What Democrats Need to Do Now

In 2016, MAGA was just a slogan — or at best a spasm of resentments and instincts about issues like immigration. Over the last eight years, think tankers, activists and politicians have developed MAGA into a worldview, a worldview that now transcends Donald Trump.

Across the Western world, right-wing parties have ceased to be parties of the business elites and have become working-class parties. MAGA is the worldview that accords with this shifting reality. It has its roots in Andrew Jackson-style populism, but it is updated and more comprehensive. It is the worldview that represents one version of working-class interests and offers working-class voters respect.

JD Vance is the embodiment and one of the developers of this worldview — with his suspicion of corporate power, foreign entanglements, free trade, cultural elites and high rates of immigration. In Milwaukee this week, with Vance as Trump’s pick for vice president, it became clear how thoroughly MAGA has replaced Reaganism as the chief operating system of the Republican Party.

If Democrats want to beat MAGA, it’s not enough to say: Orange man bad. Talking endlessly about Jan. 6 does no good. If Democrats hope to win in the near future they have to take the MAGA worldview seriously, and respectfully make the case, especially to working-class voters, for something better.

At its best, what is MAGA, anyway?

Well, in any society, there is a legitimate tension between security and dynamism. In a volatile world, MAGA offers people security. It promises secure borders and secure neighborhoods. It offers protection from globalization, from the creative destruction of modern capitalism. It offers protection from an educated class that looks down on you and indoctrinates your children in school. It offers you protection from corporate predators. As Senator Josh Hawley argued in Compact magazine this week, “The C-suite long ago sold out the United States, shuttering factories in the homeland and gutting American jobs.”

To those who rightly feel buffeted by vast and destabilizing forces, Trump emerges as a kind of Aaron Sorkin character: “You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.” He offers security so people can get on with their lives.