Political rhetoric and projects should shift away from the solution that struggling people need to improve themselves by obtaining a four-year college degree, since approximately two-thirds of Americans do not have four-year degrees, making it folly to construct an economy where a college degree is a necessary condition for dignified work and a decent life.

The MAGA movement faces a critical open question: whether it will develop a genuine strand of populist critique that challenges concentrated corporate power or whether it will use populist rhetoric at election time while governing in a plutocratic way (favoring the wealthy and corporations), as Trump's first term demonstrated through its main achievement being a massive tax cut benefiting the wealthy and corporations.

The meritocratic hubris of successful people constitutes a distinct and toxically polarizing divide: winners of globalization not only claimed their wealth but also claimed that their success was their own doing and the measure of their merit, creating resentment distinct from (though related to) wealth inequality—this meritocratic divide between winners and losers is what poisons politics.

Donald Trump's 2016 election was not a fluke; his 2024 return demonstrates that the Biden years may be retrospectively understood as an interregnum in a longer 'age of Trump' whose duration depends on what Democrats do in opposition—rethinking their economic project and learning to speak to working-class anger and anxiety.

Beneath the optimism and hubris of the 1990s—when the Cold War had ended and democratic capitalism appeared victorious—there were rumbling sources of discontent rooted in a growing sense of disempowerment (feeling less in control of forces governing one's life and lacking meaningful say in shaping those forces) and anxiety about the unraveling moral fabric of community from family to neighborhood to nation.

Democrats invoked 'freedom' narrowly and individualistically—primarily meaning freedom of personal choice (especially regarding abortion)—rather than civic freedom, which is the freedom to deliberate together as fellow citizens about self-government and the purposes appropriate to our community.

Those inchoate sources of discontent from the 1990s have hardened into anger and resentment in large part due to the way market-driven neoliberal globalization was played out, creating growing inequalities and a deepening divide between winners and losers, exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent bank bailouts that left ordinary homeowners to fend for themselves while Wall Street was rescued.

The Democratic party became the primary target of the populist backlash against neoliberal arrangements because they were among the most enthusiastic supporters of those arrangements.

The Democratic Party alienated working-class voters—who once formed its primary base—by failing to develop a coherent economic offer to address nearly five decades of wage stagnation and the sense that elites were looking down on them, allowing Trump to exploit the discontent that center-left parties have not learned to address.

The Democratic Party and center-left parties embraced market-driven neoliberalism, deregulation, and free trade agreements while never challenging the fundamental premise that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for defining and achieving the public good, leading to globalization presented as inevitable rather than subject to democratic deliberation.

Progressive politics should reframe around honoring and renewing the dignity of work, making life better, and recognizing everyone who contributes to the common good through their work, families, and community service—regardless of whether they possess prestigious credentials.

Free trade agreements of the neoliberal era were not primarily about reducing tariffs (which were already low) but about enforcing intellectual property rights regimes—such as extending Disney's ability to patent Mickey Mouse and pharmaceutical companies' ability to prevent generic drug manufacturing—that protected corporate interests rather than citizens.

A woman from Iowa said to Sandel 'we can read in Iowa,' communicating that Coastal Elites hold disdainful views of rural Americans' intelligence; this exemplifies that resentment of elites is not primarily directed at wealthy business people (like Trump) but at credentialed, meritocratic elites whom working people feel look down on them.

The political center-left is exhausted not only politically but ideologically and in need of fundamental rethinking of its mission and purpose, representing a broader crisis of center-left parties globally.

Identity and economics are fundamentally bound together in politics; the neoliberal globalization debate carried an implicit identity message framing challenges to financial deregulation and capital flows as 'closed-minded' and 'parochial,' while framing support for these policies as 'open,' thereby linking opposition to globalization with xenophobia and delegitimizing legitimate economic critique.

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that people from different class backgrounds, educational levels, and ethnic backgrounds encounter one another in the ordinary course of daily life, because such encounters enable citizens to learn to negotiate and abide their differences and to care for the common good.

The hyperrationalized globalization of the neoliberal era discredited national community and disempowered nation-states, which are the primary vehicles through which citizens can make their voices heard and exercise democratic agency.

Trump's inauguration tableau—with billionaires and tech moguls including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos seated prominently—contradicts a genuine populist commitment; real populists would seek to challenge and hold these tech companies and their founders democratically accountable, not celebrate their centrality to power.

Current political moment represents a potential starting point for bold democratic renewal, contingent on recognizing meritocratic hubris as the core toxic divide and developing a new progressive political project responsive to that insight.

The deepening class inequalities have resulted in increasing class segregation and sorting, with wealthy people opting out of public institutions by moving to private spaces (private health clubs, private schools, private boxes at stadiums) rather than participating in class-mixing civic institutions, eroding the shared democratic experience.