Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via AP
Ethan Jackline sits next to a flag planted by a friend as they attend a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in Folsom, California, April 15, 2025.
Back in the good old days of Democratic discord—say, four months ago—the party seemed divided along one primary fault line: those who criticized the prominence it gave to social and cultural issues, and those who didn’t. Today, the divisions are many and varied, though a number are a good deal less stark than their proponents and opponents contend.
Among the current causes for divisions are tariffs, economic populism (a hardy perennial), abundance and regulation, age of elected officials, and how far elected officials should go in resisting President Trump’s rush to autocracy. On the other hand, it’s clear that Democrats generally understand that some of the cultural issues with which they’ve been identified, many of which were prevalent chiefly on campuses and in corporate handbooks, were and remain surefire Election Day losers.
They ranged from pronoun alteration (though the number of Democrats who actually used the “new” pronouns while campaigning on the stump was minuscule) to the one particular in transgender rights that struck most Americans across the ideological spectrum as unfair: trans girls in sports, from middle school through college on up. (The actual presence of such people has been microscopic; the state of Michigan counted two out of the 170,000 high schoolers engaged in school sports, but that proved to be no obstacle to the Republican, Fox, and social media propagandists, who flipped out anyway.)
These issues aren’t going away, however, since the Trump war on DEI is primarily a war on the rights of traditionally subordinated racial minorities, Blacks in particular, as well as women. Democrats can’t and won’t submit to these attacks, directed as they are at the party’s core constituencies, core beliefs, and core legislative achievements. That however, raises the question of how Democrats can win back some of the white voters—most particularly, white working-class voters—whose support they need to win elections. Which turns the discussion to economic policy, economic populism in particular.
The Democratic brand of economic populism has been best exemplified in recent days by the stunningly successful anti-oligarch and anti-Trump tour of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The massive crowds they’ve been drawing have been matched by the massive campaign contributions they’ve been receiving: In the first three months of this year, AOC received more money in donations—more than $9.6 million, with the average donation just $21—than any member of the House, both Democratic and Republican.
Despite that, leaders of the Third Way tendency have argued that that doesn’t mean Americans embrace socialism. What Bernie and AOC actually advocate, of course, is a form of social democracy that encompasses public provision for health care, child care, senior care, and higher education—causes that most Americans support in part if not in full. More pointedly, though, their anti-oligarch tour focuses on attacking the huge tax cuts that Trump has promised to the very rich at the expense of everyone else—a more targeted and louder version of a long-standing talking point that has consensual status among Democrats. Where Bernie and AOC go beyond the elected Democrat consensus is their empirically grounded insistence that oligarchy is hardwired into the American political economy and needs to be destroyed, root and branch. That surely goes beyond the belief set of those Democratic electeds who’ve come to rely on the kindness of very wealthy strangers, even if poll after poll shows it reflects the sentiments of much of that elusive working class, not to mention core Democratic voters.
The Democratic brand of economic populism has been best exemplified in recent days by the stunningly successful tour of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
A SurveyUSA poll from last week, for instance, showed that 50 percent of Democrats wanted the party to become more progressive, while just 18 percent wanted it to become more moderate. Pollsters usually don’t unpack terms like “progressive,” “liberal,” “moderate,” and “conservative” to denote whether they refer to economic beliefs or cultural beliefs, but my hunch is that what most of the respondents who answered “more progressive” had in mind in this poll was economic policy, while most who answered “more moderate” had in mind cultural policy. But also, I suspect most who answered “more progressive” also meant “more openly resistant to Trump, and more committed to building the resistance to Trump.”
That surely explains the broad scope of attendees at the Bernie-AOC rallies. Sanders adviser Faiz Shakir told The New York Times that 21 percent of those who’d signed up to attend the rallies identified themselves as independents, and 8 percent as Republicans. Nonetheless, Third Way official Matt Bennett has dismissed the rallies as something of a false hope for Democrats. The only way to stop “the absolute catastrophe of Trumpism,” he told The Washington Post, is “to win majorities, and the only way to win majorities is with moderates in purple and red districts and states.”
Bernie’s bet is that there are a lot of middle- and working-class voters in those states whose anti-oligarch sentiments, inflamed by the elevation of Elon Musk to the role of retirement and health care benefit slasher, provide Democrats with a deeper and more durable way to win those majorities. Moreover, even if Third Way’s model Democrat were to deliver a “Sister Souljah” type speech specifically repudiating a range of culturally liberal policies, that would still require that model Democrat to advance some economic policy. And if the choice there is between anti-oligarchy and Clintonian mush, I wouldn’t bet on Clintonian mush to swing western Pennsylvania.
Which brings us to the party’s divide on tariffs. Rather abruptly, the new consensual wisdom of centrist Democrats is to oppose all tariffs in a reaction to the stunning scope and stupidity of Trump’s tariffs. Those Democrats who’ve insisted that some tariffs make sense, depending on details, have been roundly criticized by such normally sensible pundits as Paul Krugman and Catherine Rampell. Even as they excoriate Democrats who assert that some tariffs make sense, though, most of these born-again free-traders have also noted that, well, some tariffs—like those on Chinese-subsidized products that America actually needs to produce domestically for security reasons—do indeed make sense. Which actually isn’t all that different from what those Democrats who defend particular tariffs are saying.
Some political consultants have argued that blunting the Democrats’ anti-tariff message at this time is a mistake. That said, some of those selective tariff defenders, such as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Rep. Chris Deluzio, can justly claim to know their particular constituents pretty damn well, and also know just how much their constituents’ lives were diminished by decades of free trade. I can’t believe that if those political consultants had Whitmer and Deluzio as their clients, they’d be telling them to embrace free trade.
My own view is that tariffs are like taxes: Some are necessary, some are not, and in this case, well upwards of 90 percent of those Trump has called for are firmly in the “not” category, not to mention also destructive of economies and alliances throughout the world. (Personally, I favor putting tariffs on the primary source of low-wage competition to American living standards: the states of the Deep South, where many foreign corporations have opened factories that have brought down manufacturing wages in the other states. As was said 160 years ago, so must we say today: The North needs to win the Civil War.)
Another division that has opened in the past couple of months is that prompted by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, which argues that regulations put in place by Democrats have greatly hampered the nation’s ability to build things: rails, roads, greener infrastructure, and above all, housing, of which there’s a critical shortage. Klein and Thompson are both Democrats and both right, up to a point. What distinguished the model Democratic presidency, that of Franklin Roosevelt, after all, is that it both built more and regulated more, by far, than that of any previous president and most every subsequent one.
Though Klein and Thompson overstate some of their case against regulation—it was the crash of the unregulated mortgage market that led to the building bust of the Great Recession—their basic point as regards projects involving construction is valid, and has actually received less pushback from mainstream Democrats than might have been anticipated. Credit that to a housing shortage that has created all but prohibitive costs of living for both renters and homeowners. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-controlled state legislature have begun rolling back some of the much-abused environmental restrictions to housing construction. The main stumbling block, even in the overwhelmingly Democratic Los Angeles, is zoning regulations that permit homeowners to block the construction of multiunit dwellings. It’s not ideology that keeps Democratic electeds from changing the zoning codes; it’s fear of homeowners associations, which are a lot better organized and politically potent than any tenant groups.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are completely comfortable in militant opposition to the governing order.
More recently, another divide that’s emerged is generational. The vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, the 25-year-old David Hogg, is also the co-founder of a group called Leaders We Deserve, which pledged last week to raise $20 million to nurture and support primary challenges to “out-of-touch, ineffective” House Democrats. Hogg is the first Gen Zer to serve as a DNC official, and the other founder of Leaders We Deserve, Kevin Lata, was the campaign manager for Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, the first Gen Z member of Congress.
Hogg and Lata are far from alone in noting that the average age of Democratic members of Congress continues to rise (it’s 58 in the House and 65 in the Senate), and that some members are visibly not up to the job. They also make clear that some House octogenarians—they cite former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chicago’s Jan Schakowsky—are very much still up to the job, which is why they’re not backing the primary challenges to those two from Democrats who are half a century younger.
Still, at a time when House Democrats are falling one or two votes short of defeating House Republicans on several recent roll calls, one reason for their shortfall is the death of two of their members in the weeks following the January 3 beginning of Congress’s current term, reducing their numbers from 215 to 213. One, a 77-year-old with an advanced case of cancer, had been re-elected last November, while the other was a 70-year-old freshman member. The reasons why the party would be better served by a congressional delegation that more closely matched the median age of voters aren’t only actuarial, but neither can actuarial criteria be idly dismissed.
Which brings us back to Sanders, the octogenarian of the North. A Harvard/Harris poll from earlier this month asked Democrats if they preferred Democrats like Sanders or AOC “who are calling on Democrats to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Trump and his administration and ‘fight harder,’ or more moderate Democrats who are willing to compromise on Trump issues important to their base.” Fully 72 percent said they preferred Democrats like AOC and Bernie.
Which finally takes us to what may be the most existential of the differences between Democratic elected officials. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are completely comfortable in militant opposition to the governing order; their understanding of the governing order rests on their conclusions that it is fundamentally unjust to their compatriots, that it favors the kind of oligarchy that only a radical democratization of the economy and society could dispel. And as the governing order has grown grotesquely more undemocratic under Trump, they’ve been able to ratchet up their critiques in ways that remain alien to their colleagues, who’ve seldom if ever questioned the governing order as such, and find it difficult to do so even now.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who spoke for an unbroken 25 hours against all things Trump, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), who traveled to El Salvador to meet with the hostage Kilmar Abrego Garcia, came up with unusually demonstrative ways to condemn Trump policies. But the actual building of a new movement, enraged both at Trump and at the powers that limit the scope of democracy, appears to be beyond their capacities, let alone those of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. That task requires Democrats who are comfortable outside the established order, comfortable assailing the established order. That task—essential to both capital-D Democrats and small-d democrats—belongs to Bernie and AOC and those who join their band of outsiders.
That task is not the only one before the Democrats, and Bernie and AOC are not merely outsiders, but outsiders who can get some things done within the confines of normal politics as well. As Trump has all but abolished normal politics, however, their party and their nation need them, now more than ever.
