Battle for the Soul (ePub)

An award-winning political journalist for The Atlantic tells the story of an embattled Democratic party during the Trump years, and its fractious attempt to regain the White House in 2020

In You Are Right to Be Concerned, Edward-Isaac Dovere, staff writer for The Atlantic, will follow the Democratic Party into the wilderness, from the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, to the swearing-in of a new president on January 20, 2021. Four years have passed since the Democratic Party's leaders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, fell away, and in that time--with the ascendancy of Trumpism, "the damaging cycle of rot and convulsion that Democrats seem unable to break out of" has continued to plague the party, even in the face of a historic midterm win. Never before has it had presidential candidates as disparate as Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg, Warren, and Bloomberg. Never before has the standard playbook been thrown quite so far out the window.

Behind Dovere's fly-on-the-wall stories is a a critical look at Democrats' search for a message and an identity, the energy gathering for more progressive policies, shifting geographic and demographic voting trends, and the recalibration of what the party stands for. Democrats are fighting over how much to define themselves in opposition to Trump, but they're also fighting over whether the answer is a return to the moderate politics of Bill Clinton, an embrace of the multiethnic liberalism of Obama, or a dramatic pivot to Bernie Sanders's European-style socialism.

Dovere has spoken with most of the key players in the Democratic Party, and will be drawing on conversations with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Tim Kaine, Cory Booker, Tom Perez and many more, including key players throughout all the Democratic presidential campaigns and beyond. Rarely in history is it clear how defining the changes are as they unfold, and even more rarely are those changes so caught up in the shape of politics itself--pair that opportunity with an insider's command of the politics and contemporaneous access to the key players and You Are Right to Be Concerned will be a fresh, timely, and timeless story like no other.