The C-word that can save Democrats

Progressive visionary Felicia Wong on how to rebuild a party that can win

Happy New Year’s Eve, Ink community!

What a decade we’ve lived through together this year. I, for one, have felt so fortunate to have this community going through it all. Thank you for your thoughts and stories and comments, your hope in the darkness, and your readership.

As we stand on the cusp a new year, we wanted to bring you something forward-looking. So don’t miss this essential interview below with progressive visionary Felicia Wong, laying out a vision for a Democratic Party that could, like, actually win.

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Fast forward two years — or four. Imagine a Democratic Party that could — what’s the word? — win. What would that party be doing? What would it sound like, feel like? Most importantly, what would it be for?

Everyone and their dog would love an answer to that question. But few people have spent as much time thinking about it fruitfully as Felicia Wong.

For the last 12 years, Wong has been president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank whose ideas about how the federal government can play a stronger role in actually improving people’s lives were foundational to many of the Biden-Harris administration’s biggest policy victories, from the Inflation Reduction Act to the CHIPS and Science Act.

Now those achievements are imperiled. But Wong argues that a return to the neoliberalism of the past may not be in order. Instead, we may be entering into entirely new territory. We may all be “post-neoliberals” now.

So what does that mean for the work of rebuilding a resurgent Democratic Party?

Wong, who will soon take on a new role with the more public-facing Roosevelt Society, has thoughts. We spoke with her about what lessons we should — and should not — take from the 2024 election going into the year 2025, what America’s post-neoliberal political and economic order could look like, and how a “class-forward” politics might offer a winning formula for Democrats in the years ahead.

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We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.

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“A new common sense”: Felicia Wong, in conversation with Adam M. Lowenstein

Let’s start with the blog post that you published the day before the election, “The Other Side of Tuesday,” where you outlined “three things that will be crucial post-election, no matter the outcome.” First, you wrote, neoliberalism “broke because it failed to keep its most important promise: that a rising tide lifts all, or even most, boats. At the most basic level, a successful and enduring political system must be able to provide for its people.”

I think it is really important to remember that what happened in November is part of a very long material [failure] — and therefore economic [failure] — but also political failure of our system. I do believe that a successful and enduring political system must be able to credibly provide for its people. I think it’s also true that the American system, over decades, has not been able to do so.

The market-forward approach that we saw come into the presidency in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan [promised], “Let the shackles off the market and many good things will happen. You will have more jobs and more prosperity for more people, and more people will be able to benefit from that prosperity.” That has not happened as a whole over the last 40 years.

Now, I don’t want to be too negative about the pro-market approach. I do think we have seen a lot of innovation in the American economy over the last 30 or 40 years. It’s important to note that this market-forward approach globally has really helped reduce extreme poverty. These are important things. I’m not trying to be dogmatic about this.

But I also think that it’s clear that by the early 2000s, this neoliberal approach was failing on what it promised to do itself. It was failing on its own terms, especially on the promise of growth. That was the whole thing: More growth was going to lead to more inclusion. That just didn’t happen. Between 1950 and 1980, which was, of course, the long New Deal era, the economy grew almost a point and a half faster than in the neoliberal years, which were between 1980 and 2016. On growth itself, neoliberalism didn’t deliver. We started seeing growth that was much more sluggish, though you’d see spikes of innovation and pockets of growth.

I also think, really importantly, that during the neoliberal era, inequalities — and I use that term in the plural deliberately — grew significantly. You can measure them by wealth, by income, by geography, by education, by race.

These material weaknesses ended up threatening, and do threaten, our entire political system such that by 2016, the first time Donald Trump was elected president, we just saw a lot of anger, a lot of instability, and a lot of lack of faith that any kind of American-led economic system was ever going to deliver for most people.

Your answer gets at the second point in this blog post, which is that this is a broader arc than just the last four years of the Biden administration. As you put it, “to understand our moment, we must look further back in time and also imagine further into the future.” Can you unpack that?

What I just described was the long roots of our economic woes. But I think it’s also important for us to look at the long roots of our political woes — the fraying of the New Deal coalition of the white working class and Black and other people of color voters that came together under Franklin Roosevelt.

The New Deal coalition has been fraying for a very long time. That did not just happen in the 2024 election. Much of the punditry since November has been about this rightward shift of the electorate — “Democrats lost working-class voters” — and for good reason. Democrats did lose working-class voters. Kamala Harris did lose working-class voters, even relative to Joe Biden in 2020.

But it’s important to note that this also is not just a 2024 phenomenon. I’ve been reading this book by the historian Timothy Shenk called Left Adrift. He looks at the demise of class-forward politics from the 1960s onward. He has these quotes at the very beginning of the book [about how] Democrats are doing better with the highest fifth of the income distribution than they are with the bottom fifth. It’s not a surprise that Republicans are carrying the majority of voters without a college degree. But he’s not describing the 2024 election. That was describing 2016. He looks at the roots of this from the late 1960s onward.

So this idea that Democrats are losing workers is not new since this November. I think what is new is that many people in the mainstream media, the mainstream punditry, are really seeing this class shakeup. We’re seeing the term “class” used a lot more since this election — which, by the way, I think is a good thing because it shows us that we understand that we are in the middle of an economic realignment [and] a political realignment. We are in a place where many voters don’t feel like either party, Democratic or Republican, is a home for them, is fighting for them, is looking out for their interests.

This shift has already taken a lot of time. I would mark it beginning in 2016. Obviously 2024 was another marker. Right now, [as] I did say in that piece, “we are all post-neoliberals,” but who’s going to win this class realignment fight? Nobody knows. It’s a jump ball. The question of whether a more egalitarian, class-forward approach will win — which is what I would call a progressive approach — is highly dependent on what we build next.

There are a number of things you mentioned there that actually feel hopeful in some ways. One is that this post-neoliberal order, whatever it may be, has not been shaped yet. That gives us a sense of agency, I think, in charting where we go from here. There’s also been a lot of commentary about Josh Hawley and JD Vance and some of the other flickers of support for a strong industrial policy, or for taking on corporate power, on the right.

I think you’re absolutely right to say that when you are living in a world whose politics are very much in flux and feel very unwritten — certainly unfinished — it can give you a sense of agency. There are a lot of things that ordinary people can do, that people who are in positions of influence in the media or in policy or in elected office can do. I do think that a politics of agency is a lot of what Americans feel is lacking.

On the question of, “we are all post neoliberals now,” which is sort of what you mentioned when you look at Senator Hawley, Vice President-elect Vance, Senator [Marco] Rubio — I would [also] look at Bernie Sanders. Look at Chris Murphy. Look at the Lieutenant Governor of New York, Antonio Delgado. Obviously, Elizabeth Warren. These people share very little with respect to much of their politics. But they all agree that the amount of economic power, political power, and, frankly, cultural influence that very large corporations have over our lives is a problem. It is unhealthy for Americans. It’s bad for our pocketbooks. It’s bad for our attention. It’s bad for our ability to spend quality time with our friends and family. What it means that we are all in this post-neoliberal moment is that many people who identify on all parts of the political spectrum agree that corporations are too powerful.

If you’ve identified part of what the problem is, then you can start figuring out what some of the solutions are. The question is whether you need stronger regulations a la the FTC under Lina Khan, or the National Economic Council taking the advice of Tim Wu — stronger ways to structure more competitive markets. There are many ways where also, rather than breaking up large corporations, you can build countervailing economic power from the federal government. That is what the Biden team tried to do with the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act.

You can, of course, try to make the economy itself more democratic. That is about union power. Unions historically have been the only set of institutions and organizations at scale that have been designed to let workers have a voice [and] build a formal way to solve capital-labor or management-worker conflicts in ways that will allow a company to survive and thrive, both owners and workers. Unions also do all kinds of other political education for their members and can bring people together across geography, across race, across gender identification.

Now, I’m not saying that in the next four years we’re going to see a lot of that from the Trump administration. We honestly don’t know. [Regardless,] we need to continue to be contesting for union power, for worker power, and for more competitive markets, which are good for small businesses as well.

You mentioned the importance of identifying what the problem is. The extent to which Democrats as a party are willing to take on corporate concentration, or stand up for the right and the freedom of workers to organize — these get at the inevitable tensions in post-election discussions. I’m wondering what lessons you think we should learn, and what lessons would be the wrong ones to learn.

The first wave of, “Oh my gosh, look at all of those red arrows pointing right” — it is definitely worth continuing to remember, for those of us who identify as progressive, what that felt like, because that was a warning sign. I’m sitting here in New York state, which had been blue, but [in] many parts of this state, Democrats lost 10, 15 percent of the vote in 2024 relative to 2020. That’s worth remembering, not as something to dwell on as inevitable, but [to ask], why is it that many voters, including young people, men — and not just white working-class men, but men of color, men without a college degree of all races — why did you see that?

I think what we should learn from that is that we didn’t have a class-forward politics in the 2024 campaign. I think many of the policies that the Biden-Harris administration put forward — industrial policy, work to strengthen the National Labor Relations Board to stand up for workers’ right to organize, work early after the pandemic to make sure that workers had enough money — those were excellent policies. That was a post-neoliberal, progressive sea change that we saw in contrast to many years of pro-market policies in the decades before. The fact that unemployment has been at or below 4 percent for years at this point is absolutely incredible.

These are actually policy victories. But we never really had a politics around that. And by that, I don’t just mean a message. I don’t just mean a slogan. I mean something deeper than that. I mean something that doesn’t rely on any individual politician, whether it’s Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown or whomever. I mean something [so] that people understand that their government is doing something to support their ability to earn a living, care for their families, and so it truly becomes a new common sense. We have yet to build that.

That is one of the enormous lessons I would take from this election. There’s some evidence, by the way, to suggest that people who were able to run on that kind of message won, including in tough races. Look at the congresswoman from Washington state who is in a very purple district, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who owns an auto shop. She ran a pro-worker, anti-corporate, authentic, slightly rough-and-tumble campaign.

Look at Elissa Slotkin, who ran on 44 factories opening in Michigan. She won a tough race in a swing state, Michigan. Look at Pat Ryan in upstate New York, very similar. Look at Chris Murphy, whose race wasn’t very tough in Connecticut — he was expected to win — but he [was] very clear that he’s going to run on demonstrating that corporations are often a problem. He’s also going to run a class-forward campaign. So it’s interesting that a number of people who ran this pro-worker campaign actually did win, when we weren’t able to deliver on that at a national level.

It’s one thing to have a message that is class-forward, but if just the right message won, we would be having a very different conversation right now. How do we not only build and sustain a class-forward type of politics, but do so in a way that is genuine and authentic, and people believe that we actually mean this and will deliver for them if they choose to vote for us?

I think — not being a political operative or advisor, but from where I sit as a policy professional and an interested citizen — that is the absolute most important question. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Chris Murphy — or another [candidate] who won a super tough race, Andy Kim, who won the Senate race in New Jersey — all of those people are seen as being really authentic. Senator-elect Kim [did] not take corporate PAC money. He was the person who was shown in a photograph, [on] January 7, 2021, literally on his hands and knees cleaning up the Capitol. I know him a little bit. He comes by that very honestly.

I think Marie Gluesenkamp Perez absolutely means what she says. I think Andy Kim absolutely means what he says. They mean what they say vis-à-vis corporations. Clearly, everybody thinks that about Bernie Sanders. People think that about Elizabeth Warren. It’s true about them. I think that is very important for individual political actors. The question now — and this is where we’re at a jump ball — is, which political party is going to be seen as truly doing that? Clearly Republicans, but also Democrats, have had a problem with that over the last four years.

Was Kamala Harris going to have a truly class-forward message? Was she able to carry that forward in her 107-day campaign? I think it was really tough. Look, I actually think she ran a remarkable campaign. She increased her favorables by 15 percent over the course of 107 days. She had many hurdles to overcome, and she came extraordinarily close. For a lot of reasons, I don’t think she was able to run a truly class-forward campaign. Would that have been better? That’s a counterfactual. We’ll never know.

But I do believe that people who were able to run those kinds of campaigns and were able to build their own brand did very well. The question now is whether the Democratic Party will be able to do that going forward.

That idea of the jump ball gets at the third part of the blog post that we started this conversation with. You wrote that “we can sense convergence on the outlines of a new political order.” You can feel something coming together, and it’s on us to shape it. Is that a fair interpretation?

Definitely. On the Republican side, it is true that JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio — some people would claim that they, as “new right” political figures, would be the future of a pro-worker Republican Party. That remains to be seen.

If we end up seeing an extension or a deepening of the Trump tax cuts, that’ll be the big test. Those tax cuts expire at the end of 2025. They propose tripling down on those. That is not particularly pro-worker. That is giving multiple trillions of dollars of tax breaks to profitable corporations and the ultra-wealthy. If we see the [FTC] or an SEC that prioritizes crypto, prioritizes profitable oil and gas — that won’t be the worker-forward promise [of] some on the new right. But there is clearly a fight within the Republican Party about this right now.

On the Democratic Party side, being in the wilderness, being out of power, lets you think, okay, what are the things that are really strong and how can we continue to build on them? But also, what are the pieces of policy work, and the narrative work that has to accompany policy work, that we need to build on?

A lot of the ideas — industrial policy, wealth taxation, [a] full employment economy — those ideas were ideas that Roosevelt and our allies actually built the last time that Democrats were out of power, between 2016 and 2020. The question is now, is the Democratic Party going to take seriously what people like Bernie Sanders and Faiz Shakir are saying about the need to have a class-forward politics? I genuinely don’t know. We’ll see who ends up as the chair of the Democratic Party.

The question for those of us who are slightly on the outside of that [is], are we going to be able to keep this momentum going? Are we going to be able to learn from our mistakes [and] from the things that were only half built, but keep going on the question of how you build an actually popular full-employment economy, [or] how you build a care economy that makes sure that working parents and people who take care of their elderly relatives can do this in a way that doesn’t break the bank or mean that they have to quit their jobs or drain their meager life savings?

This is what we have to be doing now. At the Roosevelt Institute, we are spending a lot of time thinking about not just the ideas, but the people. Thousands of people — scores of thousands of people, if you think [beyond] the federal government [to] the state level, people who signed up to volunteer for a campaign, who believe in this kind of class-forward politics, who believe in this new, more equitable economy, who believe in higher taxes for the wealthy and public investment for the many. Where are they going to go? What are they going to do? The Roosevelt Society [is] designed to be a place for these people to be even when progressives are out of power. People need each other. Even policy nerds need other policy nerds.

One of the things that it’s going to take for us to have a better politics, which I’ve been arguing for, is [to] tell better stories. We shouldn’t just leave it to the policy people to explain. We need people who actually know how to tell stories, how to engage an audience: What is happening now? What could happen in the future? Who are the protagonists? Who are the villains? Who are the heroes and heroines?

We need to make our political and policy ideas much more narrative if we’re to draw more people into our new economic movement.

As you know, I’ve been on this patriotism kick since the election, trying to understand what patriotism looks like for the left going forward. I feel like this has been a very patriotic conversation in lots of ways.

I agree, it is patriotic. I’m a real patriot, actually. A lefty patriot, but a patriot nonetheless.

A lefty patriot is a patriot!

For sure! I think lefty patriots are awesome patriots.

Listen to the full audio of Adam M. Lowenstein’s conversation with Felicia Wong below:

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Photo by Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Felicia Wong photo courtesy Roosevelt Institute