My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

Phoenix, summer of 2015. Netroots Nation, an annual conference for what was once called the progressive blogosphere, was in town, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren was doing the Friday morning keynote. I was there in the audience, covering the event for Al Jazeera America.

Warren was the perfect headline act for a netroots audience; it is difficult to think of anyone else who could command such unanimous and uncomplicated loyalty from that particular crowd, and she knew it. I was an admirer myself, although I endeavored to maintain the emotional distance that I felt my profession demanded. Maybe that distance was the reason why I left the ballroom with a bitter taste in my mouth. Or maybe it was just my chronic allergy to rhetorical red meat. Either way, Warren’s closing peroration left me feeling more unsettled than rapturous. I didn’t buy it; I would have liked to, but I couldn’t.

The problem was her big applause line, the thesis she kept returning to: “The American people are progressive, and our day is coming. Our values are American values, and America’s values are progressive values.” “On the economic issues that will shape the future of this country, America is progressive.” “It’s on us to show that our agenda is America’s agenda, and that America’s agenda is a progressive agenda.” You get the idea.

What if she’s wrong? That’s the question I kept asking myself. Sure, minimum wage increases, paid family leave, and a more progressive tax rate all seem to poll well. But what if there’s something that the polls are missing? What if the forces of reaction weren’t just astroturfed into existence by the Koch Brothers, but instead bubbled up from somewhere deep inside the American psyche?

A little over a year later, Donald Trump was elected to his first term as president.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Warren’s Netroots Nation speech as I’ve tried to make sense of her recent behavior. One of the reasons why I and many others have long held Warren in high esteem is because she always seemed to take policy and implementation extremely seriously. It was her research and advocacy, after all, that led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. When she ran for president in 2020, her semi-official campaign slogan was “I have a plan for that.” Yes, her Medicare For All proposal seemed pretty dubious, but 2020 was a weird time; everyone was doing it. Overall, I considered Warren to possess one of the rarest and most precious virtues that an American politician can have: she was a bona fide serious person.

But lately, she’s been coming off as considerably less serious. One warning sign: her apparently sincere efforts to work with the Trump administration on capping credit card fees. Her endorsement of Graham Platner — the guy who sported a Totenkopf tattoo for the better part of two decades until it became politically inconvenient — was even more concerning. And then there were her efforts to turn genuinely bad policy ideas into statutory language: her work with Sen. Josh Hawley to turn a Trump executive order regarding defense industry stock buybacks into law and, most alarming of all, her insistence on clinging to a poison pill amendment in her own housing bill.

Taking all of these baffling missteps as a whole, it would be tempting to argue that Warren has changed over the past 10 or 20 years. But I think it’s rather the opposite. Circumstances have changed; the political economy of Washington, D.C. is no longer what it was. Elizabeth Warren has failed to change with it.

“Full-Throated, Economic Populist Ideas”

In a sense, Warren is a victim of success — a perverse, be-careful-what-you-wish-for type of success. She was a populist at a time when populism, in both its left and right variants, was largely relegated to Washington’s margins. Now an especially malignant strain of right-wing populism is one of the dominant political tendencies in American politics.

The political scientist Cas Mudde is one of the foremost scholars of modern populism. Here’s how he defines the term:

The language and structure of populism, as Mudde defines it, is all over Warren’s Netroots Nation speech. “We believe that the real strength of this country starts with people, not with corporations,” she says at one point. Corporations and “Insider Washington” are the corrupt elite in Warren’s cosmology; “the American people,” “working people,” and “hard-working families” are the labels she assigns to “the pure people” at various points. The volonté générale naturally demands a progressive economic platform. This sort of language recurs again and again throughout Warren’s political thought, most recently in a speech on the future of the Democratic Party from January of this year. Notably, she herself dropped the P-word in those remarks: “Running on small, vague ideas that may also raise costs for families—instead of on full-throated, economic populist ideas—is a terrible plan for winning elections.”

Regardless of how we decide to label Warren’s analysis, we should recognize that it commands some genuine explanatory power. Billionaires do command outsized influence over the American political system. Regulatory capture by multinational corporations and financial institutions is a real phenomenon. And it is one that Warren got to see up close even before she entered the U.S. Senate; in the 1990s, as a professor at Harvard, Warren joined a commission intended to propose reforms to U.S. bankruptcy law, only to see institutional creditors successfully lobby for legislation that made bankruptcy rules even more hostile to debt-ridden households.

By the time of that experience, Warren—a former Republican—had already grown disillusioned with the version of free-market capitalism that had previously commanded her loyalty. As Will Wilkinson has put it, “what Elizabeth Warren wants is the kind of democracy and market economy she thought we had when she was a Republican, but was scandalized to discover we didn’t have, thanks to the undue influence of self-dealing moneyed interests in the policymaking process.” There is a lot of power to her insight that corporate lobbyists have manipulated the rules of American capitalism to serve their own ends.

But a simple populist analysis ends up blurring some critical distinctions when it comes to America’s capitalist class. By focusing so much on Wall Street and multinational giants, Warren downplays the influence of local economic barons; the car dealership moguls and cornfield titans who the historian Patrick Wyman has crisply described as American gentry.

This was perhaps a forgivable oversight for someone who primarily operated on the federal level in the 1990s and 2000s. The American gentry may have commanded quite a bit of power in their respective communities, but they were junior partners in the national parties. Shareholders in colossal firms held the balance of power in Washington, not partnerships and sole proprietors.

But then came the 2010s.

The Revolt of Family Capital

In November 2010, the Republican populist insurgency known as the Tea Party movement arrived in Congress. Though the movement received support from some right-wing billionaires (notably the Koch Brothers—more on them later), it drew much of its grassroots support from the middle and upper-middle class. In 2011, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin noted that “Older, white, and middle class is the typical profile of a Tea Party participant.” They bore a certain familial resemblance to the Middle American Radicals (MARs) who proto-MAGA intellectual Sam Francis once wrote would overthrow the cosmopolitan elites in charge of both major political parties.

They certainly bloodied the Republican elite, particularly those who were perceived as aligned with Insider Washington against the interests of the pure people. Williamson, Skocpol, and Coggin observed that there was a very strong ethno-nationalist and welfare chauvinist component to this revolt from the very beginning: the Tea Party activists they interviewed were very preoccupied with the threat that undocumented immigrants would come to the United States in droves, live the high life on federal welfare subsidies, and serve as the foot soldiers for permanent Democratic supremacy.

The money that supported Tea Party organizations did not, primarily, come from the traditional mainstays of corporate capitalism — the banks, energy companies, and health care firms that traditionally hedged their bets by giving vast amounts to both parties. Instead, the biggest Tea Party funders were almost certainly Charles and David Koch. The Koch Brothers were billionaire businessmen, but that was about all they had in common with consummate insiders like Jamie Dimon. Their political activities had a harder ideological edge. And, notably, Koch Industries did not answer to the stock market; Charles Koch once said that the company would go public “literally over my dead body.”

The Kochs were not titans of Wall Street; they were titans of what scholar Melinda Cooper calls family capitalism. In both the Tea Party and in Trump’s subsequent rise to power, Cooper writes, “what is at stake here is less an alliance of the small against the big than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.” Even Trump II’s alliance with the tech right fits into this framework: even those tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos who preside over publicly traded companies have successfully insulated themselves from anything like accountability to a broader class of shareholders.

Notably, one of the main fissures between family capitalism and shareholder capitalism pertains to so-called identity politics. Shareholder capitalism has proven adept at metabolizing social movements like feminism, the gay rights movement, and Black Lives Matter; this is the source of the now-defunct “woke capital” tendency that populists of both the left and right deplore, albeit for different reasons. Family capitalism is different, because its governing philosophy is more bound up with traditionalist white patriarchy. The Middle American Radicals, Francis wrote, adhere to “a domestic ethic that centers on the family, the neighborhood and local community, the church, and the nation as the basic framework of values” as opposed to cosmopolitanism’s “abstract universalism, its refusal to make any distinctions or discriminations among human beings.”

Shareholder capitalism is far from dead, but the shareholder capitalists are now the junior partners in the Republican coalition — to the extent that they can be considered part of that coalition at all. Trump’s tariffs, his attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve, and his bloody misadventures in Iran and Venezuela have all undermined the interests of shareholder capitalism’s key stakeholders. He is not a servant of Wall Street; he is a warlord backed by America’s landed gentry.

The Populist Blind Spot

Warren’s political thought cannot accommodate the family capitalism/shareholder capitalism distinction that Cooper highlights. The populist dichotomy—the people versus the elites—leaves no room for distinguishing between different sets of elites with mutually exclusive goals. To the extent that Warren divides the capitalist class into different categories, she usually pits small businesses (overseen by hard-working real Americans) against big businesses (ruled by corrupt elites). This blinds her both to how family capitalism cuts across both categories and to the ways in which the owners of small and mid-sized businesses can be brutal tyrants in their own right.

A related category error helps to explain why she’s sabotaging her own housing bill. The American housing shortage simply cannot be understood in terms of a populist, people-versus-corporations Manichean framework; adopting that political analysis leads one to embrace policy ideas that either do nothing or actually throttle housing production where it is badly needed. Thus, Warren’s attachment to a ban on build-to-rent single-family home construction which, if it survives conference committee, could potentially offset all of the bill’s other benefits.

Worse, Warren’s populist orientation blinds her to the true nature of the Trump phenomenon. If “America’s agenda is a progressive agenda,” how is one to make sense of Trump’s 2024 popular vote win? To my knowledge, Warren has not directly answered this question. But her indirect answer is troubling. As she said in January: “Americans are stretched to the breaking point financially, and they will vote for candidates who name what is wrong and who credibly demonstrate that they will take on a rigged system in order to fix it.”

Did Trump “name what is wrong”? Did he “credibly demonstrate that [he] will take on a rigged system”? Warren does not say. But if we follow the line of her intellectual trajectory—including her adoption of some Trump administration policies as her own—then it at least seems like she believes Trump was tapping into the righteous anger and dissatisfaction of “hard-working families.” It follows that the problem with Trump is not in the content of his promises but in the fact that he broke them; on some level, his own brand of populism and his attack on “Insider Washington” (or, if you prefer, “the deep state”) is to be accommodated and even welcomed.

But to get to that conclusion, you need to either ignore the fascist and white supremacist currents in Trumpism or downplay their centrality. You certainly can’t confront the reality that many Trump voters—including many Trump voters who are not members of America’s top 0.1% in terms of wealth—voted for him specifically because he campaigned on a promise to ethnically cleanse the United States and restore patriarchal hegemony.

But this is the ideological core of Trumpism. When Donald Trump calls Somali immigrants “low-IQ” and promises to deport them en masse, he isn’t simply trying to distract people from the failures of his economic agenda. He’s articulating his essential value proposition for his political base.

For the record, I think Warren is genuinely appalled by Trump’s racism and authoritarianism. But I don’t think she understands these as essential features of MAGA-style right-wing populism. The problem with being a populist yourself is that once you accept populism’s essential premise—that the essence of politics is the struggle between a homogeneous cadre of “elites” and a homogeneous mass of “the people”—you become relatively defenseless against other, more poisonous populist factions. You may even be tempted, as Warren has been, to form tactical alliances with those factions against the elites.

But that is a misguided, even self-destructive strategy. It redirects our attention from the main threat to American democracy, to global stability, and to the lives of tens of millions of people. Just this morning, Trump threatened genocide against a country of 90 million. There can be no accommodation with the political coalition behind these threats, not even against common enemies. One would hope that a standard-bearer for modern American progressivism understands this. In the pivotal fight of our time, “the people” are not one of the two main combatants; instead, “the people” is contested territory. Progressives won’t be able to contest it if they take their own popular legitimacy for granted. It’s not enough to position yourself as a tribune for working America; at some point you need to start doing politics.

I’m very pleased to share the cover and publication date for my book, Build or Die: How America is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It. Mark your calendars for December 8, 2026. Here’s the description of the book from the publisher’s website:

A big thank you to Heather Boyer and the rest of the Princeton University Press team (and a special shoutout to their art team for the beautiful WPA-ish cover). I couldn’t be more excited.

PUP is not doing preorders yet, but you can sign up to get notified here. It also appears that you can preorder from Bookshop.org already!

So go ahead and reserve your copy now, or sign up for updates from PUP. As is my prerogative, I’m going to keep nudging people to do that in every newsletter update between now and December.

When asked to articulate his political aims, Bernie Sanders likes to point to the Nordic social democracies. Whatever you think of this vision, it has the advantage of being an actual vision: not just a grab bag of vague promises, but a coherent agenda. Here’s how he summarized this agenda in 2013: “In Denmark, social policy in areas like health care, child care, education and protecting the unemployed are part of a ‘solidarity system’ that makes sure that almost no one falls into economic despair. Danes pay very high taxes, but in return enjoy a quality of life that many Americans would find hard to believe.”

The key word here, I believe, is “solidarity.” In the Nordic social democracies, everyone contributes to the greater whole; in exchange, the state automatically insures them against the vicissitudes of circumstance. Per Albin Hansson, one of Swedish social democracy’s founding fathers, described his ideal state using the word folkhemmet, or “the people’s home.” As he said in a 1928 speech, “The foundation of the home is community and solidarity. The good home knows no privilege or neglect, no favorites and no stepchildren.”

Solidarity both protects and obliges you. As Sanders noted, Danes across the economic spectrum are taxed at a much higher rate than their American peers. That’s the price of the Danish social insurance system, and Sanders is correct that it’s a good trade.

Which is why it was a little bewildering to discover that Sanders is now apparently a fan of middle class tax cuts. He is one of the cosponsors for a new Senate bill that would slash federal income taxes for people making up to $80,500 a year. The list of endorsers and cosponsors also includes Senators Jeff Merkeley, Brian Schatz and Ed Markey; major labor organizations like AFL-CIO and AFT; and other progressive groups including Indivisible, Demos, and MoveOn. Katie Porter, who is currently running for Governor of California, has proposed her own state-level version of this policy that would eliminate state income taxes for anyone who makes less than $100,000 annually.

Unlike the Norquistian Republicans of a bygone age, these Democrats aren’t promising to commensurately shrink the size of government; in fact, Porter has vowed to create a single-payer health care system in California. Instead, the implicit bargain behind these proposals seems to be that Democrats can build a social democratic insurance state that is basically free to most Americans (and/or most Californians), because it will be primarily funded by higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires.

This is more or less already the model in California, albeit largely by accident. The state’s taxation system is still broken as a result of the 1970s suburban tax revolt; leaders of the revolt, most notably Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, successfully campaigned for a series of amendments to the state constitution that slashed taxes and constrained the legislature’s ability to raise them again. Their most famous victory came with the 1978 passage of Prop 13, which, among other things, did the following: it capped property taxes at 1 percent of a property’s assessed value, prevented these taxes from rising more than 2 percent per annum, and barred reassessment unless the property was either redeveloped or changed hands.

In the year immediately following Prop 13’s passage, property tax revenues fell 60 percent, which set off a scramble for new income streams. The state compensated for the loss of all that tax revenue by becoming increasingly reliant on income taxes. Income taxes in California are pretty progressive, meaning that wealthy households pay a larger share of their income than most middle- and lower-income households. Though California is widely believed to be a high-tax state, a 2024 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that “[o]nly the top 5 percent of California families pay tax rates that are more than 2 percentage points higher than the national average.”

Which sounds nice, especially when combined with California’s fairly generous social safety net. But incomes for the top five percent are volatile; the state can be flush one year and deep in a hole in the next, depending in part on whatever’s going on in the tech industry. It would be an exaggeration to say that the difference between a massive surplus and a massive deficit depends on the health of tech executive Christmas bonuses in any given year, but it’s an exaggeration that gets uncomfortably close to the truth.

A more evenly distributed tax burden might smooth out some of the volatility, because middle-class incomes tend to be a bit more stable. Property values are also more dependable than executive compensation. But broad-based income tax hikes are politically unpalatable and property tax hikes are constitutionally impossible, so state and local government mostly need to muddle through a succession of short-term fixes to budget problems. On the revenue side, that means asking the voters to authorize bond issuance, levying steep impact fees on new housing development, and coming up with ad hoc policies like a one-time billionaire tax levy. On the spending side, it tends to mean addressing long-term social problems through a succession of time-limited fixes—except when it comes to constitutionally mandated spending (the state constitution sets a floor on annual education funding) and federally supported programs (Medi-Cal).

As for single-payer health care: good luck. According to legislative policy committee staff, single-payer at the state level could cost hundreds of billions of dollars—possibly as much as twice the cost of last year’s entire $226 billion spending plan. I don’t know if there’s any scenario where the state could realistically raise that sort of revenue, but I know they can’t do it in a sustainable way by only taxing the top income brackets.¹

Of course, the federal government can run deficits, unlike California. But that doesn’t mean that federal policymakers can simply ignore the question of where the money for a social democratic safety net would come from. Unfortunately, I think the left is probably going to need to become more attentive to that question in the coming years. Creating enormous new social programs without funding them through taxes is a recipe for inflation—and we’ve seen how voters respond to inflation, even when it’s more than offset by wage growth. Further, the next president is going to have to deal with a truly dire fiscal situation: a massive hole in the federal budget thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, a federal bureaucracy that is in tatters, and an international community that has lost faith in a US-centric global financial system. In the face of these pressures, I don’t see how we can sustain (1) a truly comprehensive social insurance system, (2) low taxes for all but the wealthiest Americans, and (3) a stable dollar. At best, we can have two out of three.

I’m not saying that Democrats should campaign on a vow to raise everyone’s taxes; just that they shouldn’t make irresponsible promises about how they’re going to pair Medicare For All with tax cuts for the middle class. That sort of thing may poll well, but at some point whoever wins the next election is going to need to govern. What happens when all the goodies you said were coming after November turn out to be unworkable? How do you prevent a fascist resurgence in the election after that one?

In my view, Democratic policymakers and consultants have been devoting far too much time to coming up with appealing soundbites, and not enough time to coming up with a real governing vision. Vision is what we really need right now. And if that vision includes some sort of aspiration to resuscitate representative democracy and foster an ethic of true solidarity, then it is probably going to mean taking voters somewhat seriously instead of trying to sell them magic beans. If what Sanders et al really want is social democracy, then they should make a real case for it.

Here’s a question that no one, to my knowledge, has asked any of California’s Democratic candidates for governor: If, in January 2027, Trump decides that he’s going to turn San Diego into another Minneapolis, how would you respond?

There are any number of related questions you could ask. What do you do if Trump dispatches ICE officers to polling stations in California in November 2028? What if he illegally impounds federal Medicaid funds? And then there are the more delicate questions: In the event that federal agents run amok in California, what steps can you take to ensure the loyalty, or at least neutrality, of state law enforcement? Who is actually going to protect Californians from getting abducted or murdered by ICE? And, if and when it all goes down, how sure can you be that the governor’s security retinue is going to be a guarantor of your safety instead of another potential threat?

These are not idle questions. We’ve all seen what the Trump administration is capable of. Even now that the sack of Minneapolis has abated somewhat, the White House is still finding new ways to harass the state of Minnesota — for example, by blocking the Congressionally mandated transmission of more than a quarter of a billion dollars in Medicaid funding. There’s nothing to stop them from launching similar assaults on California.

In fact, they’re already casting around for a cassus belli. In last week’s State of the Union address, Trump announced a “war on fraud,” citing “Minnesota, where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer.” Other states, including California, “are even worse,” he said.

This “war on fraud” has alread been in progress for months, according to Trump. The racist slander against Somali immigrants in Minnesota was just one part of it. In January, Trump attempted to illegally freeze billions of dollars in childcare subsidies to California. Nick Shirley, the regime-affiliated propagandist who helped lay the groundwork for ICE’s invasion of Minnesota, was subsequently spotted skulking around San Diego day cares.

And Shirley isn’t the only apparatchik who has gone fishing. Last year, the Trump administration tried, unsuccessfully, to get access to California’s voter registration data. In February, just a week before the State of the Union, Customs and Border Protection asked San Diego County to tell them who owns every parcel of land in the county.

It is clear that the Trump administration wants another domestic invasion, and that California is a likely target. Based on Shirley’s whereabouts and that strange CBP request, I would guess that they’re zeroing in on San Diego as a potential site for their next siege. It’s something that the State of California, and in particular the next governor of California, should be prepared for. Given how much we already know about the Trump playbook, there’s no excuse to not be prepared.

And yet I haven’t seen much evidence that any of the Democratic candidates for governor are taking the threat from Trump-occupied Washington seriously. Cruising around the candidates’ campaign websites, I can find barely any mention of specific, actionable strategies for resisting Trump. Swalwell says he will “work to unmask ICE,” which is certainly worthwhile but deeply insufficient; Becerra notes that he sued Trump when he was attorney general, but doesn’t say anything about his future plans to fight the administration; Tom Steyer and Katie Porter are vocally anti-Trump but I’m not aware of any specific recommendations they’ve made regarding, for example, anti-ICE counter-measures.

In the absence of a serious and sober analysis of the threats to California, we have fairly conventional issue platforms. There’s nothing wrong with a conventional issue platform; needless to say, I am extremely interested in what all of the candidates have to say about housing policy, among other things. But this moment calls for something more than a normal campaign and a conventional governor. I’m still waiting for one of Newsom’s potential successors to recognize this.

My last post was all about the substance of what it means to be a nation. I argued that it doesn’t make any sense to talk about nations as if they are stable, discrete entities that persist in more or less the same form over centuries or millennia; it makes even less sense to describe genetic lineage as the essence of nationhood. A nation is, to quote the title of Benedict Anderson’s book on nationalism, an imagined community. It’s not a natural geographic formation; it’s a product of certain political, social, and cultural arrangements.

Nationalists of all stripes tend to consider certain types of cultural activity to be a natural product of the nation’s inner spirit; they associate their nation’s eternal characteristics with a certain aesthetic that must be constantly reaffirmed and reproduced in order to ensure the nation’s future cultural integrity. They have it backwards. “National” art does not faithfully broadcast a given nation’s unchanging features; intentionally or not, it iterates on a particular tradition to creatively reimagine it. Any aesthetic statement on the meaning of one’s country is necessarily going to be a creative act (in the sense of creating that meaning) more than a faithful report on objective conditions. There’s a reason why the defining art of America’s nationalist far right is AI slop instead of, say, precise reproductions of Gilbert Stuart paintings.

This raises a question: What is the aesthetic of liberalism? One of my favorite working literary critics, Becca Rothfeld, tackled that question in an essay published earlier this month. She ends up defining modern liberalism’s aesthetic as “a smug yet unconvincing performance of non-aesthetics [that] amounts to aesthetics too.” Its hallmark cultural products are “chains selling salad bowls, mixed-use developments featuring glassy apartment complexes, the television show Parks and Recreation, the grocery store Trader Joe’s, the word ‘nuance,’ glasses with rectangular frames, group-fitness classes, the profession of consulting, news startups focusing not on criticism or reporting but on commentary, and nonfiction that is a little too good for an airport bookstore but a little too slick and credulously economics-heavy for a literary magazine.”

I think Rothfeld is being a bit reductive here. A lot of the cultural touchstones she references feel dated; Parks and Recreation aired its final episode (other than a reunion special) a little more than a decade ago. Several months ago, in an appropriately savage review of Karine Jean-Pierre’s memoir of the Biden White House, Rothfeld wrote: “Jean-Pierre is an artifact of an age that looks recent on paper but feels prehistoric in practice — the age of pantsuits, the word ‘empowerment,’ the musical ‘Hamilton,’ the cheap therapeutic entreaties to ‘work on yourself’ and ‘lean in’ to various corporate abysses.” The “prehistoric” Hamilton had its off-broadway premier in the same year that Parks and Recreation went off the air.

If we’re going to understand the aesthetic of liberalism in the present day, we’d be better off looking for more recent cultural developments. Off the top of my head, here are some things Rothfeld omits from her analysis of liberal aesthetics but which merit a closer look: the new Superman movie, Woke 2.0, the colossal No Kings protests, the mass outpouring of sympathy for anti-ICE resistance in Minneapolis, Bruce Springsteen’s tribute to that resistance, the protestors in frog costumes in Portland, and the furor over Stephen Colbert’s cancellation. You might find some of this stuff cringe or annoying, but it all adds up to a cultural moment for liberalism that feels a lot angrier and a lot more militant than Rothfeld lets on.

Still, I don’t want to entirely discount Rothfeld’s point. That line about the “performance of non-aesthetics” is quite perceptive when applied to a particular faction of the liberal coalition—one that, unlike the examples I provided above, has its native habitat in Washington, D.C.

I take a non-aesthetic to be something devoid of texture, taste, or substance; a sensibility that conveys nothing precisely because it has no fixed points of reference; a jumbled set of habits and mannerisms that have been strenuously cultivated to avoid any offense or provocation and that therefore, by design, fail to arouse any strong emotions at all. Examples of this non-aesthetic might include an LLM’s cheerful response to a prompt, chill beats to study to, cinematography that abolishes shadows and makes all colors pop so that you don’t miss any nuance while watching movies on your phone, and a limited streaming series that acts as a sequel to a movie based off a comic book and is intended to set up another movie based off another, different, comic book.

There’s something cold, strange and a little off about all of these examples, because they’re all the products of machine learning and market analysis, not any human creative intentionality. None of them have any coherent form; they are all song-like, story-like, or movie-like, without exactly being any of those things. They all have this uncanny quality that allows them to capture your attention without actually engaging it, like a picture that always looks slightly out of focus.

The political equivalent of this anti-aesthetic is popularism: a politics drained of content and fixed values, and driven mostly by issue polling (or its proponents’ tendentious analysis of the most recent issue polling). This politics is highly rigid in its method and outputs, but it is also somehow gaseous and insubstantial; no one can really say what it is meant to accomplish. It is an LLM that has been instructed to win elections but not to govern; it is the aliens Kang and Kodos from that one Simpsons Halloween special where they impersonate Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. (Parks and Recreation and Hamilton, with their corny but legible and basically wholesome values, are not cultural popularism. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a Disney IP excrescence that wants to to skim off the prestige of 1970s paranoid political thrillers while sweatily avoiding any confrontation with actual politics, is cultural popularism.)

Against what she describes as (again, with an overly broad brush) actually existing liberalism, Rothfeld pits the now-defunct journal Partisan Review. I am a sucker for this move; a lot of how I approach researching and writing about politics is driven by a vain desire to recover something of the old Partisan Review spirit. Rothfeld writes:

Yes!!! My biggest issue with popularism is so much that I object to specific policies and strategies that the popularists recommend (though I often do, and I think the fact that popularism consistently cashes out in a kind of anodyne DLC throwback politics is highly suspect given the perverse and arcane predilections of the median voter). My biggest issue with the popularists is that I think the method in which people try to win contests for power says something about how they would wield that power. The contributors to Partisan Review didn’t just make the case for democracy against the Stalinists to their left and the Goldwaterites to their right; they also modeled a certain type of democratic argument and deliberation.

This nexus between how you do politics and the type of political world you create is inescapable. There is a clear logic that connects Trump’s rambling, raucous, weirdly voluptuous campaign rallies to the Internet fever swamp that fueled his rise, and both of these forces are clearly manifest in the character of his regime. My fear when it comes to a liberalism fueled by issue polling is that it also possesses a sort of authoritarian logic, albeit of a gentler variety. Popularism is a politics for people who have given up on persuasion, argument, and intersubjectivity; it is a “give the piggies their slop so they don’t cause too much trouble” sort of politics.

And who knows, maybe the cynicism behind this approach to politics isn’t totally unwarranted. Like much of the rest of the progressive Internet, I find myself bewildered and enraged, and ultimately sort of depressed, when I make the mistake of reading one of those New York Times focus group interviews. Maybe it’s a huge mistake for politicians to engage with voters the way I would prefer they engage with me. In aggregate terms, basically nobody read Partisan Review; Winter Soldier grossed $714 million at the box office.

But there has to be some compromise path here that involves both a bit of strategic pandering something like a more aspirational politics. Zohran Mamdani might be something of a model for how that would work. He certainly wasn’t above a little bit of pandering, but in his public communications (and organizing strategy) he also modeled a form of engagement that felt genuinely democratic. The No Kings rallies and the Minneapolis protests have a bit of the same spirit: sensitive to popular taste in their prevailing iconography but uncompromising in their values and ambitions.

Something like Partisan Review—or Becca Rothfeld’s writing, for that matter—is naturally going to be more of a niche taste. (The same is even more true of my own writing, as you can see from the difference in our respective platforms.) But I have to think there’s still some sort of place for it. As Rothfeld writes, “Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity.” That’s an ethos I think we should all try to emulate in our own idiosyncratic ways.

“Saying the quiet part loud,” as the saying goes, is such a prominent feature of the second Trump administration’s communications strategy that the phrase scarcely has meaning these days. What could the “quiet part” possibly be when the President of the United States is posting AI slop that depicts him as a fighter pilot dropping tons of fecal matter on No Kings protestors? Or when he posts even more putrid AI slop that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes?

Well, it turns out that the second video tells us something about the last remaining vestiges of the quiet part. It was a little too explicitly racist for even some prominent members of the MAGA coalition, and so Trump eventually took it down. This is the last taboo that the Trump administration needs to mind: you can summarily executive civilians, ship immigrants off to concentration camps, and openly state your intention to rule as a dictator; but you can’t actually say that there is a natural racial hierarchy with white people at the top, much less that your goal is to assert white dominance over the United States and the world. Leave that to people like Nick Fuentes, who sit at just enough of a remove to give you a veneer of plausible deniability

Trump is becoming increasingly disinhibited with age, but those regime officials with greater possession of their faculties have learned how to say “America belongs to white people” through insinuation rather than blunt assertion. Instead, they say, as Senator Eric Schmitt did at the 2025 National Conservative Conference, that the United States belongs to “a people, bound together by a common past and a shared destiny.” Or, as J.D. Vance put it in a speech to the neo-fascist Claremont Institute, “a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” Most recently, Marco Rubio—perhaps the one member of the administration who is an even more overtly cynical and chameleonic social climber than Vance—has argued that real Americans share with Europeans “the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

One of the ways you can tell this is all code is by the combination of prolixity and imprecision that tends to accompany these paeans to the American race. Listening to them, you might sometimes find yourself paraphrasing Liz Lemon and blurting out, “J.D., just say Aryan, this is taking forever.” And indeed, when less adroit Nazis like Elon Musk try to circle around a clearer articulation of what they mean by American heritage, they end up making hilariously ahistorical claims about, for example, the “English-Scotts-Irish origin” of American culture. (“Scotch-Irish” is, in the words of one historian, “an Americanism, generally unknown in Scotland and Ireland and rarely used by British historians.”)

The fact is, there’s very little basis for any of this stuff, at least if you’re looking for historical roots deeper than the middle of the nineteenth century. “Scotch-Irish” as a self-descriptor appears to have only entered common usage after large-scale Irish immigration to the United States began in the 1840s; incumbent Presbyterian communities sought a way to distinguish themselves from the largely poor, Catholic newcomers. (Ironically, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Eric Schmitt are all Catholic; Elon Musk is “culturally Christian,” whatever that means.)

The “Western Civilization” that, according to Rubio, binds America to Europe, is of a similarly recent vintage. As Yuri Slezkine observed in a recent essay for The New York Review of Books, there were no self-identified “Westerners” until the nineteenth century—and most of the early theorists of Western Civilization made a point of excluding Russia from their definition, which would no doubt upset many of Vladimir Putin’s fans on the American far right. Even the concept of a single, coherent nation that commands one’s personal allegiance is an invention of the 1800s; one that was more commonly associated with liberalism than aristocratic conservatism in its early iterations.

American fascists like Vance now openly admire nationalist movements in places like France and Italy for their attempts to preserve a single imagined lineage; but neither Italy nor France were unified cultural-linguistic communities two centuries ago. As Richard Evans writes in The Pursuit of Power, his magisterial history of Europe between the Napoleonic Era and World War I, Sicilians still tended to speak a dialect of Ancient Greek at the time of Italian unification. National identities such as “French” and “Italian” were things that had to be invented, and they were often imposed through military or state power. As recently as 1864, Evans writes, a state inspector reported stumping a group of school-aged children in southeastern France by asking them what country they lived in.

Americanism is a similarly new and synthetic identity. It is commonly observed that up to the Civil War, residents of the United States tended to speak of “the United States” in the plural instead of the singular; their primary affective attachments were to their states of residence, not the country as a whole. This only changed with the Civil War, which is rightly described by some historians as the second American revolution. To a considerable degree, we have Abraham Lincoln to thank for our modern conception of the United States as a single nation.

This being the case, maybe we should defer to Lincoln when it comes to the meaning of American nationhood instead of spelunking in the murky past of the Celtic and Icenic tribes. Lincoln was pretty explicit on this front: in the opening sentence of the Gettysburg Address, he defines the United States as “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He dates the creation of this “new nation” back to 1776 — the birthdate not of the United States Constitution, but of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln, in other words, rejects the notion that American nationhood is rooted in genetic ancestry. It is instead rooted in a shared creed based on a particular conception of liberty and political equality.

Even during Lincoln’s time there were, of course, alternative conceptions of what it meant to be an American. Lincoln would have been familiar with the thought of John C. Calhoun, one of the more influential and sophisticated proponents of a quintessentially American white supremacist political philosophy. But the Union, led by Lincoln, defeated the Calhounist Confederacy. Calhounism was decidedly not the intellectual origin of what many historians now call the Second Founding. It was instead Lincolnism that became the ideological foundation for American reunification.

In his NatCon speech, Schmitt sneered at the idea that “the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence.” In their own meditations on the meaning of America, Musk, Rubio and Vance don’t deign to mention the Declaration at all. They’re more interested in resurrecting Calhounism and marrying it to modern fascist thought.

But we should be clear: when they engage in this project, they are the ones who are rejecting our heritage as Americans. It is the modern-day Calhounists who are repelled by everything that truly makes American identity distinctive: its pluralism, its privileging of a shared creed over a shared gene pool, its history of hard-fought struggles for recognition, freedom, and equality. They might call themselves “heritage Americans” based on their bloodlines and supposed connection to the soil, but they reject the aspects of American identity that really count. The racially purified despotism of their dreams would not represent a return to this country’s traditions, but a usurpation of them.

The title of this post comes from an old joke about economists. It’s a play on one of the standard critiques of the discipline: that economists are so wedded to the realm of pure theory that they take the output of their models to be more conclusive, and therefore more “real,” than any empirical evidence to the contrary.

It’s a good joke, which is why I use it here, but the serious criticism behind the joke is outdated. Over the past few decades, economists have increasingly turned to empirical methods in their research; this has led them to findings that run directly counter to what you might expect from the output of a simple theoretical model. A classic work of the “empirical turn” is David Card and Alan Krueger’s 1993 study of a minimum wage increase in New Jersey. When they compared fast food restaurants in New Jersey to those across the border in Pennsylvania, they found that the minimum wage increase had not led to a decrease in the former state’s fast food sector workforce — despite what a simple “Econ 101” supply and demand model might suggest about the relationship between labor costs and employment.

People on the left (including myself) have often been critical of those who doggedly weight crude economic models over actual evidence. This is one of the accusations that supply skeptics often level at YIMBYs: that instead of looking at the world around us, we rely on a vulgar caricature of the housing market. It’s an unfair accusation, and it grows more unfair with each year as empirical researchers uncover more evidence that building more housing leads to greater broad-based housing affordability.

Ironically, as the empirical case for YIMBYism grows ever stronger, it is the anti-”Econ 101” crowd that is now falling back on airy theorizing and simple models. It turns out that their problem with non-empirical economics wasn’t the lack of rigorous real-world investigation after all; it was just that they would rather have everyone use models that are rigged to produce their preferred outcomes.

Case in point, a recently published working paper co-authored by Michael Storper, one of the supply skeptic crowd’s favorite academics. Titled “Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis,” the paper seeks to demonstrate that increased market-rate homebuilding will not make high-cost American cities affordable on anything like a reasonable time scale. The authors’ primary tool for doing this is a simulation of a hypothetical supply shock to six high-cost cities.

It’s an odd methodological choice given that we have no shortage of actually existing supply spikes to study. For example, over the past couple of years, Austin, Texas has seen both a significant spike in homebuilding and a precipitous drop in average rents. There’s some debate among economists and housing policy experts about the extent to which the rent decline can be attributed to the supply shock; it’s probably a few years too early to measure the impact of Austin’s building boom with any precision, but certainly not too early to attempt some preliminary estimates. The research on upzonings in Auckland and Minneapolis is already piling up, and before too long we’ll also be able to gather some initial findings from New York City’s recent zoning and planning reforms.

Instead, Storper and co. provide us with a model with just a handful of inputs: their assumed price elasticity, filtering rate, and rate of supply increase. Which is not to say that they ignore empirical evidence entirely; they just make selective use of it in their literature review and ignore the methodological flaws in papers that support their preferred conclusions.

For example, Storper et al repeatedly cite a paper that purportedly finds new market-rate homebuilding can actually increase rents in the surrounding area for low-income tenants. But they fail to note that the paper didn’t adjust for inflation, and that doing so causes the observed effect to vanish. Meanwhile, they wave away the empirical evidence on chain-of-moves filtering (where higher-income residents move into newer and pricier rental housing, making their prior homes available to residents on the next income rung beneath them) by suggesting that people who move into recently vacated housing may then “experience higher housing cost burdens.” That strikes me as a strange claim; if none of the recently vacated housing is actually becoming more affordable, why wouldn’t more people in the chain of moves stay put? No one’s forcing them to move up the chain. At the very least, if you’re going to argue that participating in the chain of moves simply increases the rent burden for most households, it would be helpful to offer some explanatory mechanism.

But the biggest problem with this paper is one that is common to the genre: it is arguing with a straw man. Very few of the people they call “deregulationists” think that regulatory reform on its own is sufficient to make cities like San Francisco affordable to non-college-educated workers. As I recently argued in a brief for the Roosevelt Institute, regulatory reform is a complement to targeted public investment, not a replacement for it. So-called deregulationism can actually make public investments in affordable housing and rental subsidies more effective.

It’s sort of funny that supply skeptics continue to grind out these papers that treat all YIMBYs like market fundamentalists. That has never been true—Sen. Scott Wiener, one of the OG YIMBY politicians, has always been a champion for deed-restricted affordable housing—but it appears even more ridiculous now that the most prominent YIMBY mayor in the country is a democratic socialist who wants the public sector to build hundreds of thousands of new affordable housing units. In both its rejection of empiricism and in its reliance on hidebound stereotypes about YIMBYs, this paper feels more like a time capsule from last decade than a novel intervention into the housing debate.

They say never to treat social media like an assignment desk, but this prompt from Zak Yudhisthu (whose own newsletter is well worth a follow) was too good the pass up:

This is a nice story about the civic/social infrastructure that came out of Mamdani's campaign

Now I want to see the @resnikoff.bsky.social take on it
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/n...

— Zak Yudhishthu (@zyudhishthu.bsky.social)
1:45 PM • Nov 5, 2025

If you’ve read any of dispatches over the past year, you might be able to guess at why Zak is asking for my take. I’ve been a strident proponent of what Henry Farrell calls “partyism”: the proposition that, in Henry’s words, “the road to renewing the Democrats (and remaking the Republicans into an organization that is not actively malevolent) begins with changing party organization from the blob-like congelation of chaos and self-interest … into organizational forms that actively connect political leaders and ordinary people.”

You can read my initial argument in favor of partyism, written almost exactly a year ago, here. More recently, I’ve proposed that the YIMBY movement offers a decent model of how to translate face-to-face socializing into real political power. Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign to become New York City’s next mayor offers another model. As The New York Times noted on election day: “Mr. Mamdani’s campaign wasn’t just about mobilizing, but socializing. And the social buoyancy of his campaign wasn’t just for show. Young people turned up and voted.”

Campaign events, including the now famous scavenger hunt, provided an opportunity for young supporters to connect with other people who shared their politics and interests; that ended up being the hook that drew a lot of people into volunteering for the campaign. As I’ve written many time in the past, this sort of emphasis on conviviality and neighborliness is a great tool for turning undecideds into supporters and turning supporters into committed ground troops.

But Mamdani’s success illustrates another advantage to the partyist approach that I haven’t covered as much: it’s great for intelligence gathering. The people who show up to campaign-sponsored social gatherings may be there to learn about the candidate or just hang out, but they also have a lot to tell campaign workers about the concerns and political currents rippling through key constituencies.

Campaigns have other ways of information-gathering, of course. Over the course of several traditional campaign events (i.e., stump speeches), a good candidate can learn something about which talking points are landing with voters and which aren’t. Then there’s the consultant-forward approach to campaign intelligence-gathering, which relies heavily on polls and focus groups. All of these tactics have their place, but none of them provide a complete picture of the electorate.

A good poll is far more representative than a series of incidental conversations with happy hour attendees. But you get far richer information from an actual conversation with someone than you get from asking them a single question and then recording which answer they chose from a limited set of options. Neither is really a good substitute for the other, which is why Democrats should avail themselves of both instead of treating issue polls like a definitive account of what voters think and believe.

Mamdani, of course, did not only interact with the voters who were sufficiently motivated to attend a campaign event. He also spent a good deal of time on the street and public transit talking with anyone who was willing to give him the time of day (including another YIMBY Substacker, Sam Deutsch). I have no doubt that he used these conversations as a sort of temperature check on the state of the race and the general mood of the city. Again, doing that sort of thing is not really a substitute for methodologically sound polling. But it gives someone with good instincts a much deeper, more nuanced, intuitive sense of how things stand than a poll alone can provide.

Contrast Mamdani’s approach to Cuomo’s. When he wasn’t staging awkward man-on-the-street interactions for a campaign ad — a campaign ad which, I should add, was clearly a fumbled imitation of Mamdani’s style — Cuomo barely interacted with regular voters at all. Instead, he seems to have spent a lot of time huddled with billionaire donors and internalizing their deeply warped mindset. That may help to explain why, as the race wore on, he leaned more and more into the kind of AI slop that guys like Bill Ackman seem to love, but which looked especially bad when viewed alongside Mamdani’s more amiable, cinema verité stylings. It probably also helps to explain why Cuomo resorted to outright gutter racism in the campaign’s closing weeks.

New York is a sui generis place, and 2024 was an especially weird mayoral election year. But there are still lessons that Democrats outside the city can draw from Mamdani’s campaign. Josh Marshall identified one of them: “find candidates suited to their constituencies and focus on cost of living issues and opposition to Donald Trump’s autocracy.” Another one is that the party needs to offer people something they can be a part of. It’s not enough to sell the candidate or the party brand as a product. That’s the best you can do for reaching some voters, but it isn’t how you build political power over multiple campaign cycles.

What Democrats need even more than better branding or better messaging is better party building. Mamdani can teach others how to do that. What’s remarkable is that he’s been able to do it without access to parts of the Democratic Party apparatus — Chuck Schumer never endorsed him, Hakeem Jeffries waited until the last minute, and the state party chair basically threw a tantrum over his candidacy. He prevailed anyway. And, in doing so, he helped demonstrate how to actually make the party stronger.