Date: 2025-07-04 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028411
US POLITICS
WHAT NEXT FOR DEMOCRATS?
The Fight for the Post-Trump Future Has Already Begun
WHAT NEXT FOR DEMOCRATS?
The Fight for the Post-Trump Future Has Already Begun
Cory Booker conducts a news conference after the senate luncheons in the U.S. Capitol.>br> Tom Williams/Getty Images
Original article: https://newrepublic.com/post/193596/fight-post-trump-future-walz-booker
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I don't see American politics through the same lens as most Americans and especially American reporters.
And young Americans seem to have very different mindsets than older Americans ... which could be good, but probably will not be. My guess is that this generation of young Americans will eventually be labelled a lost generation!
I grew up in the UK. I was born in 1940 and lived close to London during the war years moving to rural Devonshire immediately after the war.
By the end of the war, the European economies including the UK economy had been badly damaged or completely destroyed. The United States was really the only economy that was still functional. The US became the dominant economy in the world for around 25 years from 1945 until the end of the 1960s.
During this time, the US chose to push hard against the global role that countries like the UK and France had played as 'colonial powers' ... which in retrospect from a 'world view' was probably a major mistake. I am of the opinion that much of Trump's world view now in 2025 reflects this same isonlationist thinking.
By the end of the 1960s, Europe and the world beyond the United States had recovered quite well ... but then came the 'OPEC oil shock' of 1973 and the global price of crude oil jumping from $3,50 and barrel to $13.50 a barrel and then to more than $30 a barrel. During the 1970s the price of crude oil fluctuated from well over $100 a barrel to around $30 a barrel ... and since the the price has fluctuated widely around about $60.00 a barrel.
The world economy went into shock, and especially the United States which had the world's most energy inefficient economy in the world. Though the pre-1973 world price for crude oil was around $3.50 a barrel it was only in the USA that this price was passed through to industry and other users. All the other parts or the world imposed some form of energy tax which provided a big incentive to improve energy efficency.
During the 1970s, American industry went into 'free fall'. Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter were powerless to protect American industry from a huge debacle! At the time, I opined that the 1973 energy crisis was the biggest economic event 'ever' and I remain of that opinion more than 50 years later!
In 1980, Carter lost the Presidential election and Ronald Reagan became President. Reagan facilitated some major economic rethinking, some of which remains in place many decades later.
Massive American investment took place in low cost manufacturing around the world to supply the robust demand for most everything in the United States. China was a major beneficiary of this strategic realignment, but there were many many others.
Other changes took place in support of this global manufacturing realignment ... notably in shipping, and the development of huge container ships mainly built in China. South Korea and Japan.
Up to now, in the modern world, the United States is becoming more market than manufacturing ... and this cannot be sustainable.
I do have some optimism. Hopefully Trump will get out of the way sooner rather than later before he wrecks everything. A rethink of how economic analysis is done would empower progress of people in parallel with profits from wealth and reduced exploitation of nature. Modern technology can enable progess in this direction ... but most of the super rich at the moment seem to he other ideas! But seeds of hope exist!
I know Trump is a loser ... but not yet knowing who might be the future essential winner!
Peter Burgess
How Democrats choose to confront DOGE’s corrupt destruction today will determine whether America recovers—and who will lead that recovery.
Senator Cory Booker ignited the news cycle with a marathon speech against the Trump administration this week.
Is it too soon for any of us to start thinking about the post-Trump future? There are many reasons why the obvious answer is yes. The GOP has spent approximately a billion dollars on voter suppression over the past year. The president’s national security adviser is apparently dishing in multiple unsecured group chats. There are a bunch of overlapping antidemocracy forces—from Silicon Valley’s oligarchs to Project 2025’s goons—all trying to immanentize their bespoke eschatons every hour of every day. And now, the president has gutted what was once a roaring economy with nonsensical tariffs. Taken as a whole, it’s not hard to simply file “the future” under “in doubt.”
Nevertheless, the forces of Trumpism are having a very big problem earning the consent of the governed as their all-stick-no-carrot approach to autocracy has only created a suddenly vibrant resistance that’s protesting local Tesla dealerships and storming Republican town halls. So discussions of what might come next are already kicking around, with various Democrats planning on bringing new blood to Congress or slowly shuffling toward a presidential run. In the nation’s capital this week, Senator Cory Booker grabbed and held the media’s attention in a marathon 25-hour speech that was a content-creation victory for his party and a boost to his personal political brand.
Still, a lot of the recent futurecasting has nothing to do with the goings-on in the halls of power. Rather, it’s arisen because of what’s been going down on the book-tour circuit, thanks to the timely publication of a slew of new books—Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck, and Mark Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works—that collectively map out what’s being called “the abundance agenda”: a rather utopian vision that asks our political leaders to tear out all the red tape that holds our biggest ideas back and devote a monomaniacal focus to building stuff.
The New Republic’s Tim Noah has wrestled with these ideas at greater lengths than I can. To my mind, however, I find the timing of the abundance push to be lamentable. It’s pretty clear that these authors essentially anticipated a Democratic win last November. They might have even helped spur one had their ideas made it to market sooner: For all of the abundance agenda’s flaws, theirs is still a laudably optimistic mission that we can all undertake together. Such visionary quests are a mainstay in good campaign messaging, and Kamala Harris could have used something like this to anchor her campaign to a new(ish) idea. Unfortunately, these authors’ ideas have fallen into the unsweetest spot of all: The party of good government is out of power, and the people who are in power are bent on wrecking everything—the civil service, the economy, and the rule of law.
It’s that latter fact of life that really spells doom for the abundance agenda. What we’re learning in real time is that the civil service is one of the country’s most important engines of prosperity: It keeps the country’s gears spinning, all while keeping us safe and spreading wealth to communities. Every government agency that’s torn down to the joists is going to put a huge dent in our productive capacity. Every canceled government grant is a hole torn in the fabric of the future. Every fired federal worker is a post left unattended. Without key agencies like the CDC and the USDA running properly, Americans will simply die sooner and sicken more often, further kneecapping our workforce.
Last week I talked about how important it is for Democrats to bring attention to DOGE’s myriad harms, surface the people who have been hit the hardest by its wanton disregard for the civil service, and keep pumping those stories into the media maw to maximize conflict with the GOP. But there’s an important overarching message that Democrats need to convey, as well. DOGE isn’t about government spending, right-sizing budgets, or the promotion of efficiency. It’s simply about laying waste—burning the government down to its foundations—and it’s every bit as capacious and consuming a vision of the future as anything the abundance bros have come up with.
The GOP has long given up on winning over voters by demonstrating that it knows best how to make the government work for people; as I’ve noted previously, the notion that there are even “Republican lawmakers” anymore is a quaint myth. Republicans are backing DOGE because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to incapacitate the federal government once and for all and forever alter the public’s ability to demand more from their leaders. DOGE’s proponents are making a bet that even if Democrats return to power, they’ll be left with a smoking husk instead of a functional administrative state—and that they’ll lack the willpower to rebuild it.
In this way, going on the warpath against DOGE now is as much about defining the future as it is about defending the present. Some Democrats are already thinking about it in these terms. In a recent interview with Semafor’s Dave Weigel, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said that Democrats “need to start messaging” on what they intend to do if they get control of the government “right now.” “We need to put our experts on this,” said Walz. “How will we build back next time? I think it’s an opportunity … to create the agencies the way we saw them in the first place, functioning better, without all the barnacles. So, Trump might be doing us a favor. He stripped it down, he blew the motor up. We’re going to put a new motor in it and take off. And I think that’s how we have to start thinking about it.”
Walz has just one vision of this project. Other Democrats may have different opinions of what will need to be rebuilt in a post-Trump future. But no matter what, it will take a lot of political capital, and anytime Democrats gather to fix anything, a swarm of media magpies swoops in to insensately ask, over and over again, “BUT HOW WILL YOU PAY FOR IT? BUT HOW WILL YOU PAY FOR IT?” There is an array of forces standing ready to thwart Democrats’ efforts to build a better world—and as the recent failures of Senate Democrats in the budget battle showed, sometimes they are their own worst enemy.
The best thing elected Democrats can do right now is strike at the heart of DOGE’s predations and start building the public will for rebuilding what’s been torn down. And the best thing we on the left can do is take the full measure of the men and women who might be the party’s future leaders, making sure they have the mettle and the commitment for a complete, post-Trump restoration of the federal government. Anything less simply isn’t serious—not if you want a future of any kind of abundance.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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