For the Democratic Party, every passing week brings fresh humiliations. The culmination so far was the shambolic process by which Democrats let the continuing resolution to keep the government open until September 30 become law. Once House Republicans, in a break from their usual rancor, coalesced behind a bill, Democrats faced a hard choice: acquiesce to bad legislation, or force a shutdown with no clear path to anything better. After every House Democrat save one stood together and voted no, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, decided to vote yes on the critical procedural vote and brought eight of his colleagues along with him. The strategic dilemma was genuine; the strategy was risible; the fallout, predictably painful. “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters. “I think that’s what happened the other day.”

What followed was lower stakes, but in its abased way more telling: the spectacle of Schumer making the media rounds to hawk his book (Antisemitism in America: A Warning) but repeatedly confronted by interlocutors at the Times, The View, MSNBC, and onward, all trying not simply to rehash the shutdown but to pin him down on the Democrats’ seeming paralysis amid authoritarian threat. In response to Chris Hayes’s insistence that the moment of crisis for American democracy had already arrived, he was revealingly sputtering. “Now, you may be right. I don’t think so. We’re not there. You know, I think we’re getting there. We have to be really vigilant.” Schumer described his own benchmark for democratic crisis to be Trump openly defying a Supreme Court ruling—and then decentered Democrats from his vague vision of the response that should engender. “Our democracy will be at stake then. And if the people make their voices heard and are strong and stand up, and we join them, I believe we can try to beat that back.”

Schumer will, in all likelihood, survive the firestorm, whatever the limits in his leadership. But at a time of open right-wing warfare on so many fronts, it’s hard to find anybody who really thinks that Democrats have, to use a phrase of the moment, “met the moment.” Each gesture has seemed more pathetic than the last, from the geriatric TikTok videos to the little bingo paddles House members waved at Trump’s address to Congress to the feckless inside-baseball legislative maneuvering. No one is more overpowered by that feebleness than the Democrats themselves—less a political party than a vehicle for institutional self-consciousness.

The story goes far beyond elite stumbling. Democrats’ immobility stems precisely from comprehending their political challenge. November 2024 confirmed class dealignment to be Democrats’ deepest existential conundrum, and the continual driver of their electoral troubles. It is the American manifestation, in a uniquely pure two-party duopoly, of a story seen across the rich democracies: center-left parties’ voters have moved upscale and well-credentialed policymakers have lost any organic connection to the parties’ historic bases of support.¹ Debate on class dealignment has tended to focus on shifting attitudes and voting behavior across social stratification on the basis of education, income, and occupation. It has said less about the fraying of social and organizational linkages that connected the party with its core supporters. But without attending to that latter story, and its instantiations in both politics and policy, it is impossible to understand a Democratic Party that seems so incapable of recognizing the situation, still less of responding, when the crisis is here.

As class dealignment in the electorate has accelerated, the politics problem (a hollowed-out party incapable of shaping the landscape around it) and the policy problem (a vast policy-industrial complex that imagines itself to have electoral juice it actually lacks) reinforce each other as they fail, together and separately, to forge a politically generative project resonant with voters. Unrooted party organizations cannot reach an alienated and disorganized working class. Policy entrepreneurs who have identified the failings of neoliberalism cannot reach them either. Small-minded politicos cannot build from politics to policy; pointy-headed mandarins cannot build from policy to politics.

The party’s infirmities of politics and policy are deeply linked, not only historically but thematically: they manifest the common pathology of a disconnected party, far less than the sum of its parts, that cannot bring together all the forces it seeks to lead. Yet these infirmities are not quite two sides of the same coin, and their genealogy over the past half-century is somewhat different. The purely political story leans on the collapse of the old subnational party organizations that had long served as bulwarks of Democratic power and, up until 1968, key players in presidential nominations. Over the same period, the working-class associationalism that used to habituate Democratic support fell on hard times amid the decline of unions and cross-class civic groups and the anomie of suburbia.²

The policy story, for its part, emerges not only from the professionalization of advocacy (another byproduct of post-1960s civic-associational decline) but more specifically the ongoing growth of the vast, opaque paraparty apparatus in which such advocates operate: sprawling, headless congeries of foundation-funded think tanks and idea merchants that amplify problems and spout proposed fixes for the center-left.³ That growth has been fueled by money from donors small, large, and mega (and in recent years giga), and in a dizzying array of forms from campaign donations to hard-to-trace “dark money” that straddles the line between politics and charity—and money pays for staff and courtiers with priorities of their own. More than any particular source of funds or set of actors running the show to tilt the factional scales, the sheer scale of dollars sloshing through the system is the key point—both blessing to fuel the action and, in critical ways, a curse of its own.

Since 2016, the political pathologies have been more straightforward to see. The party renewal represented by the Resistance to Trump’s first presidency, much heralded in the heady moment of 2017 and 2018, appears with hindsight more delimited. A genuine activist insurgency—liberal-minded but pragmatic; made up predominantly of white, college-educated women—succeeded in reviving a slew of long-dormant local parties. In leafy suburbs trending away from the GOP already, they hastened the trend. The same demographic base and strategy motivates activism in 2025. But hopes that such activism would light the broader party afire, or reorient its way of doing politics, remain unmet, not least because it hastens more than it mitigates the problem of class dealignment. For all of us who preach party renewal as civic renewal, the sharp limits of that last attempt offer a sobering reminder: the point is not simply to deepen connections where the party already has them, but to reach voters where those ties have attenuated or worse.

More broadly, Democrats in the Trump era have seen themselves as the protectors of norms and processes come what may. Back in 2004, a Bush Administration official, assumed to be Karl Rove, had derisively referred to the “reality-based community.” Democrats’ subsequent unironic embrace of the term might mark the congealing of a party that defines itself by its sheer reasonableness. The proceduralist ethos of professional-class liberalism meets with an older tradition, back to the party’s very beginnings, of jawboning and favor-trading as ways to bring disparate actors together under the same roof.

Wracked since November by a crisis of confidence, Democrats have repeatedly defaulted to autopilot in ways that embody this ethos. In Congress, that means deference to seniority and aversion to perceived risk. Democrats have been much kinder than Republicans to leaders atop their party’s caucuses. In bureaucracy, it means reverence for procedural niceties. The path of least resistance even gets celebrated as a positive good: look at us, following the rules. Conspicuous by its absence is any instinct to go for the jugular in big fights, primary challenges to leftist House members notwithstanding. At a time when the stakes of interparty conflict are existentially high, the Democrats’ picayune organizational dynamics retain an unmistakable student-council quality. The usual story, tied to political scientist Ronald Inglehart’s theories of shifting ideological cleavages across the rich democracies since the 1960s based around “post-material” values, works better as post-hoc description than as fully convincing explanation. But whatever the ultimate cause, if post-material politics is about self-expression, the self that ever-more professionalized Democrats have come to express is high-trust and institutionalist. That’s an orientation ill-suited to risky but creative opposition in crisis—or to winning knife fights.

The Democrats’ policy problem is a murkier story, of a cross-wired advocacy world generating policies laden with problems that party politicians cannot then solve. The foundation-funded blob of Democratic-linked policy expertise can be hard to grasp, with insiders unable to see the whole thing in toto even as outsiders find it impenetrable. Myriad claims-makers for particular groups, sectors, or interests all jockey for airtime and, in a term of the age, “impact.” All manner of players that for tax reasons cannot engage in explicitly partisan advocacy act politically all the same. In 1978, the political scientist Hugh Heclo noted that the “iron triangles” of House subcommittees, interest groups, and bureaucracies that dominated Washington policymaking at midcentury had been supplanted by more diffuse “issue networks.” Now, for Democrats, the sheer profusion of players and confusion of goals, with principal-agent problems all the way down, make even that description seem quaint.

The professionalization of liberal activism is an old story by now. Advocacy shops where most everybody has fancy credentials and are accountable more to donors than mass members supplanted declining unions and cross-class membership groups. But that policy blob moved leftward in the later 2010s and 2020s, with complicated consequences. An “economic style,” obsessed with optimization amid trade-offs, and measured in the broad framework of cost-benefit analysis, had for decades served as center-left policy analysts’ stock-in-trade.⁴ The financial crisis and the slow recovery from the Great Recession that ensued prompted a challenge to that model. In place of economists, programmatic post-neoliberalists reserved pride of place for lawyers, the classic policy generalists. Yale Law School, one might say waggishly, became top dog over MIT Econ. Emerging in tandem, and overlapping in personnel, was another key tendency in the Biden years: the return of a long-dormant anti-monopolism that attacked corporate power more than capitalism per se, and that put Big Tech in its sights.

Consciously moving leftward, the upper echelons of the Biden-era Democratic Party recognized the connection between stemming class dealignment and saving democracy, and made a particular bet on how to pull off one to achieve the other: they would supplant what they deemed a neoliberal paradigm that had alienated working people from the Democrats. In the best rendering we now have of what the Biden team wanted to achieve, journalist Franklin Foer writes in The Last Politician of “a series of dinners in Washington, New York and San Francisco” during Trump’s first term, where “establishment wonks broke bread with Elizabeth Warren officials and intellectuals from left-leaning think tanks.” As Jake Sullivan, the Clinton aide who would go on to serve as Biden’s National Security Advisor, concluded in a mea-culpa-cum-agenda-setter in 2018, “We Democrats do need to embrace a big, bold policy agenda.” The Hewlett Foundation’s “Beyond Neoliberalism” initiative provided important funding and architecture for this transformation, as it emphasized breaking through ideological barriers that had putatively limited past policymakers. Lumping the Obama Administration inside the neoliberal paradigm pointed up its insufficient fiscal stimulus, too-halting approach to finance, and coziness with Silicon Valley.

Crucially, however, the post-neoliberals conceived this effort entirely in programmatic and policy terms. As sentiment turned against economistic tendencies in center-left policymaking, one option might have been to replace it with more avowedly political thinking—practical in orientation, and less tethered to expertise as such. A left-wing version might have tried harder to seed social movements; a centrist version might have tried harder to persuade key sectors in business. A synthetic version might have moved strategically in both directions. That was not the path taken. The insurgent wonks depicted the neoliberalism they aimed to supplant as a project rooted in ideas—and mounted their challenge accordingly. (The paper that launched Hewlett’s “Beyond Neoliberalism” initiative featured sixteen mentions of Hayek and zero of unions.) For all their invocations of “power,” proponents of the new paradigm conceptualized that power less as state and society moving in a given direction than simply as a circulation of new technocrats redirecting the state in new directions.

The implicit expectation was that, by demonstrating just what government could do, good policy would, via “policy feedback,” generate its own political rewards, specifically cultivating new constituents among the working-class voters recently lured by Trump. Policy design, in other words, was political strategy. The principal players made no attempt to change, let alone transform, the organizational dynamics of the Democratic Party apparatus itself, or the broader associational life surrounding the party. The Biden-era Democrats, in short, attempted programmatic post-neoliberalism inside a party that neoliberalism had hollowed out.

Whether proponents thought explicitly in terms of policy feedback, or simply incorporated a useful notion from the intellectual ether, the concept worked a kind of wonk jujitsu, simultaneously reflecting and surmounting their shared technocratic ethos. As it happened, the political scientists Daniel Galvin and Chloe Thurston had issued their own warning after 2016 about the politics of policy feedback: “Even when policies do happen to generate supportive constituencies, there is little reason to think they will generate partisan loyalties and ‘lock in’ reliable electoral constituencies for the party’s majority-building purposes.” What seemed then like a useful corrective now reads as a Cassandra-like prophecy. But they weren’t at the salons.

See these dynamics as context, and the Biden record snaps into place. The hard limits in American politics, when ambition outreaches the appetite of congressional majorities or a public that likes change better in theory than in practice, ultimately connected to a party failing. As president, Joe Biden served largely as a passive broker for what others asked, saying yes to everyone rather than ruthlessly setting priorities. (In a piece in Vox earlier this year, Dylan Matthews deemed Biden “the president who could not choose.”⁵) In time, maybe from the gossipy books set to appear later this year and maybe only when the archives open, we will learn more about Biden’s own incapacities. But whether it was the president or his praetorian guard doing the non-deciding, the upshot was to meet the asks of interests and advocates in ways that actually failed to make decisive calls. A different version of the same problem repeated itself among Democratic leaders in Congress. Parties are institutions that decide how to allocate the resources at their disposal among potential claimants. And so the Biden problem and the Congress problem each ultimately amounted to the same collective party problem.

Party leaders’ failure at brokerage and prioritization is the flip side of the diagnosis that homes in on outsized influence from “the groups,” the professional advocacy shops designed to advocate in particular issue arenas. Neither story alone captures the whole problem.⁶ To take the most salient example, vast new migrant flows from Central America posed very real political problems for Democrats, sharply different from the politics around the long-resident DREAMers whose legal status dominated discussion in prior decades. Cosmopolitan tendencies and legal-advocacy professional norms supportive of rights for refugees and asylees doubtless contributed to Democrats’ misdiagnoses of the severity of these political problems. But Texas Democrats, long pragmatic around border issues, spotted the issue early—as would any good reading of the polls. In May 2023 and more sharply in June 2024, Biden curtailed asylum claims. That timetable bespeaks an inability to get ahead of the issue. And as Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, bused migrants northwards, the Biden Administration offered little in the way of money, or a coordinated federal response, to contain the chaos.

The initial 2021 version of the administration’s Build Back Better Act, for its part, manifested both the party’s inability to prioritize and its misplaced reliance on policy feedback. A cacophony of policy thinking led to ill-fitting programs thrown together in a bill that then predictably failed to win enactment. The goal was to enact a “care agenda,” expanding the welfare state beyond health care and pensions. But its reach exceeded its grasp in ways that should have been perfectly foreseeable. Proposals for childcare, pre-K, and paid leave all collided against one another. The childcare and pre-K relied on states for adoption and implementation—as if the lesson of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), that recalcitrant red states would ignore a good deal and say no, had never happened. None of the proposals was universal or fully funded—as if implementation would be followed by a spontaneous groundswell for expansion rather than, as with the ACA, years of protracted challenge before, hopefully, eventual entrenchment.

The proposals’ fiscal limits reflected a party more eager to break through neoliberalism than to raise taxes on its upper-middle-class supporters. Various surcharges on millionaires and tax hikes on corporations ensued to keep within Biden’s red line not to raise a cent directly from anyone with a family income under $400,000. This is, in the end, the central limit to all the Democrats’ grand pronouncements in the era of class dealignment. Bill Clinton raised taxes on the middle class; the 1993 deficit reduction bill he signed hiked the federal gas tax, increased income taxes on Social Security benefits, and raised the federal income tax from 31 percent to 36 percent starting at $115,000 ($254,000 in 2025 dollars). No Democratic president since, for better or worse, has been so assertive on the revenue side.

With Joe Manchin ultimately more willing to usher in an energy transition on terms that would benefit West Virginia than to relax his opposition to benefits for non-workers, and Kyrsten Sinema making trouble on the revenue side, none of the new welfare-state proposals made it into law when the Inflation Reduction Act was finally enacted in August 2022. (Nor did a permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit.) By contrast, the climate provisions in the bill fared better, not just because Manchin proved willing to play ball, but also because advocates actually set priorities about what they wanted, using carrots and not sticks to avoid direct blowback and making investments that could plausibly generate their own constituencies over the long haul. And their theory of feedback, now being tested as Republicans prepare their monster tax bills, relied less on voters’ whims than on “green spirals” that would entrench new industries, which could then rise to their own defense.

The Biden Administration, like its recent predecessors, responded to the limits of what it could get out of Congress by embracing executive action, whether through executive orders, rulemaking run from cabinet departments up through the White House, or policies executed through independent agencies like the FTC. In the argot of political science, the personalistic presidency entwined with the administrative presidency. Such policymaking is not only vulnerable to reversal by the next administration. It also accentuates detachment from grounded politics. A recent roundup of former Biden officials reflecting on lessons learned offered a telling glimpse into this executive-centered mindset, disconnected from legislative, electoral, and party considerations. Going long on jargon about a “whole-of-government approach,” ruing “cramped imagination and limited political will,” and urging future administrations to create new agencies to solve new problems, the participants remained largely silent about what might pass through Congress, what might matter for voters, and what might generate political and policy benefits down the line.⁷

With this backdrop, the small-timey-ness and paralysis of the organizational party makes more sense. Last month, Ken Martin of Minnesota, the longest-serving Democratic state party chair in the country, ascended to the chairmanship the Democratic National Committee. He relied on a decade and a half of cozying up to the DNC’s four-hundred-plus members, the vast majority of them chosen by state party committees that are themselves overlarge and inclined to reward their own loyal time-servers. In an increasingly nationalized party system, those same state parties have found themselves marginalized from real power, serving more as conduits for dollars rather than sites for making real decisions. But their support was enough for a landslide win over Martin O’Malley, former two-term governor of Maryland and commissioner of the Social Security Administration; and Ben Wikler, state party chair in Wisconsin and darling of donors and notables across the party’s factions.

The DNC—essentially a fundraising operation that also serves as custodian of the presidential nomination calendar and process—is far less powerful than often imagined. But in this most partisan of eras, that is itself a function of the figures who have served as chair and done so little with the role, and in turn of the conditions that have elevated them. Incumbent presidents have treated the role as a mere appendage of the White House political operation. Martin’s predecessor Jaime Harrison won the job after hoovering up donations that would have been better spent elsewhere for an unwinnable 2020 Senate race in South Carolina; Jim Clyburn, third-ranking Democrat in the House, eager to cash in his rewards for delivering the state to Biden in the 2020 primary, pushed him to Biden. The only notable moment in a lackluster tenure came as he played the role of the president’s dead-ending cheerleader, not an honest broker, as Biden’s position atop the ticket teetered in the summer of 2024. Out of power, when it matters more, the record has not been much better. Look for an out-party DNC chair regarded as central to a big win (Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy as DNC chair from 2005 to 2009 succeeded on its own more modest terms), and the search goes back to Ron Brown in 1992.

What goes for the DNC in extremis holds elsewhere across the party. In the race for the high-profile ranking member spot of the House Oversight Committee, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, an undistinguished cancer-stricken 74-year-old in his ninth term, prevailed in a 131-84 secret ballot victory over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Connolly’s views are clearly closer to the median in the House Democratic caucus than those of Ocasio-Cortez. He is just as clearly a less talented politician and communicator, for a position that requires dramatizing horrors from the other side. He had not just ideology and seniority on his side, but also his party’s collective incapacity to take any calculatedly risky steps in opposition. Elevating the rule-followers and game-players too often means rewarding mediocrities.

Lousy decision-making notwithstanding, incompetence is not the core problem across the party’s electoral apparatus. Indeed, Democratic politics has gained real and genuine rigor over the past generation in, to take one notable example, testing messages and advertisements to see what performs best at motivating and persuading voters. In campaigns, in the formal party apparatus, and, far overshadowing both of them, in the shadowy world of Super PACs and dark money, vast batteries of online experiments test to see what works. Would-be voters don’t want their friends to know if they failed to vote, we have learned, so in direct mail, threats of shame work. Ads are, for better or worse, the most powerful lever to push in the course of a high-profile campaign—and 15 seconds is often long enough. Because voters seemingly have the same memory capacity as goldfish, last-minute ads are good.

The “testing machine” is a genuine achievement, and the charges leveled against it mostly miss the point, the mark, or both. Many of the supposedly grassroots-driven alternatives touted instead for soft-dollar campaign money are precisely the kinds of professional-led, unrooted outfits that have not and will not deliver the goods. Torrents of general-election ads last year from Future Forward, the leading Democratic Super PAC, hammered home exactly the super-soft class politics that has been a party staple for decades. “It makes me so mad the billionaires pay less in taxes than I do,” a teacher says as footage cuts to Jeff Bezos in a tux alongside his buxom new squeeze and then to Trump in his element at Mar-a-Lago promising tax cuts to an audience that he knows is “rich as hell.” The ads avoided gauzy defense of diversity or democracy in favor of a good old fashioned, well-calibrated us-versus-them appeal.

For all its sophistication, however, Democrats’ paid media apparatus also reflects the key disconnections of a well-heeled but hollowed-out party. Good political instincts backed by careful research get channeled into a product effective on its terms—but ultimately ephemeral. The notion that, with the right ads, the right themes, and the right messages garnered through high-powered testing, Democrats can white-knuckle American democracy through the present peril by eking out victories cycle after cycle seems as grave a delusion as anything from the left in the heady 2010s. It reinforces the central politics-policy disconnect: the testing machine handles the electoral side and the idea merchants at the ritzy convenings take care of the program. In turn, the disconnect between messaging and policymaking makes for an unstable equilibrium, always vulnerable an election or two later to the charge of unmet expectations before the hype cycle could begin anew. The charge, instead, must be to bring the same degree of rigor—based on thinking institutionally and organizationally and not just experimentally, taking into account effects that will unspool over time—to the rest of a party so soft-headed across so many domains.

The Trump victory has itself stripped away illusions. His popular vote win undercut claims that Republicans can only prevail as a minoritarian party, leaning on their structural advantages in the Electoral College and gerrymandered maps. Instead, they got it fair and square. Map after map and poll after poll hammered home just where Democrats had lost support since the Obama years: in the white working class in 2016, and in Asian, Hispanic, and immigrant communities in 2020 and, punishingly, 2024. And when Trump, back in office, secured confirmation of even his kookiest and most dangerous Cabinet picks, it put the nail in the coffin to the idea that a center-right bloc would cordon off the most dangerous elements of MAGA, if only the tendency could be cultivated and grown through reforms like ranked-choice voting. In their wake, with each new daily calamity of Trump’s rule, the reality is reaffirmed. Trump leads his party. MAGA is normal.

The myriad pillars of a free society under threat all have to respond as best they can—and it will take far more than smart politics from Democrats alone to hold the line. But in turn, everyone everywhere with a stake in what Trump is doing has to pay heed to just what the Democrats are and aren’t at this juncture. The Democrats have genuine talent in various factional flavors, whether Raphael Warnock, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For better or worse, the party of the paddle-wavers must still serve as the electoral vehicle to defeat MAGA. Democrats’ lingering shellshock from November reflects a party finally grasping the depth of its political problems, but paralyzed by that very recognition from discerning a collective direction forward. That, somehow, is the task ahead.

1. See Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy and Silja Häusermann and Herbert Kitschelt, eds., Beyond Social Democracy: The Transformation of the Left in Emerging Knowledge Societies. ↩

2. See Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol, Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters are Turning Away from the Democratic Party. ↩

3. Without wading too deep into the discourse around “abundance,” one might note that important proponents have articulated their institutional strategy around exactly these players. Robert Saldin and Steven Teles, “The Rise of the Abundance Faction,” Niskanen Center, June 4, 2024, https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-rise-of-the-abundance-faction/. ↩

4. See Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy. ↩

5. Dylan Matthews, “The President Who Could Not Choose,” Vox, January 14, 2025, https://www.vox.com/politics/394712/joe-biden-president-legacy-inflation-manchin. ↩

6. See, from shortly after the election, Adam Jentleson, “When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?,” New York Times, November 16, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/16/opinion/democrats-interest-groups-majority.html. ↩

7. “Six Biden Officials on Reimagining a Progressive Future,” LPE Project, https://lpeproject.org/blog/six-biden-administration-officials-on-reimagining-a-progressive-future/. The entry from Samuel Bagenstos, who served as General Counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services, is a notable exception. ↩

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