We hear a lot about “affordability” as a theme that could unite Democrats. But let’s not kid ourselves about just what a heavy lift this will be.
I’ve just published a memoir, titled Notes for Next Time. The subtitle is “Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America.” I’m an optimist on surviving Trump. But redeeming the kind of life chances that my generation enjoyed will be harder. Policies that merely take us back to 2020 won’t be sufficient.
Those of us born in the 1940s enjoyed a package that included college with no debt, good jobs with career security for blue-collar workers as well as professionals, and affordable housing whose value increased faster than inflation. I live like a millionaire on the income of a journalist thanks to unearned housing wealth.
That package is gone. The flip side of our housing windfall is astronomical costs of entry for our children and grandchildren. They begin economic life heavily in debt, just as reliable jobs and careers are vanishing.
This loss of life chances fed resentments that helped elect Donald Trump. Our would-be king has lately suffered several setbacks. But if we don’t restore a sense of broad economic possibility, we will keep nourishing right-wing populism, even if Democrats win in 2026 and 2028.
The package that my generation enjoyed was no happy accident, and it’s misleading to contend that “the boomers took it all.” Measured by per capita GDP, the economy on average is more than four times as rich as it was during the postwar boom. Today’s problem is distribution.
Boomers did not take it all. Billionaires are taking it all.
The economy on average is more than four times as rich as it was during the postwar boom. Today’s problem is distribution.
What my generation had was the fruit of a social compact bequeathed to us by the New Deal and strengthened after World War II. Finance was tightly regulated. Public investment and social insurance were expanded. Labor unions balanced corporate power. The tax system was steeply progressive and funded public goods—from the GI Bill to affordable homeownership.
That prosperity was grounded in policies that harnessed capitalism in the public interest. For three postwar decades, there was no financial flimflam of the sort that crashed the economy in 1929 and 2008; no private equity extracting earnings and fattening oligarchs; no toxic securities fictitiously backed by exploding subprime mortgages; no corporate share buybacks to pump up stock prices and hollow out corporations; no for-profit medicine enriching middlemen and driving exhausted clinicians out of the profession. Worker pay was in a reasonable ratio to CEO pay.
The New Deal compact had one grave omission. It was a New Deal mainly for white people, due to the power of the Southern segregationists who controlled key congressional committees. When long-overdue rights were extended to Black people in the 1960s, that achievement would trigger racial resentments once the economy faltered.
It took only one bad decade, the 1970s, to usher in a reversion to pre–New Deal policies and ideology. Democrats, in response to the popularity of Ronald Reagan, began playing on Republican turf, embracing tax-cutting and deregulation, and reaping rewards from large donors. Money became the currency of politics.
Those policies were frauds. The economy did not grow faster, it only grew more unequal. But the results destroyed the credibility of the Democratic Party with its core constituency. A key theme of my new memoir is how critics won the economic arguments but lost the politics.
Trump exploited that disillusionment with a mix of populist rhetoric and racial division, camouflaging policies that favored the same corporate elites. In his second term, as he has governed more autocratically, our very democratic institutions seemed at risk.
But the system is proving more resilient than many feared.
Republicans are no longer marching in lockstep. Key Senate Republicans are likely to block Trump’s SAVE Act, intended to depress Democratic votes by requiring proof of citizenship and photo ID. Republican unease, as much as citizen resistance, forced Trump to pull most of ICE out of Minnesota and fire Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Trump has even managed to lose Republican judges, Chief Justice John Roberts most of all. The administration has lost, often by 6-3 margins, key cases on the president’s right to impose tariffs by whim, his efforts to purge Federal Reserve governors, his attempt to take over elections, and his invocation of the Insurrection Act to federalize state National Guard troops. He is likely to lose his clumsy attempt to repeal birthright citizenship, which will be argued on Wednesday.
So the separation of powers created by the Founders as a bulwark against tyranny may yet do its job. But restored faith in democracy requires restored economic possibility. That means policies as radically ambitious as those of the New Deal: debt-free higher education, plentiful housing, and new kinds of well-paying jobs.
America can easily afford this. The wealthiest 1 percent owns about $50 trillion. That wealth largely escapes taxation, because the very rich get their wealth largely via untaxed income from capital. Tax capital income at the same rates as wage and salary income, and there is plenty of money to extend opportunity to the non-rich.
AI may be taking away jobs, but the economy could finance millions of good human service jobs caring for the old, the young, and the sick. Trade in for-profit medicine for the kind of universal system that other nations have and we save about six points of GDP—over a trillion dollars a year freed for other needs. We had free public universities for more than a century. We could have them again. Likewise, plentiful starter homes.
These policies are at the very edge of our political imagination. But policies that once seemed radical—like Social Security—became foundational once enacted.
The original New Deal was built on crisis, social movements, and rare political leadership. Today’s economic crisis is experienced not as a general depression but as personal crises of lost opportunity. It will take leadership as bold as Roosevelt’s to reverse that sense of private despair.
We may well survive Trump. But without a renewed commitment to broad economic possibility, we risk losing a democracy that serves the people.
LIVE EVENT: I will be discussing these challenges at a book event on Monday, April 6, with columnist E.J. Dionne, at the Prospect’s Washington offices. Please join us, either live (see this link) or on Zoom.
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