We’re thrilled to read the generative responses to our essay. They share a common understanding of the scope of the authoritarian threat facing the United States, whose consequences grow ever more dire as we write. But this is largely where the commonalities end. There are two main lines of debate: what caused the current crisis, and how we can get out of it.

We strongly endorse many of the cited causes. Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown rightly identify the hollowing out of Democratic-aligned civil society groups like unions and local party organizations, especially in rural areas. Several respondents—Thomas Ferguson, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Jared Abbot and Milan Loewer, Eric Rauchway, Danielle Wiggins, and Lily Geismer—justly criticize Democrats’ rightward turn on economic policy. Julia Serano is right to stress the innovations of the conservative movement in coordinating outrage against transgender rights and social liberalism more broadly. Cori Bush and Henry Burke call much-needed attention to the pernicious effects of policy and messaging driven by wealthy donors. And while we believe it is more the result of structural forces than choices made by Democrats, Matthew Yglesias is right to point to the nationalization of U.S. politics—including nationally focused (social) media, fundraising, and activism—as a new political environment that has stymied Democrats.

As for prescriptions, we find some compelling—especially Bush’s rousing call to ditch corporate PAC money, run working-class candidates, and fight for something much more than votes. For evidence of the small-minded electoralism that has crowded out credible moral and political vision within the Democratic Party, look no further than Chuck Schumer’s uninspired speech on the Senate floor last week, ending with the tepid injunction to “go to the ballot box and vote out the liars.” In similar fashion, William Galston bizarrely misreads us as claiming that “electoral victory is the best weapon against authoritarianism.” Simply trying to win another election is as far from the “genuine reform” we call for as it’s possible to get, and confusing the two is a big reason we’re here in the first place.

When it comes to other proposed paths forward, however, we are less confident. Take Brown and Mettler’s case for organizing in rural America. We’d love to rebuild federated mass membership groups, and we’d be especially happy to see organized labor reclaim its role as a driving force for multiracial democracy. We see some bright spots, including labor’s recent role in resisting ICE in Minneapolis and the Democratic National Convention’s plan to invest more in state party organizations. But we should be clear-eyed: economic and technological change have made it impossible to recreate the rich group ecology of the past. Civil society is now mostly online and national or even global in scope; local, in-person groups are the exception, and when they do form nowadays, it is often in response to events caught on video and shared on social media. The clustering of better jobs in dense metro areas has upended traditional union organizing in manufacturing towns. Union density is now concentrated in the public sector, and private-sector organizing derives its energy from younger, more liberal workers in the service industry.

Or take the case of economic policy. The modern Republican Party’s economic agenda ranks among the least popular in the history of polling. By contrast, the Biden administration and Democratic Congress of 2021–2023 was more economically populist, expansionary, and focused on manufacturing jobs than any U.S. regime in half a century. That is, of course, a low bar: the economy certainly wasn’t transformed. But it should give us pause that the relationship between the economy and public sentiment fundamentally changed in the 2020s, with wages becoming less important and price levels much more central. It should also give us pause that many voters trusted Trump on inflation in 2024 despite a policy agenda that would very clearly raise prices. We see the labor movement and economic populism as necessary but far from sufficient in this new environment.

The most misguided solution, though, is popularism as currently practiced. Our essay argued for “experimentation and exploration” in this new, volatile, and uncertain moment in electoral politics. Popularism, as advocated by Yglesias and defended by Galston, has actively hindered both.

To begin with, Yglesias is way off in claiming that moderation increases a candidate’s vote share by “one to two percentage points.” We don’t know where he got these numbers, but they aren’t in our essay; as our cited graphic shows, the best estimate is less than half a percentage point. He also need not speculate that moderating would have flipped important congressional races—we ran the numbers ourselves and found that moderation would have flipped none of the close House races in 2024. But we’re used to seeing incorrect numbers on this subject.

In any case, Yglesias’s incorrect numbers are not as important as missing the central failures of popularism in recent years. Consider how it has hindered Democrats’ leadership on public opinion. G. Elliott Morris is exactly right that trajectories are far more important than what polls say at any given moment. Throughout 2025, as Yglesias was arguing that Democrats shouldn’t talk about immigration, the public turned dramatically against Trump on the issue in part due to the leadership of some Democratic leaders like Senator Chris Van Hollen. Now even Trump himself is reportedly “looking to change the subject to his economic agenda as his administration faces growing backlash over his immigration crackdown.” (Trump’s outreach to Zohran Mamdani and Elizabeth Warren may have something to do with this, as Ferguson suggests.) Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador last April was not “shooting the moon,” as Yglesias likes to say. It was a realistic plan that taking action would throw a wrench in further attacks on due process, and that the public would reward moral leadership.

And yet the popularists are still getting it wrong. On January 14, a week after Renee Good was killed, the centrist Searchlight Institute issued a directive imploring Democrats to stick to “reforming and retraining” officers. Schumer agreed, pushing for economy-only “kitchen table” messaging for the midterms. But then Alex Pretti was murdered, and polls showed that abolishing ICE had net +5 support among U.S. adults and +12 among independents. Only upon seeing massive public outrage did Schumer pivot to shutting down the government to prevent more ICE funding. This is politics as poll-watching, not leadership.

Even if you think politicians can only react to public opinion rather than influence it—and we strongly dispute that—true leaders understand policy and anticipate how the public will react to it. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know what a mass deportation force will do. But it does take some actual knowledge of politics and a real desire to make voters understand the stakes. Instead, popularists’ favorite Democrats continue to be caught flatfooted. Moderate congressman Tom Suozzi was forced to issue an apology to his constituents after voting to increase Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding two weeks ago. By sticking to popularist both-sides statements about the occupation of Minneapolis, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is being left behind by public opinion—and by history. Moderate triangulation has done nothing to help these Democrats convey to voters the real differences between Democratic and Republican policy agendas because, as Amanda Litman wisely argues, trust is not related to being moderate or progressive. These are failures of popularism on its own terms.

Ironically, popularism simultaneously fails to consider opinion trajectories and extrapolates too far from public opinion shifts. Timothy Shenk points to rightward shifts among Latino, African American, and working-class voters in 2024. Pollster David Shor went even further when young male voters went hard for Trump, arguing that Gen Z had become “the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.” What happened since? Young and Latino Americans have swung against Trump in dramatic fashion. Popularists insisted a realignment was in the offing, but when these voters saw his policies in action, they hated them. And these shifts happened despite this entire policy agenda being written down for all to see in Project 2025.

As Litman also notes, popularism has also hindered exploration in candidate recruitment and leadership promotion. While popularists focus on messaging tweaks and strategic positioning for existing candidates, the party remains a geriatric incumbency-protection machine governed according to seniority. Eight sitting Democratic members of Congress have died in office since 2022. Litman is on point: the party has struggled to recruit and support younger, compelling candidates, and positions on the left-right spectrum cannot substitute for authenticity.

Galston claims we must be mistaken about popularist-counseled moderation demobilizing the base and dampening enthusiasm because Democrats saw record-high turnout in the 2020 general election. We think this reasoning exemplifies the fallaciousness so characteristic of prominent pro-moderation arguments. For one thing, Biden’s campaign coordinated with Bernie Sanders—a decidedly unmoderate move that even Yglesias called for to “unify the party.” For another, as we argued, tweaking ideological positioning on the left-right spectrum no longer determines election results—turnout is fueled by other factors. Most importantly, Biden failed at his prime directive: ending Trumpism. Wary of launching “divisive” investigations into Trump, he was an unpopular president by 2024, and Trumpism came back stronger than ever.

The pathologies of popularism are further evident in the retirement of Jared Golden. A moderate Democrat who won a Trump-leaning district in Maine, he is something like a LeBron James of politics for popularists. As we noted, however, by 2025 his favorability was deep in the red. In an apparent exception to the popularist principle that you must obey public opinion rather than try to change it, Yglesias did not counsel Golden to retire early due to his low favorability but rather claimed that “progressive criticism of Golden has driven him from office.” To add insult to injury, Golden joined Suozzi as one of the seven House Democrats to vote to increase DHS funding two weeks ago—and he took this vote after he announced he wouldn’t run again. So much for Ezra Klein’s argument that Democrats must “learn from” Golden.

A final but especially important reason that popularism has put the United States at greater, not lower, risk of authoritarianism is the Democratic Party’s overly cautious use of institutional authority and political power beyond elections. Popularism doesn’t just urge candidates to check the polls before making a campaign decision; by defining politics down to poll-watching, it trains leaders to check with polls before governing—any use of their legislative and administrative power. Successful opposition parties in authoritarian environments around the world don’t do this: they engage in politics in order to wield power, not just to win or maintain it. But in the United States, the opposition party sees elections as its only tool, even as the regime repeatedly and brazenly threatens electoral integrity. The implicit pitch is “at least if you vote for us, you keep the right from governing.” Examples of Democratic squeamishness about power abound. The Democrats have just now begun to engage in partisan gerrymandering, fifteen years after Republicans used it to tremendous gain. And Democratic politicians who call Trump a dictator have voted for nearly all of his nominees in the Senate.

In this, Democratic leaders are the ultimate popularists—waiting to use their institutional power until it is overwhelmingly clear that public opinion is on their side. The results have been disastrous. Most consequential was the hesitancy of the Department of Justice under Merrick Garland to swiftly and aggressively prosecute Trump for the coup attempt on January 6, 2021. That’s exactly the opposite of what Lula’s government has done to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil after Bolsonaro’s own coup attempt. As seen across more than two dozen other countries that convicted or banned from office national leaders for constitutional violations and crimes since 2010, this is not an impossible task.

Twenty years ago, Yglesias coined the term Green Lantern Theory to (rightfully) mock the neoconservative conceit that the United States can achieve anything in geopolitics with sufficient willpower. The idea has since been regularly trotted out against critics of Democrats for being insufficiently progressive—a way of saying, you naïve utopians just don’t get that politics operates under hard constraints; the party has its heart in the right place and really does try hard, but it can’t just will its way around moderate and conservative opposition. Thus Klein’s retort to those who thought Barack Obama could have achieved more. It’s true that constraints exist, that it’s easier to destroy than to build, and that the U.S. Constitution and the law must be followed. But even within those bounds, 2025 has shown that you can, indeed, just do stuff.

Popularist pundits and consultants mostly didn’t directly command Democratic leaders to do nothing. But they are also central to Democrats’ timidity around the last backstop against authoritarianism: protest. After all of the handwringing about “defund the police” and property destruction, the quantitative evidence finally came in: Black Lives Matter protests helped Democrats. ICE protests in Los Angeles appear to have performed similarly despite moderates fretting about the appearance of Mexican flags and a burned Waymo. Minneapolis, of course, now takes the cake.

Many have asked where young people are in the No Kings protests and other recent actions for democracy. Indeed, student protest movements appear to be necessary for preventing an authoritarian takeover. But on this score, Democratic leaders should look inward. In part due to their own ideological commitments and in part due to popularist-inculcated timidity, Democratic leaders worked with Republicans, university presidents, and other leaders to crush student activism on Gaza in 2024. There are many reasons why, but popularist pressure is surely one of them. At the start of the war, Yglesias observed that polling showed much higher support for Israelis than Palestinians. Again public opinion has moved dramatically.

Here we also have a good example of why Yglesias’s misreading of David Broockman’s paper matters. Democrats became more moderate on the left-right spectrum by taking the “conservative” position on the war. If moderation does what Yglesias claims, this tack should have helped Democrats’ favorability. Instead it drove down their support, especially among young people. Against proclamations that moderation is the “key to winning,” we believe that sometimes going moderate helps and sometimes it hurts. Given the centrality of student movements to blocking authoritarianism, this instance of going moderate was another popularist failure of massive proportions.

To reiterate, we are not saying that public opinion can be totally disregarded, that Democrats should focus on unpopular issues over popular ones, or that the answer is always and everywhere to go farther left. But we are saying that popularist talk about constraints has become a paralyzing cliché, concealing, condoning, and perpetuating serious failures of leadership. We echo Litman, Morris, and many others in looking for other solutions beyond this debate about tweaks to ideology, policy, or left-right positioning. We point to an anti-corruption platform—not just talking the talk, but walking the walk—as well as ending gerontocracy in party management and candidate recruitment as spaces for innovation. The United States has never faced this kind of centralized authoritarian threat from the executive branch. What we know for sure is that to fight it, we can’t rely on all-too-easy popularist answers. The opposition party can’t simply stand by and react to polls. It must lead.