Opinion | MAGA Was Built in Decades. What Will Democrats Build Next?

What populism offers people is a culture, a morality, a way of being a picture of masculinity and femininity, a sense of belonging. It is a full-service religion as well as a political ideology. The Democrats don’t have any of that. They have ideas for policies and tax policies. So they might do this on a day-to-day basis. But if you’re the Democrats, you have to think we have to create a counter-movement to what populism has. We need to create a culture, a sense of belonging, a sense of identity, a sense of right and wrong, a sense of masculinity and femininity, all sorts of other issues. And to me, that’s a generational project. Populism didn’t just start yesterday. It goes all the way back to America first. It goes back to the Know Nothing movement. It goes back to writers like Sam Francis and Christopher Lasch. It took decades to create the culture MAGA is. It’s going to take decades for the Democrats to come up with a counterculture, but positioning themselves on the realm of values and ideas and vision is the first task. And what happens in a legislative game, it’s not important. We don’t have decades to protect our constitutional democracy. Of course, liberalism and social democracy have to have a moral story to tell. I think they do have a moral story to tell about how fairness and justice can undermine better lives for people, better family lives. But right now, we are in a crisis. Either you believe we are right now in a crisis or you don’t. I do believe we’re in a crisis, and that requires that you act that way. And then we can in the meantime have these long- term discussions that you want to have. But I don’t think you can just sit there and say nothing’s happening. We’ll think for the long term.