A gentle corrective to all the takes
It's the culture for me.
This is gabestein.com: the newsletter!, which is a completely irregular note primarily focused on the intersection of culture, media, politics, and technology written by me, vitalist technologist Gabriel Stein. Sometimes there’s random silly stuff. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here. See the archives here, and polished blog versions of the best hits at, you guessed it, gabestein.com.
The takes are flying in and they are hot. Everyone has a pet reason why Harris and the Democrats lost, and of course the truth is it’s a little of all, and none of, the above. The main themes I’m seeing are:
Inflation and post-COVID disruption
Racism/sexism/white supremacy
Dominance of right-wing media
Eli Pariser has started a crowd-sourced bibliography of the highest-quality takes that I recommend to understand where the conversation is going, though I wouldn’t say I fully endorse any of them.
Before any one of these themes start to set in, I want to offer a corrective, as much to remind myself as anything else: almost none of these takes are grappling with culture. Culture, as in: what does it mean to be American?
At the end of my last note, I linked to a thread from someone who studies culture that, in my view, explains what happened far better than any of the takes on their own. Put simply, the right is winning the fight to define the American identity.
There are lots of reasons why they’re winning, which a lot of the takes tackle very intelligently. They say things like “Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions — the “establishment” — that most Americans distrust” or “we are here because far too many in this country have believed that a healthy democracy can accommodate white supremacy" or “Today, the right-wing media…sets the news agenda in this country” or (my personal favorite) “when I say I understand why people vote for Trump, my experience with our maddening kludgeocracy is part of it."
All of these takes are smart and right! But, in my view, they miss the forest for the trees by jumping straight to diagnosis. And therein lies the problem. I’m starting to think that this tendency to diagnose, to criticize, and to analyze, rather than to build, is at the core of the problem. Our policy solutions are, broadly, more popular. Our politicians are, mostly, more popular. Our (popular) culture is definitely more popular. But the practice of leftist culture — the diagnosing, the criticizing, the analyzing — that stuff, necessary as it is, is simply a mismatch for the way most people move in the world today.
Allow me to demonstrate. What does it mean to be an American? My first-blush response is: “being an American is complicated! In this essay, I will…” Harris’s was probably: “being an American means that if you play by the rules and work hard, you have the chance to succeed.” The right’s response is something like: “being an American means you should get what you want.”
Yes, that’s incredibly reductive analysis. And my instinct is to fall into the same trap I warned myself against literally one paragraph ago and start to criticize myself and analyze what’s wrong with the right’s view and write another take.
But it’s enough, in this moment, just to acknowledge that their version is better (even if it’s unhealthy and shallow and impossible — okay, I can’t help myself) because it’s simple, and because it doesn’t demand that you analyze it to understand it.
My challenge for the left is to figure out how we engage the average American in a discussion about what America means without requiring them to fully adopt our culture of critical analysis. Until we know how to do that, I’m not sure that any of the takes are going to provide much lasting value.
I’m working on some projects that are bringing together the people trying to answer that question, as a starting point for rebuilding the idea of a pluralistic America. If you are, too, or you’re interested in doing so, please get in touch.
That’s it for now. Thanks to those of you who have reached out to say hello. Keep it coming!
Gabe