"HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?"
On a revealing question
Imagine that Kamala Harris had won the presidential election. In the days following, there would be two dominant sorts of commentary. The first would focus on what the victory would say about the American people and the Democratic Party: that the good people of this land had repudiated authoritarianism, had expressed our commitment to continuing to play our role in the current international order, that progressives had succeeded in building a broad coalition of people of goodwill, and that they’d cast a compelling vision for the nation’s future. The second sort of commentary would focus on the sorry state of the Republican Party: that the stewards of the party had proven too weak or too cowardly to exorcise the demon that is Donald Trump, but now that the public had refused four more years of MAGA, Republicans could at long last reorganize themselves as a respectable party again.
What would not be said is what too many progressives are saying right now: How could this have happened?
Here lies a vital difference between today’s progressives and those (some conservative, some not) who were willing to vote for Donald Trump. While even the most devoted Trump supporter understands exactly why people find him repellent, it is apparent that awfully few progressives can understand why many people feel that the Democratic Party has become so too.
Progressives understand it when they themselves vote against someone, but they are either incapable or unwilling to understand why people would vote against them. They see more than 74 million people who voted for Trump, and the knee-jerk response is to diagnose what is wrong with the voters: their racism, their misogyny, their xenophobia, their indifference to the fate of Ukraine, and so on. It does not occur to them that many who voted for Trump do not like him, but that they dislike him less than they dislike the Democrats—that they’d rather deal with his shenanigans than theirs.
Yes, some have gotten around to some self-examination. But from what I’ve seen, most of this self-examination has focused on Democrats’ poor communication skills: that maybe they really should have dropped “Latinx” sooner—failing to see that “the Latino” voter wants to be treated as a person, not a Latino—or that it was wrong to treat men as inherently problematic just because they’re men.
In other words, the self-examination required of progressives right now is one that penetrates beneath rhetoric and tactics, evaluating critically the moral premises of their entire political program. The irony here is painful and profound. After years of critique coming from the left, calling on every person to live in constant awareness of how their social identity instills in them power interests that can operate unconsciously, the left has utterly failed to notice that they themselves are profoundly ideological. The party that likes to think of itself as the vanguard of democracy is transparently a technocratic aristocracy that has confused its own power interests for Objective Truth. Whatever an individual progressive may say, the Democratic Party and its supporters behave as though they have unmediated access to reality itself, that they owe no one an explanation, that they are in possession of the truth and it’s their job to get people to obey, that voters don’t confer on them legitimacy but rather demonstrate their own legitimacy as voters by voting as they are instructed. Progressives for the last eight years (at least) have exhibited an incredible lack of curiosity about other points of view, and have exposed their own bad faith by assuming that those with whom they disagree couldn’t have come to their conclusions honestly: no, they reason, anyone who cares about other people, who believes in fairness for the marginal and the minority and women, who loves their neighbors, who wants to live in a rules-based order, who believes in democracy, who cares about the future of our country and our planet must agree with us.
That is why they are asking how this election outcome could have happened. They never bothered to consider the possibility that they might be wrong about something. About anything.
Until and unless progressives can understand in their guts why even someone who doesn’t like Donald Trump would still choose to give the Democratic Party the middle finger by voting for him, they will repeat the same mistakes again and again. They will continue to condescend to voters by offering vibes instead of substance, insultingly relying on celebrity endorsements rather than arguments and responsiveness to what people believe and need, and engage in the same infantilizing paternalism that presumes to know the end of history and how history will judge us. But thankfully the alternative is simple enough: they just need to practice a little humility and a little self-awareness. They might even discover that some of their fiercest critics—people like me, who didn’t vote for Trump but also refused to vote for Harris—are critics precisely because we have important values in common.
Well said! I remember how in 2016 many Democrats vowed to learn the lessons of their loss by listening to white working class Trump voters, but eight years later a larger prom of Democrats seem just as mystified by Trump‘s second victory, as by his first. I wonder how many of these Democrats actually know a working class person of any color. They are living in their own little bubble, and every time that bubble pops, they decide to blow it up again, rather than entering the reality that most of America lives in.
Hey, Matthew. I sent you a DM last week. You can also email me at dennis.sanders@gmail.com. Thanks.