On the chilly afternoon of New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani was inaugurated as the 112th mayor of New York City. Just hours earlier, I was returning from a late-night celebration when the first snow of the year began, flooding the city streets with white. I took the flurry to be an altogether auspicious sign of what 2026 would look like. Indeed, it foreshadowed the first major test of Mamdani’s term.

Within three weeks of taking office, Mamdani’s team was staring down an incoming snowstorm that would bury the city in frost and threatened to slow down traffic, undermine city services, and put New Yorkers at risk. The city has a vast and sprawling infrastructure for storm response, and the mayor’s team immediately went to work deploying it. In the days leading up to the storm, I saw videos of Mamdani everywhere—on TV, in cabs, and especially on social media—explaining what city workers would do to keep the streets clear and the city running. Parents were reassured that the mayor would make an informed decision about whether to close the schools (he didn’t), while young folks were enticed with a tongue-in-cheek offer to hole up indoors and read a free e-copy of Heated Rivalry. Mark Levine, the wonkish comptroller at Mamdani’s side, promoted a live tracker showcasing the non-stop work of the thousands of workers keeping the streets freshly plowed. All of this was punctuated by a series of media stunts wherein Mamdani was recorded helping working-class NYCHA residents shovel the snow that had frozen over their cars and front porches.

At the time, I wondered to myself whether Mamdani’s response to the storm had been unusually strong, or if we were just witnessing business as usual. After digging a bit, I concluded that while some mayors have certainly handled storms better than others (and other cities—like DC—had surely done worse than New York), the Mamdani administration’s process was nothing original. When I lived in Chicago—through the terms of two consecutive unpopular mayors—overnight snowplows still went on in fairly reliable fashion. This is the ordinary business of government that we should all expect, whether we have an all-star mayor or not.

Instead, what Mamdani had done differently was show what the city was doing. By blanketing the airwaves and internet with catchy videos of the city’s actions, he was helping to connect the work of city government with New Yorkers’ understanding of it. City taxpayers were given a clear example of the public goods their dollars were funding. Skeptics were offered reassurance of the administration’s technocratic competence. Home and small business owners were reminded of their own street-plowing responsibilities, perhaps boosting compliance. In not so many words, the mayor was attempting to tell the public: “I am on your side.”

A wide range of surveys show that Americans are less informed and less trusting of the political process than they have been in decades. Social platforms—adding to the long-running fragmentation of American media—certainly play a role, as do the increasingly blatant displays of incompetence and corruption from the country’s political class. An agenda for a more activist government requires rebuilding confidence that the political process can produce better outcomes. Zohran’s strategy, beginning with his campaign, is to be everywhere and speak to everyone all the time, and thereby cultivate a durable working- and middle-class coalition that can be the foundation for a more progressive politics.

Left Coast Blues

Across the country and in the other marquee city of American liberalism, another media-savvy mayor has been hitting a stride. Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, was elected mayor of San Francisco in 2024 on a very different message from Zohran. After years of political strife in San Francisco over perceived excesses of progressivism—paired with a sense of persistent disorder from property crime and street homelessness—a centrist coalition of business groups, Asian Americans, and reform-minded Democrats had elected a straight-shooting, hands-on outsider to shake up government and get crime under control. Strikingly, Lurie’s victory over the incumbent London Breed was more one of style than substance, as both had essentially been committed to the same program of strengthening law enforcement, building housing, and moving the homeless off the street and into treatment. The San Francisco Chronicle endorsed Breed as the “safe choice” and Lurie as the change candidate, before clarifying the day after that it was endorsing Lurie alone, arguing that he would bring a much-needed shaking up to City Hall.

Since his election, it has become something of a running joke in San Francisco that Lurie is everywhere. In his dorky yet endearing little-league-coach style, he is often seen walking around the streets of Chinatown or Union Square visiting local restaurants, cheering on the opening of a new Nintendo store, or talking about services for the homeless. All of this is posted throughout the day to his Instagram story, which can accumulate well over a dozen videos a day packed with phrases like “San Francisco is back” and “let’s go San Francisco!” Some videos tackle issues that would have made SF liberals uncomfortable just a few years ago. I distinctly remember watching a clip (which Lurie reposted) showing footage of illegal dirt bikes from a police surveillance drone, culminating in a scene of police officers ambushing the culprits at a gas station and putting them in cuffs. The unmistakable message is: “my administration will enforce the law.” And whatever you think of his politics, it’s working—Lurie is popular in SF, and ended his first year in office with an approval rating above 70%.

The early success of both Mamdani and Lurie may not last. Already, Mamdani is facing criticism over his administration’s policy of ending sweeps of homeless encampments—which he now appears to have reversed—while in San Francisco, the progressive left is preparing to mount its comeback by attacking (among other things) Lurie’s coziness with the tech industry. Nonetheless, I think there is something to be learned from their early wins, and I consider myself a fan of both.

Each mayor ran on a set of concrete issues that were tightly connected to voters’ anxieties at the time. For Mamdani, that was the cost-of-living crisis—far more acute in New York than anywhere else in America—while for Lurie, it was a pervasive sense of disorder and a feeling that San Francisco was losing its trademark edge. Each took early, visible actions to address them. Each speaks plainly, speaks to everyone, and is relentless about advertising the work of their team. And taken together, this media-forward strategy has had the effect of cultivating a coherent political brand for each of them. Most of us don’t pay enough attention to the news to know the mayor’s position on every issue. But given any issue, New Yorkers and San Franciscans now have enough of an idea about who their mayor is that they can probably make an educated guess. They may not always agree, but at least they know that the government has an agenda and is working to enact it.

Crucially, this approach is agnostic to what each mayor’s political views actually are. Certainly, it’s essential that their politics are a match for the issues of the day. Lurie wouldn’t have won in New York and Mamdani wouldn’t have won in SF. But I could just as easily imagine a moderate with the charisma and coherence of Mamdani defeating a more tedious leftist had New York’s election gone a bit differently. The thing that defines each of these mayors is their ability to command attention—to earn it, and then to hold it.

The Debate That Won’t Die

In the aftermath of the first Trump victory, a heated debate kicked off among Democratic strategists about why the left lost the 2016 election, and what it would take to win the country back. On one side, “popularists”—backed by the work of pollsters like David Shor—argued that the party had strayed too far from popular issues, and that to win again Democrats would need to get back to basics, focusing on the (often but not always) moderate positions that had previously led Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to victory. On hot button issues related to crime, immigration, or trans rights, the party would be better off staying quiet and keeping the focus on the economy. On the other side, “deliverists” contended that the real problem was a lack of trust in government to deliver results, and that enacting tangible policies that improve voters’ conditions of life—even if they don’t initially poll well—will eventually be rewarded by partisan loyalty, enabling Democrats to hold the line on culture war issues. Implicit in this view for many who espouse it is that Democrats can afford to move left, and might actually benefit from doing so.

This debate has not progressed much over the past five years. After the ups and downs of the Biden years and now the return of Trump, both sides have some evidence to recommend them. Popularists cite the success of electoral over-performers like Ruben Gallego, who abandoned his Congressional Progressive Caucus membership and eschewed certain left-wing orthodoxies (chiefly taking a harder line on the border) in order to cruise to victory in his 2024 race for an Arizona Senate seat, running eight points ahead of Kamala Harris. Deliverists lean on the popularity of Lina Khan’s aggressive antitrust actions (“click to cancel”, banning junk fees) and the results of programs like congestion pricing in New York, which started off politically underwater but has quickly become a sweeping success.

Likewise, both sides have found ways to blame the other for Kamala Harris’s election defeat. Moderate commentators like Matt Yglesias and Nate Silver have tied her loss to the left-wing positions she took as a Senator and during the 2020 election, which unmistakably branded her as a far-lefty in the eyes of American voters (despite her futile efforts to moderate in 2024). Others argue that the Biden administration’s unusually bold economic agenda of infrastructure investment, robust antitrust enforcement, support for organized labor, and large-scale stimulus spending failed to win back working class swing voters in the way Biden’s brain trust had hoped it would. Depending on who you ask, this suggests some combination of the following: 1) left-wing policies don’t work, and probably fuel inflation, so it’s time to go back to neoliberalism, 2) Americans actually don’t mostly vote on material outcomes, and politics has become much more about cultural identification, and 3) any tangible victories will necessarily be filtered through right-wing media, preventing Americans from correctly assigning credit for strong economic outcomes to a Democratic president. The implication: focus on doing fewer things well, passing the “right” policies (even if they don’t deliver immediate tangible relief), and keeping to the cultural middle ground. Relative to Republican extremism, this formula will give Democrats a favorable reputation by comparison.

Those on the other side of this debate just as easily argue that Kamala Harris’s attempts to moderate in the 2024 election—lines like “I own a glock” and praises of America’s “lethal” military—went nowhere, meaning running on poll-tested platitudes did very little to improve her image. Had she instead focused on tangible economic promises, they argue, she would have stood a much stronger chance against Trump. Indeed, even as Harris primarily focused on a “protecting democracy” message down the electoral finish line, internal polling from her largest Super PAC, Future Forward, showed that her most effective ads were consistently those about cracking down on grocery store price gouging and bad landlords. We now know that her campaign was deeply divided internally about which strategy to pursue—democracy-first or economic populist—and the democratic preservationists prevailed as the campaign put some distance between itself and the highly popular Lina Khan. In other words, these critics argue that true deliverism has never been tried.

Winning Hearts, Minds, and Wallets

In my opinion, both the “popularist” and “deliverist” positions contain seeds of truth, and yet both also leave something to be desired. It’s probably true that undoing Trumpism will take more than delivering short-term material gains. Right-wing populism has deep sociological foundations, and the correlated emergence of political extremism around the world during the 2010s suggests that other factors—like the emergence of social media—share much of the blame. If that’s true, then healing America will require a generational process of institutional reform; there is no silver bullet. Still, winning elections matters, as both sides acknowledge. Keeping the right out of office is essential for halting democratic backsliding, and buys time and political capital for these reforms to be enacted. My best read of the evidence is that both improving material conditions and speaking to the broad cultural middle are important for getting elected and re-elected. That means that at this moment, Democrats can learn lessons from both Bernie Sanders and Bill Clinton.

But what both sides of this debate miss is that attention is the filter through which both popular messages and productive policies are interpreted. And in this moment, winning attention requires both having a megaphone (being everywhere, speaking to everyone) and having a coherent brand that ties the policy and message together. I don’t believe that the Biden administration’s thesis—that bold economic action can help overcome Trumpism—was wrong, and I think there is a very strong case for many of those policies on the merits. But I do believe it was incomplete. For starters, the administration failed to accurately convey to Americans what it was doing and the results it was generating. Unlike Trump, Biden was not one to shamelessly take credit for everything he did. We didn’t have billboards all over the country saying “Democrats built this bridge,” or “opened this factory.” Most voters didn’t know that Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation was the reason airlines were forced to automatically refund tickets after three-hour delays. These changes largely went unnoticed. Part of the problem was that the president was quickly aging out of the job, and as most Americans knew, didn’t actually have the energy to carry out its persuasive demands. Part of it was also that many of the policies remained purely hypothetical for far too long, as investments in green energy and manufacturing were hampered by lengthy permitting processes and environmental reviews. The next Democratic president will need to spend much more time on the road, showcasing the results of their agenda and highlighting the ordinary operation of government—perhaps even taking credit for achievements that aren’t strictly their own.

Kamala Harris’s problem in the 2024 election was somewhat different. She didn’t yet have the opportunity to deliver a tangible outcome, so her task was instead to define herself and her future administration for a national audience. In the lead up to the first presidential debate, nearly a third of voters polled as wanting to know more about her before casting their vote. Harris did win that debate, successfully predicting many of the terrible developments that have since come to pass. But what she failed to do was establish a consistent brand that unified her messaging and her policy agenda. Her last-ditch attempts at moderation may or may not have given her a boost in the polls, but they did not explain why she had given up her previous self-definition as a progressive firebrand. When asked, for example, why she had dropped her call to ban fracking, she leaned on a common refrain—“my values have not changed”—but didn’t actually offer voters insight into how she approaches tough decisions and therefore what kind of president she would make. In this sense, Harris’s loss tells us little about the virtues of running moderate candidates. Successful moderate elected officials—like Lurie in San Francisco or Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro—have an identity and a story that they have cultivated over years and reinforced through both their policy actions and their messaging. Despite today’s short attention spans, voters know what they are for. In Harris’s case, the task was to define herself in a way that would convince voters that electing her would lead to noticeable improvement in their lives, and on this she (narrowly) failed. Granted, she was in an incredibly unenviable position given Joe Biden’s unpopularity and long-belated decision to drop out. It’s possible that given these circumstances (not to mention the double standards she faced given her racial and gender background), it would have been near-impossible for her to win even with perfect execution. But given how devastating the consequences of her loss have been, it’s hard not to wonder what if.

All of this is to say that I don’t think the case for a bolder progressive agenda has been discredited. But nor is it the only way for Democrats to make a comeback. Whether left or center, what Democrats need in this moment are leaders who can build a complete story about the problems we face, execute an agenda with relentless focus on those problems, and hold the ear of voters along the way. Each leader’s experiences, biography, and rhetoric should ideally match up with the story they’re telling, creating an authentic image that is difficult for others to replicate. Right now, the issue of the day is affordability and so this will mean offering up a clear message about how to deliver rapid relief that brings down the cost of living. Crucially, the policies still need to work, or any trust earned will dry up quickly. But while good outcomes are a key condition for success, they are not on their own sufficient. If Trumpism truly is the existential threat Democrats portray it to be, then it merits a transformative response—one that reshapes Americans’ expectations about what government can deliver—to overcome it.

Playing With Fire

Behind the scenes, some of the smarter figures in the party see the writing on the wall and are clearly moving in this direction. In recent weeks, I’ve read a series of op-eds making the case for various forms of short-term relief—like temporary price freezes—that “buy time” for longer-term structural reforms (say, building more housing or expanding childcare services) to work. The implicit argument is that a future Democratic administration can use these tools—one of the authors I spoke to called them “shiny objects”—to show that they are doing something quickly, and to hold the attention of Americans while they tackle the deeper causes of the problem. This approach seems to be transcending the traditional left/center divide in Democratic politics, with both the democratic socialist Mamdani and New Jersey’s recently-elected moderate governor, Mikie Sherrill, winning on pledges for these kinds of short-term actions (“freeze the rent”; freeze utility rates).

This is a delicate balancing act, and I have mixed feelings about it. If Democrats put forward shiny objects but fail to deliver the longer-term reforms they seek, they will end up overpromising and underdelivering, thereby further eroding trust in government. That could produce a greater backlash than not taking those actions at all. Moreover, a political strategy that relies on taking credit for everything, all the time, can quickly spiral into demagoguery and the erosion of small-d democratic norms. Politicians across the spectrum are likely to quickly converge on this strategy, and while it may enable each to eke out short-term gains, it’s hard to see such an outcome resulting in a more informed political process.

An illustrative example: walking around New York these days, I often see videos of Mayor Mamdani on LinkNYC screens advertising the city’s childcare programs and encouraging people to enroll. Though he doesn’t say it in the videos explicitly, the implication is that the programs are one of his administration’s signature initiatives—a reminder that the mayor is rapidly delivering results. And indeed, a week into his term, Mamdani and New York Governor Kathy Hochul did jointly announce a new childcare initiative that will expand New York’s offering to two-year olds and gradually make 3-K and Pre-K universal. But those changes, in fact, have yet to go into effect and will take years to be fully enacted. The programs Mamdani has been promoting on screen predate his mayoralty in entirety. Moreover, previous administrations couldn’t put videos with the mayor’s likeness on city-owned screens because of a 2007 state law banning elected officials from appearing in official PSAs, intended to prevent the city from funding de-facto campaign ads. But Mamdani’s administration found a workaround through the creative use of a legal loophole, and now on any walk in Manhattan, you’re likely to run into his smiling face. On the one hand, I think this is a testament to his team’s political genius and exactly the kind of thing that a revived left could do to sell its achievements in the future. On the other, I recognize that in the long term, this could be a recipe for our politics’ continued slide into what is essentially a popularity contest with low-information voters.

Breaking out of this cycle will probably require deep structural reforms that reduce polarization, promote voter education, and restrict who can fund elections and what kinds of content they can promote. Once again, I’m forced to conclude that this is at best a generational task. In the meantime, just how far our side is willing to take the plunge into an algorithmically savvy, attention-oriented political strategy is an open question. Years from now, I would much prefer our politics to be more about the facts and evidence; for political speeches to be honest conversations with voters about values and tradeoffs. (See, for example, this address President Obama gave to Congress in 2009 making an honest case for healthcare reform.)

But I believe that even a candidate who runs on those reforms—who makes a principled case for pro-democracy and anti-corruption measures and for turning down the temperature—will probably only succeed if they can hold the attention of the country while they are doing so. Only this will enable them to build the brand and therefore trust from voters needed to weather the enormous opposition they will inevitably face. So while I hope that one day we no longer need to play the game of attentional hyper-politics that lies before us, I also think that the only way out may well be through. If I’m right, Democrats have much to learn from the mayor.

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This post was written before the tragic killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis yesterday. Right now, the fight to stop ICE’s assault on innocent Americans’ fundamental rights is paramount, led by the brave protestors standing up for their neighbors in Minnesota and across the country. The essay below speaks to a much longer-term question of the United States’ role in the world, one which can only be addressed after we secure democracy at home.

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Earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos that shocked observers around the world and which may well mark a defining turning point in global politics. It’s 15 minutes, and if you have the time, I think it’s worth watching in full. The passage below especially stood out to me:

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

And his answer began with a greengrocer.

Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe it, no one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Havel called this “living within a lie.”

The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

Carney, an economist-turned-central-banker and clearly a student of history, here inverts Havel’s critique of Soviet communism and directs it at the system that ostensibly brought it to an end—the liberal democratic global order led by the United States. In his telling, nations like Canada (and Europe, Japan, Australia, and so on) have been holding up the sign for the US-led system for decades, recognizing that while the story of that system is in part a lie, doing so has been, on balance, in their interest. Now, as the Trump administration seeks to weaponize the interdependence resulting from that system—not just against its enemies, but against its friends—the bargain no longer makes sense. “Middle powers” instead must band together and create newer, more flexible arrangements that can protect their interests and the values they hold dear.

One of the reasons Carney’s speech was so resonant is that in the days leading up to it, President Trump had been threatening a handful of European countries with tariffs if they did not assent to the US’s “Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.” The Greenland saga began at the start of Trump’s second term, and was originally mostly laughed off by observers who saw it as yet another of the President’s short-lived fixations. But after months of watching the US torch its relationships with other countries through an ill-conceived package of sweeping tariffs, and the subsequent illegal deposition of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the world was waking up to a new reality—Trump is increasingly unshackled from any real political or economic constraints, and therefore has the power to deal an immense amount of damage to the rest of the world if he chooses to. The response to this feeling was immediately felt in global stock markets, which rapidly sold off American stocks and the dollar on Tuesday in a reaction similar to that previously seen on “Liberation Day,” when investors began to doubt whether the US’s economic preeminence could hold.

Trump, for his part, appeared to back off from these threats soon after, pledging not to take Greenland by “excessive force” on Wednesday and dropping his threat of Greenland-related tariffs later that day. Some will look at this episode and see yet another episode of Trump “chickening out” in response to the first hint of resistance from the market, which he apparently uses as the yardstick of just how far he can go.

In a narrow sense, this is certainly true. Trump still has some Wall Street types—chiefly Scott Bessent—in his ear, and despite their loyalty oaths even they can see that Trump’s most extreme provocations threaten the stability of the financial system. But it would be premature to say that this walk-back puts the issue to rest.

Consider what happened in the days following Trump’s threats. Several of America’s European allies—including Britain, France, Germany, and the Nordic countries—sent military reinforcements to Greenland to signal that even Trump’s far-fetched threats of military force would be taken seriously. Members of the European Parliament were prepared to freeze a pending US-EU trade deal and had teed up retaliatory tariffs on over $100 billion of American goods. Some were even considering the use of the so-called “bazooka option,” formally known as the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI), which would enable a sweeping shutdown on investment and services trade (such as contracts with US tech companies) in order to block America from wielding its leverage to get what it wanted. Now, the most extreme of these scenarios was likely never going to pass. But the fact that some of these options were even on the table is astounding. The ACI was proposed in 2021 in response to Chinese trade restrictions on Lithuania during a dispute over Taiwan. As any European leader would tell you, it is a tool of last resort, meant to protect Western Europe from interference by hostile great powers—especially authoritarian states like Russia and China. And yet, Trump brought the US scarily close to being its very first target.

Viewed from this perspective, it’s clear that Trump’s erratic moves count for more than just bluster. They have fundamentally altered the perceived reliability of the US as a partner around the world, and Carney’s speech strikes at the heart of that. Even if America elects a Democratic president in three years, it won’t change the fact that one of the two major parties in the US was able to elevate someone like Trump to the country’s highest office—and remains squarely behind him. So long as the median Republican voter is willing to advance someone with Trumpian politics out of a presidential primary, the threat will remain that his ideas make a comeback, which makes it imperative for other countries to plan for the worst. The radical takeover of the Republican party can no longer be written off as a one-time “aberration.”

We are already beginning to see the effects of this play out. Last week, Canada signed a fresh trade deal with China, most notably granting Chinese EV manufacturer BYD partial access to the Canadian market on a “most-favored nation” basis. This reversed Canada’s previous policy, which placed 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, likely in coordination with the US’s own policy to the same effect. The immediate consequence of this will be to put American automakers (and, in turn, autoworkers) at a disadvantage, preventing them from scaling up production to the point where they could reasonably stand a chance of competing with China’s highly efficient production process. Canada is exploring similar deals with countries in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia (including those in the TPP, which the US walked away from in 2017). Europe is following suit, recently finalizing a deal with Mercosur, a bloc of South American countries including Argentina and Brazil. Germany, once secure under the umbrella of NATO, has now set a target of nearly doubling its military spending. None of these countries are disengaging from the US wholesale, but the search for alternatives is intensifying and will gradually erode the foundation of America’s leadership.

Why should Americans care? Should we care? Oftentimes in discussions about America’s role in the world, I find a first-order defense of the US’s value to be lacking. America is a democracy, but so what? It’s not obvious that a democracy wielding the reins of global military and economic power makes the rest of the world any more democratic. And as Carney, himself the personification of the globalist, liberal-democratic system said himself, the western “liberal order” has always been partly built on a lie—the US has often exempted itself from the rules it claimed it supported, whether by pursuing an illegal war of choice in Iraq or by turning a blind eye as American bombs fueled genocidal acts of aggression in Gaza. While this critique—which I have always found to be trenchant—is most strongly identified with the progressive left, a similar question has been posed to perhaps even greater effect by the new right. Does America’s role as a global superpower really serve Americans, or does it just act as a transfer from the rich to the poor, the strong to the weak?

Among these two, I find the far right’s critique much easier to dismiss out of hand. Americans enjoy enormous advantages from its preeminence in the world, ranging from the government’s ease of borrowing money during crises (compare America’s recoveries after the major recessions of this century to those of Europe) to the preferential treatment of American drugs, crops, and technology in international markets. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Big Pharma have certainly stood to gain from American-led globalism, but so too has the country’s middle class, which enjoys easy travel via passport to 179 countries, and gets to live in larger homes, go on fancier vacations, and purchase more appliances and consumer goods than their European peers.1 America’s leaders have, I think, done a terrible job of translating these gains into broad-based benefits for the working class and the poor, who face a much weaker social safety net than in other advanced countries and still have great difficulty securing access to healthcare, childcare, and housing. But this would be the fault of America’s regressive and backwards domestic politics, tinted by corruption and racial prejudice—a fault which remains eminently possible to correct if we can muster the political courage to do so.

The left’s critique bites harder. Especially for those of us growing up in the aughts, the post-World War II story of America as a shining city on a hill has never held full purchase. We learned that our country’s leaders committed and covered up heinous crimes in the name of a War on Terror. We watched the American electorate vote twice—the latter time by a popular plurality—for a campaign explicitly grounded in nativism and vengeance. We saw the credibility of many of our more “liberal” leaders crumble as they failed time after time to enforce America’s existing human rights laws, cloaking their defense of unfathomable war crimes in tightly scripted legalese. Perhaps it would be fairest to say that Gaza, not Greenland, marked the death knell for the liberal democratic order.

And yet, where does that leave us? My appraisal is that while America has always been a ruthless, self-interested superpower, there has also always been a streak of liberalism—a “better angel of our nature,” if you will—that has sometimes pushed us in a better direction. This streak, best thought of as one attitude among many of the American electorate and a faction of the American policy elite, explains some of our proudest achievements: interventions that halted ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo,2 aid programs that saved tens of millions of lives from AIDS and malaria, special operations that stemmed the outbreak of Ebola and helped countless nations recover from natural disasters. Far more important than all of this are the mundane background changes that have occurred during this time: under the postwar system of open trade and common defense, the incidence of major war has declined around the world, hundreds of millions of immigrants have moved across borders (launching businesses, starting families, and gradually eroding the enduring barrier of racial difference), and over two billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. Literacy, food security, the status of women, and life expectancy have all made meteoric strides during this period.

It would be hyperbolic to attribute all of this to the United States, but the “rules-based” system has provided the framework under which this progress has been made. America’s navy has secured global sea lanes, making international exchange possible. NATO’s protection has enabled Western European states to invest more in humane domestic policies. The norm of sovereignty—however imperfectly enforced—has helped limit escalation in some of the most conflict-prone zones in the world. The question in front of us is as follows: do the actions of a fickle liberal faction in American politics justify the continuation of such an unbalanced and risky system? Or is the world better off starting anew? Certainly, Carney is right that if the US continues down its current path, the remaining democracies of the world will have no choice but to build something different. But we should not be naive about how difficult that will be. Without the support of one of the world’s major powers, these nations will struggle to exercise autonomy over important decisions related to security and economic growth. They will pursue a policy of “values-based realism,” as Carney terms it3—that is, their ability to pursue their values of freedom, tolerance, and human rights will be constrained by the cold realities of international politics. It is no coincidence that Carney’s pitch, hailed by liberals in the United States, coincides with his government’s right-leaning agenda to cut taxes on the wealthy, boost fossil fuel production, double defense spending, and engage more deeply with rights-abusing states like Qatar. These are the “realistic” choices that countries make when they stare down a fragmented and hostile international environment, and they are likely to become more common in the years ahead.

An unsentimental—one might say realist—view of the situation is that Carney has laid out a rational path for countries to follow under fairly pessimistic assumptions about the United States. If the US remains a rogue and unpredictable actor, better to try a go at it alone alongside your like-minded peers. As an American, I admire Carney’s resolve but must protest his conclusion. I would much prefer to see a world where the US reverses the damage to its international reputation and seeks to engage with the rest of the world constructively. It is unlikely that we will return to the era of unipolar dominance that followed the immediate end of the Cold War; nor should we. But even if all democracies are condemned to live in a world of “values-based realism” for the foreseeable future, they will still be far better off with America on their side. A US that is constructively, even if imperfectly, engaged with the democracies of the world will provide an economic and military heft that unlocks more options for the world to move in a more progressive direction. It will enable countries to coordinate their efforts on thorny issues related to energy, security, and trade, reducing the need for short-termist actions that threaten the environment, the poor, and human rights.

No other major power can fulfill this role. Relative to the alternatives, the US is still unique for its relatively democratic political culture and for its diversity of background and thought. China, despite its major progress in human development, remains a racially homogenous and exclusionary authoritarian state, which sustains its immensely unequal state capitalist system with the brutal suppression of speech rights, labor rights, and the freedom of movement.4 The case against Russia writes itself. So long as the majority of the world’s population remains under undemocratic governments, achieving true global justice for all will remain impossible, but there are real ways in which the actions of the world’s democracies can help. I believe that progressives in the United States, despite their well-justified skepticism of America as a force for good, should want our country to seek to live up to those ideals and once again aim to lead—perhaps this time, partner with—like-minded nations who value the same things we do.

Doing this means, first and foremost, attacking Trumpism at its root. On this, progressives have ideas. The next few years will witness a heated debate about affordability and the economy, and will offer Democrats a fresh chance to prove that they can offer a better deal for America’s strained middle class. Trump’s drastic missteps have created a major opening for the left, and I am optimistic that they can ultimately find a way to settle their differences and meet the moment. However, winning a single election will not put the issue to rest. Progressives will need to offer American voters a better story about how the US should navigate social change and engage with the rest of the world, including making potentially difficult choices around America’s openness to immigration and cultural identity. Moreover, they will need to actually deliver the sustained economic improvement they promise, a task which is easier said than done. Ultimately, they will need to persuade a critical segment of voters that their current perception of the two parties is wrong, and that Democrats reliably offer a better bargain—thereby reshuffling both parties’ political coalitions enough to dislodge Trumpian politics from their iron grip on the GOP.

This task alone is a tall order, and more than enough to be the singular focus of the left for the next few years. My hope is that, should they gain some traction in doing so, they do not lose sight of the stakes for the rest of the world. We should not allow the sins of our nation’s past to destroy our will to build something better. Absolutely, those faults should compel us to act with humility, and to push for sweeping reforms that will raise standards, democratize international institutions, and create real accountability for our leaders. And yet, walking away from the rest of the world will be worse for virtually every goal that progressives care about. The signs may be coming down today for good reason. We, the opposition, should do everything in our power to make it worth putting them back up.