Breaking History - Resistance or Opposition: Which Route Should the Democrats Take? (From the Honestly Archives)

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

*This episode originally ran on November 12, 2024 on Honestly with Bari Weiss*  Even your most optimistic Mar-a-Lago member didn’t see Donald Trump winning the popular vote and taking all seven swing states. He even came within five points of taking the Democratic stronghold of New Jersey! So, what on earth does the Democratic Party do next? They can stay the course and resist. It’s what they did the last time Trump won. In the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory, America was stunned. Every time he opened his mouth, Trump exploded political norms, and the Democratic Party responded in kind. Being a mere opposition party—at least at that moment for the Democrats—was not strong enough for this situation they believed. Instead they needed to become a resistance. And while Democrats won in 2020, the resistance ultimately did not work. Democrats spent a decade telling Americans that Trump was an existential threat, yet Americans didn’t care. The Democrats’ goal was to scrub Trump from future history. Instead, he now controls it.  Democrats need to look inward if they want to have a shot at winning in 2028. They need to act like an opposition, not a resistance.  Eli tells the story of how a few centrist renegades saved the Democrats from oblivion 40 years ago. In 1984, after Ronald Reagan’s 525–13 Electoral College landslide over Walter Mondale, the Democrats were not just in disarray—they were on life support. And yet, eight years later, they found their savior: a young governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. And they remade their party. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Travel moves us. The Fox News decision desk can now officially project that Donald Trump will become the 47th president of the United States. Many of you sitting at home right now digesting this news right now, some of them will be you. I wish I had better news for my daughter later this morning. It is a sweeping and stunning victory, unlike any in our history. It will be studied and debated for generations, the impact broad and deep, a turning point for the country.

Rachel Scott has been on the road with the Trump campaign. She starts us off. Well, that was a walloping. Even your most optimistic Mar-a-Lago member didn't see Donald Trump winning the popular vote, controlling the Senate and sweeping all seven swing states. He came within five points of taking New Jersey. More than half of Latino men voted for him. As he said, We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible,

and it is now clear that we've achieved the most incredible political thing. Look what happened. Is this crazy? Delirium for MAGA, devastation for Harris, Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and the rest. There's no doubt about it. They've lost the nation.

So what on earth does the Democratic Party do now? One approach would be to keep doing what they've been doing. Resist. I am unafraid to be nasty because I am nasty like Susan, Elizabeth, Eleanor, Amelia, Rosa, Gloria, Condoleezza, Sonia, Malala, Michelle, Hillary. It's what they did the last time Trump won. And our pussies ain't for grabbing. In the aftermath of Trump's 2016 victory, America was stunned. There had never been a president so immune to normal analysis, and as such, so unpredictable. Every time he opened his mouth,

it seemed, Donald Trump exploded political norms norms and the Democratic Party responded in kind. Being a mere opposition party, at least at that moment for the Democrats, was not strong enough for the situation that they believed they were in. Instead, they needed to become the resistance. They built this idea of resistance into their DNA, and it inspired and infected every aspect of liberal and progressive society. From talk show hosts... You know, Ivanka, that's a beautiful photo of you and your child, but let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad's immigration practices, you feckless c***.

...to dining establishments. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant Friday. The co-owner of the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, Stephanie Wilkinson, told the Washington Post her decision to ask Sanders to leave was based on the concerns of several employees. They pursued Donald Trump through lawfare.

Following the historic conviction of They pursued Donald Trump through lawfare. Following the historic conviction of former President Donald Trump on all 34 counts in the criminal hush money trial. They have likened him to history's worst monsters. Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden comes days after his own former chief of staff went on record to describe his former boss as a fascist. But that jamboree happening right now, you see it there on your

screen, in that place is particularly chilling because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the garden for a so-called pro-America rally, a rally where speakers voiced anti-Semitic rhetoric from a stage draped with Nazi banners. And while the Democrats won in 2020, the resistance ultimately did not work. Democrats spent a decade telling Americans that Trump was an existential threat,

and they just voted for him in overwhelming numbers. Their goal was to scrub Donald Trump from future history. Instead, he now controls it. So clearly, being a political party in perpetual outrage and high dudgeon was not the path to power. Let's be real. It was a total, unmitigated disaster. They put on a pink hat, declared a sex boycott, and hollered constantly about fascism. And then

gasped with shock when the nation chose the other lot. It wasn't just poor strategy. Resistance politics turned Trump's opponents, in many cases, into the monster they claimed to be slaying. Just listen to former Republican strategist turned anti-Trump extremist Rick Wilson. I want to say something to you, Donald, and your little minions, and your whole enabling class of the sort of MAGA influencer class. Donald, if you try to steal this election tomorrow, and you're gonna, we know you're gonna try, I promise you one thing. You will die in prison alone. Your family will be broken. Every property you've ever owned.

So the party is in a pickle. Resistance has failed. And despite the warnings of Oprah Winfrey... If we don't show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again. There will be another election.

And if the Dems want to have a shot at winning in 2028, then they need to look inward. The way losing parties survive is by figuring out why they lost and trying to win next time. In the meantime, they make the best of it and take wins when they can. They act like an opposition, not a resistance. This will require an entirely new approach. But the good news here is that the Democratic Party has been here before. And that brings us to the topic of today's episode. It's the story of how a few centrist renegades saved the Democrats 40 years ago from oblivion. The year was 1984. And if you were weeping over last week's electoral

blowout, well, Trump's victory was light stuff compared to the Reagan landslide against Walter Mondale. Democrats were not just in disarray. They were on life support and in real danger of vanishing completely. And yet, eight years later, they found their savior, a young governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. From the Free Press, this is Honestly. I'm Eli Lake. After the break, the story of how the Democrats remade their party and took back the White House after being destroyed by Ronald Reagan. The day after one of the most impressive presidential victories in American history, President Reagan and George Bush won 59% of the vote, beating the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. It's hard to overstate just how massive a defeat Ronald Reagan's win in 1984

over Democrat Walter Mondale really was. Mondale, who was vice president during Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency, lost everywhere except his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Reagan swept up everything else. Thank you. A conservative Republican won Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, for God's sake. Thank you. I think that's just been arranged. Mondale's loyalty to interest groups inside the Democratic Party left him open to attack.

Gary Hart, a senator from Colorado and his chief rival in the primary that year summed up the problem as follows. You have to reach those voters who don't feel represented by the AFL, the NAACP, NOW, or the Sierra Club. But Mondale could not see beyond the demands of the noisiest factions of his coalition. For example, his deference to the nuclear freeze movement was a terrible vote loser. His campaign actually attacked one of Ronald Reagan's coolest initiatives, research into space-based missile defense, Star Wars, space lasers. Ronald Reagan is determined to put killer weapons in space.

The Soviets will have to match us, and the arms race will rage out of control. Orbiting. Aiming. There's a bear in the woods. And Reagan countered with one of the bear? If there is a bear. What Mondale's appeal was to get the support of every interest group in the party. This is Al Frum, the man who would eventually remake the Democratic Party after Mondale's defeat. You know, I think it was in October of 1983, he basically got every group.

And so from that sense, you could say Mondale had the most unified Democratic Party ever. The only people who didn't support him were the voters. To me, that was a big problem. And you can see an echo of this problem today. And my basic diagnosis is that we have allowed the far left to have outsized power over the messaging and policymaking of the Democratic Party, which is causing us to fall out of touch with the working class. This is Richie Torres, a Democratic House representative

from New York, on the lesson of the 2024 election. Particularly working class voters of color who have been the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. In early 1985, the Democrats were a big government, soft on crime party, animated by nostalgia for FDR's New Deal and LBJ's War on Poverty. The party functioned as a coalition of unions, environmentalists, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, the National Organization for Women, environmentalists, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, the National

Organization for Women, peace activists, and dozens of other progressive tribes that believed that rallying under a common banner every four years was the way to win and hold power. But win, they did not. Between 1968 and 1992, the Democrats won only a single presidential election, 1976, the one that followed the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard Nixon. The Reagan landslide of 1984 was the final straw for Al Frum. He got to work in 1985 with another Democratic staffer, Will Marshall, forming a new group that would bring moderate governors, senators, and congressmen together to steer the donkey to middle ground. This was an insurgency led by people terrified that the Democratic Party would never again win the White House,

that it would vanish into history like the Whigs. They knew the stakes were high, and they were unafraid of playing hardball. And one of their first tricks was the name itself. They called themselves the Democratic Leadership Council, even though the leadership of the Democratic Party didn't like them one bit. It was an audacious gambit that catapulted their group into the center of the political conversation. Creating an illusion is the right way to think about it. Al and I joked a lot about smoke and mirrors. the center of the political conversation. Creating an illusion is the right way to think about it.

Al and I joked a lot about smoke and mirrors. We were an entrepreneurial insurgent operation. The Democratic establishment was not happy about the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council and the premise on which it was based was that in some way the party establishment was failing. The first job of the Democratic Leadership Council, or DLC as it was known, was to focus on the Republican-controlled Senate for the 1986 midterms. And here they really did have success. This is former Senator and Governor Chuck Robb

explaining how the DLC worked. We couldn't endorse candidates. We couldn't give money to candidates. But we could provide issues forums that were directed towards specific things that we wanted to have discussed publicly and invite them to participate. The DLC in these early years operated like a political policy shop. It published papers and articles that became talking points for new Democrats who weren't beholden to their party's orthodoxies. The DLC critiqued Reagan on his strongest issue, national defense. Instead of slamming the hawkish president for bringing us to the brink of nuclear war, as Walter Mondale had,

the DLC published a policy book on national defense that chastised wasteful Pentagon spending. They weren't saying, stop building bombs. They were saying, you're building bombs badly. The DLC began to germinate deeply undemocrat-sounding ideas at this time. They wanted national service for young people who received scholarships. They became deficit hawks, which was threatening to their party's big spenders. And on crime, the DLC, unlike the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the 1980s, supported the death penalty and more police on the streets.

In 1986, the DLC had momentum. The Democrats gained eight seats that year, wresting back control of the Senate for their party. Eight of the 11 new Democratic senators had run as DLC Democrats. Al Fromm and Will Marshall were ecstatic. After a strong showing in the midterms, the Democrats thought they were in great shape to end the Reagan era with victory in 1988. Just a few minutes ago, it didn't work out that way. In fairness, the Democratic candidate that year, Michael Dukakis, made a point to say that he was not ideological.

Nonetheless, his party was still vulnerable to the taint of excessive liberalism. Bush and Dukakis on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first-degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy. And again, we see an echo in 2024. Amala supports taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners. Surgery. For prisoners. For prisoners. Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access. It's hard to believe, but it's true. Now we should say Kamala Harris did not campaign

on gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants in prison. She ran on keeping abortion legal in all 50 states and Trump's unfitness for office. But her past positioning as a senator from 2017 and her ill-fated primary run in 2019 was enough for the Trump campaign to paint her as an out-of-touch elite who didn't care about common sense. Kamala's for they, them. President Trump is for you. I'm Donald J. Trump and I approve this message. Well, the same thing happened in 1988 to Mike Dukakis. And when he finally realized that the Bush campaign defined him for the voters, it was too late. Ronald Reagan is probably one American who will have a good night's sleep tonight. He's won two presidential elections in his own right

and in effect helped George Bush win this one. Another Republican landslide. The DLC decided their party needed what Al Frum would call reality therapy. We put together a four-part strategy, and the first part was what we called reality therapy. If you don't understand why you're losing, you're probably not going to make the strategic changes you need to win. Over the 1980s, the Democrats lost the three elections in landslides that were greater than any party has ever lost in history in terms of the electoral college. You know, if you continue doing that, I mean, that's the definition of insanity. How the Democrats got their mojo back with the help of a Southern governor with a silver tongue. After the break.

In 1989, the world changed forever. That is the year the Berlin Wall came down. The days of the Soviet Union were numbered. We are coming! We are coming! It was a vindication of Reaganism and the Republican brand. After three election blowouts, the Democrats were finally ready for a change, and the DLC was there to offer exactly that. And they had a secret weapon, maybe the greatest political athlete of the last 50 years, Bill Clinton.

Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan were outstanding orators, of course. But no one combined the ability to think like a policy wonk and then sell those policies to everyday people like Bill Clinton. At a time when his party was wary of the police, Clinton would just amble up to cops and ask them about their jobs like it was shooting the breeze. He was obsessed with making schools better, and he would talk for hours and hours about his ideas for reforms. And he had a knack for presenting center-right ideas in the language of a folksy

liberalism. After all, it was Bill Clinton who promised and delivered the end of welfare as we know it. Here he is in 1991 at the Arkansas governor's mansion announcing his bid for the presidency. To be sure, the collapse of communism requires a new national security policy. I applaud the president's recent initiatives in reducing nuclear arms. They're an important first step. But make no mistake about it, the end of the Cold War is not the end of threats to America. The world is still a dangerous and uncertain place. And the first and most solemn obligation of the President of the United States is to keep America safe and strong from foreign dangers and to promote democracy abroad.

Bill Clinton's ideas didn't come out of the vapor. They were honed during his time as chairman of the DLC. And in that role, Clinton in some ways began his campaign before that announcement. He would travel throughout the country to spread the gospel of the new Democrats. Here again is Alfram explaining what these new values were. We believe the Democratic Party's fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not were. We believe the Democratic Party's fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not government. We believe in the politics of inclusion. Our party has historically been the means by which aspiring Americans from every background have achieved equal rights and full citizenship. Believed in being involved in the world, believed the

private sector growth was the prerequisite to opportunity. You know, we wanted to prevent crime and punish criminals. You know, and most important, in a sense, was we believed in the ethic that John Kennedy espoused, that every American had a responsibility to give something back to the country. Not everyone loved it. At the top of the list of prominent liberals who hated these new Democrats at the DLC

was Reverend Jesse Jackson, a formidable figure within the Democratic Party. Like Clinton, Jackson was also a great talker. To assume that there may be equal opportunity and great gaps in results assumes that somebody is inferior and somebody is superior. The assumption of that statement stinks. Now, a lesser politician would have continued to take potshots at the DLC in the media. But Jesse Jackson was a cunning strategist. He sought to

kill the DLC with kindness. He asked to speak at the group's 1990 convention in New Orleans, where he delivered a speech in which he claimed at least that the DLC moderates were on the same page as his rainbow coalition. We are delighted to be united, Jackson said. And the Reverend knew what he was doing. He knew that the entire mission at this point of the DLC was to distinguish itself from the kind of identity politics that the Rainbow Coalition was championing. Here's Jesse Jackson in 2016 in an interview for the documentary Crashing the Party. I gave a speech which was insulting to them called Delighted to be United. They reacted to that. That was Delighted to be United. I live with that. That was Delighted to be United.

I'll leave it to the things we had in common. But they wanted to draw a distinction between the rainbow and the DLC. So Delighted to be United did not exactly fit their stereotype. Going into the 1992 election year, the relationship between the New Democrats and Jesse Jackson was frayed. It was about to get worse. After Clinton survived the first of many sex scandals in his political career, he came in second in New Hampshire. While the evening is young, and we don't know yet what the final tally will be, I think we know enough to say with some certainty that New Hampshire tonight has made Bill Clinton the comeback kid. He would go on to vanquish his primary opponents,

and just as he was preparing for the general election, Bill Clinton decided to deliver a little payback to Reverend Jackson. He decided to address the Rainbow Coalition. This is five weeks after the L riots of 1992. Racial tensions in America were at a boil. You had a rap singer here last night named Sister Soldier. I defend her right to express herself through music, but her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight. Just listen to this, what she said. She told the Washington Post about a month ago, and I quote,

if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? So you're a gang member and you'd normally kill somebody, why not kill a white person? Last year she said, you can't call me or any black person anywhere in the world a racist. We don't have the power to do to white people what white people have done to us. And even if we did, we don't have that low down dirty nature. If there are any good white people, I haven't met them. Where are they? Right here in this room. And that was what became known in American history as a sister soldier moment. Today, it is shorthand for when a politician rebukes someone on their own side to appeal to a broader constituency. Clinton invented the tactic. In some ways, it was a cheap shot.

Sista Soldier was a mediocre rapper, and she was invited to the Rainbow Coalition as one of several young Black leaders. But it wasn't like Jesse Jackson was advocating armed struggle. He was a disciple of Martin Luther King. As a matter of politics, though, this was a masterstroke. George H.W. Bush was trying his best to turn Clinton into Mike Dukakis in 1992, and Clinton actually gave him quite a bit of material. He wrote a letter, for example, in 1969, when he was a Rhodes Scholar, to the colonel in charge of the ROTC training program that he was obligated to attend. He reneged on his earlier commitment because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Bill Clinton was a draft dodger. He also smoked marijuana, although he incredulously claimed he had not inhaled. So when Bill Clinton took a shot at the Rainbow Coalition at their own event, it served as an inoculation. He wasn't an out-of-touch liberal. He was a new Democrat, fighting for hard-working Americans that played by the rules. Now, this tactic had a dark side as well. Bill Clinton presided over the execution of a lobotomized cop killer named Ricky Ray Rector.

And here, I want to quote from the late Christopher Hitchens. He no longer knew his own name and met most of the standard conditions for clemency. But Clinton left New Hampshire specifically to return to Arkansas and have him put to death. He did so in order to demonstrate, or signal, that he was not soft on crime. Rector's condition was such that, as he left his cell for the last time, he saved the dessert from his last meal for later. Strapped to a trolley for a lethal injection, he actually assisted the executioners

in their hour-long search for a viable vein in which to place the lethal catheter. He thought they were doctors trying to cure him. End quote. Rector had the mind of a child. It's cruel to execute such a person, even if the messaging was brilliant. In 1992, Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in a three-way race with billionaire H. Ross Perot. The drought ended. The Democrats were finally back. The DLC had accomplished its mission. So what can the Democrats learn from the DLC's journey out of the wilderness?

Well, to start, it should stop caving to the loudest pressure groups. The far left is pressuring the party to take positions that are deeply unpopular with the American people. This is Richie Torres again, speaking about that killer ad that Trump campaign ran in the closing weeks on transgender health care for illegal immigrants. So I saw the ad. It was effective because it weaponized the vice president's words against her. And the question is,

why did she feel the need to ever say that in the first place? Because the pressure from the far left on center-left Democrats is overwhelming. Ignoring special interest groups was the first lesson the DLC ever taught the Democratic Party. It's worth listening to Congressman Torres and relearning that lesson today. But there are other lessons as well. To start, it's important to understand that resistance politics has taken over progressive discourse in recent years, whether it's climate change. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I'm one of the lucky ones.

Black Lives Matter. NYPD! NYPD! Black Lives Matter. We're trying to block the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The causes are different, but the style of discourse is the same. It's the shout-downs, the screaming, the loaded rhetoric. And all of it makes the give-and-take of normal Democratic politics impossible. On rare occasions, resistance really is required. But most, nearly all political disputes do not revolve around existential threats. Most rely on compromise. And that means acting like a political opposition. Donald Trump signed five of my bills the last time I was in Congress.

This is Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna. He's the president of the United States, or will be. He was elected by over 50% of this country. My job in representing my district is to first do what is best for America. They elected me to represent them in what is good for this country. And if there is someone who is president, and I think he's proposing something that is good for America, even if it's not perfect and I can be part of the solution,

that's my responsibility. That doesn't mean that when he proposes things that are bad for America, that I won't speak out. And I think the American people want that and they are desperate in this country for some kind of healing, some kind of moving forward. I hope the president does it. I'm dubious of it. But here's what I do know, that there's going to be the opportunity for the next generation in both parties to work towards finding more of that common ground and lifting up our politics

so you don't have the ugliness of what we've had the past decade. Pretending that Trump will end our democracy is to deride the choice of the blue-collar Americans who Clinton brought back into the party. It could also be a self-fulfilling prophecy if Democrats return to lawfare, shunning their opponents, and encouraging disruptive protest and street anger. Not only will this give Trump and the Republicans an excuse to use the same tactics themselves, it also turns off the very voters a healthy political opposition should be trying to persuade.

Right now, the Democrats have been too beholden to the well-organized fringes of their party who seek to lecture the people globalism has left behind. You know, I remember seeing a former colleague of mine come out in favor of defunding the police in the New York Times. This is Richie Torres again. And so I called him and I said, let me get this straight. You want to conduct a social experiment known as defund the police on my constituents of color in the South Bronx. And my question to you is, what happens if that social experiment goes badly? What happens if it leads to an outbreak of youth violence and gang violence and gun violence? You live in Brownstone, Brooklyn. You have the luxury of advocating for defunding the police. But for my constituents, defunding the police is

not a utopian ideal. It's a dystopian reality. It will lead to more violence, not less. And so for me, the lesson here is that working class voters of color have no interest in becoming guinea pigs for the utopian social experiments of the far left. Utopian social experiments of the far left is the stuff of resistance, not opposition. And opposition operates in political reality. And so the Democrats should criticize Donald Trump when he deserves it. And believe me, there will be plenty of opportunities for that. But they shouldn't go into his presidency calling him Hitler. It will only erode their credibility for later on.

After all, one doesn't negotiate with fascists. One bombs them to smithereens. And Trump isn't Hitler. We know this because President Biden knows this. Which is why last week he said, I spoke with President-elect Trump to congratulate him on his victory. And I assured him that I'd direct my entire administration

to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition. That's what the American people deserve. Now, Biden deserves credit for acknowledging his party's defeat, something Donald Trump did not have the grace to do in 2020. Nonetheless, his concession speech last week also revealed his earlier fascism rhetoric to be a messaging strategy, not a bold plan to save half the country from the candidate they just elected.

Because if Biden really believed that Donald Trump was a fascist and an existential threat to a democracy, why in the world would he be making his transition to power any easier? The other lesson, though, from the DLC is a little different. Bill Clinton's governing agenda planted the seeds of its eventual electoral rebuke. Clinton's tactics and political strategy are unimpeachable, pardon the pun, but his actual policy did not deliver. I refuse to be part of a generation of Americans that fails to compete in the global economy and so condemns hard-working middle-class Americans

to a lifetime of struggle without reward or security. That line worked really well in the 1992 election. But by 2015, as both Trump and Bernie Sanders were energizing a new wave of populism, public perception shifted. Donald Trump just won the 2024 election in part by promising tariffs. That's the opposite of free trade agreements. And his appeal to the forgotten man is a direct callback to those working-class Clinton voters

who didn't see their lives improve because of globalization. There are a lot of great things that came out of that era. We have more wealth as a nation than ever before. There's $12 trillion of wealth, and we're the leading innovation hub of the world. We lowered the cost of things like phones and televisions. But in the process of doing that, both parties and economists had a blind spot. Again, this is Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna. We had a blind spot to what this was doing to destroy communities.

I mean, we shipped off our steel industry, shipped away our aluminum industry, our textile industry. Towns were being hollowed out. We were giving condescending lectures to people to either train for jobs that they never had or to move miles away. And that was wrong. And I think the first thing a Democratic politician needs to say is we messed up. Congressman Khanna is on to something. Small d Democratic politics are fluid. They are ever-changing. The key to success in the 1990s, selling neoliberal policies to Joe Sixpack, led to eight years of democratic rule,

eight years of peace and prosperity. But it was also a kind of time bomb. The populist response to Clinton's neoliberalism began in that 2016 election, but it came to fruition in 2024. And in that sense, it is the bookend to 1992. 2024 is the year when Clinton's working-class coalition became Trump's. That's a tough pill to swallow for Democrats, particularly Democrats who were old enough to remember the glory days of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

But it should also be a cause for optimism for the Democrats of this generation. Trump's coalition looks formidable after last week's election, but coalitions change. And his policies today, particularly if he pursues the tariffs he promised on the trail, are likely to exacerbate the inflation that got him elected in the first place. If Trump alienates America's allies, he will make the wars he wishes to end last longer. Sometimes the best an opposition can hope for is to let the party in power make their own mistakes. And that brings us back to the theme of this episode. The secret to Clinton and the DLC's success is that they realized the voters were not buying what the Democrats were selling. So they offered them something else.

They learned how to win in opposition. They did not continue to signal their virtues to the progressive mandarins who refused to listen to the electorate. Power is earned through persuasion in democracy, not cosplay. So the Democrats are at a crossroads. One path is the make-believe of the last eight years. The other path is for the party to roll up its sleeves and offer the voters an agenda worth voting for. The midterms are less than two years away. Time to get to work. I'm Eli Lake. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment,

please share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And if you want to support Honestly, There's Only One Way to Do It, go to thefp.com and become a subscriber today. See you next time. Bye.