Medicaid Isn’t the Only Popular, Lifesaving Program the GOP Will Cut

Important as it is to protect Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, the fact that Democrats’ most popular, defensible programs are at least 60 years old doesn’t inspire confidence in their ability to govern in the future. Since 2016, the party’s main case for itself has been that it could prevent another Trump administration, restore norms, and return the country to a slightly greener version of a happier, quieter past. That failed, and Democratic leadership is once again relegated to defending programs enacted by its more ambitious and imaginative predecessors. The right has always been better at fighting for the past, though. The essentially conservative position that Democrats and progressives alike have adopted over the last several decades—to defend and expand on the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society—is a bad fit both to build a governing majority and for an era where the climate crisis is changing the country in permanent, unpredictable ways.

Fights over federal spending are showcasing a Republican Party that’s more revolutionary than conservative, trampling over constitutional checks and balances in order to concentrate ever more wealth and power in the hands of a tiny minority. Trump was elected on the promise of change, but the administration mostly articulates its vision of a MAGA-fied future in the sorts of vague, brain-dead language that crypto scammers use to sucker people into buying shitcoins.

Democrats should take this opportunity to spell out what that future would actually mean: millions of people dying of preventable illnesses because they don’t have health insurance; family homes burned to the ground and replaced by luxury developments that foreign investors buy up to avoid paying taxes; parents kicked off Social Security and out of their homes, forced to move in with their children who are working two or three jobs just to afford their insurance premiums; kids who grow up with rare and debilitating diseases—if they don’t die of measles first—thanks to the toxins in their water, whose schools can’t support them because the richest man in the world ransacked the Department of Education. The world Trump and Musk want is hellish. But in order to persuade voters of that, and persuade them to kick this pair out of power, Democrats need to be able to promise a better one—not just more of the same.