"A New Generation of Democrats Needs to Recapture This Same Spirit"

"Democrats need to move away from the language of equity, which implies that it would be acceptable to close the racial gaps in health or education by helping members of the disadvantaged racial groups improve while denying any help to lower-income whites. Obama understood this reality instinctively, as he made clear in his 'A More Perfect Union' speech. He called on all Americans to 'realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.' Like the 44th president did, today's Democrats must talk along these lines regularly and weave these concepts into their communication about all kinds of issues, not just on special occasions."

Ian Reifowitz at The Liberal Patriot writes about "How Democrats Lost Obama's Vision of American Identity."

While Bridget Bowman, Ryan Nobles and Frank Thorp V at NBC News write that "Bernie Sanders makes his next moves to reshape the Democratic Party."

"Proto-Trumpian Themes"

"The left dissented from Obama's optimistic analysis, seeing American history as a long and bloody reprise of racism and exploitation with no clearly defined trajectory. Buchanan adopts a similar analysis, except that he presents the qualities derided by the left as necessary, even praiseworthy. America is 'the product of ethnonationalism,' he asserts without judgment. 'No American war was fought for egalitarian ends, postwar propaganda notwithstanding.' Likewise, 'no one would suggest the Indian wars were about equality. They were about racism and subjugation.' Lincoln, he reminds the reader, was a white supremacist. As a descriptive account, Buchanan's history hardly differs from what you'd encounter in a text such as the 1619 Project or Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, only with the moral valence of the events flipped."

Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic calls Pat Buchanan "The Godfather of the Woke Right."

"Trump's Economic Plans Would Be Disastrous on a Grand Scale"

"Obama came into office in January 2009, amid a global financial collapse and recession. He did notch seventy-five straight months of job growth. Trump did sign a tax law that mostly helped corporations and the rich get richer. (He even bragged about it in those terms at Mar-a-Lago, telling wealthy friends that 'You all just got a lot richer.') That law added $1.9 trillion to the federal debt. And if Trump wins, the cycle will repeat, this time with President Joe Biden overseeing the handoff."

Jill Lawrence at The Bulwark writes, "Trump Wants to 'Fix' Our Booming Economy. Don't Let Him Near It."

"A Philosophical Brief in Defense of Liberalism"

"Living this liberal vision, for Obama, means accepting the diversity inherent to a large society made up of people with all sorts of beliefs and worldviews: recognizing that 'our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they'll extend to us.' It means understanding 'true freedom' as something that gives all of us the right 'to make decisions about our own life [and] requires us to recognize that other people have the right to make decisions that are different than ours.' And it means seeing democracy as more than 'just a bunch of abstract principles and a bunch of dusty laws in a book somewhere,' but rather 'the values we live by.'"

Zack Beauchamp at Vox reacts to Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention.

And Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect looks back to the Democrats' 1924 convention.

"The Old Man Who Saved American Democracy. Twice."

"This is the story of a nation grateful to a president not just for his accomplishments, but for his sacrifice. For his ability to understand that he was dispensable."

Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark reacts to President Biden's speech at the Democratic National Convention.

While Robert L. Borosage at The Nation writes that the convention is "Waving Goodbye to the Neoliberal Democratic Party."

"My Goal Is to See the Democratic Party, Once Again, Become the Party of the Working Class"

"I think that to the degree that [Harris] and Walz can focus on working-class issues and understanding that there are a lot of people in this country hurting, we have had good success in the last three and a half years in a number of areas. But we need to recognize the pain that's out there and bring forth an agenda that speaks to the needs of the working class, and not just wealthy campaign donors. And if we do that I believe that Kamala Harris not only will be the next president, I think she can win by a decent margin."

Jason Lemon at Newsweek interviews Sen. Bernie Sanders about the 2024 presidential election.

While Jonathan Chait at New York argues that Kamala Harris should emulate Barack Obama's 2008 campaign.

Though Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect says that Harris should ignore Chait.

"He Misled the Public, Mismanaged the Crisis, and Missed Chances to Save Lives"

"These are unserious people in thrall to a sociopathic clown. Trump's greatest test came in the final year of his presidency when the nation faced a true emergency and he failed spectacularly. The U.S. death rate from COVID far exceeded that of peer nations. That was not due to excessive lockdowns or masking. It was due to incompetence in the White House."

Mona Charen at The Bulwark calls for "a great remembering" of Donald Trump's actions in 2020.

As does Timothy Noah at The New Republic.

And at Salon, Heather Digby Parton remembers Trump's whole term.

"Stories Are Essential to Holding a Nation Together"

"There was another time when democracy in America was under threat, and filmmakers responded by making stirring movies aimed at lifting Americans’ spirit and equipping them for the battles ahead."

John Blake at CNN writes that "[i]f you believe democracy is under threat in America, find a 'new powerful tale' that inspires us to believe it has a future."

"We Presume We Understand It as Long as We're Not Asked to Explain It, but It Becomes Inexplicable as Soon as We're Put to the Test"

"As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world 'will not become unracialised by assertion'. (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.) Even so, after 350 years, it remains the case, as Nell Irvin Painter argues, that whiteness 'is an idea, not a fact'. Not alone, and not without much work to repair the damage done in its name, it still must be possible to change our minds."

In a 2021 Guardian article, Robert P. Baird explores the "invention of whiteness."

If "Good Enough for A Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, for FDR and JFK, It Should Be Good Enough for Today's Democratic Party"

"A Democratic party that adopts these principles has a real shot at political domination given Republicans' serious problems and weaknesses. Conversely, a Democratic party that continues on its present course dooms American politics to continued stalemate and polarization. Like the prospect of an imminent hanging, that should concentrate the mind."

Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot writes that it is "time for Democrats to try something that really could unite the country: liberal nationalism."

"The Core 200-Year Mission of Democrats"

"When Democrats advance equal dignity and rights for everyone—and focus primarily on the economic interests of working people—they win. When Democrats divide themselves and other Americans along regional, class, and ideological lines—or bicker internally over cultural divisions and downplay unifying economic policies—they lose."

John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot reviews Michael Kazin's What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.

And Ruy Teixeira describes the Democrats of the past year as "How Not to Build a Coalition."

While Teixeira also states that Democrats should always ask themselves, "What Would the Working Class Say?"

"There's an Enormous Dignity Gap in the Culture"

"Longtime Democratic consultant Joe Trippi muses that prominent liberal politicians would face a penalty from voters if they skipped straight from government office to goofy reality shows. 'I think a lot of Democrats would think it lacked seriousness,' he says. '"With all the things that you could be doing with the experience you built up, that's what you decided to do with it?"'"

Joanna Weiss at Politico discusses the rise of reality-television Republicans.

"Boring Old Liberalism Just Keeps Muddling Through to Prevail Once Again"

"But old-fashioned half-a-loaf liberalism has proven tough to replace. It's not just that revolutionary change is difficult to achieve in the American political system, though it is. There are also plenty of important constituencies invested in conventional liberal policy-making—classes of credentialed work-within-the-system subject matter experts, institutionalized interest groups that prize partial victories over none at all, and a large number of regular voters who hold moderately left-of-center views on domestic affairs and are wary of socialism and laissez-faire-ism alike."

David A. Hopkins at Honest Graft responds to the recent decision by the Supreme Court to protect the Affordable Care Act.

"Has Done What Neither Clinton nor Obama Could Do"

"'This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse,' wrote David Brooks of the New York Times. 'It's not just that government is heading in a new direction, it's the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting. Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them.'"

John Blake at CNN argues that Joe Biden has "dethroned the Welfare Queen."

"Biden Is Not Set to Achieve Anything Comparable in His First Two Years"

"The Democrats' agenda is a very progressive one, and Republicans are right to oppose most of it. If Democratic boasting about how far left they are going causes a backlash that impedes their plans and hurts them in the next election, it will serve them right. But the notion that the Left is leaving behind the half measures of the Obama era—making a great leap forward, as it were—is not really true. The first two years of the Obama presidency included, in addition to the stimulus, a permanent expansion of taxes, spending, and regulation in the Obamacare legislation; new regulation of the financial industry; and repeal of the military's 'don't ask, don’t tell' policy."

Ramesh Ponnuru at The National Review calls President Biden's "revolution" into question.

But at Politico, John F. Harris argues that Biden's "address to a joint session Congress was the most ambitious ideological statement made by any Democratic president in decades."

"If You Don't Define Yourself, Somebody Else Will"

"Obama has been attacked on the Democratic left, criticised for failing to see the urgent necessity of police reform. But that is to miss the point. It's because change is urgent and necessary that Democrats need to argue for it in a way that wins, rather than loses, support." 

Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian discusses "the gap between what people say and what other people hear."

Anti-Anti-Trump from the Left

"It should go without saying, though I know it does not, that none of this is a defense of these Trump failings or an attempt to mitigate the harms they caused. What this argument is, instead, is a vehement rejection of the grotesque historical revisionism that seeks to erase and whitewash the far worse moral evils, acts of violence and assertions of lawlessness that preceded him, all in order to propagate myths of American Exceptionalism and, worse, to rehabilitate the reputations and careers of the political and media cretins who perpetrated them."

Glenn Greenwald at Substack argues that "No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump."

"A Reminder of How Astonishing Obama's Rise Was"

"If so, there is strong reason to hope that Obama comes to be seen eventually as a great president. The alternative to his reasonable, rational, relativistic way of thinking—the alternative to the pluralistic world he seeks—is an angry world driven by people who think like absolutists and haters and zealots."

John F. Harris at Politico reviews Barack Obama's A Promised Land.

"It Is, Perhaps, a Socialist Majority in Embryo"

"Sanders had a different theory, and his campaigns assembled a different coalition, centered on younger, lower-income voters from Brownsville to Duluth. In 2020, that working-class coalition was not enough to win the Democratic nomination. And no, Sanders did not manage to turn history on its head and bring the vast reservoir of alienated, apolitical workers back to primary politics.
"But by 2032, today's Bernie voters under fifty will likely represent a majority, and certainly a plurality, within the party electorate. What sort of left will be there to greet them?"

Matt Karp at Jacobin looks at Bernie Sanders's legacy.

"It's Worth Noting, Perhaps, What Was Missing from the Democrats' Appeal"

"Finally, the party that succeeds in American elections is usually the one that captures the great middle of the electorate: Jackson's party of the 'common man,' Roosevelt's 'forgotten American,' Clinton's 'forgotten middle class.' Trump and Nixon's 'silent majority.' You can usually measure whether a candidate has succeeded in this respect by how he or she scores on questions about whether the candidate 'cares about you.'
"The Democrats of 2000, 2004, and 2016 failed to make this case. The Democrats of 2020 have a candidate in Biden who embodies this appeal, but much of their rhetoric and the program itself, more clearly reflected the identity politics of 2016 that emphasizes difference and ignores, whether intentionally or not, predominately white, flyover America. The point is not to appeal, as Trump undoubtedly will, only to this America, but to present an image of a unitary American small-d democrat. It may be hard to do, but the party’s ability to sustain majorities depends on it."

John Judis at Talking Points Memo reacts to the Democratic Convention.