There Is a Way for Democrats to Stop Trump and Save America

You are meant to feel powerless. That is what a strongman wants: to make you feel as if nothing can stop the takeover of your country.

The richest man in the world is destroying parts of the government. A former weekend Fox News host runs the Pentagon. There is the potential for corruption on a huge scale. The global order is being deconstructed. Allies are being humiliated and dictators embraced. Threats of territorial expansion are repeated until they are no longer funny or fanciful. Everything feels extreme. Yet there are no mass protests, no corporate or cultural pushback, no daylight between Republicans and only a faint pulse from the Democrats.

That paralysis can be chalked up to the fact that Americans elected Donald Trump despite knowing the risks he posed. This has prompted a public soul-searching among Democrats. But their tactics only seem to highlight their own powerlessness: whether holding press conferences in front of shuttered federal agencies, displaying paddles marked “FALSE” and “MUSK STEALS” when Mr. Trump addressed Congress or capitulating during a recent fight over funding the government. And while the strategies being debated — from strategic retreat to new approaches to communications to various policy ideas — have merits, they fall short of arresting the country’s spiral into autocracy and oligarchy.

The hard truth is that the Democratic Party, in its current form, cannot lead the opposition that is required. Faced with a relentless onslaught from Mr. Trump, the party has lost touch with an electorate that sees it as emblematic of what they hate about politics, a polarized culture, overseas commitments and an economy where being middle class doesn’t feel like enough to get by.

The party has a credibility gap rooted in its initial willingness to support Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election while warning that the stakes were existential. If that was the case, then why ignore the overwhelming majorities of Americans who believed that he was too old to run, and choose loyalty to a Washington stalwart over the country’s appetite for drastic change?

We are living through the reckoning of defending the status quo.

Yet there is opportunity in this drift: to reimagine what the party stands for, how it will fight its way back and who will lead it. Over the last few weeks, I’ve spoken to some members of the newer generation of Democrats in Congress wrestling with these questions, to the up-and-coming governor of Maryland and to activists who have battled authoritarianism in other countries. Their ideas leave me hopeful that there is a path for America’s political opposition if it casts off a top-down Washington strategy, stale talking points about democracy and the middle class and its own circular firing squads.