Bret Stephens on Why the Democrats Are Despairing
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Political eras always present you with a unique set of of challenges, but also a unique set of opportunities. And there is a real opportunity in the United States for Democrats that right now they seem too inept or divided or radical or something to seize. And that is that many Americans are supporting Trump through glitted teeth. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. My guest today is Brett Stevens.
Brett is a Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary and he is a columnist for the New York Times. We try to think about what it would take to get through this political moment. Donald Trump and other right-wing populists are threatening the democratic system in serious ways. But part of what is striking about this moment is the inability of the opponents, whether that's the Democratic Party in the United States or other political movements around the Western world, to put together a sufficiently compelling political alternative that they look like they're able to withstand those attacks.
Why is that? Would it be enough to go back to a optimistic centrist, center left politics of Barack Obama? Do you have to go further back to the third-wave politics of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair? Or was there historically contingent things about what made those forms of politics possible.
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