In the wake of losing an election, some consideration of why your side lost, that is, doing a postmortem, is an entirely reasonable idea.
1Assuming, that is, the desire is actual analysis and it's done right.
Neither of which we got. No actual analysis and what was done wasn't even done right. So let me start this by laying out my own bias, my own analysis of the "why," admittedly a limited one.
I think the Harris campaign made three significant mistakes. First, she didn't separate herself from Biden on Gaza.
2 Doing so would surely have cost her some votes but just as surely gained her a good number more.
Second, she began with a message of what could be summarized as "hope and the future" only to turn her back on her base, preferring to vainly seek votes among those all but mythical "moderate" GOPpers and the all too real 1% by campaigning with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban instead of with UAW President Shawn Fain or other labor and progressive leaders.
Third, the last weeks of the campaign revolved almost entirely around "I'm not Trump." (Which was, interestingly, the same mistake made in 2016.) A legitimate stand, particularly in the face of the genuine threat to democracy, but nowhere near adequate standing alone, because people are almost always going to vote on immediate concerns as opposed to future hypotheticals, even likely ones.
None of that, of course, was raised in postmortems from the corporate media, political big heads, or consultant coterie. Except, that is, to brush by them in their haste to get to the REAL problem.
Oh, no, they cried almost in unison, the result was all because Kamala Harris was way,
way too much into "identity politics," in particular in support of transgender folks who, to hear them say it (but not openly) really are kinda weird and who everybody hates and who we should not only throw under the bus, we should back over the corpse a couple of times to be sure.
Dan Moynihan at Can We Still Govern brings us
a New York Times tetrarchy:
- There is Bari Weiss, denouncing "running on extraordinarily niche issues that you find on college campuses and in gender studies departments." Forgetting that, as a married lesbian, just a generation ago she and her rights would have been such a "niche issue."
- There is Bret Stephens, insisting that "today’s left increasingly stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms." Because regarding basic human rights as worthy of respect is "bizarre."
- And there's Nicholas Kristof, assuring us that Democrats can only compete if they “focus more on minimum wages and child care than pronouns and purity." As if dwelling on "pronouns and purity" described her practice rather than his paranoia.
- And of course,
there is Maureen Dowd, smirking the right-wig mantra "woke is broke" and charging
progressives failed to realize that women can be worried both about reproductive rights and their "daughters compet[ing] fairly on the playing field."3
As if loss of reproductive health care was an equal worry to the hypothetical possibility of facing a trans girl on the other school's team.
In the course of this, she approvingly quoted James Carville and Rahm Emanuel and actually called Michael Dukakis an "avatar of elitism," a title that fits her far better.
On top of that, Dowd
got extra exposure from Mika Brzezinski of Joe Scarborough's MSNBC morning program, who read the entire thing on-air the day after it was published. Scarborough, for his part,
went on a wildly transphobic rant on [the day after the election] against “men who transition after puberty competing against young girls,” saying that opposing trans-inclusive athletic policies is “not a hard call.”
In other words, it was a buncha damn, comfortable, secure, rich, white people saying that the rights of vulnerable people which are of no benefit to them are therefore unworthy of consideration.
But of course it wasn't just the media elite, the sneering also came from inside the Democratic Party itself.
As I think folks have heard, there was New York Rep. Tom Suozzi declaring the party must “stop pandering to the far left” on trans rights. “I don’t want to discriminate, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports," he said, adding "Democrats should be saying that.” Which means, of course, that he does want to discriminate.
More surprising to some, there was Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, offering "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,” rather unsubtly patting himself on the back for his supposedly courageous expression of transphobia.
Fortunately,
there has been pushback from other Congressional Democrats against these and other trimmers
4 who are dipping their toe in the waters to see how far they can distance themselves from trans rights without political cost (or better yet, with political praise).
Related to which we now have Jonathan Larsen of The Fucking News
reporting that the DNC's search for a new party chair is being defined by people screeching that the party has become too "woke"
5 and demanding it must "return" to the "center" because they "don’t want to be the freak show party" and do want a party chair "who’s going to be for the guy who drives a truck back home at the end of the day” and I guess women and people of color need not apply for inclusion - unless, I suppose, if they drive trucks (The image of the "guy" "truck driver" came up more than once.
6)
It appears that's truer than not, since one DNC member described the field of potential chairs as “White Guy Winter,” with the list essentially empty of women or non-white people but including, deity help us, Rahm Emanuel.
All of which goes to raise the point I really wanted to get to. This sort of "we've gone too far" tut-tutting and hand-wringing is neither new nor actually about tans folks except as they serve as the target
du jour.
It is, rather, part of an overall effort by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, the I suppose you could call it legacy party, to find someone, something, some force, to blame for election losses that does not involve, that actively avoids, looking at the campaign itself, looking at the idea that maybe it was the party apparatus that screwed up.
Indeed, it's hard to find any analysis from any such quarter that does not praise the Harris-Walz campaign with terms like "great job" and "no mistakes" while dismissing critiques out it of hand as unproductive or even destructive finger-pointing - while busily pointing destructive fingers at anyone convenient, particularly the vulnerable population of trans folks still struggling for basic recognition of their rights, indeed of their existence. (I say that knowing much the same could be said of a good number of other vulnerable populations; it's just that this time it's trans folks.)
Same as it ever was: After 2016, the same "blame anybody else" game got played. There, the blamed included
third party voters, sexism, Russian interference, James Comey re-opening the email-investigation,
millennials, and even
Bernie Sanders - but not, oh no of course not, the party or the Clinton campaign.
This time it's "wokeness" and trans people, but the real point is the same in each case: to protect the power and position of a party hierarchy more dedicated to their prestige and perks than public benefit and committed to "winning" as a concept rather than as a program of progress.
It other words, it was intended then and is again now to smack down the influence of the actually progressive wing of the party by reasserting the control of the institutional party apparatus.
Which means - coming to the blunt bottom line - that it's time to realize, we have to realize, that the Democrats are not on our side, not on the side of doing what is right and just, not on the side of progress rather than stasis.
Some individual Democrats, yes. The party itself, no, and all the talk about "moving to the center" is about just that: stasis. It's about not advocating anything that does not already have wide support, about following, never leading, about, bluntly, being damn cowards. And doing it even as both public polling and election results on ballot questions says that on a number of those untouchable "too left" issues (including trans rights) the public is already there.
Okay. After all that, you'd think I'm chock full of idea about what to do now.
I'm not.
I'm just sure the one thing we need to do is not give up. To keep going. To seek comfort and find strength in community and, as others have noted, that community is out there and may even be next door.
So we have to, each of us in whatever way we can, just keep going. Just persist. Just be stubborn. If that's too much, then just survive. But like the man in the movie said,
"Never give up! Never surrender!" Or, if you prefer a musical reference, "
Rejoice, rejoice/We have no choice/But to carry on."
Because it can get better. And comparing ourselves to the 1900 that George Will said the conservatives' goal is to recreate, we have come so far as to astonish the most stoic among us. Even within our own lifetimes we have seen changes to be celebrated and worth building on. And, romantic that I am, I still believe in the line about the moral arc of the universe.
However - and I know it's hard to hear but yes, it's true - it will undoubtedly get worse before it gets better. Which brings me to something else. But that's for another post.
1Chess grandmaster and one-time world champion Jose Raul Capablanca once said "I have learned more from each of my defeats than I have from all of my victories.”
2Early in her campaign, I thought Harris, who expressions on the need for humanitarian aid was more intense than Biden's, was trying to distance herself from him without openly breaking from the administration of which she was still part. The same issue faced Hubert Humphrey in 1968 over the Indochina War. He finally, "tight-lipped and grim," made the break. She never did, which raises the very real possibility that she didn't separate from him because she never wanted to. However, that doesn't change the judgment that not doing so cost her a good number of votes.
3Recent studies challenge that "concern." One, from 2021 from the Center for American Progress, shows no impact on girls' participation in sports from allowing trans girls to join those teams. Another, published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2024, found that "physical performance of nonathletic trans people who have undergone GAHT for at least 2 years approaches that of cisgender controls." Finally, in October the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a study saying that at least by some measures, transwomen athletes may be at a
disadvantage as compared to ciswomen.
4"Trimmer" (referring to trimming the sails of a ship) was a term used in labor struggles to refer to those whose support for worker rights shrank as soon as things got tough.
5The next time anyone complains about anything being "woke," tell them the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" and ask them why they think that's a bad thing.
6You know the saying about generals always planning to fight the previous war? It appears the Dems will go after the "bros," planning to fight the previous election.