In the aftermath of Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss, the consensus on the left was that Democrats no longer stood for anything. They needed to use their “time in the wilderness” to develop some “fresh ideas” and “real solutions” to Americans’ manifold and growing problems. There’s been some evidence that this is happening. A number of successful campaigns from both the center and left wings of the party—most famously Zohran Mamdani’s—have foregrounded the issue of affordability. Congressional Democrats, moreover, have made a number of substantive policy proposals on a range of issues: from Jon Ossoff’s anticorruption platform to Bernie Sanders’s recent proposal on AI to a much-discussed New York Times op-ed on Israel by Chris Van Hollen.

But much of the party’s energy has been consumed by bickering between its center and left factions. Of course, in our two-party system, intraparty debate is inevitable, even healthy—especially for a party out of power. But the quality of debate inside the Democratic coalition is not healthy. Too often, reasoned debate on what’s broken with our political system and how to fix it is forgone in favor of gatekeeping and overheated squabbles over optics—on who should be excluded from the coalition and who is to blame for its repeated failures. 

Perhaps the perfect example was the fiasco around the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) report about what went wrong in 2024. DNC chair Ken Martin promised to release the autopsy—though since the party is “not dead,” he preferred to call it an “after-action review.” But months later, Martin reversed course and canceled the autopsy. The morbid curiosity, he reasoned, would do the party no good—“it was a distraction from the core mission.” Predictably, this provoked rampant speculation over the contents of the suppressed report. Many on the party’s left wing, in particular, speculated that it had uncovered evidence that Harris’s candidacy had been badly undermined by the Biden administration’s support for the war in Gaza. The absence of a report, it became apparent, was causing exactly the kind of strife and distraction that burying it was supposed to avoid, and so Martin finally released it.

The problem turned out to be that the DNC had never even finished the report. Martin received a shoddy draft that lacked sourcing, failed to take on important issues like Gaza or the neglect of Biden’s growing incapacity, and was riddled with platitudes and vague recommendations. Instead of fixing the problems, Martin dragged out a needless months-long controversy, stoked rancor within the party, then, “in the interest of transparency,” released the draft with heavy annotations and a disclaimer that the DNC did not stand behind it. Instead of projecting confidence by looking candidly at Democrats’ mistakes, the report portrayed a party committed to self-protective dissembling. In place of a substantive debate about how the party should change and what it stands for, the report itself became the center of unproductive squabbling and handwringing. 

The episode conforms to a troubling pattern among Democrats, where attention moves from the “core mission”—in this case, determining why the party failed to win enough votes in 2024, particularly from working-class and young voters—to a second-order discursive level. The main concerns become what constituency within the party is being harmed or ignored, proven right or wrong, what narratives are winning out, and how things will look from a public-relations standpoint. The discursive maneuvers that can help figures like Ken Martin keep their jobs in the DNC—placating allies, deflecting criticism, covering up failures, hanging on to long-discredited narratives, even earning favorable press coverage—are precisely those that alienate voters and prevent the party from reckoning with that alienation. Gaining and retaining power within the party apparatus trumps, time and again, gaining and retaining real political power. 

Another example concerns the central policy argument that has emerged in the aftermath of Harris’s loss—the debate over the “abundance agenda.” The idea is that progressives have hamstrung projects in the housing, energy, manufacturing, and transportation sectors with well-intentioned but excessive regulations and rules—environmental reviews, zoning laws, community veto points—intended to appease various progressive factions. These are the sins of “everything bagel liberalism,” as New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein has called it. For example, the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act subsidized semiconductor manufacturing but is larded with requirements that cost precious time and money. Contractors must detail a “equity strategy” in grant applications and explain how they will include women- and minority-owned businesses. To win the future, Klein and his coauthor Derek Thompson write in their book Abundance, Democrats need to clear the regulatory way for bold projects that will create abundant green energy, new housing supply, high-speed rail, and other technological solutions to our material problems.

There are plenty of good debates to be had about abundance. From the left, there are serious questions about whether it amounts to a kind of progressive Randianism, or what the historian Quinn Slobodian has called “progressive Muskism”—an attempt to achieve left-liberal goals by curtailing regulation and unshackling the productive power of both the private and public sectors. As political philosopher Danielle Allen has detailed, “abundantists” also seem to double down on the technocratic form of governance that drove so many Americans toward Trump. Abundantists tend to leave questions about the proper relationship between public and private power unanswered and to downplay or neglect the effects of corporate concentration and money in politics. Speaking about the abundance agenda in a recent interview, former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan said that a political program that “entirely omits a diagnosis of the role of unchecked corporate power is pretty surprising, striking, and at odds with the reality of what’s happening.”

But as sophisticated critics of abundance have conceded, Klein and Thompson—as well as Marc Dunkelman, whom I recently interviewed in our pages—are right that no one will vote for greater state capacity to solve problems if government has been discredited by myriad failures. The progressive left, far more than any other political faction, suffers from the perception that government sucks at doing stuff. Democrats of every stripe, including economic populists, should reckon with the abundance critique of progressive governance, even if its diagnosis of what ails the country is incomplete. Zohran Mamdani has already taken some encouraging steps in this direction.

But the debate over abundance has not been mainly about policy, but about its rhetorical appeal (or lack thereof) and what it signals—in other words, the abundance vibes. Abundance rhetoric, for example, has been seized by a number of the usual suspects behind centrist “thought leadership,” including PACs and foundations funded by libertarians like Charles Koch, tech billionaires like Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt, and other regulars like Mike Bloomberg and the Waltons. In these corporate abundance circles, one finds a palpable nostalgia for the Clinton era, despite voters’ decisive recent rejections of that brand of technocratic liberalism. Abundance appears to them as a rhetorical tool to keep recycling the old narrative of triangulation and “pivoting to the center.” One prominent group, WelcomePAC, even bills itself as “a new kind of old school politics” and models itself explicitly on the Democratic Leadership Council, the group that successfully sought to make the Democratic Party more market-friendly in the early 1990s and helped Bill Clinton become president.

The concern with vibes and image is of course not confined to the party’s center. In response to this remixed Clintonism, those on the populist left have accused abundance of a more sinister attempt to give corporate neoliberalism a makeover. They’ve cast doubt on the intentions of all abundantists and tried to prove the focus-group-tested appeal of an economic populist message over that of the abundance. As a result, the substantive critiques abundantists have made of Democratic governance in places like California have gone largely unanswered. Where corporate donors have embraced abundance as a buzzword, populist activists have turned it into a bogeyman. These positions are mutually reinforcing and to that extent beneficial to those who approach politics as meme warfare, but they don’t serve the broader goal—which both sides at least pretend to embrace—of making government actually work.

As Waleed Shahid argues in The Nation, an opportunity for developing a “populist abundance” synthesis has been sacrificed for infighting. As a result, those on the center haven’t had to reckon with the failures of market-based solutions to public-policy problems and growing corporate power over government itself, while those on the left haven’t had to reckon with the myriad ways that over-bureaucratized progressive government gets in its own way. If these debates were more substantive, they might draw the public’s interest and help the party redefine itself around a new paradigm, filling the vacuum created by the failures of Bidenomics. Instead, abundance has largely been reduced to a fetish object in online rhetorical squabbles, another background prop for political posturing.

The same dynamics that have afflicted the abundance debate appear in electoral politics. Take the primary race for the senate in Maine. Democrats are coming off of a disastrous 2024 election cycle where their “tarnished brand” took yet another beating. In a corrupt Gilded Age—when politics is swamped by money and corporate power—Democrats, once fighters for the little guy, have allowed themselves to be vilified as the party of the establishment. The large number of aging Democratic politicians hanging on to power cycle after cycle tends to confirm that perception. So you’d think that the party’s leadership would hesitate to back a seventy-eight-year-old term-limited governor—who is also one of the least popular governors in the country—in the race for a pivotal senate seat. But that’s exactly what Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer did, tapping Janet Mills to go up against Republican incumbent Susan Collins, only to watch her campaign sputter and then crash weeks before the primary.

Why do Democrats keep doubling down on the failed theory that voters just want safe candidates so that the country can “go back to normal” when in fact the electorate is clearly demanding change? Biden’s electoral success, such as it was, may be one reason. There is also a more general sense that decades of service, of paying one’s dues and climbing the ladder, entitle politicians to go out on their own terms. That logic is hard enough to swallow outside government, but in politics, where parties are supposed to be responsive to electoral outcomes, it’s nothing short of infuriating. Even at this late date, many older centrist Democrats are running only against Trump the man, and not the forces that led to his rise. They seem oblivious to the ways their purely personal antagonism has inflated his power. Earlier this year—a decade into the Trump era—when asked whether Trump was the symptom or the disease, Mills said, “I would like to think, I would like to believe, that it’s a fluke.” But the ongoing populist ructions that led to Trump being elected twice are not a fluke. They are part of long-developing trends in political spending and corruption, (un)affordability and inequality, and tech culture and the media environment.

As the downfall of Graham Platner’s candidacy in the wake of a credible rape allegation has demonstrated, fealty to narrative can foil the party’s so-called insurgents as well. Platner was plucked out of obscurity by insurgent consultants (no longer an oxymoron) who have had success with Mamdani and Dan Osborne’s surprisingly effective independent Senate campaigns in Nebraska. Platner’s political talent was undeniable: the gruff charisma, the antiwar bonafides, and the convincing populist message—even if his working-class narrative didn’t hold up to scrutiny. It would be naïve to deny that charisma matters, especially in the current environment. But the left wing’s antipathy to the party’s center can cloud its judgment. Clearly, the party needs fresh blood and more working-class candidates—a Yale law degree and squeaky-clean image shouldn’t be prerequisites for running for national office—but that doesn’t mean that all conventional political wisdom, including the need for a thorough vetting of potential candidates, should be tossed aside. 

At every twist and turn in the Platner affair both centrists and leftists have tried to fit the story into a prefabricated political narrative. The left’s willingness to overlook Platner’s previous transgressions made them no better than the MAGA right. No, centrists’ opportunistic latching on to every scandal—even ones their own voters were willing to overlook—was evidence of their contempt for working people. Both of these messages may get at something worrisome about the other side, but they’re also radically inadequate, and they stereotype vast swaths of their own party’s coalition. When every primary election turns into a Manichaean battle for the soul of the party, the opportunity to hash out legitimate differences is wasted in a fit of psychosocial caricature. Meanwhile, voters are left to decide between unsuitable candidates like Mills and Platner.

Mamdani’s bold electoral success—not just in his own election but in this year’s congressional primaries—and his repeated claim that “the Democratic party needs to change” may be signs that a long-awaited reckoning is finally here. But we don’t yet know what kind of reckoning it will be. As Michelle Goldberg pointed out in a recent New York Times column, the initial reaction to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 also pushed the Democratic Party leftward, but in a way that proved counterproductive and ultimately set the stage for his reelection in 2024. Instead of dealing with the conditions that enabled Trump’s rise, Democrats of all stripes staked out a set of largely symbolic, discourse-driven but increasingly out-of-touch cultural positions that helped a never-popular authoritarian cement control of his own party and regroup for his comeback. 

This latest reckoning is clearly something different. Democratic candidates from both wings of the party have emphasized material issues, while the “identity-first progressivism of the past decade,” as Simon van Zuylen-Wood put it in New York Magazine, “has been jettisoned and memory-holed in remarkably swift fashion.” Still, the dynamics and groupthink that led to the rise of that identity-first progressivism are still clearly in evidence in the recent disputes between center and left. The future of the country depends on their ability to have debates over policy that don’t immediately degenerate into mutual recrimination and posturing. The Democratic Party needs centrists capable of self-criticism and leftists capable of self-discipline. Unfortunately, the current state of the discourse militates against both.

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