This is excellent. My only point of disagreement is that I’m not sure Kamala was ever capable - or credible - in making the pivot you (and I) wanted to see. I think it would have had to have come from a different candidate, one who hadn’t been in the administration. Which is why we needed a real primary - which Biden thwarted.
I agree, and I think people talk at cross purposes when discussing where the campaign went wrong. People point to the ways in which she should have done things differently (eg "give centrists clear, convincing, genuine reasons to vote for her") but she wouldn't realistically have been able to.
The ways she needed to be different sum up to 'she needed to be a different person entirely', so things that sound like "here are the things Harris should have done to win" come across as annoying to a lot of people. Voters wouldn't have liked her unless she transfigured into somebody else.
Wow. This is probably the single best piece of election commentary of the 2024 cycle. I've subscribed to your newsletter, and I only wish I had the spare cash for a founding membership.
Unfortunately money is tight at the moment. But know that, as a fellow reluctant Harris voter, I was profoundly moved by this essay, read in the early morning following Trump's victory. Please continue writing.
I think the gist here is very insightful; lip service to swing voters doesn't work when it's so transparent. But I think this misses on the details, because I expect people like you and I are extremely unrepresentative of the median swing voter. e.g. your opposition to unions and price controls are standard economically-literate positions, but most Americans, and most swing voters, are not libertarian and don't understand economics at all. The median swing voter probably has an overall favorable view of both unions and price controls, meaning that Kamala doing what you want and opposing them would have made her chances worse.
Discussions about tariffs illustrate this nicely. To the point where I think the word "tariff" shouldn't be used, and "import tax" should be used instead so at least the median voter knows it's a tax.
Great article. Coming from a different background, but probably similar thinking style, this represents my feelings too. I was willing to vote as I historically had in every election of my adult life, but I was neither excited nor certain it would benefit me or those I care about by building a more sane politics in the long term by itself. The great motivator was, of course, the alternative but we now have that largely because we presented no positive, consistent vision.
The people who are prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters at law schools are annoying, sure. But they don't think that Kamala Harris represents them, either. A lot of them spend a bunch of their time complaining online about Democrats and maybe not even voting for Democrats. It doesn't seem like Kamala really gave them the time of day during the campaign -- which I think was a good thing, and I'm someone who identifies strongly with the Democratic Party. Yes, the top centrist priority that you list -- "excellence in education" -- seems like something a Democrat running for state or local office needs to talk about in the manner you suggest if they were going to persuade you to vote for them. But this seems like a weird thing for Kamala Harris to spend time talking about in a campaign for the presidency.
Perhaps I am doing what you caution against ("But what I hope is this: the Democrats don't take this moment to lament to themselves how everyone fell victim to misinformation and imagined grievances")...
I feel like my biggest problem with the democratic party (the way they quickly develope a new consensus and then sell themselves on it completely) has now turned into a genuine liability for them.
There was absolutely every reason to know in advance that Kamala was an unpopular candidate. But then they sold themselves on her and then made a big point of saying how the Republicans were so weird and out of touch. And the truth is I think most of them have no sense of how inorganic this sort of 180 it is, or how firmly confined it is to their own quarters. They changed their mind about Kamala so surely too has the median voter.
Unfortunately, I don't see their next big consensus being that they've become insular and unattractive and in need of change.
I've seen this for a decade+ working in non-profits / education. It's consensus / conformity (femininity) without any countervailing individualism (masculinity). One could easily argue that the Republican side of the ledger is too masculine, but they seem to have at least an iota of self awareness that the Left / Democrats / (elite) women do not. It's a problem of always and everywhere projecting outward without ever looking inward.
There is a vigorous left-of-center gender critical/sex realist backlash against gender identity ideology, and women are playing a major role in it. We have no use for progressives' culture of censorship and retribution against those who dare challenge progressive orthodoxy.
Hi Tracing, I've become a big admirer of your investigative work, and find your thought processes interesting. But I'm probably pretty far to the left of your median commentator, if only because I believe there's still a skin-crawling amount of racism around (and many even "intellectual" comment sections are absolute proof). Now, there's stuff they tell you not to do for serious activism, e.g. don't argue with people's fears, it's an emotional thing. I'm bad at following that, it doesn't fit my personality, so this comment may be a bad idea.
I think I may be getting radicalized, or maybe social-media poisoned (see above skin-crawling racism), but I worry what you want in your post is simply not possible in our polarized world. And I don't know where to go from there. There's a concept I call the "The Right-Wing Ranter Veto" (not saying anything about you personally, that's just what I call it). That is, across the entire world, all policies and discussions are to be subject the veto of ranting right-wingers. It's the mirror-image of "snowflake" sensitivities. It's an endless sequence of the form: "This person said something we *veto* - DENOUNCE THEM NOW!". What does one do in response? It's kind of a trap. Nothing works.
"Well, maybe they didn't phrase that well, but the concept is ..."
"STOP MAKING EXCUSES! THEY'RE BAD! VETO! DENOUNCE THEM!"
"There's reasons behind this ..."
"Ohh, you're not listening to me, DENOUNCE THEM!!"
"I really don't think it's worth getting worked up over ..."
"THIS IS WHY TRUMP WON! YOU DIDN'T DENOUNCE THEM!!!"
There's simply an endless cycle of being told either be more Catholic than the Pope (or maybe more racist than the racists), or it's your fault. The key point is there will *always* be something, somewhere, for this right-wing ranting. If nothing else, they'll just make stuff up, that's what clickbaiters do. And some on the left will quite obviously conclude that playing this game is for suckers. Which of course provides a constant enemy for right-wing ranters to demand that would-be centrists denounce.
Some political theorists say Democracy cannot be sustained in the long term. At times I see what they mean.
see how, in your examples, you dont offer a full-throated defense of the thing? (whatever the thing may be)
is it because "your things" are so much subtler and finer and more complex in their functioning than "their things"? maybe. but is it entirely? are you sure there aren't some things that maybe, possibly, you dont enjoy defending, because you know somewhere inside that they're wrong? and that's maybe why you're pre-weaseling even in an imaginary argument with a caricature? because that seems like weird behavior otherwise...
Ranting is anti-social and completely inappropriate in a debate or discussion. No one defends that sort of thing in a debate, and even online trolls who pretend to care will say they don't like ranting and screaming (from the other side, of course).
LOOK, IF YOURE TRYING TO WIN ELECTIONS, YOU HAVE TO SEEM LIKE YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING CARE, AND ONE WAY TO SEEM LIKE YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING CARE IS TO BE REALLY FUCKING ANGRY. ITS THAT FUCKING SIMPLE. HOW DO YOU NOT GET THIS?
YOU SHOULD BE FUCKING FURIOUS THAT RIGHT-WING RANTERS ARE MISREPRESENTING AND MISCHARACTERIZING YOUR POLICIES AND IDEAS. WHY ARENT YOU ANGRY THAT THEYRE FUCKING LYING? *cough* either you dont actually care as much as they do (possible), you dont actually want to defend all the stuff theyre attacking (also possible), or you're just a wimp who anyone loud could run over. it couldnt possibly be the last one, so which of the first two is it?
Sure, we could all just descend into screaming and shouting matches. That's the path of no productive conversation or doing better than the state of nature. This is hardly some left-wing perspective either, the Bible has verses which state the people should not let their anger control them.
You yourself acknowledge that being a furious heckler is just one way to demonstrate caring. While I have a dismal view on how smart the average voter is, I think they grasp all the other ways quite well.
sometimes you have to fight even though you're correct. there even exist people who can *control anger*! or there used to. they were called "orators."
but i will let you in on a little secret. there is a form of irate expression surpassing even capital letters. cato the elder was known to break out in fits of it. its called jambus...but lets start with someone who can use capital letters when she or he feels the need.
It's not a question of fighting despite being correct, it's about fighting in a way that doesn't shut down the conversation. Shouting or typing in all-caps is an attempt to terminate the conversation by forcing the framing you want. It's entirely unproductive and doesn't do anything so that one or both sides can learn or understand anything.
I honestly don't know if the Cheney-hugging and Israel-supporting hurt her or helped her, on net. It's true that both the ANC and LDP were recently kicked out of their decades-long hold on power. I suppose I was stupid to think that just having a younger candidate whose brain was not mush would be enough to stop that from happening here. I'd like to be able to say "Well, that proves that she should have opposed the Jones Act!" or whatever. What I do think is that a woman who couldn't even try very hard to distance herself from her unpopular boss is probably congenitally incapable of shivving the Machine.
My silver lining is that I will hopefully never have to hear from Allan Lichtman or his stupid keys ever again.
I agree that Kamala did not represent people with your centrist policy views, and I share the particular four views you list. And I certainly agree Biden's decision to try to run again was unconscionable.
I disagree that that's why she lost, and I think you are typical minding and underselling your own moral and intellectual superiority. The median American voter is not a principled centrist like you. The median American voter is dumb, ignorant, and morally corrupt, because they have been brain-poisoned by the evil Borderer-spawned anti-culture of the "heartland". There is no path to decisively defeating Trumpism that doesn't involve figuring out how to push back more effectively on that anti-culture. I don't know how to do that, but I am extremely skeptical that a better centrist-appealing policy program has much to do with it.
I think this is exactly the attitude that makes it so hard for Democrats to win. The absolute certainty that they are superior to provincials and that said provincials are bad, dumb people and deserve to be talked down to.
Just because I was lucky enough to get a good education that doesn't mean people in Arkansas who have lived entirely different lives than me and as such disagree with me on a range of topics are inferior to me.
Get over it. We are a big and diverse country and NOBODY gets exactly what they want in a candidate.
You vote for the best candidate and don’t expect to get a custom, bespoke candidate that’s everything you ever wanted.
I voted for Kamala because she is sane, smart and competent. The bad guy got in anyway, but maybe he would not have if whiners had accepted that you don’t get everything you want.
I got over it and voted for a candidate I thought, and think, was terrible and wholly failed to understand and represent me. Now that you’ve seen how bad of a losing strategy that was, are you going to double down on it or recognize what went wrong?
I think you made their's first though. Responding to people who disagree with you are have a different perspective by calling them "assholes" (or stupid) instead of pausing to consider whether another view could hold any merit is a big reason the election went the way it did
Tell me how Germans ought to have heard Hitler out — that he had good reason for exterminating Jewish people and how it wasn’t nice to just call him a murderer.
I would agree with you if Harris had been selected through some kind of primary or Dem convention run-off instead of being handed the nomination on a silver platter.
In a country with so many reasonable, smart, capable and likable Democrats they only had to select ONE person who could handily beat a vain egomaniac with visible signs of mush between his ears. Ultimately the DNC forgot their responsibility to put out a candidate that a mere simple majority of the American people would want to vote for.
If you haven't already listen to James Carville on The Bulwark. He says the DNC should be treated like a company taken over by private equity. Crappy parts sold, and good communicators installed.
Nothing about Kamala’s politics was genuine. Flip flopping with little to no explanation is cringe! May this concession speech today be her Swan Song. Extremely mediocre politician!
The Democrats have somehow managed to persuade centrists that they're crazy socialists and leftists that they're heartless neoliberals.
The left does appear to believe that "immediate full communism" should be very easy to implement and that the Democrats are simply refusing to do it, which can only be because they're actually secretly right-wing. I don't fully understand this position. I used to be a pretty committed socialist and I eventually became convinced that the government simply could not do a lot of the things we wanted it to do. The "left-wing populism" argument continually runs aground on the problem that the state cannot actually just make everyone rich by imposing price controls and nationalising everything.
The Democrats probably should just fully repudiate the entire progressive agenda and just run on being a more competent version of the Republicans, who won't do weird shit like impose tariffs or ban abortion. Everyone who would complain about this is politically powerless in America and can be ignored. If I had to guess I'll say that's what they'll end up doing.
Hi Trace, NE-2 voter here. I've always held your work up to friends as "This guy writes like peak Omaha" and I am going to continue doing that even though you are gone. I confess I voted against the Machine but with mirrored frustrations. Posts like this give me hope that one day there will be a Quality Candidate (TM) and we can all agree on them and post Jeb!-style memes online.
I had perfectly standard right-wing reasons for voting against the Machine (student loan vote-buying, BLM riots, online censorship of 2020, school closures, etc.) I was ever so slightly inclined to believe government and politics would attract right-wing talent when Elon bought X (lol!) Quite a few other tech geniuses are (uneasy) Trump supporters this time around... They've even got my old hero, Ron Paul, coming up to bat! This is how I imagine it feels to be a stereotypical teenage girl and find out Charli XCX tweeted 'Kamala is brat'. I could have been hopeful once. I am older now.
You listed a ton of Kamala's flip-flops, I will mention the one I remember - her 2020 VP debate where she said she would 'not take the Trump vaccine'. I remember thinking it was an insane statement, implying that Trump was fiddling with the beakers somehow, giving him even way more credit than necessary while also trashing OWS. It was even more insane when those 'Trump vaccines' were announced less than 72 hours after the election, and it turned out that OWS was fine all along. It was absolutely infuriating once the mandate was announced, Kamala's statement was completely memory-holed, and 'why is the vaccine so politicized' became a national conversation.
I can't figure out why she did this. Was it to win the anti-vax left-wingers? Was it a failsafe that Biden demanded of her, thinking he'd have it as leverage in a caucus? Did she think of this on her own? Was it just a ploy to avoid giving anyone a good reason to vote for Trump?
Truth be told, I think the knowledge that government and high society is run by the left-wingers is why so many people voted for Trump. If Trump did most/some/a few of the things he promised I think people would run in horror. But Kamala's administration made no promises and kept none either. Trump is a known bullshitter. Kamala is a known bullshitter. Only one of these people pretended to be an honest broker. We all know that the civil service will fight tooth and nail to stop a Republican bullshitter. They would happily ask me to make a million sacrifices for their bullshitter, and completely reverse course a week later.
You're applying "presentism" to the politics of the time. Trump used to be a big proponent of the Covid vaccine. It was, for a short time, going to be a major achievement of his administration. This in typical political Orwell fashion, has been memory-holed by right-wingers since they're so in thrall to the anti-vaxxer lunacy. A lot of Democrats and liberals were suspicious that Trump was telling the people working on the vaccine to cut corners on safety testing so that he could take credit. After the safety was later vouched for by trustworthy scientists, those people were re-assured. And then Trump went anti-vaccine (which is a really sad story, it was clear he didn't want to do it because he wanted credit - but literally, he'd rather have people get sick and die if it helped him gain power). But it's all completely consistent with the scientific data interacting with obvious politics if you look at the timeline carefully.
Kamala’s hesitation about the vaccine in 2020 is functionally no different than the anti-vax arguments that later took hold on the right. She expressed doubt about a vaccine based on the person in office and their influence over the vaccine manufacturers, identical to the behavior of the anti-vax movement. You could charitably say the Stage I results came out a few days after, but if you say the fear is they were rigged, that's no different from saying the Stage II stuff was rigged too. There was no movement to re-do Stage I results, meaning that this fear was either misplaced, that the benefits of fast approval offset any drawbacks, or that this fear just completely ignored. As for the lives lost waiting - I suspect Trump was hammering the FDA to approve, and didn't get it, for precisely the same reasons he might tamper with the results.
When Trump does these reversals, people call him on it. (I don't know if he actually did this here. Last thing I saw Trump say on this was 'beautiful vaccines, terrible mandate' but I could be wrong and he's fully renounced the vaccine.) My point is, why does the DNC tell me I am an idiot for thinking this kind of reversal is bad when Kamala does it? Why don't they replace her with someone else for the Presidential nom, and completely avoid this whole quandry?
There is an enormous difference between the current Republican sheer nuttiness of vaccine denial, and Harris being suspicious that a specific person who is a known massive liar would in fact lie about something. More importantly, the very action you are trying to make a negative of Harris - changing her mind on safety - is attributed to information from expert sources, which she then believes instead of outright lying about it like many right-wingers do.
Now, having done the formal rebuttal, let me go a bit meta. What you are doing is generously called motivated reasoning. You want to find something you can twist, some fog, some way to throw dirt, on Harris here, even in the face the utter horror of what Trump and Republicans have been doing now with spreading anti-vaccine disinformation. I feel quite strongly about this, as maliciously causing sickness and death for power is pure moral monster.
And I fear: THERE IS NO RATIONAL ARGUMENT WHICH WILL CONVINCE YOU!
Look at how far you are reaching - Harris said something which can sort of, kind of, stand on your head and squint real hard, portrayed as vaguely in the same abstract category of the lunatics ("based on the person in office"), SO BOTH SIDES! ("functionally no different"). There is nothing the Democrats can reasonably do in the face of this, short of becoming complete nuts like the anti-vaxxers.
This is proving my point elsewhere about why the original post is misguided. It's just not possible to do, look at social media for proof.
I'll stop posting after this, as we are at an impasse and I don't want to trouble our host.
I should probably have worded this better: I don't care what Kalama personally thinks about vaccines all that much. I care very much that her public opinion changes rapidly based on what is politically convenient, on such a serious issue. Simply put, I don't think her estimation of Pfizer's test results actually changed between the October Stage I results and Stage II in mid-November, or in December. I don't think her authoritative sources (Fauci, but more generally the people at FDA/OWS/Pfizer) were claiming that the vaccine tests were being tampered with, they certainly made no such claims in mid-November. I think she took this opinion because it would prove helpful in the election. That's not a stretch to believe.
And my point is this: To avoid me noticing this obvious reversal, the first and easiest thing to do was run someone *other than Kamala.* I don't need an anti-vax Democratic candidate, I don't want one. But if someone in or running for office says, "Vaccine is safe/unsafe" I want that to be information I and others can incorporate into the actions I take in my life, and not just a thing they say because it helps them for three weeks. It's especially bad when someone does this reversal and the press goes above and beyond trying to justify why it was acceptable in this specific case. It suggests that other lies will be tolerated, and if the roles were reversed, the damage to me would be exactly the same. If we want voters to put stock in officials and trust in government, "say what I need to say until it is time to do a 180, then call people schizoids for replicating my behavior" is a bad way to go.
Thanks for commenting. We're both pushing for the same norm here, just mad at different people. Like I said earlier, really hoping on a better candidate in the next round.
She was not running until 120 days ago or so. She was never a Biden insider. A national campaign is hard and you need people you know and trust running it, especially at the state level. She did not have that time. Her position papers were in part literally copied from Biden. Again, no opportunity to develop her own. If you stand up a campaign a year before the first primary, you have time for all these things. Time she did not have.
I didn't vote for her. But she was put in a bad position. (Of course she helped to prop up Biden's corpse so she has part of the blame.)
It wasn’t the best position (blame the party) but you also have to combine that with her being a very terrible politician herself.
A candidate who has to have dress rehearsals for donor dinners does not have the natural charisma to win over an electorate. If she was running against Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley instead of Donald Trump, I don’t even think the race would’ve been as close as it was.
She was literally his Vice President, who insisted that all the administration's policies be listed as achievements for "the Biden-Harris administration."
> "A national campaign is hard and you need people you know and trust running it, especially at the state level."
Kamala's demonstrated inability to keep staffers onboard due to her personality and management style was a major problem here. But notwithstanding that, Kamala still overperformed in swing states relative to deep red and deep blue states, both of which shifted *significantly* towards Trump. This suggests that the campaign was *effective* but the underlying fundamentals (i.e. the poor quality of Democratic national and local governance) were too poor for her to overcome.
> "Her position papers were in part literally copied from Biden. Again, no opportunity to develop her own"
Because she had no positions of her own, despite having run a presidential campaign in 2019 and having 4 years to refine them.
She could've been fine with new positions that were more vibes. You can't possibly claim Trump had well substantiated, well researched positions. She just needed to take positions at all, instead of being *only* vibes.
This is excellent. My only point of disagreement is that I’m not sure Kamala was ever capable - or credible - in making the pivot you (and I) wanted to see. I think it would have had to have come from a different candidate, one who hadn’t been in the administration. Which is why we needed a real primary - which Biden thwarted.
I agree, and I think people talk at cross purposes when discussing where the campaign went wrong. People point to the ways in which she should have done things differently (eg "give centrists clear, convincing, genuine reasons to vote for her") but she wouldn't realistically have been able to.
The ways she needed to be different sum up to 'she needed to be a different person entirely', so things that sound like "here are the things Harris should have done to win" come across as annoying to a lot of people. Voters wouldn't have liked her unless she transfigured into somebody else.
I said elsewhere they should have tried electro shock therapy on her, see if they could shake a different personality out of her.
She was actually a pretty decent AG. I wish that person had run for President
Wow. This is probably the single best piece of election commentary of the 2024 cycle. I've subscribed to your newsletter, and I only wish I had the spare cash for a founding membership.
Unfortunately money is tight at the moment. But know that, as a fellow reluctant Harris voter, I was profoundly moved by this essay, read in the early morning following Trump's victory. Please continue writing.
I think the gist here is very insightful; lip service to swing voters doesn't work when it's so transparent. But I think this misses on the details, because I expect people like you and I are extremely unrepresentative of the median swing voter. e.g. your opposition to unions and price controls are standard economically-literate positions, but most Americans, and most swing voters, are not libertarian and don't understand economics at all. The median swing voter probably has an overall favorable view of both unions and price controls, meaning that Kamala doing what you want and opposing them would have made her chances worse.
Discussions about tariffs illustrate this nicely. To the point where I think the word "tariff" shouldn't be used, and "import tax" should be used instead so at least the median voter knows it's a tax.
Great article. Coming from a different background, but probably similar thinking style, this represents my feelings too. I was willing to vote as I historically had in every election of my adult life, but I was neither excited nor certain it would benefit me or those I care about by building a more sane politics in the long term by itself. The great motivator was, of course, the alternative but we now have that largely because we presented no positive, consistent vision.
The people who are prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters at law schools are annoying, sure. But they don't think that Kamala Harris represents them, either. A lot of them spend a bunch of their time complaining online about Democrats and maybe not even voting for Democrats. It doesn't seem like Kamala really gave them the time of day during the campaign -- which I think was a good thing, and I'm someone who identifies strongly with the Democratic Party. Yes, the top centrist priority that you list -- "excellence in education" -- seems like something a Democrat running for state or local office needs to talk about in the manner you suggest if they were going to persuade you to vote for them. But this seems like a weird thing for Kamala Harris to spend time talking about in a campaign for the presidency.
Perhaps I am doing what you caution against ("But what I hope is this: the Democrats don't take this moment to lament to themselves how everyone fell victim to misinformation and imagined grievances")...
I feel like my biggest problem with the democratic party (the way they quickly develope a new consensus and then sell themselves on it completely) has now turned into a genuine liability for them.
There was absolutely every reason to know in advance that Kamala was an unpopular candidate. But then they sold themselves on her and then made a big point of saying how the Republicans were so weird and out of touch. And the truth is I think most of them have no sense of how inorganic this sort of 180 it is, or how firmly confined it is to their own quarters. They changed their mind about Kamala so surely too has the median voter.
Unfortunately, I don't see their next big consensus being that they've become insular and unattractive and in need of change.
I've seen this for a decade+ working in non-profits / education. It's consensus / conformity (femininity) without any countervailing individualism (masculinity). One could easily argue that the Republican side of the ledger is too masculine, but they seem to have at least an iota of self awareness that the Left / Democrats / (elite) women do not. It's a problem of always and everywhere projecting outward without ever looking inward.
There is a vigorous left-of-center gender critical/sex realist backlash against gender identity ideology, and women are playing a major role in it. We have no use for progressives' culture of censorship and retribution against those who dare challenge progressive orthodoxy.
Hi Tracing, I've become a big admirer of your investigative work, and find your thought processes interesting. But I'm probably pretty far to the left of your median commentator, if only because I believe there's still a skin-crawling amount of racism around (and many even "intellectual" comment sections are absolute proof). Now, there's stuff they tell you not to do for serious activism, e.g. don't argue with people's fears, it's an emotional thing. I'm bad at following that, it doesn't fit my personality, so this comment may be a bad idea.
I think I may be getting radicalized, or maybe social-media poisoned (see above skin-crawling racism), but I worry what you want in your post is simply not possible in our polarized world. And I don't know where to go from there. There's a concept I call the "The Right-Wing Ranter Veto" (not saying anything about you personally, that's just what I call it). That is, across the entire world, all policies and discussions are to be subject the veto of ranting right-wingers. It's the mirror-image of "snowflake" sensitivities. It's an endless sequence of the form: "This person said something we *veto* - DENOUNCE THEM NOW!". What does one do in response? It's kind of a trap. Nothing works.
"Well, maybe they didn't phrase that well, but the concept is ..."
"STOP MAKING EXCUSES! THEY'RE BAD! VETO! DENOUNCE THEM!"
"There's reasons behind this ..."
"Ohh, you're not listening to me, DENOUNCE THEM!!"
"I really don't think it's worth getting worked up over ..."
"THIS IS WHY TRUMP WON! YOU DIDN'T DENOUNCE THEM!!!"
There's simply an endless cycle of being told either be more Catholic than the Pope (or maybe more racist than the racists), or it's your fault. The key point is there will *always* be something, somewhere, for this right-wing ranting. If nothing else, they'll just make stuff up, that's what clickbaiters do. And some on the left will quite obviously conclude that playing this game is for suckers. Which of course provides a constant enemy for right-wing ranters to demand that would-be centrists denounce.
Some political theorists say Democracy cannot be sustained in the long term. At times I see what they mean.
learn to rant back?
see how, in your examples, you dont offer a full-throated defense of the thing? (whatever the thing may be)
is it because "your things" are so much subtler and finer and more complex in their functioning than "their things"? maybe. but is it entirely? are you sure there aren't some things that maybe, possibly, you dont enjoy defending, because you know somewhere inside that they're wrong? and that's maybe why you're pre-weaseling even in an imaginary argument with a caricature? because that seems like weird behavior otherwise...
Ranting is anti-social and completely inappropriate in a debate or discussion. No one defends that sort of thing in a debate, and even online trolls who pretend to care will say they don't like ranting and screaming (from the other side, of course).
LOOK, IF YOURE TRYING TO WIN ELECTIONS, YOU HAVE TO SEEM LIKE YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING CARE, AND ONE WAY TO SEEM LIKE YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING CARE IS TO BE REALLY FUCKING ANGRY. ITS THAT FUCKING SIMPLE. HOW DO YOU NOT GET THIS?
YOU SHOULD BE FUCKING FURIOUS THAT RIGHT-WING RANTERS ARE MISREPRESENTING AND MISCHARACTERIZING YOUR POLICIES AND IDEAS. WHY ARENT YOU ANGRY THAT THEYRE FUCKING LYING? *cough* either you dont actually care as much as they do (possible), you dont actually want to defend all the stuff theyre attacking (also possible), or you're just a wimp who anyone loud could run over. it couldnt possibly be the last one, so which of the first two is it?
Do you think wimps can't be correct on a topic?
Sure, we could all just descend into screaming and shouting matches. That's the path of no productive conversation or doing better than the state of nature. This is hardly some left-wing perspective either, the Bible has verses which state the people should not let their anger control them.
You yourself acknowledge that being a furious heckler is just one way to demonstrate caring. While I have a dismal view on how smart the average voter is, I think they grasp all the other ways quite well.
sometimes you have to fight even though you're correct. there even exist people who can *control anger*! or there used to. they were called "orators."
but i will let you in on a little secret. there is a form of irate expression surpassing even capital letters. cato the elder was known to break out in fits of it. its called jambus...but lets start with someone who can use capital letters when she or he feels the need.
It's not a question of fighting despite being correct, it's about fighting in a way that doesn't shut down the conversation. Shouting or typing in all-caps is an attempt to terminate the conversation by forcing the framing you want. It's entirely unproductive and doesn't do anything so that one or both sides can learn or understand anything.
I honestly don't know if the Cheney-hugging and Israel-supporting hurt her or helped her, on net. It's true that both the ANC and LDP were recently kicked out of their decades-long hold on power. I suppose I was stupid to think that just having a younger candidate whose brain was not mush would be enough to stop that from happening here. I'd like to be able to say "Well, that proves that she should have opposed the Jones Act!" or whatever. What I do think is that a woman who couldn't even try very hard to distance herself from her unpopular boss is probably congenitally incapable of shivving the Machine.
My silver lining is that I will hopefully never have to hear from Allan Lichtman or his stupid keys ever again.
Poor Allan Lichtman. Kinda feel sorry for him.
He was wrong in 2016 and tried to cover it up, so I don't think he's really behaved ethically enough to earn your sympathy.
Perhaps you're right. But he's old. Something tragic about going out like that.
I agree that Kamala did not represent people with your centrist policy views, and I share the particular four views you list. And I certainly agree Biden's decision to try to run again was unconscionable.
I disagree that that's why she lost, and I think you are typical minding and underselling your own moral and intellectual superiority. The median American voter is not a principled centrist like you. The median American voter is dumb, ignorant, and morally corrupt, because they have been brain-poisoned by the evil Borderer-spawned anti-culture of the "heartland". There is no path to decisively defeating Trumpism that doesn't involve figuring out how to push back more effectively on that anti-culture. I don't know how to do that, but I am extremely skeptical that a better centrist-appealing policy program has much to do with it.
I think this is exactly the attitude that makes it so hard for Democrats to win. The absolute certainty that they are superior to provincials and that said provincials are bad, dumb people and deserve to be talked down to.
Just because I was lucky enough to get a good education that doesn't mean people in Arkansas who have lived entirely different lives than me and as such disagree with me on a range of topics are inferior to me.
Get over it. We are a big and diverse country and NOBODY gets exactly what they want in a candidate.
You vote for the best candidate and don’t expect to get a custom, bespoke candidate that’s everything you ever wanted.
I voted for Kamala because she is sane, smart and competent. The bad guy got in anyway, but maybe he would not have if whiners had accepted that you don’t get everything you want.
Thanks for responding.
I got over it and voted for a candidate I thought, and think, was terrible and wholly failed to understand and represent me. Now that you’ve seen how bad of a losing strategy that was, are you going to double down on it or recognize what went wrong?
What went wrong is that this country is full of assholes.
When your jokes bomb, you don't blame the audience. You write better jokes.*
*(Unless you're modern Hollywood or the current Democratic party.)
You made my point
I think you made their's first though. Responding to people who disagree with you are have a different perspective by calling them "assholes" (or stupid) instead of pausing to consider whether another view could hold any merit is a big reason the election went the way it did
Tell me how Germans ought to have heard Hitler out — that he had good reason for exterminating Jewish people and how it wasn’t nice to just call him a murderer.
If you’re so butt hurt you’d vote for someone evil, you’re evil.
I would agree with you if Harris had been selected through some kind of primary or Dem convention run-off instead of being handed the nomination on a silver platter.
In a country with so many reasonable, smart, capable and likable Democrats they only had to select ONE person who could handily beat a vain egomaniac with visible signs of mush between his ears. Ultimately the DNC forgot their responsibility to put out a candidate that a mere simple majority of the American people would want to vote for.
And I say this as a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool democrat.
If you haven't already listen to James Carville on The Bulwark. He says the DNC should be treated like a company taken over by private equity. Crappy parts sold, and good communicators installed.
Nothing about Kamala’s politics was genuine. Flip flopping with little to no explanation is cringe! May this concession speech today be her Swan Song. Extremely mediocre politician!
The Democrats have somehow managed to persuade centrists that they're crazy socialists and leftists that they're heartless neoliberals.
The left does appear to believe that "immediate full communism" should be very easy to implement and that the Democrats are simply refusing to do it, which can only be because they're actually secretly right-wing. I don't fully understand this position. I used to be a pretty committed socialist and I eventually became convinced that the government simply could not do a lot of the things we wanted it to do. The "left-wing populism" argument continually runs aground on the problem that the state cannot actually just make everyone rich by imposing price controls and nationalising everything.
The Democrats probably should just fully repudiate the entire progressive agenda and just run on being a more competent version of the Republicans, who won't do weird shit like impose tariffs or ban abortion. Everyone who would complain about this is politically powerless in America and can be ignored. If I had to guess I'll say that's what they'll end up doing.
Hi Trace, NE-2 voter here. I've always held your work up to friends as "This guy writes like peak Omaha" and I am going to continue doing that even though you are gone. I confess I voted against the Machine but with mirrored frustrations. Posts like this give me hope that one day there will be a Quality Candidate (TM) and we can all agree on them and post Jeb!-style memes online.
I had perfectly standard right-wing reasons for voting against the Machine (student loan vote-buying, BLM riots, online censorship of 2020, school closures, etc.) I was ever so slightly inclined to believe government and politics would attract right-wing talent when Elon bought X (lol!) Quite a few other tech geniuses are (uneasy) Trump supporters this time around... They've even got my old hero, Ron Paul, coming up to bat! This is how I imagine it feels to be a stereotypical teenage girl and find out Charli XCX tweeted 'Kamala is brat'. I could have been hopeful once. I am older now.
You listed a ton of Kamala's flip-flops, I will mention the one I remember - her 2020 VP debate where she said she would 'not take the Trump vaccine'. I remember thinking it was an insane statement, implying that Trump was fiddling with the beakers somehow, giving him even way more credit than necessary while also trashing OWS. It was even more insane when those 'Trump vaccines' were announced less than 72 hours after the election, and it turned out that OWS was fine all along. It was absolutely infuriating once the mandate was announced, Kamala's statement was completely memory-holed, and 'why is the vaccine so politicized' became a national conversation.
I can't figure out why she did this. Was it to win the anti-vax left-wingers? Was it a failsafe that Biden demanded of her, thinking he'd have it as leverage in a caucus? Did she think of this on her own? Was it just a ploy to avoid giving anyone a good reason to vote for Trump?
Truth be told, I think the knowledge that government and high society is run by the left-wingers is why so many people voted for Trump. If Trump did most/some/a few of the things he promised I think people would run in horror. But Kamala's administration made no promises and kept none either. Trump is a known bullshitter. Kamala is a known bullshitter. Only one of these people pretended to be an honest broker. We all know that the civil service will fight tooth and nail to stop a Republican bullshitter. They would happily ask me to make a million sacrifices for their bullshitter, and completely reverse course a week later.
You're applying "presentism" to the politics of the time. Trump used to be a big proponent of the Covid vaccine. It was, for a short time, going to be a major achievement of his administration. This in typical political Orwell fashion, has been memory-holed by right-wingers since they're so in thrall to the anti-vaxxer lunacy. A lot of Democrats and liberals were suspicious that Trump was telling the people working on the vaccine to cut corners on safety testing so that he could take credit. After the safety was later vouched for by trustworthy scientists, those people were re-assured. And then Trump went anti-vaccine (which is a really sad story, it was clear he didn't want to do it because he wanted credit - but literally, he'd rather have people get sick and die if it helped him gain power). But it's all completely consistent with the scientific data interacting with obvious politics if you look at the timeline carefully.
Kamala’s hesitation about the vaccine in 2020 is functionally no different than the anti-vax arguments that later took hold on the right. She expressed doubt about a vaccine based on the person in office and their influence over the vaccine manufacturers, identical to the behavior of the anti-vax movement. You could charitably say the Stage I results came out a few days after, but if you say the fear is they were rigged, that's no different from saying the Stage II stuff was rigged too. There was no movement to re-do Stage I results, meaning that this fear was either misplaced, that the benefits of fast approval offset any drawbacks, or that this fear just completely ignored. As for the lives lost waiting - I suspect Trump was hammering the FDA to approve, and didn't get it, for precisely the same reasons he might tamper with the results.
When Trump does these reversals, people call him on it. (I don't know if he actually did this here. Last thing I saw Trump say on this was 'beautiful vaccines, terrible mandate' but I could be wrong and he's fully renounced the vaccine.) My point is, why does the DNC tell me I am an idiot for thinking this kind of reversal is bad when Kamala does it? Why don't they replace her with someone else for the Presidential nom, and completely avoid this whole quandry?
There is an enormous difference between the current Republican sheer nuttiness of vaccine denial, and Harris being suspicious that a specific person who is a known massive liar would in fact lie about something. More importantly, the very action you are trying to make a negative of Harris - changing her mind on safety - is attributed to information from expert sources, which she then believes instead of outright lying about it like many right-wingers do.
Now, having done the formal rebuttal, let me go a bit meta. What you are doing is generously called motivated reasoning. You want to find something you can twist, some fog, some way to throw dirt, on Harris here, even in the face the utter horror of what Trump and Republicans have been doing now with spreading anti-vaccine disinformation. I feel quite strongly about this, as maliciously causing sickness and death for power is pure moral monster.
And I fear: THERE IS NO RATIONAL ARGUMENT WHICH WILL CONVINCE YOU!
Look at how far you are reaching - Harris said something which can sort of, kind of, stand on your head and squint real hard, portrayed as vaguely in the same abstract category of the lunatics ("based on the person in office"), SO BOTH SIDES! ("functionally no different"). There is nothing the Democrats can reasonably do in the face of this, short of becoming complete nuts like the anti-vaxxers.
This is proving my point elsewhere about why the original post is misguided. It's just not possible to do, look at social media for proof.
I'll stop posting after this, as we are at an impasse and I don't want to trouble our host.
I should probably have worded this better: I don't care what Kalama personally thinks about vaccines all that much. I care very much that her public opinion changes rapidly based on what is politically convenient, on such a serious issue. Simply put, I don't think her estimation of Pfizer's test results actually changed between the October Stage I results and Stage II in mid-November, or in December. I don't think her authoritative sources (Fauci, but more generally the people at FDA/OWS/Pfizer) were claiming that the vaccine tests were being tampered with, they certainly made no such claims in mid-November. I think she took this opinion because it would prove helpful in the election. That's not a stretch to believe.
And my point is this: To avoid me noticing this obvious reversal, the first and easiest thing to do was run someone *other than Kamala.* I don't need an anti-vax Democratic candidate, I don't want one. But if someone in or running for office says, "Vaccine is safe/unsafe" I want that to be information I and others can incorporate into the actions I take in my life, and not just a thing they say because it helps them for three weeks. It's especially bad when someone does this reversal and the press goes above and beyond trying to justify why it was acceptable in this specific case. It suggests that other lies will be tolerated, and if the roles were reversed, the damage to me would be exactly the same. If we want voters to put stock in officials and trust in government, "say what I need to say until it is time to do a 180, then call people schizoids for replicating my behavior" is a bad way to go.
Thanks for commenting. We're both pushing for the same norm here, just mad at different people. Like I said earlier, really hoping on a better candidate in the next round.
This is a really, really good essay.
Just a reminder Biden only endorsed her to screw over the Democrat establishment that was angling for someone else
Specifically, to screw over the Obamas.
She was not running until 120 days ago or so. She was never a Biden insider. A national campaign is hard and you need people you know and trust running it, especially at the state level. She did not have that time. Her position papers were in part literally copied from Biden. Again, no opportunity to develop her own. If you stand up a campaign a year before the first primary, you have time for all these things. Time she did not have.
I didn't vote for her. But she was put in a bad position. (Of course she helped to prop up Biden's corpse so she has part of the blame.)
It wasn’t the best position (blame the party) but you also have to combine that with her being a very terrible politician herself.
A candidate who has to have dress rehearsals for donor dinners does not have the natural charisma to win over an electorate. If she was running against Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley instead of Donald Trump, I don’t even think the race would’ve been as close as it was.
> "She was never a Biden insider"
She was literally his Vice President, who insisted that all the administration's policies be listed as achievements for "the Biden-Harris administration."
> "A national campaign is hard and you need people you know and trust running it, especially at the state level."
Kamala's demonstrated inability to keep staffers onboard due to her personality and management style was a major problem here. But notwithstanding that, Kamala still overperformed in swing states relative to deep red and deep blue states, both of which shifted *significantly* towards Trump. This suggests that the campaign was *effective* but the underlying fundamentals (i.e. the poor quality of Democratic national and local governance) were too poor for her to overcome.
> "Her position papers were in part literally copied from Biden. Again, no opportunity to develop her own"
Because she had no positions of her own, despite having run a presidential campaign in 2019 and having 4 years to refine them.
She could've been fine with new positions that were more vibes. You can't possibly claim Trump had well substantiated, well researched positions. She just needed to take positions at all, instead of being *only* vibes.
Thank you for not joining the morning-after pile-on.