Hey, everybody, welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Lovett. Obviously right now for National

Democrats, success is defined by what we can stop. It counts as some kind of good news when the president

walks back his threat to use military force against Greenland or removes a petty tyrant and a fascist

outfit from the streets of Minneapolis.

And our job over the next year is to use what little power we have to stop the administration's worst successes while winning what will ultimately be a referendum on Trump's cruelty and failures.

But regardless of the outcome in 26, the Democrats are in a massive hole.

The country may be turning against Trump,

but that has not corresponded to any newfound love for his opposition. In recent polls, barely a third

of voters have a positive view of the Democratic Party. And so one thing we're trying to do is

have conversations about where we go from here, whatever happens in the midterms.

And so that's why I wanted to have the conversation we had today.

I spoke to Mark Dunkelman.

He wrote a book called Why Nothing Works.

And it is a story about what happened to progressive governance and the changes in the way progressives think about power between the New Deal and today

and what we need to do to prove to people that Democrats not only deserve power, but Democrats

know how to use power once we have it. And a lot of times this gets framed as a left, center-left debate.

It kind of falls into the usual grooves of our kind of ideological fights over the last

10 or more years.

Sometimes it feels like people like to bring their old baggage to a debate because

it's easier than packing a new suitcase.

But I think it's worth listening to this as an opportunity for everybody in the pro-democracy

movement to understand what we have to do to demonstrate to people that democracy can actually

...