Dems need to unite as a broad anti-Trump coalition

I think this is 100% correct:

Ask almost any professional Democrat what the party needs to do to become nationally viable and they’ll respond with some version of the same boilerplate internal critique:

• We have to be more than just the anti-Trump party.
• Voters want to know what we’re for, not just what we’re against.
• Democrats need a vision.

If this were true, it would be a big challenge. The fact that so many Democrats believe it to be true is a pretty big problem in its own right. In their certainty that they need to coalesce around some policy agenda or other, they choose a course of infighting for themselves.

You see the tension over policy differences in the way moderate and frontline members define themselves by contrast to members to their left, and vice versa. You see it in the way moderates blame the squad and “wokeness” for Democratic underperformance, and progressive members criticize establishmentarians for ignoring the working class, or being bought and paid for.

And because they are ultimately fighting over the party’s brand, or the way the public perceives the party—fighting for factional control—the underlying policy dissension never gets a real airing. Moderates insist that the party should be “normal” and prove it by promoting “kitchen-table issues,” without almost ever saying what those issues are. Progressives call for big structural reforms, or else they promise a “revolution” rooted in policies that they also insist are not radical.

If all of these Democrats were correct in their conviction—that they need a unifying platform—the infighting would get worse. They’d have to air substantive differences and hash out an agenda that most members and candidates could endorse and campaign on. They pulled this off OK in the hothouse environment of mid-2020, when the country was in crisis and Democrats were desperate to defeat Donald Trump. But that truce has broken down.

Here’s the thing, though: They’re wrong. They can actually do just fine being the party of people who understand that Trump is bad, that his worst deeds have to be undone, and that he and his enablers should be held accountable, some politically, some legally. People who believe that they can freely disagree in good faith1 about policy and govern the country through a mix of consensus and responsiveness to emerging need. “We’re a big tent party of people who disagree in good faith and thus don’t all espouse the same policy views” isn’t the absence of appeal, it’s the appeal itself. Are you one of the 55-60 percent of Americans who now sees Trump clearly, and is repulsed? You have a seat at the table here.

Things may be a little more complicated in presidential years, where coverage ultimately coalesces around one candidate (although even there Trump won much more on “not being Biden” than on any coherent positive vision.) But in midterms and special elections? They’re referenda on the incumbent no matter what, and when the incumbent is as unpopular as Trump is now (let alone how unpopular he’s going to be when the consequences of his economic policies become clear) that’s a favorable context.

Now isn’t the time for divisive intercine policy debates about laws that can’t go into effect with Trump in the White House anyway. Make Trump as unpopular as possible and contests as many races as possible, which by definition requires some vagueness from the national campaign. “We’re not the old man who is emptying the shelves, raising prices, ruining your 401(k), taking away your jobs, killing cancer research, and kidnapping children” is in fact a great message when the incumbent is widely disliked and has a coalition whose marginal voters generally don’t show up when he’s not directly on the ballot.