In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory last November, Matthew Yglesias published a manifesto imploring the Democratic Party to reembrace “common sense.” Specifically, in his Slow Boring newsletter, Yglesias called on Democrats to redouble their party’s commitment to economic growth, honor the electorate’s moral values, reject identity politics, abandon language policing, and moderate on a wide assortment of issues.

Many moderates have since rallied behind Yglesias’s vision for remaking the Democratic Party. Progressives, meanwhile, have made a priority of trying to discredit his critiques of Democratic governance and electioneering. To both factions, the debate over where the Democratic Party goes from here is, in no small part, a debate over whether Yglesias is right.

Earlier this week, I spoke with Yglesias, who co-founded Vox, about his indictment of Democratic policymaking, whether moderation actually works, the tensions between increasing economic growth and pandering to voters, and why he’s pessimistic about moderates’ prospects for winning the battle for the soul of blue America, among other things. Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

In your view, what are the biggest political mistakes that the Democratic Party has made since the Obama era?

The big picture thing is: Starting in the 2016 campaign and continuing afterwards, Democrats talked a lot about the idea of Donald Trump as an outlier threat to the country — but in practice, they treated his flaws as an opportunity to be more boldly and aggressively progressive across a whole bunch of fronts. And they got some mileage out of that. They almost won in 2016 at a time when the thermostatic public opinion had been against them. They did win in 2020. They lost, but it was narrow in 2024. But what we’ve seen with Trump getting steadily more popular over this time is that you’ve run out of string on that play, and I think need to come back to the reality that Obama-era Democratic party politics was where a robust national political party can be.

Where specifically do you think that Democrats got too left-wing during the Biden years?

I think that the Green New Deal concept made a lot of sense as an effort to square reducing climate change with addressing people’s material economic needs. But it was designed for a specific moment in time. The premise of a Green New Deal is that you have a depression and so you’re going to address people’s depression-induced material problems with a “new deal.” And then you’re going to make that new deal green. So it all makes perfect sense — except there wasn’t a depression.

And that then requires new thinking. But instead, we wound up pursuing energy-efficiency rules for dishwashers and blocking offshore drilling in different places and blocking pipelines, which was all out of line with the official idea that we wanted to address climate in a way that was good for jobs.

A lot of thinking around criminal justice and immigration enforcement issues has proven to be pretty much a total dead end. The desire to bring more humanity to these systems is understandable and correct. And for a while, progress was being made: We had less crime and incarceration rates were falling in the United States. But starting in 2014 and accelerating in 2020, you just had a move to say, “Well, we should care less about crime outcomes.” And people notice that and don’t like it. Crime came back on the table as an issue. It’s good that the homicide rate has fallen again from its 2021 peak, but there’s all these other concerns that people have about shoplifting and public disorder and people breaking immigration laws, etc.

And it’s just going to be tough, I think, for Democrats to rebuild trust on those kinds of issues once it’s lost. “You should be lenient to criminals” isn’t really part of the core suite of ideas that gets people invested in progressive politics. And the criminal justice system is probably the single biggest thing because it impacts both actual state governance and political perceptions very, very heavily.

I think some on the left (and perhaps, the right) would argue that leniency toward criminal offenders and........

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