Politics are often distorted by arguments rooted in false choices. It’s hard to find a better example than the one Democrats keep wrestling with: Should they focus their energies on the survival of constitutional democracy or on economics?
For many in the party’s grass roots, it’s obvious that President Trump’s abuses of power and his grasp for unchecked authority frame the most important question to put before the country — all the more so because Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court have been unwilling to restrain him. Now, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, Mr. Trump and his administration are vowing a crackdown on any organizations and individuals it regards as part of “the left,” a dangerous escalation of the president’s attacks on core political freedoms.
No, say the critics — this issue may resonate with MSNBC viewers, but it won’t move swing voters. The Democrats’ energy should be dedicated instead to highlighting Mr. Trump’s erratic stewardship of the economy, the persistence of inflation, his attacks on access to health care and his abandonment of the very working-class voters who helped elect him. After all, they say, wasn’t Kamala Harris defeated in 2024 because she spent too much time talking about her opponent’s threats to democracy and too little about prices?
This debate is flawed on many levels, including the most obvious: Politicians are entirely capable of talking about more than one issue at once. Mr. Trump regularly changes the subject whenever it’s convenient for him. Democrats can do this, too.
In any event, the economy is always on the minds of voters, and the chance of Democrats doing well in next year’s elections hangs in significant part on market forces beyond their control. “I don’t know that what the Democrats say will matter very much,” a Republican pollster, Whit Ayres, told me, “because history suggests that midterm elections are largely a referendum on the party in control of the White House.”
This is why the opposition’s priority now must be to show that the threat of authoritarian rule is real and unfolding every day. The economy will always be with us. Our free institutions might not.
The facts need to be laid out clearly and forcefully because we Americans are reluctant to acknowledge how fragile our freedoms are. We want to think that our institutions are so strong and durable that a repressive regime could never take root here. Most people can happily go about their daily lives without thinking much about Washington. Many in the worlds of politics and commentary worry about appearing alarmist or excessively partisan. They don’t want to be cast as victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
But there is nothing deranged about calling out threats to our liberties and the constitutional order. Political realism tells us that Mr. Trump’s authoritarian moves will not become a major issue outside Democratic circles unless his opponents make it one.
The catalog of his abuses is long, beginning with attacks on independent institutions with the power to critique and contain executive overreach: law firms, universities, the news media, judges, progressive groups and state and local governments.
The administration and its supporters have been shameless about embracing the trappings of authoritarian rule. Mammoth autocrat-style portraits of the president now hang on the facades of the headquarters of the Labor and Agriculture Departments; troops occupy the streets of the nation’s capital.
And don’t ignore his asides. He recently mused that “a lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator’” — even as he insisted he wasn’t one.
Americans need to pay attention to what many of the United States’ friends abroad make of what Mr. Trump is doing. In late summer, within days of one another, three of the shrewdest foreign commentators on the United States — Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, Andrew Coyne in The Toronto Globe and Mail and Gideon Rachman in The Financial Times — all warned in remarkably similar terms about the prospect of dictatorship.
Critics of moving the president’s authoritarianism center stage are not wrong to insist that economics matter. There’s a case to be made that Ms. Harris put too much emphasis on Mr. Trump’s authoritarian intentions in hopes of winning over moderate suburbanites, and too little on themes that might have turned out economically pressed voters who usually back Democrats. Ms. Harris received roughly 6.27 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020, and most of those who voted in 2020 but skipped 2024 were Biden voters.
But the big difference between 2024 and 2025 is that the dangers Ms. Harris talked about last year have become a reality. Reporters often found that swing Trump voters in 2024, people who were not part of the MAGA base, made arguments along the lines of “He wasn’t that bad the first time” or “The economy was better under him.” They could plausibly tell themselves this because until his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the Donald Trump of the first term was less likely to challenge democratic and constitutional rules and norms than the Donald Trump now in power. Alas for all of us, seeing Trump 1.0 as the prototype for Trump 2.0 was a mistake.
There are, however, lessons to be learned from 2024. The first is that focusing on democracy in the abstract is less effective than highlighting the specific dangers Mr. Trump poses to freedom and self-government. Voters have different ways of defining what “democracy” means but broadly share an understanding of the perils of one-man rule, the curtailment of individual rights, and the arbitrary use of military and prosecutorial power.
The other lesson — it applies as well to European nations facing an ascendant authoritarian right — is that defending free and democratic institutions does require a reckoning with the economic forces that have sapped public confidence in mainstream political parties, intensified opposition to immigration and created a wider audience for the appeals of authoritarian zealots. Stagnating incomes, disparities of wealth and a loss of confidence in the rewards for hard work have paved the way for extremism.
Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and one of his party’s strongest voices on the constitutional underpinnings of democracy, argues that one way out of the false choice between opposing authoritarianism and advancing an economic argument is to defend democracy’s “material achievements” as well as its “legal infrastructure.”
“When Democrats defend democracy, we must take care to defend all the programmatic achievements of democracy: Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, SNAP, public education, clean air and water, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act and so on,” Mr. Raskin told me in an email.
“Millions of people used their democratic rights to fight to improve the living standards, material security and quality of life of all our people, and we are the beneficiaries of a great democratic inheritance,” he added. “Democracy delivers concrete results, not abstract ones.”
Of course democracies need to renew popular faith that they still can deliver widely shared well-being. But the contrast with authoritarian regimes that shower benefits on rulers and elites who do their bidding should be made plain. Kleptocracy and autocracy, as Anne Applebaum argued in her 2024 book “Autocracy, Inc.,” are close cousins.
In normal times, political parties can argue about normal things — what government should spend money on, who should pay for it, which side is the better steward of the economy, which policies are more likely to promote growth, fairness and social mobility.
Those debates will continue. But they are occurring under the shadow of a threat to the very survival of self-rule that cannot be wished away. The responsibilities of the party that once called itself “the Democracy” are clear.
E. J. Dionne Jr. is a distinguished university professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics” and “Our Divided Political Heart.”
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