How To Take The Whipping
On Democratic politics and self-regulation skills
Kamala Harris underperformed with every demographic she was supposed to win, including black women. Democrats met their turnout goals and still lost. Conversely, Donald Trump won the popular vote, gaining ground with demographics that were considered reliably Democratic since 2008.
There is no way to explain this outcome other than American voters decisively rejecting the Democratic Party ticket. They simply did not buy what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz tried to sell them. This did not happen because of Russia. It cannot be blamed on Elon Musk or misinformation or “hate.” There was no sudden surge of alt-right Nazis at the ballot box. Neither the Electoral College nor the Supreme Court figures in this result. Democrats bear 100 percent of the blame for preferencing identity over earned merit or demonstrated ability. They did it to themselves.
Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running-mate in 2020 because she had the correct demographic identifiers. Her weaknesses were visible in her disappointing presidential run, yet she stood one geriatric heartbeat from the presidency because of what she was, not what she had accomplished. Biden kept his cognitive decline secret until after the nominating conventions, when a disastrous debate performance made it all too apparent. By that point, Harris had done nothing to convince the public she was capable of being president.
Democrats then scrambled to replace Biden, whereupon party kingmaker Barack Obama pushed for Harris, a political protegé, to have the nomination. Unprecedented, this was still the Democratic Party’s choice to make: “the party decides,” as we say in political science. Parties exist to choose the candidates that voters choose from; they literally have no other reason to exist. If an assassin’s bullet had been two inches to the right, and this shoe put on the other foot, the Republican Party would have also chosen someone to replace Trump at the top of the ballot. Voters would still have still been presented with a Republican choice.
Democrats thus own their choice as a party even though they were forced to make it this way, and so late in the game. Then, given a choice between a gender-swapped Obama with none of his oratorical gifts and a reality TV star with orange hair, American voters chose the latter. It was not even close.
Shock wore off by Thursday morning. Altogether, Democrats are dealing with grief better this time than they did in 2016, though results are uneven. Hollywood is taking it harder than the policy wonks, for example. Acceptance thus came quickly for some, while others are still angry, or in denial, or depressed, or bargaining, and stuck in those phases. The last phase, the bargaining over what comes next, promises to be an enduring and debilitating fight.
The angriest elements of the Democratic Party coalition demand a return to #Resistance organizing and the oppositional politics of denial. Everything Trump does or says can once again be cast as an emergency. His every social media thought can be fodder for the 24-hour news cycle and parsed to death for evidence of fascist ideology. Progressive activists must protest and litigate every initiative of the Trump administration, goes the argument.
Returning to the politics of exhaustion has risks for Democrats, however. After all, Harris would be the president-elect today if all the party had to do was call Trump a fascist more often. Americans are fed up with the politicized culture, the name-calling, the cancellations, and the mostly-peaceful riots that formed the “resistance” to Trump. Americans voted overwhelmingly for normalcy. A renewed atmosphere of emergency will only repel them further.
This is not to suggest that Democrats must stop fighting for anything at all. Rather, the party must regard the activists within its coalition with a new skepticism, and pick their political battles more wisely. Activists with agendas that annoy a majority of American voters, such as banning gas stoves and plastic straws, must be marginalized. In short, Democrats have to start ‘punching hippies’ again. When Democrats became associated with inflation and disorder in the 1970s, it led to the election of Ronald Reagan and the conservative revolution in American politics. It also forced Democrats to reconsider the radical demands of their progressive wing. History is rhyming again.
Voters are not excited by a “green new deal.” They find “degrowth” repulsive and “sustainability” annoying. Americans prefer a program of new energy and economic growth. They want to drill the oil and gas, build the first nuclear power plants in decades, and make manufacturing great again. Unlike the First World elites who wring their hands about climate doom, most American voters are more worried about the economy than the glaciers. They want to build their way out of the problem instead of wearing sackcloth and ashes.
Democrats would be wise to reject the Hamasniks, condemn anti-Semitism on the American campus, and engage with hearings and legislation aimed at removing Iran’s network of student associations and professional provocateurs from colleges. This will make MSNBC very angry, which will make most Americans very happy. The new Republican Congress will likely hold hearings into Rob Malley and his merry band of Iran stans, too, so Democrats had best remember how to be hawks. Everyone associated with Obama’s Iran policy, and its attempted revival under Biden, must be kept far away from the reins of foreign policy, forever.
Condemning Islamic terrorists will be easy, however, in comparison to taking on the gender identity lobby. But Democrats will have to take it on.
“Trump and Vance made attacks on transgender rights a central part of their closing argument, and findings from AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 115,000 voters nationwide, suggest that those arguments may have resonated with some voters,” the Associated Press reported in the hours after polls closed.
About half of voters overall said that support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far, according to VoteCast, while about one-quarter said support has been about right and about 2 in 10 said support has not gone far enough.
The vast majority — around 8 in 10 — Trump voters said that support for transgender rights has gone too far, while Harris voters were more divided.
To recap: Harris voters were “divided” by this wedge issue while a supermajority of Trump voters were activated by it. But the media opinionators supporting Kamala Harris did not know that. They were not allowed to know it, for they exist inside an epistemic bubble, or ‘safe space,’ in which it is unsafe to acknowledge any reality which conflicts with the absolutist and total demands of ‘gender identity.’
Americans hate seeing men cheat at women’s sports. They will never accept it and cannot be shamed into accepting it, even if they still fear to speak out loud about it. Democrats and their proxies do not make the issue more acceptable to viewers by insisting it doesn’t matter, or that it is somehow fair. On the contrary, all the clucking and tsking and shaking heads regarding the Trump ad campaign multiplied its effects. A substantial number of potential Harris supporters experienced the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, whereas most Trump supporters felt vindicated in their choice of candidate.
Sports are perhaps the easiest policy area for Democrats to admit the demands of the gender identitiarians go too far because the unfairness is so obvious to the naked eye. Problematically, however, Democrats have also attached themselves to the so-called ‘trans kids’ phenomenon, a scientific and medical scandal that is unraveling fast, and will be studied for decades to come as an example of best intentions gone horribly wrong.
House Republicans will hold hearings in the new year to investigate the sheer fraud of the so-called “settled science” that supposedly justified endocrine quacks and surgeons harming kids. The Supreme Court is likely to uphold Tennessee’s ban on pediatric sex changes. Democrats will have an off-ramp from this issue if they want it — they can say ‘we were lied to’ and change their minds based on the actual science — or they can choose to miss this exit and remain on the wrong side of voters.
The Obama administration opened this Pandora’s box by directing schools to admit students into the opposite-sex restrooms if they express feelings of ‘gender,’ a term which no Democrat can define with non-circular language. Under the rubric of “protecting transgender people” — yet another term still undefined in law by non-circular language — the Obama administration forced insurers to cover “gender affirming surgeries,” a third example of gender identity Newspeak in this paragraph. Contorted logic and tortured definitions are intentional because the idea behind them is patently ludicrous.
The Biden administration has nevertheless doubled-down on what Biden himself calls “the civil rights movement of the 21st century” by inverting the language of Title IX and ignoring the plain language of the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock ruling. Harris, the DEI candidate, was forced to back off from her position that undocumented immigrants should receive free transgender surgeries, but she made it very clear that she still would have continued this perverse “human rights” project.
Americans resent being ignored by out-of-touch elites imposing unwanted change from the top down. Americans are increasingly unwilling to endorse the linguistic games around ‘gender identities’ that cannot be detected by scientific method. Average people are done with pronoun rituals in workplace settings and drag queens in the libraries. If Democrats want to be on the right side of the voter, they should start waving American flags again — and stop saluting the “progress flag” that most Americans now consider an authoritarian ideological symbol.
As this new internal war begins, the wonky Democrats who want to win elections have one distinct advantage over the activists who want to die on the metaphorical hill of ‘gender identity’: the latter group has no real argument for their position.
On Wednesday, Democratic arch-wonk Matthew Yglesias provided an illustration of this imbalance when he advised Democrats to recognize that “biological sex is not…a social construct.” Progressive “Law Dork” Chris Geidner then took to his Substack to decry “Dems going after trans people.”
The public policy debate is over whether your “biological sex” — the sex assigned to a person at birth, generally based on external sex organs — controls your identity for life; whether “biological sex” and “gender identity” can be discordant; and whether “biological sex,” in either event, should determine, by law, the sex with which you are to be identified for all purposes.
This is simply stupid. Human sexual dimorphism is not in fact a public policy debate. Rather, public policies which altogether ignore the immutability of this evolved human trait have been put in place without any public debate, and now Democrats are finding out how unpopular that is proving to be.
Reducing the issue to how someone wants others to see them, Geidner skips the part where everyday people know damn well that Lia Thomas and Charles Clymer and Rachel Levine and Dylan Mulvaney are men, and cannot be convinced to see them as women, no matter how much social and political pressure they experience.
Ultimately, Geidner lands on the argument that the Democratic Party is “protecting” transgender people from harm. But what exactly counts as “harm”? If you say aloud that Thomas and Clymer and Levine and Mulvaney are men, then you “harm” them, according to the gender identitarians. Observing aloud that a male athlete is in the pool, or on the volleyball court, or in the boxing ring is literal violence against the man because it harms the magic gender identity inside him. This invisible, self-defined ‘identity’ deserves greater protection than the physical bodies of women and girls, according to transgender activism. People who support these absurdities are implicitly demanding that material atrocities be committed in the name of an ineffable identity.
Democrats, and more importantly the broader ideological movement that supports the party across academia and media, have collectively traded identity for social or economic class as an organizing principle. Obama embodied this trade-off. Like Harris after him, the 44th president began his career as a cultural hybrid, but defaulted to ‘black identity’ along his political path. Identitarian politics flatten and reinvent hierarchies. It is not by accident that Charles Clymer, like many white male progressives, reinvented himself as a “trans woman” after the Obama administration, erasing his past as a “toxic white male” to restore his place in the Democratic Party’s new hierarchy of identities. The Biden White House welcomed him with open arms.
Identitarianism lost in this election. Obama was elected on a platform of “hope,” while Harris lost badly on a platform of “joy,” because Americans stopped buying the identitarian hype. They demand authenticity. Obama was controversial because he was so new and untested, and according to the vast right wing machinery which had been poised to crush Hillary Clinton, he was “unvetted.” The results of his presidency are at least as mixed as any, and in certain domains worse than most. Identitarianism is one of the most pernicious legacies of the Obama presidency because it has displaced meritocracy.
Continuing down the same path, Biden was in office for a day before he vowed to let men take over women’s collegiate sports, whereupon he started losing women. Harris never defended women’s sports. Instead, she played up threats to abortion rights under a second Trump presidency and lost ground with women voters. Democrats at the highest level genuinely believed that women would feel the abortion rights threat so much that they would overlook their own erasure in policy and law, starting with sports, under the guise of “being kind” and “inclusive” to men. Instead, the seemingly-irresistible force of gender identity collided with the actually-immutable object of biological human sex difference — and the result was catastrophe.
Democrats will not inhabit the White House again — indeed, they may never hold a majority in either house of Congress again — until they observe the First Amendment again and stop championing speech controls for social media. Pronoun hippies are by far the strongest advocates of online censorship and the worst hall monitors of social media, for their claims to “harm” are boundaryless and ever-expanding.
Some Democrats are already trying to draw lines. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports,” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) said on Wednesday. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-NY) told the New York Times on Thursday. Reactions from the activists were suitably unhinged.
Party Democrats must internalize the lesson of the whipping: Americans want them to produce quality candidates again, to make merit great again, to display common sense again. They want plainspoken Democrats who are capable of explaining themselves to Joe Rogan for three hours without resorting to a thought-terminating cliché. They want Democrats to demonstrate self-regulation and model an internal locus of control instead of playing footsie with revolutionaries and radical agendas. Carville’s wisdom that “It’s the economy, stupid” applies more than ever, now.
The Obama coalition belonged to Obama. It did not come back together again for Biden or Harris. It is simply not happening again, ever, and Americans are exhausted with the Democrats who try to make it happen again. Voters are sick of ideological schemes (“hope”) that conflict with observable reality. They are unswayed by emotional language (“joy”) that conflicts with their actual feelings. Democratic candidates must ground themselves in reality and reflect the real world. Until they restore common faith in their ideas, they will struggle as a minority party. The culture is headed one way, their ideological-activist wing headed in quite another. Democrats will have to choose.
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Aaaand cross-posted!