George Will & me

Simple but Not Easy

Two-thirds of voters feel stranded between the 40-yard lines of American politics. Late last year, I had coffee with The Washington Post’s George Will to discuss how Democrats can win over this exhausted majority in 2026 and beyond. From the school closures of 2020 to the Whigs of 1840, we covered a lot of ground.

Below are excerpts of his piece:

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“The Democratic Party’s future — if it wants one; the evidence is mixed — should be based on candidates who understand that U.S. politics, when healthy, takes place between the 40-yard lines, contesting the center of the field. People such as the 37-year-old Marine (he served in Afghanistan, and is in the Corps’ Individual Ready Reserve) who now is a Whiggish (his description) congressman.

A substantial portion of his Massachusetts district, including some Boston suburbs, typifies what now is his party’s affluent, educated base — people who have flourished in the knowledge economy that globalization fostered. Another large portion of his district resembles what used to be his party’s base: blue-collar manufacturers.

The district’s largest city, Fall River, in 1880 was the nation’s foremost textile manufacturing powerhouse, with more than half a million spindles. In 2024, for the first time in a century (in 1924, it voted for Massachusetts’s former governor, who was then president, Calvin Coolidge), [Fall River] voted for the Republican presidential candidate.

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In 2020, during the pandemic, when Jake Auchincloss won his first congressional term, he was dismayed by Democratic-run cities that ignored public-health experts and kept schools closed: “There was a condescending attitude to parents who were rightfully frustrated watching kids atrophy at home,” he told the Wall Street Journal in August. This oblique, but clear enough, criticism of teachers unions indicates his desire to push against the boundaries of acceptable speech within his party.

By calling himself, in passing, “Whiggish,” Auchincloss implies intellectual kinship with those British who favored parliamentary power capable of trimming the king’s sails. And with 19th-century Americans who favored congressional supremacy: Whiggish politics implies less president-centric politics.

Auchincloss, who writes on Substack that he thinks many voters regard his party as “weak, woke and whiny,” wants a more “muscular” vocabulary about “upholding social order.” He has a Marine’s way of discussing guns, a way probably grating to some in his party: “I slept, ate, trained, and patrolled with an assault weapon for four years. I cleaned it before I ate or slept every night. Selling AR-15s at Walmart to teenagers is not just dangerous, it also undermines the military ethic … and degrades warrior craftsmanship.”

When was the last time a Democrat said anything so interesting about this issue? He is equally distinctive when discussing a subject that today disturbs the tranquility (elusive as it might be) of every American family with children in or approaching adolescence: smartphones and social media.

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Twenty years ago, the technology that torments today’s parents did not exist: The iPhone arrived in 2007. Now, Auchincloss has written, “Kids in America spend less time outdoors than federal inmates.” Social media corporations are “attention fracking.” They have “monetized children’s attention,” making many adults, too, “angrier, lonelier, and sadder.”

…Auchincloss proposes a 50 percent tax on the companies’ advertising revenue over $2.5 billion to help finance “1,000 new trade schools across the country.” This is a timely proposal: While the Trump administration is deporting workers, Ford Motor’s CEO Jim Farley laments that the nation has “over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.”

…“The country is in crisis,” Auchincloss says, “and Democrats are in the doldrums.” But politics is mostly talk, at which some Democrats are getting better.”