Stop Them Before They Democrat Again

I've been talking to Dem insiders. Now, I know what the party's problem is.

I live on the outskirts of Washington. It is a 30 minute drive from my house to most places in downtown DC. That means I’m not immersed in the depressing realities of DC 24/7. Admittedly, there are a few too many cybertrucks out here (the farmier it gets the more of them you see…often in camo or black). But it allows me to decompress, walk the dog, pat the horses on their snouts, and feel like our next door neighbors are really a large herd of deer that graze on a big lawn a few hundred feet from our house.

That said, I’m also in town pretty much daily doing business, meeting with colleagues, and participating in the non-stop schmooze fest that is the life’s blood of our nation’s capital. It’s the way information spreads through the city and it’s invaluable if you want to know what’s really going on. Of course, figuring out who is telling the truth is a challenge. And recognizing why things are being spun one way or another to serve one self-interest or special interest or another takes years of training, discernment and industrial-strength skepticism.

I once wrote that the World Economic Forum is the factory at which conventional wisdom is manufactured. It made for an amusing soundbite. But the reality is that in the global economy there are long, complex conventional wisdom supply chains. Many include important nodes in Washington, DC—in certain restaurants, in the homes of certain professional hosts, in the swampy goo between the ears of the nation’s punditerati.

Sussing out who is a legitimate source of news or insight among the thousands who spend all their waking ours trying to pretend they are real insiders (when they’re not) is a challenge. In fact, in some sense, it is the challenge in DC.

But, stick around for a few decades as I have and if your best contacts don’t all pre-decease you, you could find out things that aren’t printed in newspapers or in the on-line gossip mills that pass for mainstream journalism these days. Of course, unlike with most “access journalism” in which sources are feeding information to reporters to help shape narratives suited to their political or business goals, the best of these conversations and the most useful insights actually come from people who don’t want them shared and who trust one not to share them.

But it’s valuable. (For the record, what can be shared is what we try to focus on in all of our Deep State Radio Network podcasts and events…providing the perspectives of experts who are true insiders, experts and reliable sources.)

Sometimes what you learn is unsurprising but important. (The White House really is freaking about the Epstein case because it won’t go away. Trump really doesn’t consult his top advisors before making big decisions. Corruption really is rampant. We really are in what seems to be serious decline as a nation because of deep rot within our institutions. Everyone in the Pentagon knows Hegseth is an even bigger dope than he appears to be. The rank and file in the State Department and Treasury despise their spineless leaders. Dems are very frustrated with their old line leadership but unsure of how to move on. Like that.)

But from time to time the insights you gain are not the ones your contacts think they are sharing. For example, I regularly meet with influential, high-level Dems. And the topic of conversation these days is “how do we fix a broken party so we can win in 2026 and 2028?” And listening to their prescriptions the one thing that I am increasingly sure of is they’re the reason most days start with Omeprazole and end with Advil in the Washington DC of 2025.

For example, a common theme is that 2028 will be a change election. This seems a safe enough bet since virtually all elections are change elections here in the U.S. There may be even more urgency to the need for change this time around what with us being neck deep in a hideous shit show that could well mean the end of the republic.

The problem is that because all elections are change elections, the leaders of our political parties spend all their time coming up with talking points designed to persuade people that they’re not actually the reasons people want change…when, in fact, they are. It’s the core messaging paradox of Washington…and frankly, one of the biggest problems we face. The truly powerful are running against themselves all the time and, disturbingly, they become good at it. That’s how every big change election actually elects yet another person who represents the establishment.

Which…by the way…is what the people who are really in power…the people who are calling the shots behind the scenes…pay them for.

The genius of the really powerful is their ability to use the merely ambitious to advance their goals, regardless of how they might see or differentiate themselves…they look at an Obama or a Trump, a Clinton or a Bush as mere vehicles to get them from here to there, each requiring a little adjustment, but all serving their purposes. And the way the Clintons and the Trumps win is by persuading the public that they are “change agents.”

This may seem abstract to you but it is anything but.

Because when the time comes that you need a real change agent, the super-empowered want to have nothing to do with them and Washington insiders recognize any one who actually wants to promote change to be challengers to their ability to resist it while pretending to embrace it.

I know it’s convoluted. It’s supposed to be. It’s the game. The Washington establishment is the ouroboros, the snake that eats itself. Except that rather than representing destruction and renewal as it did in the ancient world, it represents the ability of those in power to always end up in power. The snake may be eating itself, but it is also sustaining itself. The snake is always the snake.

That is why when, every so often, someone comes along who represents real change, someone who has not been indoctrinated into the rules of the game as it is, it scares the crap out of everyone…and all the forces in the system come together to try to destroy it. (See the attacks on Zohran Mamdani for the latest example of this. Attacks I heard from tons of insiders recently who really ought to be celebrating him and learning the lessons of his victory.)

Probe deeper about how Dems are planning to win a change election in 2028 and a couple things become clear. In most (but not all) cases, what they mean by “change” is coming up with new messaging rather than new ideas or new people. In fact, quite the contrary, when I would ask about who was leading the discussions or working groups or informal pow wows on what the change platform should be, the names I heard sounded disturbingly familiar. They were, in fact, the same people who were at the center of every Democratic policy rethink of the past thirty years.

Having been here for those past thirty years, let me tell you, it makes me want to whoops. (An expression my dear old Dad used to use to describe barfing.)

We all know Trump’s whole “outsider” and “change agent” shtick was b.s. He’s a billionaire after all and he is representing the interests of other billionaires and America’s corporate elite. (Plus the occasional foreign enemy.) But at least he did not look or sound or come from the Mitt Romney factory. He did not seem like other Republicans. He did not sound like other Republicans. And he has not played the game like other DC folks. Admittedly, this is because he is an authoritarian imbecile whose main line of work is corruption. But the thing about Trump is he didn’t really have to persuade people he was not like the other candidates because…he was not like the other candidates.

Now, the last guy to beat him, Joe Biden, was the exception that proves the rule in DC. He was the seasoned insider who beat the obvious outsider. But he did it after four extraordinary years of Trumpian catastrophe. And he definitely seemed like the un-Trump. So, I suppose there is an argument that could happen again.

But, given the stakes and the need we’re going to have to actually reinvent our government and chart a new course, my view is that the best way to communicate the Democratic Party is the party of change is to actually change the goddam Democratic Party. Not its values. Not its voters. But its leaders.

Politics is a business in which politicians not policies are the product. (Democrats have trouble with this idea.) The best way to convey that one is authentically an advocate for something new is…to authentically be an advocate for something new.

That means that contrary to what I’m hearing from many Dem insiders in DC..the future of the country and the party is really going to depend on people from outside of DC behaving in un-DC-like ways and presenting ideas that seem new because they actually are, you know, new.

This means look to governors and mayors. It means look to thinkers from across the country with ideas that haven’t been tried before. It means embracing new coalitions. It means accepting that we are at a moment that demands and will be driven by a generational change in American politics.

That doesn’t mean everyone has to be, look, or sound like Zohran Mamdani (though they could do worse). It means that we need to accept that much of his success is due to the fact that he doesn’t have argue that he is something different because that is obvious on its face.

Contrary to the old theater joke that the key to appearing authentic on stage is learning how to fake it, the key to having an audience believe you are different—whether you are a new kind of threat (like Trump) or a new kind of advocate for positive change (like Mamdani or Michelle Wu or AOC or Jasmine Crockett or, for many years without getting the credit they deserve Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren…or maybe in the future will be Wes Moore or Gavin Newsom or Elissa Slotkin) is to actually be obviously, indisputably, down to your DNA, different.

(Importantly, that means to actually not be beholden to the entrenched donor establishment either. For us to make real progress, we have to be able to stand up to them—their allergies to fair taxes, reasonable regulations, a real social safety net, a country by for and of ordinary Americans rather than one dancing to the tune of its richest citizens.)

Many in the Dem establishment are trying to figure out how to fake that. If that is the approach the whole party takes, we are in for a rough few years and potentially another round of MAGA disaster. My view is that the authentically new will take many different forms in 2026 (as it should in a mid-term) and that from that reset can emerge the kind of new and different leader who will be able to credibly stand up to Trump and MAGA but also be seen as the kind of leader we will need to move into the 2030s and beyond. With some luck, they will also turn to new advisors with new ideas and the old guard can settle into a constructive role of supporting, for once, the kind of real change that we have needed for half a century but have not gotten.