An Abundance of Caution

We could revitalize and grow liberalism to defend democracy against MAGA, but it might make some people feel unsafe

Trump has reshaped the right into a new fusion of anti-intellectual, amoral pragmatism with a conspiracy-theory mindset resembling that of the 1960s New Left. The GOP is now an assisted living facility for the feeblest ideas with any kind of pulse in our culture—ethno-nationalism, anti-anti-Nazism, anti-vaxx paranoia, trade deficit fundamentalism. And it won. We have to understand the big shift this represents in order to see how the left might respond to it and reshape itself in turn.

The Opportunity

Negative polarization is part of this dynamics. We tend to oppose any view held by those we already dislike. Republicans embrace populist stupidity, so Democrats side with intellect and expertise, or at least a semblance of it, causing Republicans to double down on stupidity, etc. Many cycles of this have played out. It all accelerated under Trump, but the process started well before he got involved.

Politics used to be about “issues.” It still is in some sense, but we don’t even know what an issue is anymore. Today, it’s not a tax policy, or even an onslaught of tariffs. MAGA doesn’t feel it needs firm opinions at that level. Trump can veer off in one random policy direction or another, and his fans will chuckle, follow his lead, and then follow again when he wakes up the next day and veers back. They’ll watch as their 401(k)s get decimated. They don’t care. It’s worth it to keep owning the libs.

But notice a glaring exception to this pattern, something MAGA treated like it was a genuine issue from the olden days: Covid vaccines. Trump’s top first-term achievement was the accelerated production and distribution of life-saving vaccines, which were hailed over and over by Big Science. But MAGA saw what these scientists really wanted: to control everyone’s bodies, if not by locking them down, then by forcing them to be injected with dangerous chemicals.

Vaccines are the last thing that would have counted as a political issue in the pre-Trump era. It was a boring bipartisan no-brainer. Science—the basic method of it, if not any one specific research program—had been something all sides accepted as the gold standard of knowledge. Even the creationists had felt it necessary to rebrand their wishful thinking as “intelligent design” and coat all their arguments in a veneer of scientific language.

But MAGA couldn’t take it anymore. Like a fat guy, after years of media shaming about obesity and dieting, finally throwing his arms up—to reach for that crate of twinkies atop the pantry. The right doesn’t feel any need to account for itself in rational terms now. And so it is inundated with anti-expertise—a flood of twinkie cream that has swept over almost every rural hamlet in the country.

Sometimes actual experts on the right try to swim against the flood. There were a handful of legitimate economists who had retained some credibility inside MAGA. Then they opened their mouths about tariffs only to start ingesting creamy fluid until the tops of their eyeballs disappeared beneath its smooth white surface.

Trump’s revolt against expertise has not turned out well for his poll numbers overall. Most Americans don’t actually prefer stupidity. Indeed, it’s time for that old democracy thing to kick in. Democrats ought to be summoning the whirlwind of popular backlash into the 2026 midterms. And yet control of the Senate is still worse than 2-to-1 in favor of Republicans on the betting markets.

Liberals shouldn’t just accept this. Pressure should be applied now to get the right candidates in place for retaking the Senate and, more importantly, for scoring a blowout against MAGA in 2028. That could create another vibe shift, but this time a stabilizing one both for our politics and for the constitutional order itself.

The W-Word

There was a reason Trump won again in 2024, despite his deluge of election conspiracy nonsense and the absurd insurrection it inspired. That reason—wokeness—remains a ball and chain around Democratic ankles as they try to pull bodies out of the deluge. Kamala Harris was silent about it in 2024. But you can’t go full-woke in 2020 and then, next time around, just pretend nothing happened.

A big part of the solution for any serious Democratic candidate is embarrassingly easy: be able to utter the w-word without air-quotes or eye-rolls or sidebars about the whole issue just being a GOP campaign tactic. Wokism is a thing. It’s a fake, anti-rational claim to expertise. The emperor has no clothes.

After the 2024 loss, there have been glimmers of candor. Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom both admitted, obliquely, that a problem exists. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) called for her party to summon some “alpha energy” and came dangerously close to uttering the w-word in anger. When pressed, though, she felt it necessary to qualify that it wasn’t her term, it was how voters themselves described the problem with Democrats, according to survey results. Why is just saying the word so hard for Democratic leaders?

One thing is that, as with Trump’s hold on Republican primaries, enough Democratic primary voters could still be in the thrall of wokism. Another is that Democratic staffers, functionaries, and donors could be too woke or too intimidated by woke peers. Calling it out would lead to internal disarray.

The bottom line for these voters and insiders is whether they take their own accusations against Trump and MAGA seriously. His anti-constitutional decree of massive across-the-board tariffs, his usurpation of Congress’ power of the purse, his defiance of judicial rulings, his flagrant denial of due process, his threats to lawlessly fire heads of federal agencies, his pocketing of enormous and comically overt bribes—it all either constitutes an attack on liberal democracy or it doesn’t.

The people committing this dangerous offense against our republic are very bad. What does that imply about the people who watch it being done, wax rhetorical against it, and then choose not to do the one thing—saying the word—that would give them a shot to get back the Senate?

If we explain the hypocrisy of the politicians by their fealty to woke activists, how do we understand the activists themselves? And here’s the real problem. Over the last decade, wokism solidified into the ideological core of the whole progressive movement. Even if that core has started to soften, it is still the core.

There is no other crusading, moral force within the left—a left that long ago became numb to liberalism, and the cis white constitutional order, as a source of inspiration. Today’s progressives are being given an opportunity to repel a serious attack on this order, at the price of further restraining the forces of wokism. How does that make them feel? Exhausted. They can’t even.

An apt parallel can be drawn to Thomas Kuhn’s (flawed but not useless) theory of paradigm shifts. It’s not enough for a scientific paradigm to perceive its own failures and inconsistencies. Something else must be ready to replace it, or else the partisans will never let it go. The human craving for order and systematic understanding is too strong. Progressivism needs a new paradigm before it can fully get rid of wokism.

What could that new paradigm be? Can the left just throw it in reverse and back up into the garage of old-school liberalism? Unlikely. The way this works is that a movement in disarray starts failing to channel all its idealistic, youthful energy into the staffing of campaigns and the working out of detailed policies. The movement stalls. Some faction has to emerge with a new paradigm, including a story about what went wrong and how to fix it. And that paradigm, first of all, has to inspire the kids. Then they can start cranking out viral videos and policy documents again.

But no one is going to be inspired by the message of “oops, let’s back it up a decade or two.” Liberalism, if it’s going to make a comeback, has to move forward. It has to morph into something conceptually new, but also something that could have broad appeal among the public.

A New Hope

There is one faction that has a chance at this right now. It’s gaining momentum around a new book, Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. They start by acknowledging the fact that coastal, progressive governments can’t get anything done because they have tied their own shoelaces together. They can’t build housing, or public transport, or even solar plants, because of all the DEI and environmentalist red tape they wrap around any real-life project. If you want abundance you will have to cut the tape, throw away the roll, and get back to building like Democrats did under FDR.

Unfortunately Abundance Democrats don’t want there to be any light between themselves and some other key factions, ideologically. They’re still for “equity” and egalitarianism. They just want to get stuff done. So don’t worry, all you staffers who changed your profile pics to black squares in 2020, please jump on board the abundance train. We’re not going to antagonize you by saying the w-word.

Klein and Thompson have been engaging other progressives and taking unexpected flack from some Old Left types who see the emphasis on over-regulation as a distraction from the real villain: big corporations. The Abundance authors respond that their own critique of power contains, but also goes beyond, these traditional leftist concerns.

Their approach to understanding complex social phenomena begins with a granular view of the kinds of people involved—the home-buyers, developers, power-system builders, etc.—including their incentives and the legal constraints under which they operate. Digging into specific examples of the actual problem you want to solve is what lets you start to develop a broader explanation that brings together all the low level facts. And then as more examples surface, you assess your theory based on how much you have to contort or stretch it to keep the core idea intact.

Klein didn’t start out convinced the problem was over-regulation. He was dragged there by this process, which itself happens to map pretty well onto a certain model of how good science works. This model, laid out in the 1970s by the philosopher Imre Lakatos, goes beyond Kuhn to give us a scale by which to objectively weigh one candidate paradigm against another. And it’s pretty clearly tipping in favor of the abundance theory over Old Left ideas about corporate power. The Old Left method is more to start with a vague but ideologically appealing story and then shoehorn into it as much of the ground-level data as they can.

Fortunately, there’s space for Klein and Thompson to make points like this because Old Leftism, whatever its problems, still accepts the responsibility of rational argument and critique. Of course, this doesn’t mean every Old Leftist will be zealously rational and honest, just that the movement’s culture still values those things. (New Leftism is more of a mixed bag on this.)

Wokism, on the other hand, is much less constrained by such standards. And they’re not interested in policy wonkery that feels to them like it’s just trying to desacralize the rites of DEI. To take on the wokists, Klein and Thompson would have to start playing a very different, more philosophical game, something they apparently don’t want to do.

The Core of Liberalism

The problem with this is that Democrats need to win elections. For swing voters, it’s not enough that you’ve subtly pivoted away from woke symbology. They need you to acknowledge that there has been this Hamas-curious, trans-activist segment of your party, and that you reject its views, unequivocally. Then you can explain your own form of pro-reason, pro-progress liberalism to these voters, including how your specific policies can help Americans in general.

Once you do all that, which includes saying “woke,” you’re going to be asked what you think wokism is. Crucially, you’ll need to point out how wokism is not just a concern for justice that some may take to extremes. There’s an anti-rational core to it, going beyond any policy-level question, that explains its willingness to campaign against straightforward scientific truths like the sex binary. But Klein and Thompson just don’t want to go there.

Anyone who does go there has to wonder what other problems may be lurking deep inside the left. Klein is quick to distinguish his desire to deregulate home-builders from a more broadly pro-market position. He constantly emphasizes the goal of using deregulation to accelerate state projects rather than private ones. Why though?

Most of your wealth, whether you’re rich or poor, has been produced in the market, not by government. If over-regulation of state projects is causing harm, over-regulation of private ones is likely causing even more harm.

Both forms of regulation suffer from special-interest capture, lacking any real mechanism to align them with broad societal interests, up and down the income ladder. As Klein himself points out, rich people hire lawyers to shape regulations and then to get around them if necessary; poor people are just stuck with them. The logical endpoint of the turn toward abundance is a streamlining and containment of anti-growth regulation across-the-board.

This would in turn create a real opportunity to pull in sane, market-oriented conservatives who have been repeatedly abused and neglected by MAGA, most recently with its economically illiterate fixation on trade deficits. There’s a path toward compromise within a broadly liberal coalition, opposing MAGA, through a shared appreciation for the power of markets to create wealth and lift people out of poverty, built around a shared core of ideas that are fundamentally pro-reason and pro-democracy.

Progressive liberals could agree to pare back the regulatory state, while conservative liberals could accept more redistribution to help those whom the regulations had been meant to protect. The exact level and form of redistribution would be a point of continuing negotiation, but the principle is clear and it would be a win-win for the vast majority of society. Unleash the market forces of progress, and set aside a portion of the gains to fund public projects that now could actually get built and create real value in their own right.

All of this, including the best shot at an electoral majority for sanity, requires a clean break with wokism, which still occupies the moral center of the left. There’s no other way to get the swing voters you need. But Klein and Thompson don’t want to do it—out of an abundance of caution. If that doesn’t change, what we can expect is just a divided Congress by 2026 and another coin-flip in 2028 pitting a limp, confused set of Democratic contenders against a new—one can hope—champion of MAGA’s attack on the constitutional order.

Ultimately a choice has to be made: caution or abundance.