• To use Thomas Piketty’s terminology, the “merchant right” has long understood that they needed to forge a coalition with middle-status people against the “Brahmin left.” They had to give them something, so they offered cultural issues that matter less to them than perpetuating their wealth.

   

• Trump innovates on this tradition. He’s brilliant at it. He genuinely feels condescended to and rejected by elites — the high New York elites, not the Brahmin left — and people sense his authentic anger against elites. He performs a certain strain of masculine toughness that conveys dignity among blue-collar men, saying, “I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m not mealymouthed like those white-collar professionals who suck up to each other. I’m a straight shooter.”

   

• Compare that to Hillary Clinton’s recent op-ed titled “How Much Dumber Will This Get?,” the first line of which is “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity.” This type of condescension appeals to elites but not to middle-status people, who often feel they’re on the receiving end of this attitude from elites.

    

   

     

   

   
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• Both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris faced what I call “the tightrope” — women must balance being seen as competent without seeming unlikable, or likable without seeming incompetent. It’s extraordinarily difficult. Whitmer and Gluesenkamp Perez show it’s possible, but whether it’s wise for Democrats to run a woman for president at this point — that’s a tight space.

    

   

     

   

   
• In truth, the Democrats have actively abandoned middle-status people for fifty years.

• Then my generation of hippies arrived with antiwar, abortion rights, and environmental concerns, followed quickly by race and gender issues. They were all noble causes, but what’s missing? If you already have a stable middle-class life, you can worry about the end of the world. If you don’t, you’re worried about the end of the month, as the yellow vest protesters in France put it.

   

• Democrats were seduced away from the politics of the New Deal coalition by neoliberalism: self-regulating free markets, consumers benefiting from globalization. What a vision! But the consummation wasn’t what they had hoped. After World War II, productivity and wages grew together — then, with the introduction of neoliberalism, wages stalled while productivity grew eight times faster. If wages had maintained that growth line, they’d be 43 percent higher today. Three-fourths of that decline happened in the fifteen years after 2000.

   

• I’m not sure Democrats realize this. They seem intent on rescuing neoliberalism. Right now, in response to Trump’s tariffs, they’re basically saying, “We need a return to the perfectly functional global economic order. Trump has rocked the boat too much.” That strikes me as ignorant of how dissatisfied middle-status Americans are with existing conditions.

    

   

   

   

   

• That’s another terrible message. You’re trying to appeal to voters who’ve been royally screwed by the establishment for fifty years, and your argument is that we should defend the established order?

   

• Issue by issue, there are certain nonnegotiables. We won’t embrace racism, simply put. But the conversation can’t stop there. Many people of color voted for Trump, not because they’re racist but because he was communicating in a register they understood and liked. We need to figure out how to talk to them.

   

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• "Democrats could make huge progress quickly with a simple formula: try to persuade the middle-status noncollege voters whom you’ve lost. There’s plenty to work with. Look at Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour — people in red states flocked to hear them rail against the rich."

   
• I agree, up to a point - the point being that  the big corporations and wealthy donors who control the political system through both parties would never allow a left social democrat to admnister it unless they gave clear evidence they were disavowing their anticapitalist rhetoric and agenda. The widely popular Corbyn and Sanders campaigns were the most recent to drive that point home  Despite their best efforts to neutralize this effect, they were seen as too risky. Right populists like Trump and Vance are an entirely different matter. They belong to the ruling class, embrace its interests and values, and can be reliably depended upon to  follow its dictates. 

   
• Unfortunately, the two-party system is rigged in multiple ways to prevent the emergence of third parties with an anticapitalist agenda, as we've seen time and again in North America and Europe.  It will take an economic collapse for things to change - either from reform at the top as under the New Deal or, more fundamentally, from the bottom in a revolutionary crisis when the masses of necessity organize independently to overthrown the system. Meanwhile, initiatives like the Fighting Oligarchy campaign are the only means through which Marxists can today reach a mass audience to promote the need for fundamental change. 

   

         

     

        

   

     

       

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• This striking ecological building in the former World Trade Centre on Boulevard du Roi Albert II
• The first-floor lobby of the Flemish government building can be visited during office hours. Here you can sit with a coffee on a terrace looking down on the greenhouse. It feels a long way from the Brussels you know.