Democratic leadership and it’s brain trust are fighting the last war and losing this one.
Adam Jettleson and his ilk represent exactly the kind of Democratic thinking that makes people like me—living here in East Tennessee—either angry to be Democrats or pushes them straight into Republican arms. These neoliberal goofballs—Adam Jettleson, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith—are peddling 1992 third-way, New Democrat Coalition bullshit in 2025. They think our path forward is social issues. The key, they reckon, is running pro-life candidates, anti-trans candidates, and maybe some folks who want to moonlight as ICE agents on weekends.
They're going to lose. And not only are they going to lose—America is going to lose. Because that means our authoritarian slide will continue.
These people seem incapable of understanding the moment we're in. This is a revolutionary moment, and we're already getting radical change—just in the wrong direction. When 80 percent of Americans are spending the majority of their money on survival, you don't solve that with deregulation and the abundance doctrine. You solve it with the Arsenal of Democracy for modern times.
Theses Thought Leaders See the Trump Wins Very Differently Than I
IMHO there’s a complete misunderstanding among these consultants and the democratic brain trust as to why Donald Trump won. Twice. He didn't win because of messaging or because Democrats were too woke. He won because people believed he was ready to overturn this broken-ass system. They thought he would stand up, break things, ignore the rules and norms, and restructure this economy in a way that would pay off for them. They didn't care that he was reckless. They wanted reckless. They wanted someone who looked ready to kick the table over, because nothing else moved.
Trump gave people villains—but he picked the wrong ones. He painted the villains as immigrants and poor people. He painted them as inner-city Black people. He painted them as other nations that robbed us blind with trade deals. But the call was coming from inside the house. It was our own elite. The ultra-rich. The centi-millionaires and billionaires and centi-billionaires. The multinational multi-trillion-dollar corporations and all their cronies. That's who did it.
People didn't vote for Trump because they love authoritarianism. They voted for him because they're desperate for someone—anyone—willing to break the system that's crushing them. If Democracy fails to deliver you start looking at other options. Voters saw that little changed regardless of who they elected, so they go further and further to the extremes, searching for somebody who finally does something different. Until somebody has enough power to overcome this system that seems immovable.
The Real Crisis: It's the Economic System, Stupid
Polls show that 72% of Americans believe the government is "mostly working to benefit itself and the elites." 68% say the economic system "unfairly favors the wealthy." When three-quarters of your country tells you the system is rigged, maybe stop debating messaging and start addressing the rigging.
Our economy has been turned into a house of cards, a casino where the house always wins. And who's the house? The same people who've decided they'd rather burn this whole thing down than give us what we're due.
What are we due? I am glad you asked. We're due a functioning society because this is our nation. It was built by our work, by our forefathers' labor. These are our roads, our bridges, our tunnels, our seaports, our airports. These are our airwaves and seaways. The corporate charters these companies exist under were granted by us, through our government. The market needs to learn whom it serves. It exists at the leisure of the American people.
But we've gotten so obsessed with this 50-year experiment of neoliberalism that we can't imagine anything different. We've lost the plot.
The Revolutionary Moment Requires Revolutionary Response
Why does our healthcare cost more than any other country's by almost double at 5 Trillion a YEAR? We're being robbed. And we're being robbed because of our economic system. Housing is unaffordable because we decided it was cheaper to finance scarcity than to build, that's not a messaging problem—it's systemic.
The path out of this mess—the path toward a super-majority party—isn't by moderating on social issues. It's about building trust that you have a plan to solve the major issues that dominate every single election: jobs, affordability, the economy, and healthcare. None of these can be solved without abandoning neoliberalism.
The Choice: Arsenal of Democracy or Authoritarian Slide
If you've made it this far, you might be saying to yourself: "Corbin, you sound angry."
And yes, I am angry. I'm frustrated to no end that the party I thought was going to save this country—for so much of my politically aware life—is now not only unable to do anything other than send strongly worded letters, but is actually suggesting we do the opposite of what needs to be done.
The data is right there in front of our faces. Even if they wanted to be data-driven, 72% of Americans are telling them the government works for elites. 68% say the economy is rigged for the wealthy. But they ignore it because it's complicated. It's hard. It's difficult. It's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take a lot of messaging. It's going to take a lot of talking to people, building trust.
It ain't going to be easy. But change isn't easy. Averting authoritarianism isn't easy. Reversing this decline, this tide, will not be easy. That's a fact.
I'm 45, and ever since the Clinton years—as long as I can remember—the Democratic Party has tried to emulate the Republican Party but usually one cycle too late. Always playing catch-up, always trying to figure out who they need to throw under the bus next.
The Democrats enabled Trump's rise and if we don’t take the party over they’ll enable the next authoritarian too. The path to victory is through vision and acceptance of failure. Democrats need the, “Yeah, we fucked up moment.”
When we recognize the pain and the severity of the failure, we will see the scale of the solutions. We will see we are in a revolutionary moment that demands revolutionary response. Rebuild our public capacity. Discipline capital when it extracts. Build housing again. Manufacture again. Create public healthcare systems that compete with and break private monopolies. Restore the compact: the market serves the public, not the other way around.
This system is hell-bent on continuing its ride of inertia over our economic and social lives. Hell-bent on continuing to destroy our cities until they're worth rebuilding as riverfront property for the wealthy.
And it's people like Adam Jettleson, organizations like the Searchlight Institute and others, who have led this country down the wrong road for the majority of my life.
They will not stop this authoritarian slide. It will end when a real alternative to the system that's crushing people's lives is offered—one as radical as the moment demands.
Either we build an Arsenal of Democracy, or we'll keep building an arsenal for the next authoritarian.
Let's name what is needed. A very high top income tax rate and a strong graduated income tax that limits allowable deductions. No cap on Social Security taxes for individuals and corporations. That keeps SS solvent. Universal health care and single payer system. You can't have a competitive market when their is high inelastic demand. The present health care system is inefficient and extractive. A strong EPA with power to limit poisons and carbon emissions. Trump's EPA enables pollution always. Support National Parks and other public lands. Forgive student loans and increase support for education from pre-school to post-graduate. Our present system basically benefits banks. Develop a sensible immigration system that is clear, easy to comply with, and recognizes the value of needed labor in a number of fields. Court reform is necessary, with term limits and age limits in place. Perhaps first, campaign finance reform, eliminating corporate funding, limiting contribution (including self-financing), and reducing the endless cycle of campaigning so politicians can actually work for us instead of constantly panhandling. Support candidates who come close to supporting this agenda. Most don't.
I agree with Corbin Trent that “Republican light” Democrats like Clinton, Newsom and the like cannot save our country much less our own party. I believe we need someone like FDR at this juncture. The only candidate I have heard that sounds like that is Governor Pritzker of Illinois. Like FDR, he is from old money but rejects the prevailing ethos of the very rich and sounds genuinely angry with it and der tRumpf. I think he understands what the working people and what’s left of the middle class need. We need radical change. We need to have the very rich pay their share, we need to take the middlemen out of health insurance, we need to tax the transfer of great wealth between generations in order to pay for the infrastructure upgrades so badly needed and for real education reforms, not to mention to pay down tRumpf’s enormous debts. We need to be able to invest in rural hospitals, not close them down. We need to invest in high speed rail and we need to regulate the many industries that are becoming increasingly monopolistic or oligaristic. CEO pay over 1000% of workers? Tax it higher after it hits a threshold, say 300 or 500%? We have to stop the flow of wealth into an increasingly smaller percentage of our population at the top. We need to take care of our seniors, our youth, our veterans, our mentally ill, our addicted, our working families, and our disabled. In short we need to take care of everyone in our society. We also need to be truly “Christian” by again welcoming immigrants and refuge seekers and helping them to integrate into our society, not rounding them up and putting them into concentration camps for months before we ship them off.