When Texas Republicans announced last month that they would redraw congressional maps for the explicit purpose of picking up five seats currently held by Democrats, they shocked the Democratic Party into action. Within days, Eric Holder, the former attorney general who has spent his post-White House career fighting to end gerrymandering, said he was done playing by the rules. It was time to rig the maps, too. “Progressives and Democrats are uncomfortable with the acquisition and the use of power in ways that Republicans are not,” Mr. Holder said. “And that time has got to be over. We need to be unabashed in our desire to acquire power, and then to use power.”

…Democratic voters may be wondering what took so long. When asked to describe their party, a full quarter of Democrats used words like “weak,” “ineffective” or “apathetic,” according to a recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Only two in 10 Democrats had positive things to say about the Democratic Party.

…The Democratic Party has long had two distinct political styles. To borrow Mr. Martin’s formulation, it’s the knives versus the pencils. For more than a century, a more ruthless, transactional model dominated Democratic politics, for better and for worse. But since the 1970s, the experts with the pencils have come to run the show. And it is increasingly clear that this model has hindered the party’s ability to deliver, even to its most loyal supporters.

…During the Obama administration, this version of democracy seemed to involve an unyielding faith in bipartisanship, even as Republicans were growing fiercer in their tactics…”The reality of the situation, one that never quite hit home with the Obama team, was that the technocratic, consensus-driven, bipartisan approach to government favored by the president and by professional-class liberals was simply no match for Republican obstruction,” Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University, writes in an essay titled “The Professional-Class Presidency of Barack Obama.” “It wasn’t that Republicans were stronger or more powerful than Democrats; they were simply employing a different mode of politics.”

…A more difficult issue for the party may not just be about how Democrats fight, but about what they might fight for. By embracing a high-minded, technical style of governance, the party has diminished its ability to excite the public with ideas that tangibly affect people’s lives. Meanwhile, campaign promises that do have mass appeal — whether they are from Mr. Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders or the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — are often vetted and laughed out of the classroom by the party’s leaders and in-house technocrats. While Democrats dismissed as absurd fantasy Mr. Trump’s promise to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border and sanded off the details of their own immigration policy, voters merely heard that Mr. Trump would make the border a top priority. “You get this mishmash of policies that are technically more rigorous than what Republicans offer. But whether it’s Trump or Sanders, the policies are simple and at least I can remember them,” said Timothy Shenk, professor of history at George Washington University and author of “Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.” “In real-world politics that counts so much more than the compendium of policies that are so massive you have no idea what’s actually going to happen.”

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In the days after it became clear Zohran Mamdani had won New York City’s June mayoral primary, much of the Democratic establishment began to panic. Former President Barack Obama, the last Democrat to captivate the party’s base, got on the phone. In a lengthy call in June, Mr. Obama congratulated Mr. Mamdani, offered him advice about governing and discussed the importance of giving people hope in a dark time, according to people with knowledge of the conversation.

Others in Mr. Obama’s orbit have also shown a keen interest in Mr. Mamdani and his campaign. Jon Favreau, who served as Mr. Obama’s speechwriter, and Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser, have been in communication with the Democratic strategist Morris Katz, among Mr. Mamdani’s closest aides. David Axelrod, who served as Mr. Obama’s chief campaign strategist and senior adviser, was also curious. Last month, he stopped by Mr. Mamdani’s campaign headquarters, then in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan, to meet the candidate and his staff, and see things for himself…The interest from the closely guarded world of Mr. Obama and those around him is the clearest sign yet that Mr. Mamdani is likely to be embraced by the Democratic mainstream, whether the party’s leaders and donors like it or not. It comes at a time of dueling visions among voters, Democratic politicians and donors over the future of the party.

“What I found when I went over to that office was a familiar spirit that I hadn’t seen in a while of just determined, upbeat idealism,” Mr. Axelrod told me. “You may not agree with every answer he’s giving, or every idea he has, but he’s certainly asking the right questions, which is how do we make the country work for working people?” He said Mr. Mamdani’s ability to inspire young Americans, who feel economic uncertainty acutely, was critical and something the party at large needed to reckon with.

…Though it has been nearly two decades since Mr. Obama’s 2008 victory, the parallels between the two charismatic Democrats are unmistakable. Both are political outsiders with unconventional biographies. Mr. Obama was the country’s first Black president. Mr. Mamdani, if elected in November, would be the first Muslim to govern New York City. Both built campaigns around grass-roots organizing and formed diverse multiracial coalitions that galvanized younger Americans and attracted voters far beyond the party’s traditional base. Mr. Axelrod said he found the reaction of much of New York’s political establishment dispiriting and outdated. “‘Scare the hell out of people and maybe we can get them to vote for our deficient politics,’” he said, describing the approach with brutal efficiency. “That’s not a politics I want to be associated with. That’s not a politics I think prevails.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/opinion/mamdani-obama-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.eE8.ebWs.Le22jcuXvvo_&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

President Trump may have moved out of New York City, but he has privately discussed whether to intercede in its fractious race for mayor to try to stop Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, according to eight people briefed on the discussions. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has quizzed a Republican congressman and New York businessmen about who in the crowded field of candidates, which includes Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, has the best chance of beating Mr. Mamdani, the leftist front-runner.

The president has been briefed by Mark Penn, a pollster who has worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Andrew Stein, a former New York City Council president and decades-long friend of Mr. Trump, on a range of polling that showed Mr. Cuomo could still be competitive as an independent candidate. Both men have pushed Mr. Cuomo as the best candidate despite his loss in the Democratic primary, including in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. One of Mr. Penn’s firms did extensive work for a pro-Cuomo super PAC in the primary. And in a previously undisclosed call in recent weeks, Mr. Trump spoke about the race directly with Mr. Cuomo, an old associate and foil, according to three people briefed on the call, who were not authorized to discuss it.

… The possibility that Mr. Trump would somehow involve himself in New York politics could inject a new element of unpredictability into an already fractious contest. It remains far from certain how or if Mr. Trump will ultimately make his presence felt. And in recent weeks, some Republicans close to the administration have indicated that the president might simply sit it out. But donors and allies of Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo have pined for weeks for the president to intervene, arguing that Mr. Trump, a lifelong New Yorker with strong views about how the city should be run, could play a role in consolidating the fractured anti-Mamdani vote behind a single opponent. This group strongly opposes Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist who outflanked Mr. Cuomo in the primary with a message about freezing rents and raising taxes on the rich.

… Even those in favor of Mr. Trump intervening acknowledge that any public endorsement or other effort to help one of the candidates could backfire in a city where he remains unpopular overall. “The city is still not exactly a haven for Trump supporters,” said Sid Rosenberg, a conservative talk radio host who supports Mr. Trump. “I’m not sure if it bodes well for Curtis or Andrew or Eric to get Trump’s support publicly.”

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If you want to understand why New York — and virtually every other state — is drifting to the right, observe how so many in the Democratic establishment confuse triangulation with leadership and treat stability as a virtue in and of itself. There’s a chasm between what we say and what we deliver. We continue asking voters to show up while we refuse to show up for them. What makes this situation all the more frustrating is that we just saw what it looks like to connect with voters on the most important issue of the day: affordability. In June, Zohran Mamdani pulled off one of the biggest upset in New York’s modern political history.

Establishment Democrats have been talking about affordability for years and have very little to show for it. Mr. Mamdani got through to New Yorkers on the very same set of issues. Instead of lecturing them, he took the time to actually listen to what voters were feeling. He had the courage to directly engage with people, and then brought a laser focus on the issues that they care about. As a result, he shattered turnout records and brought out young voters in droves. It should have been a major signal to the establishment. Instead of embracing Mr. Mamdani’s success, as I have, many top Democrats have kept their distance.

To date, party leaders seem more interested in clinging to power than delivering for the people. Better to maintain an unsustainable economic status quo than be mislabeled a Communist, the thinking goes. Better to avoid being called soft on “illegals” than to do the hard work needed to truly protect hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers living in fear under Mr. Trump’s dragnet.

Mr. Trump’s appeal isn’t rooted in policy; it’s rooted in style. He uses delusional bravado to cosplay as a rebel against a broken system that both parties helped to rig. The Democratic establishment’s timid, survivalist politics can’t compete with that. You can’t beat an immoral agent of chaos with risk aversion. You beat him with moral clarity — the kind that’s willing to sacrifice corporate donations, political comfort and maybe even your own career for the sake of the greater good. Mr. Trump doesn’t win because people love his ideas. He wins because people stop believing in what Democrats have to offer.

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Direct flights from Moscow to North Korea have begun this week, amid a strengthening of ties between the two nations and a decline in options for Russian tourists travelling abroad. The first Moscow-Pyongyang flight, operated by Russia’s Nordwind Airlines, took off on Sunday, according to the Sheremetyevo airport’s website, and landed in the North Korean capital about eight hours later.

The route will initially be serviced only once a month, Russia’s transport ministry said, with the first return flight from Pyongyang to Moscow taking place on Tuesday. Nordwind Airlines – which used to carry Russians to holiday destinations in Europe before the EU imposed a ban on Russian flights – had tickets priced at 45,000 rubles ($570).

…Russia and North Korea have been forging closer military bonds in recent years, with Pyongyang supplying troops and weapons for Russia’s military operations in Ukraine. They signed a mutual defence pact last year when the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, visited North Korea. “For the first time in more than 70 years of diplomatic relations, we are launching direct flights between the capitals of our countries,” Russia’s deputy transport minister, Vladimir Poteshkin, was quoted as saying on the ministry’s Telegram account.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/28/moscow-pyongyang-direct-flights-russia-to-north-korea-tourists?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

For more than four decades, Robert Reich has been ringing the alarm bell about rising inequality in America. He did it as a member of three presidential administrations, including a stint as labor secretary under President Clinton. He did it as a revered professor at U.C. Berkeley, Brandeis and Harvard. He’s currently doing it online, where, somewhat improbably, the 79-year-old has become a new-media star, having built a devoted audience of millions across Substack, TikTok and Instagram. Through it all, his message has remained consistent: Inequality — be it economic, racial or political — erodes social trust, diminishes belief in democracy and can create openings for demagogues…He recently retired from teaching after more than 40 years. Indeed, the run-up to his final lecture is the subject of a documentary, “The Last Class,” which is currently in theaters. Reich also has a memoir on the way, “Coming Up Short,” which will be published on Aug. 5. In the book, and in our conversation, he reckons with the political failures of his fellow baby boomers, the rise of what he sees as a culture of brutality and bullying and why Democrats have failed to connect with struggling Americans.

…The title of your memoir is a pun on the fact that you’re short, but it also refers to your argument that your generation failed to strengthen democracy, failed to reduce economic inequality and, generally, failed to contain “the bullies.” What went wrong? We took for granted what our parents and their parents bequeathed to us. I was born in 1946, as were George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. The so-called greatest generation gave us not only peace and prosperity but the largest middle class the world had ever seen. What I try to understand is how we ended up with Donald Trump. Trump is the consequence, not the cause, of what we are now experiencing. He is the culmination of at least 50 years of a certain kind of neglect. And I say this very personally, because I was part of this failure. It is a reckoning that is deeply personal.

But how useful is the generational frame? Because alongside the shortcomings, baby boomers helped reduce racial discrimination, grew the environmental movement, bolstered feminism and gay rights and helped to shepherd along giant technological advances. So is it really accurate to describe the problem as a “generational” failure? Or is the issue more that conservative politics, which plenty of baby boomers have always held, have won some significant victories over the last 50 years? It’s not fair to blame a generation, but I think it is fair to say there has been, in America, a failure to appreciate the importance of democracy, the importance of holding back big money. Because as inequality has gotten worse and worse, the middle class has by many measures shrunk. That is an open invitation for corruption. We see more and more big money undermining our democratic institutions. We could not have stayed on the path we were on even if Trump hadn’t come along. We were opening ourselves to, if not a demagogue, then something like a demagogue, because so many people became so angry and were convinced even before Trump that the system was rigged against them. I don’t want to minimize the good things that have happened over the past 70 years, but the fact of the matter is we ended up with a very large number of Americans who feel that the American system and the promise of America was a sham.

…In a bigger-picture sense, are there reliable strategies for dealing with economic bullies? If you’re an average working person today, you are extraordinarily vulnerable. Nobody is protecting you. This is one of the attractions that Donald Trump wittingly or unwittingly presented in 2016 and continues to present. He has provided an explanation for people who have been economically and socially brutalized and bullied. An explanation that is, by the way, completely wrong and that has to do with immigrants and the deep state and transgender people. Part of the book is my attempt to help the Democrats, or at least the progressives, see that the way forward is to talk truthfully about why it is that so many people are powerless and bullied and feel so vulnerable and so angry.

What’s your diagnosis for why Democrats have struggled to do that? Some Democrats don’t want to tell the true story of concentrated wealth and power because they are drinking at the same trough as Republicans. This quandary has been growing since I was in my 20s, beginning to watch money and politics and the Faustian bargain that the Democrats were making. The Democrats want to be on the side of social justice and fairness and equal opportunity and political equality, and yet some Democrats — I don’t want to tar with too broad a brush here — are taking money and don’t want to bite the hands that feed them. I’ve seen it personally. I saw it when I was at the Federal Trade Commission; I saw it when I was at the Justice Department working in the Ford administration; I saw it very close up when I was in the Clinton administration and then at a distance when I was providing some advice to Barack Obama. One of the frustrating things about writing this book and reliving these years is that I came across memos and letters and videos of me at that time saying over and over again, like a broken record, “If we stay on this path, we are going to find ourselves in the not-too-distant future with a demagogue, and our democracy is going to be threatened.”

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