Every week or so the NY Times has a group discussion among some of its regular columnists. Because nearly all of the columnists at the NY Times are on the left, you're not getting a broad spectrum of viewpoints but you do get some kind of insight into the streams of thought that are animating the left. Today's discussion is a case in point.

Jamelle Bouie is arguing from the left and Nicholas Kristof arguing from the center left. They seem to fundamentally disagree about what Democrats should be doing right now to win people over/damage Trump. Then the other two writers, Zeynep Tufecki and M. Gessen seem to be less clearly anchored in a specific agenda, at least to start. So here's Bouie making the case that what Democrats need is a total war on Trump, one that emphasizes drama and resistance over policy.

Bouie: I do not think it is particularly difficult to fight Trump. Democrats could have, from the jump, assumed a posture of total and unrelenting opposition. They would not have been able to stop most of the president’s actions — that is the consequence of losing control of Congress — but they would have made clear the radicalism of the administration and, more importantly, they would have sent a signal to ordinary Democratic voters that there’s no need to give the president the benefit of the doubt.

On the other hand, Kristof seems a bit more practical. He disagrees with Bouie that shouting about the same things Democrats shouted about pre-election will make an impact now. He's sort of arguing that a diffused resistance vibe won't matter as much as practical issues like the economy for most Americans.

Kristof: The problem is that Democrats are outraged over Trump eroding our democracy and system of laws — but that isn’t an issue that has as much resonance with many Americans. Democrats are right that we’re drifting toward authoritarianism, and as someone who has spent much of my career covering oppressive governments, I’m horrified by this. But a winning argument has to be about not what you find most compelling, but about what the distracted, centrist voter in Wisconsin finds most important...

...it may have less to do with appalling operational security on Signal group chats, or disgraceful revenge attacks on Perkins Coie, and more to do with the cost of eggs, or losing Medicaid, or the Social Security office not answering the phone.

At this point an argument broke out about whether Democrats had done a real autopsy on the 2024 loss. Tufekci argued the Biden admin. had been too insular and too over-confident about a lot of things.

Tufekci: Well, Democrats who worked in the Biden presidency don’t give much reason to feel encouraged. They circled the wagons indiscriminately against most criticism. Some of them gaslighted people about inflation, claiming they were brainwashed on TikTok. Since when did lecturing voters that they were misinformed about something so palpable work? A tendency toward closed-mindedness and self-congratulation made it harder for them to have a realistic assessment of their or Trump’s strengths and weaknesses.

Bouie doesn't find that persuasive. He thinks Dems have apologized enough and wants them to be...more like Trump, i.e. more a showman than a wonk.

Bouie: What they failed to understand is that it did not matter what they did if they could not capture the attention of a highly distracted public. Trump knows how to capture attention. I think this is the entire difference.

A Democratic Party that is oriented toward attention seeking, toward picking fights, toward telling a simple story of big problems and clear villains, toward performing politics as much as talking about policy is a Democratic Party that would be a little more successful than the one we have.

But again, Kristof argues Democrats need to take a deep breath. Moving farther left could create new problems, just as it did for Democrats during Trump's first term.

Kristof: Opposition can and should take many forms. But I think we also need to take a deep breath. During Trump’s first term, his outrageous behavior moved many of us — me included — to the left in ways that diminished our effectiveness in countering him. When Trump was tearing apart families at the border, I was ready to embrace every immigrant I could find. And as a result, we didn’t pay adequate attention to the tens of millions of Americans who were saying they wanted some tighter lid on immigration. And if you consistently ignore voters on an issue that is a priority to them, you lose elections.

This results in clear rejections from all three of the other columnists. Somewhat incredibly, Bouie argues that opposition to Trump in the first term resulted in "a string of political victories for the Democrats." That's a hell of a way to describe the Biden administration at this point. Does anyone really see the Biden administration as a string of victories?

My point in rehashing this is that I think this is broadly representative of what is happening on the blue side of the aisle at this moment. Everyone is anti-Trump. Everyone is anti-Musk. But the argument about how to turn those feelings into action bogs down pretty quickly over the same intra-party divide that Democrats have been dealing with since Hillary ran against Bernie.

And so, even today, you have Hillary trying to capitalize on "Signalgate" with a new opinion piece and Bernie and AOC out there shouting about oligarchs. These are two approaches to the same problem, but they are distinct. 

I think there are two lessons from this discussion. First, the anger people on the left feel right now makes them eager to line up on the far left, with Bouie, Bernie and AOC. When people are angry, they aren't thinking clearly. They want a show of resistance (like shutting down the government) even if the outcome is clearly worse for them than not shutting down the government. And so, lots of people are showing up for the Bernie/AOC anger tour and everyone is furious with Sen. Schumer. In short, the left is empowered.

The second lesson here is that only one person in the discussion seemed to grasp that there were genuine reasons Democrats lost the last election, and that person was Kristof. He's angry too, but he still sees the potential danger of letting anger run the party. Running to the left hasn't worked well for Democrats in the past 5 years. Defunding the police, closing the schools and opening the borders for 3 years plus other ideas they embraced in haste have cost them dearly. But the left clearly doesn't want to hear it. Bouie would rather believe his path leads to a string of victories, even though he can't explain how that will work.

So you have this dynamic happening where anger is driving the party to the left even though moving too far left is pretty arguably why they lost the last election just a few months ago. 

Meanwhile, there are some people on the left, notably Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, patiently arguing that Democrats need to fix their problems rather than put on a resistance circus. But make blue cities work is a message that relies on people stopping and thinking and taking accountability. That's a much harder pitch to a bunch of angry people than stop the oligarchs at any cost.

Klein is right but AOC will win the most applause. That's the core problem for Democrats at this moment.