How to contain Trump and defend democracy? What to stand for affirmatively as an opposition party?

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-05-09-democrats-great-debates/



There are now two parallel debates about the role and future of the Democratic Party. One has to do with how fiercely and by what means Democrats should resist Trump. The other is about what Democrats should stand for going forward. For a time, the accommodationists in the party had a modicum of credibility. Maybe there were areas of common ground? That posture was undermined by Trump’s increasing destructiveness and his habit of making a deal and then demanding more. Advocates of having the Democrats stand back and let Trump destroy himself, such as James Carville, now look silly. The coup de grâce was the extraordinary April 27 speech by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a man known more as a liberal than a radical but now sounding like Bernie Sanders on steroids. Space precludes my quoting the entire speech, but you owe it to yourself to watch it. In part, Pritzker said:

After that speech, I don’t know how any self-respecting Democrat can say we need to seek common ground, or argue as Carville does that Democrats should just get out of the way and wait for Trump to fail. The other great debate among Democrats is over what Democrats should stand for affirmatively. And that ideological debate is substantially a proxy for the fight over how much influence Wall Street Democrats should have in dictating the party program. The ideology of neoliberalism—deregulation of finance, globalization on corporate terms, fiscal conservatism—ruined the Democrats as a credible tribune of working people and set us on the road to Trump. There was a real-time test of neoliberalism as economic policy for all but the rich, and it failed. But neoliberalism is the zombie that won’t die.

We see that on an intellectual level with forays like that of Jason Furman, the sidekick of Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, with a widely quoted piece in Foreign Affairs magazine attacking Biden’s industrial policy as ineffective and inflationary. The piece, which could win some kind of award for sheer intellectual dishonesty, was demolished by several point-by-point rebuttals, most effectively by Jared Bernstein. The New York Times, in an appalling roundtable piece titled “How Four Democrats Who Saved the Party Before Would Do It Again,” gave space to four architects of the Clinton neoliberal strategy to argue that the road back to power for the Democrats was to learn from Clinton’s “New Democrat” success. Please. Clinton, in the words of the title of a definitive book co-authored by Nelson Lichtenstein was a “Fabulous Failure.” Aided by Rubin and Summers, Clinton brought us financial deregulation, which in turn brought us the 2008 financial collapse.

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