Keen On

“What Trump is doing is not popular”. For the This Old Democracy podcaster and veteran Democratic activist Micah Sifry, that’s the good news of Trump’s sub-40% approval rate. The bad news, Sifry warns, is that the Dems remained a weak, divided party struggling to counter the MAGA-controlled Republicans. Learning from the campus success of Charlie Kirk, he says, the Democrats need to rediscover what once made them a party of the vibrant counterculture. And that certainly isn’t going to happen if grey functionaries like Schumer and Jeffries retain control of an increasingly gerontocratic party. He favors economic populism over identity politics, arguing that progressives made a “gigantic mistake” by favoring the woke politics of the university over working-class concerns. And so the New York based Sifry is cautiously optimistic about Zohran Mamdani whose primary victory, he is convinced, demonstrated that young voters will turn out for dynamic candidates who offer both generational change and credible ways to