While organizing the clutter accumulating in the Partisan Hex office—an Augean stable of printed drafts, red pens, correspondence, and copies of The Atlantic monthly—I found a promotional bottle opener for WelcomeFest 2025, “the largest public gathering of centrist Democrats.” I picked it up at the Principles First Summit in late February. When I RSVP’d, I expected the conference might be an interesting counterpoint. Sad #NeverTrump Republicans, marked as dissidents by their old comrades, might have no political home, but my people, the Ezra Klein enjoyers, were going to be lit as hell.
On June 4, while masked ICE agents were taking people off the street, Democratic lawmakers were being criminally probed, and the administration was promoting the authoritarian-coded Grand Military Parade to celebrate President Donald Trump’s birthday, WelcomeFest no longer sounded fun. Three months ago, when I was already scared deathly this administration, I never thought the state of the union would get so fucked, so fast. Instead of boiling the frog, the second Trump administration set about chasing it with a branding iron.
Centrist Democrats have become a caste of politicians I never purposefully read about. I have not become radical, and consider my politics more pragmatic and consequentialist than ideological—whenever I am drunk, I shout that Democrats should “team up” with the pharmaceutical lobby to take down Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., bilk “fat cat” donors for all they have, and that bringing back pork-barrel spending, machine politics, and smoking in back rooms would improve bipartisanship. To solve our crises, “doing what works” means doing what must be done to achieve the dissolution of MAGA Trumpism.
It was not my intention, when I sent The Welcome Party a $20 entry fee, to attend with a poor attitude. It cost as much as a movie ticket, so I resolved to try to be entertained—which is to say, I bought a plastic liter of Fireball Whiskey. Unfortunately, I left it at home. An ill omen for my hopes of having a good time.
I loved the theme of the conference: “Responsibility to Win.” That is my ethos, too. We have an ethical obligation, a moral imperative, to destroy the Republican Party. I do not view that as compatible with “punching left.” Meanwhile, their pineapple logo made me chuckle. Did they know that symbol is traditionally used to “welcome” swingers? Certainly an unexpected interpretation of “third way.”
The event was in the basement of Washington, DC’s Hamilton Hotel. Reporting described this “CPAC of the center” as being “swank,” but I promise you, Dear Reader, while the venue was nice and historic, it was not the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center or the Ritz-Carlton, and the event was an afternoon of lectures and a Happy Hour, not a three-day bacchanalia with chainsaws, charismatic dictators, and Borat.
My invitation listed “come as you are” as the dress code. I took that on good faith, and arrived wearing sunglasses and a TRUMP IS A BITCH shirt (available now at the Partisan Hex webstore). When I saw every other attendee in a suit—even the College Democrats in sneakers—I returned to the parking garage and changed into the collared shirt, blazer, and tie that were hanging in the back of my car. Let it never be said that Hex travels unprepared for any vibe. I was unsurprised but disappointed nobody else thought to look cool.
Also not unexpected, the conference’s morning session opened with a plea to follow “The Depolarizers” podcast and subscribe to “WelcomeStack.” I have, but I rarely read their newsletters. Which reminds me, Dear Reader: Please like and subscribe to my Substack, too.
One of those early guests made some interesting points; for example, he suggested provocatively that the culture war is filling a vacuum left by a lack of education policy reform. Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate audio to properly attribute those speakers, so I do not know whether I was rankled by Reed Howard, Derek Kaufman, Jason Mangone, Andy Rotherham, or Daniel Squadron.
That unknown speaker’s second point—that Republicans are not the enemy—seems dangerous in a world where Republicans certainly see us as the enemy. Defusing polarization, as a goal, does not appeal to me. I have come to view partisans as weapons, and surrendering unilaterally allows the vulnerable to be metaphorically killed or captured. I cannot be convinced it is safe without bilateral disarmament.
The speaker’s third “point,” “be normal,” was followed by an excoriation of “gender theory in the third grade,” or whatever. That feels anachronistic in a world where, on the first week of Pride Month, the USS Harvey Milk was renamed and Jonathan Joss, the beloved voice actor of King of the Hill’s John Redcorn, was killed outside his burned home, next to his dog’s skull and in his husband’s arms. After which, Texas police were quick to note that “this was not a hate crime.” If Republicans have their way, we will see more dead LGBTQ Americans. But sure, Democrats should be “normal.”
It was mentioned that there is a need to improve blue state governance to stop “exoduses” from California and New York to Texas and North Carolina before the 2030 census and reapportionment. This makes me dread. I would prefer nobody mention this. This is what is inside my Room 101. If reapportionment loses us electors and House seats before we have made more states permanently blue, there is no more hope for the country, and we will be permanently lost. After that anxiety, I stepped outside to smoke.
I found an attendee with shaggy hair and a beard on the steps outside the hotel, clutching an oversized pen, except he sucked on it and exhaled marijuana vapor.
“What is that?” I asked him.
“This is the Pulsar Scribe, available for 20 percent off with coupon code HigherCulture20 at Pulsarvaporizers.com,” he said, and wrote down the URL with it. “You plug the marijuana cartridge in, then puff discreetly. Writes like a real pen, too, and you can even buy ink refills!”
“How marvelous!” I exclaimed. “Science is amazing.”
“Do you want to hit this shit, then?”
I was disgruntled and probably could have mellowed out a bit. But my mellow had been harshed since 2016 and no libertinism ever repaired it. So, I sighed and did what former co-President Elon Musk never could: I said no to drugs.
“Well, time to walk the green mile,” I gestured back inside.
“Have fun, man.” He tucked his lanyard under his collar. “Got all I could take down there. Doesn’t seem like they want progressives in this bitch.”
“But the conference is only just starting.” I thought perhaps he was just high and confused, but no, that cool guy dipped the hell out.
At the main block, only a few minutes into Lauren Ann Pope’s introduction, she mentioned Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s cult text “Abundance.” Must I add that book to my library? I am reaching the point where I will have to replace my shelving and rearrange my workspace to fit more books. Is this worth the effort?
I suppose, out of a charity of spirit, I will add it to my To-Read stack. At present, my library is otherwise occupied. I am rereading Miles Taylor’s Blowback and panicking as his dystopian predictions materialize. That represents the emotional conflict diminishing my enthusiasm. I am fearful of authoritarianism, fascism, a chaotic austerity regime, government violence, and the abuse of state power. The snarkiest pundits at WelcomeFest, by contrast, seemed fearful of “becoming the main character on Twitter” or scoldings from their peers.
I thought the same thing while reading Jake Tapper’s Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. It was an interesting book published in the wrong era. Abundance may or may not prove to be a strong policy blueprint. But I do not know if any blueprint is useful without knowing what will be left of America in two or four years.
Perhaps that is unfair. But one week after this conference, there were troops in California, a military parade underway, and bomb strikes on Iran. Some Welcome presenters seemed like they put tremendous efforts into PowerPoints for a political world that no longer exists. Ignoring the worsening reality to focus on pet issues, I think, allows MAGA Trumpism to normalize and fester unexamined.
I suspect the average WelcomeFest speaker and I would not diverge much on policy. Certainly, their ideas fall within the boundaries of my tolerance. But in style and tone, they are alien to me. I am uncertain whether some of these Blue Dogs even wish to be involved in the project of anti-authoritarianism.
I am sympathetic to Ms. Pope’s goal to “build and cultivate community to make sure that the centrist faction of our party feels the vibrancy and the coherency… it deserves to feel,” though I find the characterization that progressives and leftists are soaking in camaraderie to be a fantasy borne of envy rather than an observation.
Another stated objective, making sure “that the centrist faction has the muscles that it needs to build to win” must have made some lefties stare, since in their minds, too-moderate Democrats are the dominant force and they are underdogs. Ms. Pope said that WelcomeFest was “for the people in the middle, where all the energy is,” though to my understanding of physics, the center is where momentum dies, not where it is born—a strange machine, indeed, asking its fulcrum to provide force.
Ms. Pope quoted Adam Frisch as saying that “most people are in between the two 40-yard lines on the football field, right? And they’re not in the extremes, they’re not in the end zones… [s]o where can we meet America where they are?”
I am puzzled by this metaphor, too, because (1) I am generally unfamiliar with football (the Washington Football Team rarely commands much local enthusiasm); (2) I am not convinced that even the moderates of both parties have been within 40 yards of each other since the Gingrich Revolution; and (3) I was under the impression that the mission of a football player was to carry a ball across the goal line, not to meet new people.
“It’s not our job to set the purity test. It’s not our job to reject nuance. It’s our job to win, to be able to build power and ensure that Democrats can have the power to lead and to govern well,” Ms. Pope concluded. Functionally, I agree, but “reject nuance” is circled with a question mark. I am suspicious when “nuance” is invoked, because while political writers like myself delight in dissecting the fine details of a candidate’s messaging and policy, I am not convinced voters are so sophisticated. “There is a complicated reason you cannot have what you want” may be “nuanced,” but “the bad guys will fuck your Medicaid” is resonant.
Liam Kerr, wearing a Joe Manchin jersey, mockingly displayed a PowerPoint slide of a purple “Official WelcomeFest Protester” t-shirt, which I thought was unnecessarily antagonistic. Unfortunately, many early write-ups of the conference opened with that anecdote. Worse, while Mr. Kerr said they “printed up some shirts” that could be “exchange[d] for some American dollars,” and that they were “nice” and “kind of hipster-ish,” they were not for sale either at the event or online. As an unnecessarily antagonistic political merchandise salesman, I expected more commitment to that bit. Worse, when someone came to the stage to model it, they were wearing something different: a red jersey featuring Babydog Justice.
This is not to say there was no swag available—I got a New Deal Forum stress ball from one table, and I have since given a bunch of Third Way-branded bottle openers I picked up as gag gifts.
It seems doubtful to me that the momentary chuckle was worth the sourness it inspired. Whatever delight Mr. Kerr and the gang take from “hippie punching,” I hope they understand that, like hypertension, the accumulated result of these indulgences could become dangerous and painful.
“The choice is Jim Justice or Joe Manchin,” was Mr. Kerr’s muddled punchline. It ought to have been mentioned that before he was a Republican senator, the Medicaid-supporting, center-right Mr. Justice was elected to West Virginia’s governorship as a “nuanced” Democrat, too, then, within a few months, swapped parties to support Mr. Trump. Both the former and current senators from West Virginia are interesting studies in a sort of pragmatic Appalachian moderation, so I was disappointed to see substantive discussion on the continuum between the two men reduced to a sassy line.
“We want people wearing the blue jersey,” Mr. Kerr clarified, which is true! But I want them not to be so ambivalent that they change sides mid-game.
“We need five more Jared Goldens. We need five more Joe Manchins” was a phrase I have only heard at WelcomeFest, but I am not unsympathetic to Mr. Kerr’s Manchin-mania. He classified the former senator as an “overperformer,” and highlighted “invest[ing] in supporting and replicating what was working in candidates [like Mr. Manchin] who were winning Trump voters [and] red districts.”
When Mr. Kerr complained that WelcomeFest’s mission was met with “active harassment” and “sabotage,” presumably by a gang of progressive pranksters, I felt a tingle in my Spidey Sense. These were allegations of criminal conduct, and if they were meant to describe something other than Twitter snarkers, no efforts were made to explain. It was left to the imagination what dastardly acts Marxist saboteurs might have committed.
Lakshya Jain, a data engineer, told the audience that moderate candidates overperform progressive candidates and he “did the math.” Admittedly, when engineers insist I should trust their math because they love math, I am tempted to assume their numbers are good, because I am awful at math. But when he said: “There is an inverse correlation between what you in DC find appealing and the average voter finds appealing,” I wondered if he was comparing the mean DMV local’s policy preferences and then correlating them against the mean voter nationwide, or using math words to shade my locality. Because if so, Dear Reader, your boy Hex has spent his life driving long, hard nights in loops around the Beltway, and I take exception to politicians and bloggers who use my community as shorthand for whatever set of character traits they condemn.
I am no sports bettor, so Mr. Jain’s “wins against replacement,” or “WAR,” framing, which declared Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won her race by less than she could have, a worse candidate than Janelle Stelson, who lost by less than she could have, feels too unintuitive to enthuse me. However, I agree with the conclusion that even solid red districts are “gettable” with good candidates in a world where “something always happens.” If a Republican drunkenly crashes a car full of cocaine and MDMA, but no Dem challenger can capitalize on it to take the seat, then we should disband and reconstitute the national party.
Where we differ is that Mr. Jain appears to be more confident “the base” would never fail to vote for Democrats. He said: “The base will vote for you anyways. Don’t worry about liberal defections. You will win the liberal vote if you get out of the primary.”
And perhaps math tells him so. I am not convinced the Democratic base is so reliable, or that some progressives are unlosable. There is a specific cohort that I lose sleep over: cool guys in leather jackets, who smoke cigarettes outside nightclubs and college dorms. They constantly complain about lesser evils, marijuana legalization, quote a 20-year old South Park episode, and bounce between Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders. Frankly, we have to take this “crank realignment” more seriously—we alienate the Fonz at our peril.
Mr. Jain repeatedly insisted we act “normal,” but I saw no modeling of what that looks like. Wearing a Joe Manchin jersey? Keeping your beer in a Jared Golden koozie? I fear this cohort simply expected to define “normal” as insulting Democrats. I think this “Not Like the Other Libs” posturing is worse than merely toxic—it is unserious. (Hell has no greater damnation for The Atlantic Monthly subscribers than that slur.)
Mr. Jain smiled and said that “being yelled at on Bluesky is good.” Slams on Bluesky, as if its only purpose is to be a left-wing nuthouse, are despicable. Twitter must die. It cannot be trusted as a communication method. Mr. Musk wants to turn it into a fuel for his artificial intelligence and “rewrite knowledge itself.” We must oppose that endeavor. To be more paranoid, I see no reason to imagine Mr. Musk would not read the “Direct Messages” of his adversaries or use the personal metadata the app collects for something nefarious. I am not comfortable knowing Mr. Musk was in a “k-hole” the last time I called him a bitch from the backseat of a Tesla. He is vindictive, and the measure of “how far he will go” is a product of his mental health more than his moral opinions. While it is not impossible the SpaceX, Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), The Boring Company, Neuralink, and xAI CEO would refrain from abusing his control of the platform, I will not trust the “sportsmanship” of someone who has shown the country and Party so much malice. Microblogging can be done elsewhere.
Mr. Jain slammed haters on Twitter, saying “[They’re] not fighting fascism, [they’re] posting on [their] phone[s]. If [they] want to fight fascism, [they should] go and win elections.” Assuredly a sick burn! But it did not escape me that he would also be posting that from his phone. There seems to be a double consciousness at play here. Outside the two or three days a year elections happen, the ideological battlespace is online, and I assume many of the bloggers and Twitterers on the stage would acknowledge this is why they are publishing on the Internet, yet they seem to be willing to jab at the Netroots, too. Only one can be true.
The Twittersphere is not representative of all primary voters, but cable television viewership was down significantly in 2024 from 2020, and newspaper readership is so diminished that you cannot purchase The New York Times or Washington Post at some DC-area gas stations. The number of offline voters must be scant. Advising politicians to disregard digital voices may be perilous. If not social media, do we expect that leaders learn what their electorate wants from augurs?
It should not escape anyone’s notice that the current president is remarkably online for someone who never touches a computer keyboard. Mr. Trump views social media as important enough to own a social media company. He is on his cell phone reposting shit at every hour. His Twitter, as you may recall, was a constant object of consternation during his first term. If it were meaningless, the man would have stopped doing it by now. We are too quick to dismiss whether the next Democratic presidential or congressional candidates need to be posters.
To be clear, I do not want that. I would rather have someone who says, “I am done with social media. I deleted Facebook. That platform was harmful to me, and it is harmful to the children.” Someone with the guts to ban TikTok, not because of Chinese surveillance, or national security, but because it is, as they say, “cooking” the youths’ brains. I want the Nancy Reagan of social media.
With that said, I question why we should dismiss the idea that Democrats should engage in the shitpost game that Republicans are immersed in. If the goal is to say, “While Republicans are posting ‘dank memes,’ we will exploit that blind spot and engage their communities,” then we are talking in the language of good ideas.
If it appears I spent an excess of time excoriating Mr. Jain, Dear Reader, I want to assure you that this is not personal. Rather, it reflects (1) I thought his perspective was interesting and engaging, even though I am opposed to his style and conclusions; and (2) while I vigorously took notes at the start of the conference, I was too overzealous and caused myself painful carpal tunnel. My copper compression gloves were at home with my Fireball, and the local CVS, unfortunately, did not have any in stock. Another sad casualty of Mr. Trump’s trade war.
Reporting says that Matt Yglesias, author of Slow Boring on Substack, was treated like a rock star at WelcomeFest. He was well received, but I doubt anybody making that comparison spend much time at rock concerts. People read Mr. Yglesias’s posts; they do not buy his posters. Mr. Yglesias’s crowd would be better described as “rapt” and treated him like a sage. I was forced to restrain my inner contrarian.
While our readers may try to set us against each other, I have no personal animosity towards Mr. Yglesias. This is attributable to the rigid paywall on his Substack. I have had little opportunity to encounter much of his text that I would find disagreeable. I am also a lifetime Twitter drama avoider, so I missed all the days when he was the “main character.”
Let me take a moment to celebrate myself. Partisan Hex is free to the public at the time of writing. My subscribers do not pay for access to my content; they do so because they are good, smart, hardworking Americans who love their country. That is at least as valuable as hundreds of thousands of paying readers and the #14 most-read Substack political blog.
It must seem unusual for a Beltway insider not to be well-versed in the writings of Mr. Yglesias. Many such characters exist, but they feign otherwise. Unless you ask them specific questions, they will pretend to be familiar with any blog. I have at times, while drinking a vile concoction of energy drink and vodka, gotten some congressional staffers to agree that they enjoy watching a YouTuber I made up, “Goatse.” I have more shame than that, and would be embarrassed pretending proficiency with the Slow Boring canon I could not defend.
Mr. Yglesias showed a projected PowerPoint slide about “the groups,” and characterized liberal organizers and advocates as “extremists” whose “main mode of operation” was, “for no logical reason,” “generat[ing] bad press for Democrats” and “working… to make [moderate] candidates look bad.” At best, this felt uncharitable; at worst, it sounded like dog-whistle rhetoric. I do not mean that Mr. Yglesias meant the phrase as a dog whistle, but “the groups” sounds dehumanizing, like a slur in a bland, technocratic science fiction.
These “Bad Groups” create “bad substantive policy,” according to Mr. Yglesias, and their influence “leads to a lot of policies that even the Democrats who support them don’t seem to really care that much about. You never meet the person who’s like, fuck yeah, we ban plastic straws.” I can agree that this has made worse the experience of doomscrolling in a Wendy’s parking lot. Each time I touch a paper straw, I recoil like it were the first. One of the funniest pieces of campaign merchandise I have owned was the 2020 Trump campaign’s branded plastic straws ($15 for 10—$1.50 a straw!).
Mr. Yglesias entered dicier territory with a subsequent slide, entitled “BAD GROUPS CREATE BAD INCENTIVES FOR DEMOCRATS” alongside the Associated Press headline: “More Democratic lawmakers visit El Salvador to see Abrego Garcia, wrongly deported by Trump administration,” which covered lawmakers’ advocacy for the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement illegally, and without trial, renditioned overseas to CECOT, the 40,000-inmate megaprison in El Salvador. The public’s focus on the administration succeeded in bringing Mr. Garcia home for his day in court. If Mr. Yglesias meant other than abandoning immigrants to whatever cruel fate the Trump administration afflicts, he forgot to clarify. The whole of WelcomeFest unfortunately was made infamous by this slide.
Mr. Yglesias clarified he was not complaining about “fringe groups,” in case anyone might have mistaken his pitch as a call to “Sister Souljah” a “cringe intersectionalist” or whatever. “These problems here are being caused by fairly mainstream groups that have real meaningful clout in the Democratic Party. major green organizations, labor unions… mainstream Democrats [] are seen as too left wing.” Somewhere else, I imagine, a Justice Democrat was giving a version of the same speech, where they were the underdogs and the mainstream of the Democratic Party was too conservative and feckless.
I have long been an antagonist to those Brothers of Bernard, as I call them, who undermine the Democratic Party because of their grievances over the 2016 primary. Why should I treat the centrist coalition with more charity?
“It used to be that you would meet people all the time in politics who privately had certain very progressive views that they were swallowing for electoral reasons,” Mr. Yglesias explained his idea of “dog-whistle moderation.” “I now more and more often meet the opposite. People who have three or four things that they’re secretly moderate on, but they don’t want to say that because they don’t want to get yelled at”—echoing earlier gripes about Bluesky pile-ons. “Don’t want to get yelled at” was a frequent complaint, which made me wonder how much of this reactionary distaste for our coalition members is the product of cyberbullying. If “getting yelled at” was a concern of theirs, perhaps someone should next threaten that they will “get in trouble,” or to “call their mom.”
It is true the Democratic Party must be “open to heterodoxy and differences of opinion across these different things” and that if “you develop an ideological infrastructure where to be considered kosher, you have to be orthodox on this incredibly long laundry list of policy things… somebody who’s not as into politics is going to gravitate to the other side.” But Mr. Yglesias and other speakers all continuously collapsed supposed disagreements or alternate policy positions into vagaries. What are these views that would have Democrats excommunicated that are so odious that even those who say Democrats should be free to hold them will not name them?
Democrats should be having these discussions. The party in the wilderness will have to return to the nation transformed at the end of their quest. But there is an arrogance—I suffer it too—in assuming that the coalition’s successful final form happens to be the one your Substack describes. Slow Boring could well be the answer, though I am more partial to Fast and Cool.
Mr. Yglesias closed: “So it’s a great idea to fund these kinds of groups”—still meaning “major green organizations and labor unions”—“if your view is that Trump is fine and there’s no problem with running the risk of losing seats. But don’t fund them if you seriously think that Trump is bad, that he’s a threat to democracy, that rolling back the social safety net and abortion rights is bad…. [C]an we fund something useful instead?” I think every part of the Democratic coalition should be funded, but I was reassured to see Mr. Yglesias acknowledge Mr. Trump is mad, bad, and dangerous, even if “Do not fund left wing groups if you think Trump is bad” was out of place at a conference that paid so little mind to the immediate danger of MAGA Trumpism.”
Lanae Erickson spoke next with Adam Jentleson and Mr. Jain. The three immediately undercut that reassurance. Ms. Erickson said: “Over the last 10, 15 years, we’ve seen a huge amount of investment in places like Justice Dems, Our Revolution, a lot of #resistance-y people that are doing #resistance-y things. And they’ve had a lot of energy and a lot of activity and a lot of coverage in the press. But what they haven’t done is done a lot of winning.”
I do not care if Justice Dems or Our Revolution catch a few strays—I have assuredly caught some of theirs. But it annoys me to see #resistance used as an epithet for mainstream Democrats. The pink pussy hats are no longer popular, but #resistance should not be a quick burn to discredit someone to your left or right as “performative.” The ruling regime is seeking to use the full power of the state to maximize the suffering of its opposition. #Resistance should be unifying.
Statements like this disparaging activists especially rankle me because it is those “groups” who have organized protests, donated funds, and said fighting words to this administration, while centrist reformers have been lamenting the “She’s for They/Them” ad—an obsolete topic as the MAGA Republican Party shuts down the LGBTQ suicide hotline.
Mr. Jentleson voiced a worrying strain of thought. “There’s a sort of macro effect of voters observing the far-left activist in your party get mad at you… and then voters see that and say, oh, that is a positive to me. I see it as a positive that this person is saying something that is getting them yelled at… because that must mean that they’re saying something normal. And it demonstrates that they have the independence of mind and the independent thought to speak out for themselves and to not follow the rigid ideology of their party.”
The real secret to Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski’s appeal is not that they occasionally break with the Republican Party—as the late, great Harry Reid said apocryphally: “You can always count on Susan Collins when you don’t need her.” Rather, voters enjoy watching their senator play Hamlet. Even if the end result is still party-line voting, they enjoy the spectacle of internal debate.
However, I am tired of this valorization of getting on my nerves. I could alienate some part of my readership if I insisted that mixed-use housing was a mistake and that zoning laws be rewritten to forbid it, or if I proposed euthanizing polar bears in advance of imminent global warming. I would not be an electoral hero for daring to oppose orthodoxy. I do not believe there is much short-term electoral advantage for Democrats in disrespecting and openly antagonizing other Democrats, regardless of “who started it.” Our members must advocate for and exercise their judgment on behalf of the localities they wish to represent, but they should not feel as comfortable as Mr. Jentleson using their electorate as laugh lines.
Mr. Jain reiterated his opinion that “Democratic voters are much more understanding than you believe.” Perhaps they have been! But how much can we depend on others to forbear us? I thought of Milan Kundera’s Slowness: “Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you’re intelligent, because you’re decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don’t chase women, because you do the dishes, then I’m disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, an egotist, a bastard.” Expecting our electorate to be “understanding” while we do things they find unappealing to pursue other voters has already eroded some alliances. See: the “Muslims for Trump” fiasco.
“We don’t just go and pick the craziest person around like the Republican Party tends to do in Arizona. So use that to your advantage.” Mr. Jain identified one of the GOP’s great weaknesses, and I have gotten terribly, despairingly drunk on many occasions over the Democratic Party’s failure to properly exploit it. I wish this had been more central to Mr. Jain’s arguments, because it would have recolored the whole conference into something that could have been, as Mr. Yglesias put it, “useful instead” of hectoring Democrats to be more “mainstream” and “normal.” Instead, I plan to make Republicans look crazy.
Ms. Erickson lauded former Senator Jon Tester as “pretty left on some things, like campaign finance, but then pretty conservative on other things, like immigration. But you know where he stood and he said it out loud and he got yelled at by people on all sides,” contrasted against “the kind of moderates that say, I want to be as quiet as possible so no one can disagree with me. And if I stand here very quietly and do everything perfectly and say nothing that matters, maybe I’ll get elected again.” The latter grey rock politician is an absolute liability. Scapegoating them could broker peace between the centrist and progressive factions.
Mr. Jentleson clarified that his view of moderation “doesn’t necessarily mean taking the position that is in the exact middle on a left-right binary spectrum on every single issue… because your average voter thinks of themselves, especially swing voters, as being an independent thinker and not being aligned entirely with one party or the other.” This is right, too.
Mr. Jentleson reflected on 2008, when Democrats held Senate seats in Arkansas, both North and South Dakotas, Montana, West Virginia, Indiana, Louisiana, Florida, and Nebraska. These “Blue Dog Avengers,” former Senators Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Tim Johnson, Max Baucus, Jon Tester, Robert Byrd, Jay Rockefeller, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Bill Nelson, and Ben Nelson, gave us the Affordable Care Act, which, while not Medicare-for-All, expanded Medicaid in dozens of states, provided health coverage to over 20 million Americans, guaranteed protections for people with pre-existing conditions, eliminated lifetime limits, and made preventive care free.
My enthusiasm stalled when I recalled that Mr. Jentleson's most recent Hill employer was Senator Jon Fetterman, who has become a liability to the Democratic Party. That Mr. Jentleson would warn in New York Magazine about his former boss crashing cars, carrying a firearm, and crying in constituent meetings gives me red flags about his judgment, or at least taste.
Next on stage, Ms. Pope introduced Rebecca Cooke and Janelle Stelson. When the lineup was posted on Reddit, Ms. Cooke’s name alone was exempted from mockery. Her reputation seems unique—few politicians are described as “good,” “sweet,” or “genuine.”
Ms. Cooke said: “How we drew people along was showing up, which seems like that should be the bare minimum, but I’ve always said that there’s no community too small or too red that we’re not showing up in… we spent a lot of time in third spaces… [and] showing up in places that you weren’t always seeing a Democrat.” She described working as a waitress while running for office, how her experience growing up on a dairy farm helped her relate to Wisconsinites, and gave the star advice: “Just be yourself.”
Ms. Cooke’s campaign “focused on pocketbook issues,” “hearing about how folks were struggling to pay their rent and being able to afford their groceries and fill up the gas tank,” and “laser-focused on… making sure that we were talking about what [people’s] top concerns were.” These are not bad suggestions, but must it be reiterated that talking to constituents is good, actually? Why is “kissing babies” now novel? Do people carry pocketbooks anymore? Would I understand “kitchen table issues” better if I had a better kitchen table?
Ms. Stelson lost in her race against Representative Scott Perry, who she described as “an entrenched bad guy,” “so extreme that he does… not represent his constituents any longer [and] doesn’t show up to see what we care about, what we’re thinking about.” That is how we ought to talk about Republicans—whatever twitchy opinions I might have about Welcome, their championship of her candidacy has been excellent.
Ms. Pope suggested “being hyperfocused on your communities and on the voters you’re talking to every day helps you to be depolarizing,” which, as I mentioned before, may not be the best goal. Reversing illiberal polarization is good, but insufficient. Instead of restoring voters to a random, neutral state, Democrats need an external field stronger than the GOP’s coercive threshold so that voters are reverse-polarized, dipoles flip, and their remanence is stuck in the opposite orientation: hostility to authoritarian Republicans.
Ms. Cooke had another suggestion that I hope candidates are already doing: “I want the people that are living failed policies by this administration in my district to be the messengers. People that are feeling the impacts to the cuts in Medicaid and SNAP…. Some of what’s happening doesn’t really change their voting behavior until it impacts them.”
“How does this affect Americans?” is a central question for any effective campaign. But I do not think this is novel or traditionally neglected in Democratic advertisements and speeches. Working-class, everyday Americans hear about themselves plenty—but how do you get them to listen or understand that it is not a lie suggest that, when Mr. Trump signs a “Big Bitch Bill” cutting Medicaid, that might cut their Medicaid?
Ms. Stelson gave more examples of things that should move voters: “The cliche is all politics are local, but national issues have never been more important. When you are cutting cancer researchers and your neighbor's child has cancer and could have been helped by those researchers,” or “vot[ing] against giving firefighters protection from some of the toxic chemicals in their gear,” she said, “that gets pretty damn local.”
Ms. Cooke joked: “I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anybody that was like, no, I love that chaos and division [in DC].” This cannot be true. Otherwise, the late Maha Rushdie, El Rushbo, the Doctor of Democracy, would not have, with half his brain tied behind his back, garnered an audience of tens of millions of those hardworking, everyday Americans.
Ms. Cooke’s suggestion to “hold on to who you are and find[] those ways in which you can come back to yourself,” did not stop her enemies from telling Wisconsinites that she was an extremist and a villain. The National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, to elect insurrectionist Representative Derrick Van Orden, called her “a certified loser,” “a sleazy political activist only looking out for herself,” said she was a “shameless [liar],” “desperately trying to hide the fact that she has spent her career electing radical leftists,” and accused her of “making shady deals for her own personal gain.” Mr. Van Orden won, and now, in Ms. Cooke’s words, “serves in the building he tried to burn down.” I do not think we can afford to be blind to chaos and division’s desirability to part of the electorate.
Representative Tom Suozzi was next. I promised myself I would remember his name but forgot why. After Googling, it was because he voted alongside every Republican to censure Representative Al Green, who, during the worst Joint Session of Congress ever, boldly pointed a cane at Mr. Trump and told him that he had no mandate to cut Medicaid.
Mr. Green was celebrated at the April 5 protests as a hero. Meanwhile, Mr. Suozzi once wrote a New York Times editorial calling for Democrats to collaborate with the Trump administration and DOGE. (Generously, this was naïve—the administration has been explicit that they will not work with Democrats.) On my way out, I caught a sentence of his presentation—“Democrats used to show up at the church picnics and the bars…. Nobody does that anymore.”—but I was committed to my huff. I even shook my head with exaggerated disgust, too, so that anybody who glanced at my exit could interpret my resentment.
I splashed cold water on my face and stared at the bathroom mirror. For months, I have heard people say the Democratic brand is “toast.” These speakers continued the trend by repeatedly suggesting that “nobody trusts Democrats.” They said that candidates have to separate themselves from the national party, that we are all lost, lost! This state of affairs is not improved by talking extra shit on ourselves.
I returned to hear Mr. Suozzi say: “Trump says things on the right. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says things on the left. The more extreme things you say, the more follows, the more likes you’ll get.” Representative Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most popular, personable, “authentic” Democrats in office right now, and we are lucky to have her. There is no cause to tarnish her.
Next, the discussion between Josh Barro and Representative Ritchie Torres went immediately into more unbearable griping about “the groups.” The doors suddenly flew open. A volunteer started shouting.
“We have protesters. Welcome,” Mr. Torres said, with a hint of smarm.
“Oh, Jesus Christ.” Mr. Barro’s contempt was more naked.
“You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon played, and activists dressed in the colors of the Palestinian flag photobombed Mr. Torres with “Genocide Ritchie” banners. They were chased around the room by security and escorted out in a sequence that made me think of Yakety Sax.
Mr. Torres returned to the stage and quipped: “Speaking of the groups…” to applause. This was a comedic gift he had not earned. At least everyone had fun.
In another age, I would be entertained by a zany interruption. Instead, it nearly brought me to my dipping point. I moved to an exit that led to the Hamilton backroom and watched the livestream from my phone until I felt safe to return. I do not intend to compare activists who wanted to get a photo of a mean banner next to Mr. Torres’s head with damnable terrorist insurrectionists like the Proud Boys. There is no parallel, but my body does not know that. Doors bursting open, yelling, pursuing security—a recipe for adrenaline.
In the aftermath of the bomb threat at the Principles First Summit, I developed anxiety about the safety of opposing Mr. Trump in public. I find myself factoring in another evacuation or danger whenever I plan for political events. Sitting in the hotel service hallway, I barely remembered how I felt in civic spaces before 2025.
Whatever else they talked about—presumably zoning, I remember hearing a lot about zoning—was more noise in my racing brain. Ms. Pope gushed about the next speaker, Congresswoman Kristen McDonnell-Rivett, overperforming Kamala Harris by eight or nine percent in Michigan. Certainly an exemplar of a successful campaign in a state we need to win.
Ms. McDonnell-Rivett said that Democrats “have created too many rooms where somebody with mud on their boots doesn’t feel like they’re welcome.” And I am sorry, but if voters feel self-conscious, that is not an excuse for evil MAGA Republican shit. They can leave their shoes at the door like everybody else. The infantilization of the working class aggravates the hell out of me. I agree that Democrats must better communicate the impact of policies to the public, and that focus-grouped politicians come off as “diminish[ing] pain points,” but something is darkly distorted in a cohort that responds to that perceived neglect by voting for Mr. Trump. We cannot accommodate perverse wants like the “Alligator Alcatraz.” If they desire the bad stuff, the other side can give them the worst.
The festival’s headliner, Derek Thompson, took the stage next to discuss Abundance, finally, and it was described as “an economics textbook for the Democratic Party.” I wished Ezra Klein were there, too, but instead he was joined by Rep. Derek Auchincloss. They both answered the same questions, but a bit at cross purposes.
I wondered, if Mr. Auchincloss read Mr. Thompson’s book, or if he were a poser adopting it for its shiny retrofuturist aesthetic. This sounds admittedly very snarky, but I mean the question sincerely. I recalled when the book was initially released, only a short while later disgraced former New York governor and losing mayoral Democratic primary candidate Andrew Cuomo (who should fuck off) was citing it as if he were a lifelong adherent. A whole Abundance subculture blossomed overnight.
Mr. Auchincloss suggested he was “unwilling to accept the lecture on corporate power from the left when they are carrying the water for the most pernicious, nefarious corporations in modern history, which are the social media corporations,” then complained, with some real venom: “Every time we try to take on big tech, which are attention-fracking our children[,]… corroding our civil discourse, [and] monetizing our attention spans, it’s the left that’s carrying the water for their spurious political arguments. They’re the ones who are in the pocket of these big tech companies.”
What the hell did Representative Ro Khanna ever do to him? That zinger sounds like some Rush Limbaugh shit, though if El Rushbo were giving the rant, he would conflate the whole of WelcomeFest with the “Marxist Left.” OpenSecrets reveals that Mr. Auchincloss’s campaign received donations from Andreessen Horowitz and the Winklevoss twins, so I really do not understand what the hell he was talking about. Messrs. Klein and Thompson have both described the goal of Abundance as a “reconciliation” between semi-progressive Democrats and the tech industry, and I am reasonably certain there are some Silicon Valley guys pumping money into Welcome’s constituent organizations as well. (At least, I saw some Bernie Sanders superfans saying so on Reddit.
Mr. Thompson discussed the significance of “telling people that they’re right about their vague, spectral feeling that shit is broken,” and validating their “spectral sense of anxiety” with “specificity [that] registers as optimism,” which I suppose is the whole metaphysics of American politicking, but not exactly the data-driven and analytical technocracy I was promised by Abundance’s reputation.
If one of my complaints about Welcome has been its inadequate sense of narrative, Mr. Thompson addressed that with moderate metatextual suavity, though I was not convinced:
“If you and I were running in a primary, and you said that the far right has a story, and they’ve won. The far left has a story. The center doesn’t have a story, and that’s a problem. What I would say in response to that is, ‘Yeah, stories are for children. Americans need a plan. Americans need solutions. So, I would prefer to tell the audience,’ turning to them, gesturing broadly, to say, ‘Yeah, the right has a story, it’s bullshit. The left has a story. I think it’s wrong. You don’t need a story. You need a place to live. You need an electricity bill that you can afford. You need childcare that you can afford that won’t bankrupt you….’ What I just did is also storytelling, right? It is essentially saying, like, the story that I would tell is essentially that American politicians, in some categories, have fallen too in love with this idea that you don’t have an agenda until you have a story…. You can just have the answers. You can just have a plan to make people’s lives better. And you don’t necessarily have to wrap it up in a complex story that like belittles elites, or finds the bad guy, or says, you know, if a company gets relatively big, it’s always evil. You don’t have to lie to people to win elections.”
This puts too much onus on the people. Mr. Thompson knows damn well Americans are cooking in the fever swamps. If you cannot convince them to climb out before they are boiled, there will be a significant human cost. Abundance was not written to resist authoritarianism, it is a manual for improving the version of the world that Mr. Trump’s election negated, or perhaps instructions for building the America that comes afterwards. Right now, it seems like errata.
If it will dull the repetition—abundance, abundance, abundance!—I say we should give them their zoning and housing reform. They are passionate and claim to have done their homework, so let HUD become the Department of Abundance (DOA). Just end the misophonic torment!
This is not to diminish the things Messrs. Klein and Thompson value. I want, in principle, all the good stuff they tout—abundant housing, green energy, whatever—but “[w]e’ve got numbers to crunch” is a rallying call that mainly appeals to math enjoyers, and based on the scant outcry to Mr. Trump’s insistence that gasoline is $1.99 a gallon when the average price is $3.15 nationwide, we should not assume voters are strictly looking for rigorously calculated policy proposals.
I am skeptical of cutting any more red tape at this moment, The Memphis xAI facility that got itself waived from regulation is a polluting nightmare—described as “environmental violence,” “35 massive methane gas turbines, burning fossil fuels around the clock,” “industrial behemoths[] emitting dangerous levels of formaldehyde and nitrogen oxides, which are linked to severe respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.” Captain Planet ought to be revived in the national consciousness to remind Americans that toxic emissions on this scale are catastrophic to humans and wildlife. Former president Elon Musk has long since given up preserving either.
Mr. Yglesias returned to the stage with Representativesas Jared Golden, Adam Gray, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who was wearing a Blue Dog baseball cap. Mr. Yglesias praised the trio, calling them, unsarcastically, “legends in the moderate community,” then asked Mr. Golden, with an audible sneer, how his local Indivisible chapter was doing. To his credit, Mr. Golden claimed he was on fairly good terms with his local activists, and the “national organization” was the headache for him.
I thought they were basically fine. Mr. Gray said that: “If you have to explain to somebody what you did for them, you probably didn’t really do much for them. They would know if you did something for them,” which sounds true enough, and “that Bill Clinton was the last Democratic president to win a majority, you know, of rural counties is a major problem for our party and one that we ought to be hyper-focused on.” Definitely true, but strategists would have learned more about that from a four-hour King of the Hill marathon.
According to my notes: “Gluesenkamp Perez talked about sealion predation, Slotkin, lampreys, Golden, lobsters, Cooke, lutefisk. Local issues appear to all be fish or cows. One of those would be a better option than the pineapple for the WelcomeFest logo.”
Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez made one statement which raised my brow. “If you can financially afford to go to a protest every day you are an inherently different person from most of the people in my community.” Nobody is expected to be protesting 24/7. Events that occur on weekdays are usually small, and larger gatherings take place on weekends or holidays. It seems unnecessarily derogatory to insinuate that Democrats and Independents who do put on their boots and oppose the regime are somehow wealthy, privileged princesses.
For Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez’s birthday, Mr. Kerr brought out a Tupperware tote containing 11,800 “body parts gummies,” one for each crossover voter she won. She seemed amused, appreciative, and chagrined. A perfectly normal thing to happen in a hotel basement.
I did not listen to David Shor’s presentation at all. He said nothing wrong, but the conclusions he draws about the loss of working class voters are depressing. Many apologies, Mr. Shor. Even hearing those numbers secondhand makes me claw my face. If things are irreparably as bad as that arithmetic shows they could be, we are damned.
Senator Elissa Slotkin came to the stage and bizarrely pitched that the Democratic Party lacked her “alpha energy,” which put such tension in my neck I debated abandoning the last presentation to find an ibuprofen. “Alpha energy” does not declare itself. It waits for the heraldry of others. In the meantime, it insinuates. It says, “I was at the dog park, and for some mysterious reason, all the small animals started to freeze, lower their eyes, and roll on their backs—how curious!”
The Michigan senator talked about spitting in a bucket of lampreys. How on Earth did I miss that news cycle? Apparently, one of the urgent local issues that representatives must prioritize to better position themselves to defeat the parasitic Yarvinites and fascists in the MAGA Republican party is the epidemic of “giant eel[s] with a ton of teeth and a pointy tongue that attach [to and] … kill[] fish by sucking [the] guts out.” If only some of these lecturers were to describe Mr. Trump’s blight so eloquently!
Ms. Slotkin detailed one of Democrats’ crucial problems: “9% of [her old] district was on Twitter[;] [o]ver 60% of Michiganders don’t have a news app on their phone and they consume no news.” It is true that much of the electorate is disengaged from day-to-day politics, but her solution was spitting on fish. She offered those specific statistics as a criticism of the concept of a “digital campaign,” but cited her lamprey video’s 400,000 views as “breaking through.” There is a contradiction here that does everyone a disservice: while Twitter is “not real life,” a viral short of a politician disrespecting a fish is not analog either.
Multiple times that afternoon I scrawled a variation of this same paragraph in my notes: “There is no reason opposing this regime’s authoritarian takeover of the country needs to exclusively be the domain of the far left.” As the clock ticked through WelcomeFest’s last hour, I was worried it would not be addressed.
Ms. Slotkin finally did what most other speakers that Wednesday had not: reject authoritarianism. “We’re at a conference of the centrist, pragmatic—whatever the right label is…. [The] traditional progressive-versus-moderate debate that we’ve largely been having since 2016 is not actually the real fight anymore. It’s not the internal squabble. It’s really how you answer the following question. Senior leaders, do you believe that Trump’s second administration is an existential threat to the country you love, or do you believe that it’s bad, but, like, Trump won, we’ll get through it, and things will boomerang on him, so we just need to kind of wait it out? And I’m in camp number one.
And the camp—the people and how they divide members—it doesn’t go along the moderate-versus-progressive ideological lines. There are people who are considered moderates who feel really strongly that we need to be treating this as a real problem, existential problem for democracy. And then there are people who I consider real progressives who are like, ‘I’ve seen this movie, we just gotta let things turn on him.’ I would say, watch for that divide, because that, to me, is the real debate right now in the party. When something’s existential in a Department of Defense context, it means you are required to get your ass in gear to figure this out now. If something is a concern, well, you watch it. Right? So, to me, how you answer that question is how we split now in the party.”
I had not seen that ethos at WelcomeFest. I can count the number of times the word “Trump” appears in the transcript, but it has generally been next to words like “voter” or “district.” While there are some offhand references to his “craziness” or “fascism,” even those were introduced to frame the accusation, “but the Average, Normal American thinks we Democrats are even worse!”
After the room dispersed into the Happy Hour, I slipped away. I did not want to find out if I was “normal” enough for that crowd. Discombobulated by the severity of the heat outside, I made some wrong turns on the way to the parking garage, then a few more. In a haze, I found myself sweating and shaking miles away in Georgetown. My donkey feet brought me somewhere familiar: the site of the old punk boutique Commander Salamander. It has been gone since 2010. For a time, it was an M&T Bank; now it is a sad, aged storefront for lease. One day, it will probably be a Chipotle.
I was reminded of Herman Hesse’s novel Demian: When you become blameless and normal, the spirit will leave you and look for a different vessel in which to brew its thoughts. Over and over, the speakers lectured that Democrats need to be “normal” and then all our ills will be cured. But Republicans are not normal—Minnesota Governor Tim Walz shot straight when he called them “weird.” They try to mold the world into their own aesthetic, and, as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan might have said, define deviancy downward.
WelcomeFest’s guests and attendees assuredly are the “adults in the room,” and must seem like an appealing posture. The Clinton-Kaine and Harris-Walz campaigns did not fail to accomplish that, despite whatever they wrote on ACLU questionnaires. I do not think it politically wise to describe yourself as responsible and boring. The public wants fun and emotionally engaging. That, to me, is good versus evil, liberty versus authoritarianism, sadists versus the hurt—grand and operatic, not middling and technocratic.
I hold no disdain for moderates (though I wish Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would cave less), nor any grudge from past primaries—as I repeat often, I supported Martin O’Malley in 2016 and Elizabeth Warren in 2020. I am not a bitter leftist fighting for control of the party; I am a loyal Democrat. I would climb into that bucket of lampreys myself if it would end the nightmare of Trumpism. But I worry about this faction’s emotional legibility.
What is the centrist, moderate way to warn against dismantling critical government infrastructure? To state plainly that migrants must not be sent to foreign prisons without trial, that nobody should be deported for college essays? How does one centrist-ly articulate the urgency of preventing hundreds of billions of dollars in savage cuts to Medicaid and SNAP that millions of Americans cannot afford? How can you moderately demand that measles and bird flu must not ravage the nation, or that children’s cancer research should not be stopped? Even if Messrs. Golden or Torres had the proper prescriptions before 2024—which I do not concede—it is now a more dangerous era. Democrats cannot be “less woke” and expect that to magically break the hold of fascism on the electorate.
I know how Indivisible addresses these dangers—they spoke loudly and boldly at the April 5 and Mayday protests. I have even seen #NeverTrump Republicans realize the true nature of the MAGA threat, renounce their wicked ways, and wrestle with the nightmare their party made. I still do not know how Welcome’s squad intends to fight these horrors, and I spent the whole afternoon there. Is that “normal?”