The Conventional Wisdom Predictably Decides that Democrats (especially Progressive Democrats) are the Ones Who Ushered in Fascism
In my Dorf on Law column last Tuesday, I argued that the people who voted for Trump this year -- as well as, crucially, the people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but stayed home rather than vote against Trump in 2024 -- should not be condescended to as if they are children who were "understandably" acting out against the world because they were upset about the economy (even though the US economy is, for the time being, in great shape), or whatever. Sadly but predictably, however, this is exactly how non-Republican commentators have now chosen to distract themselves. Do not hold voters responsible for their own actions in ushering in the new age of fascism. Do not even blame Republicans. Blame Democrats for being too much and too little, all at once.
Why? As one reader put it to me in an email after reading my column, millions and millions of the American "people saw Trump as an outlet for their hate, bigotry, misogyny, and racism. [T]he Democrat's biggest mistake was nominating a woman
of color, and I am tired of hearing the politically correct reasons for
her loss." Precisely. Just as conservatives are the ones who engage in "virtue signaling" but accuse liberals of being performative, certain self-professed reasonable non-conservatives make a show of supposed fairness by being deliberately blind to what is happening. Now, we are being told that "Democrats need to look in the mirror" and similar stock platitudes, making it clear that stating the truth -- that Kamala Harris addressed the full range of issues (from consumer prices to threats to democracy) but could not pull people away from voting for the worst candidate in history running the worst campaign imaginable, a White man who just happened to be an unashamed misogynist, racist, and xenophobe -- is not PC. Better to blame the Democrats (and better still to point the finger at the party's left wing).
To emphasize the point, Trump voters as well as non-voters had more than enough information to know who Trump is, because he has told us loudly and clearly, over and over and over again. Being angry about the price of eggs (especially because Trump never once even pretended that he had the concept of a plan to bring those prices down) is not a justification that we would accept from sentient adults in any other context, and we should not do so now. To do so infantalizes them in a way that no latte-sipping Upper West Side lefty could ever even imagine.
Voting in 2016 was different, at least in some important ways. Trump had already revealed himself as a wannabe fascist even back then, but people might have believed that he could be contained by "the system" -- a system at which they were supposedly thumbing their noses by voting for Trump, by the way, but no matter. Earlier that year, the pro-Brexit vote included people in the UK who were not sure whether the vote was binding or what Brexit even meant. Again, Trump in 2024 is none of that.
But why do I make such a point of placing the responsibility for this un-American turn on the voters? Why insist that "but they were angry" is a bad argument that is utterly condescending? I do so because the rest of the insane finger-pointing that has erupted in the last two weeks is built on this nonsensical refusal to say what truly happened. Completely predictably, almost all fingers are being pointed at "the left." My column earlier this week included the end of this quote from something that I wrote in early 2022:
The anti-progressive Democrats, then, are never going to forgive progressives for being progressive -- and they certainly will not let go of any supposed overreach or messaging error, no matter how much time passes. And this is great for the anti-progressives, because even when their chosen candidates -- most obviously Joe Biden -- are in trouble politically, it is always the hippies' fault.
And because there are supposed centrists and the familiar gang of anti-Trump conservatives who will always go for cheap shots against the left, the hippie-punchers will reliably pull out their usual complaints and pretend that "the people" disagree with the left. Evidence? Evidence is for chumps. I will re-quote the satirist Alexandra Petri's perfect distillation of this idea in her November 8 column:
Like lots of people on the internet right now, I am certain that the thing that went wrong in the 2024 Harris campaign is the very thing that I have been going on about for years. …
I know that some people are saying, “Your prescription is the opposite of what is true. You are just bringing a bad set of assumptions to a situation where there is no evidence that your suggested course would have made things any better!”
So when the Democratic establishment says that "the left" is the reason Harris lost, they are simply saying what they always say, even though they can never back it up with evidence. And to be clear, I pointed out in my column last week that Bernie Sanders quickly lapsed into his comfort zone of economic essentialism, saying that Democrats have not given the working class any reason to vote for them. My apologies for belaboring the point, but once again, Trump very much did not give such voters any economic reasons to vote for him, either.
Although it is to Sanders's credit that he is not among those saying that the Democrats should abandon trans kids (as backbench House Democrats including no-names like Richie Torres and Seth Moulton have now shamefully done), it is more than a bit of the usual "I was always right" on Sanders's part to say that Democrats could have won over those voters with a more aggressively lefty policy agenda.
To be clear, I am absolutely to the left on policy, favoring progressive taxes and expanded social services like increased Social Security benefits and subsidized child care. Yet I simply do not believe that even a fulsome policy package of the sort that would make my heart sing would have changed this election. Trump won the popular vote (barely) and the electoral vote (by a margin only better, since 1972, than Carter and Bush fils, along of course with Trump himself) because -- again, to be politically incorrect -- he talked bigotry and enough people liked what they heard, while millions more were not sufficiently troubled by it to bother to vote for the Black and Indian woman.
As I noted last week, I do understand why so many Democrats and others do not want to say such things out loud, but that is no excuse for placing the blame squarely where it does not belong. And it is certainly reasonable for people to wonder what might have changed the outcome, so long as it is not done in a way that baselessly blames The Squad or some other convenient scapegoat for Harris being unable to get over the finish line.
Before discussing some examples of reasonable post mortems, I should point out that even if the election had gone the other way, with Harris winning most of the swing states and the popular vote, that would have been better but in no way good. I say this not because Trump and the Republicans would have found a way to hack the system and get him installed in office anyway, even though I have made that argument many times (based on actual evidence and knowledge of the weaknesses in the law). Even setting that aside, if Harris had become President, the poison in roughly half of the country was not going to abate. These were going to be horrible years either way. I certainly would have preferred the other outcome (by a long shot), but there was no way this was going to go well.
That said, what are the kinds of honest discussions that people could be (and to some degree are) having? Nancy Pelosi was surely right in saying that Joe Biden should not have held on for as long as he did, not only after his disastrous non-debate performance but (as Ezra Klein also emphasized) even by deciding to run for re-election in the first place. Thinking back on Merrick Garland's diffidence will forever be infuriating as well.
But even the people who are not taking it out on vulnerable groups are still, I think, completely missing the boat when they claim that Harris emphasized Trump's existential threat to democracy too much (while others say it was too little). Monday-morning quarterbacking is fun, but this makes no more sense than the 2016 complaints that Hillary Clinton failed by not making campaign stops Wisconsin when people claimed that she should have. It is not as if she was off playing golf. She and her campaign had to balance demands on her time, and it was far too easy to say, in essence: "Whatever she did was wrong."
On the other hand, last week I saw someone claiming that Biden should have stayed in the race, which made me laugh. Honestly, Biden is probably the only qualified White male Democrat who would have lost to Trump.
Perhaps the most difficult explanations to listen to are those from Democrats who earnestly say, "I won, and here's how I did it. This is the secret formula for our future success." Probably the most well meaning of that genre of argument that I have seen came from incoming Senator Reuben Gallego. In a news article carrying the already-trite headline "Ruben Gallego has a blueprint to win Latino men. Will Democrats listen?" a Washington Post reporter extensively quotes Gallego talking about how he connects with working-class Latinos (which he sensibly points out comes naturally to him, because those are his roots as well).
Gallego in the article talks about family and fatherly motivations, saying at one point "that some Democratic leaders and strategists failed to recognize what Latino men really care about: protecting and providing for their families." Right, except that -- once again! -- Trump offered absolutely nothing to Latino men (or to anyone else who worries about their families, which is surely almost everyone) that could make them feel that their families will now be better protected or that the fathers will now have opportunities to be better providers.
But beyond that, let us be clear about what happened in Arizona. The latest estimates show that 1,766,887 voters in Arizona chose Trump, while 1,592,919 chose Gallego's opponent, Kari Lake. Over 184,000 people who voted for the O.G. Trump thus did not vote for the female version of Trump. Again, I have no doubt that Gallego believes that he deeply connected with voters, but Occam's Razor tells me that slightly more than ten percent of Trump's voters could not bring themselves to vote for a woman -- even the Trumpiest woman out there (who has been at it for over four years).
I would add that in North Carolina, 2,898,306 people voted for Trump, but only 2,241,235 voted for Mark "I'm a Black Nazi" Robinson, who was running for governor against a White man. Robinson was certainly "out there," but compared to Trump? It is comforting to imagine that some number of people rejected unqualified and hateful candidates because of their lack of qualifications and all of the hate, but it is difficult to shake the suspicion that this election was driven by bigotry, even in some instances where Democrats won.
I applaud those Democrats who are honestly looking for answers, and Gallego and a few others might be partially right about what worked for them. Even so, there are two problems with using such testimony as a guide to winning future elections. First, what worked for them worked for them, and the evidence is lacking (to put it kindly) that any of their homespun lessons could be generalized. Second, "winning future elections"? The reason that it was essential this year to emphasize that Trump is a fascist who represents an extinction event for democracy is that Trump is a fascist who represents an extinction event for democracy -- and Republicans are giddy about helping him finish the job that they began long ago.
The one thing that seems clear is that too many Democrats and nominally independent pundits are going to continue to argue that Democrats need to compete with Republicans by embracing ugliness, othering, and abandoning the most vulnerable among us. Even if there is a chance for Democrats ever to be in power again, however, what would be the point in becoming mirror images of Republicans?