Washington Monthly - To Defeat Trumpism, Relearn America’s Language & Levers of Power
In a powerful essay published in The Washington Monthly on June 2, 2025, Barry Lynn, Executive Director of the Open Markets Institute, calls on Democrats to chart a bold new course by recovering the foundational American language of liberty, shared power, and economic democracy — the very principles that once made the Democratic Party a champion of the working class and protector of the republic.
In the piece titled “Resurrecting the Rebel Alliance: To End the Age of Trump, Democrats Must Relearn the Language and Levers of Power,” Lynn argues that the rise of Donald Trump is not an aberration but a symptom of a deeper structural failure: the Democratic Party’s decades-long retreat from the politics of economic liberty and power-sharing.
“Trump’s power is built on systems Democrats helped create — concentrated corporate control, corrupted communications platforms, and the abandonment of working-class communities,” Lynn writes. “To defeat Trumpism and protect democracy, Democrats must do more than resist — they must rebuild.”
Lynn traces America’s original economic language of liberty — rooted in antimonopoly laws, mutual aid, and political-economic checks on concentrated power — from the Puritan revolution in England to the American founding, through the New Deal, and up to its bipartisan dismantling starting in the Reagan era and culminating under Clinton-era globalization.
Drawing on his own working-class upbringing and decades of frontline reporting, Lynn vividly illustrates the human cost of elite technocratic governance that prioritized efficiency and corporate scale over community, democracy, and resilience. “I know how much blood is in each basket,” he writes of his father’s time as a child laborer in Florida’s strawberry fields.
The essay delivers a searing indictment of both Republican and Democratic complicity in enabling oligarchy, but it ends with a call to action: a reinvigoration of liberal democracy through the restoration of a political economy based on shared power, local independence, and strong emphasis on the dignity of work.
“Democrats must not merely win elections,” Lynn writes. “They must build a new system that ensures liberty and prosperity can never again be threatened by any homegrown autocrat or private king.”
Lynn's article is a sweeping appeal for Democrats to reconnect with the principles that once made them the party of the people. In doing so, Lynn offers not just a critique, but a vision of renewal grounded in America’s truest traditions.
Barry Lynn is the executive director of the Open Market Institute. For 20 years, he has reported on democracies’ slide into oligarchy by abandoning the principles and laws of antimonopoly, fair competition, and democratic distributions of power in all sectors – and examined how to come back from it.