Opportunity Knocked

Lily Geismer
© Anibal Ortiz

Lewis: What do you think about the phrase “Two wings, same bird,” which paints the Democrats as Republican-lite?

Geismer: We’re in a moment where we’re seeing more distinctions between the parties because of the changes in the Republican Party over the last couple of decades. This issue of Democrats looking like Republicans is in some ways a thing of the past. Before 2008, and especially in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, there was a lot more overlap between the two parties. That’s not to say that they were completely indistinguishable, but there were a lot of parallels.

But in the last ten or twenty years the Republican Party has seen a fundamental departure from tradition, especially on economic issues, turning away from promoting globalization and toward things like tariffs. That’s a real departure from what the mainstream Republican Party has long stood for. I don’t think it’s useful to reduce everything to partisan distinctions, but if you see the two parties as aligned in all respects, that makes it harder to find mechanisms to fight back. For instance, the current attacks on DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion—Ed.] from Republicans are a distinction between the parties, and understanding that as a starting point provides ways to resist the assault.

Lewis: I think you’re right that there are very stark differences between the parties now, but I hear that “two wings” phrase a lot on the Left, specifically in reference to the last administration’s funding and arming of Israel.

Geismer: On issues like Gaza, as well as national security and military spending, there’s not a huge amount of distinction between the parties. What makes this especially challenging is we operate in a two-party system, and that means liberals and the Left are put together in the same party. This produces particular tensions—some productive, some not. In the last ten years we’ve seen a more active and resurgent Left come to the forefront. That has pushed the Democratic Party left in various ways—especially on economic policy in Joe Biden’s administration. This progressive movement has roots as far back as the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 and runs through Occupy Wall Street. Coming into office after the Black Lives Matter upheaval of 2020, which was one of the largest mass movements in American history, also clearly shaped Biden’s administration. But in some ways that was window dressing, and some of the liberal gestures toward antiracism have been those that were the most quickly eviscerated.

Biden was as an insider Democrat in a way that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were not. Clinton came into office as a governor, and Obama was a one-term US senator, so neither had deep ties to Washington. Both Obama and Clinton were trying to remake the Democratic Party—especially Clinton—whereas Biden said explicitly that he represented the will of the Democratic Party. He understood that to mean its progressive wing as well. Having fought off very real challenges during the primaries from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, he recognized that those progressive sentiments were popular among Democrats. Biden’s actual ideology has always been really hard to pin down, but I think he understood that the ideas floated by those campaigns had a lot of political purchase and could be good for the economy. And Elizabeth Warren had a lot of say over who Biden brought in as advisers, policymakers, and administrative officials. She admitted that regulation was central to her vision. Student-debt relief was not a policy that Biden would have prioritized had it not been for those pushes. Some of the social welfare agenda, like trying to increase the child tax credit as part of the American Rescue Plan, and even some of the policies in Build Back Better, came from that progressive plank as well.

In the Clinton era there was not a coordinated Left pushing back against the Democrats’ move toward the center. I think that enabled Clinton to do a lot more—or, from a progressive point of view, to do a lot less. There was pushback from the Left on certain issues like welfare and free trade, but it wasn’t across the board like in previous eras or even some periods since then.

What makes this moment such a crossroads are the ways the Trump administration has reshaped our system of governance. Traditionally, for a mid-level bureaucrat in an administrative agency, it hasn’t mattered who was president. If you worked with the EPA, for example, there might be more or less regulation, depending on which party was in power, but nothing like the fundamental difference we have right now. One of the real issues for people on the Left is where to align in this moment of upheaval.

Lewis: How do you think the Left should respond, and what do you think a successful alignment would look like?

Geismer: I’m given hope by how Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have responded, holding rallies in a lot of places, trying to galvanize people. It’s not just about trying to win the midterms or even a presidential race. And their turnouts have been big. There was a rally in LA last weekend [April 12] that had a huge turnout. [Reports say around 36,000 people.—Ed.] But there are problems with turning to charismatic politicians as the future of a movement. More progress will come from actually doing grassroots political organizing.

One potentially galvanizing issue right now is immigration. We’re starting to see strong pushback against the Trump administration’s deportation policies. The ways in which colleges are being directly impacted by the administration’s targeting of international students and scholars is also a potential site for more-intensive mobilization, but I don’t think we can rely on college campuses alone. Because the immigration issue is impacting so many people, it’s actually a chance to build a broad-based movement and unify the liberal-Left coalition. The concern I have is that for center-leaning Democrats, the immigration issue will just be about the courts and how Trump has violated norms by ignoring judges’ orders in matters like refusing to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States. When this interview gets published, maybe no one will really remember what I’m talking about, because so many other things will have happened by then. But my fear is that if immigration is only about the courts, it will become about this battle of elites and not about broad movement-building.

Lewis: In a Jacobin piece that was published right after the 2024 election, you write that the Democrats’ “opportunity” pitch is essentially dead. Why do you think Democrats haven’t been able to move past the idea of providing opportunity and more into directly changing people’s material conditions?

Geismer: This goes back to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which was an organization started in the mid-eighties by a group of primarily Southern and Sunbelt white male politicians who really believed in shifting the course of the Democratic Party. They feared the party was in danger of basically being eradicated in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s two presidential victories. They wanted to move the party more to the center and shift its focus to markets. Their whole idea was to promote opportunity, not government, which was a departure from what the Democratic Party had stood for. They also felt that the Democratic Party had become too beholden to special interests. When they referred to “special interests,” they didn’t mean corporate interests. They meant labor, people of color, environmental groups, and feminists. Their idea was that the party had to move away from that to be effective. Bill Clinton was head of the DLC and really embodied their ideas in his presidential run. Al Gore was one of their core founding members. When Clinton and Gore won in 1992, it was the culmination of the DLC’s influence. Jesse Jackson called the DLC “Democrats for the Leisure Class.” Unlike the traditional Republican view of the market for the market’s sake, the Democratic view was that growing the economy would help everyone and that market-based tools could be used to address inequality and poverty. Those two planks became central to how Democrats operated and how they saw the role of the government. It wasn’t just about reducing the size of government; it also aimed to connect the public and private sectors.

What I have argued is that this group of Republicans—sorry, that was a Freudian slip—this group of Democrats wasn’t just trying to one-up the Republicans or defend themselves in elections. They genuinely believed in the power of markets and the private sector to help people. That’s really central to understanding the kinds of policies that they produced, which included microenterprise programs [financing small businesses through microloans to those with poor credit—Ed.] and bringing market opportunities to developing places in the Global South, as well as to low-income communities in the United States. But at a macro level, their faith in tech, trade, and finance translated into supporting and growing those parts of the economy, which they thought would benefit everyone.

Lewis: So it was their version of trickle-down economics?

Geismer: It was a version of trickle-down economics, but so much of what they were actually doing was investing in tech and trying to support the financial sector through selective deregulation. They thought that some forms of financial, banking, and telecommunications deregulation would be good for consumers, and that having more competition would actually help the middle class. That’s slightly different from the classic trickle-down approach.

The other piece of it—and Clinton basically said this later—is that, in their mind, globalization was an inevitability. That applied to things like job training. North Carolina is a classic example of this. The textile industry there was decimated in the nineties. Those jobs were not coming back, so there was a big push to retrain people to work in tech and become engineers. Democrats wanted to bring broadband to rural North Carolina, because the idea was that if you had access to the internet, you could telecommute, or you could sell things on eBay. Those are the kinds of opportunities they were thinking about.

“Opportunity” has been a long-standing Democratic idea going back to the New Deal, but where you see it really take off is in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-sixties. The Johnson administration had an Office of Economic Opportunity, which oversaw the War on Poverty. In the early eighties, when the Democrats were trying to redefine themselves, they increasingly embraced the term “opportunity,” which they connected to the market. The idea was that, through the structures of capitalism and the market economy, you could provide opportunity. It wouldn’t completely eliminate government programs, but more opportunities for individuals would mean less reliance on government. “Opportunity” was core to the Clinton philosophy. The word appears in many major pieces of legislation from that period, most famously welfare reform, which was called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. You can see it pop up throughout the Obama years too. I found it profoundly revealing that Kamala Harris chose that term to brand her vision for the economy, because it’s really tied to these older ideas.

A lot of the Biden administration’s pitch was “In ten years, we promise you you’re going to have a job.” Most people can’t afford to have that long-term view.

Lewis: In his book Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin posits that Trump’s 2016 win was the inevitable outcome of the turn toward neoliberalism in the 1970s. [Distinct from liberalism, neoliberalism emphasizes the power of free markets, the reduction of government in economic affairs, and the necessity of free trade.—Ed.] We could argue that the 2024 election confirmed that. Harris’s campaign platform adhered closely to Biden’s steady, incrementalist approach and to the embrace of public-private partnerships. This really seemed to turn off voters, especially swing voters. In a simpler analysis, we could say that Trump won because he promised to bring down the cost of living. In my lifetime I’ve never heard any Democrats say that as plainly as he did. If the Democratic Party does believe in changing people’s material conditions, how can they present that idea more directly?

Geismer: Part of it has to do with the ways Democrats sell what they are doing. A lot of the Biden administration’s programs, especially around industrial policy, were extraordinarily technical, so there was this message of “Trust us, we know what we’re doing.” That’s in line with a traditionally technocratic bent in the Democratic Party and in modern liberalism. Clinton and Obama were much more technocratic in their demeanor, and although Biden was traditionally less so, he governed in a very technocratic way. And I think another part of it was not actually translating what was happening or what the administration was doing and the ways in which some of those policies could affect people’s material conditions. This happened especially with policies around infrastructure and green energy, neither of which had immediate effects on the cost of living of most ordinary Americans. The administration did try some traditional promotional techniques, like ribbon cuttings at factories or something like that, but the vast majority of people weren’t seeing direct improvements to their material well-being. On top of that, problems arose that were beyond the Biden administration’s control, like the post-COVID inflation. Biden was arguably the most pro-labor president in history, but the vast majority of Americans are not in a labor union. And people in nonunionized jobs saw their material conditions worsen.

This is maybe a tangential point, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how we measure the economic health and stability of the country based on Wall Street. If you have lots of investments, then what Biden was saying was right—the economy was soaring. I think we’re actually seeing the opposite right now with the tariffs. Many people are freaking out, and rightfully so, because their 401(k)s are being affected. But if you don’t have a lot of money in a 401(k), you don’t think about it in those terms. That’s how these kinds of disconnects between Democrats and the working class have happened.

The Biden administration never made working-class people feel that the economy was doing well. Showing up at a factory and doing a ribbon cutting might have worked for politicians in the past, when everyone watched the nightly news, but the average person today does not have any understanding of the intricate workings of economic policy. The reality is that industrial policy and regulation are really complicated, and Biden was not able to translate those into terms voters could grasp. Now, I don’t think everything is about messaging—that can become a superficial way of thinking about policies—but a much more tangible, concrete message would have been more effective. One of the things Bill Clinton was effective at was translating complicated ideas into terms people could understand. A lot of the Biden administration’s pitch was “In ten years, we promise you you’re going to have a job.” Most people can’t afford to have that long-term view.

Lewis: Do you think either party can actually make people’s lives better?

Geismer: I don’t know if I would put my faith in either party to do so, but I do believe the government can. Think about housing. The only force big enough to address the scale of the housing crisis in the United States right now is the federal government, aligned with state governments. I spent a lot of my career looking at mass suburbanization and postwar housing. There was a massive housing crisis after World War II, and the US government responded in various ways to build out housing markets and public housing. That capacity to help is still there.

I believe in the ability of government to meet people’s material needs. I think that has historically happened all over the world. Of course, now we’re in a moment where the long-term damage to the federal government from things like DOGE is unclear. But the Democratic Party has traditionally stood for government at its core. It’s the job and responsibility of the government to help people and protect their rights.

I was really fascinated when Republicans like JD Vance began talking about the capacity of government to improve people’s material conditions. Conservative figures like Oren Cass [chief economist at the American Compass think tank—Ed.] have also promoted those ideas. That talk has not really manifested in the Trump administration’s policies so far, but it was interesting to think that this belief that the government can help people doesn’t have to come only from Democrats or the Left. There’s a potential that some Republicans believe in this, too, even though their reasons for wanting it are different—they’re often more explicitly seeking to promote traditional social values.

Lewis: Do you think the Democrats are ignoring the culture of instant gratification that we’ve developed in America?

Geismer: Definitely. But as the parent of small children, I don’t know if giving in to everyone’s desire for instant gratification is the greatest thing. [Laughs.] There’s a history of doing that, though. That’s what the New Deal did: immediately change the conditions of people’s lives. It’s not that American life today is in the same place that it was during the Great Depression, but this is a moment of severe inequality and, for many people, vulnerability. We’re experiencing a cost-of-living crisis. So government interventions and programs could make a huge and very tangible difference.

It’s important to show people what the federal government is capable of. I give the Biden administration credit for some of the things they were trying to push, like the child tax credit, for example. Their efforts to help with childcare were admirable, but, given the dynamics in Congress, they weren’t able to get them fully passed. And this is not just about helping the poorest of the poor. Upper-middle-class people are also facing serious problems with childcare and housing. These are broad issues that the Democratic Party has stood for historically. I’m not nostalgic for every part of the New Deal or the Great Society, but Democrats began parting ways with those issues starting in the 1970s with the neoliberal project you brought up earlier. Mainstream Democrats were absolutely complicit if not active agents in promoting that.

Lewis: What do you think Democratic Party populism would look like?

Geismer: It would tackle economic issues, but I don’t think it would be purely economic in focus, because I think economic issues actually go hand in hand with things that often get deemed “cultural.” But it would entail understanding that a lot of people are experiencing profound economic insecurity. One component of populism is naming an enemy, so Democrats would need to say who and what is causing the problem in addition to finding ways to address it. Populism is a political style more than anything, a way of unifying diverse groups. To me, economic populism would be a way of building a Democratic coalition with different priorities.

Beginning in the 1960s the Democratic Party prioritized winning over white, educated, suburban knowledge workers. That’s become the base of the Democratic Party. A lot of the messages prioritizing tech, finance, and trade were geared toward them. In an effort to appeal to that particular group, the Democratic Party took other parts of its constituency for granted, especially working-class people of color and working-class white people. We’ve seen the consequences of that.

Another key piece would be to highlight and encourage the rebuilding of labor unions. At the core of unionization is a message of economic populism and economic protection. One of the most powerful ways to actually improve people’s lives is to have unions. The periods when large portions of the American public have been the most financially secure have been when there’s high union membership. That would, of course, be difficult in the current moment, but I’d like to believe it’s not impossible, since so much of the infrastructure is already in place, and new sectors, particularly white-collar ones, have been increasingly unionizing.

© Eoin Vincent

Lewis: I want to talk about the cultural aspect of populism. It seems that there’s a fairly demonstrable shift rightward from Democrats when it’s politically advantageous or feels like the cultural winds are blowing that way. I’m thinking specifically about [California governor] Gavin Newsom’s podcast, where for his first episode he had Charlie Kirk [conservative activist and president of Turning Point USA—Ed.] as a guest. Newsom ended up agreeing with Kirk about the need to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports. Conservatives and the Republican Party have been able to effectively dictate culture lately. They decide something’s morally wrong, they repeat their attacks, and the repetition changes public opinion. Meanwhile Democrats shy away from attempts to influence culture and simply react to these engineered cultural shifts.

Geismer: Part of the issue is that the Democrats’ embrace of “wokeness” was pretty disingenuous to start, so it was easy for them to abandon. I try not to make it sound like social media is the answer to all problems, but I think that it has changed some of the cultural dynamics. Throughout history, when we see conservatives promote culture-war issues, it’s because they do not have a sound economic vision. The clearest example is the early nineties, when conservatives were questioning what was happening on college campuses around multiculturalism and “political correctness.” There was a big war around national history standards for school curriculums led by people like Lynne Cheney. That, too, was a moment when the Republican Party did not have a clear alternative to what the Clinton-era Democrats were advocating economically, so culture became the major wedge issue. Abortion was also a major wedge issue beginning in the seventies. That’s really when you see culture-war conservatism coming into the forefront.

The strategy for Democrats now should be to not just react. The party has failed at various points to outflank Republicans. In response to the culture war in the nineties Clinton proposed V-chips [“V” for violence—Ed.], with which parents could block certain types of TV programs. That was tame compared with what’s happening right now.

The key to debating culture issues is to be genuine about it. Doing it in a superficial, disingenuous way doesn’t actually help very much. Who knows what Gavin Newsom actually thinks about transgender athletes? And the end goal for politicians like him shouldn’t be just to win voters; it’s about making policy that improves people’s lives. Part of the problem is the Democrats don’t have a vision right now of what they stand for—particularly on cultural matters. In the short term one thing they could do would be to shift back to the economy and talk about those issues instead of, say, throwing transgender athletes under the bus.

Lewis: I like the point you raised about how culture wars generally come when the Right doesn’t have a strong economic message. It feels like the Democratic Party doesn’t really have a strong economic message at the moment, so they’re testing out culture wars to see how they can gain some ground.

Geismer: The 2024 Democratic campaign was strange in so many ways, but I thought it was really interesting that Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate, because in some ways he is a populist. How he thinks about the economy governs his style. But—and this was really on display during the convention—he appealed to a type of nostalgic conservatism, like a left-wing version of Make America Great Again: this gauzy vision of small-town America. Maybe that does exist in some places and for some people, but it missed the mark of what cultural populism is. It was a small-c conservative vision of small-town life and a time when people had a sense of cohesive community. One thing his speech also brought back, which wasn’t populist at all, is this idea that, at an individual level, Americans get along. That’s the classic Obama idea: that we can transcend our political divisions and have Republicans and Democrats living next to each other in a mosaic of different religions and races. Walz offered the idea that the Democratic Party was going to bring that back. As a governor and as a member of Congress, he actually did match that with a certain economic populism, but it was presented in this much more cultural way.

Lewis: There always seems to be this clash between the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the more moderate or conservative wing. Right now, on the moderate side, you have the remnants of corporate-style Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin, and opposing them you have young noisemakers like Maxwell Frost, Jasmine Crockett, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who seem to understand the directness that needs to happen to connect with people. When AOC put in a bid to be elected as the ranking member of the Oversight Committee last year, Pelosi whipped House Democrats against electing her. How do these competing factions find common ground?

Geismer: This tension within the party has existed throughout the twenty-first century, but it’s been particularly pronounced in the last decade. In some ways the party has been struggling to figure out what it stands for. Since the George W. Bush years, the Democrats’ identity has just been opposition to the Republican Party. That’s what Democrats stand for: “We’re not Republicans.” You can win some elections like that, but it’s not enough to form a coalition. You have to stand for something. Historians often paint the period since 1980 as a conservative era, and a lot of those years were governed by Democratic presidents: Clinton, Obama, and Biden. The Left had been tamped down.

In the nineties the Left was not expressing a lot of opposition to mainstream Democrats because they figured, “This is better than having a Republican president. We have to go along with what Clinton is saying.” There was some of that during the early Obama period, when more of this tension emerged. Then the 2020 election actually brought this onto the floor. You had issues on the table that had not been discussed by the Democratic Party in a generation. Affordable housing, for example, was not an issue that Democrats talked much about. There was very little conversation about labor. Some of the push for stronger regulation was brought up by the left wing of the party. So what is the common ground within the party? Should there even be one? What do you give up if you’re trying to create consensus?

The story of Pelosi blocking AOC is really instructive. It’s an effort to keep the Left from having a say in the party. And meanwhile there hasn’t been any cultivation of new progressive voices.

Lewis: It reeks of fear to me. We see so many of these older Democrats engaging in a white-knuckle grasp on power. What are they afraid of?

Geismer: This actually connects to what we discussed earlier about the opportunity economy. Kamala Harris ran the safest possible Democratic Party campaign. Granted, they only had a few months to put it together, but it was a classic Democratic Party campaign. They must have done test groups on how to win over moderate suburbanites. It’s a math game to them: “How can we win those voters in the safest way possible?” They’re so afraid of anything that reeks of redistributive forms of governance. That takes more vision or ideology than you’ll find among the remnants of those DLC people. Clinton at least genuinely believed that the market is the best way to help people and create growth. I don’t honestly know if Nancy Pelosi even has that much of an ideological belief. I think it is about power for her: If your goal is to maintain control in Congress, these are the mechanisms. I think it is about fear of letting go of that power. The 2024 election was an opportunity for Democrats to say, “What we have been doing has not been working. We need to make our message a little bit more tailored to working-class voters.” And they didn’t do that.

Lewis: The definition of working class seems to have shifted over the years from industrial and factory workers—who are disappearing because so much of that work has dried up in the United States—to the service industry, gig workers, and short-term contract workers. I’m curious what the Democratic Party’s definition of working class is at this point.

Geismer: From what I’ve seen, most Democrats use a much older definition that falls in line with white industrial workers. It’s a white man with a high-school education who does manual labor. The new working class is much more Black and brown and largely consists of women in the service sector, whose position is much more precarious and vulnerable. Part of the issue, too, is that Democrats have a really outdated vision of suburbanites. We have this cultural definition of the suburbs as being white and upper-middle-class, but they’re a far more diverse place. And this is apparent when the polling data comes out. Why did Biden do well in suburban Georgia? It’s because suburban Georgia looks really different than it did forty years ago.

I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that white working-class men are a homogeneous constituency. Within that demographic is a diverse group of people with different views. Any effort by the Democratic Party to meet these challenges should involve having a more expansive and contemporary understanding of who working-class people are and what they need. Working in a factory in the 1950s was very different from working at Target or Walmart today.

Lewis: It seems Democrats don’t understand that someone driving for DoorDash is a working-class voter.

Geismer: Their idea is that working for DoorDash is entrepreneurial. That really came of age during the Obama years, promoting that as work of the future. But if you’re a DoorDash worker or an Amazon driver and your hours get chopped all the time, then a different set of policies is needed to meet your needs. If your average working-class constituent is working for DoorDash, then you have to think about what kind of health care needs they have. What kinds of safety nets do they need? What are their concerns about their children? Thinking this way is really fundamental to coming up with both a political strategy and a policy vision of how to help people.

For a generation—and this was really prevalent during the Clinton years—Democrats and Republicans both criticized government. Clinton famously said, “The era of big government is over.” Instead he touted ideas like public-private partnerships that, in many ways, reduced the functions of government and shrank the idea of government’s purpose. There’s going to have to be a change: not a reinventing of government as Clinton and Gore tried to do, but a reenvisioning of government, not just going back and restoring old programs.

Lewis: We’re watching this slash-and-burn approach happen right now, where government workers are getting laid off left and right. Some of this is legally questionable, but it’s something that the Republicans have run on for a long time and something that Democrats have adopted in certain ways. There was a big reduction in the federal workforce during the Clinton years, but it was more measured.

Geismer: Yeah, Clinton made it a huge part of the 1992 campaign. It was more gradual, as opposed to what’s happening with DOGE. They studied and analyzed the landscape of the federal government for a long time.

Lewis: What would you say to people who claim that the Democrats tend to launder Republican ideas and present them in a more “humane” fashion?

Geismer: I think there’s something to that. In response to the economic crisis of the 1970s, many states passed property tax caps, most famously California’s Proposition 13 in 1978, and then in Massachusetts with Proposition 2½ in 1980. There was opposition to the caps among Democrats, because freezing property taxes had catastrophic effects on local governments and was seen as a more Republican strategy. In California the effects are stark, especially in education. But Democrats have never run on eradicating Prop 13. They’ve found ways to work within it.

I think about this a lot with health care. Obama’s Affordable Care Act was heavily compromised, and it was very clear at the time that Democrats weren’t going to get any more than that. They made do with a program that was much more centrist, if not right-wing, in nature. Once something gets passed, it’s very hard to repeal it—unless, I guess, you come in with an Elon Musk–style, extralegal approach. I’ve argued extensively that Clinton and the New Democrats had their own vision of governance and the market that differed from the Republican view, but it is also true that many policies associated with Reagan were passed during the Clinton years, welfare reform being the biggest. Most of the big, transformative deregulation happened under Clinton. Some of it had to do with the end of the Cold War, but that wasn’t the sole explanation.

Lewis: Much of the world is experiencing a shift to the right, but in Denmark the Social Democrats are doing quite well. They’re prioritizing material conditions while also severely restricting immigration. The Democrats in the US have offered mixed messages about immigration. Biden didn’t rescind a lot of Trump’s immigration policies, for example. I’m curious whether the American Democratic Party can learn from the Social Democrats in Denmark how to sell a more progressive approach that necessitates higher taxes and a bit more caution in general.

Geismer: There’s a long-standing question in sociology, political science, and history: “Why can’t the United States be Sweden?” This even goes back to the nineties: What happens when migrant populations create crises for social welfare systems? The centrist, neoliberal policies of that era’s Democrats were also a transnational phenomenon. The UK and Germany and a number of other countries were embracing the idea of transcending nationality for a larger global vision. What we’re seeing now in Western democracies is a rejection of those policies, in large part because a globalized, pro-tech economy benefits certain groups and excludes others. This is happening even in places that have a more robust social welfare system than the United States does, like Sweden.

The example of Denmark shows that social democracy is possible as a political strategy. I don’t know if they’ve been able to do it in a more populist way that appeals to broad swaths of people, but I think it has to be done in a way that puts immigration front and center, and not as a side issue. The next Democratic administration will need to address these questions. It’s not even a question for four years from now—it’s an immediate concern for Democrats: How do we find a way to respond to what is happening with immigration that is not capitulating but that counters what the Trump administration is doing? Obama was the deporter in chief—I think people forget that. We associate deportation with what Trump is doing—the chaos, the posturing—and forget that Democrats have done similar things, just without those rhetorical flourishes.

Since the George W. Bush years, the Democrats’ identity has just been opposition to the Republican Party. That’s what Democrats stand for: “We’re not Republicans.” You can win some elections like that, but it’s not enough to form a coalition.

Lewis: I live in Virginia, and we will have a gubernatorial election here this year. There’s a gubernatorial election in New Jersey this year as well. As we look to these immediate elections and toward the midterms in 2026, how do you think the Democrats can recalibrate and find a way to connect with voters?

Geismer: One short-term measure is building credibility as a party. People are feeling insecure on all fronts: climate, the economy, national security. Among my students I see a lot of anger and anxiety about the future. They wonder if they’ll be able to find a job. I think that’s one reason we’re seeing unionization among white-collar workers; those are no longer secure jobs. I’m told that the word security doesn’t poll well with voters. I’m not a political consultant, but that, to me, is the thing that Democrats should stand for. That’s what the New Deal stood for. A key part of it was creating a sense of economic security. The other thing that’s really important for Democrats is a return to traditional community organizing and community tactics to rebuild the party’s base. Democrats have used a tactic of only targeting swing voters in swing states and only in election years, like showing up in Pennsylvania for two months. I know many people from California who went to Nevada to work on Democratic campaigns there for a few weeks. [The Democrats lost Nevada in 2024.—Ed.] But if you’re there for years, living in the community and getting to know people, I think that type of organizing can work.

There’s been this tendency among Democrats to always try to build something new, a new organization or a new foundation, but I think what’s needed is reinvestment in old structures and old systems. Starting in the 1980s, the DLC thought the way to win was just to focus on the presidency. That has had really negative consequences. Where Democrats actually have power is at the city level. There are a ton of Democratic mayors, but they don’t seem to use their power, nor are they overwhelmingly popular. The party isn’t invested at the congressional level, and especially not in state and local politics. If they elected me as the head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which will never happen and is not a job I want, but if they did, I would reinvest in the deeper parts of the party structure and political system. Instead of funding some new super PAC, have local politicians meet people and show them what the party stands for. Cultivate some of these more progressive, if not Left, city council members or state representatives.

The early to mid-2000s saw a real restructuring of the Democratic Party. When Howard Dean was DNC chair, he wanted to do a fifty-state approach, go into every state. There was a huge amount of pushback, especially from people like Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer, who said that was insane and that you had to really target swing states and districts. But demographics are actually shifting. A lot of people are leaving California for other places, and that actually does give Democrats an opportunity to do more mobilization. If you just say that a state is a lost cause, you’re missing out on those demographic changes.

Lewis: Isn’t that how Barack Obama became a US senator for Illinois? He didn’t just focus on Chicago. He went downstate to the very rural parts that typically vote red. At the beginning of your book Left Behind, Clinton is in Kentucky, talking to poor and working-class folks.

Geismer: Obama’s interesting because his community-organizing background gave him that ability. Clinton was just genuinely able to speak to multiple audiences in a way that I think made him a different kind of candidate. But Democrats can’t just wait for the perfect candidate to come along. They need to be less candidate focused. Yes, they did have these two once-in-a-generation political talents who were extraordinarily gifted campaigners, but, as we have seen, that doesn’t translate into a stable long-term coalition.