It’s not easy to be optimistic if you’re on the left side of the American political debate these days. Donald Trump is back as President, with a compliant, Republican-majority Congress ready to do his bidding. And while the polls suggest his Capitol Hill majority might not last past the midterms, he and they have already done incalculable damage—not just to the programs and laws that progressives and liberals cherish, but also to governing institutions and faith in the public sector and the entire world order.

Undoing all of that promises to be a massive task, one that would require the kind of unified control of government that isn’t possible until January 2029. Even then, it would be tough going given all the constraints on action in the U.S. political system. And that’s to say nothing of trying to do more than simply reverse the effects of Trumpism. Making real progress on reducing inequality? Slowing climate change? Achieving—finally—truly universal health care? They’re virtually impossible to imagine right now.

Things are even more depressing if you’ve been around long enough to remember moments when that kind of progress felt within reach—like following the elections of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, both of them young, dynamic Democrats who had campaigned on ambitious platforms and seemed to have a wave of popular support behind them. It might seem more crushing still if you were around in the 1960s to hear John F. Kennedy’s invocation of a New Frontier or to witness Lyndon B. Johnson’s creation of a Great Society. Although all these presidencies left important legacies—from the Voting Rights Act to Obamacare—they came in an era when Democrats were losing the governing majority they’d held since the time of FDR, forcing them to fight the kind of desperate rearguard actions in which they are currently engaged today.

It can all seem downright Sisyphean, which is a central theme of Notes for Next Time, an engaging, insightful, and important new memoir by journalist Robert Kuttner. If you’re reading this journal, then chances are good you are familiar with him—or, at least, his contributions to the discourse, which include a series of books on political economy that he wrote and a publication, The American Prospect, that he co-founded and continues to co-edit.

Headline-grabbing political memoirs usually come from individuals who have played pivotal, singular roles in shaping history. Kuttner is not that, by his own admission. As he recalls telling his then-seven-year-old daughter, in one of the book’s charming asides, he is only “a little bit famous.” But his journey through postwar America and into the twenty-first century—a journey of unabashed activism that took him to journalism and then to government service and then back to journalism—means he has an uncommon set of perspectives on what’s happened to American politics, and where it could still go.

Here I should mention my bias. I know Kuttner and have great affection for him, because my first job out of college was at the Prospect, where I was hired and then managed by Kuttner and his co-founder/co-editor Paul Starr. Most of what I know about policy traces back to lessons they taught me over the span of several years, and many of my writerly tendencies do too. Case in point: When editing my drafts, Kuttner would routinely delete quotes from sources because, he told me, too many journalists used them as a substitute for independent thinking. It’s a quintessentially Kuttnerian take because it’s really about how mainstream journalism parrots conventional thinking rather than questioning it. It also explains why to this day I use quotes less frequently than other reporters—for better or worse, depending on which of my editors you ask.

But you don’t need to know Kuttner to appreciate one of the reasons his memoir makes for an especially timely read. Kuttner is an unabashed left-leaning liberal. He is not shy about saying that the government should do a lot more to regulate business and to tax the rich, and to provide public goods and services directly. He is openly contemptuous of corporations and skeptical of accumulated wealth. He thinks class is the defining cleavage of politics and isn’t afraid to cite Marx favorably—although, as he makes clear in the book, he is by no means a Marxist or a radical. He wants to fix and manage the capitalist system, not smash it to bits.

It’s an outlook that once existed firmly within the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and American politics writ large. Then the Reagan Revolution pushed it to the margins, where it has been most of the time since. But Kuttner never stopped making the case for his worldview, and now it is coming back into fashion. It has prominent, influential champions like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and more pull on the party than it has had in half a century.

That probably helps explain why Kuttner has infused his book with a sense of hope, even if he recognizes the dramatic difference between getting an Elizabeth Warren into the Senate—a story in which he turns out to play a part—and seeing an agenda like hers become reality for the nation. “Our calling, as progressives,” Kuttner proclaims in a key early passage, “is to offset the injustices of the natural order and to keep pushing the rock up the hill, appreciating that sometimes it does stay put for a long time.”

Kuttner’s convictions come from remembering what it was like in the decades immediately following World War II, when the federal government created a foundation for widely shared prosperity by investing in public goods and services, promoting a social compact between business and labor, and providing a safety net for people who suffered misfortune. Kuttner felt this personally, he explains, thanks to a series of veteran and pension programs that paid for his father’s medical care while he was fighting cancer and then supported the family after his death, when Kuttner was still a child. “Long before I ever studied Roosevelt,” Kuttner writes, “I was a New Dealer in my bones.”

Looking back, Kuttner marvels at the opportunities this system created for everyone—although, he makes a point of acknowledging, it would take a long time before women, Black people, and other traditionally marginalized groups got to take advantage of them fully. Those opportunities included the chance for home ownership at a young age. That experience turned out to be unusually lucrative for Kuttner and his then-wife, Sharland Trotter, because accidents of timing and location allowed them to sell their first home at a 300 percent markup after owning it for just six years. (Years later the beloved Trotter would die from cancer at a far-too-young 54, in one of several personal tragedies Kuttner touches on in the book very briefly.)

The housing experience reinforced Kuttner’s sense that success in life had a lot less to do with skill or talent than it did sheer luck, strengthening the case for a government that intervenes to make sure everybody gets a chance regardless of how fortune treats them. And during the 1970s Kuttner got a chance to put those ideas into action, during a brief tenure working in government for the Senate Banking Committee, and on two key pieces of legislation designed to crack down on discrimination in housing loans.

The committee’s chairman at the time was the legendary William Proxmire, a Wisconsin Democrat whose passion was more for fighting fraud than fortifying the welfare state, making him a somewhat unlikely hero for Kuttner. But this was, Kuttner explains, the “golden age of Congressional investigations, especially investigations of predatory capitalism.” And the crusaders on Capitol Hill weren’t alone. Advocates from consumer groups, muckrakers at newspapers—many forces were pushing in the same direction, enabling change to happen.

But by that point another kind of change was underway: A powerful political undertow from the right. Kuttner touches on some of the key events and trends that launched it, including the backlash against property taxes in California that helped to propel both Reagan and his anti-tax agenda into power. The revolt is commonly misunderstood, Kuttner says, because it was less an objection to taxes per se than to the particularly perverse system California had in place. “The real lesson…was that when liberals ignore valid grievances, conservatives and eventually tyrants fill the vacuum,” Kuttner writes.

Or that’s one lesson. Another is that conservatives were able to get power because they patiently and persistently built an infrastructure designed to win arguments and—ultimately—win elections. Kuttner chronicles the way funders on the right underwrote the creation of think tanks, media outlets, and advocacy organizations. “By the 1980s,” he writes, “the organized right wing was spending billions of dollars on the creation of a cadre of intellectuals to propagate business-friendly capitalism.”

Business-friendly capitalism didn’t work out so well for the majority of Americans, Kuttner notes, citing both diminishing income supports (through, for example, the end of defined pensions) and the sheer volatility of the deregulated economy (which led to, among other things, the banking and housing collapse of 2008). But Kuttner understood that changing policy first required changing politics, which meant first and foremost finding a counterweight to the right’s new intellectual edifice.

That was very much what Kuttner and some of his fellow policy entrepreneurs had in mind when they established the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank dedicated to restoring the kind of broadly shared prosperity Kuttner got to experience but that succeeding generations have not. EPI remains highly influential today. Its research is cited regularly even by analysts and groups who may not share the organization’s worldview but depend on it for insights into the realities of life for low- and middle-income Americans. It was also the longtime home of Jared Bernstein, who became the Chair of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.

The same mentality went into a series of ventures designed to examine American life through a journalistic lens, culminating in the establishment of The American Prospect in 1990. The Prospect would go on to (and still does, under executive editor David Dayen) publish plenty of influential articles, punching well above its weight for a tiny nonprofit on a shoestring budget. But its most lasting influence may be through the journalists whose careers it launched.

The alumni club includes heavyweights in The New York Times opinion section (Jamelle Bouie and Ezra Klein) and newsroom (Nicholas Confessore and Dana Goldstein), as well as at The Atlantic (Jonathan Chait, Adam Serwer, and Scott Stossel). Joshua Marshall and Matt Yglesias also got their starts at the Prospect, and that’s not to mention the many other accomplished journalists—including this publication’s current editor, Michael Tomasky—who left their mark as longtime senior staff.

The Prospect alumni don’t all think alike, and today the ones engaged in opinion (as opposed to news) journalism occupy a broad spectrum of thought that more or less defines the ideological boundaries of the mainstream Democratic Party. That is in many ways true to the spirit of the Prospect itself, which featured intense debates about public policy within its pages and, now and then, behind the scenes.

Kuttner says with pride that these debates played out without “the kind of sectarian and factional infighting that has plagued so much of the left.” And compared to other publications with similarly diverse viewpoints, that is almost certainly true.

But it’s not like Kuttner shies away from infighting on the left. In the memoir, he is as preoccupied with ridding the Democratic Party of its demons as he is with fighting the devils of the GOP. In his view, that includes excessive deference to the economics establishment, which he describes as “the ideological department of political conservatism” for (among other things) portraying severe tradeoffs between an economy that grows quickly and one that provides for all. “Contrary to the conceits of orthodox economics,” Kuttner writes, “history shows that it is possible to have a society that is both economically dynamic and socially just.”

Kuttner sees a direct line from this kind of thinking to a series of positions that led to a hollowing out of the middle class and an abandoned political constituency that eventually found its way to Donald Trump. The paradigmatic example Kuttner cites is the expansion of free trade, especially to China. This shift was devastating to certain communities and sectors in ways that a landmark 2019 paper by MIT economist David Autor and co-authors eventually acknowledged. “The article examined the loss of factory jobs due to trade and the impact on regional economies, on marriage, and on political backlash,” Kuttner writes. “This story was well known to journalists, sociologists, and historians. The only thing new was that a mainstream economist was attesting to the reality.”

But inside the Democratic Party, Kuttner says, the pull to the right on economic policy wasn’t just intellectual. It was also financial—and personal. The party came to rely too much on donations from groups and individuals with stakes in a low-tax, low-regulation economy, Kuttner says, and on policy advisers who hailed from the world of finance. One person he singles out in the memoir is Robert Rubin, the Wall Street titan who became a top economic adviser to Democrats and who supported policies like focusing on deficit reduction or deregulating the banks that, Kuttner says, were as disastrous as politics as they were as policy.

Notes for Next Time doesn’t spend a ton of time litigating the substance of these fights, each one of which entails its own complexities and good faith disagreements. At one point, Kuttner mentions Rubin defending Walmart from populist attacks by noting that lots of Americans like the low prices—a true statement that Kuttner never addresses again. But that’s in the nature of this particular memoir, which necessarily covers a great deal of ground and doesn’t have time to bog down in point-by-point policy argumentation. (For the substantive debate, you can always go back and read Kuttner’s previous books.)

The one recent Democratic presidency that impresses Kuttner is Joe Biden’s. As a point of comparison, Kuttner looks at Biden’s response to the economic crisis of the pandemic and compares it to the responses Clinton and Obama mustered when they assumed their presidencies at times of economic turmoil.

Both of those prior Democrats ended up with smaller packages than they had originally envisioned, for a combination of reasons that included political resistance and advice from deficit-conscious advisers like Rubin and his protege, former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers. Both were later criticized for doing too little—Obama especially, because the subsequent economic recovery was slow. Biden was able to pass a much bigger stimulus that included measures like a cash allowance that dramatically reduced child poverty. And the United States came through the pandemic in better economic shape than most of its peer countries.

Of course, Biden’s legacy has a big asterisk attached to it. The reduction in poverty was short-lived because the cash benefit was a temporary measure. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the caucus, wouldn’t supply the fiftieth vote necessary to renew it. Other Biden-era accomplishments, like generational investments in climate change and a boost in health subsidies through the Affordable Care Act, have proved just as fleeting, because Trump and the Republicans took a wrecking ball to them once they got full control of the federal government after the 2024 elections.

Kuttner finds more redeeming value in Trump’s tenure than you might expect, mainly because some of Trump’s sensibilities—on trade especially—have a fair amount in common with Kuttner’s. That in many ways is the point of the book, or a point anyway: That Democrats have strayed from positions that were right as both politics and policy, making it easy for Trump to seize control with his twisted version.

But mostly Kuttner shares in the collective horror at Trump, especially his second term version that has operated without the guardrails and (relatively) sober advisers of the first. Kuttner is especially alarmed by the way Trump has turned management of the economy into an instrument of absolute power and grift, a transformation that is less about trying to change the priorities of the state than it is about eliminating the state as we know it. “In the Trump era, the opposite of FDR liberalism is not libertarian in the sense of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman,” Kuttner writes, “it is personalist power.”

This approach isn’t turning out to be especially popular, in part because of how it exposes Trump as a phony populist. And that is an opportunity for Democrats, Kuttner writes. The final chapter of Notes for Next Time sketches out a broad agenda he imagines Democrats might adopt, covering everything from how to protect workers in an age of AI to how to rebuild civil rights enforcement. Once again, Kuttner necessarily touches on these ideas quickly and lightly—“This is not the place for a full-blown policy manifesto,” he makes clear—in order to focus more on big themes, like the need to build political movements and intellectual institutions.

Above all, he says, Democrats and fellow travelers on the left need to focus on recreating the kind of broadly shared prosperity they once had. And while it might seem impossible to imagine such a world ever existing, Kuttner wants his readers to know that it really can, because he remembers when it did.