Josh Marshall has an insightful piece up today called “Reckonings of Contempt” in which he discusses how so many people, including many liberals, hold the Democrats. He looks at some of the many pieces that are offering up criticism of the Harris campaign and the Democrats’ failure in general starting off with a piece by Eric Levitz at Vox which, as I have done here as have many others, looks at the global anti-incumbency mood as well as the more ominous implication of rightward move among the working class of all races and ethnicities. Pretty standard stuff and I think probably correct. However:
Then there’s this piece in Axios. It probably won’t surprise you that I wasn’t terribly impressed with it.
It starts …
Democrats are a lost party. Come January, they’ll have scant power in the federal government, and shriveling clout in the courts and states … The traditional media structure sympathetic to their views, and hostile to Trump’s, was shattered … But the road to the Democrats’ Damascus requires deep, honest self-reflection — and, many party insiders tell us, entirely new leadership … When journalists held up a mirror, they often looked away … Harris just lost what Democrats considered an eminently winnable race, despite relatively light scrutiny and more money than any candidate in U.S. history.
What’s notable is that the Axios piece isn’t so different from stuff you can read in publications at least notionally friendly to Democrats. Another example is this one by Alex Shephard in The New Republic. The tone in both cases is what can only be called one of contempt. But it’s contempt of a particular sort.
Marshall concedes, of course, that losing elections often produce contemptuous retrospectives of the campaigns, the politicians, strategists and pundits who they believe should have seen it all ahead of time (even when they, themselves, did not.) But that’s not what he’s talking about here:
When you sift through the tone, the nature of the indictments and its totality, it is really more a contempt for Democrats generally, a contempt for the kind of people who make up Democratic majorities when they win and minorities when they lose — their condescension and obliviousness, their empty bromides and obsessions, above all their failure. We hear a lot of derision for the “resistance” and especially “resistance moms,” over-educated and out of touch, whiners, stuck in the “MSNBC bubble.” In a Washington Post article whose headline said the Democratic Party is now in “shambles,” Joe Manchin’s chief of staff Chris Kofinis put it in a multiply revealing line: “If you try to win elections by talking to the elites of this country, you’re going to get your ass kicked — there are not enough Beyonces, Oprahs or Hollywood elites to elect anyone.”
Many of the blows in these write-ups remind us of the way even some of the kinder young boys on an elementary school playground will be motivated to get in a punch, while the animal spirits are running, on that one boy who is always the target of bullying. It’s the lure of the predator.
Considering that the tone of so much of those criticisms are sexist and misogynistic — everything is so female coded — that the better analogy would be when some of the kinder boys join in on a sexual assault on a girl — while the animal spirits are running, if you know what I mean.
As Josh says, these are not the type of people you want to listen to in order to improve or correct mistakes.
I found this clarifying. I have been distinctly uncomfortable with the whole “we must find ourselves a Joe Rogan” a guy’s guy who can talk to the men who we desperately need to appease in order to win elections. It’s not because I don’t think liberals and progressives need to adapt themselves to a new media landscape and claim some of that territory for ourselves. This is a new world and the old so-called liberal media is dysfunctional. But the canonization of the dumbshit bro talk as the the only way to do it strikes me as wishful thinking on the part of a whole lot of lefties (you know who you are) who really relate to that stuff and think the whole “girlification” of the Democrats is a drag. The fact that the majority of Democrats are women is considered a liability apparently. Good to know.
There needs to be some creativity here, people. Running with stupid (or pretending to) isn’t going to get it done. Looking down on the Democratic party for not being the kind of people you want to have a beer with is well… stupid. This isn’t about your social life.
Marshall goes on to offer up some of his own analysis on what may have gone wrong and it’s worth listening to. Click over for the whole thing. It’s really good.
As he says, “Voters often want new leaders. But things are always a bit out of joint when it’s leaders who want new voters.”