A Dangerous and Consistent Misreading of Trump’s Appeal

There is a dangerous and increasingly dominant misreading of Trump’s appeal inside Democratic politics. Matthew Yglesias, Harvard grad and New York City native, has made a career as the working-class soothsayer to the elite. He tells corporate Democrats what working-class Americans think. And, because it’s what they want to hear, they listen. His latest theory: The party is too woke, too ideologically rigid, and if candidates would just moderate on a handful of cultural issues, the working-class voters they’ve lost would come back. It sounds reasonable. It has charts. It cites academic survey experiments.

It also happens to be wrong. And the people most harmed by that misdiagnosis are exactly whom Yglesias and the “moderates” claim to be channeling.

Both Yglesias and the editors of The New York Times treat Donald Trump’s victories as evidence that moderation works, pointing to positions he walked back on Medicare cuts, the Iraq War, opposition to gay and lesbian soldiers serving openly. That reading fundamentally misunderstands what Trump did. He didn’t win by meeting us halfway on policy details. He won by going to war with the institutions we blamed for our decline. Both parties, the media, the donor class, the trade deals that gutted manufacturing, the consensus that had governed Washington for 30 years. None of that is moderation. That is a frontal assault on the status quo. What he quietly dropped were the positions that most obviously signaled he was working for the same donor class as everyone else.

The moderation crowd calls this “angry centrism.” I’d call it a con that worked, because it addressed a real grievance.

The deeper problem is the narrowness of their imagination. They talk constantly about supermajorities and winning back the center, but never look at what actually produced supermajorities. Yglesias has written that if AI advances on the current timeline, “America is cooked.” That fatalism is revealing. It means the moderation argument isn’t really about how to win. It’s about how to lose more slowly while keeping the existing economic architecture intact. Moderating on affirmative action while accepting permanently unaffordable healthcare and housing as facts of nature is not a governing vision. It is a smaller version of the same failure that created this crisis in the first place.

The Times holds up Obama as a model of winning moderation. I can speak to that from personal experience. Al Gore was my first election. I was 20 years old. I didn’t vote again for eight years, until Obama ran. He didn’t just inspire me to vote. I drove to Asheville to see him speak. I raised money for him from family members. I had a watch party on election night. I was genuinely all in, because I believed he was ready to take down a system that had been crushing my region for decades, to rebuild a Democratic Party more like FDR’s or LBJ’s than Bill Clinton’s.

I didn’t vote again for seven years, until Bernie Sanders came along in 2015. And Bernie didn’t just inspire me to vote either. I sold my business and started volunteering for the campaign until I got enough attention that I was hired onto it.

In my life I have voted four times: Al Gore, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders twice. Every single one of those votes required someone to genuinely inspire me, to make me believe they were ready to actually fight the system rather than manage it. I told that to Michelle Goldberg, a columnist at the Times, when I was in New York recently, and she was mortified. Just mortified that I’d only voted four times. The question she didn’t ask was why. The question she didn’t ask was what it would take. The question she didn’t ask was what kind of candidate or party could turn someone like me into the person who sold his business and gave everything he had to a political campaign.

That’s the voter the moderation crowd doesn’t have a theory of. They have a theory of the persuadable suburban moderate who needs to feel comfortable crossing over. They have no theory of the tens of millions of us who have checked out entirely, who will move mountains for the right candidate and stay home for everyone else. We aren’t waiting for a Democrat who’s tougher on the border. We’re waiting for someone who’s ready to actually fight.

What caused the collapse, the wipeout of 2010 and everything after, wasn’t Obama’s presence on the ticket. It was his moderation once in office. A month before the 2008 election was even decided, a Citigroup executive had already e-mailed John Podesta a near-complete list of Obama’s future cabinet, and it came true almost entirely. That a Citigroup executive could preselect a cabinet before a single vote was cast tells you everything about how the system filters candidates before they ever reach us. He passed Romneycare instead of a public option. We noticed, across Tennessee, West Virginia, and the Rust Belt. Not because he was insufficiently tough on transgender issues. Because the help that was supposed to come never came.