. Israeli and Palestinian teams took nine months to work out the Oslo Accords. The 2000 talks at Camp David lasted 13 days and took place in the closing months of Clinton’s presidency. PLO leader Yasser Arafat had had to be cajoled into participating on a promise that he wouldn’t be blamed for their failure, which, of course, he subsequently was. Arafat was justifiably distrustful of the process and of Barak, who had expanded settlements more extensively than his Likud Party predecessor, who was none other than Benjamin Netanyahu.

The 2008 talks between Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lasted longer, but they stalled in the fall when Olmert, facing corruption charges, resigned, and Abbas balked at not being able to see a map of what Olmert was proposing. And as noted, neither Barak nor Olmert issued a definitive written proposal. (If your attitude is that a negotiation is a negotiation, consider the difference between long, intensive negotiations leading up to the JCPOA and the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran.)

Third, Emanuel is at the least oversimplifying when he contends that the Palestinians not only rejected the generous Israeli proposals but also reacted violently to them. He says that Israel’s “reward” for Oslo was “a wave of unrelenting violence.” Hamas and Islamic Jihad did oppose the Oslo Accords and the bombings they conducted in the 1990s were meant in part to derail further negotiations, but the bombings initially arose in response to the rise of a violent rightwing Israeli opposition to the Accords. Hamas claimed the first Hamas suicide bombings that occurred in April 1994 were in retaliation for settler Baruch Goldstein’s murder of 29 worshippers at a Hebron Mosque. If there was a key blow struck against the Accords, it was rightwinger Yigal Amir’s assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin the next year. Hamas at the time was still subordinate to the Palestine Authority, which vigorously opposed its violence.

Emanuel tries to make the same point about the failure of the negotiations in 2000. “What did Israel earn for offering sovereignty in exchange for security that second time? The Intifada.” he asserts. But he leaves out an important intervening event. The negotiations collapsed in July 2000. The Second Intifada began at the end of September in response to provocation from Likud party leader Ariel Sharon, who, accompanied by Israeli soldiers, led a march of his party members to the Haram al-Sharif, the site of Islam’s Golden Dome. I’m not comparing Sharon to George Lincoln Rockwell, but if you want to imagine the impropriety of his actions, and the provocation behind them, think of the American Nazis marching in Skokie, the home for many Holocaust survivors.

Emanuel also claims that Palestinian rejection of Olmert’s proposal sparked “another wave of horrific violence.” Once again, there is a crucial interval. The talks between Olmert and Abbas ended in September 2008. In November, Israel violated a six-month ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza by killing several militants. Hamas responded with rockets, and the next month, the first Gaza War broke out. It had little directly to do with Olmert-Abbas negotiations.

The purpose of this counter-history is not to exonerate the Palestinians. Hamas and Islamic Jihad did try to blow up the Oslo Accords. Abbas was not the most skillful or dependable negotiating partner. But it is to say that Emanuel’s history of the negotiations, which mirrors that of many Israelis, is blatantly one-sided in blaming Palestinians. It suggests -- and is used by Israelis to suggest -- that the Palestinians aren’t worthy negotiating partners, when, if anything, the principal obstacle to a negotiated peace with the Palestinians has been rightwing settlers and the Prime Ministers who have done their bidding. This anti-Palestinian bias in Emanuel’s narrative carries over to his presentation of the 23-state solution.

J Street’s 23-state solution is meant to reward Israel for agreeing to Palestinian statehood. But in arguing for the 23=state solution, Emanuel partially inverts the logic of the proposal. He sees Arab participation not so much as a means to induce Israel to negotiate, but as a means to ensure dependable Palestinian participation. “Arab leaders, not Israel,’ Emanuel said, “must hold the Palestinians responsible and accountable for their actions, and for being a true partner in peace.” He adds:

Arab nations that have exploited Palestinian rights as a slogan for decades now need to roll up their sleeves and stand up a governing authority capable of accepting the historic Jewish connection to this land. That new institution must put an end to the heinous practice of financially rewarding terrorists who kill Jews. And they must stop teaching young children to hate Israelis.

There is certainly merit to the idea that Arab nations should help the Palestinians acquire a representative government that can negotiate with the Israelis. Abbas’s government is corrupt and unpopular. But Emanuel’s version of the proposal fails to acknowledge Israel’s role in thwarting and corrupting the creation of a viable Palestinian leadership. Israel has refused to release from prison Marwan Barghouti whom the Economist has described as “the world’s most important prisoner” and as “the one Palestinian who could end the conflict” between the Israelis and Palestinians. Barghouti, a former Palestinian legislator, was imprisoned during the Second Intifada and has been subject to assaults from his Israeli jailors.

Israel sought to undermine the 2021 Palestinian elections, banning election activity in occupied East Jerusalem and arresting candidates. The head of Shin Bet urged Abbas to call off the elections. Emanuel barely mentions Hamas, except to say that Israel should not “nurture” the “destructive” group, but if one is planning negotiations to quiet the region, I’d make a much different point about Israel and Hamas.

The US and Israel have repeatedly conspired to prevent a rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas. This may seem far-fetched to some readers, but I believe a rapprochment would have facilitated rather than prevent negotiations with the Palestinians. Here’s how I see it with the proviso that I have no inside knowledge of Hamas’s leadership and could be wrong in my assessment.

Hamas’s October 7 attack was a flat-out war crime. But Hamas retains a following among Palestinians, and its leadership in Qatar seems to have had no knowledge of the October 7 assault by its Gazan military wing. It has shown signs of a willingness to be part of a negotiation for a Palestinian state. In 2017, Hamas modified its charter to include support for an independent Palestinian state. In April 2024, a Hamas official pledged to disarm and become a conventional political party if Israel would agree to a Palestinian state along the lines of the 1967 border. While pledges like these could prove hollow, it is difficult to imagine fruitful negotiations for a Palestinian state that would exclude Hamas. Yet Israel and the United States have repeatedly attempted to prevent that. (I am appending to this article an article I wrote in 2013 for The New Republic about the American and Israeli role in the strife between Hamas and Fatah.)

Emanuel would also like the Arab states to remove hatred of Israelis from Palestinian schoolbooks but says nothing about dousing the flames of Israeli hatred of Palestinians. Israeli rightwingers continue to pay tribute to Baruch Goldstein. Current Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir displayed a portrait of Goldstein on his wall. In a 2025 poll, 56 percent of Israelis support forcible expulsion of Israeli Arabs to other countries. The point here is not that Israelis and Palestinians should ban expressions of hatred against each other, but that in his presentation of the 23-state solution, Emanuel wants to police Palestinians, but not Israeli, expressions of hatred. Emanuel’s speech is an important first step by an American politician away from the uncritical support that Israel once enjoyed, but it is not free of an older disdain for Palestinian concerns.

Finally, leaving aside Emanuel’s speech, I have some thoughts on the 23-state solution. First of all, it would have to overcome growing, rather than declining, opposition among Israeli Jews to even the truncated satellite version of a Palestinian state put forward in past negotiations. In the current projection of who will win the October elections, none of the three major leading parties favor a Palestinian state. Gadi Eisenkot, who is the prime ministerial candidate of the Yashar Party, and the leader of the Left Bloc that would counter Netanyahu’s Right Bloc, opposes a Palestinian state.

In an interview on Israel’s “Meet the Press,” he said, “I have never said two states for two peoples because I understand the depth of this religious-national-social conflict, and anyone who talks about ‘peace now’ and two states doesn’t understand the conflict.” He added, “I very much believe in settlement in Judea and Samaria,” using the Biblical terms favored by the Israeli right to indicate the Israeli right to the West Bank.

Secondly, achieving a 23-state solution would require concerted pressure on Israel from the United States and Europe, including sanctions. Expressions of disapproval won’t hack it. But there is no sign that an American government would go that far. That holds for the Trump administration, but it would also hold, I suspect, for its Democratic or Republican successor. What Trump’s Iran adventure at Israel’s behest has done, if anything, is to lay the groundwork for American withdrawal from, rather than further engagement in, Middle East conflicts. There is popular support for cutting military aid to Israel and for ending involvement in its regional conflicts, but there is not similar support on intervening forcefully to achieve a 23-state solution. The 23-state solution is a worthy proposal, but I fear it will suffer the same fate as the two-state solution

CLUELESS IN GAZA:

New Evidence that the Bush Administration Undermined the Two-State Solution

February 19, 2013

A decisive turning point in the recent political history of Palestine came in June 2007, when Hamas defeated Fatah’s security forces in Gaza and took over uncontested administration of the strip. This was the moment that Palestine became divided in two with rival governments in charge—Hamas in Gaza and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in West Bank—which meant the end of a single, coherent Palestinian leadership that could negotiate with the Israelis. Afterwards, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, who has favored a two-state solution, wrote of the efforts to negotiate with Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, “The notion that the Palestinian rump authority ... can be a credible partner in negotiation defies logic.”

But if the political effects of Hamas’ ousting of Fatah are clear enough, Washington’s prevailing narrative about it has mostly been self-serving. In a new book, Tested by Zion, Elliott Abrams, who supervised American policy in the Middle East for George W. Bush’s National Security Council, offers the standard line, charging that Hamas staged a “coup” in Gaza because it feared that “time might bring greater strength for what Hamas saw as Fatah and we saw as the legitimate PA national security forces.” Abrams acknowledges that Hamas leaders might have believed there was “a conspiracy to crush it,” but dismisses the possibility that there actually was one, and that the United States might have played any role in it.

This account is in marked contrast with the testimony put forth independently by two journalists, Paul McGeough and David Rose, by a former British intelligence official, Alistair Crooke, who had served as a special advisor on the Middle East to the European Union, and by UN Under-Secretary General Alvaro de Soto. Key parts of the this alternative narrative have been confirmed by leaked government documents and contemporary newspaper accounts and by David Wurmser, who was Middle East advisor at the time to Vice President Dick Cheney.

This version of events is considerably more damning about Washington’s role in the events leading up to the Hamas “coup”. According to the alternative narrative, the Bush administration blundered at every turn in its dealings with the Palestinians. It encouraged an election on the assumption that Abbas and Fatah would win. When Hamas was victorious, it sought to nullify the results and to block a unity government between Fatah and Hamas, even though such a government might have actually become a credible partner in peace negotiations. And the Bush administration helped arm Fatah’s security forces against Hamas, which stoked the civil war and led to Hamas taking over Gaza. According to this narrative, Hamas was basically right about American intentions.

I am not absolutely certain which version of events is right. Too much of what happened is still shrouded in secrecy. Abrams’ reputation is tarred by his admission that he withheld documents from Congress during the Iran-Contra investigation. On the other side, Rose published credulous accounts in 2001 linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. But I believe that the alternative narrative fits the outward events much better than what Abrams recounts in his book. And if this narrative is a better representation of what actually happened, it holds important lessons for American diplomacy today. While the Obama administration has generally taken a different tack in foreign policy than the Bush administration, it has not done so in its relations with Fatah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority—and it may be tempting the same kind of trouble that Abrams and the Bush administration got themselves into.

The story begins in June 2002, when Bush in a White House speech pressed for the Palestinians to “to elect new leaders” and “build a practicing democracy.” Bush was initially determined to promote an alternative to Yasir Arafat, but after Arafat died, he continued to urge elections as part of the administration’s plan to build Arab democracies. In February 2005, Mahmoud Abbas won an election to succeed Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority, and at Bush’s urging, agreed to hold elections for a legislative council, which were scheduled for August and then postponed until January 2006. Israel was worried about Hamas’s participation, but in a meeting with Abbas in Washington in October, Bush, who was confident that Fatah would win the elections, did not raise the possibility of banning Hamas candidates.

Hamas, of course, won 74 out of 132 seats. Fatah candidates won a majority of the vote, but lost seats because the party could not agree on a single candidate and split their own vote. Earlier, to sideline Arafat, the American government had pressured the Palestinian Authority to shift power from the president’s office to the prime minister’s, and now Hamas was entitled to the prime ministership and to control of the country’s finances and security. In effect, the election result had sidelined Abbas and Fatah and put Hamas in charge of the country.

According to a mission report from de Soto, who was the U.N. representative to the Middle East Quartet, Abbas and the Hamas officials wanted to create a unity government of the two parties. Abbas was convinced that Hamas, which had not campaigned against a two-state solution, would allow him to pursue negotiations with Israel. And de Soto and the UN wanted the Quartet wanted to open a “channel of dialogue” with Hamas. Like Abbas, they believed that Hamas’s decision to participate in elections indicated a willingness to lay aside their opposition to the peace process.

But despite having pushed for the election, Washington would not legitimate its results. In the wake of the election, the United States, together with Israel, pressed for the international community, including the U.N., to cut off aid to a Hamas government unless it agreed to recognize Israel, abide by previous treaties and renounce violence and terror. The Bush administration couldn’t get the U.N. to cut funding, but they did eventually convince the Quartet to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority. The U.S. also approved Israel’s decision to deny the Palestinians the tax revenues (through a VAT on their imports and exports) that they collected on their behalf. (Israel was now levying a tax on Palestinians for participating in the election.) And the U.S. repeatedly urged Abbas not to conciliate Hamas. Abbas didn’t dissolve the government, as the U.S. wished, but he restored the Arafat-era power of the Presidency over security, finance, and patronage. Abbas’s moves may have pleased Washington, but they were predictably provocative to Hamas and helped fuel armed clashes in Gaza.

Israel and the United States believed that by depriving the PA of the funds it needed to pay workers and dispense welfare, it could bring down the government. Abbas would call new elections and this time Fatah would win. But Israel and America’s strategy backfired. By denying the PA funds, it initially crippled Abbas and Fatah’s patronage base and security force. Hamas, meanwhile, whose sources of funding in the United States were drying up because of federal prosecution, turned to Iran for support, and Iran’s funding allowed Hamas to pay its fighters and to maintain its own system of clinics and schools. Hamas retained its political support, while Fatah continued to lose ground.

In November 2006, with civil war already breaking out in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah, Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, whom Bush had appointed the U.S. security coordinator for the Palestinians, met with Muhammed Dahlan, a Gazan who was Fatah’s security chieftain. According to Rose’s account in Vanity Fair, which draws upon notes taken during the meetings, Dayton urged Dahlan to “build up your forces in order to take on Hamas,” and promised $86.4 million in aid. Two months later, an administration spokesman reported, Bush instructed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to transfer “about $86.4 million in aid to help Palestinian security forces under President Mahmoud Abbas’s direct control … to help provide law and order in Gaza and the West Bank, fight terror, and to facilities movement and access especially in Gaza.” That announcement, combined with an announcement from Fatah that Dahlan would be financing a “security and protection force” in Gaza, further enflamed the conflict between Hamas and Fatah.

Congress balked at the $86.4 million grant—in part because some members didn’t want to send any military aid to the Palestinian Authority and in part because some thought the aid would end up in Hamas’s hands. Congress finally agreed to $59 million in non-lethal aid, but the Bush administration tried to get around Congress by seeking lethal aid from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. In December, Egypt had already begun sending military aid to Fatah in Gaza. That effort sparked a fierce debate among neo-conservatives, some of whom, like Wurmser, believed that the United States would end up provoking a Hamas takeover. Wurmser told me that he opposed the plan to arm Fatah in order to defeat Hamas. The administration, Wurmser said, “was engaged in an effort to help Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas]—a corrupt dictator—to stay in power.”

Abbas, alarmed by the growing violence in Gaza, had periodically urged a unity government. So did de Soto in Quartet meetings, but de Soto got no support from the United States. According to de Soto, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch, who, along with Abrams, were the point men for the U.S. policy, told him in January 2007, “I like this violence. It means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas.” But in February, the Saudis surprised the Quartet members by bringing Hamas and Fatah leaders to Mecca for unity talks that resulted in an agreement between the two sides establishing a new government. The government included prominent Fatah and Hamas officials as well as several academics and policy experts, including Salam Fayyad, who were not at that point aligned with either faction. The two sides agreed that Hamas would handle domestic matters and Fatah and the independent experts international affairs, including negotiations with Israel.

Abrams makes no mention of these concessions in his book, but they were widely reported at the time. As recounted in award-winning Australian journalist Paul McGeough’s history of Hamas, Hamas leader Khalid Mishal, who led the negotiations, reasserted Hamas’s opposition to the state of Israel, but agreed to abide by past treaties between the PLO and Israel, including the Oslo accords, and to support negotiations for a two-state solution. “Hamas is adopting a new political language,” he said afterwards. “The Mecca agreement is a new political language .. and honoring the agreements is a new language, because there is a national need and we must speak a language appropriate to the time.”

The U.S. and Israel, however, refused to deal with the new government, and according to Rose and McGeough, pressed ahead with its plans to force Hamas out of the government. Abbas was convinced to name Dahlan, whom Hamas saw as its enemy, as the new security chief in the cabinet. And the United States sought to develop a new “action plan” with Abbas and Fatah that would lead by the year’s end to Hamas’s removal. In the months after the Mecca agreement, fighting had abated in Gaza, but on April 30, the Jordanian newspaper Al-Mayd published a leaked 16-page draft of the action plan, which did not emphasize military means, but did include the need for a military buildup. The Jordanian government confiscated the issues before they got on the streets, but the text remained on Al-Mayd’s website, and was widely disseminated.

Hamas interpreted the plan accurately as a conspiracy to block the Mecca agreement and to remove it from power. Then two weeks after the plan surfaced, new Egyptian trained and armed Fatah forces arrived in Gaza with Israel’s approval. The fighting in Gaza resumed. Then on June 7, Ha’aretz reported that Fatah officials in Gaza has “asked Israel to allow them to receive large shipments of arms and ammunition from Arab countries, including Egypt.” Ha’aretz also reported that Dahlan was organizing another paramilitary force in Gaza to fight Hamas. At this point, Hamas, who had already lost 250 fighters that year, took the final step and drove the Fatah forces out of Gaza and took control of its government. Wurmser told Rose, “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.” Wurmser, who left the Bush administration a month later, told me he still stands by this judgment.

On June 13, two days before Hamas took over, American Ambassador to Israel Richard Jones sent a cable recounting conversations he had at the time with Israeli Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin and Military-Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin. The cable, which Wikileaks released in 2010, confirms parts of the alternative narrative. Diskin told Jones that he opposed American proposals to supply weapons and ammunition to Fatah, because he feared that Hamas would get their hands on them. He also told Jones of Fatah’s request that Israel attack Hamas. “They are approaching a zero-sum situation, and yet they ask us to attack Hamas,” Diskin told Jones. “This is a new development. We have never seen this before. They are desperate.”

On the same day, Jones sent another cable describing a conversation he had the previous day with Military-Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin. The Israeli Defense Forces had earlier been eager to help Fatah against Hamas, but when Jones spoke to Yadlin on the eve of Hamas’s takeover, Yadlin said he was actually “happy” with the prospect that Hamas would gain control of Gaza. He thought that Israel could then treat Gaza as a “hostile territory.” And several weeks after Hamas’s takeover in Gaza and Abbas’s ouster of Hamas officials from the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, Israel’s cabinet did declare Gaza a “hostile territory.” And in a 2010 article, Ha’aretz revealed that during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, Israel’s Defense Minister asked Fatah’s leadership whether it wanted to take back control of Gaza after Israel had ousted Hamas. That operation ended badly, of course, for Israel and its government.

If the alternative narrative to Abrams’ is plausible, and I believe it is, what are the lessons to be drawn? The first, and most obvious, is that the Bush administration was utterly incompetent at foreign policy. That clearly goes for Bush’s second as well as his first term. And in the case of its policy toward Israel and the Palestinians, it is not just Abrams and the White House that is to blame, but the State Department under Condoleezza Rice. Nothing they did—from urging elections on the Palestinian Authority to attempting to oust Hamas from the PA—achieved what they hoped. They were constantly being upended by events that they had not foreseen—from Hamas’s victory in January 2006 to the Saudi’s Mecca agreement in February 2007 to the Hamas takeover in June 2007.

The second, having to do with American policy toward Hamas, is more complicated and controversial. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration had good reason to try to isolate and sanction Hamas, which was using suicide bombers to undermine the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. But by 2006, the situation had changed. Oslo was, to all intents and purposes, dead. Fatah and Abbas were unpopular, and in participating in the 2006 elections, and in occasional statements, Hamas had shown some willingness to let the PLO negotiate with the Israelis and to a long-term “hundna” or ceasefire with Israel. The Bush administration had at its disposal all kinds of circuitous means of dealing with Hamas without directly recognizing a an organization that the State Department had designated as “terrorist.” For one thing, as de Soto suggested, it could have acted through the Quartet.

Instead, the administration joined the Israelis in doing everything it could not only to isolate but to defeat and destroy Hamas, even though Hamas had won elections that the Bush administration had urged. At this point, the administration’s strategy recalled earlier failed attempts of American administration to deny the existence of regimes and movements of which it did not approve. By refusing to deal with, or attempting to destroy, movements or governments that have genuine popular support, and that were not at war with the United States, the United States has almost invariably strengthened those movements and governments, and in some cases, removed the possibility that they could have been brought around. There is no question that the American and Israeli strategy against Hamas strengthened that movement, deepened its support, and also hardened its ties to a country, Iran, that both the US and Israel see as hostile.

American or Israeli politicians who back the idea of a “greater Israel” that incorporates lands that the Jews inhabited several millennia ago might agree with Yadlin’s judgment that Hamas’s takeover in Gaza boded well for Israel. But it would be hard for anyone who backs a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to agree. Hamas remains a force in the West Bank as well as Gaza, and as Halevy and other prominent officials have contended, would eventually have to be brought into any viable peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. That should have been clear during Bush’s misadventure in his second term, but the lesson seems not to have been learned.

While Obama sought initially to press Israel to conclude an agreement with the Palestinians, he continued to harbor the illusion that it could be done while pretending that Hamas does not exist. Obama also followed the Bush administration in rejecting the idea of a unity government between Hamas and Fatah when the two parties again agreed to reconcile early last year. The agreement fell apart—and not least because of an absence of American support. Will Obama change course in his second term and attempt to deal with Hamas and Fatah? In Obama’s State of the Union address, he managed to mention Israel’s security, but not the peace process or the Palestinians. Evidently, the administration is now denying the existence not only of Hamas, but of Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. That suggests that the lessons of Bush’s disaster in Gaza have still not sunk in.

White spent a month attending “Coffee with Comrades, a Socialism 101 course, a new-members social, a book club and even a hootenanny. The DSA also hosts board game nights, running clubs, World Cup watch parties, a softball league and birding trips.” At the “New Member Social,” White found that “many of the attendees were charming and funny, and all were friendly. I left with a few phone numbers and an invite to their group chat and upcoming meeting.”

I looked at the weekly newsletter for DC Metro DSA, where I live. If my wife and I had the interest, we could attend not only a “New Member Community Cohort,” but also a “Spanish Club for Socialists,” “The People are not One Book Club,” and the “Leftist Baking Club.” My wife also discovered a knitting group. In offering these kind of activities, DSA is not veering from the deadly seriousness of the older socialist left but emulating its earlier most successful parties. Eugene Debs’ Pre-World War I Socialist Party held days-long encampments that were modeled on religious camp meetings where thousands heard talks and sang and socialized. It had book clubs and sports leagues for its members.

The pre-World War I German Social Democratic Party, the most important party of its day, had choirs, gymnastic associations, sports leagues, and schools and reading groups. It owned cooperative grocery stores and even funeral parlors. These activities offset the anomie of daily life. They are probably even more important now when many forms of daily association -- neighborhood bars, company sports teams, and even unions -- are disappearing.

The Republican right addressed the problem. In the last decades, Republican success has been predicated on megachurches, gun clubs, business associations, and a host of smaller political groups around the Tea Party. But and where political organization among mainstream Democrats has disintegrated.

Kendall reports, “If you’re a young moderate Democrat wanting to meet like-minded friends, good luck. I filled out the New York State Young Democrats interest form two weeks ago and have yet to hear back. There aren’t any events listed on their website. Even if there were, I doubt they would have as much folk music and free beer as the DSA shindigs I attended.

”

After I wrote, “Can the Democratic Party Become Democratic Socialist?.” several people sent me Paul Krugman’s column, “There are Very Few Socialists in America.” They took Krugman’s column as a corrective to my assertion that democratic socialism was on the rise. Krugman’s argument can be divided into three assertions:

Assertion One: He contends that when young voters say they approve of or support socialism, what they support is not socialism, which is “government ownership of the means of production,” but “what Europeans call social democracy,” which consists of “policies to tame markets and inequality with progressive taxation, safety net programs, and regulations.”

Assertion Two: He suggests that when young people use the term “socialism” instead of “social democracy,” they are doing so in reaction “right-wing propagandists [who] continually smear social democratic policies as socialist.” They “in effect respond by saying, ‘Well, if that’s socialism, I guess I’m OK with socialism.’” Krugman doesn’t cite these analogies, but it would be similar to how British conservatives accepted the derogatory term “Tory,” which is derived from the Irish term for outlaw, or disillusioned American liberals accepted their critics’ designation of them as “neo-conservatives.”

Assertion Three: He implies that young people are wrong to call themselves “socialists” rather than “social-democrats.” Doing so is not so much impolitic as inaccurate. They don’t understand what socialism is.

I agree with assertion #1, but not with #2 and #3. These last two assertions are based on a misunderstanding of current political history and of how political language works.

1. When young people say they approve of socialism, or support candidates who are “democratic socialists.” they do mean by socialism something like European social democracy or an extension of New Deal economics. I’ve confirmed that in scores of interviews with Sanders or Mamdani supporters. In 2016 and 2020, Sanders’ supporters pointed to Scandinavian countries or to Sanders’ support for programs like Medicare for All in explaining what they thought of as socialism. In 2025, Mamdani supporters pointed to his policies on housing, affordability, or the distribution of wealth.

2. How did they come to this understanding of socialism? I would cite three factors, none of which jibe with Krugman’s explanation. First, Americans who came of age after the end of Cold War no longer identified socialism automatically with the Soviet Union. The term became detoxified and subject to redefinition.

Secondly, for these young people, socialism became identified as an alternative to capitalism, which Reagan conservatives had identified with an unregulated free market economic system that contributed to the unequal distribution of wealth, financial crashes and recessions, the degradation of the environment, and limited access to public goods like health care and education. In other words, the conservative right did contribute to the redefinition of the term “socialism,” but not in the way that Krugman describes: it was by their definition of capitalism rather than socialism. In the wake of the financial crash and Great Recession, many young people began seeing “socialism” as an alternative to the capitalism that had led to those calamities. That’s when polls began registering approval of socialism and disapproval of capitalism.

Third, that understanding of socialism as the alternative to an unregulated free market system was popularized by Bernie Sanders in his 2016 campaign. Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other elected officials who identify as “democratic socialists” have followed suit. They don’t identify socialism with the Marxist concept of ownership and control of the means of production, but as “Swedish-style socialism” (the term Sanders began using as early his 1990 campaign for Congress) and as extension of the New Deal and the Four Freedoms. (I recount this transformation of socialist politics in The Socialist Awakening.)

3. Are young people, as well as Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani, being inaccurate when they describe their politics as “democratic socialist?” Krugman treats political terms as if they were scientific terms like photosynthesis that don’t alter with the times. Political language does. Think, for instance, of the term “liberal,” whose meaning has changed dramatically from the 18th century to the present. Ohio Republican Senator Robert Taft, who authored the anti-union Taft-Hartley Law, described himself as “liberal,” but would now be considered a “conservative.”

The same changes have overtaken the terms “social-democracy” and “socialism.” In its Erfurt Program of 1891, the German Social Democratic Party, the premier socialist party of its day, equated social democracy with Marx’s concept of socialism. It advocated “transformation of capitalist private property in the means of production—land, mines, raw materials, machines, transportation—into social ownership.” American Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs also identified Marxist socialism with social democracy.

After World War II, the German Social Democratic Party abandoned Marxist socialism in favor of subjecting “every form of power ... to public control.” In its 1959 Godesberg Program, the SPD stated that private ownership of the means of production could remain as long as it did not “hinder the establishment of social justice.” But while it also repudiated Soviet socialism and communism, the German party continued to describe their members as “democratic socialists.” Social democracy remained synonymous with socialism -- with the adjective “democratic” in front of it. In its 2007 Hamburg program, the SPD declared:

Our history is shaped by the idea of democratic socialism, a society of free and equal people where our core values are realized. It requires a structure in economy, state and society guaranteeing civil, political, social and economic basic rights for all people living a life without exploitation, suppression and violence, hence in social and human security.

In the United States, the terms “socialism” and “social democracy” have a less straightforward history. The term “social democracy” has never been popular. In 1901, Debs’ Social Democratic Party, which he had founded in 1898, became the American Socialist Party. Then, after World War II, in the wake of the Cold War, socialism became identified with communism. It lost its public standing among liberals as well as conservatives. During the 1960s and early 1970s, there was a resurgence of interest in socialism within the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movements. The New American Movement was founded in 1971 and Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in 1973. These two groups merged in 1982 to form the Democratic Socialists of America. Their vision of socialism -- spelled out, for instance, in Harrington’s book, Socialism -- was Marxist, as were the platforms of the more immoderate socialist and communist grouplets that sprung up during that period. Some groups even described themselves as “revolutionary communist.”

That Marxist understanding of socialism persists among some self-identified socialists, including some people active in DSA, but beginning with Sanders’ shift in the 1990s, and accelerating in the wake of the Great Recession, the Marxist idea is being displaced by an understanding of democratic socialism that is similar to that of European socialists and social democrats. Socialist theorists including Fred Block, James Livingston and the late Erik Wright have argued that socialism is developing within capitalism in the same way that capitalism developed within feudalism.

The activists and academics who still think of socialism exclusively as a distant epoch where workers will own and control the means of production and who hanker after a revolution that will eliminate the capitalist class are not necessarily misusing the term -- the meaning of political language is always up for grabs. Their mistake is advocating a political outcome that is at best utopian and at worst one whose pursuit could devolve into a dystopian version of state socialism similar to that of the Soviet Union and China today. Their mistake is political. Krugman’s mistake is linguistic. He doesn’t acknowledge the malleability of political language.

These successes have prompted a harsh reaction not just from the Trump White House who warned that “communists” were going to “completely destroy the American way of life,” but also from established Democrats. Former Clinton campaign manager James Carville and former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison called for the DSA’s candidates to leave the Democratic Party and form their own party. “Let’s negotiate a terms of schism,” Carville suggested. Rep. Josh Gottenheimer charged that DSA and the left were “using Tea Party tactics and trying to divide up the country and pray to socialist ideals.”

I have some things to say about DSA’s brand of socialism and about the candidates they have promoted, but I want to say something first about the Democratic Party and democratic socialism, which some of the established Democrats believe are incompatible. In ten or fifteen years, it is very possible that the Democratic Party will be known as “democratic socialist” in the same way it is now known widely as “liberal.” My reasoning follows an argument I made in The Socialist Awakening in 2020.

We are in what I’d call a “Polanyi moment” in the United States and globally. In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi argued that in the 1920s and 1930s, the West faced a backlash to the capital-dominated political economy that was based on the gold standard internationally and minimal business regulation and the suppression of labor income and power nationally. The United States and Europe responded by reasserting the power of government over the economy -- through creating command economies. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt’s government moved left to create a New Deal and a new balance between capital and labor. In Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe, including Stalin’s Russia, countries moved right to fascism or totalitarian communism.

The United States and the global economy reached a similar, although not quite as dire, crossroads in the early 21st century, marked off by onset of the Great Recession. The capital-dominated political economy of neo-liberalism failed nationally and internationally provoking a backlash. In the United States, it has taken the form of the re-emergence on the left and right of a politics based on energetic government intervention in the economy. The key event was the election of 2016 and the campaigns on the left of Bernie Sanders and on the right of Donald Trump. I’m not equating Sanders to Roosevelt or Trump to Hitler, but like Roosevelt and Hitler, their politics, and their approach to government and the economy, represented a sharp break with the past.

As I recounted in The Socialist Awakening, Sanders might have preferred his politics to be described as “progressive” rather than “democratic socialist,” but he had been known as a socialist, and when his opponent, Hillary Clinton, attacked him for being a socialist, he did not back down, but tried to define what democratic socialism meant in 21st century America. He initially cited Scandinavian social democracy, but on the advice of several historians, he began describing democratic socialism as an attempt to extend the New Deal and its Four Freedoms.

Some orthodox socialists saw this as an evasion, but Sanders had remedied a glaring flaw in the Marxist concept of socialism, which still prevailed in the nooks and crannies of American academia. Marx’s theory of socialism, heavily influenced by Hegel’s philosophy of history, had portrayed economic history as a series of discrete stages punctuated by revolutions. Socialism would replace capitalism by a revolution. Marx’s Hegelian history was, as Karl Lowith argued in Meaning in History, eschatological. But as a succession of theorists had begun to note, just as capitalism had developed in the bowels of late Middle Ages feudalism, socialism was developing inside capitalism. Publicly-controlled institutions were arising alongside or in some cases with authority over private institutions. To advocate for democratic socialism was to advocate for the spread of these public institutions, not necessarily for the obliteration of capitalism, free markets and the capitalist class. That was what Sanders’ attempt to define democratic socialism was about.

I have long expected the United States to develop a politics along these lines, but I did not expect it to be called “democratic socialism.” I was a socialist during the Cold War and spent a decade as an agitator in the late ‘60s and early 70s trying in vain to explain that socialism didn’t mean the Soviet or Chinese variety. I expected that what we would see would be more “progressive” politicians like Elizabeth Warren or Ro Khanna. I would still expect a socialist presidential candidate in the United States to have trouble with voters over fifty and in much of small-town America, but as these recent elections have shown, voters in the great metro areas, and younger voters in particular, no longer fear but even welcome some version of democratic socialism. As the memory of the Cold War fades, the term “socialism” is regaining some of the appeal it had in the nineteenth and early twentieth century when it connoted a society based on cooperation rather than on sink-or-swim individualism. That’s why I say that in ten or fifteen years, “democratic socialist” could replace “liberal” as the term of choice for a leading tendency within the Democratic Party.

***

What of DSA and the current “democratic socialist” candidates? I am a grudging member of DSA. I was a founding member of the New America Movement in 1971, the organization that merged in 1982 with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to form DSA. But I quit the organized left in 1977 to become a journalist. I joined DSA in 2020 after I had finished The Socialist Awakening. I had hoped it would carry on from Sanders’ campaigns, but when it went whole hog on defund the police and refused to support Joe Biden against Trump in 2020, I let my membership lapse. I rejoined DSA last fall after I witnessed and wrote about the Zohran Mamdani campaign. I was impressed by him and by New York DSA’s electioneering. I still am, but I have misgivings about the group’s understanding of democratic socialism.

On its website, DSA adopts a somewhat anodyne explanation of democratic socialism that nonetheless hints at the orthodox Marxist meaning of the term. It calls for “replacing” capitalism with socialism and for workers to “collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives.” Own? Regulate? Control? Co-determination? Many of DSA’s active members, including members of its national leadership, are explicitly committed to various versions of Marxist socialism. They belong to caucuses like “Marxist Unity.” Some of the group’s ten caucuses cite Lenin and Marxist-Leninism in explaining their commitment to socialism. Even the most “reformist” of the caucuses, Socialist Majority, is committed to a “socialist revolution.” None of the caucuses embrace what Sanders described as democratic socialism.

In the name of socialism, DSA also enthusiastically endorses the cultural politics of the cosmopolitan metro centers and college towns that is set off from much of small town and small city America. It supports open borders -- a stance that would jeopardize support for the welfare state and undermine labor organizing. (Such a position was anathema to the original American Socialist Party of Eugene Debs but is favored by the Wall Street Journal and Cato Institute.) It supports defunding police departments and eventually abolishing prisons. This, too, would have been indigestible to the older left, which promoted public safety.

In the name of socialism, DSA also imposes litmus tests on its candidates’ foreign policy stances that have nothing to do with socialism but instead reflect a continuing American penchant for projecting our unrealized ideals on other countries. DSA won’t support political candidates unless they renounce “Zionist” organizations like J Street. It’s not enough for its candidates to oppose arms sales to and diplomatic support for Israel and to demand an end to the occupation. They must also support a one-state Palestine that mimics the multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-religious ideal of the United States in a region long dominated by ethno-religious states. It’s not enough, in other words, to back Palestinian self-determination, whether it takes the form of one state or two. That doctrinaire and wrong-headed stance has prevented DSA from backing politicians like Brad Lander, who won the Democratic primary for Congress last week against an opponent who refuses to use the word “occupation.”

* * *

The country’s three most prominent democratic socialists, Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani, when asked what they mean by socialism, describe it as an extension of liberal democracy and social-democracy. Mamdani, when asked, has responded, “When we talk about my politics, I call myself a democratic socialist in many ways inspired by the words of Dr. King from decades ago who said, ‘Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism. There has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.’”

In a television interview, Denver Democratic Congressional candidate Melat Kiros, who is backed by DSA, was asked what she tells voters about socialism:

For in this race, yeah, well, first I’ll tell them that we already have socialism, right?

It’s in the roads that we drive on, it’s in our fire stations, it’s in the public schools we send our kids to. What I’m calling for is the same security that we have in those institutions to be in our health care, to be in our access to nutritional food, to be in making sure that we have universal childcare and universal elder care. We’re embarking on a new era.

Right now, where AI is going to change the entirety of our labor economy as we know it and we’re not ready, we’re not ready for what it looks like when all these jobs potentially

get taken away and wiped out by machinery and if that happens, we need to make sure that people’s basic needs are protected and that’s only through programs that would be socialist.

That answer is pitch-perfect. And I would hope that she believes it and is not providing a bowdlerized version of what she really believes socialism to be. A division between the private and public articulation of belief has characterized the old Communist left as well as many sectarian movements on the right like the Christian Coalition. It attracts converts who enjoy the arcane private language but eventually dooms a group to irrelevance.

Sanders, AOC, Mamdani and at least some of the current candidates also do not share the extreme cultural positions of DSA. Kiros, for instance, backed away from DSA’s support for open borders. But some of the current candidates do not. A great deal of attention has been given to Darializa Avila Chevalier, who defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary. Chevalier has been widely criticized for her past tweets, which she has deleted. Those tweets concern me less than the positions she currently holds, which as evidenced in a long interview she gave during the campaign, include open borders, opposition to the deportation of violent criminals, voting rights for non-citizens, and the abolition of prisons. She displayed a riveting concern for criminals, whom she sees as the product of a flawed society, and a shocking indifference to the victims of crime and to the cause of public safety. She may moderate her views once she gets to Congress, but at the present, her views represent the worst of DSA’s cultural insularity. Mamdani’s endorsement of her candidacy also raises questions about his political judgment and about what he really believes.

My hope, as expressed here, is that DSA and the left embrace the version of democratic socialism that Sanders promoted in his campaigns and abandon the extremes of our current culture war. It needs to set its sights on a politics that can appeal outside Brooklyn’s “commie corridor.” If it does so, and if it lays asides its fantasies of breaking with the Democratic Party and forming its own “mass socialist party,” it can facilitate the Democratic Party becoming a democratic socialist party. That won’t ensure victory, but it will put socialism on the American agenda in a way that it never has been, and that until recently I never believed it would be.

When Donald Trump won office in 2016, he promised to preserve and revive the vallley’s industry. The focus of his efforts was General Motors’ Lordstown plan, which is outside of Warren and which had been the valley’s largest employer. In the 1990s, it employed over 10,000 workers. But by the mid-2010s, there were rumors that GM could close down the plant. In a visit to Lordstown, Trump promised that wouldn’t happen. “Don’t move, sell your house,” Trump advised.

In 2019, GM shut down the plant, a victim in part of diminishing demand for the small car it produced. What happened over the next seven years is a soap opera of false hopes that could well have an unhappy ending.

In 2019, with the Trump administration’s encouragement, GM sold its plant to Lordstown Motors, a startup that planned to make electric trucks. GM also announced a joint venture next door that would produce batteries for electric vehicles. In a September 2020 press conference, Trump voiced his pleasure at the electric trucks the plants would deliver. “This is great technology,” he crowed.

But Lordstown Motors proved to be a bust. It produced 31 trucks in the fall of 2022, but 19 of them had to be recalled for electrical problems. It ceased production in February 2023 and declared bankruptcy in June. Its workers were laid off. But there were episodes to come.

The Taiwainese high tech giant Foxconn purchased the plant and announced it would produce an electrical vehicle there with Fisker, Inc., but Fisker, facing huge losses, dropped its plans in March 2024. Foxconn contracted with Monarch, Inc. to produce electric tractors, but after it produced a handful of tractors, it sold the plant to an affiliate of the Japanese investment firm Softbank, and stopped making vehicles. The story goes on!

Foxconn rented back the location from Softbank, but after Trump took office a second time and, chanting “drill baby drill,” discontinued subsidies for electric vehicles and declared his opposition to or indifference toward renewable energy, Foxconn shifted from making EVs to producing parts for data centers. When I was in the valley for a political story, I drove out to the plant, which occupies 6.2 million square feet, or the equivalent of several city blocks. But I was stopped at the kiosk at the plant’s entrance. According to reports, Foxconn is making parts, but on Wednesday afternoon, I could see only a scattering of cars. (I did manage manage to take a photo from outside the gates. You judge for yourself.)

What of Ultium, GM’s battery plant? It was supposed to produce batteries for EVs, but it now plans to make batteries for data centers. And it’s unclear whether LG, GM’s partner, will be making them at the Lordstown plan. Last October, it announced layoffs. It remains unclear when, if ever, the workers will be hired back.

All in all, very little “great technology” has come out of the attempt to revive manufacturing in Lordstown. The most recent chance to do so was tied to the Biden administration’s encouragement of EVs, but that episode in the Lordstown saga came to a sorry end with the election in November 2024 of Donald Trump. Now the future of Lordstown depends on demand from data centers whose installation some Ohio small towns oppose.

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Almost twenty years ago, I switched from Comcast as my internet provider to Verizon FIOS. My Comcast service was spotty at best and the repair people they were sending out were incompetent. I even wrote about it. Verizon worked well for most of those years, but about two months ago, my service began going out every few hours, and I would have to go downstairs and reboot the entire system by unplugging the router.

I called Verizon and after the usual runaround, they agreed to send someone around. He replaced my router with a new one, and for a day, the service worked fine, but then it began going out again. I called Verizon a week later, and they agreed to send someone else out. This time, the repair guy replaced the ONT box on the outside of our garage, which receives the FIOS signal from the cable in the ground and transmits it to the router. Everything worked fine for about a day, and then lo and behold, the service began going out.

This time, I got so exasperated that I arranged Comcast to come back and replace my Verizon service. On the appointed day, the repair guy never showed up. When I complained, the service representative said that the repair guy had said there was no one at home. (My wife and I were home all day.) I didn’t know what to do. My friend Larry advised me to describe in detail to Gemini my experiences with Verizon, which I did.

It wrote that “Given that Verizon has replaced both the router and the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) outside, the issue likely lies with faulty coaxial cabling (MoCA signals), a loose connection in a splitter, or inconsistent DHCP lease renewals from the network.” It recommended that I look first to see “If the coax cable running from the ONT to your router is old, damaged, or passes through a faulty splitter” and if “the power outlet powering the ONT (often in a basement/garage) may be faulty.”

I called Verizon again, and this time, and they sent a third repairman out to fix my internet system. I told him what AI had said, and he agreed that the only remaining solution lay in the cable from the ONT to the Router and in the power supply box in the garage, and he replaced both. Voila -- my internet system has been working perfectly ever since, and that was two weeks ago. AI had figured it out.

A decade ago, you would have had a hard time finding a debate between Zionists and anti-Zionists, but they now proliferate on the web. On April 8, for instance, J Street’s “Word on the Street” held a debate featuring Arielle Angel, the editor of the anti-Zionist Jewish Currents, which boasts a million online readers. The Zionist Organization of America, the oldest Zionist group, claims 25,000 dues-paying members. By contrast, the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which played a leading role in the Gaza protests, boasts 32,000 dues-payers.

The rise of anti-Zionism is a reaction to the failure of the peace process and the two-state solution, Israel’s brutal expansion into the West Bank, the death and destruction it visited upon civilians in Gaza, and Israel’s repeated, and finally successful attempt to draw the United States into a war against Iran. In the course of these events, what Zionism means -- and what supporting or opposing it entails -- has subtly changed. And for supporters of Israel, it is not a change for the better.

I

The term “Zionism” was coined by Viennese writer Nathan Birnbaum in 1890 to describe an Odessa-based group, the Lovers of Zion, who advocated Jewish emigration to Palestine, but it was popularized by Thedor Herzl in his 1895 book, The Jewish State, which originated as a plea to the Rothschild family to fund a Jewish colony. The next year Herzl founded the World Zionist Congress, which after some deliberation, became devoted to establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. To be a Zionist was to advocate for such a state. Among European Jews, it meant to favor emigration. Among Americans, it came to mean supporting European emigration to Palestine. An American Zionist, the saying went, was someone who gave someone else five dollars to send a European Jew to Palestine.

Many of the early Zionists, including David Ben-Gurion, were social democrats, and Ben-Gurion’s Labour party would dominate Jewish politics in Palestine and the Israeli government for Israel’s first 29 years. It envisioned Zionism as a movement for a Jewish state that would be democratic. Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 committed the new state to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” There was a Revisionist faction some of whose leaders in the 1930s looked favorably upon Italian fascism, but the parties that descended from Revisionism wouldn’t gain power until 1977.

In the years between Herzl’s Jewish State and Israel’s founding, most Arabs in Palestine and many Arab intellectuals in the United States and Europe opposed Zionism outright as a colonial landgrab under the auspices of British imperialism. So did many American foreign policy officials who feared a backlash from Arab states. But most important in this case, many Jewish intellectuals in Europe and the United States also opposed Herzl’s Zionism. That opposition took three very different forms.

First, there was cultural, but not political Zionism, espoused by Ahad Ha’am of the Lovers of Zion and later by Hebrew University founder Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and other well-known Jewish intellectuals. They advocated for Palestine as a center of Jewish cultural revival, but they opposed a Jewish state. Magnes, Buber and Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold created Ihud (Unity) to promote a binational Arab-Jewish state.

Secondly, some Jewish political and religious groups opposed cultural and political Zionism. Among religious groups, these included many Reform Rabbis who insisted that Judaism was a religion not a suppressed nationality and Orthodox Rabbis who believed that Jews would only return to Palestine upon the arrival of a Messiah. Among political groups, the socialist Jewish Bund, recently portrayed in Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live is Our Country, dismissed Zionism as an evasion of Jewish responsibility to build socialism in Europe. Until the Nazis took power in Europe, that belief was common among European Jewish socialists and communists. Together, the rabbis and the left could accurately be called “anti-Zionist.”

Third, there were prominent American Jews who styled themselves as “non-Zionists.” The American Jewish Committee, which before World War II was an invitation-only organization of upper class central European Jews, opposed the formation of a Jewish state, which it saw as a threat to their Jewish identity as Americans, but AJC members supported financially the emigration to Palestine of European Jews suffering from antisemitism. Many Reform and Conservative Rabbis, who early had strenuously opposed a Jewish state, adopted this non-Zionist outlook.

After the revelations about the Holocaust, the Jewish victory in the 1947-48 war with the Arabs, and the formation of the state of Israel, much of the Jewish opposition to Zionism melted away. The non-Zionist American Jewish Committee would become an enthusiastic supporter of the new state. The most prominent organs of the American left, The Nation and New Republic, would lead the charge for the new state. Anti-Cold War presidential candidate Henry Wallace would criticize Harry Truman for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the new state. The anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, which was founded in 1942, and which included New York Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Rabbi Elmer Berger, gradually disintegrated into a letter-head organization after 1948.

II

In the decades after Israel’s founding, the flame of anti-Zionism was kept alive by Israel’s Arab neighbors and Arab intellectuals like Edward Said and by a few American and European Jewish intellectuals, some of whom Susie Linfield profiled critically in The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. But after the Six-Day War and Israel’s seizure and occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, the debate over Zionism changed. A new debate broke out among self-identified Jewish Zionists.

Most American Jewish organizations and most Jewish politicians adopted the position of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which began as the Israel-funded American Zionist Council, but under pressure to register as an Israeli foreign agent, rebranded itself as an American-funded AIPAC in 1963. AIPAC, along with the AJC, the Anti-Discrimination League (ADL), the Conference of Presidents of Jewish Organizations, and other leading political and religious organization promoted a “special relationship” between the United States and Israel. They backed whatever Israeli government was in power. They harshly criticized politicians, intellectuals, or political groups that were critical of Israeli policies.

They criticized the intellectuals who came to be called “liberal Zionists.” In the 1970s, as the Israel occupation of the West Bank began, some Jewish intellectuals on the left took issue with Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the PLO. In 1974, over a hundred rabbis and noted intellectuals including Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, formed a short-lived group called Breira, which advocated negotiating with the PLO. In 1981, American Jews formed Americans for Peace Now as a branch of the Israeli group Peace Now. In 1992, Partners for a Progressive Israel was founded as an American wing of the leftwing Israeli party, Meretz. These groups vigorously opposed the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and they advocated what came to be called the “two-state solution.” They argued that Israel could not be Jewish and democratic -- it could not fulfill what they saw as the promise of Zionism -- as long as the occupation endured.

In 2008, Jeremy Ben-Ami, whose father had been a Revisionist in Palestine, but then emigrated to New York, formed J Street, a group dedicated to liberal Zionism. AIPAC and other leading organizations greeted it with hostility. In 2014, the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations rejected its application for membership. AIPAC called it “one of the greatest threats to America’s support for Israel’s security” and “anti-Israel.” But J Street, which now boasts over 200,000 donor-members, has survived and has grown in numbers and influence, particularly among Democratic politicians. Until recently, the main contest in U.S.-Israel politics among Jews has been between the unconditional Zionism of AIPAC and the liberal Zionism of J St.

III

During the last 25 years, however, the opposition to political Zionism among American Jews, which expired with Israel’s founding, has returned with a vengeance and threatens to overshadow the conflict between unconditional Zionism and liberal Zionism. The opening salvo among Jewish intellectuals was fired by historian Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books in 2003. Judt argued that Israel’s expansion into the West Bank had already made a viable Palestinian state impossible. “The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years,” he wrote, “will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.” Judt, following in the footsteps of Ihud, advocated the latter.

Liberal Zionists as well as the more traditional Zionists denounced Judt’s essay. The New York Review of Books received over a thousand letters protesting its publication of the essay. At The New Republic, where Judt was a contributing editor, the owner Martin Peretz, a liberal Zionist, removed Judt from the magazine’s masthead. Commentary termed his views “hateful.”

In 2008, journalist Philip Weiss founded the website Mondoweiss devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2009, Weiss declared himself an anti-Zionist in the tradition of the American Council for Judaism. “Zionism privileges Jews and justifies oppression, and this appalls me,” he wrote. “Saying I’m anti-Zionist is a sincere expression of my pluralist, minority-respecting worldview.” Like Judt, Weiss was vilified. Mondoweiss was called a “hate site” in the Washington Post. (In New York Jewish circles, the hatred of Weiss was personal. One prominent liberal Zionist told me that she wouldn’t come to dinner with me if Weiss were to join us.)

Jewish Voice for Peace was founded by University of California students in 1996 after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. It became a national organization in 2003 and has steadily gained membership. It was at the forefront of the demand for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) to pressure Israel to leave the occupied territories. In 2019, it formally declared itself to be “anti-Zionist.” “We have come to see that Zionism was a false and failed answer to the desperately real question many of our ancestors faced of how to protect Jewish lives from murderous antisemitism in Europe,” the group wrote. “While it had many strains historically, the Zionism that took hold and stands today is a settler-colonial movement, establishing an apartheid state where Jews have more rights than others.”

Perhaps, the most telling rejection of political Zionism came from Peter Beinart, the former editor of The New Republic and a staunch proponent of liberal Zionism. In an essay in 2020 in Jewish Currents, Beinart didn’t reject Zionism as such, but reaffirmed the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am against the political Zionism of Herzl. “The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society that both offers Jews refuge and enriches the entire Jewish world,” Beinart wrote. “It’s time to explore other ways to achieve that goal—from confederation to a democratic binational state—that don’t require subjugating another people. It’s time to envision a Jewish home that is a Palestinian home, too.”

In the wake of the Israel’s brutal war on Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, the few prominent Jewish voices rejecting political Zionism have become a chorus. Among the latest is Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov, the author of Israel: What Went Wrong? Like Beinart, Bartov doesn’t identify as “anti-Zionist,” but he rejects political Zionism. Bartov told Ha’aretz:

I’m not anti-Zionist. I grew up in a Zionist home... But Zionism as an ideology didn’t just run its course...It became the ideology of the state. And it became not only militaristic and expansionist but also racist, extremely violent and ultimately an ideology that deeply harms both the individual and the collective. Such an ideology has no place.

Some liberal Zionists share with the critics of Zionism opposition to the Netanyahu government and to occupation. They are harshly critical of Israel’s conduct of the war (although less likely to brand it as “genocide”) and of the government’s tolerance of settler violence on the West Bank. But what distinguishes the critics, above all, is their belief that the two-state solution, which has been the goal of the “peace process” and the demand of Israel’s Arab neighbors, has been rendered moot by Israeli expansion and by the trajectory of Israel’s politics and public opinion.

That perception is grounded in facts. Settlement expansion has increased inexorably even under the few Labour governments. In Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s first five months in office in 1999, he approved more new West Bank housing units than Netanyahu’s government had approved the prior year. The current Netanyahu government has accelerated settlements in the West Bank, including on a corridor that would separate the North and South and make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. In the coming election, the main opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is a new merged party, Beyahad, that if successful, will install religious nationalist and settler movement leader Naftali Bennett as prime minister. Bennett is committed, he wrote on X, to “not ceding our land and preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Public support for a two-state solution has also cratered. The only Jewish party that backed a two-state solution, Meretz, failed to win a single seat in the last Israeli election. In a 2025 Gallup Poll last year, only 27 percent of Israelis (and probably a lower percentage of Israeli Jews) supported a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Among the young, the percentages are even lower. According to a 2023 poll, 73 percent of Israeli youth between the age 18 and 24 consider themselves “right-wing” -- a position that would reject a Palestinian state. The October 7 assault has, if anything, locked in the opposition to a two-state solution for the foreseeable future. Judt’s assessment in 2003 -- that the choice, if anything, is not between two states but between an ethnically cleansed greater Israel and a binational state -- looks to have been prophetic.

Some liberal Zionists will also insist that Israel, for its faults, remains a “safe haven” from antisemitism for the world’s Jews, and must be preserved as a Jewish-ruled enclave. Indeed, that was an initial promise of Zionism. Growing antisemitic sentiment and attacks in the United States and Europe, they argue, only make the existence of a Jewish Israel more essential. The critics of Zionism take the opposite view. They argue that Israel’s conduct has fueled attacks against Jews outside Europe and even encouraged a new antisemitism, based on the assumption that Israel is pulling the strings in American policy.

Bartov writes in his new book, “Having claimed to be the definitive answer to antisemitism, Israel is now the best excuse for antisemites everywhere, a nation whose addiction to violence and oppression, reliance on great powers and financial clout, and constant harping on the horrors of the Holocaust as an excuse for untethered violence against Palestinians are making even some of its erstwhile supporters shrink from it in discomfort, or horror and disgust.”

There are, of course, still many Jews who support an unconditional political Zionism. Their ranks have been bolstered by Republicans and particularly by white Protestant evangelicals who, organized in groups like Christians United for Israel, back a greater Israel. But the growing implausibility of a two-state solution -- combined with Israel’s conduct of the war and occupation -- has begun to undermine the liberal Zionist case for a two-state solution. Within the Jewish intelligentsia, the parameters of the debate over Zionism increasingly resemble those before the establishment of the state of Israel.

IV

When a third of 18 to 34-year-old American Jews say they are “anti-Zionist” or “non-Zionist,” they are not, however, replicating the pre-World War II arguments about Zionism. The anti-Zionists don’t necessarily favor a binational state; the non-Zionists don’t necessarily favor funding Jewish emigration to the Holy Land. What these labels designate are degrees of disenchantment with Israel as a model society. The current conduct of Israel along with the receding memory of the Holocaust has blotted out the original meaning of Zionism; instead, many young Jews and non-Jews think Zionism refers to the current conduct of Israel -- the brutal occupation, war crimes or genocide in Gaza, settler violence, and most recently the involvement of the United States with Israel in a disastrous war in Iran.

In her analysis of the Jewish Federation poll, federation official Mimi Kravetz acknowledged that that the term “Zionism” has been subject to “definition creep.” When the respondents who said they were “anti-Zionist” or “non-Zionist” were asked what Zionist meant, they responded that it meant that “Israel has a right to the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” “supporting whatever action Israel takes,” and “believing Jews are superior to Palestinians.” In other words, it means what Israel has become.

This is not an unusual linguistic development. Consider what “communism” meant to Marx and Engels in the mid-19th century. It was the fulfillment of democracy, an end to “the exploitation of man by man.” The goal of Communists, Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, was “to win the battle of democracy.” But a century later, in the wake of the Stalin’s Soviet Union, and the beginnings of the Cold War, communism became identified with Soviet totalitarianism and later with the Chinese variety. It was an anti-democratic faith. Something very similar is happening to Zionism, although it is in the early stages.

Leon Trotsky and his followers attempted to invoke the older meaning of communism to distinguish what they advocated from what the Soviet Union had become. They called the Soviet Union a “degenerated workers’ state.” But it was to no avail. The reality superseded the older ideal. Liberal Zionists find themselves in the same linguistic pickle. Jeremy Ben-Ami defines Zionism as “a commitment to a democratic national home for the Jewish people and to the equal right of the Palestinian people to their own state in that same land.” He acknowledges that Israel’s “current leadership is increasingly militaristic and undemocratic, pursuing policies and expressing views that violate core Jewish ethical values.” But he calls those policies a “distortion” of the “Zionist vision,” just as the communist dissidents called the Soviet Union a “betrayal of the revolution.”

Kravetz of the Jewish Federation takes comfort in the fact that a large majority of the respondents to their poll still back Israel’s existence. She believes that “the overwhelming majority of American Jews can stand together in support of Israel and Israelis even as they wrestle with serious concerns that matter enormously to them and that Israelis themselves wrestle with as well.” But that would be a misreading of the growing opposition or indifference to Zionism. Young Jews and non-Jews don’t necessarily want to eliminate the state of Israel -- neither do most of Zionism’s critics -- but they are profoundly troubled by what it has become and less likely than ever before to “stand together in support of Israel.”

*For more of the historical background, see my book Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

It’s tough to pinpoint when exactly it happened, but gradually, as President Trump has entered the second year of his second term, a sense of optimism has returned to the Democratic side.

“House Democrats are on the verge of a takeover,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently predicted. And while he is obligated to sound optimistic, he is not wrong. The war in Iran is highly unpopular. Gas prices are about to go through the roof. Democrats might well take back the House in November. They might even be in strong position to take back the White House in 2028. On our current trajectory, it seems quite possible, even likely, that Trump will end his second presidency unpopular, ineffective and roundly repudiated by voters.

But too many Democrats are missing the forest for the trees. Yes, Trump himself may soon be disgraced, but he and his administration have set in motion long-term changes that are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Trump, it is increasingly clear, is a figure of enormous historical significance who is reshaping America and the globe in ways that will not easily be undone by Democratic wins in future elections.

Liberals, naturally, would like to believe the opposite: that once they triumph at the ballot box, all can go back to normal. “Time will show the Trump era to be less turning point, more freakish aberration,” Simon Tisdall, The Guardian’s foreign affairs columnist, wrote in December. “In history’s bigger picture, Trump is a blotch, an unsightly smear on the canvas.”

This could not be more wrong. And the ill-conceived but also era-defining war in Iran — the seventh country that Trump has attacked in his second term — is just the latest manifestation of how Trump is irrevocably changing our world. To make sense of Trump’s presidency, I recently returned to G.W.F. Hegel’s “Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” which I had read many years ago when I was trying to understand his influence on Karl Marx. This may seem to be an unnecessary diversion — like studying quantum mechanics to repair a car — but Hegel’s theory of history maps remarkably well onto our current situation.

Hegel understood history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval. He assigned to what he called “world-historical individuals” a special role in spurring the transition from one era to another. These individuals didn’t necessarily understand the full import of what they were doing, and their actions, while transformative, didn’t necessarily result in the outcomes they intended. Trump, I have come to believe, is exactly such an individual: He is speeding the transition from one historical era to another. The ultimate results are very unlikely to line up with his exact ideological aims, but they will be profound. And the world is never going back to what it was.

***

Hegel, writing in the early 1800s, divided history into three major stages. The first was the Asiatic-Oriental (ancient) stage in which only the ruler possessed freedom; next was a Greek and Roman stage in which some people were free, but slaves were not; and finally, there was a Germanic-Christian stage in which all citizens of a nation achieved freedom. Hegel further divided the Germanic-Christian stage into the Barbarian centuries, the Catholic years of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Protestant years — his era — of sovereign states and nations.

The world, Hegel believed, goes from one stage to another because of continuing conflicts. During these clashes, individuals, peoples and nations are moved by different passions and interests, but the outcomes, driven by what Hegel called “the cunning of reason”—that is, the sum of historical forces beyond the control of any individual—almost invariably defy their expectations. To cite a contemporary example: A decision to invade a country may not result in the promised liberation of its peoples, but in decades of strife and hardship. These clashes eventually reach a point when they can only be transcended through a major change that results in a new stage of history. That’s when the world, in Hegel’s phrase, is “ripe for development.”

At these moments, Hegel believed that a “world-historical individual” could play a decisive role. Alexander the Great spread Greek culture throughout Asia and north Africa. Julius Caesar transformed Rome from a republic to an empire. Napoleon Bonaparte -- Hegel’s contemporary and the model for his theory -- ended feudalism, instituted civil law (the Napoleonic Code) and put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, creating a continent of rival states.

These world-historical individuals were “practical political men” of action, not philosophers. Caesar, Hegel writes, was driven by “an unconscious impulse that occasioned the impulse for which the time was ripe.” Their ability to enact change depended on their willingness to defy current custom, convention and mores. “It is even possible,” Hegel writes, “that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to morally reprehensible.”

These leaders often leave death and destruction in their wake. To achieve their results, Hegel writes, “they must trample down many an innocent flower, crush to pieces many things in their path.” To many of their contemporaries, they may seem to be monsters. They “appear to have done everything under the impulse of some passion, more grand -- some morbid craving -- and on account of these passions and cravings to have not been moral men.”

Hegel saw the stages of history as naturally progressing in a positive direction. But shorn of that Enlightenment optimism, the parallels to today are considerable. When Trump burst onto the political scene in 2015, he entered a world where a consensus that had prevailed for decades was rapidly breaking down. The consensus had several names and overlapping premises. The economic component went by “neoliberalism” or “market liberalism” and consisted of a belief that the U.S. and the rest of world could achieve peace and prosperity through the free flow of goods, capital, currency and labor. Its crowning achievement was the World Trade Organization, which began in 1995.

The geopolitical component was liberal internationalism, a concept that dated from Woodrow Wilson but that the United States began to put into effect after World War II. Its premise was that the U.S. could keep the peace by aggressively encouraging capitalism and democracy—through the spread of neoliberal institutions but, if necessary, through military intervention—and that it could prevent or resolve conflict through agreements like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and international organizations such as the United Nations, NATO and the European Union. After the Berlin Wall fell, liberal internationalists assumed that both Russia and China could be brought into the American-led order of peaceful, free-market, free-trading nations.

In the early 2000s, this consensus fell victim to a series of historical fiascoes. American invasions failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Great Recession cast doubt on the reliability of free markets. Porous borders led to soaring illegal immigration in the U.S. and Europe. The fear of migrants became fused with the fear of Islamist terrorist attacks. NATO expansion plans provoked Russia into war in Georgia and Ukraine. China’s entrance into the WTO caused a massive loss of factory jobs in the U.S. and Western Europe. And far from becoming a liberal democracy, Beijing remained a dictatorship, one that threatened its neighbors.

When established political leaders failed to recognize that the old order was disintegrating, politicians and populist movements sprung up on the left and right who did. And the most important of these was Trump and his MAGA movement.

***

In a 2018 interview with the Financial Times, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who certainly knew his Hegel, said, “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”

Trump may or may not have fully understood what he was doing, but he did, clearly and correctly, sense that the world was at a turning point, which he encapsulated in his promise “to make America great again.” In his first term, he took direct aim at the pretenses of neoliberalism and liberal internationalism. He rejected the ideal of free trade and boycotted the World Trade Organization. He instituted tariffs and negotiated bilateral and trilateral agreements. Defying his own party’s free market precepts, he subsidized and protected industries that he thought were vital. He began building a border wall. He gave short shrift to the post-World II system of alliances and institutions, including the United Nations and NATO. He denounced the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan that were intended to spread democracy. He resisted his generals’ advice to continue the war in Afghanistan and began negotiating a withdrawal.

In his second term, he has gone much farther. He imposed global tariffs and slapped additional punitive tariffs on countries that were running large trade deficits with the United States or had simply incurred his displeasure. He empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport illegal immigrants through paramilitary incursions into Democratic cities. He stopped funding the U.N. and its agencies and sought to replace the Security Council with a Board of Peace. He backed away from Ukraine and courted Russia. He declared a new “Donroe Doctrine” that justified kidnapping Venezuela’s head of state. In Venezuela and Iran, he initiated military action not to spread democracy, but to exercise power over two oil-rich nations by replacing their unfriendly leaders with those who would do his bidding.

Trump’s break with neoliberalism and liberal internationalism perfectly fits Hegel’s profile of the world-historical individual standing at the center of a transition from one era to another. So do his character and leadership. He didn’t merely appear to act out of a “morbid craving” for power and glory; that is at the center of his being. When Napoleon became First Consul of the French Republic in 1799, he had one of his successful battles turned into a national holiday. Trump has put his name on buildings and institutions and lusted after the Nobel Peace Prize. When Napoleon became emperor in 1804, he bestowed titles and riches on his family and supporters. Trump has enriched himself and his family.

Trump, like Hegel’s world-historical individuals, has ignored or repudiated “sacred interests” including the Constitution and its checks and balances. He tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shut down or fired the heads of independent agencies that Congress created. He fabricated pretexts for patently illegal actions by invoking laws that were intended for entirely different purposes – for instance, citing the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, intended to root out French insurrectionists, to justify deporting Venezuelans to foreign prisons without a hearing. His actions, which included calling Somali immigrants “garbage” and belittling a female reporter as “piggy,” have been, in Hegel’s parlance, “obnoxious” and “morally reprehensible.”

When Caesar vanquished his enemies, Hegel wrote, they “had the form of the constitution, and the power conferred by an appearance of justice, on their side.” Like Caesar, Trump sees himself as above ordinary morality or law. In the wake of his invasion of Venezuela, The New York Times asked Trump if he saw any limits of his global use of power. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he responded. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law.” This willingness to defy law and morality, and to pursue power and glory relentlessly, have been integral to world-historical individuals — and to their ability to detonate outworn ideas and institutions.

***

Even if Democrats win in 2026 or 2028, it is increasingly difficult to imagine important parts of Trump’s legacy being reversed. Given recurring imbalances in the international economy, could any future president really resurrect the old dream of free trade? Remember that Biden retained Trump’s tariffs from his first term. Going forward, countries are likely to emphasize bilateral and regional trade agreements, as well as government policy aimed at protecting key industries. Trade may begin to look more like it did 100 years ago, between the world wars.

Trump has also likely dealt a death blow to numerous international institutions. His Board of Peace, dominated by illiberal democracies and autocracies, is unlikely to last, but it has still exposed the impotency of the United Nations and the Security Council. He has undermined, perhaps fatally, the trust that held together America’s post-World War II alliances. NATO temporarily lost its rationale after the Cold War ended, but it appeared to revive in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After a lame attempt to reach an agreement between the warring parties, Trump has largely withdrawn from the conflict. By the time Trump leaves office, the defense of Ukraine may have become a lost cause — and with it the bond between the United States and its erstwhile NATO allies. To make matters worse, Trump has sent mixed signals about his commitment to Article 5, which requires NATO countries to come to the aid of any members who are attacked. America’s Asian allies, who depend on our nuclear umbrella, have taken note.

Trump may have also, without specifically intending to do so, set in motion a struggle to divide up the world among the great powers that recalls pre-World War I imperial rivalries. In Latin America, he has attempted to coerce countries into accepting American leadership and business investment. He has softened his objection to Chinese economic and foreign policy, and, by undermining international law, he may have helped lay the groundwork for Beijing to take Taiwan.

What Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called the “middle powers” have already begun to fend for themselves. Japan’s new prime minister has pledged to rewrite its country’s post-World War II constitution, which committed Japan to pacifism. France, Germany and Canada have attempted to improve relations with China. Canada has made overtures to the European Union. The European Union has drafted a “made in Europe” rule. International diplomacy and military rivalry, like international trade, is becoming more anarchic and less predictable. It is difficult to see how these changes, once set in motion, could be reversed under Trump’s successors.

Outcomes that would have been unimaginable 10 or 15 years ago are now conceivable. Here at home, the foundations of our democracy—the rule of law, respect for election results, a free press—now appear shaky. On the economic front, we could experience another Great Recession because of constricted trade, the removal of regulations on banking and crypto currency, and artificial intelligence’s reduction of job opportunities. A new global recession could arrive even earlier courtesy of the United States and Israel’s war against Iran. We could even see the dollar lose its status as the main global reserve currency. Trump’s use of punitive tariffs and sanctions has already inspired key nations to discuss an alternative. If this were to happen, the United States could no longer run large budget deficits with impunity.

In response to Trump’s weakening of the ties between the United States and its principal allies in Europe and Asia, we could see countries withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty to build their own nuclear weapons. In the wake of Trump’s professed admiration for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, 70 percent of South Koreans backed building a nuclear weapon. The US-Israel war against Iran, far from discouraging proliferation, could encourage it. The spread of nuclear weapons might reduce chances of regional wars breaking out, but it would also increase the possibility of a global catastrophe. Here again, there is probably no going back from the changes that Trump has set in motion.

***

Trump won in 2016 and 2024 for many reasons, but one factor was that voters understood, as Kissinger had argued, that the old order was broken. Free trade was a chimera. The free movement of capital had contributed to the hollowing out of industry in the West. Illegal immigration had become unmanageable and a threat to public order. NATO had lost its rationale after the Cold War’s end. The U.N. had long ceased to play a constructive role in major conflicts. And American attempts to introduce democracy to rogue states had proven disastrous. It was no mean feat for Trump to have exposed these pretenses.

But Trump — driven by hubris, seething with a desire for vengeance against his political enemies and buoyed by “new right” intellectuals, conservative media and billionaires with their own agendas — has also overreached. And voters have noticed. The pledge to deport illegal immigrants who had committed crimes morphed into sweeps by ICE of random illegal (and sometimes legal) immigrants. His demand that other NATO countries pay for their own defense somehow morphed into an attempt to poach Greenland from Denmark, a fellow NATO country. His promise to end “forever wars” and eschew “regime change” has yielded to a newfound enthusiasm for intervention aimed at securing power for the United States over oil-rich states. His tariffs aimed at protecting strategic industries became selectively punitive tariffs aimed at eliminating trade deficits entirely (which would also imperil the dollar as a reserve currency) and at providing revenue to make up for his huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. His first term forays into industrial policy — culminating in the highly successful Operation Warp Speed, which allowed for the impressive development of covid vaccines — have devolved into a defunding of medical and scientific research and the abandonment of renewable energy, including vital battery technology. Trump may not merely fail to make America great again; instead, he may have assisted in making China the center of the world again.

Yet these failures do not disqualify him as one of Hegel’s world-historical individuals. On the contrary, those leaders — often driven by megalomania — also overreached, then found themselves bedeviled by forces beyond their control. What Hegel described as “the cunning of reason” invariably caught up with them, making a mess of ultimate ambitions. Alexander the Great swept through Egypt and the Middle East, but when he tried to conquer India, his troops revolted. Napoleon suffered a major defeat when he tried to expand his empire into Russia. He spent his final years in exile. And instead of solidifying the dominance of France, he bolstered Britain’s power and put Prussia on a path to becoming the continent’s preeminent military force.

Does the pattern sound familiar? Trump has pushed us into a new stage of history. But it is a stage in which, because of his overreach, America may find itself diminished and disempowered. Whoever wins the White House in 2028 will inherit a fragmented international economy, ruptured alliances and emboldened adversaries, a Middle East in turmoil, not to mention a divided and angry electorate. That president, and presidents for many years to come, will be operating in a difficult and perilous world — a world Trump remade. Does anyone believe the major parties are ready to meet this challenge? I don’t.

Postscript: Hegel’s Philosophy of History

In my essay applying Hegel’s philosophy of history to Trump’s presidency, I used Hegel’s theory as a kind of metaphor to explain Trump’s significance. Hegel’s philosophy of history contains some concepts that are extremely useful in understanding the present -- like the idea of the world-historical individual -- but it also includes an overarching framework that was peculiar to Hegel’s mix of Enlightenment optimism and Lutheran theology and that doesn’t do justice to the present. In my essay, I cherry-picked the most useful parts of Hegel’s theory. Here is an expanded version of what Hegel’s philosophy of history is. (It’s mostly from the first draft of the essay, which was radically compressed on the wise advice of my editor, Richard Just.)

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Like Marx’s philosophy of history, Hegel’s is rooted in an underlying eschatological framework. Marx’s stages of history, driven by the class struggle, are supposed to culminate in classless communism. Hegel’s stages of history are to culminate in the unwieldy notion of Spirit becoming fully conscious of itself -- a result which can be parsed as the arrival of the Kingdom of God on Earth in which divine purpose coincides with human will and understanding.

Spirit, which Hegel also terms “Mind,” “Reason,” and the “Idea,” is mankind’s collective consciousness and its material expression in art, philosophy, government, commerce and crafts. It combines mind and matter. Spirit’s development is driven by the passions or interests of individuals but transcends them the way a symphony transcends the notes played by the individuals in an orchestra. The ultimate objective is “freedom” (Freiheit), but by freedom, Hegel means the ability to act voluntarily and consciously according to reason and conscience, as prescribed by the laws of the state. Slavery is not freedom; and the ability to do whatever we want is caprice, not freedom.

Hegel divides history into three major stages and different periods within those stages: an Asiatic-Oriental (ancient) stage in which only the ruler possesses freedom; a Greek and Roman stage in which some people do, but others -- slaves -- do not; and a Germanic-Christian stage in which the citizens of a nation finally achieve freedom. They become conscious of and act according to Spirit’s aims and the modern state’s laws. A nation, Hegel writes, “is well-constituted and internally powerful when the private interest of its citizens is one with the common interest of the State.”

Hegel’s overall scheme is a product of Christian theology and Enlightenment optimism. This kind of framework persists among both religious and secular thinkers. As Karl Lowith argues in Meaning in History, Marx’s schema of revolution as Armageddon and communism as the kingdom of God was borrowed, consciously or not, from Christian eschatology. Such teleological thinking also flourished in the 1960s and again in the 1990s during the high-tech boom but has waned during wars and recessions. It is, basically, an application of faith rather than reason to history.

But while describing the march of Spirit through time, Hegel introduces three concepts that could prove important to understanding the present. The first is the “cunning of reason.” History develops from a myriad of individual actions by people driven by “self-seeking” passion or interest who are not aware of history’s aims and often act at odds with each other. The ultimate outcome of this myriads of acts accords with the development of Spirit or Reason. Think again of a conductor-less symphony orchestra producing a work featuring counterpoint in which the instrumentalists know only their own parts. Hegel writes, “The vast congeries of volitions, interests and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the World-Spirit for attaining its object. of which they know nothing--which they accomplish unconsciously.”

Hegel’s idea of the cunning of reason derives from his theodicy -- his attempt to explain how evil acts and catastrophes could occur under God. In simpler terms, Hegel is applying the Law of Unintended Consequences to the historical narrative. There is a wealth of domestic examples, but perhaps the most relevant examples, where the consequences are large and unforseen, are in foreign policy. The United States decided to invade Iraq for a variety of individual motives -- historians may have a better idea a year from now -- but the policy-makers did not anticipate the actual outcome: a decade-long war that destabilized the Middle East and discredited the Bush administration and the United States. That, one could say, was the work of cunning of reason.

The second concept is that of historical stages or periods -- another concept that derives from Christian theology. Hegel specifies three major stages, but he accounts for lesser stages, or periods within them. Hegel divides the German-Christian stage into the Barbarian centuries, the Catholic years of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Protestant years of sovereign states and nations. Peoples and nations go from one stage or period to another through a “dialectical” process that involves what Hegel calls “Aufhebung.” It is sometimes translated as “sublation.” It refers to a transformation that transcends existing reality by negating some aspects of it while preserving others. Hegel never used the terms “thesis,” “antithesis” and “synthesis,” but they are an accurate representation of the dialectical process of change that occurs both in everyday life and in major historical transformations.

Marx adopted Hegel’s idea of historical stages as well as his understanding of the dialectical process. In succeeding feudalism, capitalism replaced serfdom with wage-labor, but retained, and reshaped the family as an institution and the use of money and the practice of trade, resulting in an overall synthesis that at once flowed out of and broke with the past. Within capitalism, one could say, an early mercantilist phase gives way to a period of laissez-faire, which gives way to modern managed corporate capitalism. Hegel doesn’t make precisely these distinctions, but they accord with his concept of stages and periods of history.

The third concept is that of the “world-historical individual.” Marx described history as the history of class struggle, but Hegel assigns a leading role in periodic transitions to world-historical individuals such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Alexander spread Greek culture throughout Asia and north Africa. Caesar transformed Rome from the republic to the empire ruled over by an emperor. Napoleon ended feudalism and instituted civil law (the Napoleonic Code) and put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, creating a continent of rival states. Hegel’s theories spawned some vulgar adaptations such as Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Man” theory, but it seems to me he was right that at certain key moments, individual leaders can play a transformative role.

Hegel is sometimes described as an idealist and Marx as a materialist. But Hegel’s world-historical individuals are not simply Gods who descended from Heaven with earth-shaking ideas. They appeared when the time was “ripe for development,” when the clashes among peoples and states became larger and more portentous. At such times -- that of the French Revolution, for instance -- world-historical individuals can emerge who transform and transcend the conflicting passions and interests, leading to a new period or stage of history. They are the catalysts of change.

Like the humble citizen, world-historical individuals are subject to the cunning of reason. They are not necessarily conscious of the higher aim they serve. They are “practical political men” of action, not philosophers. Caesar, Hegel writes, was driven by “an unconscious impulse that occasioned the impulse for which the time was ripe.” These individuals, Hegel writes, “have derived their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from their inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which, impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it into pieces.”

The world-historical individuals upturn current custom, convention and mores. “It is even possible,” Hegel writes, “that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to morally reprehensible.” The world-historical individuals “appear to have done everything under the impulse of some passion, more grand -- some morbid craving -- and on account of these passions and cravings to have not been moral men.” They often leave death and destruction in their wake. To achieve their results, Hegel writes, “They must trample down many an innocent flower, crush to pieces many things in their path.”

And these results don’t necessarily conform to their conscious intentions. Napoleon sought to create a European empire that would be dominated by France and ruled over by a dynasty that he would have founded. Napoleon’s wars did transform Europe, but not in a way that he intended. France lost its leading role in Europe -- to be humiliated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War. And Britain cemented its maritime superiority. “God works in mysterious ways,” would sum up the application of the cunning of reason to the achievements of world-historical individuals.

Shorn of its Christian teleology and Enlightenment optimism, Hegel’s theory of history looks something like this: history has gone through a succession of stages and periods. The transformation from one stage or period to another comes when seemingly unresolvable conflicts have been surmounted through dramatic changes. These changes, which entail breaking with but at the same time incorporating and reshaping the past, have often been driven by very powerful leaders whose motives may be suspect, but whose rejection of the status quo results in the transformation of governments and economies and of the relations among nations.

Does it make sense to see Donald Trump as a leader who, despite his glaring personal flaws and spurious motives, has precipitated and accelerated the transition from a period of world history to another? My answer to this in the essay I wrote was a qualified “yes” -- qualified, because as Hegel himself argued, history is best understood after rather than before it takes place.

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One more point about Hegel and Trump: Hegel regarded his world-historical individuals as “heroes” who advanced a journey of Spirit toward freedom. He acknowledged that history contained periods of stagnation and backwardness, and he didn’t assign the leaders responsible for those to the status of heroes. He wrote of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane (Timur), “ They destroyed all before them; then vanished again, as does an overwhelming Forest-torrent – possessing no inherent principle of vitality.” But shorn of Hegel’s eschatology, the villains of history -- Genghis Khan, Vlad III the Impaler, King Leopold II, Adolf Hitler -- may also qualify as world-historical individuals for the impact they had.

Will Trump qualify as a great destroyer, a wrecker of nations, or will his legacy be decidedly mixed? We won’t know for decades, but I would guess that like Mao Zedong, who led the Chinese Revolution, but in his later years championed the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, his record will be mixed on the great Hegelian scale.

In 2025, Democratic women won the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia. Female Democrats were elected mayor in Detroit, St. Paul. Syracuse, Greensboro, New Carolina, Seattle, St. Louis, Oakland, San Antonio, and New Orleans. In the election for the Virginia House of Delegates, Democrats replaced Republicans in 13 seats. Nine of the Democratic candidates were women.

Many of these candidates, as well as the men who won, benefited from a partisan gender gap between women and men. In Virginia, 65 percent of women backed Democrats Abigail Spanberger compared to only 48 percent of men. In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill enjoyed an almost identical gender gap. That gender gap is now a half century old. But like the ballyhooed rise of the “minority voter,” the emergence of a gender gap must be broken down into its components to be properly understood.

In the first decades of this gender gap, it was driven more by working-class women than middle class and professional women, roughly identifiable in polling, respectively, as women without and with a college degree. But it has become increasingly the province of college-educated women. These women have also provided the leadership, the votes, and the money as well as two of the last three Democratic presidential candidates.

But education itself has not been the deciding factor in the growth of the gender gap. Women’s views have been shaped by the feminist movement that emerged in the Sixties. Feminism is the hidden factor in the transformation of women’s vote and of Democratic party. Through their identification with feminism, women Democrats have changed what it means to be a Democrat and to be liberal. These women voters have helped the party to remain competitive as it has lost support among many working-class voters, but their rise has also provoked, as became apparent in the 2024 election, a backlash among male voters.

The Anatomy of the Gender Gap

Since the onset of reputable election polling after World War II, and probably since women received the franchise, there has been a gender gap in voting, that is, a difference in the percentage of men and women who supported the winning candidate or the candidate of a particular party. For my purposes, I will refer to the difference in percentage points in supporting the Democratic candidate. From 1948 through 1960, men were more likely to vote Democratic than women. In 1956, for instance, when Republican Dwight Eisenhower defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson, men were 6 percentage points more likely to have backed Stevenson. That first shifted in 1964 when Democrat Lyndon Johnson defeated Republican Barry Goldwater, but it shifted back in 1976, when there was no measurable gender gap between Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford.

1980, the pro-Democratic female gender gap returned with a vengeance when women became nine percentage points more likely than men to prefer Carter to Ronald Reagan. That’s when women’s organizations began talking about a “gender gap” in American politics.

Source: American National Election Studies (’48-’56), Gallup, Roper

That gap has persisted to this day, and since 2012, has been in double digits. In the 2024 election, women were 10 points more likely than men to have backed Democrat Kamala Harris. There is no single answer why they did so. Instead, the gender gap has been the product of several factors coming together.

Women’s Work: The first is the change in women’s position in the home and labor force. In 1948, only 32 percent of women worked outside the home. Over two-thirds were “homemakers.” By 1964, the composition of women in the labor force had risen to 38.7 percent; it peaked at 60 percent in 1999, and it has hovered around that number ever since. The earlier prevalence of homemakers may help explain why women were less likely than men to support Democrats from 1948 through 1960.

According to data compiled by Richard A. Seltzer, Jody Newman, and Melissa Voorhees Leighton in Sex as a Political Variable (1997), in twenty presidential and congressional elections from 1952 to 1992, homemakers, with only two exceptions, were more likely to vote Republican than women who worked outside the home. In the 1992 election, homemakers were 9.4 percentage points more likely to vote Republican.

This is a possible explanation: In the immediate post-war decades, women who were tied to home and family were prone to reject change in their circumstances. They would be more likely to vote for the Republicans because they were then seen as the status quo party. By the same token, as women joined the workforce, they were more likely to favor Democrats as the party of change. But to understand why that is so, one must introduce additional factors: one such factor is the greater likelihood that women in the workforce would have gone to college—and been exposed to feminist politics and concerns.

Divisions in Class, Education, and Locale: As a guide to changing opinion, the match between class and education works differently for college-educated women before and after the 1960s. In 1956, only 5.6 percent of adult women had college degrees. Today, 39 percent of adult women do, more than the percentage of men who have degrees. (Among 25 to 34 year olds, almost half have a degree.) In the 1950s, women with college degrees occupied the upper and upper-middle classes and tended to vote for Republicans as the business and professional classes did during that period, regardless of whether they worked outside the home. (In 1956, Eisenhower carried these voters by two to one.)

During that period and afterwards, most women without degrees who worked for wages could be accurately counted as working-class. Many of them, like their husbands, had been and remained New Deal Democrats. They supported social security; they were supportive of government spending on healthcare and education and for the poor. And that was particularly true of women who worked outside the home. In the 1964 presidential election, they were twenty percentage points more likely to support the Democrat; in 1968, the gap was thirteen percentage points; in 1976, it was fourteen percentage points; and in 1980, they were nine percentage points more likely to support the Democrat than their college-educated counterparts. That reflected, above all, their continuing support for New Deal Democratic politics and the Republicans’ grudging support for or opposition to New Deal programs.

By the early 1970s, the political trajectory of college-educated women began to change. During the 1960s, increasing numbers of women had begun going to college and working outside the home. They were no longer confined to the higher reaches of the society and economy. They worked in healthcare, education, the media, and the growing high-tech industry. Nurses and schoolteachers joined unions. At universities and in the large metro centers where they went to work, they were exposed to the political movements that had arisen during the ’60s. This included movements for civil rights, peace, environmental and consumer protection, and, above all, women’s rights.

In the 1984 election between Ronald Reagan and Democrat Walter Mondale, they were more likely to support the Democrat than their working-class counterparts. Beginning in the 1988 election, most college-educated women began supporting Democrats. They have continued to do so and in growing numbers. In the last three presidential elections, Democratic candidates won over 60 percent of the vote from college-educated women.

By contrast, some women without college degrees—most of whom either work at home or for wages—have abandoned the Democrats. While many black and Hispanic women have remained loyal Democrats, white working-class women have turned to the Republicans. They did back Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and Barack Obama in 2008, but after that election, they began to bolt. In 2012, white working-class women favored Republican Mitt Romney over Obama by twenty percentage points; in 2016, 2020, and 2024, they favored Trump by twenty-seven, twenty-five, and twenty-eight points respectively. The difference between these voters and college-educated women has become a chasm. While white college-educated women favored Harris in 2024 by seventeen points, Harris lost white working-class women by 62 to 37 percent.

Source: American National Election Studies; AP/VoteCast

Many white working-class women simply followed the same political trajectory as white working-class men. Some split with the Democrats initially over civil rights, but later over programs that seemed to ask them to subsidize the poor with higher taxes or premiums, while receiving no benefits themselves. Many also objected to Democratic support for gun control and indifference to illegal immigration. Significant numbers shared the cultural agenda of the religious Right.

The loss of Democratic support was particularly dramatic in rural areas and small towns that used to favor the Democrats. These areas, where on average only 25 percent had college degrees, became hotbeds of Republican support. Feeling left-behind and ignored by Democrats, they backed Trump in his three campaigns. While Harris carried the big cities and adjacent suburbs, Trump won the men and women of rural areas and small towns by huge margins. According to a voting analysis by Dante Chinni of the American Communities Project, Trump carried women voters in aging farmlands by 82 to 17 percent and in working-class country towns by 68 to 30 percent.

At the same time, college-educated women were becoming more Democratic. As they became more diverse, and less upper-class, as a group, they became far more supportive of Democratic economic initiatives—from New Deal programs to Democratic proposals on healthcare, education, and childcare. The change came quickly. In 1956, only 23 percent of college-educated women thought the government should help people get healthcare. By 1968, that number had risen to 42.7 percent. By 2020, 47.9 percent thought the government rather than private insurance should pay for healthcare. That’s what used to be called “socialized medicine.”

At colleges, many women were exposed to the civil rights revolution and to regulatory reforms pioneered by Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson and embraced by the Democrats. When they went to work, it was often in the large postindustrial metro centers where about half of the residents have college degrees, and where the ideas that originated in the 1960s continue to prevail. In 1984, 34.8 percent of college-educated women thought spending on the environment should be increased; by 2020, it was up to 59.2 percent. In 2020, 52.7 percent of college-educated women thought government should aid black and minority citizens. By contrast, 23.7 percent of women without college degrees shared this view. But most important of all, college-educated women became exposed to feminist ideas and priorities.

Feminism: The modern post-suffrage feminist movement (later dubbed “second-wave feminism”) originated in the mid-1960s at the same time as the female gender gap emerged in the 1964 election and as many more women were beginning college and entering the workforce. Betty Friedan’s best-selling The Feminine Mystique appeared in 1963, and in 1966, Friedan and other feminists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). That was followed by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and the National Women’s Political Caucus. On campuses, and among young graduates, a women’s liberation movement sprung up.

The women’s movement agitated for equal rights for women in the workplace and home and in school admissions, the right to abortion, the prevention of violence against women, and the creation of women’s studies departments. But the women’s movement also extended its reach to healthcare, education, and childcare. One of the key publications of the movement was Our Bodies, Ourselves, published in 1972 by the Boston Women’s Health Care Collective. The women’s movement became a chief defender of the government safety net erected by the New Deal and the Johnson administration. It joined forces on these issues with conventional liberals. Radical feminist groups went further: they questioned the role of the nuclear family and endorsed gay liberation.

Support for feminism has been concentrated among women who were attending or had graduated from college, single women, young women, and women who lived in postindustrial metropolitan centers. It has had less resonance, and sometimes inspired sharp opposition, in small town and rural America and among women who did not graduate from college. According to the American National Election Studies, in 1980, a crucial year for the gender gap, 50 percent of female college graduates thought women should have an “equal role” to men, but only 30 percent of women without degrees thought so. Similarly, 49 percent of college graduates favored full abortion rights compared to 25 percent of women without degrees.

Forty years later, the same kinds of differences remained. In 2020, 60 percent of women with degrees favored full abortion rights. By contrast, only 44 percent of women without degrees favored full rights, and 40 percent wanted either to ban abortion or to permit it only in the case of incest, rape, or threat to a mother’s life. Of course, men of different classes and regions also held opposing views on these subjects, but they didn’t tend to base their choice of candidates on them. These mattered more for women, and they also mattered more at certain times.

Many of the college-educated women and single women have identified themselves as feminists. According to a YouGov poll in 2024, 43 percent of women with a college degree identify themselves as “feminists” compared to 25 percent who do not have a degree. An Ipsos poll in 2018 came up with almost identical numbers: 44 percent instead of 43 percent for women with degrees. According to a Pew poll in 2020, 26 percent of women with degrees said that “feminist” describes their views “very well” and another 46 percent “somewhat well.” That’s 72 percent. In these polls, the two other groups that stood out were young women and seniors. That makes perfect sense: for young women, it’s because they experience more directly the challenges of abortion rights and employment; for seniors, it’s because they are the generation that grew up when the women’s movement originated.

The first clear indication that the commitment to feminism among college-educated women played a role in their election choices was in the 1972 and 1976 presidential races. The 1972 election pitting Republican Richard Nixon against Democrat George McGovern was the first in in which the Democrat received a higher percentage of the vote from college-educated women than from women without degrees. That reflected the changing composition of the women with degrees, but it also may have had to do with abortion becoming a political issue in that campaign. In this race, Nixon accused the Democrats of backing “acid, amnesty and abortion” and the McGovern’s camp embraced the demands of the women’s movement.

The 1976 election saw the gender gap temporarily disappear: college-educated women were 13.7 percentage points more likely to back Republican Gerald Ford than women without degrees. They went 60 to 40 percent for Ford. That may have had to do with Ford having enthusiastically backed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which had been revived in 1971, and which promised women equal rights to men. Also, the First Lady, Betty Ford, enthusiastically supported the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade making abortion a right. In the campaign, Ford and Carter both took equivocal positions on abortion rights.

In 1980, the female pro-Democratic gender gap revived and has persisted. In that election, the Republicans became committed to the agenda of the religious Right. Reagan opposed abortion rights and the ERA, and the Republicans became defenders of the traditional family. They also balked at funding for childcare and a national program for access to healthcare. After its repudiation by the GOP, feminism quite naturally became the province of the Democratic Party. That’s probably why, in the 1984 election, college-educated women were more supportive of the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, than were women without college degrees. In 1988, for the first time, most college-educated women backed the Democrat, Michael Dukakis.

In the 2010s and early 2020s, feminist concerns have once again shaped elections, particularly among college-educated women and single and young women. This was the time of the “Me Too” movement that exposed celebrities, media moguls, business leaders, and politicians who had raped, abused, or otherwise taken advantage of women. Some of the abuses were decades old. They came out in the 2010s, at a time when women had reached a critical mass in the upper reaches of the media, legal firms, and political organizations. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, reigniting the movement for abortion rights. And last but by no means least, in 2016, 2020, and 2024, Trump was the Republican presidential nominee. From his firm embrace of the religious Right in court appointments to his own history as a womanizer accused of rape and sexual assault, he embodied everything the feminist movement opposed.

The Democrats in these elections highlighted feminist concerns. In the 2016 election, Democrat Hillary Clinton ran as the embodiment of feminist ambition. “I’m with Her” was her campaign slogan, and in the convention, she burst through a glass ceiling to signify that she would be the first female president. “Hillary Clinton is suddenly bringing gender, subtly and explicitly, into the 2016 campaign,” an article for the National Women’s Political Caucus declared.

In 2024, Harris was more circumspect about the possibility of becoming the first woman president, although her supporters were not. During her campaign, she spoke eloquently and passionately about abortion rights, but with far less conviction and clarity about economic issues. Both presidential candidates received over 60 percent of the vote of college-educated women. Harris received 61 percent of the vote from young women aged 18-29. She won women in big cities by 67 to 32 percent and in adjacent suburbs by 61 to 37 percent. These were women whose outlooks were mostly likely to have been shaped by feminist concerns.

By contrast, Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 barely won the vote of women without college degrees, and Harris lost that vote to Trump. If the vote of minority women, whose electoral loyalty to the Democrats has dated from the civil rights era, is set aside, Clinton, Biden, and Harris lost the vote of white women without college degrees by 34, 36, and 35 percent, respectively. Many of these voters do support abortion rights, but they accord less importance to basing their vote on the issue than do college-educated women and women who live in large metro centers. They are also much less likely to describe themselves as feminists.

To sum up: the pro-Democratic female gender gap was initially driven more by working-class women then by women with college degrees. That began to change in the 1980s and culminated in the dramatic shift in party allegiance in the last three elections. Many working-class women abandoned the Democratic party for the same reasons as their male counterparts. Those who lived outside the great metro centers felted snubbed by Democratic elites; they blamed Democrats for lost jobs through bad trade deals and regulations and for rising illegal immigration. But many also rejected what they saw as Democrats’ identification with cultural views of the family and home that had been shaped by feminism. They identified the proponents of those views as metropolitan elites. In this way, the shift of the party’s base toward college-educated women and feminist priorities helped speed the exit of some working class women from Democratic ranks.

The Politics of Democratic Women

Over the last sixty years, blacks have become essential parts of the Democratic base and leadership. Witness not merely the importance of the black vote and of opposition to racism as a core issue, but the fact that two of the last four presidential nominees and the current House Minority Leader are black. The other key group to gain prominence in the Democratic Party has been college-age women whose political outlook was often shaped by feminism. For both these groups (like, say, the Irish a century earlier), success and visible influence in the political realm became a measure of overall social advancement.

As college-educated women, along with young and single women, have become more attached to the Democratic Party, they have become an increasingly important part of the party’s base and its leadership. In 1998, 13 percent of self-identified Democrats were college-educated women; by 2022, it was up 30 percent. That’s probably the largest single group of Democratic voters with a relatively uniform outlook, who can determine the results of primaries and caucuses. They have also become significant donors. In 2024, women who gave $200 or more contributed $1.45 billion to the Democratic Party and its candidates; men contributed $1.87 billion. (By contrast, men gave more than twice as much to Republicans as women did.)

College-educated women have become leaders of the party. As already noted, two of the last three presidential nominees were college-educated women. Nancy Pelosi was the most powerful House Speaker since Sam Rayburn. On the party’s left, the best-known politician besides Bernie Sanders is New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Besides California’s Gavin Newsom, the Democrats’ best-known governor has probably been Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer.

Women are also leaders in the institutions, activist groups, and media that are part of the larger Democratic universe. Two women started Black Lives Matter. A young woman leads the Sunrise Movement. Women head the Economic Policy Institute, the Roosevelt Institute, the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, the Human Rights Campaign, Moveon.org, and the New America Foundation. Women occupy key positions in The New York Times, the Atlantic, The Bulwark, and MSNBC. Women head the AFL-CIO, and two of the most influential political unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union.

As women have gained prominence in the Democratic coalition and its supporting institutions, they have helped to define the party’s political positioning, setting it in a liberal direction. College-educated women have been one of the single most liberal groups. According to a 2020 American National Election Studies survey, 44.5 percent of all college-educated women—of whom 58.9 percent identify as Democrats—define their politics as liberal. That comes out to be almost three-quarters of college-educated women who identify as Democrats while also identifying as liberals. That’s compared to 19.9 percent of women without a degree and 25.5 percent of men with a college degree identifying as liberals.

Source: American National Election Studies

But the liberalism of college-educated women is different from New Deal liberalism. That older incarnation of liberalism emerged from the industrial unions and the big city machines and was centered on support for higher wages, better working conditions, massive public works, and programs like social security and later Medicare. At the heart of the politics of college-age women is feminism, which includes support for abortion, affirmative action, increased spending on childcare, healthcare, and education, and greater attention to violence against women. In recent years, defense of the rights of LGBT (and particularly the T or transgender) has become an abiding concern of many feminists and Democrats. These concerns have become core issues for the Democrats.

According to the ANES survey, in comparison to women without degrees, and men with or without degrees, college-educated women are the most supportive of using affirmative action in hiring and promotions. According to a March 2025 NBC poll, white women with a college degree were the only group supportive of continuing the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that the Trump administration was trying to eliminate.

Opinion of Trump administration Eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Programs

NBC News Poll, March 7-11, 2025

College-educated women have also embraced neoliberal positions on certain issues relating to nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. The older New Deal liberalism worried about the effect of unbounded immigration and free trade on workers’ wages and jobs. The newer brushed aside these concerns. According to the ANES survey, college-educated women have been the most favorably disposed to decreasing or limiting money for border security and the most opposed to any limits on imports. By the same token, they have been the most opposed to Trump’s stands on immigration and trade. In the 2020 primaries, they favored Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders. Their political approach was best represented by Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.

As a result of the influence of these college-educated female Democrats, voters’ perception of what the Democrats and Democratic liberals stand for has been changed. If you look at surveys designed to tell whether you are liberal or conservative, or how the electorate leans, you will invariably see a question about abortion, often at the very beginning of the survey, or most recently, about “the social acceptance of people who are transgender.” Voters identify Democrats by their stands on these issues. In January 2025, a New York Times and Ipsos poll asked over 2000 voters what they thought were “the most important issues” for themselves and for each party. Voters thought the Democrats’ principal issues were, in this order, abortion, LGBT policy, climate change, the state of democracy, and healthcare. That bespeaks a Democratic Party profoundly influenced by college-educated women and by feminism.

Source: New York Times/Ipsos

This disparity between what an average voter thought important and what he or she believed the Democrats stood for has proven disastrous for some Democratic candidates, including Harris in 2024. It is not a product of voters’ imagination, but perception, and it is the result of the degree to which Democratic politics today is shaped by college-educated women who were products of the feminist revolution.

The Political Repercussions

The successes of the women’s movement have bent the moral arc of the universe. Like the civil rights movement, it has benefited not just its immediate subjects, but the country. That, however, is not the question here. It’s what the movement’s and feminism’s effect has been on American party politics. And from the standpoint of what feminists and Democrats have wanted to achieve, the answer is decidedly mixed.

Beginning in the 1970s, as Republicans wooed the religious Right and continuing through the Donald Trump era, feminism has brought women into the Democratic Party and strengthened its ranks. It has also opened new avenues for women’s leadership in the states and in Washington. Opposition to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade also helped Democrats win back the House of Representatives in 2022. In the first months of the second Trump administration, college-educated women have led the charge against what has been something of a political horror show. As a group, they have been the most critical of Trump’s stances.

Source: Washington Post/Ipsos Poll, April 18-22, 2025

But the preeminence of feminism and of college-educated women has also provoked a backlash, one that’s benefited Republicans while empowering a stridently anti-feminist conservative opposition. The backlash began in the ’70s. In 1978, Democratic Senate incumbent Dick Clark was upset by Republican Roger Jepsen partly because Catholics in eastern Iowa abandoned the Democrats over their support for abortion. Conservative evangelicals were once either apolitical or inclined to back Democrats—but were opposed to abortion and supportive of the traditional family; after the feminist revolution, they became one of the Republicans’ most dependable constituencies. In 2024, Trump won eight of ten white evangelical votes. As Democrats have become more closely identified as a feminist party, they have found it near impossible to reach many observant white voters whose faiths take a more traditional view of family.

To be sure, Democrats cannot be faulted for casting their lot with women’s rights any more than they could have been faulted for supporting civil rights. But the backlash against feminism has been fueled partly by radical stands that feminist groups have taken that go well beyond the defense of women’s rights. In the ’70s, radical feminists attacked the institution of the family itself, which invited Republicans to cast their own party as “pro-family.”

In the last few decades, most feminist groups have taken up the cause of transgender rights. They have called for a feminism that is “trans-inclusive” and denounced feminists who insist on a biological definition of sex as “TERFs,” or “trans-exclusive radical feminists.” They have gone beyond opposing discrimination against transgender people in employment or housing, to defending the participation of biological men in women’s sports and to championing surgery and hormonal drug treatments for minors who question their gender. Republicans have been able to exploit these stands that are unpopular with the public, including many voters who identify as Democrats.

During the last decade, Democrats and feminists have also charged that Trump and his supporters are afflicted with “toxic masculinity,” a term that ironically originated with pro-feminist men’s groups that was taken up by gender studies departments. No doubt the term fit Trump himself and some of his associates, but its use, which extended to supporters of Bernie Sanders who were cast “Bernie Bros,” conveyed an overall dismissal of masculinity. Coupled with an elevation of women’s concerns and an indifference to whatever ills young men may suffer, the term “toxic masculinity” suggested that feminists and Democrats disliked men.

As Richard Reeves, who wrote Of Boys and Men (2022), has noted, the counterpart to the Harris campaign’s focus on feminist concerns was its seeming indifference to the plight of young males who suffer from a high suicide rate and an absence of opportunity. The Trump campaign seized on this impression in their campaign in 2024. The Republican convention was headlined by Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, and Trump actively sought the support of podcasters like Joe Rogan who appealed to young men.

In championing men, Trump could also rely on a resentment toward women and feminism that predated his campaign. While the gap between women’s and men’s wages has shrunk (though it persists) and while men still occupy most of the commanding positions in business and finance, women have rapidly advanced in the last century up the occupational ladder. According to the Department of Education, women received 61 percent of the college degrees last year. Since 2015, women have outnumbered men at law schools. Women are now 40 percent of practicing lawyers, up from 31 percent in 2010. Similarly, since 2019, women have made up the majority of medical school students. Women account for 45 percent of the faculty in medical schools.

Women’s advances may have stirred resentment among younger men. According to a Brookings study, 45 percent of the men aged 18 to 29 say they face discrimination as men. The number of young men who think the United States “has gone too far in promoting gender equality” rose from 8 percent in 2017 to 19 percent in 2024. In a 2020 survey, half of men believed that society “punishes men for being men.” According to a Pew Poll that year, three in ten men believed that “women’s gains have come at the expense of men.” When Trump appealed directly to men’s resentment in the 2024 election, he fully reaped the benefits of that underlying resentment. Much of his success in wooing young men, but not young women, may have come from an underlying opposition to feminism. In an April 2025 NBC poll, 44 percent of young men (18-29), compared to 26 percent of young women, thought “American would be strong if more women held traditional gender roles” as homemakers.

Just as there has been a pro-Democratic female gender gap, there has been a pro-Republican gender gap among men. The Republicans have won the male vote in every presidential election since 1996, except in 2008 when they lost the vote by one percentage point. In the 2016 and 2024 elections, the male vote provided Trump with his margin of victory.

In 2024, Trump also broke ground among different male voters. Trump won young (18-29) male voters by 56 to 42 percent after having lost them to Biden by 56 to 41 percent. Trump vastly improved his showing among Latino and black males from 2020, and he edged out Harris by 49 to 47 among young Latinos. Harris and the Democrats were able to maintain, with minor losses, their margin among young women and among black and Latino women, but the pro-Democratic female gender gap was overcome by the pro-Republican male gender gap. Trump and Republicans benefitted with these once solidly Democratic groups from being on the male side of the battle of the sexes.

In other words, the growing identification of the Democratic Party with feminism -- driven by the growing importance of college-educated women to the Democrats’ base and leadership -- allowed Trump and other Republican politicians to peel away male voters. The result has been exactly the opposite what many women who embraced Democratic politics over the last decades had hoped: instead of a victory for feminist politics, it has contributed to the success of a party that opposes not merely the most radical measures advocated by feminists, but such basis objectives of the movement as ensuring the right to abortion, preventing violence against women, and ensuring that women are given their due in the higher circles of public power, including the military.

Toward the 2028 Election

In American politics, the rival two parties are roughly equal in voter support nationally, with about a third of voters occupying a fluid middle and identifying as “independents.” In recent years, presidential elections have been won or lost on the ability of one party to make the vote a referendum on the other party’s most extreme socio-cultural positions. In 2022, the Democrats held their own by tying the Republicans to abortion bans. In 2024, Trump and the Republicans succeeded in making the election, at least in part, a referendum on Democrats identification with extreme feminist positions on men and transgenders. Having succeeded in that election, Trump and Republicans are likely to continue with that formula. Democrats, for their part, have been forced to rethink how the public sees their party.

American political parties are loose coalitions of politicians, powerful donors and lobbyists, business and labor groups, issue organizations, consultants and intellectuals in the media, thinktanks, foundations, churches and policy groups, and the active primary electorate. When a party wins the White House, the President can rule the party and keep the different parts of the coalition in check. That’s been the case with Trump. But without a President in the White House, the party’s political identification is up for grabs. That’s the case with today’s Democrats.

In the wake of the Democrats’ defeat in 2024, some prominent politicians, donors, and operatives are attempting to reshape the party’s identity looking toward the 2026 and 2028 elections. Some of this rethinking involves the party’s identification with radical culture stands. There have been two different strategies for redefining the party’s goals. The first, enunciated by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, has been to restore the party’s older pre-Sixties focus on economic well-being at the expense of social issues. Social issues would simply be downplayed without necessarily changing the party’s positions on them. That approach has also been recommended by California Congressman Ro Khanna and by a group of retired labor and political operatives who are drawing up a “Contract with Working Families,” modeled on the Republicans’ 1994 “Contract with America.”

The second approach has included repudiating the party’s positions in 2024 on social and cultural issues and condemning the influence wielded by what is called “the groups” on the party’s political identification. What is most often cited as an example of the groups’ nefarious influence is the American Civil Liberties Union’s circulation in 2019 of a questionnaire asking aspiring candidates whether they supported government funding for gender-affirming medical care on prisoners who were illegal immigrants. Five years later, the Trump campaign bludgeoned Harris for checking yes on the ACLU’s questionnaire.

Two politicians, Massachusetts’ Congressman Seth Moulton and California Governor Gavin Newsom, repudiated the party’s support for biological men competing in women’s sports. Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a potential presidential candidate, promised in his February 2025 State of the State speech to “begin implementing targeted solutions to uplift our men and boys.” Ilyse Hogue, the former chair of NARAL Pro-Choice America, along with a pollster and former congressman, has organized “Speaking with American Men,” a project to figure out how Democrats can reach young male voters. The project exemplifies Democrats’ insularity -- it consists, it seems, of metro elites trying to understand the rubes in flyover country -- but it is notable, and exceptional, in being led by a prominent feminist.

Other efforts are specifically intended to redefine the party as “moderate” on social issues. A former Senate staffer and a consultant have begun a thinktank, Searchlight, that would free the Democrats from the influence of the groups on social policy. Other Democrats are trying to promote moderation through a PAC called “Welcome,” which hosted an event last June at which Democrats were urged, in the words of one attendee, “to come back to the center and get away from woke, identity politics.” The event attracted Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin and House Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez from Washington and Jared Golden from Maine.

There has also been a subliminal discussion among Democrats about whether their party should nominate an “alpha male” rather than a woman in 2028. The discussion has been greeted with some derision. In a May Sirius talk show, Rep. Jasmine Crockett from Texas, who is currently running for senate, accused Democrats of wanting to run “the safest white boy” for President. Later that month, MSNBC aired a discussion, “Is a Female Candidate at the top of the 2028 ticket ‘Radioactive’ for the Democrats?” in which their panelists dismissed the concerns about running another woman candidate. These dismissals bore out, however, the extent to which Democrats are privately mulling whether a male candidate will be needed to counter the Democrats’ reputation as a “woman’s party.”

In the 2026 election, these efforts might prove unnecessary. Trump and the Republicans’ unpopularity might have shifted the onus of extremism onto the Republican candidates and have nullified Republican attempts to tar the Democrats as the party of elite social liberalism. But it is likely that the dilemma that the Democrats faced in 2024 will recur in the years ahead and that they will have to find a way to reach across the divides of geography, sex, and education that have prevented them from creating a stable political majority.

Note: For polling data, I have relied on the Catalist survey, where possible, for elections from 2012 to the present. For prior elections, and for particular groups not included in the Catalist survey, I have relied on a variety of sources, including the American National Election Survey, Gallup, and AP/Votecast. Some of these surveys are limited in their samples, but they are still useful in describing trends over decades.

I actually favored a tariff strategy. I applaud the writings of Michael Pettis, Michael Lind, and Oren Cass on the subject. Over the last forty-five years, wrong-headed American policies, Japanese and then Chinese mercantilist strategy, and an American business class without loyalty to its country have decimated American manufacturing. It has created a situation where we depend on other nations (some of whose interests run counter to ours) for goods that are vital to our defense and prosperity. It has distorted American economy in favor of speculative finance and away from goods production. And it has contributed to economic instability and inequality.

Tariffs, if coupled with an industrial policy, are one tool in beginning to correct the problem. I look favorably on an overall ten percent tariff (which could encourage domestic production), targeted tariffs at China and at goods that Chinese companies are end-running through third countries, and an end to the de minimis loophole that allows the Chinese to evade tariffs. And I favor some action to boost American domestic auto production. Some of this is in the plan, but it's the rest of it that bothers me.

The imposition of high tariffs (beyond the 10 percent) on a host of countries with which we had formerly enjoyed good relations, and which have not contributed to the international imbalance in trade surpluses could very well precipitate a global downturn; and it could isolate the United States economically and open the door for the Chinese to peel away trade partners. It could land a final blow to our diplomatic and military alliances.

There seems to be a basic misconception that lies at the heart of Trump's trade policies. It was first clearly articulated in a September 2016 "white paper" that Peter Navarro (who became Trump's White House trade advisor in his first administration and has retained that post in his second) and future Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross put out to defend Trump's initial tariff proposals during that year's campaign. Navarro and Ross rely on the standard economics 101 formula:

The growth in any nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) – and therefore its ability to create jobs and generate additional income and tax revenues – is driven 8 by four factors: consumption growth, the growth in government spending, investment growth, and net exports. When net exports are negative, that is, when a country runs a trade deficit by importing more than it exports, this subtracts from growth.

In equation form, that's GDP=C+I+G+(X-M), where C is consumption, I is investment, G is government spending, X is exports and M is imports. Navarro and Ross's assumption, which Trump articulated repeatedly, is that if the United States were to eliminate its trade deficit, it would dramatically boost GDP. But as a host of economists pointed out at the time, C and I are not independent variables. For instance, the trade deficit usually goes down during a severe recession, because a recession depresses consumption, including consumption of imports. Tariffs, if not used judiciously, could reduce the trade deficit by dragging the United States into a recession. And that's exactly what a single-minded attempt to eliminate America's trade deficit could do.

And it gets worse. Trump's goal is not merely to end America's trade deficit, but to end its deficit with each country. That could at best spell endless negotiations that are well beyond the capability of Trump's appointees, but more likely it could fuel trade alliances against the United States. America's goal, as Michael Pettis has argued, should be to end the international imbalance between surplus and deficit countries, of which Chinese mercantilism is the main cause. You don't do that by slapping high tariffs on Indonesia or Lesotho.

What the Trump strategy could do is precipitate a trade war that could cause an international downturn. Instead of promoting new trade agreements with other countries, it could sow distrust of any agreement with the United States. What are countries to think of Trump slapping new tariffs on Mexico and Canada and renegotiating the USMCA that he negotiated during his first term?

Trump's tariffs might not even encourage the kind of manufacturing the country needs. Take the 25 percent auto tariffs that the United Auto Workers have applauded. The United States should encourage auto companies to produce here, and the USMCA began this process. But the 25 percent tariffs take that to a crippling extreme that will damage the Mexican and Canadian economies. An auto tariff and a tariff on other key manufactures also needs to be coupled with an industrial policy that will encourage companies to take advantage of the tariffs by reviving their industries. In the case of autos, that would seem to suggest encouraging the transition from gas to electric cars and trucks, but Trump has coupled the tariffs with killing off the provisions of the Biden administration's attempt to spur an American electric car industry by funding networks of charging stations, battery research and production, and the improvement of the grid. The net effect of Trump's auto tariffs, it seems to me, will be to cede to China domination of the global electric car industry.

You can make similar observations about Trump's tariffs on India (where many of our pharmaceuticals are produced) or on the European Union (whose companies vie for superiority with ours in biotechnology). Trump has coupled his tariffs with measures, led by the unspeakable moron who heads of the Department of Health and Human Services, to gut our bio medical research. In the long run, that could cede leadership in biotechnology to European and Asian firms and universities.

The only silver lining in Trump's proposals is that by stirring discontent within the electorate, they will make it more likely that the Democrats will recapture power. That won't save the country or the Democrats. The seesaw of power between the parties will continue. But it could save us temporarily from the black hole in which Trump, Musk, Navarro, Kennedy et al. are determined to plunge us.

Shor is one of the best analysts of American politics. I like what he says about the turn to the Republicans of young voters. I had written about it myself ("Where Have All the Young Democrats Gone?"), but he has more extensive polling at hand, and makes a useful distinction between the young and very young (18-24), who have moved even more dramatically away from the Democrats.

He also has interesting observations about immigrant backing of Donald Trump. I had encountered this in 2017 when I was the journalist/moderator for a panel at Montgomery College about the election outcome. The representative of the county Republicans was an immigrant from India and that of the student Republicans was a Filipino immigrant. Something was clearly happening, and as Shor demonstrates, that trend has continued.

I want to confine my comments to areas where I disagree with Shor or where I believe something is missing from his analysis of 2024.

Climate Change: Shor finds in his polling that voters thought that Democrats were much more trustworthy on dealing with climate change, but that voters didn't attach that much importance to the issue in choosing either Trump or Kamala Harris. If this is all you want to know about voters' opinion of climate change, you're misreading its salience.

Instead of asking how respondents rate the importance of climate change compared to other issues, or whether respondents support policy X or Y, or whether they think Republicans or Democrats will successfully reduce the rate of climate change, pollsters should be asking questions like this: would you support a candidate who favors reducing or eliminating the production (or use) of fossil fuels to combat climate change?

I suspect that pollsters would discover that in many states whose economies depend on fossil fuel extraction either directly or indirectly (as in the fertilizer in farming) that a large group of voters would reject a candidate who embraced the kind of program on climate that many Democrats have favored -- a program that entails reducing the use of fossil fuels to net zero. I have not seen polling on a question like this, but recent political history supports my view.

You have to look at opinion in states. Winning states is what counts for the presidency and for control of the Senate. West Virginia was one of the mostly solidly Democratic states until the Clinton administration, led in this case by Vice President Al Gore, signed the Kyoto treaty. That was the end of Democrats' winning the state in presidential contests. Republicans now hold all the state offices that are elected by party and its Senators and House members are Republicans. Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, North Dakota and South Dakota used to be swing states until after Kyoto and until Democrats started backing measures to discourage fossil fuel production.

In addition, polls show voters overwhelmingly favor producing more fossil fuels. My illustrious co-author Ruy Teixeira cites a New York Times/Siena poll from last September showing that two-thirds of likely voters support a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” Trump understood this when he made "Drill, baby, drill" one of his campaign slogans. Harris tried to backtrack on her opposition to fracking -- an issue that was important to Pennsylvania voters -- but for many voters, the damage was already done. The Democrats' history on this issue had already put a number of states out of reach, and it had made winning a state like Pennsylvania much more difficult.

I suspect Democratic consultants don't dwell on this issue because they see no obvious political solution to the problem that doesn't undercut the urgency of the actual problem. But as Ruy and I have argued, if one wants to pass any measures that will reduce the rate of climate change, one has to back down from proposals that clearly require sacrifice from workers and homeowners. What's needed is support for natural gas as a transition fuel and for nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, as well as funding for research into new methods of curbing carbon emissions. That means taxpayer funded programs, but it doesn't mean requiring someone in Wyoming to rely on an electric car to get across the state.

Education Polarization: Shor says that the "most important political trend of the last thirty to forty years, both here and in ... Western countries with elections has been the story of education polarization." Education polarization has been a useful statistical predictor of election outcomes, but it doesn't explain why voters with college degrees vote differently from voters without them. People without college degrees don't vote Republican out of solidarity with those who also lack a college degree or in explicit opposition to those who do. It's a correlation not a cause.

The polarization is dictated partly, if not primarily, by economic geography. In states that Democrats win and that are dominated by large metro areas, Michael Podhorzer has calculated that Democrats win half or more of voters without college degrees. They break even, too, with white college educated voters. I don't have exact results but from looking, say, at the margins in the Portland and Minneapolis St. Paul greater metro area, Democrats win more than half of voters without college degrees within large post-industrial metro centers. The Republicans' big margins among non-college educated voters come from voters within rural districts, small towns, and larger towns that are not within metro regions. Republicans win between 65 and 80 percent of the vote in these areas, where voters without college degrees predominate.

Democrats used to have a hold in many of these small towns and smaller cities in the Midwest that were centers of mining and manufacturing, but as the mines and factories have closed, the unions, which buoyed and defined Democratic politics, have also disappeared. As the national Democratic Party has increasingly become centered in large post-industrial metro areas, social and cultural differences among the voters in small-town and metro America, which were once submerged, have surfaced with a vengeance.

As Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea document in The Rural Voter, many of these voters hold traditional views of family, work, and nation. They vehemently oppose illegal immigration. They see Democrats as rewarding people who don't work and are not legally in the country. They oppose gun control. They are religiously conservative and more inclined to oppose abortion and to be more exercised about trans men participating in women's sports. If they don't think climate change is a hoax, they oppose measures to arrest it by reducing the use of fossil fuels. And the Democrats' opposition to fossil fuels is toxic in farm communities and places where people have to drive long distances.

To be sure, there are people without college degrees who live in the suburbs or cities who hold some of these same views. But as Jacobs and Shea argue, these views constitute an overarching worldview that pits the "us" of rural and smalltown America against the "them" of cosmopolitan big cities. David Goodhart makes a similar argument about Brexit voters in The Road to Somewhere. And if you look at other countries where there is a correlation between education level and a turn rightward, you find a similar difference in geography. In Germany, for instance, support for the Alternative for Germany is heavily concentrated in East Germany. In France, the National Rally, which began as a small business party of the South has taken root in the small towns in the North that were once centers of manufacturing and mining.

The Woke Factor: Asked by Klein about wokeness's role in the election, Shor says Trump's transgender "they/them" ad was a "70th percentile ad," he says, "When you look at Donald Trump’s best-performing ads, it was basically the economy, gas prices, immigration and crime. There has definitely been an overemphasis on D.E.I., wokeness and trans issues."

Shor uses "woke" in a narrow way that excludes two of the issues he cities as important -- immigration and crime. Immigration is a cultural as well as economic issue and the issue of crime is interwoven with a racial radicalism that wants to defund the police, abolish prisons, and ignore or downplay shoplifting and even carjacking. Blueprint, a Democratic firm, polled voters who made their choice of candidate in the last weeks. They concluded, "Republicans’ cultural critiques stuck to Harris and to the national Democratic brand, tapping into existing anxiety about Democratic Party priorities." Swing voters who ended up backing Trump believed that Democrats "are too focused on identity politics," "have extreme ideas about race and gender," and "don't share the values that have made America special."

Greenberg Research did extensive post-election polling and came to a similar conclusion. According to their poll, inflation was a key issue, but the other top issues were "securing the border and deporting illegal immigrants" and "calling out woke policies." The third most important reason that "moderate Democrats" gave for backing Trump was that Harris "promotes transgender operations and allowed them to compete in all sports." Just as the Trump campaign understood the importance of climate change, they also understood the degree to which Harris's support for taxpayer funding of transgender operations for prisoners would infuriate many voters.

Brand Names: Asked about the Democrats' future prospects, Shor says, "How Harris did and Biden did in most of the country show that these problems won’t be fixed unless we spend the next two or four years changing the party’s brand — especially among working-class voters, who are overrepresented in the Senate." True enough, but I want to say something about the term "brand." It doesn't quite capture what the Democrats' problem is. If you like a brand of toothpaste, you are unlikely to say it tastes good, but it doesn't do a great job preventing cavities. Many people who vote Republican will continue to do so even if they agree with Democrats on specific issues like the minimum wage or Medicaid and even if they don't like the Republican nominee.

What's usually happening in this case is that there is a set of issues or concerns that a voter associates with each party that has created an image of what the party stands for that transcends a candidate's stance on some particular issues. In the older division between Democrats and Republicans, it was the perception of class loyalties: Democrats were seen as the party of common man, and Republicans as the party of business, even though in fact, Democrats were the party of big oil, big finance (at least the Jewish part of Wall Street), big real estate and Hollywood. That wasn't how some Democrats, particularly in the South, saw the division of the parties, but it was the way a core group of Democrats saw it, and they constituted a base on which the party built a majority.

Today, Republican support among voters without a college degree is translated by political analysts into "working class" support, but the perceived difference between the parties is not along economic class lines. Democrats are not seen as the party of big business. They are seen as the party of cosmopolitan elites. The difference is more socio-cultural than economic, even though some of the social and cultural differences, like that on immigration, have a significant economic component. This difference in worldview -- to use a different term from "brand" -- is at the heart of why many rural and small-town voters reject the Democrats. It is about culture in the widest sense of the term. Democrats, of course, don't accept this same difference, and some Chamber of Commerce Republicans don't either. But it's what holds together a voting bloc on which Republicans can depend on from one election to another.

Shor cites the example of Dan Osborn in Nebraska to make this case about "brand.' Running as an "Independent" rather than a Democrat, Osborn ran well ahead of Harris even though he espoused policies associated with Democrats rather than Republicans. He was even ahead in the polls until Republican donors and consultants launched a last-minute campaign to get the voters to perceive him as a closet Democrat. Osborn's success showed the extent to which the very label "Democrat" conjures up an image that in many states proves fatal to Democratic candidates. And Democratic association with a socio-cultural image and set of issues is central to that perception.

If Democrats want to reclaim the majority they once enjoyed, they have to change that perception, and that requires more than declaring you are an economic populist. It requires changing the party's image on such issues as immigration, crime, and sex and gender. And it also requires finding a way to address the genuine dangers that climate change poses that doesn't spook many voters.

In May 2023, the Minnesota House and Senate passed a bill that would have provided minimum compensation rates for Uber and Lyft drivers and given them a right to appeal their "deactivation," that is, firing. Walz vetoed the bill, claiming it would unduly raised costs for consumers.

Perhaps, Walz's defense of the rideshare companies appealed to Harris. One of Harris's chief advisors during her presidential campaign (who also had a role in selecting her vice presidential nominee) was her brother-in-law Tony West, who was on leave during the campaign as Uber's Chief Council and Vice President.

One of the members of what the Washington Post described as Harris's "inner circle" before and during the campaign was California Senate appointee Laphonza Butler. Butler lobbied in 2019-2020 for Uber in California when it was battling drivers who wanted to be recognized as employees (with benefits) rather than as independent contractors. In 2020, Uber and Lyft spent millions supporting a referendum that overturned a California law that would have granted employee status to their drivers.

What's the point of this? The California bill that was overturned was an important effort to prevent companies from exploiting a new and growing group of "gig workers." So, too, I learned, was the Minnesota bill that Walz vetoed. Harris and Walz, it turns out, were the candidates from Uber. Make of it what you want, but I’d keep it in mind if either of them runs for high office again. I think it also says something about the Democrats’ higher circles.

But the TCJA has failed. Multinational corporations continue to export jobs and profits to low tax countries. Rich individuals continue to hide money offshore to avoid being taxed by the U.S. And it has cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the TCJA lost $1.45 trillion in revenue so far and that, if we extended just the individual tax cuts another 10 years we would lose an additional $3.37 trillion in revenue. That does not include the tax cuts for multinational corporations. Since the TCJA was passed, our deficit has increased by 248%. In 2017 when the TCJA was passed the federal debt equaled 76% of GDP. Today the federal debt is almost 100% of GDP.

You would think, if President Trump and Elon Musk were serious about cutting waste in the federal government, repealing the TCJA and eliminating its revenue loss would be a top priority. But, instead, they are pushing to continue to pay trillions of dollars in tax subsidies to its beneficiaries. And, rather than boosting tax collection efforts, the Administration is cutting 6700 IRS employees, most of whom are auditors, as well as closing about 110 in person assistance offices. Apparently they are adopting an honor system of taxation even though the tax gap between what is earned and what is taxed is estimated to be about $700 billion a year by the GAO. Where there is third party verification (e.g.1099s, W-2s) 95% of income is reported to the IRS but less than 50% of income is reported where there is no third party verification.
Because tax cuts, or in economic terms tax expenditures, are hidden from public view and not subject to annual appropriations they are the most prized federal subsidies. Since 80% of the tax benefits of the TCJA go to those in the top 10% ncome bracket, this might be the explanation for why there is so much pressure to extend them. Corporations and wealthy people can hire the lobbyists and make the kind of campaign contributions that seem to determine what happens in Washington.

I guess nothing much has changed. By pressuring Congress to extend the TCJA despite its failure to perform and its enormous expense, President Trump has proved he is just another politician who wants to hand out hidden subsidies to his campaign contributors and let our children and grandchildren pay the price, despite the warning signs from Wall Street about our growing debt. In Sept. 2017 when TCJA passed, the yield on the 10 year treasury was 2.3%. Today that yield is hovering around 4.3%. In 2017, when the TCJA passed, the national debt was $15 trillion. Today it is $30 trillion. It’s growing at triple the economy’s growth rate. Ironically, under the House proposal pushed by President Trump, most of the cost of extending the TCJA will fall on the middle and lower income whites who gave President Trump his margin of victory.

I thought of these kind of criticisms in the wake of Vice President J.D. Vance's speech last week at the Munich Security Conference, in which he said the biggest threat to Europe is not external but internal, and consists of its abandonment of democracy and free speech -- "values" that Europe "shared with the United States." Vance's criticism of the Europeans had two things in common with the Soviet and Chinese Communist criticisms of the United States.

First, their criticisms of particular practices had some validity. In the 1950s, the American South was racially segregated. And today, American democracy is being undermined by a growing inequality of wealth and power. And the particulars that Vance cited were, or seemed to be, violations of democracy. In November 2022, a British citizen, who opposed abortion, was arrested and later convicted for silently praying within 200 meters of an abortion clinic, which was forbidden because it might "influence" a woman from seeking an abortion at a clinic. That would seem to be a blatant violation of free speech.

At the conference itself, the German organizers barred two parties, the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) and the Budnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), respectively on the right and left, from attending, even though in polling for this month's election they command more support than parties whose attendance was welcomed. The organizers' decision excluded the opinions of about a quarter of the German electorate.

And the Romanian government, with the support of European Union officials, cancelled the results of an election on the ground that Russian social media had influenced the results in favor of a pro-Russian candidate. I am not too familiar with the precise details of what happened in Romania, but it is suspicious that in polls for the new election, the same candidate leads, presumably without help from Russian social media posts.

Secondly, however, the charges brought by the Soviets and Chinese and by Vance suffer from the overall context in which they were made. Neither the Soviet Union was or China is a democracy; they are dictatorships. And both were and have been guilty of violating human rights. The Chinese persecution of the Uyghurs matches and far exceeds any recent American violations of human rights. In these cases, one could see "glass-house" hypocrisy.

The same can be said of Vance's criticisms of the Europeans. In the United States, pro-life demonstrations are not suppressed. Indeed, they would never occur in thirteen states where abortion itself is illegal, which is an abridgement of women's rights.

Free speech restrictions in Germany were created in order to prevent a recurrence of Nazism. The AfD has a wing whose members have been prosecuted for employing slogans reminiscent of the Nazis. They have advocated a kind of German racial purity. The American Constitution was created in order to prevent a recurrence of monarchical authority. It decreed checks and balances among three state institutions and an orderly process of electoral succession.

The Trump administration has already run rough shod over the checks and balances that were supposed to restrain a President. It has attempted to shut down agencies that Congress created and to impound funds that Congress allocated. Trump himself tried to subvert the results of the 2020 election; he continues to insist the election was stolen. And the administration has set up a litmus test for appointees based on whether they agree with Trump that the election was stolen.

To his credit, Vance did mention the exclusion of the populist left party, the BSW, as well as the AfD. But Vance's statement has to be seen in the context of Trump sidekick Elon Musk's promotion of the AfD in Germany's elections. Vance met privately with a leader of the AfD while he was in Germany while snubbing German Chancellor, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz.

The Trump administration is promoting a far right movement in Europe that is a far greater threat to democracy than British laws protecting abortion clinics from protests. Indeed, the greatest single threat to democracy in the Western world is coming from Washington not Berlin or London.

One might argue that it is unfair to compare Vance's attacks against European democracy to Soviet or Chinese Communists charges against the United States. It is true that the degree of hypocrisy is not as great. I also don't mean the comparison between Vance and various Soviet or Chinese leaders should not be taken literally. But the grammar of the statements is similar. What a statement means depends partly on who is making and the context in which it is being made.

And the context in this case is one of Trump's United States, not Scholz's Europe, leading the West into dark and turbulent waters.