On July 9, I tweeted:

“We are unfathomably richer than our ancestors. Output per capita in America today is on the order of 900 times greater than before the invention of agriculture, about ~225 times higher than in 1 CE, and about the same (225 times) higher than Europe in 1000 CE.

If measurable productivity were really the greatest object of human society, then we shouldn’t just be a little bit happier than people in the distant (or even recent!) past—we should be *ecstatic*. We should *already* be living in a utopian age of overwhelming contentment. We should be *currently* experiencing a kind of paradise.

The Kingdom of Heaven, as liberalism conceives of it, has already been made real on Earth. We are living in their Eden, and 20% of people are depressed. We’ve stopped reproducing ourselves. We’re overwhelmingly dissatisfied with our governments, anxious about our economies, and pessimistic about the future.”

12 days later, Alexander replied with a defense of growth as the all-consuming intervention that should leave liberals assured their path is leading us, unerring, into future utopia.

He accepted my charge that liberalism is primarily concerned with turning up the dial on the Output Machine. (This surprised me: I worried that I had unfairly stereotyped liberals as mere growth-maximizers; maybe I’d overlooked a still-vibrant reverence for self-government and popular agency.) But we part ways on whether the Output Machine can really deliver happiness.

Even if growth does produce happiness, the magnitude of the effect is narrower than Alexander lets on. And there’s good reason to doubt the effect is a causal one in the first place. His response to my post was exactly as narrow as I’d feared liberalism had become: growth really is what matters, and everyone just needs to keep the faith.

In his view and mine, today’s liberal project balances on a single leg: maximizing productivity. The question, then, is whether this leg can actually bear the weight liberal thinkers have heaped upon it. Alexander’s own evidence shows it’s buckling under that burden.

First, even if we stipulate to his empirical arguments about happiness scaling with income, a myopic fixation on growth is unsupported. Redistribution, too, is an incredibly high-value intervention, with a much shorter timeline to impact than growth-maximizing. Income is only one constitutive element of human well-being among many.

Liberal economists agree: income doesn’t buy much happiness

The crux of Alexander’s empirical argument (what he described as “an elegant mathematical response which will satisfy nobody”) is that happiness scales linearly to the logarithm of income, not to nominal income. Put in simpler terms, the happiness-difference between incomes of $10k and $20k is much larger than the same $10k difference between $500k and $510k, because the happiness effect is proportional as we go up the ladder. This is well-supported, and it makes intuitive sense besides.

The first study he cites, from Matthew Killingsworth, puts the linear correlation between log(income) and happiness at 0.98-0.99. Very convincing stuff. We can see the relevant chart here:

This is absolutely a robust finding. Pay attention to the y-axis, though. Killingsworth used a -50 to +50 scale, so the magnitude of the happiness variance explained by income in this paper amounts to about 5 points on a 100-point scale (from an average value of ~11 to ~16, eyeballing this). In other words, the wealth of a group of people explains about 5% of their happiness.

It’s a small effect. So how does Killingsworth manage to get such a strong correlation? Well, by binning individual responses into income quantiles. As he puts it: “this averages out the substantial variation in individual happiness that income cannot explain, and isolates the underlying shape of the association between income and happiness.” (Emphasis mine.)

In short, a correlation does exist, and it’s plausibly causal. But it’s pretty small.

How small? Well, Alexander cites another article from Killingsworth that gives us the correlation across the entire dataset of individual observations, not just across these smoothed-out groups: “the correlation between average happiness and log(income) is 0.09 in the experience sampling data...the effect of an approximately fourfold difference in income is about equal to the effect of being a caregiver...and less than a third as large as the effect of a headache.” (Emphasis added).

So, according to Alexander’s strongest sources, quadrupling one’s income from $50,000 to $200,000 explains less impact on your happiness any given day than a bad hangover. This is not a suitable foundation on which to build an entire political program--or even most of one.

Why didn’t he deal with the smallness of the income effect in his post? I don’t know, but he may have misinterpreted my original tweet as saying income doesn’t matter at all, in which case this data functions as an effective rebuttal. If that’s what happened, I don’t begrudge Alexander for it; Twitter context-collapse comes for us all.

But my argument was not that growth is irrelevant; merely not so overwhelmingly important that liberals can afford to pay it special attention above everything else. As I wrote in my tweet, “I don’t believe things were better in the poor old days.” But “delivering human contentment is not as simple as turning the dial up or down on the Output Machine,” and “meaning, security, and satisfaction are actually hard problems that demand specific and well-evidenced answers.”

Liberals’ reluctance to tackle other big challenges is evidence of their intellectual exhaustion. And voters penalize them for it. So growth-obsessed liberals often develop feelings of indifference and disdain toward democracy itself. Voters, they conclude, just don’t know what’s good for them.

And, beyond the magnitude of the effect (or lack thereof), there are still more problems for liberals’ obsession with the Output Machine!

Remember, happiness scaling with log(income) rather than with income means that each marginal dollar of income procures less happiness than the last. This means that giving an amount of money to poor people (like through redistribution) improves happiness a lot more than if the same amount went to richer people.

Killingsworth says this himself: “decision-makers that seek to improve collective happiness might find that preferentially increasing incomes of those who earn the least generates a large ROI for collective happiness.”

This study finds an extremely robust income-happiness correlation, and yet redistribution emerges as an essential policy concern, distinct from growth. Clearly, if our ends are maximizing happiness, Alexander’s monomaniacal focus on output is misguided. People can—and should—prefer certain redistributive tradeoffs even if they have negative effects on growth. Alexander anticipates this response to some extent, but handwaves it away in his discussion of an international dataset.

Here, he admits there is significant variation within income bands: the r² on the whole dataset is about 0.62). But he slightly undersells the variation: “all of the great policies...in Finland/Israel/etc can only buy 0.5 - 1 extra point [of happiness] over the countries that screw them up or pursue the exact opposite policies,” but neither the characterization of the data nor the conclusion he draws are quite right.

Right off the bat, he compared Finland and Israel against the USA—this elides how big the differences can be between the countries that get policies/culture right, and those that “screw them up.” For example, Botswana is slightly richer than Belize, but Belize is 3.27 points higher in life satisfaction. That 3.27 point difference is functionally the same as Alexander’s estimate that, “since the medieval era...happiness should have increased about three points on a 1-10 scale” thanks to economic growth. So even if you buy that growth has bought humans three extra happiness points since 1000 CE, you could apparently get that same boost just by being more like Belize instead of Botswana—today, without waiting a thousand years.

If the happiness gains from non-income factors rival or exceed those from all of modern economic growth, “just focus on growth” is not a serious position.

Not only that, but policy can act much faster than growth can. Alexander pegs the growth benefit at “about one point of extra happiness per century,” but the policy gap between the Nordics and the United States may be similar in size and far more quickly obtainable. A good welfare state is a project achievable in a decade or so, not a century. This, to Alexander, is actually a flaw: “[growth is] stable; no opposite-party administration can take [it] away.” Policy, presumably, is fleeting.

Voters who care about redistribution or “culture” over growth are actually rational actors: a 35-year-old wants to have a happier society at 45 old, not 45 years after they’ve died. There’s nothing immoral or irrational about this kind of time-preference, and liberals would do well to muster some ambitious answers that can happen now, not a century from now.

But Alexander also overstates the extent to which growth is stable, and other policy unstable. For one thing, deep and enduring declines in output are possible even outside of state-collapse scenarios. Greece lost about a quarter of GDP per capita in just five years after the 2008 financial crisis. This wasn’t the result of a civil war, or a revolution, or state collapse. Greece was a relatively high-income liberal democracy that simply cratered due to bad policy and external economic shocks. Growth dividends can be reversed through bad governance, contra Alexander’s “growth is stable” formulation.

Conversely, policy can be durable. Social Security and Medicare have survived decades of hostile-party governments. When you establish a popular redistribution regime in a democratic state, it can be pretty fucking tenacious. The Nordics have also largely retained their ample welfare states; there has been some degradation at the margins, but the core policies remain intact, and people in these countries are the happiest in the world.

So where do we land at the end of this first half of the essay, where I tried stipulating all of Alexander’s evidence? Even if we accept his premises, the answers are clear: income growth has a real effect on happiness, it’s relatively small, it’s not straightforwardly stable, and other policy interventions can work faster to deliver bigger gains—and they’re often quite durable.

These points are simple disagreements over our respective interpretations of the relevant data. But what really alarms me is that Alexander didn’t touch my accusation that liberal frustration has curdled into disdain for democracy. One of liberalism’s greatest contemporary theorists, speaking to an audience that includes much of the Big Tech and AI elite, did not think popular sovereignty worth even a passing mention. The radical project of self-government is liberalism’s greatest legacy—not technocratic fetishism of supply curves.

Instead, he spent 2000 words confessing his exhaustion with everything that isn’t growth. He waved off the effects of “probably culture or something,” dismissed material redistribution as something “opposite-party administration[s] can take...away,” and urged liberals to deepen their worship of the Output Machine: “So long as technological civilization continues to function, we can keep rising and rising, until in 300 years we approach the 10/10 barrier and have to get a new chart.” You won’t get tired of winning, but your great-great-great-grandchildren will.

This is less a political program than it is a belief in some telos of history which Alexander prophesies will vindicate him long after we’ve both passed from the Earth. I don’t know what to call that if not religion. It is, at any rate, a religion with few adherents in America today. If this is the state of liberal ambition, then the center cannot hold.

Growth might not buy any happiness at all

It was worth engaging with a generous interpretation of Alexander’s argument that took his evidence at face-value, but the truth is that his empirical claims are actually fragile. Dissecting them will be the purpose of the second half of this essay.

The biggest problem is simple: all of Alexander’s supporting evidence that growth-over-time increases happiness comes from cross-sectional analysis of societies at one point in time, not time-series data. This is an infamously controversial move, one often criticized by economists in exactly this context. As an example, he makes this claim while comparing Burundi and the USA:

“So if income increased 225x since the medieval era, then using observed coefficients, happiness should have increased about three points on a 1-10 scale. If the average serf would have rated his condition 3/10, we should be at 6/10...
According to the Maddison Project, medieval England c. 1000 AD had a GDP per capita of $1,151. The closest country on this graph is Burundi at $1,031. Asked to rate their happiness on a 1-10 scale, most Burundians say 3 - 4; most Americans say 6 - 7.”

This is what’s called a “space-for-time substitution.” We can’t go back in time to survey medieval English peasants to compare them against modern Americans, so Alexander looks for a group today, in a different place than the USA. He finds modern-day Burundians as a plausible substitute. This kind of move is questionable. It should at least be named and appropriately caveated if you attempt it, but Alexander doesn’t do that.

Anyone can intuit what might be wrong with this swap: Burundians are aware their country is poor relative to the rest of the world. England in 1000 CE was not much poorer than anywhere else—and even if it had been, its peasants would have had little way of knowing.

More importantly, a country at the very bottom of the global income distribution likely has compounding problems that explain its poverty. A country with dysfunctional institutions might be unhappy for reasons unrelated to income. In fact, that dysfunction may be the common cause of both low income and low happiness. Therefore, treating modern Burundi (an extreme low-income outlier) as a valid substitute for medieval England (economically unremarkable in 1000 CE) warrants a high degree of baseline skepticism.

The fact that national happiness correlates far more strongly with log(income) than with individual happiness (remember, that was a correlation of just 0.09, or ~1% of the variance in individual happiness) supports this story about institutions as a common cause of both income and happiness. Richer societies tend to have stronger democracies, less corruption, more security, rule-of-law, and so on; these are the kinds of institutional differences that make countries rich, according to the institutional model of economic growth (exemplified by economists like Daron Acemoglu). They also, quite probably, make people happier.

Additionally, there are other stand-ins we might use to approximate the happiness of our medieval forebears, besides Burundi. Alexander relegates this to the footnotes of his essay, where he admits that present-day “hunter-gatherers are somewhere between 6 and 8 [on the happiness scale] despite their apparent poverty.” Who is the better proxy for our distant ancestors? Burundians, living in a dysfunctional modern society, or those hunter-gatherers, living in groups thought to closely mimic the social and economic environment that prevailed for the vast majority of the human past?

We have to take this much more seriously than Alexander does. If foraging peoples today are about as happy as wealthy Americans are, and if they represent something like a baseline contentment that predominated for most of human existence, then suddenly that lovely chart of countries’ happiness/GDP looks rather bad—half the world is miserable, and only the richest countries have clawed their way back to what was once a universal human patrimony of modest contentment.

Now, these foraging groups are hard to measure, and the studies are usually pretty small. Maybe they’re not very representative of forager societies across history. That’s probably true. But there’s good reason to believe that ancient foragers might’ve been happier than modern ones. Latter-day foragers have mostly been pushed to the least-desirable land by settled agrarian and then urban societies. They have to work harder to secure less subsistence than many foraging societies would’ve in the distant past. And yet they still appear to be relatively happy!

There’s an underlying evolutionary rationale for why this might be the case; for the vast majority of hominid evolution, we really were stuck in the Malthusian Trap. We couldn’t consistently improve per-capita consumption because we lacked the technology for it. Per-capita growth was effectively nonexistent for millions of years, and incredibly slow from the Neolithic through early modernity.

Therefore, our ancestors who cared more about the allocation of finite resources derived from the natural environment were likely to be more fitness-maximizing than those who prioritized increasing production. It makes sense that we’d be more attuned, neurobiologically, to relative incomes rather than absolute incomes, and more attuned still to non-economic factors like the richness of your social connections, or your physical health.

These are all serious cracks in Alexander’s foundation, but they’re merely logical arguments to be skeptical that his evidence actually reveals causation—a good rebuttal, but not as strong as marshaling our own directly contradictory evidence. Luckily, we have that too.

In fact, there is a long-lived and abundant literature devoted to exactly the problem of whether we can infer that more income causes more happiness over time, or if they’re merely correlated at a given moment in time. I’m not sure why Alexander didn’t engage with any of this literature, but in that failure I see more evidence of liberal exhaustion. It’s an unwillingness to look hard and look thoroughly, instead falling back to defend the easy, familiar answer: just keep juicing the Output Machine.

One study from 2016 puts it this way: “one would therefore have expected economic growth to bring considerable increases in life satisfaction. But in many countries, it has not – the so-called ‘Easterlin paradox’.”

They offer this chart to illustrate their point in four wealthy liberal democracies:

In each of the four countries examined, income rises substantially over time, while observed happiness remains essentially flat. The authors think this has to do with inequality: people “compare their own income to that of their peers.”

The “Easterlin Paradox” mentioned by the authors refers to the observation that log(income) is correlated with happiness, but happiness doesn’t necessarily improve with overall growth. First articulated in the 1970s by economist Richard Easterlin, it directly criticizes Alexander’s premise that cross-sectional analysis of income/happiness can be used to extrapolate how happiness might vary in response to income growth over time.

Notably, in Easterlin’s seminal 1974 paper, he includes a data point on the same happiness scale Alexander uses today. That data point, where the US scored 6.6 out of 10 on the happiness scale, was observed in 1959. American GDP per capita has more than tripled since then, yet life satisfaction scores remain essentially flat.

Alexander admits that America’s “happiness more or less followed a random walk from the beginning of the graph in 1970 to 2020, then suddenly cratered [with the COVID pandemic],” but it’s actually worse than that; we’ve been flat over a 65-year span, not a 50-year one, and over an even bigger multiplier of income that should’ve yielded close to ~0.75 points on the life satisfaction scale.

He dismisses this as the artifact of a temporary shock–COVID–but the Easterlin Paradox was first observed 50 years ago, and the study I quoted earlier was from 2016, before the pandemic. The fact that increasing national incomes don’t necessarily secure more happiness has been evident in the data for a very long time.

Finally, we have the problem of forward expectations. Even if growth plays some causal role in happiness, is that because of the absolute increase in income? Or is it because a consistently growing economy is one in which people have optimistic expectations about their future prospects?

This may sound like hair-splitting, but it matters. If the benefit to happiness comes from absolutely-higher income, then plausibly it might scale infinitely. But if it’s because growth makes people more optimistic about their prospects (like relieving them from worry about losing their jobs), then this may be a fixed benefit that growth secures as long as it’s happening, but which does not compound.

There’s evidence to suggest that exactly these kinds of forward expectations do influence people’s well-being. A 2011 study examining how perceived job insecurity, employability, and actual unemployment affected happiness found that “the potential penalty [to happiness] of unemployment is very large, as other studies have found; however, when circumstances allow a person to have complete confidence in gaining a job the adverse effects of unemployment are more than three quarters mitigated” (emphasis mine).

That’s a huge effect, and it suggests that progressive policies like a national jobs guarantee might yield happiness improvements far in excess of simply raising the incomes of people who would otherwise be unemployed.

Expectations can of course apply to other areas of life besides employment; fears about losing health insurance, losing housing, and inability to afford education all probably yield negative effects on happiness—and could be mitigated with a more robust welfare state that guarantees security in forward expectations.

If I agree strongly with Alexander on anything, it’s that expectations of housing insecurity are surely a drag on American happiness today. Because housing suffers from genuine shortages, we must tweak policy to increase the supply of (especially rental) housing stock. Although I am a socialist, I am nevertheless a YIMBY, and I’m even pretty Abundance-pilled.

How to square that with the pessimistic outlook I’ve taken on the effect that More Output can have on human happiness? Well, housing shortages have effects beyond just eating up people’s disposable incomes; the forward-expectations problem seems massive there.

Becoming homeless (or just having your rent go up) is anxiety-provoking, and this is a happiness-drag even on people who are presently housed. Also, spending money on rents (of all kinds) is subjectively unpleasant.

Plus, a thoughtful abundance program has value beyond merely stoking the Output Machine. I strongly believe that democracy is intrinsically happiness-promoting, and that governments need to be responsive to be truly democratic.

If people vote for a high-speed rail line and it takes 20 years to get built (because of the intolerable proliferation of veto points in our society) then how democratic are we, really? Are we getting the value of agency that democracy brings, and which is itself associated with happiness?

Also, I don’t believe growth is worthless. Yes, Alexander overstated the effects in his own data, drew unsupported conclusions, and didn’t reckon with an extensive literature that rebuts even the small effects on happiness we do observe from log(income). But, even if what really matters for happiness are things like healthy life-years, then a society still needs sufficient productive capacity to devote to, e.g., healthcare.

But I believe that growth, carefully and intentionally directed, can have a bigger impact on human happiness than just letting it rip. That desire for intentional, democratic direction of the economy is precisely why I became a socialist in the first place. Capitalism, I realized, just isn’t that good at maximizing happiness.

Yes, capitalism is fantastic at optimizing productivity and growth. It is world-historically good at producing what people will buy. But the problem is that “what people will buy” isn’t quite the same thing as “what people want,” and “what people want” isn’t the same thing as “what makes people happy.” It turns out that happiness is an extremely hard problem, and there is no One Weird Teleological Trick for solving it.

Alexander disagrees: “our [liberal] plans are measured in centuries; how are the communists’ and fascists’ plans going?” But that is precisely the feeling shared by so many communists and fascists. Across the political spectrum, people are convinced that their program is on an inevitable march to utopia.

Whether you place your faith in the Output Machine, the Material Conditions, or the Volksgeist, these are all ways of soothing the anxiety that comes from acknowledging just how durable human suffering is, and just how monumental the collective task of happiness will be.

I suppose such faith might be happiness-maximizing at the individual level—those forward expectations that are so important to well-being look a lot rosier if you’re convinced you can sit back and let some grand destiny carry your project to inevitable victory. This is one kind of optimization in which I’m uninterested.

Ultimately, I experience my socialist politics as what I can only imagine is karmic punishment for terrible debts in a previous life. Seeing the distance between our time and place, and the socialist future I hope to help build, is excruciating. And we won’t necessarily deliver exceptional happiness and freedom even if we do win a grand struggle for political power!

Everything is contingent, everything must be built, and once built, everything must be defended. Unfortunately, there is no respite from the fight—for anyone, in any time. It is an exhausting thing to acknowledge, but I am not exhausted; I am willing to struggle. I wish more liberals could say the same.

But, regardless, it may well be that the full benefits of liberalism—beyond mere income growth—do actually produce happiness. I’m entirely amenable to the idea that good institutions are the real cause; those institutions make us both richer and happier. A common cause that explains both outcomes. The problem is that Alexander’s essay never defends liberalism on the basis of its many virtues besides economic efficiency; he says nothing about equality, popular democracy, or rule-of-law. If liberals want to renew their political project, they’ll need to think more about these institutions and values, and less about simply juicing the Output Machine.

This chart from the second Killingsworth paper provides a visual example of how little happiness income explains, compared to everything else. For people in the lowest income bin, around $15,000, the happiness gap between the 15th percentile of happiness and the 85th percentile is about ~25 points, or five times the amount of happiness explained by variance in income. Even the 30th-percentile-happiest individuals making $15,000 are happier than the 15th-percentile at an income of $480,000! Money can buy happiness, but not all that much--at least not reliably.

The additional finding that the income effect plateaus at the lowest happiness percentiles, while it accelerates at the highest makes some sense--if you’re a happy person with a good life, having money lets you enjoy more of it (go on memory-forming trips with your loving family, play golf at beautiful courses with your healthy body and robust social network, etc). If you’re divorced, insecure, seething, and vindictive--like, say, the richest man in the world--then money can’t do much for you.

I am, of course, describing Barack Obama’s failed 2000 primary campaign in IL-01 against then-Congressman Bobby Rush. People tend to forget about Obama’s sole (blowout) loss in his otherwise unblemished electoral career—hell, I forgot about it until recently reminded me of it, and I worked for Obama in ‘07-’08—but it’s worth remembering: Barack Obama could orchestrate a spectacular 6-year rise from relative anonymity to become America’s first Black President, but even he couldn’t unseat a Congressional incumbent with full Democratic Party backing in a safe-district primary. In 2026, multiple challengers in House primaries have done what Barack Obama, in 2000, could not.

When I asked pollster/analyst about the present wave of defenestrations, he told me “it used to be unheard of for an incumbent to lose a House primary. What we’re seeing now is extremely unique.” NYC Reps Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat going down on June 23rd was statement enough, but the left-flank’s march on Democratic incumbents has not relented. On Tuesday, Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed Melat Kiros defeated Diana DeGette in Colorado’s 1st district. In a poetic flourish, 29-year-old Kiros was born three months after DeGette first took office.

While most commentators and politicians at least acknowledge that incumbency may no longer be a guarantor of re-nomination, that doesn’t mean everyone is happy about it. In fact, much of the Democratic establishment is experiencing something ranging from misery to apoplexy. I suppose that’s understandable, given that their jobs are the ones now under threat, but the rest of us ought to be delighted, whether we happen to align with the specific politics of DSA or not.

My argument for why the rise in defeated incumbents is in itself a good thing comes in two parts:

1. The democratic argument. It is inherently unacceptable that so many Americans can’t participate in competitive elections on a consistent basis. It’s corrosive to democratic legitimacy, and it fundamentally circumscribes how representative our representation can really be.

2. The strategic argument. Incumbency just isn’t that valuable anymore, but a more vital and responsive intraparty democracy might be. The empirical literature is divided and ambiguous, but there’s good reason to put some hope into these reforms; at a minimum, strategic concerns don’t make a case against a more democratic Democratic Party.

First, let’s dig into the democratic argument. Simply put, Americans deserve real, competitive elections that give them a voice, even if they live in districts that are safely held by one party. I would hope that this claim is not seriously contested by anyone to the left of Mitch McConnell. But given the lack of action on the part of Democratic politicians, affiliated organizations, or the broader commentariat, one must conclude that too many people simply don’t realize the scope of non-democracy that many voters are enduring—and that the problem is getting worse.

There are two key facts to consider:

1. Most federal elections in America are not competitive, and the number of competitive elections is shrinking.

2. Incumbents have historically won re-nomination at astronomical rates, such that a district which isn’t competitive between the parties effectively has no competitive elections until the incumbent dies, retires, or is otherwise removed.

On the first point, political scientists were already finding in 2005 that House elections had been becoming less competitive for 50 years, with the problem intensifying since the 1970s. Since that finding, things have only gotten worse; this year, analysts rate the number of truly competitive House races at about 35-42—fewer than 10% of seats. Worse, this is shaping up to be a major wave election year for Democrats, meaning that even in the most competitive type of cycle, more than 300 million Americans live in House districts considered safe. By comparison, in the Democratic wave year of 2018, the GOP lost 42 seats (with more considered competitive), and in the GOP wave year of 2010, they picked up 63 seats. Things weren’t very competitive to start with, they’re getting even less competitive, and it’s happening fast.

On the second point, incumbent House members almost never lose their re-nomination elections; on average, more than 98% of incumbents are re-nominated, and that astronomical number is dragged down by post-redistricting cycles where incumbents get drawn together in new districts and run against one another. The true rate of incumbency defense is slightly higher than 98.3%.

When you take these two facts together, the implication is obvious: the vast majority of American voters do not enjoy competitive elections for the federal legislature. They don’t get competitive general elections between the parties, and they get even less competitive re-nomination contests in safe seats. This is a fundamentally untenable status quo for a democracy—it’s amazing American dissatisfaction with our democracy is only 69%, according to Pew.

I really want to drive this home: we have a country where most people, most of the time, cannot participate in meaningful elections for the national legislature. This is an insane way to run a democracy, and it foments distrust, apathy, reduced agency, and diminished support for democratic institutions. This alone should be sufficient reason for Democrats to stop throwing the weight of popular elected officials, state party endorsements, coordinated fundraising, or other forms of organized support behind incumbents in primary contests.

As a useful example, Diana DeGette reigned for thirty years before Melat Kiros and DSA unseated her. That’s three decades without change for voters in CO-01. That’s madness. It’s an embarrassment, and small-d democrats should be thrilled that someone like DeGette was unseated, purely as a matter of principle.

We should note before moving on that there is a wrinkle here: politicians can reasonably endorse candidates they sincerely agree with and support, even if that candidate is an incumbent facing a primary challenge. It’s not tenable to suggest that no one in the Democratic Party should ever support an incumbent seeking re-nomination, and I’m not suggesting that. But it’s clear that there’s something else at work in American party politics—a generalized deference to, and defense of, incumbents.

We saw this in New York, where Mamdani and AOC collaborated to endorse in each other’s turf, while each avoiding endorsing against incumbents in their own spheres of influence; Mamdani endorsed the Congressional challengers, while AOC endorsed against incumbent state legislators. Clearly, there’s enough of a taboo that even two of the most adventurous and insurgent-friendly politicians in America took pains to avoid violating the unwritten rules of incumbency-defense that govern the Democratic Party. We know the rot is real. It’s not just a matter of politicians making individual statements of sincere support. The Party privileges incumbents as a matter of course, even though this is unavoidably anti-democratic when we rigorously examine the implications.

Now, onto the strategic argument. This is where things get stickier, but where I find myself excited by the possibilities of a truly competitive intraparty democracy. First, we have to stipulate a few general trends to properly understand the context. For one thing, the incumbency advantage in general elections has been declining for years. According to , “even as late as 2016 [the incumbency effect] used to be worth ~6pp in margin; it is now half that.” Other analyses peg the current benefit even lower; FairVote found in 2024 that the incumbency advantage had declined to just 1.1 percentage points in Congressional general elections. It’s not nothing, but it’s the kind of advantage that is easily swamped by other considerations like candidate quality and the general partisan environment.

When it comes to candidate quality, candidates like ME-02’s Jared Golden can beat baseline expectations by significant margins. The Split Ticket WAR (wins-above-replacement) database pegs Golden as between a 13- and 6-point overperformer from 2020-2024 (notably, this metric already accounts for an expected incumbency bump, so if we’re thinking about how candidate quality can swamp incumbency effects, Golden’s WAR is even more impressive). Finding real winners is a lot more important than keeping incumbents on the ballot.

At the same time, candidate quality effects are also declining over time as partisanship increasingly predicts election outcomes; in the Split Ticket dataset, WAR scores have compressed by about half from 2014-2024, meaning that the overperformers are overperforming by less with each passing election cycle.

Basically, everything is getting swamped by pure partisanship and the nationalization of elections; what matters more with each passing year is getting voters to like your party, not your candidates. That’s a difficult problem, and one where the empirical evidence is less of a guide. Trying to determine causal variables that drive overall party perception is tougher; there’s just far fewer observations than we get when examining individual candidate effects, and there are so many confounding variables and reverse-causality problems.

So, how do you get voters to like your party? One possibility is to have more inclusive, competitive candidate-selection processes. I say “possibility,” because the empirical literature dealing with this problem directly is ambiguous; while there seems to be good evidence that “[voters] who vote for a party that uses inclusive selection procedures tend, on average, to exhibit higher levels of satisfaction with democracy,” this is not the same thing as a clear electoral benefit for parties with more inclusive, open selection processes (like primaries).

There’s quite a few papers that find, in experiments, voters express strong preferences for open selection methods, but research examining real-world electoral dividends for parties that change their selection procedures is mixed. One 2025 paper in the British Journal of Political Science found that parties which moved from highly-restrictive to most-inclusive procedures gained a nominal 2.83 percentage point benefit at the polls, but this wasn’t statistically significant—not a negative result, but not positive either. However, like other papers, they replicated the finding that, in experiments, voters do say that more inclusive parties are more appealing, and they note that the empirical literature is divided: some papers find positive effects, some find negative effects, and others find no effect at all.

Clearly, more inclusive candidate selection is not an obvious strategic benefit—but, given that we’ve already established its moral necessity, it’s important to note that this moral benefit doesn’t appear to be a strategic harm, either. And I think there’s room to take the optimistic case, at least in the present-day American context, that more intraparty democracy could yield electoral dividends.

First, the Obama example. I opened this essay with his 2000 loss to Bobby Rush because Obama is one of the most successful Democratic politicians of my lifetime; he remains the most popular figure in the party to this day. And yet, if he’d had to come up through safe Democratic seats, he would’ve been completely stifled by non-competitive primaries dominated by incumbents. He was only able to rise to national prominence because, in 2003, there was a Republican-held Senate seat in Illinois to run for! Given that American politics is increasingly polarized by geography, and competitive general elections are in steep decline, the next Obama could conceivably be stuck at the level of a state legislator, city councilor, or mayor—unable to defeat institutional backing for incumbents to rise up the ranks of intraparty democracy, but also without the opportunity to contest a general election against statewide Republican incumbents who no longer exist in places like Illinois, California, or New York.

In other words, the kind of transformative, generational candidates who can improve the perception of the entire party are potentially being sidelined and backbenched because there isn’t a talent pipeline to move them up through the ranks. If Democrats remain committed to this stifling status quo, the next Obama might take 20 or 30 years to percolate to the top, instead of 6 or 8.

That’s only one strategic consideration. Another is that while the global literature on the electoral dividends of open candidate-selection methods is mixed, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t make a difference in America today. For example, since members of inclusive, democratic parties tend to express more satisfaction with democracy, that seems potentially useful for the party that represents democratic institutions and norms against an authoritarian, personalist regime. Trump and Trumpism are wildly corrupt and anti-democratic; the more Democrats can materially differentiate themselves against that, and the more they can re-instill confidence in democracy itself, then the better they’ll do.

Further, we’ve seen from the American example that nominally-inclusive methods of selection are not necessarily competitive or democratic in practice. In most studies, America counts as an open, inclusive party system because we have primaries—despite the fact that incumbents win renomination >98% of the time. Perhaps some of the ambiguity in the data is precisely because some of the “inclusive” political parties under study, like our own, are quite exclusive in reality—and voters can tell.

There are other minor strategic concerns that tend to break in favor of robust intraparty democracy, like studies from around the world which show voters tend to penalize older candidates, but there’s also the question of ideology—and how it intersects uniquely with the American political system.

What matters most to voters, much more than how parties pick their candidates, is whether they perceive parties to share their ideological views. This is a major driver behind the nationalization and polarization of American politics: the parties are getting more ideologically coherent, and people are voting for the parties that match their views more closely. It’s for this reason that so many centrist Democrats express fear and hostility about the rising tide of successful challengers against incumbents; the challengers have, thus far, skewed far-left, and the incumbents less so. This makes total sense, given that Democratic voters are much more liberal than in the past. The voters are simply bringing the party officials in line with their views.

Centrists are alarmed by this both for their own sincere ideological reasons—they’re centrists for a reason, after all—and because they fear it will harm the electoral chances of the Democratic Party with moderate voters.

But their solution, simply “moderating to win,” is completely untenable. How do you force the Party to field more moderate candidates when the voters are becoming more liberal? This is necessarily an implied argument against intraparty democracy, and in favor of going back to backroom deals and powerful party executives choosing names.

Setting aside the moral outrageousness of such a move, it would also be a strategic disaster. Restricting nomination processes to motivated party activists (like delegates to conventions) would make it easier for far-left candidates to win, not harder, so the only workable method amounts to something like how the Working Families Party doles out endorsements—decided from above by a tiny committee of entrenched party officials, routinely overturning the votes of members. If you haven’t noticed, the WFP got eaten alive by the robust internal democracy of DSA in New York City; it doesn’t seem like this is a great way to generate enthusiasm, mobilization, or votes.

More importantly, going back to the pre-primary mode of party politics would likely precipitate a historic collapse of the Democratic Party, resulting in something truly catastrophic like schism or outright replacement.

If that seems doomerist to you, then walk through the steps with me. The pro-moderation faction’s core premise is that voters overwhelmingly care about ideological alignment. As they also stipulate, the Democratic voter base is very liberal, and becoming more so. Thus, they implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) advocate top-down, anti-democratic measures to force the Party to moderate. But using top-down, anti-democratic controls is advocating for ideological misalignment between Democratic candidates and voters. Their own premises argue that this is the surest way to drive those voters out of the party and into schism. The very motivation for the “moderate to win” thesis—the overwhelming importance voters put on ideological alignment with parties—is its own undoing.

It’s both morally and practically ludicrous to think you can have a stable, successful party which explicitly says “our candidates will not reflect your ideology, and we’ll lock you out of the process” to its voters. It’s baffling that so many “reasonable” centrists seem to think of this strategy as somehow sensible, pragmatic, or mature.

If America were a multiparty democracy with proportional representation, schism probably would’ve already happened. But America is a two-party system, which makes it difficult to arrive at stable ideological equilibrium; moderates really are cross-pressured, and their swings between the parties reflect the problem of only having two parties in a time of rising ideological coherence and a rising demand from voters for candidates that closely match their views.

More sensible liberal commentators, like Ezra Klein, don’t seem to yearn for ruthless top-down control forcing moderation on an unwilling Democratic Party, but rather a genuine big tent; he’s aware that “the theory of having a big tent doesn’t just mean moving to the right—it also means accepting the left.” In principle, I agree with him. But how to do it? Facially, this doesn’t seem a whole lot more plausible or pragmatic than the “moderate by force” thesis.

But there is hope: robust intraparty democracy. If you want moderates and liberals to belong to the Democratic Party, you need to give them both a meaningful electoral voice, and that means that both factions need to be able to compete with one another on a fair, representative basis. Democracy is the tool by which you cohere the big tent, by letting these factions compete openly with one another, and resolve their disagreements fairly. Let them cohere into open, explicit caucuses! Give voters an opportunity to self-identify with them, not just members of Congress.

This is, of course, the way that the existing big-tent elephant in the room works: the Democratic Socialists of America.

Now if you’re not an anti-capitalist radical, you’re probably scoffing at the notion that DSA is a “big tent” institution. And yet, if you’re a leftist, you probably marvel at how DSA has been able to hold together a fractious coalition of social democrats, socialists, communists, anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyites, and assorted others. While the differences (and the tent) may seem small to outsiders, leftists know that schism is one of the most enduring and fatal problems that has plagued our movements for the better part of 150 years. Holding together these groups in the same institution, and directing them to shared ends, borders on the miraculous. No one goes in for the narcissism of small differences like leftists, and yet the DSA holds us together.

Notably, we don’t do it through top-down control, but through self-organization into explicit caucuses that openly compete with one another for power. When you lose, you might be frustrated, but you don’t blame an unfair and closed process—and you don’t need to schism. You get back up, dust yourself off, and organize harder. None of this would work if we didn’t have open, fair, and regularly competitive elections to manage our intraparty democracy, nor if we lacked the explicit caucus structure.

The Democrats can learn from this. I’m not saying they need to completely replicate the DSA—they’re very different institutions as a matter of both scale and structure—but there are broad, guiding principles here that the Dems can use to better manage a fractious coalition and generate sincere buy-in and agency from voters.

I am a socialist, but I am persuaded that voters really do want ideologically-matched candidates, and swing districts really do have a lot of moderate voters (’moderate’ here not meaning consistent centrists, which barely exist, but cross-pressured voters with both liberal and conservative beliefs). I have thought for some time that the most practical coalition against Trumpism and fascism would ideally consist of 2-3 parties, each internally coherent, operating as a popular front—if only the American electoral system made that plausible.

But maybe it does. Maybe the answer has been in front of us all along, and Democratic voters’ present rebellion against incumbents is just revealing it. Maybe the answer isn’t fewer DSAs in the Democratic coalition, but more, of more ideological strains—parties within the Party, so to speak.

Maybe the strategic answer and the moral answer are the same: meaningful democracy.

But the most under-discussed element of this sweeping victory for American socialism—with 10 out of 11 DSA-endorsed candidates winning—is right there in the name of both the Democratic Party and DSA: democracy. The socialists bet on government of, by, and for the people, while the Democratic Party elite bet on machine politics, seniority, and ethnic patronage. And the elite lost. Badly. If the Democrats can only understand June 23rd through the lens of “kingmaker” Mamdani, or a general anti-incumbent/change narrative, they’ll keep flailing. What voters want is something deeper than a charismatic mayor or “throw the bums out” surface change: we want agency—the belief and the reality that our choices matter. That this government of ours is really self-government, not merely an oligarchy with elections.

Maybe no race illustrated this contrast better than NY-07, where Assembly member Claire Valdez obliterated the heavily-endorsed machine scion, Antonio Reynoso. After weeks of anxiety about the outcome on election Twitter, it turned out the race wasn’t even close; Valdez romped to a 20-point blowout, winning just about every precinct in the district except those where the Satmar Hasidic community voted as a bloc for Reynoso. Outside of those precincts where endorsements still drive lockstep voting, Valdez won by closer to 30.

You wouldn’t have expected that result from the way that elected Democrats talked about the race in the run-up to June 23rd, though. Nydia Velázquez, after 33 years in the House as a prominent member of the Hispanic and Progressive Caucuses, marred her retirement from NY-07 by fuming against Mamdani and the DSA for refusing her the privilege of anointing a successor. She complained to the New York Times, saying “It’s very nice to get to New York for a few years and to have opinions about other elected officials without knowing the history . . . Now, all of the sudden, people want to come in and decide who is the best candidate.” She further elaborated that “this is personal,” and that she supported Reynoso “because I know him.”

Her objections, in other words, were framed in the language of illegitimacy, naming the tenure of Valdez, Mamdani, and their voters in New York (an insufficient tenure, to her mind) as the reason why they shouldn’t get to “decide” on candidates. As far as Velázquez was concerned, interlopers were interfering with her right to appoint a loyal successor. She referred to her endorsement as “pass[ing] the torch to the next generation,” and Rep. Pat Ryan declared Reynoso the best candidate to “carry on the legacy of my friend...Nydia Velázquez.” From the beginning, the forces backing Reynoso framed the election as a bequest from the esteemed powerbroker of the district.

It wasn’t just Velázquez who rankled at the principle of open democratic competition. The Working Families Party, once the leading organization of the New York left, endorsed Reynoso despite the vote of their members in Brooklyn and Queens, who chose Valdez. Strikingly, this top-down rejection of majority rule is how the WFP’s internal structure is designed to work: their Regional Advisory Council routinely overrules the vote of the rank-and-file. This happens because most delegates to the Council come from affiliated organizations, like labor unions and NGOs, who make large contributions to the WFP. The number of delegates they get on the council directly corresponds to contributions—more money, more votes. (As a side note, the WFP was even more anti-democratic regarding Chuck Park’s insurgent campaign in NY-06; there, the local members and the Regional Council wanted to endorse Park, but state leadership overruled both votes.)

In contrast, NYC-DSA’s straightforward one-member/one-vote process earned Valdez a staggering 97% share of support across the city chapter. DSA’s direct member democracy couldn’t more obviously reveal the ugliness of WFP’s indirect “democracy” where institutions and cash decide the outcome. The DSA result was an enthusiastic, representative mobilization monster on behalf of Valdez in NY-07 that knocked over 300,000 doors, while WFP contributed money but little grassroots legitimacy to Reynoso.

Reynoso had the endorsements of the vast majority of unions (despite Valdez being a UAW organizer herself), elected officials and NGOs, plus the WFP. They framed the election as a contest between Valdez’s insolent newcomers, against, in the words of Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, “someone who is not new to this, but . . . true to this,” in Reynoso. The orgs and the pols overruled grassroots enthusiasm in favor of machine politics and patronage. And they got blown the fuck out. This is not an accident. This is not incidental.

This race drew about as clean a divide as you can ask for between rank and file democracy, on the side of Valdez and the DSA, and entitlement on the side of the Democratic establishment, which treated this seat as a fief to be doled out on the basis of seniority and personal relationships. Commentators throughout the race emphasized how—unlike in NY-13—the race in the 7th district had little policy daylight between the two candidates. It was “a turf war when the candidates are 95% the same,” in the words of one Democratic operative. Many have chosen to interpret the result as a question of who built the better organization—and clearly DSA has—but with surprisingly little attention paid to why the DSA machine was so much more powerful than that of Velázquez and the WFP.

When you see the difference in how these organizations made decisions, and the respect they had (or didn’t) for internal democracy, it actually becomes obvious why Valdez triumphed so resoundingly. Americans want a stake and a say. It is fundamentally more compelling to choose for yourself, and to choose in collaboration with others, than it is to receive commands from on high, as was the case with the Brooklyn and Queens members of WFP. Democracy nurtures enthusiasm, and it strengthens support for the decisions of the whole body. Top-down control breeds apathy. If you don’t trust people to choose and to act, then they will stop choosing and stop acting.

Valdez said it best in her victory speech: “[This movement] will not stop until working people are no longer asked to just build the table, no longer offered a seat at the table, but will run the table.” In a race where the candidates were both progressives with similar platforms, that promise—to run the table—is what made the difference. A 20 point difference.

Despite how Valdez and the DSA humbled them, the establishment still doesn’t get it. After the election, Letitia James minimized the legitimacy of the DSA candidates, whining that “some of the candidates . . . do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, [they] have not been part of the history . . . and are relatively new to the body politic.” She’s doubled down on this argument about standing, as if democratic participation is an earned privilege rather than the right of all. But this is America, and in America, you don’t need tenure to run for office, endorse, volunteer, or vote. There’s no bar to clear, except the bar of earning votes. In a democracy, that’s what matters. What the people choose is the ultimate standard of legitimacy, and we should commit ourselves to no other before it.

While the NY-07 race might’ve been the starkest contrast on the question of internal party democracy, Darializa Avila Chevalier’s victory over incumbent Adriano Espaillat in NY-13 was the contest that best revealed something else: resentment. Nothing less than gutter racism slithered into open view in NY-13. Avila Chevalier, on the eve of the election, went to social media to condemn attacks painting her as Haitian (as if that were a slur), demanding her birth certificate (in echoes of Trump’s racist Birtherism campaign against Obama), and impugning her Muslim faith. Attacks like those from former Espaillat advisor Rusking Pimentel, who said in a radio interview:

“Mamdani, who is also Muslim, his goal is to change the demography of Washington Heights, that Washington Heights no longer be a bastion of the Dominican community, that it rather become a bastion of the Haitian, Muslim community allied to him”

We should be clear about what this is: a Dem Party version of MAGA’s “Great Replacement Theory,” in which legitimate political actors are replaced by illegitimate newcomers who taint the political process. It’s an illiberal articulation that positions only some people as deserving a democratic voice, on the basis of race, national origin, religion, or other innate characteristics. Consider what Stephen Miller said Wednesday morning after the elections in NYC: “Change the voters, change the country.” It seems that some of Espaillat’s boosters would agree, and share Miller’s resentful, conspiratorial tone when they’re the ones facing ouster at the hands of new voters.

It wasn’t just one former advisor, either. While Espaillat himself largely dodged the issue with perfunctory distancing (”I ask for people to tone it down,” he meekly offered in response to miserable racist attacks on Haitians and Muslims), the surest sign that this was a genuine expression of his campaign is how it filtered down to volunteers and supporters. In a viral video, poll volunteers for Espaillat screamed “No! Dominicans only!” and told a Darializa voter to “go to Cuba if you want communism.”

You might think the distasteful rhetoric and behavior of one advisor and a few poll workers is something you can cringe at, but otherwise safely ignore. The rot is deeper. In more genteel terms, Espaillat and other elected officials in the Democratic Party articulated a very similar premise. Espaillat derided DAC and DSA voters before the election as “people that fly in from other states or from other parts of the world to try to impose their failed ideology,” not legitimate participants in an open democratic contest for representation.

There’s more, from before and after June 23rd:

Rep. Juan Vargas said of the NY-13 race: “All of a sudden, here comes this new guy, Mamdani, and says, ‘You’re no good, you’re out.’ No one’s in favor of that, we’re all arguing, how the hell can this happen?”

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries brushed off results in NY-07 as belonging to “the most gentrified district in the nation, by far,” suggesting illegitimacy on the grounds of the voting population.

Jaime Harrison, former DNC chair: “I say this with no ill will or animosity: if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination. Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure,” suggesting the victorious candidates and voters on June 23rd were not “real” Democrats, and didn’t deserve to contest elections in the party.

Melissa DeRosa, former advisor to Andrew Cuomo, summarized this resentment in the most unashamed terms: “They are not Democrats; they are socialists, and they are parasites. They cannot win on their own by creating their own party, so they are going to latch onto the Democratic Party and feed off of it.

All in all, the message from the Democratic Party establishment was clear before and after the elections of June 23rd: new voters shouldn’t get a say—whether because they’re the wrong race, they’re from the wrong hometown, they’re too young, they work the wrong jobs, they have the wrong beliefs, or they’re insufficiently loyal to the party. Velázquez was “infuriated” by the challenge in NY-07, treating a seat in the US Congress as her personal patrimony to leave to her successor.

Our democratic legislature is not the personal property of its occupants. A House seat is a position of public service to the voters who choose their best representative, not an inheritance. Espaillat’s supporters saw NY-13 in even uglier terms, as an ethnic patronage for Dominicans, not “Haitians” or “Muslims.” Throughout, politicians and groups across the spectrum derided DSA voters as “gentrifiers” and “transplants,” insinuating insufficient racial standing to deserve representation—never mind that DAC and Valdez are both women of color, or that DAC won Black voters and ran nearly even with Hispanics, or that Valdez’s blowout win crossed many lines of racial identity.

We should take a beat to be clear: no one had an obligation to roll over for DSA or the new challengers. There’s nothing wrong, in principle, with a retiring incumbent endorsing a new candidate for the open seat, or unions or the WFP going to work on behalf of a known quantity. In fact, this is precisely my point: open and contested elections are a good, healthy, essential part of democratic society. Vigorously contesting these seats of tremendous power is itself laudable.

Where the Democratic Party has gone fatally wrong is in how they treated the DSA challenge as an affront, a betrayal, an unacceptable breach of the norms that were supposed to let the establishment anoint successors for perfunctory approval by disempowered voters. Even worse, the Party elite treated the voters who carried the insurgents to victory as less democratically legitimate than the voters who supported the incumbents and their successors. This is reprehensible. It is the same underlying logic as Trumpism, which also stratifies voters and politicians into people with more-and-less legitimate claims to democratic participation.

This cannot be the way forward. If the Democrats really want to resist Trumpism, if they really want to reinvigorate their party and our democracy, then there can only be a singular and universal standard of democratic legitimacy. Every vote, equally sacred. Every voter, equally entitled. Every politician, equally accountable.

The lack of such an equal and vital democracy is what, after decades of oligarchy, endless incumbencies, and strangling Party control, has pushed so many Americans to embrace Donald Trump. If you’ve lost faith in your own agency to self-govern, then why not throw off the gridlocked costume of democratic process and just revel in an autocrat who will be honest about your disenfranchisement—and punish the people you hate?

At a fundamental level, that’s what democracy is: a way to resolve disagreement that legitimizes the outcome, allowing all to feel that the disagreement was concluded justly and fairly, even if we don’t get the result we want. Without that belief, Americans will keep turning to strongmen who offer to go outside the law and the institutions to punish and suppress their political opposition. Why restrain yourself to irrelevancy in a broken, faithless institution, when someone offers to rain down punitive fury on your opponents? What do you have to lose?

On Tuesday, the DSA candidates and voters demonstrated that, despite everything, there is still an appetite for democracy in America. Real, living democracy, not mere rule-following and institutional deference, which is what so many Democrats have come to mean when they talk about “defending democracy.” There is still a true counterpoise to Trumpian fascism, not a lukewarm version of his ethics of personal patronage and racial hierarchies. Mamdani and his endorsees whetted that appetite in New York, and we’re only getting hungrier.