You can’t turn a virtual page these days without finding a new article or column or editorial forecasting or demanding a “reckoning” for Democrats after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris for the presidency. In some respects that’s as it should be. It was a critical election and Democrats came up short. So it’s important to ask why and come up with good answers to launch back into the fight against Trumpism and everything it represents. But it would be my failure if I didn’t point out that many of these reckoningers, let’s call them, are born of the same tilted playing field we discussed leading up to this defeat and played some role in creating it.
Let me show you two of these pieces. The first is by Eric Levitz at Vox. It’s a members only piece (somehow I originally read it in a non-walled version). So let me briefly describe that Levitz says the post-mortems comes down to a basic question. The optimistic view is that Joe Biden got saddled with high inflation and all the other after-effects of the pandemic, voters were mad and rejected his presidency soundly. That’s similar to what’s happened in tons of other countries since 2021. The more ominous possibility is that this election is part of a more general and global shift to the right not only among working class voters but working class voters across racial and ethnic dividing lines that have long structured U.S. politics. These are good and sobering questions.
Then there’s this piece in Axios. It probably won’t surprise you that I wasn’t terribly impressed with it.
It starts …
Democrats are a lost party. Come January, they’ll have scant power in the federal government, and shriveling clout in the courts and states … The traditional media structure sympathetic to their views, and hostile to Trump’s, was shattered … But the road to the Democrats’ Damascus requires deep, honest self-reflection — and, many party insiders tell us, entirely new leadership … When journalists held up a mirror, they often looked away … Harris just lost what Democrats considered an eminently winnable race, despite relatively light scrutiny and more money than any candidate in U.S. history.
What’s notable is that the Axios piece isn’t so different from stuff you can read in publications at least notionally friendly to Democrats. Another example is this one by Alex Shephard in The New Republic. The tone in both cases is what can only be called one of contempt. But it’s contempt of a particular sort.
Recriminations after a major political defeat are seldom pretty. They’re not always fair and they’re seldom kind. As I wrote on Friday, running for President (and being President for that matter) is a no excuses endeavor. You win and you’re transformed into the most powerful person in the world. Lose and there’s seldom forgiveness or any soft landing. But the contempt here isn’t really for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. And it’s not even for Democratic leadership generally or a even a specific political strategy. When you sift through the tone, the nature of the indictments and its totality, it is really more a contempt for Democrats generally, a contempt for the kind of people who make up Democratic majorities when they win and minorities when they lose — their condescension and obliviousness, their empty bromides and obsessions, above all their failure. We hear a lot of derision for the “resistance” and especially “resistance moms,” over-educated and out of touch, whiners, stuck in the “MSNBC bubble.” In a Washington Post article whose headline said the Democratic Party is now in “shambles,” Joe Manchin’s chief of staff Chris Kofinis put it in a multiply revealing line: “If you try to win elections by talking to the elites of this country, you’re going to get your ass kicked — there are not enough Beyonces, Oprahs or Hollywood elites to elect anyone.”
Many of the blows in these write-ups remind us of the way even some of the kinder young boys on an elementary school playground will be motivated to get in a punch, while the animal spirits are running, on that one boy who is always the target of bullying. It’s the lure of the predator.
Now, some people are worthy of contempt. People often view adversaries with contempt. That’s common and perhaps natural. But those are seldom the people you want to listen to to improve or learn from mistakes. Criticism is how you learn. It’s essential. But as we know from the rest of life, there are different kinds of criticism, constructive and otherwise.
Wednesday will mark the 24th anniversary of this website. I’ve spent those 24 years arguing that there are all sorts of really basic things Democrats should do differently to be more effective. With respect for the last four years, I think a lot about the technocratic mindset; the inability to effectively tether policy to politics and power; the unwillingness to smash up more of the customary practices of government that deepen its feeling of distance from the public and the voter. My arguments may be right or wrong. My point is simply that I have many criticisms. Anybody who is familiar with my writing knows this. It’s not a matter of thinking Democrats do everything right. But contempt is a different thing. Leaders? Sure. Failure can be worthy of contempt. But if you have contempt for the kinds of people who provide the vote for Democrats, like all or most of them, that’s a different kind of thing. And it’s not the basis of very practical advice. Voters often want new leaders. But things are always a bit out of joint when it’s leaders who want new voters.
I doubt anyone reading this won’t find at least one bit of imagery in that list of foibles above that they too will cringe at. Indeed, it’s one of the dynamics of this sprawling story that Democrats themselves are particularly susceptible to this kind of self-loathing. That’s kind of the key: many of these cheap and half-baked demands for “reckonings” are internal to the American cultural world Democrats inhabit. (Let’s not forget that in modern parlance, a “reckoning” is usually not for failure but misdeeds — racism, sexual abuse and the like.) They are at least to a degree conversations Democrats are having with themselves. You don’t see demands for self-flagellation like this when Republicans lose an election. The reason is clear as the nose on your face: they don’t have any time for it. So what’s the point in the press demanding it?
This is the endless comedy about the Democratic “bubble” and out of touchness. The primary information source of Red America is Fox News, a news organ designed with top-flight modern engineering to evade self-questioning or contrary viewpoints of any sort. The Trump GOP lost an election four years ago and still hasn’t been able to admit it even happened. Beyond the Big Lie dimension of it, one of the powers of the Big Lie is that millions of Republicans still find it inherently not credible that Joe Biden really won 81 million votes, fully 6 million more than Donald Trump. You’re telling me Democrats are the ones in a bubble only hearing self-confirming information? Really?
One of the points I’ve made many times is that things like the Democrats’ propensity for self-doubt, their tendency to crumble in the face of reverses, are really the flip side of attributes most of us find meritorious: an empirical mindset, a privileging of expertise, a tendency to second guess which is the basis both of true knowledge and civic democracy. Parties are like people. We can’t not be who were are. But we can learn to maximize our strengths and find ways to compensate for our weaknesses. This is the basis of any real “reckoning.” Anything else is just denial or abuse dolled up in fancy words.
