The Weekly Sift

Does the Trump resistance need a rival candidate, or a cultural turnaround?

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This week, two very different articles caught my eye. In one, The Washington Post ranked “The 12 Democrats who make the most sense for 2028“, starting with Tim Walz at #12 and concluding with Josh Shapiro at #1. In the other, Rolling Stone picked “The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time“, reminding us of moments when history was moved not so much by politicians as by songs (or perhaps, going further back, by novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or pamphlets like Common Sense).

Three years out from the 2028 campaign — assuming elections are still meaningful in three years — should we be uniting behind a candidate or promoting a broader cultural movement?

Maybe it’s the people I hang around with, but the anxieties of my friends keep manifesting in two opposite ways: Many are just refusing to watch the news at all. And the others are obsessed with campaign-and-candidate analysis: What states do Democrats need to flip? What demographic groups might be persuadable? What policy positions should our messaging emphasize? And most of all: Who can lead us to that promised land?

I’ve been pretty useless in those conversations, because (while I am watching the news) anything about candidates and strategy leaves me cold right now. I think they play into an unhealthy framing: politics as game. We lost the last game, so how are we going to win the next one?

What I think we need to reestablish in America is that politics is about something, and the things it is about are important. Our politics should be about the People banding together to make systems work for us rather than grind us into the dust.

And that’s what the list of protest songs symbolizes for me. Not candidates and campaigns, but ending wars, establishing justice, and liberating people from oppression.

What MAGA does. MAGA, of course, is both a candidate and movement. It’s a cult of personality, full of images of Trump as a superhero or God’s chosen one. But it’s also a culture of grievance revolving around the message that favored groups in America — Whites, men, Christians, etc. — are actually victims of some vast Satanic force. And America itself — the richest most powerful country on Earth — is the most aggrieved nation of all, battling a world system that is unfairly stacked against it.

In 2024, Trump often played the role of a typical American presidential candidate: He raised money, held rallies, won primaries, made TV commercials, and toured swing states. But it was the MAGA cultural movement that lifted him out of situations that would have doomed any previous candidate. Elected Republicans were ready to be done with Trump after the 2020 loss and his failed coup on January 6. But the movement would not hear of it, and party “leaders” were forced to come around.

If we could unstring the MAGA movement by winning an election, 2020 would have done it. But instead, being rejected by the voters was just one more grievance to add to its list. Getting past the MAGA moment in our politics will have to involve a change in the larger culture, not just a winning campaign.

What happened in 2024? Everyone has their own theory about what went wrong in 2024, and just about any of them can be justified if you slice and dice the exit polls with that conclusion in mind. Harris should have run further to the left or the center, said more or less about the economy, defended trans youth or thrown them under the bus, defended Biden better or denounced him. Maybe she should have picked a different VP, or maybe Harris herself was the problem and we should have run a White man. Maybe Biden should have gotten out of the way sooner. On and on.

But OK, I get it. Without some reasonable explanation, people begin to think that the currents of History are against us, or the Universe is, or God. Without a plan (or even a fantasy) of what we might do next, despair can seem overwhelming.

So let’s briefly talk the language of analysis. After considering the various theories, I’ve come down here: Trump won because he managed to cast himself as the candidate of change and Harris as the candidate of the status quo. The problematic part of Trump’s candidacy, which Harris tried to point out but never made stick in the minds of low-information voters, is that Trump was specifically running against the best parts of the status quo: the rule of law, the separation of powers, democratic process, and even the existence of Truth itself. What we’re seeing in the early days of the Trump administration is that he has no program for change beyond aggrandizing himself: His supporters are good and should be rewarded; his detractors are bad and should be punished.

But try as he might, it will be hard for Trump to avoid responsibility for the status quo going forward. So in my mind, the fundamental question for Democrats to answer in 2026 and 2028 is: What’s wrong with the status quo?

That was a hard question for Democrats to message in 2024, because the Biden/Harris administration really did have accomplishments it deserved credit for (but never got). It managed the post-Covid economic rebound well, resulting in spectacular job creation with inflation no worse than the rest of the world. It made investments for the future, ended the long fruitless war in Afghanistan, and began taking action against climate change. Biden left office with excellent economic statistics: GDP rising, unemployment low and steady, inflation under control.

But claiming credit for all that sounds a lot like claiming responsibility for the status quo, and arguing that it’s not so bad. (And it honestly wasn’t as bad as Trump kept making it sound. There never was an immigrant crime wave, for example. Or a crime wave of any kind.)

So let’s start here: What’s not to like about the status quo? Plenty, as it turns out. Put aside the statistics, and consider how life looks to a large number of Americans.

• It’s hard to get out of college without a lot of debt.
• Once you get out, it’s hard to get a career started.
• If you do get a career started, it’s hard to find a house you can afford in a town with good schools.
• If you’re not in a town with good schools, it’s hard to pay for private schools for your children.
• If your children have any special problems — physical handicaps, learning disabilities, neuro-diversity, etc. — you’re on your own.
• At any moment, you might fall through one of the cracks in our healthcare system and be bankrupted.
• At every moment, you’re vulnerable to the risks of a market economy: Your good job may vanish. To get employed again, you may have to move away from your town with good schools.
• Even if the difficulties of your own life work out, you may have to take care of your parents and deal with a nursing-home industry that can eat life savings of almost any size.
• It’s hard to get your children through college without burdening them with a lot of debt.

In short, America may be a rich country statistically, but most Americans don’t feel rich. Life looks like a labyrinth with lots of dead ends.

Now, all those difficulties have been building for decades, so there’s no particular reason voters should have blamed them on Joe Biden or his party. (Republicans have held the presidency for 6 of the last 11 terms, and none of those situations improved during Trump’s first term.) But the Democrats did not tell a convincing story of how they were going to take on these problems.

To be fair, neither did Trump. It’s hard to look at any of the hardships on that list and paint a plausible picture of Trump solving that issue, or even helping you deal with it. Much of what he has proposed — eliminating ObamaCare, say, or defunding the Department of Education — will probably make some of them worse.

But Trump did do something politically clever. He told unhappy voters who to blame: immigrants who are stealing your opportunities; women who don’t know their place; rebels against the God-given order, where there are only two genders and you mate with the opposite one; people who worship the wrong God, or none at all; so-called “experts” who make you feel stupid by quoting “facts”; Chinese scientists who engineered the Covid bio-weapon, a.k.a. the Kung Flu; environmentalists who care more about fish or birds than about you or your children; and (most of all) liberals who enable all the other villains by putting the government on their side rather than yours.

What was going to solve these problems was not any particular Trump plan, but rather the abstract “greatness” of America, or perhaps of Trump himself. Or alternately, the greatness of God, who will once again shower His blessings on America once the atheists and Satanists are removed from power.

It’s not a rational story, but it is a story.

Prospects for 2026 and 2028. My thinking going forward is based on the assumption that Trump will provide his followers with entertainment and satisfying spectacles (like immigrant children in cages or FBI agents on trial), but he won’t actually improve anyone’s life. (He didn’t in his first term either, though he was able to take credit for the economic momentum established in Obama’s second term.) We can see that already in the skyrocketing price of eggs. Somehow, neither Trump’s inherent greatness nor his Day-One executive order is bringing prices down, and he has never had any actual plan to fall back on.

So if the labyrinth of American life looks difficult now, it’s not going to look any better in 2026 or 2028. Trump will likely have consolidated his influence over most major media platforms (both broadcast and social), but there are limits to propaganda’s effectiveness when it tells you that you ought to be happy when you’re not.

Consequently, I expect there to be considerable discontent with Trump in 2026 and 2028, just as there was in 2018 and 2020. (Now, it’s entirely possible that by then he has made elections irrelevant. I don’t expect that, but it’s a possibility. In that case, though, this whole discussion is moot; neither a candidate nor a movement has any hope.)

If that’s the lay of the land, how do we want to be positioned? In my mind, this is where the candidate-centered vision falls short — unless your candidate is a genuinely mythic figure whose mere presence will give the electorate hope. Unfortunately, I don’t see any of those on the horizon. If I’m, say, a 20-something worried about my future, I don’t think “Gretchen Whitmer will save me” goes very far. Nothing against Gretch — I’ll be happy to vote for her against the MAGA candidate in 2028 if it comes to that — but there’s nothing messianic about her or Gavin Newsom or anybody else on the Post’s list of 12. Plus, I expect the failure of salvation-by-Trump to discredit the whole idea of individual saviors.

Instead, I picture just about any Democratic candidate having a message like this:

• I know many of you are facing a difficult path into the future.
• Our explanation of who you should blame is better than MAGA’s. The oligarchs are to blame. While the American economy remains productive, the benefits of that economy keep getting channeled towards a smaller and smaller group of people, who keep exchanging wealth-for-power and power-for-wealth, with a profit on every transaction. (This point comes from the playbook of the Bernie/AOC left, but there’s no reason a centrist can’t use it too.) If Elon is still around (doubtful, I think), he can be the poster boy for the corrupt interplay between corporate and government power.
• We have specific ideas that can help you, but the general idea is simple: The productivity of America needs to be redirected towards making people’s lives better, rather than further enriching the oligarchs.

The protest songs almost write themselves. America has a long tradition of songs about people being cheated out of the fruits of the economy they built. Here’s one from the Depression:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, 
Made it race against time. 
Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. 
Brother, can you spare a dime? 

What about now? It’s important to recognize that Democrats currently have no national power base, so demanding that they “do something” is unrealistic. They can’t bring legislation to a vote. They can’t launch investigations or subpoena witnesses. They can vote No on things that do come up for a vote, but if all (or nearly all) Republicans vote Yes, those things will pass anyway.

The urge to do something is misplaced for another reason: Trump is the one who needs to show quick results right now. He has a unleashed a flurry of activity, and that will carry him for a while. But without some actual progress, the public disgust with the game of politics will rebound against him. All his activity will look (in MacBeth’s words) like “sound and fury signifying nothing”.

Some liberal pundits are calling for the kind of resistance shown in 2017, with millions of marchers and other displays of energy. But demonstrations that are simply anti-Trump harden people into their current stances. We just had an election about Trump, and we lost. Demonstrations will come into play again, I imagine, and probably soon. But it’s important that the demonstrations be about something more than Trump. Heather Cox Richardson puts it like this:

This is the time for the American people to say “Hang on just a red hot minute here. It’s my country. Those are my tax dollars. And this is what I want the government to do.” And to reshape the way we approach this moment from saying “I gotta stop this. I gotta stop this. I’m afraid of this.” to say “I care deeply about cancer research, something Trump has stopped money for.” [Lists other things you might care about.] Those things are ways to define America in this moment as something other than what Trump is trying to kill. Because that takes the initiative away from him, and away from his people, and gives it back to us.

The important thing to ask about any political activity is “Will this persuade anybody who wasn’t already on our side?”

Unfortunately, protests that are about something more than Trump require waiting for things to play out a little. There need to be visible results worth protesting, not just possibilities.

Similarly, Democratic votes in Congress will start to mean something again as we approach March 14, the date when the government runs out of money. If Speaker Johnson can’t muster unanimity among his troops — something he has never done in the past — then Trump and Johnson will need Democrats. Then there will be leverage to make demands.

More importantly, March 14 is when Trump’s vague promises and intentions have to resolve into actual numbers and legislation.

In the meantime, the only arena currently open for struggle is the courts, and they are being used. State-level Democrats have filed lawsuits to block illegal Trump actions, and so have organizations like the ACLU. Legal action means delay, and delay works in our favor.

These last two weeks have felt like an assault, as Trump tries to panic and stampede us. It’s a time to endure, to remember your core values, and wait for the wind to blow itself out. And if you can learn the guitar while you’re waiting, that would be good too.