#25 - Democracy is Not Dead
But the Democratic party might be.
Over the last few days, I’ve received several texts from friends despondent over the election that have infuriated me including, “I’m researching how to move to New Zealand,” and “Fuck everyone who voted for Trump.” If this is how most Democrats are going to react to Trump winning the election, we have surely lost this country and its people forever.
Wanting to withdraw from American political life entirely or attributing Kamala Harris’s loss to racism and sexism alone would be a doubling down on why we lost this election in the first place: because of decades of elitist social policies that bankrupted most Americans of economic belonging.
The Republicans are no better. They just positioned themselves perfectly to rebound on a play we kept missing. In this epic clash between two political parties it is we the people who have lost, again.
I’ve decided to unhitch from the Democratic party once again to join the Independent movement until there is a truly progressive third party emergence in this country, hopefully formulated by Bernie Sanders, the only clear and consistent progressive voice we’ve had in American politics over the last fifty years.
Had the Democratic party taken him seriously as a bellwether, it would not be languishing today as the party that failed to build a working-class coalition, but instead operationalized inequity.
I read somewhere that Democrats need to start from zero. I would argue that the Democrats are actually finished, and we need to start from zero. For the longest time, the full spectrum of progressives have relied on the narrative that Trump is a one shot wonder. That he is merely a crutch for a conservative party that has no identity. Welp, that ass was handed to the wrong hands. It is clear that he and the Republican party are one and the same, and Trumpism, whatever the fuck it is, is here to stay.
In the aftermath of what happened on election night, I foresee disillusioned progressives like me splintering into various factions on principle based on their dearest issue. For me that issue is working class jobs and the economy, which is something I’ve devoted my career to developing in my community over these last few years against a tidal wave of small business-unfriendly policies, especially in California.
Begrudgingly at times I have stuck by my party because of a single issue — their staunch allyship of reproductive freedom and rights for women, which now seems to be working itself out in lower houses of government. To those who say that Americans who voted for Trump don’t care about this issue, I say bullshit because, up and down the ballot, voters overwhelmingly demonstrated that they care about body autonomy for women. So don’t try to reaggregate the insightful disaggregation of voting data there. That breakaway tells us something.
There are several examples that make it clear that voters stood on issues important to them this time regardless of who they voted for at the top of the ticket. A majority of Californians, including me, voted conservatively on ballot measures tackling crime and reducing taxes.
But instead of surrendering to the undeniable need for change, members of the establishment like Nancy Pelosi continue to push the obsolete narrative that Democrats are not obsolete. Really, Nancy?
I have been relishing the post-game analysis because, personally, I don’t fare well in recovery. I’m not much of an escapist. I’d rather jump back in and figure out what happened because, as I said in my last missive, as a community worker I don’t have the luxury of time to languish in a political loss.
Nor can I afford to cull my Rolodex of people who voted for Trump. If I did that, I’d lose virtually all of my social capital, connections, and the ability to inculcate positive change in my red dot community.
I also don’t want to do that because it’s stupid and irrational. I know a lot of Trump supporters who are wonderful people. It’s a mind fuck to be sure, but there are people I work with (in public education!) who I consider to be chosen family, who I couldn’t do this work without, who voted for him. Even if their vote was a referendum vote on Democratic policies in spite of Trump, something easier to swallow (but still a mind fuck because they could have sat it out!), they voted for him.
I’ve wondered if I’m less depressed by the outcome of the election because I’ve been in a pinball machine with these motherfucking friends of mine for years in the field, butting heads, hashing it out, calling each other c*nts, yet still coming together for the sake of the children. In fact, I spent all of election day locked in a room with my school’s leadership team doing federal program review work to make sure our dollars are going to the right stuff.
The night before, I was worried how this was going to go. It ended up being the best thing because, not only was I detached from the media, I was doing high-impact school improvement work with colleagues who hold wildly different political views, but who all happened to be on the same page about how to help our most vulnerable students. It would be thoughtless, irresponsible, and un-American to dismiss these people.
But going back to what the hell happened. I have read some phenomenal dissections over the past week on why we lost so “bigly,” to use a familiar term. If you’ve read similar breakdowns that put a pause on your emotions and made you think, “Oh,” please hit reply and share them. Here are two that made a whole lot of sense to me.
In Kamala Harris’s Democratic Betrayal, Compact Magazine’s Zaid Jilani breaks down how Democrats lost a totally winnable election by abandoning the primary process, and how Kamala peddled a fluffy vision, foregoing repeated chances to stand on more potent and decisive material she had in her back pocket that might have refreshed the party’s pitch.
This felt particularly scathing to me as a woman because the level of scrutiny on any woman’s tactics is ten-fold compared to men, but what I appreciate about this piece of writing is that it calls bullshit on the blubber of platitudes progressives have been standing on for decades and cuts through to the bone of the issue — that both socially and politically, Democrats have become weirdly unrelatable and increasingly Bush-like in their choice of dynastic mouthpieces and corporatist allies.
When it comes to taking a stand on the day-to-day issues Americans are facing, Democrats are just as spaced out as that emerald-up-the-anus billionaire dipshit Elon. In fact, The Atlantic just published a piece about the Democratic party’s unwillingness to talk about gender identity and their own confused stance on it.
As an educator, I have been resentful about schools being the battlefield for this particular cultural proxy war because we are beyond our breaking point. What the GOP successfully provided its voters on this issue that the Democratic party did not is clarity on where it stands, even if that stance is hateful. This enabled the conservative movement to coalesce and infect school boards around the country, including mine.
I also liked Jilani’s take on the Joe Rogan campaign debacle. While I personally dislike Joe Rogan and his raw milk-drinking bro cult fanbase, I confess that even I found it troubling that Trump spent three hours with him, and that the conversation was viewed close to 20 million times within a mere couple of hours of it getting posted on YouTube.
At first I assumed that Joe didn’t invite Kamala, but when it came out that he did and she refused to go on the basis of some technicalities, I had my first inkling that maybe we’re going to miss this one because, if you’re going to win people over from that other side, you need to jump into the big balls contest with both feet and show up where they’re hanging out.
If I’m selling saddles, I better show up to some damn rootin’ tootin’ rodeos and not a fucking Aspen Institute conference.
For a more mainstay analysis of the Democrats’ unraveling, something I needed in order to palate cleanse after going down a Compact Mag rabbit hole (which I will undeniably return to because, wow, what erudite commentary) check out David Brooks’s NYT op-ed, Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now? in which he necessarily zooms out on Democratic social strategy over the last forty years.
Brooks walks us through how the Democrats’ Ivy League instincts approach to education, climate, and economic policy cleaved away entire working class communities from the map of relevance, deeming them unworthy of participating in the kind of social progress that educated elites were interested in.
His commentary especially hit home for me because it touches on themes that have been important to me personally. As a hometown holdout, there have been times when even I, a progressive member of the educated class, have felt gravely left out and isolated by the dominant narrative that important things only happen in New York or LA.
In my moments of FOMO, my only reality check has been — “If I am feeling this way, how might the people around me left entirely out of the game feel?” This is the bankruptcy of belonging I mentioned earlier, and as Brooks aptly says, “There is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect.”
I believe this election turned on this issue of class. To attribute Kamala Harris’s loss to her gender, color, and ethnicity does both her and the country a disservice. Even with some potency, it is unfortunately the least actionable insight coming out of this loss.
So what now? Well, something I’m personally looking forward to while I do the hard work of finding a more suitable political home is the infighting between JD and Elon. Unfortunately, I think Trump is going to do everything in his power this time around to seem buttoned up even if shit is hitting the fan internally, but we can hope!
But yeah, I’m angry. The Democratic establishment, something I fully backed in order to keep a criminal away from the ability to dismantle our institutions, has let progressives down once again, and we just cannot afford to be this blind moving forward.
The American people did a good job of telling us what they cared about a week ago, and we have to listen starting today if we’re going to reverse the slide on the Kim Jong Un’ification of America.