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Photo: Probal Rashid/LightRocket/Getty Images

One chronic vice in politics is failing to learn lessons from electoral defeats out of stubborn attachment to priors. But it’s also possible to overlearn lessons, too. That may be happening to Democrats right now, as Ron Brownstein observes at CNN:

As President Donald Trump openly contemplates sending military forces into more American cities, the leading congressional Democrats almost invariably describe his actions as an attempt to create a “distraction” from something else — whether that’s the cost of living, the massive Medicaid cuts he signed into law, or the controversy around the Jeffrey Epstein files.

That reflex captures the overwhelming preference of top DC Democrats to frame the 2026 election on familiar partisan grounds, particularly the charge that Trump has failed in his core 2024 promise to bring down the cost of living for average families. It also reflects their hesitation about contesting Trump’s actions relating to immigration and crime.

The preponderance of evidence suggests that Democratic efforts to depict Donald Trump as a “threat to democracy” in the 2024 election did not move that many voters. What persuadable voters did seem to care about was the cost of living, which they perceived as having been vastly more affordable during Trump’s first term. And Trump also benefited from “issue advantages” over Kamala Harris on immigration and crime/law and order.

Unsurprisingly, many Democrats have been allergic to “threat to democracy” messaging ever since the 2024 election and have also shied away from much talk about immigration or crime on the hoary theory that you shouldn’t “play on enemy turf.” While waiting for Trump’s tariffs to produce the inflation that they rightly regard as a potential disaster for the 47th president, they have typically tried to identify a few narrowly material but broadly shared concerns associated with Trump’s agenda and have mostly settled on the Medicaid cuts that helped finance the high-end tax cuts in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Aside from the fear that swing voters are fine with dictatorship if it delivers cheap groceries and gasoline and are bored with hearing about Trump’s own criminal lawlessness, Democratic monomania about “kitchen-table issues” is also reinforced by the ancient prejudice of progressive “populists” in favor of pocketbook issues at the expense of cultural matters or “insider” institutional concerns they tend to dismiss as distractions from the real politics of class struggle. So there’s a double temptation for Democrats to downplay angst over Trump’s power grabs as “distractions” from the arguments that turn public opinion and win elections.

But there’s a big problem with this tunnel vision: Trump no longer represents a prospective “threat to democracy” who might fail to follow through on his thuggish authoritarian rhetoric, just as he often did during his amateurish first term. Depending on how you view his trajectory, he poses at the very least an imminent danger to democracy and is arguably in the process of converting America into an authoritarian regime. Nearly every step he has taken since last November, from building an administration stuffed with MAGA shock troops, to relentless, almost hourly claims of new presidential turf, to unprecedented assaults on private businesses and universities, to the rapid development of a national police force, shows that something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary — formally still a democracy, but under rigid one-party control — is Trump’s goal. So dismissing creeping fascism as a distraction from Medicaid cuts or the Epstein files is rightly infuriating to many Democratic activists. This approach implicitly legitimizes Trump’s lawlessness as relatively unimportant. When rank-and-file Democrats demand their congressional representatives show more “fight” against Trump, they aren’t asking for more frequent or louder protests about the distributional effects of the One Big Beautiful Act. They are alarmed more fundamentally about what’s happening to their country under a proto-fascist regime whose leader treats all opponents as traitors to be jailed, sued, deported, gerrymandered, or physically intimidated.

As Brownstein points out, it’s no accident that the non-congressional Democrats most focused on the fight against Trump’s authoritarianism are becoming rapidly more popular with the rank-and-file:

[J.B.] Pritzker has been unsparing in denouncing Trump as a “wannabe dictator,” as he put in a fiery news conference last week decrying the president’s threats to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. Surrounded by local business, religious and civic leaders, Pritzker struck a conspicuously more urgent tone than the party’s Congressional leadership. “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm,” Pritzker insisted, before describing the prospect of troops on Chicago streets as “unprecedented, unwarranted, illegal, unconstitutional, un-American.”

[Gavin] Newsom has attracted even more attention among Democrats by resisting Trump actions he’s portrayed as a threat to democracy through over three dozen lawsuits; speeches; mocking social media posts; and his ballot initiative to offset the Texas Republican gerrymander.

This isn’t to say that the GOP’s chronic assaults on the material interests of Americans, or its alignment with oligarchs, doesn’t matter, but it’s precisely what history tells us you can expect from any right-wing authoritarian movement in the kind of power Republicans now enjoy. Trump is forever declaring emergencies to justify his endless expansion of his own power. It’s time for Democrats to recognize the real emergency that threatens to make economics almost irrelevant.

Democrats Can’t Afford to Ignore Trump’s Creeping Fascism

Democrats Can’t Afford to Ignore Trump’s Creeping Fascism