The Moderation Trap

Why I've worked for more candidates than I've voted for.

Matthew Yglesias has a theory about why Democrats keep losing, and the New York Times editorial board is happy to amplify it. The party is too progressive, too ideologically rigid, and if candidates would just moderate on a handful of cultural issues, the working-class voters they’ve lost would come back. It sounds reasonable. It has charts. It cites academic survey experiments.

It is also dangerously wrong. And the people most harmed by that misdiagnosis are exactly the ones Yglesias and the Times claim to be trying to help.

Both pieces treat Donald Trump’s victories as evidence that moderation works, pointing to positions he walked back on Medicare cuts, the Iraq War, opposition to gay and lesbian soldiers serving openly. That reading fundamentally misunderstands what Trump did. He didn’t win by meeting working-class voters halfway on policy details. He won by going to war with the institutions those voters blamed for their decline. Both parties, the media, the donor class, the trade deals that gutted manufacturing, the consensus that had governed Washington for thirty years. None of that is moderation. That is a frontal assault on the status quo. What he quietly dropped were the positions that most obviously signaled he was working for the same donor class as everyone else.

The moderation crowd calls this “angry centrism.” I’d call it a con that worked, because it addressed a real grievance.

The deeper problem is the narrowness of their imagination. They talk constantly about supermajorities and winning back the center, but never look at what actually produced supermajorities. Yglesias has written that if AI advances on the current timeline, “America is cooked.” That fatalism is revealing. It means the moderation argument isn’t really about how to win. It’s about how to lose more slowly while keeping the existing economic architecture intact. And it explains why none of the positions they’re recommending are remotely big enough to address what’s actually wrong. Moderating on affirmative action while accepting permanently unaffordable healthcare and housing as facts of nature is not a governing vision. It is a smaller version of the same failure that created this crisis in the first place.

The New Deal built the Hoover Dam and the water projects that made California farmable. It strung electrical wire across the rural Midwest, bringing power to millions of farms private utilities had deemed unprofitable. The WPA hired 8.5 million Americans directly. The minimum wage and the 40-hour work week were established. These weren’t poll-tested adjustments to existing private systems. They were structural transformations that changed people’s lives, and the coalitions they built lasted for decades because people could feel the difference. That is what a supermajority looks like. The moderation crowd invokes those majorities without ever asking what built them.

The Times holds up Obama as a model of winning moderation. I can speak to that from personal experience. Al Gore was my first election. I was twenty years old. I didn’t vote again for eight years, until Obama ran. He didn’t just inspire me to vote. I drove to Asheville to see him speak. I raised money for him from family members. I had a watch party on election night. I was genuinely all in, because I believed he was ready to take down a system that had been crushing my region for decades, to rebuild a Democratic Party more like FDR’s or LBJ’s than Bill Clinton’s.

I didn’t vote again for seven years, until Bernie Sanders came along in 2015. And Bernie didn’t just inspire me to vote either. I sold my business and started volunteering for the campaign until I got enough attention that I was hired onto it.

In my life I have voted four times: Al Gore, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders twice. Every single one of those votes required someone to genuinely inspire me, to make me believe they were ready to actually fight the system rather than manage it. I told that to Michele Goldberg, a columnist at the New York Times, when I was in New York recently and she was mortified. Just mortified that I’d only voted four times. That reaction tells you everything about the gap this piece is trying to describe. The question she didn’t ask was why. The question she didn’t ask was what it would take. The question she didn’t ask was what kind of candidate or party could turn someone like me into the person who sold his business and gave everything he had to a political campaign.

That’s the voter the moderation crowd doesn’t have a theory of. They have a theory of the persuadable suburban moderate who needs to feel comfortable crossing over. They have no theory of the tens of millions of people who have checked out entirely, who will move mountains for the right candidate and stay home for everyone else. Those people aren’t waiting for a Democrat who’s tougher on the border. They’re waiting for someone who’s ready to actually fight.

Despite all the noise about Obama being a radical socialist, he barely underperformed Clinton in Tennessee. Democrats held five state legislative seats there right through his election. What caused the collapse, the wipeout of 2010 and everything after, wasn’t his presence on the ticket. It was his moderation once in office. A month before the 2008 election was even decided, a Citigroup executive had already emailed John Podesta a near-complete list of Obama’s future cabinet, and it came true almost entirely. Obama nominated people suggested by Citibank and listened to them.That a Citigroup executive could pre-select a cabinet before a single vote was cast tells you everything about how the system filters candidates before they ever reach voters. He passed Romneycare instead of a public option. He managed the existing system rather than challenging it. Working-class communities across Tennessee, West Virginia, and the Rust Belt noticed. Not because he was insufficiently tough on transgender issues. Because the help that was supposed to come never came.

The Working Class Project, 39 focus groups, 400 voters, 21 states, found that voters perceive Democrats as “too focused on social issues and not nearly focused enough on the economic issues that impact everyone, every day.” Yglesias reads that and concludes: less woke. Stop talking about trans people. Find a candidate who sounds more like a regular guy.

That is exactly the wrong lesson.

What those voters are describing is not an excess of cultural liberalism. They’re describing a party that spent thirty years presiding over the destruction of their economic lives and filled the void with culture war positioning because it had nothing real to offer on the things that actually determined whether their lives got better or worse. The frustration isn’t that Democrats cared too much about gay marriage. It’s that caring about gay marriage seemed to be all they had energy for, because actually challenging the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance industry, the trade deals, the financial sector, the whole architecture of extraction would have cost them something. Culture is cheap. Structural economic change is not.

As a white working-class man from Appalachia, it was not wokeness that drove me away from the Democratic Party. It was not gay marriage. It was not the idea that trans people have a right to exist. What drove me away was watching a party that claimed to represent working people become indistinguishable, on the things that actually mattered to my region, from the Republicans they were supposed to be fighting. The uniparty of war and free markets and neoliberal consensus that shipped our jobs, let our towns rot, looked the other way while the Sacklers poisoned our communities, and then showed up every four years to tell us the market would eventually sort things out.

My neighbors who vote Trump talk about wokeness because that’s what they see on Fox News. But what drove them there is a feeling of being completely disposable. Of being abandoned by a party that viewed their economic suffering as a lifestyle choice rather than a structural condition. That’s what the Working Class Project is actually measuring. Not a cultural preference. A betrayal.

The multiracial numbers confirm it. Latino working-class men went from 22% Trump support in 2020 to 55% in 2024. Black working-class men went from 17% to 22%. If this were a story about wokeness driving people away, you would not see those numbers. You would not see a multiracial working-class coalition moving in the same direction at the same time. What you see is a class-based revolt against a party that stopped fighting for the people who needed it most.

Yglesias has written that the affordability crisis is “basically just anger at inflation” and that there “isn’t really that much” to it beyond technocratic management of interest rates. He has argued that wanting prices to actually come down is promising something impossible, that the old price level is simply gone. In other words, affordability cannot be reclaimed and there is no structural solution. That is not political analysis. That is a surrender document dressed up as realism. And it is precisely why the moderate positions being recommended will make things worse, not better. Every election cycle that passes without a real answer to what healthcare costs, what housing costs, what it costs to raise a family, is another cycle where people conclude that no one in the existing political system is actually on their side. Moderation doesn’t cure that resentment. It confirms it.

The United States spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024, $15,474 per person, roughly double the OECD average, and ranks last among wealthy nations in outcomes. 79 million Americans carry medical debt, 80% of them insured. 146 rural hospitals have closed since 2005. Public healthcare ownership in this country peaked in 1983. Cities, towns, and the federal government once owned a substantial share of healthcare delivery, not just insurance coverage. That is nowhere in the Yglesias prescription. The answer is always more subsidy, more guardrails, more money poured into the same broken private system. If that approach could fix American healthcare, $5.3 trillion a year would have already done it.

The claim that bold structural policy is unpopular doesn’t survive contact with reality. Most Americans say government has a responsibility to ensure health care, 90% of Dems and 41% of Republicans. A wealth tax polls at 74%. There is no gap between voters and bold policy. There is a gap between voters and a political class unwilling to champion it.

The real risk here isn’t ideological. It’s strategic. If the Democratic Party absorbs the Yglesias prescription and shifts right on culture while leaving the economic architecture of extraction untouched, it will have done nothing to address the conditions that made Trump possible. It will have produced a cleaner-looking version of the same failure. And eventually that produces something worse than Trump: a better fascist. A more capable leader who can articulate a genuine structural vision without the chaos and the corruption. Someone who names the same enemies Trump named but actually means it, and has the discipline to follow through.

The Working Class Project asked voters in 21 states what they wanted. The answer was direct: “Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge we need big, bold, aggressive changes, across the board.” That is not a progressive slogan. That is the median working-class voter, speaking for themselves.

The question is whether anyone in the party is willing to listen, or whether they’ll keep taking their cues from people who have never once had to.

Corbin Trent