13 - Generations
Change starts with recognizing the moment and thinking differently
This is the thirteenth in a series of occasional posts about rebuilding democracy after Trump. You can read an overview of the series here.
This is not normal.
There is nothing normal about what’s happening in America.
And our response to what’s happening can’t be normal either.
In this series, I have addressed institutional reforms that I contend need to be implemented before we can begin the repair work necessary to heal the country after Trump is gone. Before we can even begin to consider policy changes that will reverse decades of economic and social inequities, we need to correct the institutional imbalances that have made it impossible for majorities to govern.
They cannot be corrected today. Prior attempts to correct them—under conventional conditions—have failed.
Conventional conditions made it impossible to adjust the size of the Supreme Court, or implement term limits.
Conventional conditions made it impossible to end partisan gerrymandering or consider different schemes of representation like multiple member districts and different methods of counting ballots like ranked choice voting.
Conventional conditions made it impossible to reform the Senate filibuster.
Conventional conditions made it impossible to legislate and implement meaningful and enduring campaign finance reform to control the flow of money in politics.
Conventional conditions made it impossible to remove barriers to voting.
Conventional conditions made it impossible to regulate our information environment or educate people about government and politics.
But we no longer live under conventional conditions.
The second Trump presidency has been so destructive to political, economic, social, and international stability that the response to Trump’s actions—once he is gone—will by necessity be of a magnitude equal to the damage he will have inflicted on the country.
That response will not take place under conventional conditions. It is more likely to look like those rare previous moments in our history when discredited elites have been pushed aside by a new regime with a popular mandate to make fundamental changes that for years had been successfully resisted by the old guard.
And the more damage Trump does, the greater that mandate for change will be.
Preparing to meet that mandate means thinking about things differently. It means allowing ourselves a different mindset than the one that shapes politics as usual.
Conventional elections are fought on ideological grounds. You probably know how that looks. We might hear talk of a candidate being too liberal for the electorate in Georgia or too conservative for California, and that makes sense in conventional terms. It’s what leads Democrats on the left to lock horns with Democrats closer to the center over whether a national candidate with openly liberal views would come crashing down in a general election.
Generational elections are defined by directionality: Not right vs. left but forward vs. backward. Once a regime has been widely discredited, the argument for replacing it is about how a new regime will move the country in an entirely different direction.
This is how Ronald Reagan framed the 1980 presidential election to persuade those who saw him as a dangerous radical to accept him as a viable replacement for the discredited Carter presidency. In his closing argument to the county, Reagan asked:
Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we are as strong as we were four years ago. And if you answer all of those questions yes, why then I think your choice is very obvious as to who you will vote for. If you don’t agree—if you don’t think that this course that we’ve been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have.
This is a directional question.
It doesn’t address the perception that Reagan was too conservative for the American public. It doesn’t try to soften his record of conservative governance. Reagan just attacked a discredited regime and offered himself as the candidate of a different direction.
In one respect, this is the message of any change election. But 1980 wasn’t just any change election.
Reagan’s message could have been delivered by any change candidate. But Reagan wasn’t just any change candidate.
It’s easy to see a Democratic presidential nominee offering the same framing in 2028, and seeing it work for the same reasons it worked in 1980.
To earn the right to make his case for change, the far-right Reagan first had to capture the Republican nomination by defeating a field of conventional candidates. He would choose his main rival in this effort—George H. W. Bush—to be his running mate in a nod to establishment Republicans who worried that by nominating Reagan, the party was blowing an opportunity to defeat a weak incumbent in Jimmy Carter. There were even negotiations to bring former President Gerald Ford on the ticket as a running-mate and potential co-president.
That’s how much Reagan worried the Republican old guard.
He worried them because Reagan didn’t run away from his economic, foreign policy, and social policy ideas, which pushed the margins of American political discourse at the time.
Reagan advocated for supply-side economics, which Bush famously labeled “voodoo economics” before joining the ticket and claiming he never said it.
Reagan advocated for a confrontational foreign policy to combat communism that broke with the prevailing diplomatic approach to the Soviet Union.
Reagan advocated for unapologetically conservative social policies. The 1980 Republican platform called for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion and the selection of anti-choice judges. Four years earlier, the Republican platform was equivocal.
A nominee like Bush could have presented himself as an agent of change just like Reagan did, but it would have been change of the sort that Eisenhower or Nixon represented in their day—an alternative to the prevailing liberalism of the dominant Democratic regime, but not a direct repudiation of that regime.
But by vanquishing establishment Republicans, Reagan assumed control of the party and rejected the moderation that had defined it—save for the disastrous 1964 Goldwater campaign—ever since Republicans learned that rejecting New Deal liberalism was a political loser.
By 1980, that establishment had grown ripe for being pushed aside after dominating party politics for the better part of forty-plus years.
Then, having repudiated an old and tired Republican establishment, Reagan went to work on an old and tired Democratic establishment.
Democrats had lost two consecutive presidential elections prior to 1976, when Jimmy Carter managed to briefly reassemble the once-dominant New Deal coalition that had shaped American politics since 1932. Carter had a big assist from Watergate and domestic economic doldrums, but his victory was narrow and his coalition weak.
Like the Republican establishment, the Democratic party was a tree with withering roots. A firm push could knock it over.
And Reagan pushed. Hard.
In the end, his popular vote margin wasn’t all that impressive. Reagan won over a slight majority of voters—50.7%—but the bottom dropped out of Carter’s support, which fell to 41%. The balance was claimed by John Anderson—a traditional Republican congressman who ran as an independent after failing to win the Republican nomination. Anderson offered a conventional alternative for the 7% of voters who had given up on Carter but weren’t sold on Reagan.
Still, Anderson’s presence on the ballot allowed Reagan to sweep the electoral college. Reagan prevailed in 44 states with 489 electoral votes.
This allowed him to claim a mandate for change.
That change lasted four decades.
The dynamics of 1980 surfaced again in 2016—another change election that revealed the weaknesses in two fraying party coalitions.
On the Republican side, Donald Trump vanquished a field of conventional Republicans and took control of the party in a manner reminiscent of Reagan’s conquest 36 years earlier. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton was able to secure the nomination after an unexpectedly robust challenge from Bernie Sanders—a challenge that rocked establishment figures who proved barely resilient enough to ward it off, and who ultimately did so at the expense of party unity.
With the Republican establishment moribund and the Democratic establishment decaying, Trump was positioned to be an agent of generational change rather than a candidate of momentary change.
Almost.
That’s because Trump lacked the mandate, moxie, and motivation to scramble existing political alliances.
Losing the popular vote limited his reach. But Trump also had no interest in advancing the populist portions of his 2016 agenda. It’s not hard to imagine how it would have shattered traditional party alliances had Trump acted on his promises to provide universal health insurance and invest $1 trillion in infrastructure—proposals that Democrats would have found impossible to ignore and Republicans impossible to accept—while pushing his wall-building, immigrant-bashing agenda—which would have had the opposite effect.
This could have been the basis for a right-wing populism that would have differed dramatically from the politics of the Reagan era. Could it have been the basis for a lasting realignment? It’s impossible to know.
But it doesn’t matter, because Donald Trump was never interested in anything that didn’t directly benefit Donald Trump. So a new era of right-wing populism was never launched.
We had change elections in 2016, 2020, and 2024, but none of them established a lasting governing majority. In that time, the country has repudiated Reaganism but it hasn’t yet replaced it with something that can endure.
Which brings us to 2028.
The ingredients for another generational election are building, only this time MAGA Republicans represent the status quo. This presents us with a tremendous opportunity—provided we recognize that we are in a rare generational moment on par with 1980 that potentially allows us to reimagine the republic on a scale not seen since 1932.
What does this mean?
It means thinking in terms of forward and backward instead of right and left.
It means recognizing that voters are hungry for authenticity that isn’t smothered by talking points.
It means constructing a broad coalition of voters who are aggrieved for different reasons by the fallout from Trump’s destruction and are yearning for alternatives that can help them.
It means reaching out to voters who are not part of the Democratic coalition without alienating voters who are.
It means recognizing that progressive ideas can quench the thirst people have for a government that works for them and not just the ultra-wealthy—provided progressives deliver on those ideas.
It means building institutional structures to give progressives the means to deliver on their agenda.
It means moving beyond the politics of the past. Donald Trump has destroyed that past. In the process, he is undermining an elite that for decades resisted changes it does not like.
Remember, our electoral coalitions are in flux. People are angry, and their anger will only grow deeper as Trump continues to devastate the country. The destruction Trump is causing will eventually touch everyone, until only the most deeply attached MAGA adherents will rationalize it away.
This provides us with a rare opportunity.
But to seize this opportunity—to plant and nurture a lasting progressive regime—several things have to happen. And they have to happen in sequence. We will discuss them in our next post, but they start with recognizing the possibilities in front of us.
We are living through a generational moment. We need to start thinking in generational terms.
UP NEXT: Imagining the world we want to see.
I greatly appreciate how you frame ideas/concepts. It does give me hope for our future.
You are right. Conventional politics is gone. We can meet the moment and we must.