The Dueling Party Visions of 2026:

Small and Subtle Details Provide Us Two Very Different Narratives of America

Feel free to check the past Biden Era archives and follow the editions to come in the Trump Era on Substack, Medium, and LinkedIn, including those on the 2024 Autopsy, Bench-Building, DOGE News, Project 2025 Authoritarianism, Progressive Populism, and more (First Come, First Serve!).

Via courses.lumenlearning.com

Via france24.com

So what have you missed in the headlines this past week?

Continue to be wary of Welcome PAC, an entity that seeks “moderation” in the Democratic Party. We learned about more of its megadonors and staff, which includes Joe Manchin’s daughter (who price-gouged Epi-Pens), half a dozen members of the Walton Family of Walmart, the co-chairman of Bain Capital, various leaders in private equity and hedge funds, the Murdochs, and Reid Hoffman (who called for the replacement of Lina Khan). It also includes a Welcome PAC co-founder who worked for Democrats for Education Reform (and wore a jersey with Joe Manchin’s football number at the June 4 WelcomeFest event), and a board member who previously worked with No Labels.

Fears of a surveillance state rise as Palantir sets up a system to centralize data on all American residents, as my brother recently profiled.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics starts to be questioned by experts as firings and layoffs impact data collection for policy areas like inflation rates, unemployment numbers, and farm prices.

Trump’s assault on the courts is not just limited to rhetoric. His push also includes nominating more judges aligned with his values. Tell Democratic Senators to vote NO on and block every single unqualified nominee Trump tries to push through.

Big corporations who donated to Trump’s inaugural fund get a reprieve from federal investigations with cases being dropped within the first few months of 2.0.

The Big, Fat, Ugly Bill has a provision that coerces workers to return to the federal government only if they give up their employment/union protections.

And the bill targets abortion providers, effectively defunding Planned Parenthood from any future Medicaid coverage.

Bipartisan backlash emerges to the closure of Job Corps, which serves as a provider of free career training, housing, and meals for low-income students.

RFK Jr. runs out a COVID vaccine advisor after announcing recommendation changes.

Colorado’s state legislature would have banned price-fixing algorithms on rents. But…you guessed it. It was vetoed by the Governor.

Corporate money floods local primaries in New York City for control of its city council.

Kentucky Democrats’s last state senator in Appalachia just switched to the Republican Party. Jacobin writes a fantastic profile of how Democrats took for granted Coal Country.

SEIU California labor leader David Huerta is detained (and injured) by ICE.

AND…Donald Trump falls into the rabbit hole that a robot governed the country instead of Joe Biden, who supposedly died in 2020. We sure everything is normal health wise for Trump, Jake Tapper?

Back to the main course, and boy is it a good time to take a look at the bigger picture.

Donald Trump, as many people on all sides of the aisle know, likes to talk about President William McKinley and his position on tariffs. It almost serves as the framework for the Trump Tariffs we have been contending with today. Although TACO has raised the question of whether Trump will ever fully follow through on his tariff threats—or any of his tough talk, for that matter.

(The similarities between Trump and McKinley get even more interesting. But back to that later).

By contrast, in Joe Biden’s presidency, he and progressive populist Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren looked to a different source of inspiration. That source of inspiration came from the New Deal era shaped primarily by Presidents FDR, Truman, and LBJ. LBJ’s agenda became sidelined by the Vietnam War, while FDR’s lost steam after his court packing plan and World War II, but the point still stands. Democrats are supposed to be the working class party that lifts people up, and although the recent journey of the last 30 years has not been encouraging, signs of hope are amidst that maybe we have learned where our real source of strength comes from.

The growing populist wing of the Democratic Party encompasses a wide range of Progressives, New Democrats, and even a small handful of Blue Dogs. It is built off of the model of the Progressive and Populist movements of the late 1800s (maybe they should form a Populist Coalition that pressures the Democratic Party as a whole to decouple itself from corporate special interests and dark money groups). Some have called themselves the New Economic Patriots and the Monopoly Busters seeking to reign in business monopolies and corporate greed, much like what was attempted with the railroad conglomerates and utility companies in the 1890s. What they say is the status quo system as we know it today has to be completely changed and transformed, not just reformed. And they are right, just as advocates and activists were during the Second Industrial Revolution that swept the US in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

The Democratic Party is often considered to be one without a clear vision or narrative of what the vision of America is. Part of that is because the Democrats have become so much of a “big tent” ideologically (especially on economics and kitchen table issues) that it has lost its way. No one would have argued who FDR and LBJ stood for: the working class. As for the governing philosophy that shaped the Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s through the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), who got more of the focus there? The traditional working class base or the elites on Wall Street and Silicon Valley? I think my opinion on the matter should be clear enough.

That is why former Wall Street fundraiser and placater Rahm Emanuel can never again be the spokesperson of the Democratic Party as a whole. Pure and simple; he was one of the many people who sold the Party of FDR, Truman, and Johnson to the highest bidder.

In other words, yes to old-school economic patriotism and populism, and no to unfettered crony capitalism still legitimized (for now anyhow) by “abundance.”

The United States has been through so much, and although the historical track record is not perfect, the Democratic Party has much to be proud of. It was a party through leaders in FDR, HST, JFK, and LBJ that appreciated work as more than a paycheck.

Work comes with dignity and pride. They understood that people did not want a hand out, but they needed a hand up in times of continual distress and change. They understood that the rich and the powerful and the well-connected were the ones who usually dominated American politics in Washington DC and in the states, instead of the priorities being on the middle and working classes of this country. They understood, as the late Paul Wellstone once articulated, that “we all do better when we all do better.”

They were brilliant people who understood that their job was not to transfer agency from the individual to the government, but rather to have a public institution be a last resort of assistance and support for people when they are down for reasons beyond their own fault—such as the Great Depression or Jim Crow segregation.

Furthermore, the New Deal-Great Society model similarly is built off of the Progressive Era that sought major reforms, not just little band-aids and tweaks to major societal problems of that time: industry consolidation, workplace safety violations, overcrowded urban development, lack of rural opportunities, poor health outcomes, and record income inequality.

Democrats standing for that vision again of taking on the greedy and fighting for the needy, away from the corporate status quo consensus of the 1990s, will put the party in a better position to retake control of Congress and the states in 2026.

As for Republicans, let’s circle back to Trump’s idolization of McKinley (as if William McKinley was God almighty; not a terrible president, but no FDR).

The time Trump idolizes with McKinley’s tariffs is a time when there was record inequality. The First Gilded Age has almost been replicated, and then some, by Trump’s Second Gilded Age. The billionaires and wealthiest elites run the country, while everyone else is left looking for scraps. True then, true now.

In McKinley’s time, there was very little of a social safety net to keep households and families afloat in times of distress or crisis. Or rules that prevented corporations and oligarchs from plundering and plowing through the lives and livelihoods of factory workers, small businesses, and farmers or farmworkers. Or many workplace protections for those in the mills, meatpacking plants, or canneries. There was not even an income tax or estate tax that existed.

Not to mention that, during McKinley, America had record tariff rates that sucked the oxygen out of an otherwise booming US economy. And as Herbert Hoover would learn the hard way in 1930 with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, poorly thought-out tariff policies can do some serious damage not only to the American economy, but to the global economy. FDR and every President after him never had to raise tariffs on other countries nearly as high again. All the while, manufacturing remained in the US for decades. Yes, we didn’t need tariffs to pull that off, folks. And we kept our manufacturing advantage until bad trade agreements were negotiated in the 1980s and 1990s.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this historical comparison between Trump and McKinley is how it encompasses what the parties look to and stand for.

Democrats have a chance to return to its historic working class roots that made the American economy the envy of the world and allowed social mobility like never before across various backgrounds after World War II; as well as address the issues that were neglected back then (like racial inequality and the status of women). They’re the ones who can “Unrig the System” again.

Republicans, on the other hand, prefer to preserve a status quo that rewards the most prosperous among us, while pulling the rug out from under the working class and middle class that built this country.

Decimate Medicaid and SNAP and the entire government apparatus that supports Main Street America, just so we can fund another big tax cut for the fat cats. That is what the Republican Party stands for today.

Democrats have a better way. But they must travel down the path that FDR and LBJ laid the groundwork for.