Democrats Are Debating Right Now What The Party's Going To Be
It's not just who'll lead Democrats, it's whether "wokeness" gets left behind
The Democratic Party today is deciding the contours of the coming race for the party leadership.
A party committee is setting the rules — including guidelines for debates — for how the race for Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair will unfold. Campaigning is already well under way to determine what the party will be.
The chairs of state Democratic parties began their winter meeting last week with a land acknowledgment, recognizing that on the site where the Phoenix, AZ, Hilton now stands once lived and thrived an indigenous people and symbolically (rather than financially) thanking them for use of the land.
As Julie Roginsky wrote, “Stop the Performative Bullshit.” Salon’s Brian Karem called the gesture “reprehensible.”
The point, of course, is that voters are put off by, well, performative bullshit. And it’s true: Some are.
Will getting rid of it help Democrats? Last month’s elections offer evidence that it might. In some states and districts, Democrats won distancing themselves from wokeness, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and everyone this side of Jeffrey Epstein.
But at last week’s meeting, departing DNC Chair Jaime Harrison delivered a robust defense of “identity politics.” Harrison is conflicted here, because it was his organization that lost the presidential election, so he may be reluctant to admit his organization bears any blame here.
But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
And Harrison presented a fair case, pointing out that Democrats down-ballot defeated Republicans:
“Those mixed results don’t say that this was a landslide. It doesn’t say it’s an existential crisis for the Democratic Party.”
Yes on one, no on two. Not a landslide, but Donald Trump winning four years just four years after his first four years is a seismic event.
That’s why some Democrats, as I’ve written before, are panicking and looking for anything remotely resembling ballast to toss overboard.
But sinking doesn’t necessarily mean you’re too heavy. Sometimes it means you’ve got no wind in your sails.
It’s a tale as old as Pete Seeger. Or at least, um, Christina Ricci, who was born the same year Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States was published.
If workers let the rich divide them, workers lose. If you jettison transgender people, the wealthy seeking to divide workers will just move up to the next rung and target that group.
It’s a tale as old as, um, Trump, actually, who was born the same year that Martin Niemöller first articulated the ideas that became the poem “First They Came…”
Symbolic gestures like land acknowledgments need not be trivial and can in fact power movements. We know this because Republicans (and some Democrats) begin all kinds of meetings with acknowledgments to a magical invisible being, even if it means forcing it on people.
It seems to be working for them.
But the bigger point is that no one will care about land acknowledgments — except as effective social bridges — if those making the land acknowledgments are fighting for everyone. For things that benefit everyone.
Again, Republicans seem to understand this. You win by articulating concrete goals that you’re fighting for — that will benefit people’s lives materially — as Trump did when he lied and said he could bring down prices (until he won and then said, eh, maybe not).
You have to describe how you think things should be. Not what Congress will pass. Not what will survive legal challenges. But the world you would make with the people behind you.
Democrats have articulated no such goals. Instead, they let Trump sucker them into defending systems hated by everyone almost as much as they’re hated by Luigi Mangione.
For political reasons and — please for the love of whatever god might be in charge of my child’s future — for reasons of making life better, Democrats need to articulate concrete goals and explain how achieving those goals will make our world better.
If we tax the rich like we did in the 1950s you can have that 1950s lifestyle of a house, one working parent, vacations, and retirement.
If we make it a crime for Big Oil and Big Polluters and Big Food and Big Insurance and Big Health Care to exploit us for profit, your home will be safer and you will literally have more years of life.
If we undo Wall Street commodify everything, you won’t have to pay a ransom for your home or your food or your hospital stay.
How will we do that, some may ask? Fun fact: Nobody actually cares. Did Trump care about the details? Did his voters care? Trump won by claiming to have the concept of a plan.
Trump’s vagueness was a feature, not a bug. It signaled that he wasn’t engaged in process, he was wedded to outcomes.
Trump appeared prepared to will his vision into existence. People believed it. They don’t believe it of Democrats.
That’s because the only way to be taken seriously on any of this is, again, to take a page out of Trump’s book. Who took a page out of Fox’s book.
Fox’s strategy when it was just a bouncing baby Damien was (probably consciously) to go hardcore jailyard and punch the biggest dudes in the nose. You establish that you’re serious by advertising that you’re here to make enemies.
The way to make a big tent, ironically, is to start with a tent where someone’s not welcome. And the only people Democrats have to exclude to accomplish this are people who can afford their own tents. Fucking glamping shit, in fact.
The next chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), put it this way: “...when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did — with Republican help.”
If Democrats focus their energies on the two-fold task of building real movement(s) and naming names as part of their investment in manufacturing enemies, no one will care about transgender people or land acknowledgments.
Nobody trapped in a burning building ever interrogated the firefighters about their politics.
Cleaning house of empathy abandons constituencies and imperils the next ones. It’s also busy-work — the kind of bullshit you do so at least you’re doing something. Even if you can’t explain how to build a coalition while jettisoning members (and even if you’re hoping to swap them for other members).
But horse-trading with voters is amateur hour. Who joins a team in return for its willingness to betray existing team members?
Pundits and consultants and too many politicians read polls as wildly over-determinative. Anyone claiming that America is right or left or center-whatever has lost the thread.
Americans aren’t anything. They’re just people. They want lives of security and meaning. If democracy provides it, great. If not, what else ya got?
So if your argument is that democracy itself is great, then yeah your party is screwed. Democracy is a tool, not an end. And it’s been a long time since Democrats imagined out loud the America they want to build with that tool.
If Democrats had been running on a sweeping vision of transformative change, the attacks on transgender people and immigrants and women and LGBTQ+ people would have been self-evident as distractions. They gained traction only in the absence of a competing vision.
Democrats are meeting and debating now, and choosing Harrison’s successor to run the party in less than two months.
The person they pick will have a lot to say about whether the party is listening to the people America hate — those who’ve benefited from economic systems enacted in the name of reform and modernization — or listening to people fucking sick of living this way.
Democrats can put Republicans back on the defensive — and not so incidentally make progress on economic justice, Earth-saving, and social justice — simply by doing what popular Democrats always do, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders to many but definitely not all Kennedi. Just forget what they think is possible and start talking about and fighting for what’s right.
Even — especially — if that means letting voters know who the enemies are.
Do that, and Democrats will have enough wind in their sails to carry all of us.
Wokeness wasn’t a Dem thing. It was name calling by R’s and media. And still is.😞
Hey, I think you meant to put a D after Greg Casar’s name