Democrats/Left Wing Folks' Problems Go Deep
This isn't just inflation/global anti-incumbent mood. We are actively alienating people doing dumb things.
I know everyone is sick of election post mortems. I wrote this a week or so ago and have been sitting around deciding whether to publish. And I’m sick of being yelled at, but I really can’t help myself. This stuff is important, existential to things I care about. And we need to be real about extent of the problem and our own culpability here. Next time I’ll write a fun post about how basketball is awesome I swear. With that aside…
This line from fellow left-of-center disillusioned-with-the-direction-of-the-party writer Jeff Mauer really sums it up for me:
“Democrats continue to soul search after losing a popularity contest to perhaps the worst person in the entire country.”
Whenever I see people trying to sugarcoat or soft pedal what just occurred, I’m flabbergasted. It’s like we’re watching a different movie entirely.
We (Dems) just spent the last year saying Trump’s reelection would be the worst thing that can possibly happen to this country. And it happened AND it happened in a more resounding way than most of us expected (we lost all seven swing states). We lost support with key demographics, the working class, latinos, on which we have (flatteringly) portrayed ourselves as champions.
I don’t know what could signal more strongly that something is wrong.
Some people are trying to sugarcoat this. And some of them I like. But I am just going to have to respectfully disagree in the strongest terms here: This is an active and straightforward rejection of Democrats’ leadership over the last four years. I don’t know how it could be interpreted otherwise.
The New Yorker had an article recently, which was good, about how so many people online don’t even know how to proceed, the scale of the defeat and the stakes are so overwhelming. I actually sorta relate to this.
I worked on issue advocacy in the left-wing arena for more than a decade (sustainable transportation/traffic safety). We fought tooth and nail for tiny little wins over the years. And one reason I was so loyal to the Democrats is because I thought they handled this so much better. Night and day in my opinion. On my issue — as much as I have been critical of the Democrats recently — I stand by that.
The Biden Admin’s USDOT was heroic imo. They were making long-past due changes that would likely save a lot of lives in my opinion and bring our transport system into a more modern era that would better serve our health and well being. Now all of that is — maybe — out the window. (I just heard an important hire at an important agency that was finally in a position to make some desperately needed changes, is out in January.) We’re in damage control mode now.
I have been worried about this for a while. I wrote an article in the Atlantic two years ago trying to warn my fellow Dems about this prospect, and then I got mildly cancelled, by friends and colleagues. And everyone was like “why can’t you stay in your lane?!”
But this is sorta why. We have ruined our credibility with the public by mishandling important quality of life and economic concerns. Extended pandemic-era school closures are a great example of this. How out-of-touch activist voices and very online (wealthy) people pulled Democratic policy, especially in blue strongholds, in a direction that was wildly unpopular and harmful to exactly the groups they claimed to champion.
As me and other people who tried to sound the alarm about this feared, now parts of our agenda like climate action are going to be set back tremendously. Trust in institutions and experts and “science” — I used quotes because the label has become such a partisan cudgel unfortunately during that time — has been damaged.
I’ve felt alienated by all of this, by certain aspects of our culture and priorities for years. It’s tough to hear it and I think MANY, MANY people are not ready to hear it (they keep yelling at me), but the problem is us, the problem is serious and we can’t continue this way and be competitive.
As I see it, there are a few core issues:
#1. The way we communicate with the public is obnoxious and condescending
A few years ago, I was walking around my neighborhood, and I started to notice, wow, almost every yard has some sort of symbol, a flag or a yard sign, signaling what political “team” they were on.
At one point I was like, even our yards are preachy and condescending. People don’t like to be scolded, lectured and talked down to.
How self-satisfied do you have to be to put up one of those “IN THIS HOUSE” signs? Groan. And the best is when you see them in front of a mansion. It’s like an ostentatious performance of white guilt.
Our messaging is extremely tone deaf and often overtly classist quite frequently. And many people use these accusations cynically to signal their own moral superiority etc. without much self-awareness.
Here is an example that came up on my timeline yesterday (at first I thought it was a parody but I actually believe it’s sincere now FFS). I see this kind of nonsense every day.
“STFU, your racist mouth-breathers, and accept our vision of what is best for you:” not a winning a message. Especially imagine this message is from some jerk who is richer than you?
Who interacts with the public this way? It is antithetical to public service. Where is our curiosity about how people are actually impacted and what matters to them?
This became a reflexive way of engaging with any viewpoint that didn’t exactly match partisan talking points (which at a certain point became completely unhinged from reality) at a certain point. And my friends/associates are still doing this all the time. It is excruciating.
I could not get over how insulting our public messaging was during covid. And to what end? Insulting people only pushes them away into echo chambers where anti-vaccine nonsense or whatever is even more extreme.
It’s time for left of center people to eat a dose of humble pie, listen and at least pretend to care about the public rather than openly insulting them.
#2. Our pundits are living in another planet from reality/the average American
Six months ago, all of our big time pundits were mansplaining to anyone who would listen on Twitter how AMAZING a president Joe Biden was, and how stupid the public was for not recognizing it. How he was probably the best president EVER, when you consider what he got passed, including the IN-FRA-STRUCT-URE BILL(!!).
In retrospect we know Biden was probably not fit to be behind the wheel of a car during that time. Our “intellectual leading lights” sense of denial about Biden’s well-observed decline may have helped, more than anything, deliver Trump the presidency. This is something, mind you, that the public (supposedly so stupid!) could clearly and easily observe.
It is actually amazing in retrospect our pundit class’ ability to be 100%, diametrically wrong so often and so shameless about it. But this is a pattern. I remember four years before, they were saying, with complete assurance, ONLY BERNIE SANDERS COULD BEAT DONALD TRUMP. And then after campaigning for eight years straight, he lost the Florida primary by 20+ points. And they just kind of changed the subject and moved on.
These guys pay no penalty. They are out of touch with average people, and they are (often) openly disdainful of them (when I complained about extended school closures, these kinds of folks made snide remarks about yoga and brunch, which was projection from their own bougie neighborhoods almost assuredly). They felt no shame about explaining how a public school mom living in one of the nation’s poorest cities and seeing the reality of Zoom school up close should view that. And many times it was based on their non experience of having listened to one New York Times podcast or something to that effect. They might never interact with any schoolchildren in low income districts who were affected by these policies and spend most of their time in Twitter echo chambers with other well-off professionals, who spent this time gratuitously back-slapping each other while single moms and low-income third graders paid the price.
Many of our policy influencers live in the same two fancy neighborhoods in New York and DC . Many of them went to the same few Ivy League/minor ivy colleges. Left-wing politics is like a fashion they don to distinguish them from their frattier contemporaries at Harvard and Brown. They have no skin in the game. Politics is like an armchair hobby for them, they participate in at a comfortable distance.
They win either way. They have all moved over to Substack now, and are cashing in on the same grift — and still making money doing it. (Taylor Lorenz is the classic case, but many, many others deserve blame here as well. People like Rachel Cohen who spent the whole pandemic fear-mongering against school reopenings at the New Republic — a textbook in this utterly pretentious fake class consciousness — is another.)
Bad pundant-cy is a product of the algorithm which offered entrepreneurial writers no self-interest in ever moderating their views. They preach to the converted, and the algorithm they rely on only rewards them for doubling down, and taking their positions to more insane extremes, which are repellant to the normies who live in suburban Atlanta who actually have a stake in this stuff and swing elections. Due to the collapse of/their takeover of “responsible” media, these guys have played far too large of a role in determining Democratic policies to disastrous effect on average people and their supposed political goals.
The same guys who were assuring us that Biden was AWESOME(!) NOT TOO OLD (!) and the ECONOMY RULES, ACTUALLY(!) a few months ago just memoryholed that whole hilariously earnest act and continue to spout ridiculous, super-wrong opinions with the unearned self-assurance like they Moses reading from the tablets.
#3. We are obsessed with gatekeeping
Some annoying person is going to respond to this by saying I’m really a Republican or something for saying all this. Like this movement is some kind of hipster cool-kids club I’m not allowed to sit at at lunch.
Sorry, no. Climate change is one of my top political concerns. I’m pro-choice. I don’t attend church. I spend my time riding public transit around the poor city where I live and am raising my kids and have worked for years on trying to create a better, safer public realm. I’m a lifelong feminist. I should be firmly in the D camp.
It’s a problem that people like me are getting alienated because I’m frankly way, WAY to the left of the average voter. (This is sorta the point I was trying to raise with my Atlantic article, but I knew I would just get smeared.)
We can’t win elections with only 14 irony poisoned super online 22-year-olds from San Francisco or wherever. We NEED normies. Normies — the not-super-political/online middle class! — are sorta the whole project in politics and if you’re contemptuous of them, you don’t have any business being involved, quite frankly.
These jerks that are obsessed with gatekeeping here’s their secret: These are rich people. Some software engineer political hobbyist doesn’t get to dictate who is and isn’t legit. What gives him that authority? I reject the whole notion, quite honestly, that these guys are “leftier” or whatever than me. I deserve to be treated with respect and my political concerns, among them my children learning to read, taken seriously. That is how coalitions work.
We need to get back to big tent. We need to get back to BEING NICE TO PEOPLE rather than yelling at them and stereotyping them and assuming the worst about people. We need to listen to people. Stop correcting them.
The good news for us is Trump sucks and is going to make a mess of things. We’re in the political wilderness for the next two years at least and we deserve it.
That being said, it’s very, very important for us to strive to be a little bit less clueless/bad. Small changes will not be enough. A total house-cleaning and rethinking of some of our core assumptions is in order.