On November 5, Americans elected a reactionary authoritarian to the presidency — again.
After trying to overturn an election, fomenting an insurgency, becoming a convicted felon, and baselessly accusing an immigrant community of eating pets, Donald Trump not only won a second lease in the White House, but he did so with a popular majority. did Vote – When Republicans take control of both chambers of Congress.
Liberals may be experiencing a sense of déjà vu. But it’s not 2017 again. It’s something bad.
Over the past eight years, Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image. He has almost all of his intra-party critics in Congress decamped for the private sector or Kneeling to kiss her ring. In the executive branch, “Adults” is And “not in the room”: Awed by his own power and unprepared for administration staff, Trump turned to a number of relatively mainstream advisers during his first term. This time also he and his associates Assemble a cadre Among loyalists, some of whom won cabinet nominations (alongside some more mainstream Republicans).
Meanwhile, conservatives have consolidated their grip on the Supreme Court, cut Democrats’ advantage with Hispanic votersAnd with the GOP’s power strong Non-college-educated votersRealignments that threaten the Democratic Party’s ability to hold federal power.
All this is a disaster for those who value liberal democracy, egalitarian economic policies and social equality for all marginalized groups. As someone who has spent the past decade advocating for more expansionary immigration policies, a larger social safety net, criminal justice reform, and decarbonization, it’s hard to see my country embracing a man who scorns all of these causes.
In the face of this disaster, Democrats must develop a clear-eyed understanding of how they got here and create a plausible path back to the country they want to live in.
This newsletter — Rebuilding — aims to help with that project. In this weekly installment, I’ll try to offer some insight into how Democrats lost their national majority, as well as what we—those who care about advancing progressive change—need to be more effective moving forward.
Answering these questions requires Democrats to analyze their predicament with an open mind. If we seek ideologically comforting explanations for the party’s problems—rather than empirically correct ones—the coalition will move deeper into the wilderness.
Unfortunately, practically in terms of Harris’ loss each democratic The group has produced its share of motivated arguments. In future newsletters, I plan to take issue with some centrist analyzes of the party’s difficulties. But today, I want to explain why I worry that the left is allowing wishful thinking to cloud its view of political reality.
As of Nov. 5, some progressives have taken a clear lesson from Donald Trump’s second victory: Harris’ defeat proves that Democrats have “little to gain from .moderation“or”centrality“And of course”Adopting fundamentalist policies“To compete. I greatly admire the authors making this argument. But their confidence in this narrative strikes me as wildly unfounded.
It’s true that Harris has been at the center of border security, crime and, to a lesser extent, the economy. There are plenty of compelling arguments—both moral and political—against Democrats being moderate on specific issues. Yet it’s hard to see how anyone can be confident that Harris lost because he moderated, much less that his loss proved that moderation as a rule is electorally counterproductive.
To name a few reasons to doubt these premises:
- Harris actually well done Where both she and Donald Trump held campaign rallies and aired TV ads more than the rest of the country. Thus, if Harris’s problem is his moderate messaging, it is odd that he won a greater share of the vote in areas that were more open to that messaging, even though such areas were also flooded with pro-Trump ads.
- In a September survey GallupFifty-one percent of voters described Harris as “too liberal,” while only 6 percent considered him “too conservative.”
- Some of the Democratic Party’s biggest performers in the 2024 election — down-ballot candidates who were ahead of Harris with their primary candidates — were moderates: Jon Tester, Amy Klobuchar, Jared GoldenAnd Marie Glusenkamp Perez.
- Harris was A liberal senator And take a lot Leftist position Time for the 2020 Democratic primaries. he was Attacks indiscriminately Trump’s campaign is based on that. It’s hard to see how one could determine that it was Harris’ moderate messaging, rather than his progressive background, that was more damaging to his chances. However, what we do know is that his opponents’ political advisers wanted to highlight the latter, not the former.
- The Biden-Harris administration was, by many progressives’ own accounts, the most left-wing White House on domestic policy in generations, and Trump’s team portrayed Harris. As an extension of that administration.
- Across the rich world, there are parties presiding over inflation Lost at the ballot boxRegardless of their political leanings, a fact that raises doubts about whether any great ideological lesson can be drawn from Harris’s defeat.
My purpose here is not to argue that Democrats must move toward the center on all issues. I don’t think they should. I think the party needs to moderate its image nationally, if only to compete better for control of the Senate. But I’m still collecting my thoughts on how precisely they should pursue that task and will elaborate on them in future newsletters.
For now, my point is simply that there is little basis for confidence that Harris lost because of extreme moderation, or that Democrats will benefit electorally from being massively left-leaning. Many on the left find such certainty so disturbing.
To be progressive, in the best sense of the word, is to put the interests of the weakest above one’s own comfort – be it material or ideological. And right now, Democrats in America’s most disempowered constituencies have a vested interest in ousting reactionaries from power. If the party substitutes wishful thinking for fuzzy analysis, they will have a harder time accomplishing that task.
