In a recent “Conversation” column about politics, New York Times opinion columnists Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens discussed the future of democracy.
Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. I hope you had a great summer. I know President Donald Trump is going to be a frequent topic of discussion in this and many future conversations between us. But can I begin by broaching a subject that’s just as depressing? The Democratic Party, I mean.
Frank Bruni: Bret, but I take bitter exception to the insinuation that Democrats are as depressing as Trump. That’s like saying a piranha is scarier than a great white (a metaphor I offer in recognition of Trump’s obsession with sharks).
Bret: You’re right: Democrats aren’t piranhas. Right now they’re more like the blobfish.
Frank: Whatever their marine counterpart is, it does seem that our entire democracy may be riding on whether Democrats can find the right leader before November 2026, the right message and the right succinct set of policy priorities, not to mention the right blue states to gerrymander. A modest to-do list! On which of those tasks do you see them making the most — or any — progress?
Bret: The philosophical question Democrats need to answer for themselves is whether they should move toward the center or lurch further left. Trump and his party would obviously much rather run against the Zohran Mamdani Democrats than he would against, say, the Andy Beshear Democrats or the Josh Shapiro Democrats. Which, to me, sort of answers the question of where Democrats ought to go.
Frank: Well, they’re not going to move toward the center in New York City; that ship has sailed, and the city is the city. There probably are moderate Democrats who could beat Mamdani, but not when there are two of them dividing the center-left vote and the two in question are as repellent as Andrew Cuomo and as corrupt as Eric Adams — who may exit the picture if Trump succeeds in an apparent effort to lure him to Washington to clear the field for Cuomo. That said, there’s going to be a lot of time between the city mayoral election and the midterms, and I do see evidence of many, many Democratic leaders trying to pull the party toward the center.
Bret: Really, who?
Frank: Pete Buttigieg, who has been doing interviews in unlikely places and saying, for example, that Democrats need to take many Americans’ apprehension about trans women in women’s sports seriously. Elissa Slotkin, who, from her response to Trump’s address to Congress early this year until the present, has been talking economics, security — not culture-war issues. The list is long — Ruben Gallego, Mikie Sherrill, Gina Raimondo — but what’s happening with Democrats and with discussion about Democrats is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, a snowball effect. Every day they wear the scarlet L for “loser,” it gets bigger, redder, so it’s not just affixed to them — it’s the whole-damned outfit.
Bret: I used to admire Buttigieg, at least for his debating skills. If you can think of a single notable accomplishment of his, either as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, or as secretary of transportation, I’d be happy to be reminded.
Frank: The party has plenty of talent. What it lacks is consensus and discipline, and what’s so ironic here — what’s so tragic — is that Republicans are benefiting from precisely such consensus and discipline, but it’s the consensus and discipline of fealty to a despot and spectacular surrender of anything in the same hemisphere — the same galaxy — as conservative principles. They’re closer to communists at this point.
Bret: Let me say one more thing about the Blobfish Democrats: It’s not that there aren’t big talents in the party. It’s that I haven’t really seen any senior figure in the party take a clear stand against so much of what the party came to represent in recent years. An obsession with identity politics. An indifference to legitimate public concerns over the pace of immigration. A see-no-evil approach to crime and urban decay. The best the Democrats have done is attach themselves to what our colleague Ezra Klein calls “abundance,” which is a step forward for a party previously addicted to regulation but not, to my mind, a big enough step.
Frank: I feel obliged to point out that the obsession with identity politics exists in at least equal measure in Trump and the MAGA movement — it just takes a different form. It, too, fetishizes victimization, but casts white people in general and white men in particular as the victims. I mean, yeesh, it layers identity politics onto a development as banal as Cracker Barrel’s logo change. Sometimes a country-fried steak is just a country-fried steak.
Bret: On this, you have a point.
Frank: I want to know: How should Democratic governors like JB Pritzker of Illinois and Democratic mayors like Brandon Johnson of Chicago deal with the ostentatiously performative, wildly provocative arrival of federal troops? Per your point a moment ago, Democratic leaders must not play into any soft-on-crime stereotypes. But to my mind, they also must not defer to these attacks on their sovereignty and curtsy to this authoritarian theater. So give them a script.
Bret: Well, it would be nice if a city like Chicago, which I love, wasn’t being governed by yet another incompetent left-wing mayor who, over the Labor Day weekend, presided over 58 people getting shot and nine being killed. I believe in federalism and local control and don’t want federal troops in American cities any more than you do. But it would be nice if Democrats stopped pretending that crime isn’t a major problem in cities led by Democrats, including Washington, D.C.
Frank: Um, crime is also a major problem in states run by Republicans, as our news-side colleague David Chen noted in a recent article.
Bret: Yeah, but the cities where the crime is happening are run by Democrats. Paul Young in Memphis. Cara Spencer in St. Louis. Brandon Scott in Baltimore. Johnson in Chicago. Anyway ….
Frank: Listen, Johnson is failing, no doubt, and as a result he has an approval rating a few percentage points below poison sumac’s. But I worry about people getting as worked up about distracted left-wing mayors as they do about laser-focused right-wing zealots like Kristi Noem and Kash Patel, who are to me the bigger threat to the country’s welfare because they clearly don’t respect its laws or democracy or civil liberties and are eager to grant Trump all the power he desires and every last one of his wishes. That’s my ongoing qualm with Democrat bashing; there’s another party whose aims and methods are infinitely more alarming. Let’s apportion our horror sensibly.
Bret: I think it’s a historical truism that for authoritarians to win, democrats — small d — must fail. Lenin didn’t just seize power; Kerensky made some fatal mistakes. The question is whether the obverse is also true: that democrats will be saved by the mistakes authoritarians make. Like, for instance, causing economic mayhem through capricious tariffs or turning companies like Intel into arms of the state or the general mayhem and foolishness of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s management of public health.
Frank: You just put your finger on or close to something that warrants saying: One of the reasons so many of us are so despairing about and furious with the Democratic Party isn’t that it’s rotten; it’s that we trust and count on it to be somewhat less rotten than the Republican Party under Trump, and we so desperately need it to get its act together and save us. Let’s give it that odd kind of credit, no?
Bret: I’m with you. And I should give the unloved and unlovely blobfish some credit: It lives at great depths and does well under intense pressure. So there’s that.
Frank: Does well under pressure? You mean like in November 2024? Not so much!
Bret: We need to look forward, Frank. I don’t think I’ve heard from you about what Democrats should actually do.
Frank: They need to look forward. Or, rather, focus on what they have to offer versus Trump’s moral and intellectual atrocities — is that big enough to be an SAT word? — because Americans are well acquainted with those.
Bret: I’d say “enormities.”
Frank: “Monstrosities”? Whatever. I keep fantasizing about an ad campaign that takes a given Democrat (say, Shapiro), a given achievement (opening more state jobs to people without college degrees, or getting a collapsed section of I-95 fixed in the political equivalent of milliseconds) and then ends: “Democrats did that.” Go through governors, initiatives, successes: “Democrats did that.” Make it a party of solutions, not a party of pronouns.
Bret: Sure. But what accomplishments? Fire management in Los Angeles? Public finances in Illinois? To quote Walter Mondale, “Where’s the beef?”
But let’s not end on this somber note. Read anything recently in the Times that you loved?
Frank: For sure. Everyone should check out Christopher Maag’s article about a wealthy Wall Street commodities trader, Jonathan Kleisner, who, about 13 years ago, at the age of 41, left that job to become a New York City paramedic. He wanted to provide measurable, palpable help to people. To make amends for what he described as a job in which he had “created nothing, gave nothing to anybody.”
“Sometimes,” he told Maag, “I feel like an outlaw who’s trying to get to heaven. Or maybe a few good nights of sleep.”
What he and the article do not talk about is his politics or politics in general, and that’s so refreshing — and a reminder that when we step away from our labels and our tribes and just look squarely at the hurting individuals in front of us, we can be bighearted and decent. In fact, we often default to that.