A Common Sense Democrat manifesto

Where do we go from here?

Years ago, I coined a phrase — the pundit’s fallacy — to describe the belief that to win elections, a political party needs to cater to the exact views of the pundit writing the column.

So as a believer in intellectual honesty, I want to say right here at the start that this is a column I am writing because Kamala Harris lost the election, but it’s not a column about “why Harris lost.” An honest assessment of why Democrats lost has to acknowledge that 90 percent of the explanation is the inflation-driven anti-incumbent trend that has hit essentially every rich country around the world. This explanation is a bit banal and doesn’t have any specific forward-looking implications. But when you lose an election, a leadership void opens up. And that void will be filled — with people and institutions and, hopefully, with ideas — and I would like the ideas that fill the current void to be good.

This is not a column about why Harris lost; it’s a column about what should happen next.

And I believe the answer is that the Democratic Party should embrace commonsense moral values and move away from academic fads and deliberate tent-shrinking, while redoubling their commitment to ideas that have been pillars of Democratic campaigns for decades. Being a Democrat should mean caring more than Republicans about the lives of poor people, about equal rights and non-discrimination, about restraining big business in matters related to pollution and fraudulent practices, and about protecting social insurance for the elderly and disabled.

These are important progressive ideas, and because they are important progressive ideas, I think that anyone who identifies as a leftist or a progressive should vote for Democrats.

But that doesn’t mean that Democrats’ agenda should be driven by those on the far left. A big-tent Democratic coalition needs leftists. But left-wing candidates are rarely winning tough elections, and too often, they’re not improving governance of the solidly blue places where they’re elected.

Democrats need their votes to win, just like Republicans need the votes of theocrats and those who believe we should eliminate Social Security. But Republicans suffer electorally when they let that wing of the party steer the policy agenda (there’s a reason Project 2025 was a huge talking point for Democrats in the recent campaign), and Democrats have allowed those on the far left to exert much too much influence over their policy agenda in recent years. Most elected Democrats are not, themselves, actually that far left, and when faced with acute electoral peril, they swiftly ditch ideas like defund the police or openness to unlimited asylum claims. But what they haven’t generally done is publicly disavow the kind of simplistic disparate impact analysis that leads to conclusions like policing is bad. Similarly, the Democrats are not a degrowth party. When good GDP numbers come in, Joe Biden and his team celebrate them — they believe in taking credit for strong growth. But even without being a degrowth party, Democrats are heavily influenced by the views of major environmentalist organizations that do have a degrowth ideology at their core.

Critics on the right charge that Democrats are in the grips of radical ideology, but the truth is more boring: Many elected officials are just not particularly rigorous thinkers (think of how much backbench Republicans have shifted on various policies since Trump took over). Most only really understand a few issues and do a lot of going along to get along.

Which is why Democrats need to build a strong, explicit commonsense faction with institutions and leaders and think tanks and media. A faction that wins primaries and provides a staffing pipeline, that generates new policy ideas. I think doing so will help the party’s electoral fortunes, and more importantly, I think it will make America a better country, a country where economic growth is both more robust and more broadly shared, and where freedom flourishes.

Winning elections is important, because if you don’t win, you can’t govern.

It doesn’t make sense to say Democrats have to do X to win — there are lots of ways to win, and dumb luck is very important in politics — but this is how I think Democrats should try to win.

Nine principles for Common Sense Democrats

My goal here is to write these principles down at an adequate level of abstraction such that they don’t become a policy laundry list. They’re also not supposed to be a straitjacket. Different people have different views and different priorities, and principles need to be loose enough to accommodate some differences. But I also don’t want these to be total platitudes; I want some people to read them and think, “Fuck this, I don’t agree.” Over the next few weeks, I’ll share posts elaborating on each one individually, but in the meantime, these are the principles I’d like to see the Democratic party embrace:

1. Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

2. The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.

3. Climate change — and pollution more broadly — is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.

4. We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, rejecting discrimination and racial profiling without embracing views that elevate anyone’s identity groups over their individuality.

5. Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.

6. Academic and nonprofit work does not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private business or any other jobs.

7. Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.

8. Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.

9. All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American citizens.

This is a slight tweak of the nine principles that I floated last week on Twitter. I heard from Democrats in the Bay Area asking me to explicitly call out some of the controversies around advanced math coursework and magnet schools that have been playing out in California and a few other places. That’s obviously very important to the impacted parents, but I thought it was too specific to be a plank of its own. I instead tried to modify (8) to be clearer that schools are the most important case here.¹ And of course, part of the point of (4) is precisely to block the kind of analysis that leads to the demise of excellence-oriented education.

I’m not going to go into greater detail even though I, an urban public school parent, am also quite concerned with this specific issue, because I think it’s important not to over-index on the specific issues that impact me.

Jared Golden in Maine is one of the most important common sense Democrats we have in elected office, but what makes sense in terms of organizing school systems in the tiny towns of northern Maine is almost certainly not what makes sense for Grow SF to push for in the Bay Area.

But Golden and Grow SF are two pillars of what I think is fundamentally the same movement animated by the same values. A big part of my intellectual project here at Slow Boring is making the case that there are, in fact, deep complementarities between the common sense reform project in the blue zones and the common sense electoral viability project in the red zones. You don’t just copy and paste the exact same proposals, but you do want to work together, share intellectual spaces, share staff and policy development resources, and develop a brand identity that is legible across the landscape.

A moment of peril — and opportunity

The last time Republicans won the popular vote in a presidential contest was 2004 when I was 23 years old. I am part of the youngest cohort working in politics and media to have experienced that event as an adult. My friends and peers who are just slightly younger, many of whom have ascended to positions of responsibility and influence, have never had that experience before, and the same is probably true of many Slow Boring readers.

To lose, for real, is not a good feeling.

It’s not the same as losing in a low-turnout midterm like 2014 and telling yourself maybe it would have gone better if you could’ve engaged your base. It’s not the same as losing the electoral college while winning the popular vote and telling yourself the real problem is the unfairness of the system and the solution is a narrow technical optimization of the coalition. It’s not the same as losing the House in 2022 but gaining a Senate seat and scoring a huge moral victory. When you lose fair and square — an experience familiar to Republicans from 2008, 2012, and, even if they don’t like to admit it, 2020 — you are truly beaten, and it feels bad.

It feels especially bad because it seems like the walls are closing in. Your enemies just beat you and are set to amass incredible power, power they’ll be in a position to wield against you. It felt perilous to me when it was George W. Bush, and it feels even more perilous now that it’s Donald Trump. I worry about bad policy, and I also worry about clever policy. I worry about abuses of power, I worry about January 6 pardons. I worry about all kinds of things, and I cannot assure anyone that things will be okay.

What I can do is reassure everyone that in retrospect, the mid-aughts were the most exciting and generative time in Democratic Party politics that I can remember.

Peril focused the mind, and leaders became more serious about tradeoffs and less indulgent of frivolity. Smart people grew bolder and less risk-averse. New institutions were created, and (some) old ones were re-invigorated. New modes of communication came to the fore. New policy ideas came into play. We saved Social Security, we retook Congress, and the most brilliant political talent of our time “jumped the line,” beat the party establishment, and entered the White House.

There is no guarantee that the pattern will repeat. But history points the way to possibilities. A Harris administration would have continued the kind of straddle that has paralyzed Democrats since Bernie Sanders’ failed insurgency in 2016 — cycle after cycle after cycle of establishment Democrats giving enough ground to their leftist critics to stay in charge but not enough to satisfy those critics. In the process, many mainstream Democrats have completely lost their identity, going far enough left that moderate voters find them unrecognizable, while leftists still deride them as the same tired establishment.

This is a time for new blood and new leadership and a new round of frank argumentation. Do we want a sectarian party whose only chance of gaining power is for Trump to do something truly catastrophic? Or do we want a big-tent party that can compete across the country and contribute meaningfully to better governance everywhere? Do we want a party that delivers economic policies that generate prosperity and wins votes by reflecting voters’ actual moral and cultural values, or a party that insists on trying to impose fringe values on an unwilling populace, while flailing to buy votes with unsound fiscal policies?

I know what I want, and I know that many other people want it, too. Now is the time to stand up, unfurl our banners, and make our voices heard in the clarifying fights that will decide the direction of the party, and the country.

1. CORRECTION: I messed up and referred to point nine in an earlier draft, but I meant point eight.