In Part II of this interview with Washington Monthly Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris, Paul speaks with co-hosts Anne Kim and Garrett Epps about the shape of “Resistance 2.0” to Donald Trump and the legacy of Monthly founder Charlie Peters.
Below is a transcript lightly edited for readability:
Anne: Welcome to part two of our interview with Paul Glastris, editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly. Paul was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, who led Democrats to victory in 1992 after a long stretch of electoral defeats for the Democratic Party. This backdrop was very much on Paul’s mind as he put together the most recent issue of The Washington Monthly.
The cover package is titled 10 New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class and Itself.
Please also listen to part one, where we began a conversation with Paul about the new ideas he believes could help revive the party’s fortunes.
Garrett Epps: Well, let’s pick up on that, Paul, and look at the question of what Democrats should be as we move forward. We find ourselves in a different situation than we did in 2017. Of course, in the 2016 election, Trump eased his way into office, even though he lost the popular vote to Secretary Clinton. The vagaries of the Electoral College gave him the White House.
Now, we have a situation where Trump actually won the popular vote. There’s a perception that he scored some kind of smashing victory. We all know that’s not true—that he squeaked through. He didn’t win a majority of the popular vote, but he did get more votes than Vice President Harris. And he got them in the right swing states, which made all the difference.
It’s certainly correct to assess this as a formidable political situation, even though it was a narrow one. There was a sense in 2017 that we were “the resistance,” fighting against a completely illegitimate interloper that we could rid ourselves of as soon as possible.
In 2025, we face the prospect of a much harder slog to get our politics back on a reasonable footing. Somebody mentioned we need a “Resistance 2.0.” How do you see that idea? And what role can The Washington Monthly play?
Paul Glastris: Well, there’s a lot in that question.
Look, we could discuss the potential damage this new Trump administration—Trump 2.0—could do to democratic norms and our constitutional system. And I suppose you can exaggerate it. I do think there’s a lot of resilience and redundancy in our system that will make it difficult for him to wreak total havoc. His administration is often at odds with itself about what it wants to do, and that gives us some hope that the constitutional order can survive. But I don’t want to minimize the danger. We are in uncharted territory.
We could very well be moving toward a system of government like what you see in Hungary, Turkey, or Poland. Take one aspect of that: oligarchs buying up media and aligning with the dominant power. This is the system those countries have created. We now see something similar happening here, with Elon Musk purchasing Twitter—not a good economic investment for him, but a brilliant political one. Major media outlets, with the exception of maybe The New York Times, feel the need to bow to Trump’s power, even contributing to his inauguration fund.
It’s a scary time.
That said, there is a limit to what average citizens, Democratic elected officials, and brave Republicans can do in terms of resistance. They should fight like heck, but there’s a limit.
A better way forward might be good old-fashioned politics. A lot of what Donald Trump and the Republicans want to do is deeply unpopular. Trump didn’t win a sweeping mandate for massive change. He won because predominantly working-class people—whose lives have frankly sucked for decades and who were hit hard by inflation—thought, At least this guy’s going to shake things up. I’m for that. Many knew full well he’s a liar and a criminal, but they voted for him anyway—not because of those traits, but because they don’t believe existing institutions work for their benefit.
So, Trump and his party will push unpopular policies, not just with liberals but even with many Republicans. Here’s an example:
One story in the current issue of The Washington Monthly is called Tutorize Don’t Privatize Public Education. The basis of this story is the likelihood that Trump’s Department of Education will push legislation allowing public school tax dollars to be diverted to private and religious schools. Conservative states have already been doing this. Unlike the old voucher idea, which was mostly aimed at low-income neighborhoods, this new policy lets anyone, regardless of income, take public tax dollars to pay for private or religious schooling.
It’s a terrible policy. There’s no evidence it improves school quality. It predominantly benefits affluent families and drains funds from public schools. Worse yet, it’s deeply unpopular—even with Republican voters. In 2024, ballot initiatives in states like Colorado, Nebraska, and Kentucky overwhelmingly rejected similar proposals. Nevertheless, the Trump administration seems likely to push it.
Democrats should uniformly oppose this legislation. If they do, they’ll likely succeed—and it could deal a political blow to Trump and his party, much like George W. Bush’s failed attempt to privatize Social Security.
But Democrats also need their own plans for public schools. Post-COVID, student achievement levels have plummeted and haven’t recovered. Short of embracing what teachers’ unions want—like higher pay for teachers, which doesn’t necessarily improve education quality—Democrats need a concrete plan.
We propose tutoring for every student who needs it. This was proven effective under Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which provided $7.5 billion for high-impact tutoring. It boosted students’ math and reading scores significantly. Even red state governors have embraced the idea, though Republicans in Congress resist it because it happened under Biden.
This is a great idea for Democrats to champion. So, a combination of resistance and offering clear alternatives is the smarter strategy for Democrats over the next few years.
Anne: So, Paul, you have this slate of wonderful ideas, and I’m wondering if you have a particular person in mind as a messenger to carry it forward. One of the things we learned from the Trump era, if nothing else, is that the messenger often matters just as much as the message. You know, where Democrats have kind of fallen short is on that emotional connection, perhaps, with the working class. I mean, Bill Clinton was Bubba. You know, he was that persona. He got it. He connected. And that was a big part of why he won.
So, who do you see as someone who could replicate that kind of success, that visceral connection with ordinary people? Who do you see as a new standard-bearer that you’re most excited about?
Paul Glastris: You know, that is a great question, and I wish I had a good answer for you.
Bill Clinton was a once-in-a-century political talent—except, actually, we got two in a century because we got Barack Obama. And the two of them had a few unique qualities. One was the capacity to get across complicated policy ideas to the mass of Americans in ways that made them clear enough for people to understand the essence of them.
The world’s complicated. People know the world’s complicated. We all deal with complexity every day. We know government’s complicated. People don’t have time—well, the listeners of this podcast and the readers of The Washington Monthly are the rare individuals who spend the time to learn. But average people can learn just fine if you take the time, have the care, and possess the talent to explain what you’re doing with the power the public gave you.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had that skill. We really haven’t had, on the Democratic side, anyone with that level of skill—maybe Pete Buttigieg. And it’s not just a skill of communicating; it’s the capacity to absorb, understand, and put policy ideas into a larger context of vision—to use a, you know, $10 word or biblical word, really.
Absent vision, absent a larger sense of where you’re taking the country, the policies are just a kind of technocracy that don’t matter. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had vision. I’m not sure Donald Trump has vision, but he sure has policies, and he’s able to boil them down in simple ways that resonate and make sense: Build a wall. Get rid of the illegals. I mean, it doesn’t take a lot to get these across.
So the idea that policy doesn’t matter is ridiculous. We know policy hurt the Democrats on things like trans issues, defund the police, and open borders. Democrats were still smarting from that stuff four years after most of them abandoned those ideas.
And, you know, great communicators—go back to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan won on the strength of ideas like vastly expanding the military and major cuts in government, ideas that were extreme even within his own party a few years before he won in 1980. So ideas and vision really matter.
I don’t know which of the potential Democratic candidates can absorb this—it takes a kind of entrepreneurship of political talent. And there’s a lot of political talent in the Democratic Party. Josh Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris—she’s an extraordinary political talent.
What she didn’t show in this race, and perhaps it’s because she came in so late, was a new vision. Joe Biden, bless him, put in place a new vision but could never explain it. I think he was almost afraid to explain it—afraid he would offend one part or another of the Democratic coalition.
If there’s anything Democrats need to do, it’s find new ideas that bring the different parts of the coalition together. Look, we have young, progressive, educated people who, over the last four years, thought the most important things government needs to do are protect the rights of undocumented aliens and trans folks and combat police brutality. Those were their issues—that’s what they stood with.
Fine. But those were not the issues most working-class people wanted to address. In fact, they found those issues almost counter to their interests.
At the same time, we have affluent, college-educated folks in the Democratic Party, especially at the upper echelons of the tech and financial sectors, who were very, very worried about Joe Biden’s economic populist ideas—things like antitrust.
Both Biden and Harris were so afraid of offending any of those groups that they spoke in a kind of pablum. The public wasn’t given a sense of vision. Whoever this new person is has to find a way through it.
And I do believe that it begins with the…
Garrett Epps: Yeah. Well, I think this may lead us into a forest where we don’t need to go, but the late Charlie Peters of blessed memory wanted to have the Monthly embody a philosophy that he called neoliberalism. It’s pretty important to note that the term got taken in a whole different direction, and we do not want to be the neoliberal magazine within those terms. You know, how about it, Paul? How about giving us a name? How about giving us, you know, a motto, a flag—Excelsior or up the hill?
Paul Glastris: I do not like the term neoliberal for precisely the reason you said, Garrett. First of all, it’s an imported word that was invented in England and Europe to describe a kind of Thatcherite market fundamentalism—the policies of privatization and deregulation Margaret Thatcher brought to the UK.
Charlie was never a privatizer. The Washington Monthly under Charlie Peters, my predecessor, never believed in privatizing government services. It was a staunch defender of most, if not all, regulations.
The only magazine I know of that put on its cover a story opposing the deregulation of credit default swaps—the kind of thing that led directly to the housing crisis and the Great Recession—was The Washington Monthly.
Yet, the term Charlie came up with, neoliberalism, did define those policies at the time.
And as I said, I didn’t agree with everything Charlie wrote back then. Charlie wanted to make 50% of all civil service jobs political appointees. He thought it would lead to a more responsive government. I didn’t agree with that then; I don’t agree with it now. And I don’t agree with Donald Trump doing it.
But in general, Charlie and the Monthly provided fresh insights into policy and the workings of government that ultimately found their way into Bill Clinton’s policies.
When I was a young editor here in the ‘80s, we published a story on school reform and got a letter from Bill Clinton saying, I liked your story on school reform. He was governor at the time. My wife Hillary’s done a lot on school reform, and you didn’t mention it. That’s how carefully Bill Clinton read the Monthly.
I hope there’s some talent out there in both parties reading our stuff and absorbing it. And someone with greater talent than any of us can use these as tools to shape a politics that can get us out of our mess.
Anne: Paul, thank you so much for this preview of this incredibly important issue for The Washington Monthly. Thank you for the incredible slate of ideas that the team has come up with. Hopefully, we’ll find that standard-bearer soon.
Paul Glastris: Yeah, let’s hope. Thank you for having me on. It’s been great fun. Love the show. Keep at it—we need this. We need these kinds of discussions because there are very few places in the podcast world where you get this level of discussion of policy itself. A lot of politics, but not a lot of substance. So thank you for what you’re doing.
