Now What?

Since 2019 Joseph O’Neill has been writing essays for the Review exhorting the Democratic Party to play offense in the face of what was beginning to seem like an aversion to winning. So in November 2024, in the bewildering days after Donald Trump’s reelection, I wrote to O’Neill in search of a diagnosis of the Democrats’ ills and a prognosis for the country’s recovery. His assessment—“it’s our job to make Trump fail, fail again, fail worse”—inspired what has become a series of conversations in the two years since, aimed at figuring out how Democratic leadership might be pressured into mounting effective resistance to the president’s alarming authoritarianism.Now that the Democrats have finally scored an unambiguous victory in the midterm elections, the question is no longer how they might regain power, but what they should do with it. With two more years to go in Trump’s second term, I wrote to O’Neill this week to take the measure of the “blue wave.”Daniel Drake: For the first time since we started doing these interviews, there is good news to discuss. The Democrats’ midterm victory outpaced even the more optimistic polls, and made clear that there is enthusiasm for progressive ca...