How to Keep a Democracy

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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I’m going to try and keep this short and sweet.

What do the Dems need to do if they want to win? Because right now, they’re not. The race is tied, yet nobody should be losing to Trump and Vance.

What’s going wrong here?

How do you actually defend a democracy? By repeating the same old warnings about authoritarianism that we’ve all heard a thousand times before?

If that was enough, surely, this election wouldn’t be a toss-up.

This approach isn’t working. Not in the sense of: The Democrats are winning.

Do they really want to defend democracy? Do they really want to win?

I don’t ask that in a contemptuous way. I have a point I want you to understand.

The “Booming” Economy That People Think Sucks

Today, a “stellar” and “blockbuster” jobs report came out.

Pundits cheered, economists celebrated, and columnists cooed.

But dig just beneath the surface of “lots of jobs added,” and what do you see? Here, let me quote.

Food services and bars led payroll gains, rising by 69,000…these jobs tend to be lower-paying, less stable positions typically staffed by women and minorities.

Health care, fueled by the demands of an aging baby boomer population, added 45,000 jobs, mostly in hospitals, nursing homes and home health care. Government added 31,000 jobs, primarily at the state and local levels. Social assistance, which includes services for individuals and families, added 27,000 jobs, while construction grew by 25,000 jobs, mostly fueled by a boom in the Biden administration’s spending on projects such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS and Science Act.

One major industry to lose jobs was manufacturing partly due to weaker activity in that sector as well as retirements, regional hiring challenges, and skills shortages.”

So. The economy added jobs, true. But mostly low-income service jobs. Meanwhile, manufacturing and white collar jobs actually shrunk. Both of which are pathways to the middle class.

This is a portrait of an economy undergoing structural change. These trends have been afoot for quite some time. This is hardly the first jobs report like this—they all are.

People suspect that the Dream is fading because middle class jobs are going away, and they’re precisely correct in that intuition.

Economists and pundits and so forth who don’t dig beneath the surface are like doctors for a patient who comes in with cancer symptoms—and they just look at their skin, and say all is well. It’s literally skin-deep.

All of this fuels today’s rampant mistrust in experts, media, and politicians. It is a key, maybe the key, driver of it. They keep telling people that the economy’s great, awesome, wonderful, and meanwhile, things over time get worse. Bills are harder to pay. A middle class life feels like a distant memory. Just a stable one is unattainable for many if not most.

People can’t square their lived reality with the commentary that comes from on high. Especially regarding the economy. And so over time, they’ve come to distrust institutions. That’s true at a social level—levels of trust have cratered over time. And like I said, this is a key reason why, this enormous gulf between what people live, experience, feel, and the skin-deep recitation of the sacrament of the Booming Economy,

What do economies like this—structurally crashing—do? They destabilize societies, and produce authoritarian waves. Think Rome to Weimar Germany. But I’ll come back to that.

Why People Don’t Trust Institutions and Leaders Anymore

This is why people don’t trust the Democrats on the economy. Even young people, there are signs, trust them less. This ritual’s played out time and again, and every time it is, the main consequence is the shattering loss of credibility.

If this is a good jobs report—one which shows stable middle class jobs being replaced by low wage service work—then what on earth is a bad one?

Pause and really think about that for a second. Good? As in, not enough to have a middle class? Not enough to have a stable society? Not enough for people not to be in constant distress? That’s good?

Come on, this is fatuous. It’s foolish.

That’s clearly not good enough. Not just morally, but to defend a democracy, and we’ll get to that part.

Nobody with common sense would believe that bar for “good” was anything but as low as humanly possible, and that’s why people are incredibly pessimistic about the economy, which is Issue Number One.

Now. What do the Republicans do that the Democrats don’t?

They admit it.

JD Vance, at the debate, came right out and said things like the Dream has faded and times are tough and people are struggling.

Struggling.

Trump says this kind of thing over and over again.

And the result is that people trust them more.

Even if their plans and policies are bad, not good, some crazy, some delusional—doesn’t matter. Here, we’re just talking about earning people’s trust, the question of credibility.

The GOP has more of it because they start from people’s lived experience, how they feel, how things really are.

And…come on. How many of us would say the Dream is in good shape? That a middle class life is some kind of easy trajectory to get to? That a stable one is easily attainable? That the bills can be comfortably paid?

Nobody much would say that if we asked them, and we know that because when we do, the numbers are staggering, saying that 70-80% of people are having it pretty rough.

So it’s delusional to keep on playing out this ritual. Let me say that flat out. All it does is destroy credibility, instead of earn it. If this is “good,” it’s nowhere near good enough—to keep a democracy.

How to Earn Trust in a Troubled Age

The Democrats instead should start from where people are. They should challenge the Republicans by admitting that things are pretty dire for people. That over time, the Dream’s faded. That times are rough. That people are struggling.

They should use exactly those words, too, like Vance did, because they’re the ones that count, grounded in reality, resonant with meaning.

If they don’t do this, the election will continue to be a toss-up, and there’s a very, very good chance they could lose. Because of course this is the Number One Issue, and they appear to most people to be detached from reality on it. Their support comes at the expense of this issue, despite it—people back them for their positions on social issues, like abortion and rights for minorities and so forth. Think about that for a moment.

Now. The Democrats still have time to change their approach, and ground it in reality, instead of playing out the Ritual of the Booming Economy, which nobody much believes, a ritual that’s meant for an elite class, so as not to challenge it much.

Will they? Probably not, because their advisors will be dead against it. They’ll say all kinds of things, mostly foolish, like hey, if we admit it, people will trust us less. We already know that’s not true, because this approach isn’t working.

How to Really Defend a Democracy

It’s incredibly risky, to play this delusional game with the Number One Issue.

So. Do the Democrats really want to win? Or do they care more about their own pride? Because if they really wanted to win, they’d change their approach. The one that isn’t working. They’d adopt one that is, which is grounded in what people actually think, believe, and want, instead of this weird pretense that everything’s great and awesome, when quite clearly, it isn’t.

They talk a lot about defending democracy, how important that is. But if they really believed it? They’d do a lot more than issue stern warnings about Trump’s authoritarianism. They’d be trying harder to win, thinking more intelligently about it, and changing what isn’t working.

That’s how you actually defend a democracy. Not with warnings, but with wisdom.

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