For much of the 20th century, there were two relatively straightforward ways to win elections in the United States. Conservatives espoused their belief in traditional family values and getting out of the way of the wealthy. They defended the status quo against various liberation movements and labor coalitions, fighting to keep everything as it had always been in service of the people who most benefited from the old arrangement. With their natural orientation toward the past, conservatives would run on the good old days and attack anything that read as newfangled, trusting voters who thought similarly to show up at the polls in defense of American values. 

Liberals did the same, but in reverse. They fought for the rights of all people and defended the working class from the attempts of the wealthy to claw back hard-won protections. They pushed a larger, protective federal government that held back retrograde currents looking to lock people of color, women and other minorities into a permanent underclass. They ran on these values, trusting unions and activists to back them at the ballot box. 

But in the late 1980s, a new path to electoral victory emerged, blazed by people who pushed left-leaning politicians to erode labor victories and sell out loyal constituencies, creating a tacked-together centrist position that left almost everyone a little bit unhappy. This “Third Way” urged Democratic politicians to adopt the hands-off economic policies of their rivals while making welfare programs more punitive, all in the hopes of netting a few wishy-washy right-wingers come election time. For nearly four decades, this thinking has birthed a seemingly endless parade of candidates, political strategists and columnists pushing the idea that the ideologues are wrong. “Shut up,” they have said to anyone believing a better world is possible, “the adults are talking.”

Outside the masthead of The Atlantic, no one better represents this political tendency better than James Carville. The “Ragin’ Cajun” first rose to national prominence in 1991 by encouraging Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who had just announced his presidential bid, to point out to a strapped country that the economy wasn’t doing so hot. At the same time, Carville encouraged Democrats to carve up the welfare state that was buoying Americans taking the brunt of the economic downturn. Democrats had been locked out of the White House since 1980, and they were willing to try anything to win. These counterintuitive policy solutions were assumed to be smart, and Clinton’s victory in November 1992 proved it. Carville was a kingmaker, and his “please nobody” politics were the Democratic Party’s future. 

A congressional wash-out just two years later couldn’t knock the bloom off the Third Way rose among Washington’s Democratic consultant class. Carville’s reputation for colorful turns of phrase, and his tendency to stomp on any calls for the party to move left, made him a favorite of cable news programmers looking to make entertaining television. 

Now 81, Carville has remained a stock choice for cheap heat, even as his positions became more predictable, such as a recent slam on left-wing media personality Hasan Piker in which he called the streamer a “raving antisemite” due to Piker’s opposition to America’s support of Israel and his comment that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” As progressives and democratic socialists have notched recent wins across the country, Carville has been there to tell the activist wing of the Democratic Party to pipe down and tack toward Republican stances on issues like transgender rights and police reform. 

To Carville’s credit, he’s said that he would support Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who won Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate, because his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, is a “clown.” But that admission came just one month after democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier’s primary victory for a U.S. House seat in New York led Carville to call for the party to split from its progressive wing. 

“I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘s’ word: schism,” he said. “I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. We’re a big tent.’ There’s just some s**t I can’t be in the same tent with.”  

All this wouldn’t grate quite so much if it were coming from someone else, someone who could point to real, sustained political wins outside of a few choice Novembers. To borrow Carville’s folksy schtick, the Ragin’ Cajun was born on third base and has spent his whole life telling network anchors he hit a triple. Tagged by the Clinton campaign and a fascinated media as a strategic genius, his standard strategy of tacking toward the center has been taken as gospel by many in the Democratic Party ever since. In truth, Clinton was a neutron bomb of charisma running against an unpopular president in a bad economy. If you need proof that the tactic doesn’t work without a generational schmoozer as its face, just look at the presidential elections since Clinton term-limited out. 

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Extenuating circumstances in Florida provided useful cover for the Democrats’ 2000 loss in an election that never should have been close. John Kerry blew it against George W. Bush’s 40% approval rating. It took Barack Obama, another hall-of-fame charmer, to win back the White House in 2008. Then came 2016. 

Trump’s win should have forced reflection among Carville and his ilk, some admission that the project of the New Democrats had ended in obvious failure. Kamala Harris’s Liz Cheney-boosting, Glock-boasting campaign should have erected the tombstone on Third Way’s grave. Instead, Carville can still be counted on to punch left for the cameras while his ideological allies fill out the opinion pages of most major American newspapers. 

He defended Graham Platner, the former Maine Senate candidate who ended his campaign in disgrace following allegations of sexual misconduct, seemingly because of an innate need to be on the opposite side of every issue from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who recently told TMZ, “James Carville has an opinion on everything, and I pay attention to almost one out of 10.”

You don’t need to look at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s approval ratings to know the centrist wing of the Democratic Party is clearly out of gas. The energy of the party is now with progressives like El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez’s early wins proved that Democratic voters had an appetite for left-leaning solutions to the ongoing economic crises. Mamdani offered an amiable leftist alternative to “making the trains run on time,” flexing state power to make life easier and more affordable for average citizens. In his recent primary election, El-Sayed showed that centrists’ belief in playing nice with the opposition was played out. 

Recent progressive wins have shown that there’s no need to accept the framing of conservatives on issues like reeling in corporations and the war in Gaza. Allowing debate about the party’s supposed core beliefs on Republican terms is the sort of milquetoast politics that led us to where we are now: constantly fighting against whatever fantasy Carville’s counterparts on cable news have cooked up instead of talking about substantive issues. 

We don’t need any more of that.

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According to a Pew Research Center survey released in October 2025, large majorities of Americans are unhappy with both political parties. Three-quarters were frustrated with the Democrats, and almost as many felt the same about the GOP. Half said they are downright angry with both parties. Partisanship is responsible for some of it, of course. But despite all the talk from Donald Trump about the “golden age” of America being upon us — symbolized by the gaudy, gilded gew-gaws all over the White House and Washington — just over a third of Republicans said their party makes them feel hopeful, and far fewer noted it makes them feel proud. Democratic voters were even less hopeful and proud than their rivals. This is not a healthy political system. 

The loathing for the parties doesn’t just come from the high-profile national campaigns. Republicans and Democrats alike have been taken over in recent years by a populist uprising coming from within. From the Tea Party on the right to Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders-led democratic socialist movement on the left, there has been a large shift away from the traditional politics of party leaders and ideological conformity to a more grassroots-oriented politics. 

Both sides have at least one thing in common: They loathe the political and media elites who, they believe, have lost touch with ordinary people and run the country for their own interests. This should not surprise anyone who has observed politics for the past 30 years or so. Those elites have shown their tone deafness toward the concerns of the average American for decades, and the rise of cable television and the 24-hour news cycle, conservative talk radio television, the internet and social media have successively given people a front-row view of their pretentious arrogance. 

One person in Washington perfectly illustrates this phenomenon: Sally Quinn, the longtime columnist and doyenne of what remains of the Georgetown set. Married to the legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee until his death in 2014, Quinn has functioned, at least since the 1980s, as the self-appointed spokeswoman of the nation’s permanent political establishment. 

In 1998 she wrote the seminal essay on official Washington’s state of mind during Ken Starr’s investigation into Bill Clinton. The day of that year’s midterm elections, the Post published “Not in their back yard: in Washington, that letdown feeling,” which quoted numerous political and media denizens expressing their shock and horror at Clinton’s inappropriate behavior with Monica Lewinsky. Those interviewed insisted their disgust wasn’t about the unseemly power differential between the president and the former White House intern, and they insisted it wasn’t about the sex. Rather, they were apparently upset that Clinton had lied to them about the affair, as if they thought that it all would have been fine if he had just shared it with them privately at a glittering, intimate dinner party. 

The quotes were unbelievable. “There is a small-town quality to the grief that is being felt,” said journalist Andrea Mitchell, “an overwhelming sadness at the waste of the nation’s time and attention, at the opportunities lost.” Muffie Cabot, Nancy Reagan’s former White House social secretary, mourned, “This is a demoralized little village . . . the emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn’t quite as sordid as this.” 

But the piece de resistance came from the then-dean of the Washington press corps, Post columnist David Broder, who lamented, “He came in here and he trashed the place — and it’s not his place,” as if the nation’s capital belonged to him and Quinn and their kind, rather than the American people. 

Quinn vapidly observed in passing, “For reasons they cannot understand, Washington insiders come across to the public as judgmental puritans, shocked and horrified by the president’s sexual misconduct,” which was completely off the mark because contemporary polling showed that people saw the non-stop, six-year crusade against Clinton by the GOP and media establishment as over-the-top and hypocritical, not that it excused Clinton’s conduct. 

As the election results trickled in later that night, it emerged that Republicans had unexpectedly lost seats. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was forced to resign his seat, and just a few months later, on the very day he was impeached by the House, Clinton’s approval rating reached 73%. The number was not an endorsement of the president’s behavior; it was a reaction against the hypocrisy of the GOP and the elitism of the same establishment elites Quinn portrayed as the nation’s moral conscience.

One might have thought Quinn and her fellow Washingtonians would have taken a beat to question whether they were actually qualified to be the voice of American democracy when they were so clearly out of touch with the people. But that didn’t happen. 

Now, nearly 30 years later, Quinn is at it again, this time railing against Donald Trump in the same tone she deployed against Clinton. 

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No longer writing for the Post after it acquiesced to Trump and MAGA after the president’s return to office, Quinn instead contributed an op-ed to the New York Times called “Watergate-Era Washington Was Less Toxic Than This” that described how vulgar and frightening D.C. has become under the second Trump administration. She claimed that everyone is terrified, even Republicans, and waxed nostalgic for the days when she and the “charming, funny, bright, thoughtful” Lindsey Graham, the late Republican senator from South Carolina, could talk about throwing bipartisan dinner parties together. Sadly, those days are over, and the barbarians have trashed the gates — again. The crude Trumpers are having too much fun with their vulgar galas and economic excess. 

Evoking the Watergate crisis, Quinn seemed to have no recollection of eagerly joining that earlier GOP crusade against Clinton, despite the widespread understanding of its cynical partisan nature — and how that marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s descent into the ruthless partisan warfare that resulted in Trump’s election and non-consecutive reelection. 

On Sunday, Quinn wrote another essay for the Times announcing “It’s No Longer So Much Fun to Be MAGA in Washington.” Apparently, the inhabitants of the village have noticed that the GOP, under strain from the relentless failure of Trump’s policies, isn’t feeling its oats so much these days. She describes a “popular annual cocktail buffet at the Hay Adams Hotel on the rooftop overlooking the White House” on the night of Trump’s UFC cage fight on the White House lawn. The party’s attendees laughed and scoffed at the “garish,” “grotesque” and “bizarre” scene below, much relieved they were suddenly feeling the return of “bipartisan” revulsion at the spectacle of a usurper “trashing the place.”

I confess that I, too, was appalled at the grotesque display that night. And I, too, have nothing but revulsion for everything Trump stands for. But when I read those words coming from the likes of Quinn and her elitist comrades, I actually felt some sympathy for Trump’s MAGA followers. Quinn’s description of this soi disant aristocracy literally looking down on the plebes who refuse to know their place was almost enough to make me don a red cap and burst into a rousing rendition of “YMCA.” 

Nothing provides a boost to Trump’s MAGA agenda like the brand of Washington snobbery Quinn’s writing chronicles, and it’s this kind of thing that’s driving both parties to populism. If Republicans and Democrats could come out of their corners and recognize their common foe, we might actually get a little of that vaunted bipartisanship for which Quinn and her fellow travelers are so nostalgic. 

Unfortunately, it might not work out so well for them if that happens.

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