Donald Trump is back in the White House, and the “pro-democracy” movement that emerged during his first term is warning once again that America is on the brink. To be sure, Trump’s actions so far—defying court orders, dismantling federal agencies, and going on the offensive against law firms, media outlets, and universities—have offered plenty of evidence that seems to bolster their case. Leading neoconservative-turned-Never-Trumper William Kristol marked Trump’s first 100 days by warning that “this major assault on the rule of law, on our government institutions, on civil society, on the international order, has only just begun.” The former White House press secretary turned news anchor Jen Psaki echoed Kristol’s tone with a segment headlined by a graphic that read: “How to Lose a Country in 100 Days.”
I’ve worked inside the “pro-democracy” apparatus, which includes publications like The Bulwark, nonprofits like Protect Democracy, and an array of PACs, SuperPACs, and Substacks. While these organizations largely support the Democratic Party and its candidates, many of the coalition’s leading members were, like Kristol, influential figures in the pre-Trump GOP. The people I worked alongside in this world believe they’re doing the right thing—defending institutions, stabilizing norms, standing up against Trump’s authoritarian overreach.
But beneath that moral clarity is a problem they can’t—or won’t—admit: The crisis isn’t just about Trump. It’s also about the system that produced him—a system they still serve.
The professionalized anti-authoritarian center is fundamentally backward-looking. Nearly a decade after Trump’s rise, it mourns a political order that no longer exists, and arguably never did for most Americans. Its members oppose Trumpism, but preserve the structure that made it possible: the politics of technocracy, financialization, elite consensus, and electoral theater. They name the threat, but refuse to name the conditions that gave rise to it.
When my colleagues discussed “saving democracy,” redistribution, inequality, and labor rarely came up. I’ve heard consultants earnestly debating whether a color scheme or narrative frame might win back disillusioned voters. The threat was always fascism, but the proposed solution was rarely much more than better messaging.
“That legacy defines the limits of the pro-democracy center today.”
The bipartisan drift that created the conditions for the Trumpian revolt began long before Trump. In the 1970s and ’80s, amid economic upheaval and conservative backlash, both parties began to abandon the postwar consensus built on organized labor and public investment. The Democratic Party reoriented around an ascendant professional class that was college-educated, donor-connected, technocratically minded. What replaced class politics was segmentation: targeting voters by lifestyle, race, education level, and consumer preference. The New Deal gave way to new data models. That legacy defines the limits of the pro-democracy center today.
Take The Bulwark, a hub of anti-MAGA centrism that now functions as a content mill for elite self-reassurance. What its writers truly mourn isn’t democracy, but the legitimacy of a politics in which institutional actors policed the boundaries of acceptable discourse and voters behaved accordingly. Even after Trump’s return to the White House, the collapse of that older arrangement is treated as an aberration—not as the result of decades of bipartisan policies that eroded trust, gutted labor, financialized the economy, and disengaged citizens from political life.
The result is a strange form of elite nostalgia disguised as resistance—a belief that we can fight authoritarianism without confronting inequality, that we can defend norms without examining who they excluded, and that we can beat Trump without altering the conditions that made him inevitable. What this movement cannot admit is that legitimacy is not a message problem. It is a material one. And no amount of focus-grouping will reverse the fact that millions of people no longer experience this system—economic or political—as responsive to their needs.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders are drawing large crowds to their “anti-oligarchy” tour because they name the system and tell voters what they already suspect: that both parties have served capital more than people, that politics has become a spectator sport funded by billionaires, and that real change will not come from better messaging, but from rebalancing power. You can hear how uncomfortable this approach makes the pro-democracy center when someone like Sarah Longwell—host of The Bulwark’s podcast, The Focus Group—talks about AOC. There’s a kind of cautious admiration: “She’s principled,” as Longwell put it. But what’s never acknowledged is the actual content of Ocasio-Cortez’s politics. What resonates is not just her affect—it’s that she’s one of the few voices naming the power structure. But because that critique implicates the entire political class, it must be kept at arm’s length.
The Focus Group brands listening as insight, but practices it as containment. Each week, Longwell and a rotating cast of political professionals listen to carefully curated audio clips of swing voters, then discuss how best to interpret them. The message is always the same: “Here’s what voters are telling us. Now here’s how we, the professionals, should adjust.”
“Voters are spoken about, never with.”
What’s striking isn’t the tone so much as the posture. There is no power in these rooms, only data. Voters are spoken about, never with. Their distrust is observed, not shared. The format reinforces a basic premise of modern technocratic politics: that democracy is something to be studied and optimized, not lived or fought for. Given this approach, it is hardly surprising that structural critiques—especially of economic inequality, elite capture, or institutional complicity—are treated as either too radical or too simplistic. The center cannot name what it cannot imagine changing.
This is the deeper crisis that the pro-democracy center refuses to confront: that legitimacy cannot be restored by rebranding the status quo ante. You cannot poll-test your way out of 40 years of bipartisan neglect. If democracy feels fragile, it’s because for many, it never felt like theirs to begin with. Not seeing this isn’t a messaging failure—it’s a failure of imagination.
Maintaining the center’s preferred version of democracy requires excluding the very people who have lost faith in it. It requires filtering their anger through consultants, reducing their discontent to metrics, recasting their alienation as misinformed rather than earned, and continuing to treat redistribution—not authoritarianism—as the real threat to stability.
To be clear, I’m not saying pro-democracy centrists are insincere. Some took real risks in leaving the Republican Party, speaking out against Trump, and alienating their former networks. That takes courage. But courage is not static, and past clarity does not absolve present evasions. Most of them haven’t relinquished the worldview they held when they were still Republicans in good standing. They still think politics is best handled by professionals; that voters are too volatile to trust; that power should circulate among the credentialed class. They walked away from a party, but not from a system that sees democracy as management.
So here’s the challenge: If you had the clarity to leave your party, can you find the clarity to give up the assumptions that guided it for decades and rendered it vulnerable to Trump’s hostile takeover in 2016? Can you question not just the tactics of authoritarianism, but the foundations that made it plausible? Can you look at the architecture of the system you still serve—its hierarchies, its gatekeeping, its deference to capital—and call it what it is?
Democracy, if it’s going to mean anything, has to belong to those who’ve been denied it the longest. It has to be rebuilt with people, not for them. And it begins not with a speech or a slogan, but with a break from the comfort of insider access, the rituals of elite politics, and the illusion that the system just needs better caretakers. The people who most loudly defend democracy today need to decide whether they are prepared to walk away not from a party but from the story they’ve told themselves about how power works and who deserves to hold it.
The most important question in American politics is not whether we can defeat Trump again, but whether the bipartisan class that produced him—and that continues to dominate our media, campaigns, and institutions—can admit what it built. It will come down to whether the pro-democracy center can face the possibility that Trump is not an anomaly, but a consequence. That authoritarianism didn’t arrive from outside, but emerged from a system emptied of meaning, purpose, and trust, and eroded by elite capture, institutional decay, and top-down cynicism. Until that reckoning happens, the so-called pro-democracy movement isn’t saving anything. It’s managing decline.