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Rahm Emanuel has never been mistaken for a shrinking violet. As former President Bill Clinton‘s senior adviser, former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, and the mayor of Chicago, he operates with a bluntness that has made him enemies on both sides of the aisle. So, when he sits down on a podcast and unloads on the Democratic Party of which he is a member, from the right, it is worth paying attention, even if you factor in that he is almost certainly running for president in 2028 and has every reason to position himself as the adult in the room.
He is not wrong.
In a wide-ranging conversation on the Reason podcast, The Fifth Column, with Michael Moynihan and Matt Welch, Emanuel laid out a critique of the Democratic Party that is as clear-eyed as anything you will hear from a figure of his stature. The party, he argues, lost the plot. It has substituted left-wing cultural advocacy for economic populism, chased the faculty lounge while losing the kitchen table, and managed the remarkable feat of making President Donald Trump, a twice-impeached, felony-convicted candidate who promised tariffs, retribution, and the systematic dismantling of federal institutions, the more plausible champion of the American working class.
That is not a small failure. It is a generational one.
Emanuel’s diagnosis starts with what he calls four defining moments of the first quarter of the 21st century. The Iraq War cost 5,000 American lives and $1 trillion, and the Democratic Party tried to distance itself by blaming former President George W. Bush. The financial meltdown saw Wall Street executives pocket bonuses while ordinary Americans lost jobs and homes, and tax dollars went to bail out the institutions. China‘s rise went largely unanswered, while communities such as Battle Creek, Michigan, had to absorb the fallout. And COVID-19 once again divided the population into those protected and those bearing the burden. Emanuel argues that the common thread in all four moments is the complete lack of accountability for those responsible for the damage. That lack of accountability is not a policy failure — it is a moral failure, and voters have not forgotten it.
“In all those events,” Emanuel said, “the well-heeled and well-connected are basically held harmless, and everybody else pays the price.”
That accumulated rage, he argues, is what explains the current political moment. Trump did not create it. He captured it. The distinction matters enormously because if you believe Trump is the disease rather than the symptom, your entire political strategy is built on a flawed premise. You spend your energy fighting the man rather than addressing the conditions that produced him.
Democrats, Emanuel argues, did exactly that. And while they were busy fighting Trump, they handed him gifts.
The immigration issue is where his critique lands hardest. He traces the party’s drift from a defensible position, enforcing the law while remaining humane, to an indefensible one: candidates at a 2020 primary debate raising their hands to provide free healthcare to people who crossed the border illegally. “The American people,” he said, “are quite accepting and quite open and receptive to immigrants. But they don’t think the law should be broken, and they don’t think anybody who breaks the law should be rewarded. And that should not be hard for any Democrat with a voice to articulate.”
It wasn’t hard. Democrats just refused to say it because the interest groups inside the party’s Washington orbit, as well as the progressive wing of the party, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), were louder than the voters outside it. Emanuel speaks on this with some authority. As Clinton’s point man on the issue in the 1990s, he built Operation Gatekeeper on the California border and similar enforcement operations in Arizona and Texas. He knows the difference between a party that takes the border seriously and one that merely performs seriousness when the polls demand it.
The cultural issues are where Emanuel gets most pointed, and where his critique will sting progressives most. “We lost the plot,” he said flatly, listing the progression: Latinx, defund the police, declaring all police organizations racist, and then the cultural battles imported into public schools. “You are worried about bathroom access and locker room access. Why don’t you focus on classroom excellence? You have 50% of our kids not reading at grade level.” When Moynihan interjected, “They say they can do both,” Emanuel responded, “You’ve proven that you can’t.”
He saved particular contempt for the progressive position on transgender athletes in women’s sports, calling it a direct assault on Title IX, one of the Democratic Party’s genuine legislative achievements. “Why would you undercut the premise of Title IX with the ability of trans men playing in women’s sports? To me, it’s insane. It’s baffling.” The party’s position managed to simultaneously alienate parents, women’s sports advocates, and voters who simply thought the whole debate was a distraction from kitchen-table concerns. On the merits and the politics, it was a losing hand, and Democrats played it anyway.
The larger diagnosis is captured in a single line: “The country has a culture of acceptance. We went from acceptance to advocacy. Big difference.”
That shift, from tolerating difference to demanding its affirmation, is where Emanuel believes the party lost its center of gravity. And he has the numbers to back it up. A Manhattan Institute poll of 2,500 Democrats found 50% self-describing as moderate. A Third Way poll found similar results. The progressive base is loud but not large.
Emanuel points to successful Democratic presidents as the model: Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment, Obama’s speech distancing himself from Jeremiah Wright, John F. Kennedy telling a Baptist audience in Texas that he would be an American president who happened to be Catholic, not a Catholic president taking direction from Rome.
“Every one of our most successful electoral presidents,” Emanuel said, “anchored themselves in what I call middle-class values, values that people can universally ascribe to.”
The current party, he implies, has abandoned that anchoring entirely.
Now, Emanuel is not an entirely disinterested observer here. He is plainly positioning for 2028, and every critique of the progressive wing doubles as a contrast to his own record: minimum-wage increases in Chicago, universal free community college, free pre-K for every 4-year-old. “The first eight letters of progressive is progress,” he said. “Not perfection.” The message is not subtle.
But self-interest does not make him wrong. The evidence is sitting right there in the 2024 results. A candidate in Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, refused to break with then-President Joe Biden’s border policy despite attempting to boost her bona fides as a prosecutor. A party that spent years telling voters their concerns about crime, schools, and cultural imposition were either illegitimate or bigoted. And an opponent who, despite everything and all the baggage, made the sale and scored a significant win, including the non-issue but narrative-framing popular vote.
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“We have to prove we can fight for America,” Emanuel said, “not just fight Trump.”
That is the correct lesson. Whether Democrats can learn it is a separate question, and on that one, the record is not encouraging. Another cycle of the same instincts, the same interest groups, the same catering to the progressive Left, and a refusal to hear what voters outside Washington are saying, and the party will lose again, and deserve to.
