The differences between Republicans and Democrats in 2024 are now apparent, thanks to the parties' national conventions. However, the conventions also revealed something that liberals and conservatives have in common: They both want the national government to play a very active role in the American people's personal lives.
The November election will be a referendum on government activism, and the question between the lines on the national ballot will not be whether the government should be more involved in our lives, but how.
In the good old days of electoral politics, we could count on the GOP to stand for a limited national government that exists primarily for national defense. It kept its hands off personal choices and freedoms.
That's not the case in 2024. Donald Trump, the Republicans’ nominee, says he wants to lay waste to the administrative state. The conservatives' Project 2025 instruction manual says its mission is to "return self-governance to the American people." Those are smoke screens.
Elsewhere in the manual's pages and from Trump on the stump, we get a far different picture, of a government that meddles in who people love, the faith they practice, the medical treatment they are allowed to receive, what their children learn in school, what books our libraries can stock, and what energy we use (spoiler alert: fossil fuels). Trump makes clear we should be careful with free speech, lest we criticize him and find the FBI at our door, and careful how we assemble, lest we want a first-hand experience with the world's most lethal military.
Democratic VP hopeful Tim Walz undoubtedly spoke for many Americans during his convention speech Wednesday when he told the GOP to "mind your own damn business."
We heard a far different type of government activism from the DNC’s speakers. They provided a long list of proposals to improve the lot of low-income and middle-class Americans. A frequent theme was an American "opportunity economy." Trump, America's poet laureate of cheap shots and insulting sobriquets, responded by calling Harris "Comrade Kamala."
We can expect Trump and his supporters to use "socialism" repeatedly to characterize the Democrats’ proposals for government activism. It has proven in the past to be a very effective rhetorical stun gun that stops progressive proposals in their tracks.
Harris and Democrats should not let that happen this time. Instead, they should lean into the many worthwhile ideas they have proposed to improve the lives of those on the wrong side of the income and wealth gaps. The reason to keep advocating these ideas is simple: The American people are still the nation's most underutilized natural resource.
What is an "opportunity society?" Former President Obama defined it during his inaugural address in 2013. "We are true to our creed," he said, "when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own."
One after another, the distinguished speakers at the DNC, including Harris and Walz, offered living proof that people born into modest means can grow up to be president or achieve other exalted positions in America, just like the old saw says. But the talents and potentials of millions of other Americans are unfulfilled, to society's loss as well as theirs.
In the New York Times last year, columnist Joseph Stiglitz reported, "The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. … Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of Europe and lower than in all of Scandinavia."
Nearly 38 million Americans, or 11.5 percent of us, live in poverty. More than 13 million children (about one in five) are forced to go hungry. The top 10 percent of earners in America own nearly 70 percent of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 50 percent owns only 2.5 percent.
Women at every level of education are paid lower wages than men for the same type of work. About 90 percent of Gen Z students this summer lack the funds to pay for college in the coming year. And bout 256,000 Americans live in "sacrifice zones" where power plant and industrial pollution significantly increase their risks of cancer.
America's Founders declared that pursuing happiness is an inalienable God-given right. But the latest World Happiness Report — which weighs each nation's per capita GDP, social support, healthy life expectancy, interpersonal generosity and freedom to make one's own choices — placed the U.S. only 23rd among nations, down from 15th in 2023.
Tellingly, all of the 10 happiest countries in the world have some form of universal health insurance, and six provide free college tuition. Conservatives will keep calling it socialism if Democrats take steps to replicate that happiness here, but their put-down could backfire. The Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of Americans say the federal government should ensure health coverage for all, and that 80 percent want Social Security to remain untouched or expanded to provide more benefits to more people. A poll in February found that 78 percent of Americans favor free college tuition.
So, undeterred by cries of socialism, Democrats should lean into their opportunity agenda, build it into a coordinated and ambitious national equal opportunity initiative, and point out that its economic springboards and safety nets will pay for themselves, because more successful Americans mean more tax revenues and greater economic productivity, as well as less need for social safety nets.
After Harris's meteoric rise and the Democratic Convention in Chicago, anything seems possible. This could become one of the most satisfying elections in a long time, followed by one of the most satisfying new presidencies.
Now, regardless of party affiliation, we must find ways to keep Trump from spoiling all the fun.
William S. Becker is co-editor of and a contributor to “Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People,” and contributor to “Democracy in a Hotter Time.” He is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.
