Whomp ‘em up! Side ‘o the head! I said, whomp ‘em up side ‘o the head!
— a cheer heard in high school
I’m gonna have to turn in my progressive credential by the end of this, but….
Brian Beutler over at Crooked Media suggests Democrats need to change with the times. He got pushback in early December for tweeting that after 2008, the right’s “plan was to sabotage the economic recovery. This time, it’s to sabotage recovery from plague.” People of the left still have trouble wrapping their brains around the notion that “leaders of a major U.S. political faction would lay waste to innocent life for short-term partisan gain.” Remember: There is no bottom for Republicans to hit.
Beutler runs through a decade or so of recent history to make his point that, as much as Democrats think electoral contests are about kitchen-table issues and sound policy, Republicans run on culture war nonsense. They are playing a different game entirely. And with too little blowback at the polls, it works for them.
Meanwhile, Democrats cannot get traction running on responsible governance and popular policies. Republicans dominate the battle space with manufactured outrage while Democrats play defense. If they defend at all. They’d rather not dignify Republican disinformation attacks until the damage is already done. Then it’s too late. Beutler illustrates with a graph.
Democrats need to make Republicans pay a penalty, Beutler argues. The desperate attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the testosterone-gun-and-camo displays, the manufactured outrage over critical race theory, etc., exist because the white-right knows it is losing its cultural dominance. Republicans have no desire to govern. Republicans have no policy answers. They cannot win if people vote, so they are doubling down on vote suppression and their culture wars. Republicans are losers. Democrats should lean into that.
For example, Beutler cites:
Beutler writes:
I’ll be the first to admit this isn’t the most elevated stuff in the world; there are a lot of smart people in Democratic politics and most of them don’t want to spend their days contemplating how to outmaneuver Republicans in the realm of brutish messaging. But there’s no less honor in that than in clinging to the belief that politics is an elevated calling, only to lose elections when Republicans decide to make them about outlandish, in many cases fictional things.
He offers a too-inconvenient truth (emphasis mine):
When I started in this business in the mid-aughts, blogs were all the rage, and the liberal blogosphere flourished on the premise that the ultimate purpose of politics should be to improve people’s lives through the enactment and implementation of good policy. That insight was correct and decent, and holds true all these many years later. It’s why Biden’s infrastructure agenda matters! But some of the same wonky minds ultimately convinced themselves that the inverse is also true; that the hidden upshot of good policy is that it makes for great politics.
This should have struck these very smart people as suspiciously convenient. If it were true as a rule, we might expect that the passage of the American Rescue Plan, one of the most popular and consequential kitchen-table policies in history, had made Democrats politically bulletproof. In reality, it had no discernible impact on Biden’s popularity whatsoever.
And if you think about it for more than just a second, you realize it’d be a huge coincidence if both of these things happened to be right. The end goal of politics could after all be many things: the common good, liberty, group dominance, scientific innovation. The wonkosphere formed around one I agree with: the common good. But the other question—what’s the ideal politics for building power to advance political end goals?—is separate, and you could answer in many ways: divide and conquer, conciliation, pandering to the fevered imaginations of swing voters, technocratic excellence in pursuit of the common good. The wonks quite conspicuously decided that their calling in life also happened to be self-actualizing. It’s not impossible to imagine that being the case, but it is improbable. The kind of tidy theory one arrives at through motivated reasoning: both the means and the ends of politics happen to be the same things that bring me professional and intellectual satisfaction.
I marveled at how many 1990s New Agers sought to monetize their spiritual journeys. I’ve written about the campaign industrial complex by which enthusiastic young politicos work their ways into professional politics by not rocking boats … until they run for office already the kind of milquetoast Democrat big donors love and activists hate. I sat in a trainers meet-up at Netroots-Philadelphia (2019), and virtually everyone (with the exception of three) had gone from being campaign volunteers to marketing digital services to candidates.
To extend Beutler’s point, sometimes politics is grittier than business cards and intellectual satisfaction. Voters don’t care that you’ve checked every box on some progressive org’s questionnaire and have a killer digital campaign. Sometimes winning (and advancing your ultimate goals) requires getting your hands dirty with stuff that is not self-actualizing.
But political wonks want to make the Olympics on the strength of their sports visualization technology. They expect to be competitive when they show up with no physical conditioning and no skills. Developing those is not as intellectually stimulating.
That’s why I have I have my corner of election mechanics to myself. There’s no money in it, it’s not tech-heavy, and teaching under-resourced county committees how to put on their political pants on one leg at a time and tie their shoelaces (ideally in that order) is not a promising way to land a job in D.C. Why do it? Because there’s nobody else to do it.
That’s not the way we think things should be, but it is the way things are. Democrats need to dump the motivated reasoning and mix it up with Republicans more, Beutler suggests. As I’ve said, too, voters want to see that Democrats will fight. Beutler concludes that Democrats need to be less high-minded:
In the face of this belief, election after election has come and gone, and few if any have turned on the substantive policies that came into existence over the preceding two years, or that the candidates in those elections promised to support going forward. More often they turned on whose passions had been stirred the most. So ask yourself, which is the more galvanizing appeal: 1. The other side (sotto voce: which stole the last election and murdered the hero who could have stopped them) seeks to control your lives, and the life of the American mind, or 2. We passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill with those people!
Unless Dems swap out option 2 for something a little more responsive to the passions of the moment, I think I know the answer. The election won’t be about both of these things. One or the other will take hold. And what’s at stake is whether a major U.S. political party can turn their countrymen into cannon fodder for a deadly virus, embrace an attempted coup…and win.
In 2022, Democrats have a chance to win a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina. Several candidates have thrown their hats into the ring, including former state supreme court chief justice, Cheri Beasley. She lost her reelection race in 2020 by 401 votes out of 5.5 million cast. She was mentioned as a possible Biden Supreme Court pick.
Someone asked me where she stands on Medicare for All. I don’t know and I don’t care. Judge Beasley has no legislative record (although I’m pretty sure what she feels about voting rights). Beasley is an accomplished Black woman with a sterling reputation who, if she wins the primary, will be at the top of the state’s ticket in an off-year election. Galvanizing Black women to vote as they did in the South Carolina primary for Joe Biden will mean the difference between winning the seat and losing it. And when lawmakers vote in the well of the U.S. Senate, they don’t count ideologies. They count heads. Democrats need more heads in the Senate or our policy aspirations are dead, and so are a lot of fellow Americans.
The gloves need to come off. Mix it up, people.