Friday, November 22, 2024
A few days after the election, I remember seeing a Washington Post column that
said something like "You can't win an election if you're going to shun or
denigrate half the electorate." And I remember wishing I could ask the
author, in all earnestness: Why not?
After
all, hadn't we just seen someone win an election while shunning and denigrating
half the electorate? Clearly it's possible! The Post's hypothesis had been
decisively falsified less than a week before!
This came up again today with the ongoing "echo
chamber" discourse about BlueSky, paired against the fact that
Republicans did in fact manage to win an election while generating an almost
entirely cloistered epistemic bubble for themselves. The belief that echo
chambers are antipathic to good electoral strategy is a comforting belief for
people of a certain political persuasion (myself included!), but it just seems
not to be true.
So the
real question, and I think harder question, for Democrats is -- what if echo
chambers work? What if one can win an election by constructing
an epistemic fortress and just mainlining as many conspiracy theories and wild
accusations about the other sides as humanly (or AI-ing-ly) possible?
It's a
harder question because, at least for someone like me, this would be a very sad
reality to come to grips with. I very fervently don't think
democracy should be about scratching your way to the thinnest possible
plurality and then steamrolling the other side. If you asked me what I would
hope to happen to MAGA Republicans in rural Idaho or whatever after a Kamala
Harris win, I'd have answered "I hope they get good healthcare, decent
jobs, and well-funded schools." I have no desire to unleash recriminations
upon "enemies", and I hate the idea of politics as a lawless
bloodsport where all is fair if it wins you an election.
But
maybe people like me are naive, and the lesson that has to be learned from 2024
(and 2016) is that brutal, no quarter, snarling attacks are an electorally
winning play, and that for Democrats to win they need to harness their inner
demonization machine and find some people to vilify. Of course, one could
respond to this by saying that even if such a strategy is electorally
superior at the margins, it's just plain wrong. That's always a valid response,
and one might notice that it's the same response given to arguments that
Democrats need to throw trans persons under the bus for electoral wins. There,
of course, the retort is "well, enjoy feeling morally pure as you lose the
Senate for the next decade" -- it's of course fascinating that the Post would
never apply a similar retort to those demand foreswearing scorched-earth
electoral tactics against the GOP ("have fun patting yourselves on the
back for your moral purity!"). It goes to show which moral commitments are
truly seen as sacrosanct by the mainstream media, and which aren't.
But if
we leave the moral objection aside, there remains one circle I cannot quite
square. I've never been one to think, contra some narratives, that Democrats
have just preemptively surrendered at every turn (e.g., as far as I know I'm
the only person who thinks Chuck Schumer has done a pretty good job
keeping a very thin majority dependent on some very unreliable
actors relatively unified over the course of his tenure). Nonetheless, I am,
with great reluctance, coming to believe that Democrats cannot win elections
solely by taking the high road and demonstrating sober commitment to good
governance and rule of law, when pitted against the emotional fever-dream
populist pitch that characterizes the modern GOP. Again -- this is not a
conclusion I'm happy to accede to. There probably are some people whose every
instinct is to destroy the opposition at all costs and have to be persuaded to
stay within the lines; but as noted above that's not me. My sensibilities are
extremely wedded towards sober technocracy and good governance, and I
reflexively recoil at the sort of hardball, "crush the enemy" tactics
we're talking about here.
But
here's my problem: if over the short term I think Democrats need to compete
with the GOP on the level of back-alley brawl politics, over the long term I
think that a politics that takes that form is inherently slanted towards the
right. We will never be able to out-hate the GOP. We'll never be better than
them at conjuring up some shadowy enemy to put people into a frenzy. There are
absolutely ways to pitch distrust towards established institutions and a belief
that "They" are out to get "Us" in a left-ish manner, but
ultimately those narratives are going to benefit the right more (and we're
already seeing how that pipeline flows from left-to-right in the form of folks
like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard). So even if I may believe that my fighting
faith of good governance liberalism just isn't winning elections, I'm also very
concerned that the punchier left-wing populist alternatives will generate a
political environment that is even more systematically slanted towards the
right. Conspiratorial populism is home turf advantage for the right -- if
that's the field we're playing on, we're always going to be starting from
behind.
As I
said, I don't have a way to square this circle. I'm not a political strategist,
and I'm trying to avoid the temptation of "just agree with me and of
course we'll win elections." But it's something I'm feeling very glum
about.
Posted by David Schraub at 8:32 PM 
Labels: Democrats, extremism, GOP, populism, Republicans
