If Democrats want to exploit the openings Republicans have left, they can’t do it with a vibes-only pitch about “normalcy.” I say that as someone who voted for George W. Bush twice and, then as now, found the old conservative catechism genuinely persuasive: local control, constitutional restraint, civil liberties, sober budgets, personal moral leadership. Whatever else “conservative” meant in the 1980s and 1990s, it was at least marketed as a philosophy of limits—an argument that power should be hemmed in by law, custom, and conscience.
Watching that word evolve into what it often signifies now—maximal executive dominance, selective proceduralism, and pure weaponized grievance—has been clarifying in the worst way. And Trump, in particular, didn’t just break norms; he shattered the social-conservative idea that the movement stands for personal moral leadership at all. At this point I can’t imagine supporting Republicans again, not because I’ve become allergic to conservatism as a concept, but because the label no longer reliably points to what I thought it did; voting against authoritarianism is conservative.
So if Democrats want to reconfigure coalitions, they need something sturdier than aesthetics. Coalitions don’t shift because one side sounds calmer. They shift when there are credible commitments—especially commitments that bind you when it’s inconvenient.
The cleanest opening is civil libertarianism. Republicans spent decades selling constitutional restraint and then, at key moments, governed as if “security” were a solvent that dissolves constraints. If Democrats want civil libertarians, the pitch has to be simple and testable: we will treat privacy, speech, and due process as real limits on state power even when our side is scared, angry, or embarrassed. That means making surveillance reform, warrant standards, and enforcement guardrails flagship issues—not as partisan cudgels, but as principles. It also means refusing the temptation to treat speech as something the state should curate. The moment your stance sounds like epistemic management, you lose the people who still believe liberty is an end, not a tool.
The harder opening is social traditionalists. Democrats don’t need to become culturally conservative—they need to protect women’s rights, including abortion access, and they cannot abandon the principle that bodily autonomy and equal citizenship are part of what “dignity” actually means. What they do need to drop is the reflexive contempt for the institutions that form people: family, church, local association, communal ritual, inherited meaning. Republicans increasingly turned “tradition” into a loyalty test for power rather than a moral vocabulary ordered toward the common good. That leaves space for Democrats to speak with seriousness—without cosplay—about duty, formation, and the moral ecology that makes citizens. Not as nostalgia, but as civic infrastructure.
And here’s where Russia matters as a negative model—not because it “banned voting,” but because it hollowed out the conditions under which voting means anything. The democratic façade can remain while the friction disappears: media becomes an instrument, law becomes selective, institutions become executive prosthetics, and reality itself becomes contested by design. It’s an accretion process: small consolidations that feel procedural in isolation but become ineluctable in aggregate. If you want a single theoretical lens for the move, you could do worse than to read it through Foucault—power operating less as a singular decree and more as a diffuse regime of control over what can be said, believed, and punished. Dovetails nicely with "Epstein class" talking points.
So the coalition Democrats should aim for is not “left plus anti-Trump.” It’s a rights-forward liberalism that is willing to bind itself; a pluralist moral language that can speak about faith and family without flinching; and a governing style that treats friction—process, oversight, warrants, federalism where appropriate—as the integral feature, not a bug. Arguably good-government reconstruction is not only wise after an aspiring authoritarian rises, it is crucial. The only pitch that works here is restraint that can be audited. Anything else is meretricious: pretty rhetoric that can’t survive contact with power.
