How Democrats can stop talking past each other and start winning
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The third group of moderate Democrats yearns to turn back the clock to the New Deal coalition. A chief spokesperson is Ruy Teixeira of the Liberal Patriot newsletter. '[T]he New Deal Democrats were moderate and even small-c conservative in their social outlook,' he
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Beginning in the 1970s, college-educated progressives began to focus on issues involving race, gender, the environment, and sexual freedom. Teixeira
This brings us to the only moderate position that holds promise for Democrats: defining moderate as being pragmatic, rather than doctrinaire. College-educated progressives need to recognize that their priorities and their cultural values don't match those of most Americans.
In 2024, inflation and the economy were
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Centering that economic message is the first pragmatic step in rebuilding Democrats' brand to appeal to both college grads and noncollege grads. The second step is to recognize that cultural preferences differ across class lines. Non-elites value self-discipline because they need to get up every day, on time, without an attitude, to work at jobs with little autonomy. Consequently, they highly value traditional institutions that anchor self-discipline: religion, the military, the family. Those same institutions offer non-elites sources of social status independent of their subordinate positions in a capitalist economy. Blue-collar values reflect blue-collar lives.
That's why, on cultural issues, college-educated progressives need to stop demanding a mind-meld with the Democratic Party. If you're playing to win, politics requires not purity but an ability to build coalitions with people whose values may differ from yours in fundamental ways. Democrats need to treat voters without college degrees as respected coalition partners, making tradeoffs.
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This doesn't mean that progressives need to abandon their values; it means they have to act on them. Here are two uncomfortable facts: Progressive activists as a group are much
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The Hill
3 minutes ago
- The Hill
We must loosen China's chokehold on battery supply chains
A ceasefire in the U.S.-China trade war doesn't change the fact that Americans are subject to Beijing's whims when it comes to critical supplies of everything from magnets to minerals. This is not an accident but the result of decades of Beijing's deliberate practices to build monopolies, dominate supply chains, stifle competition, and foster resource dependencies. But the U.S. and its allies can break China's stranglehold on the battery supply chain, if they work together now to build the components and mine the minerals that go into advanced batteries, while fighting back against China's market manipulation. In our new report, Unplugging Beijing: A Playbook to Reclaim America's Advanced Battery Supply Chains, we lay out the scale and scope of China's non-market practices in battery supply chains — dumping, price manipulation, intellectual property theft, monopolies, and forced technology transfers — and, more importantly, say what America can do about it. One key way in which China controls the battery market is through intentional overproduction — making too much of everything — driving prices below profitability in ways that push out competition. For 2025, Chinese analysts are projecting that China will make twice as many electric cars as the entire global demand from last year. While enormous subsidies and state support cushion Chinese companies, American companies cannot sustain unprofitable production. China's decision to dump cheap batteries and underlying minerals on global markets sustains their monopolies but harms free markets and open competition. Beijing may finally be acknowledging that its massive overproduction of just about everything is fueling a race to the bottom. But as the central government frets about what Xi Jinping has labeled 'disorderly price competition,' local governments in China are still backing absurd strategies to juice production, such as state-sponsored programs to sell brand new cars as 'zero-mileage' used cars — sold at a loss and dumped on foreign markets, but allowing companies to inflate sales numbers to justify factories operating at full tilt. While Beijing deploys a suite of non-market tactics at scale, its price manipulation is especially damaging. Advanced batteries depend on a host of refined minerals — lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite — that are responsible for most of the cost of the resulting battery. China's intervention in nickel markets, for instance, has saddled Western producers with unsustainable costs. In lithium, Beijing has driven prices up or down at will, undermining competing U.S. projects. To counter this, we propose creating a critical minerals and metals exchange, backed by physical assets and a U.S. strategic stockpile. This would offer offtake guarantees above a price floor to support domestic processors. China's monopolies on mineral processing have also become a weapon in the broader trade war. Beijing has imposed export restrictions on key minerals, including graphite — of which it controls more than 95 percent of global battery-grade processing. To reduce these choke points, we advocate for the creation of special economic zones that co-locate processing, infrastructure, and energy access near known reserves. These zones could take advantage of colocation synergies around large reserves, such as the Salton Sea, and could feature pre-vetted environmental analysis and rigorous safety protocols to localize mining, on-site processing, downstream fabrication, energy, and water needs for all related infrastructure. We also recommend expanding the U.S. Development Finance Corporation's risk appetite to back more processing projects internationally. Beyond supply and demand, China's record on intellectual property theft is extensive. Most Chinese espionage cases involve attempts to acquire commercial technology. The battery sector is a repeated target: the Justice Department has charged Chinese actors with stealing battery tech from Tesla and Phillips 66. Many of China's non-market tactics — from forced labor to environmental shortcuts — thrive in secrecy. To increase transparency, we recommend that the U.S. bar foreign firms from selling into American markets unless they meet strict digital customs and trade data standards. U.S.-listed companies should also be required to map their full supply chains to expose any hidden reliance on forced labor. To compete with all this, the U.S. must invest in cleaner, more efficient, and higher-performing manufacturing processes. We propose increased academic research in battery science in exchange for low-cost licensing to U.S. companies, full cost recovery for research and development in the tax code, and publicly owned modular testing facilities to reduce innovation barriers for smaller firms. There is a way forward — if we choose to act boldly. New supply chains won't emerge from one nation alone. We need domestic reindustrialization and international ally-shoring. Both require upgraded infrastructure and reliable access to the raw inputs of advanced manufacturing — minerals, chemicals, and tooling. Strengthened trade rules, coordinated tariffs, and harmonized regulations among market economies are essential. Most importantly, this effort must be spearheaded by strong American leadership and a dynamic, integrated North American trading bloc. Rebuilding America's supply chains will take industrial work and political will, but we must commit to the hard tasks now to protect our economic security and resilience for the long term. The future of American prosperity depends on it. Elaine Dezenski is senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Joshua Birenbaum serves as deputy director.
The Hill
3 minutes ago
- The Hill
Abbott threatens to remove Texas Democrats over walkout
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) threatened to remove Texas House Democrats from the legislature after they left the state on Sunday in a bid to stop Republicans from proceeding with a redistricting effort that would give the GOP five more opportunities to gain seats in the 2026 midterms. 'This truancy ends now. The derelict Democrat House members must return to Texas and be in attendance when the House reconvenes at 3:00 PM on Monday, August 4, 2025. For any member who fails to do so, I will invoke Texas Attorney General Opinion No. KP-0382 to remove the missing Democrats from membership in the Texas House,' Abbott wrote in a statement issued Sunday. The Texas Democrats said they were denying Republicans a quorum, or the minimum number of lawmakers needed present in order to conduct legislative business, following a similar tactic they employed the last time the GOP pursued midcycle redistricting effort in 2003. Most of them traveled to Illinois, New York and Massachusetts, all of which are Democratic-led states, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is supporting their effort. Abbott also said in his statement that any Democrat who receives funds 'to evade the fines they will incur under House rules' may be in violation of felony bribery charges. He made the same threat against those who offer or give funds to Democrats. Abbott pledged to use his 'full extradition authority to demand the return to Texas of any potential out-of-state felons.' 'Real Texans do not run from a fight. But that's exactly what most of the Texas House Democrats just did,' Abbott wrote in his statement. 'Rather than doing their job and voting on urgent legislation affecting the lives of all Texans, they have fled Texas to deprive the House of the quorum necessary to meet and conduct business.' Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a similar threat to 'Democrats in the Texas House who try and run away like cowards,' saying they 'should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately.' 'We should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law,' Paxton added, in a post on the social platform X.
CNN
3 minutes ago
- CNN
Chief Justice John Roberts enabled Texas' gambit to gerrymander the state for the GOP
The brazen partisan redistricting underway in Texas, with Republicans attempting to entrench themselves in office and Democrats weighing a counter-offensive in blue states, was greenlit by the US Supreme Court six years ago. Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion for a 5-4 court, declared that federal judges could not review extreme partisan gerrymanders to determine if they violated constitutional rights. Roberts' opinion reversed cases that would have allowed such districts – drawn to advantage one political party over another irrespective of voters' interests – to be challenged as violations of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and association and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. The justices split among the familiar ideological lines, with the five conservatives ruling against partisan gerrymanders and the four liberals dissenting. 'Of all times to abandon the Court's duty to declare the law, this was not the one,' dissenting justices warned in 2019, 'The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court's role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.' That decision in Rucho v. Common Cause has generated a new era of partisan rivalry with vast repercussions for American democracy. The decision resonates as profoundly as the Roberts Court's decision last year in Trump v. United States, which granted presidents substantial immunity from criminal prosecution (also delivered among partisan lines). Trump has taken the 2024 ruling as a blank check, tearing through democratic norms. The gerrymandering case also lifted a federal guardrail. Lawsuits challenging extreme partisan gerrymanders can still be brought before state court judges. But state laws vary widely in their protections for redistricting practices and state judges differ in their ability to police the thorny political process. Roberts may have failed to foresee the consequences in 2019 and then in 2024. Or, alternatively, perhaps he understood and simply believed the effects were not properly the concern of the federal judiciary. In his opinion, Roberts acknowledged the apparent unfairness of gerrymandered districts. 'Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,' he wrote. But, he said, 'the fact that such gerrymandering is 'incompatible with democratic principles,' … does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary.' The chief justice said no constitutional authority exists for judges to oversee the politics of redistricting, nor are there standards for their decisions, that is, to know when state lawmakers have gone too far in what is an inherently political process. Roberts wrote: ''How much is too much?' At what point does permissible partisanship become unconstitutional?' The current redistricting controversy arises from Trump's pressure on fellow Republicans to generate as many GOP-controlled districts as possible before the 2026 midterm elections for the US House of Representatives. Right now, the focus is on Texas where legislators broke from the usual cycle of post-census redistricting that happens every 10 years and suddenly proposed a new map intended to push several Democrats out of office and buttress the chances that Republicans keep their majority, now hanging by a thread, in Congress. The audacious Texas effort has prompted liberals to consider a counterattack in Democratic-controlled states such as California to create new maps that could boost their numbers. But politicians' effort to draw lines to their advantage have never been free of controversy. The paired cases before the justices six years ago involved extreme gerrymanders by Republicans in North Carolina and by Democrats in Maryland. Roberts was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, whose vote was crucial. A year earlier, Kavanaugh had succeeded Justice Anthony Kennedy, who had previously left the door open to federal court challenges to partisan gerrymanders. Justice Elena Kagan, taking the lead for dissenters, insisted workable standards existed and had been used by lower US court judges. 'For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities. And not just any constitutional violation,' she wrote, pointing up the stakes. 'The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives,' Kagan added. She was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who remains on the bench, and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020, and Stephen Breyer, who retired in 2022. Echoing a line from redistricting precedent that appears apt as Texas legislators divide voters for predetermined results, Kagan wrote that a core principle of government is 'that the voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.'
