If you think that elections are won by vibes, not vision, the latest issue of the Washington Monthly, out today, is not for you. If you’re of the opinion that resisting the Trump administration’s growing authoritarianism should be the overwhelming focus of liberals’ attention and that policy debates are a sideshow at best, this issue of the magazine will try your patience. If you’re sure that Trump will not allow fair elections in the future, this issue of our publication will seem naive. If you’ve concluded that rural and working-class voters are so lost in the fever swamps of conspiracy and resentment that there is nothing the Democratic Party can reasonably do to win them back, this issue will frustrate you. If you believe that Democrats already have the right policy ideas and just need stronger messaging, or a better messenger, then I can suggest some other media outlets that will better suit your inclinations.
The Washington Monthly was founded on the belief that good policy makes good politics—not in every case or every election, but generally and over the long term. We also believe that the flip side is true: Parties that pursue policies that screw average Americans eventually pay a price. Three days after last November’s election, when many of my liberal friends were still so shell-shocked they could barely get out of bed, I wrote that Donald Trump and his MAGA colleagues would make moves that would “horrify the same public that elected them,” and that “the role of this magazine is to get the American people ready with ideas they can use when the opportunity arises.”
Weeks later we published an entire print issue devoted to “Ten Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself.” These included having government set prices in the highly consolidated commercial health care market to control soaring costs; providing the growing ranks of the self-employed with portable benefits and relief from monopoly predation; creating a new deal between Washington and universities to make tuition free for moderate-income students; and making ICE raids unnecessary by combining tough restraints on companies that hire undocumented migrants with generous opportunities for those migrants to become legal.
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In subsequent weeks and months, in print and online, we proposed bringing back “regulated competition” in the airline industry to spur innovation and lower costs to travelers in “flyover” parts of the country. We called for stronger antitrust enforcement to combat corporate “greedflation” in consumer-facing industries from food to financial services. And we took the measure, respectfully but critically, of the new policy ideas being promoted by our friends in the “abundance liberal” movement to address the housing and climate crises by cutting red tape and regulations.
This latest issue adds more new weapons to our arsenal. Phillip Longman and Gillen Tener Martin offer a creative plan to save Social Security—the solvency of which has been made worse by Trump’s tax and immigration policies—that avoids raising taxes on average Americans, boosts benefits to retirees who need it, and promotes a healthier and more productive America. Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that by exacerbating the suffering of rural Americans with tariffs and health care cuts, Trump is creating the same conditions that allowed FDR and Barack Obama to win substantial numbers of rural votes. Zach Marcus makes the case that instead of fighting MAGA in today’s poisonous digital political ecosystem, Democrats should challenge that environment as the root cause of our dysfunctional politics, and vow to be the party that cleans it up. And a group of writers lays out a post-Trump industrial policy for America that incorporates positive aspects of the administration’s approach while rejecting what’s insane.
This first year of Trump 2.0 is not yet over, but there is already mounting evidence that the public is indeed horrified by most of what the president is doing. His job approval ratings have been steadily underwater since March, and by even greater margins voters hate his tariffs, military deployments to blue cities, cuts to federal medical research, and overall handling of the economy. Meanwhile other recent surveys show strong and broad voter support for policies that take on corporate pricing power of the kind the Monthly has been proposing—with one finding that voters prefer cracking down on corporate price gouging over abundance liberal policy prescriptions by a two-to-one margin.
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Of course, polls also show that the Democratic Party brand is at least as toxic as the GOP’s. The reason isn’t “messaging” but policy: For decades both parties have presided over a government that consigned the least-affluent 60 percent of Americans to grinding downward mobility. Trump is president because he promised to help those folks by overthrowing the old order with far-reaching, if ill-advised, policies. If (when) he fails, Democrats can win, and possibly win big, but only if they adopt new, equally far-reaching, but smarter policies truly geared toward uplifting that neglected 60 percent.
If you agree—that Democrats need smart new ideas to win, and they can find them at the Washington Monthly—there’s something you can do to help: Donate to our Fall fundraising drive, which we’re kicking off today. Do it now. Give whatever you can—$25, $50, $100, $1,000.
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