The Ezra Klein Show - This Is How the Democratic Party Beats Trump

Episode Date: November 2, 2025

Democrats don’t just need to win more people; they also need to win more places. And that requires a different kind of thinking.Mentioned:"How Liberalism Wins" by Ezra KleinThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon, Marie Cascione and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Isaac Jones. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Insta. the Democratic Party, in its backrooms and its group chats and its conferences and its online flame wars, an increasingly bitter debate has taken hold over what the party needs to do to become capable of beating back Trumpism. Do Democrats need to become more populist, more moderate, more socialist? Do they need to embrace the abundance agenda? Do they need to produce more vertical video. The answer is, yes, they do. All of them. But none of them in particular. The Democratic Party does not need to choose to be one thing. It needs to choose to be more things. In a few days, there will be elections for governor of New Jersey, for mayor of New York City,

and for governor of Virginia. Democrats are leading in all these races. As of now, polling averages show the Democrat up by about seven points in Virginia and about four in New Jersey. But these aren't unusual leads in what have become reliably democratic states. You can imagine a world where the violence and corruption of Donald Trump's first nine months in office had led to a collapse in support for him and his party. We'll see what Election Day actually brings, but we do not look to be in that world. Donald Trump is not beating himself. That's all the more true, if you look a year out to the midterms.

In the Real Clear Politics polling average, Democrats are leading by about two and a half points when you ask Americans which party they want to see control Congress. At about this time in 2017, Democrats were up by about 10 points in that very same average. To win the House back next year, Democrats have another problem. They're going to need to overcome the chain of redistricting Republicans are setting off across the country. Republicans have already redrawn the maps in Texas. Aiming for maps that could net Republicans five more U.S. House seats before 2026.

North Carolina. North Carolina's maps already received the worst grade for fairness according to the Princeton gerrymandering project, and it believes these new changes would make them even worse. And Missouri. Missouri's Republican governor is expected to sign a controversial new congressional map into law. The proposed map would likely flip one Democrat held seat

read for Republicans. They are seeking to do the same in states like Florida, Indiana, and Ohio. And the Senate, the Senate is even harder for Democrats. They will need to flip four seats in the 2026 midterms to win back the Senate. That would mean winning in Maine and North Carolina, no easy task, and then winning at least two seats in states that Donald Trump won by 10 points or more, states like Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, or Texas. And that difficulty is not some quirk of the 2026 Senate map. There are 24 states that Trump won by 10 points or more in 2024. Any enduring majority, any real power will require Democrats to solve a problem.

They do not yet know how to solve. The number of places in which Democratic Party is competitive has shrunk. In 2010, when the Affordable Care Act passed, Democrats held Senate seats in Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and West Virginia. How many of those states remain in reach for Democrats today? In American politics, power is not decided by a popular vote. In the electoral college, in the House of Representatives, and particularly in the Senate, it is apportioned by place. This is the problem for Democrats. They don't just need to win more people.

They need to win more places. And that requires a different kind of thinking. If Zoran Mamdani wins the New York City mayor's race, running as a Democratic socialist. I am both a Democratic socialist, and I'm also a Democrat. One is a description of my political ideology. The other is a description of the party that I belong to. And Rob Sand wins the Iowa governor's race next year, running as a moderate who hates political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties don't solve enough problems to deserve their little shared monopoly.

We aren't doing our country a service by forcing people to choose between two candidates when they're not excited about either. Talking about that is the first piece of getting down the road to fixing it. Did the Democratic Party just move left or right? Neither. It got bigger. It found a way to represent more kinds of people and more kinds. kinds of places. That is a spirit it needs to embrace. Not moderation, not progressivism, but in the classic political sense of the term, representation. In 1962, Bernard Crick, a political theorist and a democratic socialist, published this strange little book called In Defense of Politics. Politics for Crick is something precious and specific. It, quote,

arises from accepting the fact of the simultaneous existence of different groups, hence different interests and different traditions, within a territorial unit under common rule. That fact of difference, he is pointing out, the reality of difference, is not always accepted. There are other forms of social order like tyranny or oligarchy that actively suppress it. But to practice politics, as Crick defines it, is to accept the reality. of difference. That is to say it is to accept the reality of other people, of how different other people are from you, of how they are no less complex and contradictory than you are. In my favorite line of his book, Crick writes, politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely

other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy. Genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people. I love that line. I think the path to a better politics, I think the path to a political majority, lives within it. Because the endless fantasy in politics is persuasion without representation.

You elect us to represent you, and where we disagree, we will explain to you why you are wrong. The result of that politics tends to be neither persuasion nor representation. People know when you're not listening, to them, and they know how to respond. They stop listening to you. They vote for people who they feel do listen to them. I'm not a pessimist on the possibility of persuasion, but I believe

it is rare outside a context of mutual respect. And if I were to say where the Democratic Party went most wrong over the last decade, it's there. In too many places Democrats sought persuasion without representation. And so they got neither. A Democratic strategist who has conducted countless focus groups told me that when he asked people to describe the two parties, they often describe Republicans as crazy, and Democrats is preachy. One woman said to him, I'll take crazy over preachy. At least crazy doesn't look down on me. That echoes the conversations I've been having. I've spent much of the last year talking to the kinds of voters, Democrats lament losing. I feel I end up having the same conversation over and over again.

They sometimes tell me about issues where the Democratic Party departed from them. But first, they describe a more fundamental feeling of alienation. The Democratic Party, they came to believe, doesn't like them. Many of these people voted for Democrats until a few years ago. They didn't feel their fundamental beliefs had changed. but they began to feel like deplorables. They began to feel unwanted. When I'd push on the experiences they had,

when I would ask, which Democrats were they talking about? What exactly had happened? I often found they were reacting to a cultural vibe, as much or more than a flesh and blood party. They had felt something changed, and I knew they were right, because something had changed. It had changed on the left.

It had changed on the right. but it was diffuse. It wasn't any one person or any one moment or any one policy. The structure of American life changed in a way that has made the genuine relationships of politics much harder to maintain. Instead of representing many different kinds of people in many different kinds of places,

the parties now tilt towards a place in which the elite of both sides spend most of their time and get most of their information. I believe the first party that figures out its way out of this trap will be the one able to build a majority in this era. When I grew up in a Republican county, an hour south of Los Angeles, my family subscribed to the Los Angeles Times, and to the extent I heard political commentary, it was on local

radio. In today's show, we'll look at the state of arts funding in California. I'm sure we'll be hearing plenty about education from Governor Schwarzenegger in a couple of hours in his state of the state address. Now, the New York Times is the largest newspaper by subscribers in California. And a young, politically inclined kid like I was will listen to podcasts like this one, or The Daily, or Ponsave America, or Ben Shapiro. Welcome to Pod Save America. On today's show, we'll talk about Donald Trump's latest musings, about doing away with the Constitution to become president for life.

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed Trump. Donald Trump. President Trump. Trump. Talk me through your evolution on Trump. Sure. So when he came along, that kid's political sensibility will be less distinctly Californian and more relentlessly national. The same is true for someone in Montana or Kentucky or Texas or Illinois.

For decades, we have been losing local media and migrating to national media. And that has meant politics everywhere is losing its local character and reflecting national divisions. Then there is the astonishing amount of money politicians need and the places they go to find it. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court decided money was speech. Campaigns became more expensive, and candidates often need a whole lot more money than what they can raise in their own states and districts. They go out seeking support from political action committees who can spend more freely than they can. That means exciting donors who are much further to the left or right than the public, and winning over interest groups that seek their support on policy.

Money can polarize. money can corrupt, but either way, it pulls candidates away from their own constituents. That was all true when I moved to Washington cover politics in 2005. Already, politics was becoming more polarized, more nationalized, more expensive. But two years later, the iPhone was released. By 2013, more than half of American adults had a smartphone. In 2016, Twitter went algorithmic. We all know this changed to politics.

But for all the words that have been spilled on it, I think we still miss how fundamentally it is altered the day-to-day work of politics. The work of political representation has always been bedeviled by an information problem. How do you know what the people you're representing think? How do you tell the people you're representing what you've done? Everyone working in politics had too little information. Now they have too much information, but it is the wrong. information. I cannot overstate how much this next dynamic has changed everyone in politics

at every level. Prior to social media, everyone in politics was not talking to everyone else in politics all of the time. It just wasn't possible. People who worked in politics in different places had their own local political communities. If you did campaigns in Kentucky, it was not easy to be in contact with political operatives in California. Social media has thrown everyone involved, at every level of politics, in every place, into the same algorithmic thunderdome. It collapsed distance and profession and time, because no matter where we are or when we are, we can always be online together. And this affects even the people in politics who are not on social media, because they're still operating in a professional community

where their colleagues are shaped by it, where everyone is always talking about what just happened on it. We always know what our most online peers are thinking. They come to set the culture of their respective political classes and there is nothing that most of us fear like being out of step with our peers. Since the 2024 election, there's been a lot of talk on the Democratic side about the power of the so-called groups. These interest groups, right? Non-profit interest groups who have these maximalist strategies. There are a lot of advocacy groups, a lot of parts of the Democratic Party that really thought things were fine. They're more extreme than many of their constituents, right?

That's not how normal people think. It's not common sense. And we need to start being the party of common sense again. I've used that term before. I've talked about the groups, but I think it is imprecise. The real thing we're talking about here is what might be called the professional political classes. The groups that we're talking about are downstream from the progressive professional political class. the people in the groups are the same people who staff or drive

all the other parts of progressive politics. One year you're with a non-profit, then you're on a campaign, then you're in the White House, then you're back at a group. You're followed on X or Blue Sky by left-leaning journalists like me,

by producers at MSNBC or by breaking news reporters at Politico. It's not a bunch of groups. It's a professional community that exists largely online. And so that professional community culture and its attention is governed not by its own values or goals, but by the decisions of the corporations and oligarchs who own the social media platforms, who design them to further

their own profits or their own politics. The conversations pulsing across these platforms are shaped not by civic values, but by the hacks that keep people scrolling. Newanced opinions get compressed into viral slogans, attention collects around the loudest and most controversial voices, and the algorithms they love conflict and inspiration and outrage and anger. Everything is always turned up to 11. This is, of course, true on the right, where many of the president's most consequential statements are delivered on the social media platform he personally owns. It is also unbearably literal, but it is also true on the left. From 2012, to 2024, Democrats moved sharply left on virtually every issue. They often did so believing

they were finally representing communities that had long suffered from too little representation. This was what they were told by the online voices and by the professional groups that claimed to represent those communities. But it went wrong. Democrats became more uncompromising on immigration and lost support among Hispanic voters. They moved left on guns and student loans and climate and lost ground with young voters. They move left on race and lost ground with black voters. They move left on education and lost ground with Asian American voters. They moved left on economics and lost ground with working class voters.

The only major group where Democrats saw improvement across that whole 12-year period was college-educated white voters. If you judged democratic politics expressively by what it was saying, it stood in solidarity with the struggling and the marginalized, as never before. If you judged it consequentially, it was breaking faith with those it had vowed to represent

and protect. Online, politics is expressive. You need to say what will win favor with the highly online voices that dominate your side of the algorithm. Offline, you need to win elections. And winning elections means winning over voters who have no voice in the professional political world,

who don't think the way the people in it think. Passing policy means building coalitions that include views and members who are held in very low esteem in the more ideologically pure world of online politics. I'm Joe Manchin. I approve this ad because I'll always defend West Virginia. In 2010, Joe Manchin ran for Senate in West Virginia with this now famous ad. I'll cut federal spending and I'll repeal the bad parts of Obamacare. I sued EPA, and I'll take dead aim at the cap and trade bill. Yes, that was Manchin shooting the cap and trade bill.

The Democrats have been trying to pass with a rifle. But Manchin, 12 years later, was the key vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the single largest green energy investment in American history. Progressives hated negotiating with Manchin. But for everything they believed about him, It was so much better to have him there than to have any Republican in that seat. And it was so unlikely that Manchin was holding that seat at all. In 2012, Mitt Romney won West Virginia by 27 points.

In 2016, Donald Trump won it by 42 points. In a state that the president in the previous election won by 42 points, the opposite party win. Never happened. Never happened. expressively, to progressives, Manchin was just a constant irritant. Consequentially, he was the Democrats' most remarkable overperformer. He made their majority possible by winning elections.

No Democrats should have been able to win. The most important question the party needed to be asking in that era was where do they find more Joe Mansions? How do they make more Joe Mansions possible? But today's Democratic Party, particularly its online culture, has taken forms of disagreement and difference. It once held inside its tent and pushed them outside.

Republicans have helped, of course. As Democrats move left, they've beaten candidates holding purple and red seats where the Democratic Party's brand has become toxic. But the culture changed on the Democrats' side too. The countenance, compromise, and difference on key issues begin to be treated as betrayal, not as a necessary part of building power.

In 2010, when the Affordable Care Act was passing, the crucial vote in the Senate came from Ben Nelson, a pro-life Democrat from Nebraska. There were then 40 pro-life Democrats serving in the House. Crafting compromises across these disagreements was hard, but Democrats were able to pass Obamacare, which expanded reproductive health coverage and remains the greatest Democratic policy accomplishment of the 21st century. That same Democratic Party, with all of its internal disagreements. It had the votes to confirm Supreme Court justices who would and did in their time protect Roe. That Democratic Party was less lockstep in its values, but is more able to turn those values into policy. I've been in a debate recently about whether Democrats

should run pro-life candidates in red states in much the way that Republicans run pro-choice candidates like Susan Collins and Larry Hogan in blue states. And I think I was taken aback to hear people say in response to this argument that I just wanted to throw reproductive rights overboard. So I want to say this clearly. No, I don't. I thought past episodes I've done on abortion, episodes I've done in the context of what my own family has been through,

should have shown that. But what I want is the Democratic Party big enough and strong enough to protect reproductive rights. and I feel our politics on this have failed because they have failed. We cannot protect or restore reproductive freedom if the coalition that cares about that cannot compete in more places.

But this point is not about any one issue. It's about a broader approach to politics. Different places have different politics and to win in them. Politicians have to represent the people who live in them. That means representing views Democrats are now find to be anathema on immigration or guns or trade or climate or trans rights. When those disagreements are held inside the Democratic tent, commonality can be found across them because people agree on other issues and have trust in each other in other ways. Joe Manchin, despite being pro-life, voted to put Katanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court.

But one worry I have about Democrats right now is that they do not want to confront how much of the country truly, deeply disagrees with them. Polls show that the percentage of voters saying the Democratic Party is too liberal increased sharply between 2012 and 2024. The percentage of voters saying the Republican Party

is too conservative fell during that same period. Even now, after the aggression, and the outrages and the violations of Trump's second administration, that gap has not fully closed. A September poll from the Washington Post in Ipsos found that 54% of voters thought the Democratic Party was too liberal, and 49% thought the Republican Party was too conservative. I would like to believe that all Democrats need to do

to win back these voters is embrace an agenda I'm already comfortable with. economic populism or abundance or both. But I don't think it's true. A study by the Center for Working Class politics found that in key Rust Belt states, when you attached the Democratic label to a candidate running on an economic populist platform, that candidate lost 11 to 16 points in support. That's how Sherrod Brown, once one of the strongest economic populace in the party, lost his Ohio Senate seat to a Republican car dealer who had a decision.

settle more than a dozen lawsuits for wage theft. The problem with seeing either populism or abundance as the sole answer for Democrats is that both of them are working across the idea of agreement, that the voters just want Democrats to be more of something they already are. In many places, it's true. And so that is enough in those places. But in other places, it's just not true. Across much of this country, voters don't agree with the Democratic Party as I understand it. And more fundamentally, they believe the Democratic Party doesn't agree with or respect them. The New York Times editorial board recently looked at the members of Congress, representing districts that the opposite

party carried in the presidential election. So Democrats in districts it went for Trump. The sea off the coast of Maine is constantly turning, like our lives the past few years. They all emphasize their disagreement with and their independence from the Democratic Party in various ways. But I do know Maine does better when we have independent leaders, no matter the weather. And that's why I do this job for you, not for any political party. Jared Golden is a Democrat from Maine. In 2024, he edged out a victory in a district Donald Trump won by nearly 10 points. Golden won running ads like this one.

I was the only Democrat to vote against trillions of dollars of President Biden's spending because I knew it would make inflation worse. Worked with the Trump administration to build a treatment center in Maine for my fellow veterans. Now I'm fighting against Biden's electric car mandate while voting to increase domestic oil and gas production. Working with Republicans to secure the border and standing with law enforcement against defunding the police. I'm Jared Golden and I approve this message because you deserve a... No other Democrat in Congress, not one, has survived in such a pro-Trump district. Now, in what strikes me as an absolutely insane turn of events,

Golden is facing a primary challenge from a progressive challenger who says Golden's independence has disenchanted Democrats in Maine. Golden even said he was okay with Donald Trump becoming president again. I'm not okay with Donald Trump as president. That's why I'm running for Congress. I stop Trump. Instead of learning from Democrats like Golden, Democrats who are successfully representing voters, who are otherwise moving towards Donald Trump, some progressives want to purge him. Again, I want to be clear that I'm making something different than an argument for pure moderation. I don't think the Democratic Party should just move right. It is good, in my view, that AOC and Zoran Mamdani run as Democrats, and that Bernie Sanders has become a leader. in the Democratic Party, it is good that you can be an out-and-out Democratic Socialist in today's Democratic Party. When I got into politics, none of that was true. Back then, I used to

fight with the Democratic establishment for how much it feared its own left. Today, you can run as a Democratic Socialist. Then you can barely call yourself a liberal. But what has happened over the past 15 years is a Democratic Party has made room on its left and closed down on its right. For all the talk of what Democrats should learn from Sanders or Mamdani, there should be at least as much talk of what they should learn from Joe Manchin or Jared Golden or Marie Glucin-Comp Perez. It's almost disempowering to people to say our entire world is based on one vote. No, like democracy persists in all of these small and all of these like microscopic things.

It is how well you know your neighbors. It is who comes to your house. You know, it's who is teaching shopcloth. Like, those are all the things that build a strong nation. Or Sarah McBride. You can't foster social change if you don't have a conversation. You can't change people if you exclude them. And I will just say, you can't have absolutism on the left or the right without authoritarianism.

Right? The fact that we have real disagreements, the fact that we have difficult conversations, the fact that we have painful conversations is not. a bug of democracy, it's a feature of democracy. And yes, that is hard and difficult, but again, how can we expect that the process of overcoming marginalization is going to be fair? The Democratic Party should be seeking more, not less, internal disagreement. It should treat that disagreement as more welcome. But changing a culture is harder than changing a policy. Moderating on this or that issue is more straightforward than finding ways to radiate respect and interest in people who disagree with you and people you've come and to feel far away from.

It is a building of genuine relationships and politics, not the taking of positions that is truly hard. But that's also the part that is beautiful. It's a privilege to do that work, not a concession. We are quicker to find complexity and extend generosity when we're able to see others as part of our community. Working to widen that circle of empathy, to widen our circle of belonging is both morally and politically good. Whatever the problems are on the left, there is something truly frightening brewing on the right. Tucker Carlson had a sit-down interview with Nick Fuentes, who's obviously a very controversial fake. And what you're saying about putting aside the tribal interest for the corporate interest,

that's absolutely the case. And that's the only way the country's going to stay together. Exactly. That's my concern. And I absolutely agree with you. I would say, though, that the main challenge to that, a big challenge to that, is organized jury in America. Paul and Grascia, President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, not a small job, said on a text thread leaked to Politico that he had a, quote, Nazi streak. A separate text thread of young Republican leaders leaked to Politico had messages about sending enemies to the gas chambers and one saying, quote, I love Hitler.

Ingracia had to withdraw his nomination, but Vice President J.D. Vance has dismissed coverage of the young Republicans' messages as pearl clutching. He said, Grow up, I'm sorry. Focus on the real issues. Don't focus on what kids say in group chats. Kids do stupid things. And I really don't want us to grow up in a country

where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive stupid joke, is caused to ruin their lives. Look, I don't want to ruin anybody's life either. But these were recent statements by adults who were vying for leadership in political organizations with official ties to the Republican Party. There is no rule of civic generosity

or political practice that Trumpism has not broken. And for many I know on the left, it's created a sense that there is no sense in trying to appeal to the media and voter. No sense in moderation. No sense in any of the old rules of politics. Look at how extreme the right has become, yet they have thrived. In this telling, Trump understands what the Democrats don't.

Nothing matters anymore except attention. But a few things are wrong with that. Trump did moderate the Republican Party in crucial areas, Medicare, Social Security, trade. and the simple truth is Democrats can't win the way Trump and the Republicans do. This goes back to the problem of place.

Trump and the Republicans lead a coalition built on overwhelming strength in rural counties. America's place-based politics gives rural places disproportionate political power. Trump and the Republicans can hold power with a smaller coalition than Democrats can.

And then there's this. Democrats should, shouldn't want to win the way Republicans do. This country could break. The abyss is dark and it is deep and America, like other countries, has fallen into it before and can again. I see the simple fact of a free and fair politics is much more of an achievement, something much more precious and difficult to preserve today than I did 20 years ago. I no longer take it or the habits of citizenship or politics to preserve it for granted. We cannot trust that Providence

or some innate American exceptionalism protects us from calamity. It doesn't. Over the past year, I have found myself obsessively reading histories of liberalism, looking for something, even though I didn't know exactly what. Illiberalism is winning right now,

but there's nothing unusual about that. By modern standards, virtually every past society was illiberal. that we now call them illiberal, that exclusion and domination and state suppression have been made strange enough to demand a label. That is the unlikely achievement. But how did liberalism do it? Because liberalism today feels exhausted to me. It does not feel up to this challenge. Did it fail us or did we fail it? For most of my life, when I called myself a liberal, I meant basically someone who believed in universal health care

and the right to form a union and racial equality and social security. But in her book, The Lost History of Liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt shows that in its oldest forms, liberalism was built on a virtue that we rarely talk about today. To the ancient Romans, Rosenblot writes, being free required more than a Republican constitution. It also required citizens who practice liberalitas, which referred to a noble and generous way of thinking and acting towards one's fellow citizens.

The word liberalitas became liberality, and it was discussed and debated for 2,000 years before liberals became a part of anyone's political vocabulary. Liberality came to mean something like demonstrating the virtues of a citizen, showing devotion to the common good, and respecting the importance of mutual connectedness. It flowered into religious tolerance when that idea was truly radical, when mainstream thought held that the violent persecution of heretics was an act of charity because it would keep others in the church. Liberality proposed, it demanded, a different way of relating across disagreement and division. It built towards liberalism's great insight. What Edmund Fawcett in his book, Liberalsum, The Life of an Idea, calls it liberalism's first idea. Conflict of interest and beliefs was to the liberal mind inescapable. If tamed and turned to competition in a stable political order, conflict could nevertheless bear fruit as argument, experiment, and exchange.

Today, I think political tolerance is harder for many of us than religious tolerance. Finding ways to turn our disagreements into exchange into something fruitful rather than something destructive seems almost fanciful. But there is real political opportunity. I even think a real political majority for the coalition that can do it. I saw a poll a few weeks ago that struck me. It was from the New York Times and Sienna University, it asked Americans what they thought the top problem facing the country was. Number one was the economy. That was what I expected. But number two, wasn't immigration or inflation or democracy or climate change, or even Donald Trump. It was political division. And that same poll, 64% of the country said they think, we're too divided

to solve our problems anymore. They're not wrong. Right now, the project of America feels to many impossible. And not just on the left. I hear it every time J.D. Vance or Stephen Miller speaks. I hear it when Trump says, I hate my opponent and I don't want the best for them. When I hear that, I hear something scary, but I'll see you're an opening, an opportunity.

In the end, most Americans want America to work. They know we disagree with each other. They don't want us to hate each other. They don't want to hate each other. these divisions exist not just in the country but in our communities in our families they're painful people want politicians they want a politics capable of making that problem better not worse i keep coming back to something crick writes for him what emerges out of politics is beautiful and rare he calls it a pearl beyond price he writes it the moral consensus of a free state is not a not something mysteriously prior to or above politics. It is the activity, the civilizing activity, of politics itself. In America, for all our sins and injustices and tragedies and oppression,

a freer state emerged through the practice of politics. It did not do so painlessly, it did not do so bloodlessly, but it did happen. and for a time, it gave us confidence in ourselves and in our system. It showed what could emerge from genuine relationships between people who are genuinely other people. And I think it still could again.