I have no appetite for the intra-party recriminations that have dominated the conversation on the Left this past week—the "blame game," as one New York Times article put it. For one thing, it seems to me this conversation is completely unproductive. For another, it mostly seems to help Trump. Turning on our own leaders and institutions in a moment of defeat is an all-too-common left-wing vice, and I don't see how anyone benefits from it except the Right.
But most importantly of all, I just don't think any of the recriminations ring true. Let's take them one at a time.
Recrimination 1: Biden "didn't leave the race soon enough."
It's impossible to run the counterfactual, so—who really knows? But how quickly we've all lost any sense of gratitude for the fact that Biden ultimately did exactly what the party asked of him. He stepped aside; and it can't have been an easy pill to swallow. He was supportive of his successor without trying to hog the spotlight or go off-script in his messaging (something that wasn't always true of that other presidential surrogate for Harris, Obama).
"But maybe if we had run Whitmer! Maybe if we had run Shapiro! Maybe if we had run Dean Phillips!" Who knows? What's the point of asking? "Look in my face," as Dante Gabriel Rossetti once wrote: "My name is Might-Have-Been/ I am also called No-More, Too-Late, Farewell!" That is about all that can be said, of any of the counterfactuals the recriminators want to pose...
Recrimination 2: Harris was a weak candidate and/or there "should have been an open primary."
Again, it's impossible to know what might have been. But note this for the record: Harris started the race this summer with underwater approval ratings from the general public. She turned this around within a matter of days—a total reinvention of her public image that is almost unheard of in politics for its success and rapidity. You can see it happen in the 538 favorability tracker—watch that purple line improbably skyrocket this past summer, seemingly overnight!
Harris was also incredibly disciplined in her messaging throughout the campaign. She turned in the superior performance in the presidential debate. She chose a likable vice presidential candidate with appeal to those demographic groups among whom her support was flagging.
The worst moments for Harris in the campaign (and there were a couple) never stemmed from her own words or actions—but rather from those of her surrogates—the older ones who supposedly had more experience—as when Biden and Obama put their foot in their mouths (see Biden's garbled statement about Trump's supporters and/or the stand-up comedian who made racist jokes at Trump's MSG rally; and Obama's needlessly condescending remarks to Black voters).
Recrimination 3: Democrats were too "beholden to wokeness and identity politics."
Yeah right. Whoever is still arguing this point must have had this take saved on their computer since 2020 and has simply refused to update it in light of what the Harris campaign actually did. Any fair analysis of her messaging would find that she was actually incredibly disciplined about not coming across as playing the identity card or otherwise seeming too far left on these issues.
When journalists asked Harris about her historic glass-ceiling-busting campaign for president as a woman of color, for instance, she would just say: I'm running to be president for all Americans. When people asked her whether she thought sexism was holding voters back from supporting her (as Obama implied), she said: it's my obligation to earn every person's vote.
If anyone interfered with Harris's messaging on this issue and went off-script, it was the Obamas—who lived in the White House for eight years and who are supposedly the more polished and experienced politicians. Go figure.
I get that everyone still wants to re-litigate "the border" and "Defund the police"—but the fact is that police reform played no role in this campaign, and Harris ran on a pledge to end asylum. She shifted so far right on these and similar "cultural" issues that she managed to infuriate human rights activists like me (though I of course still voted and campaigned for her). There is no way that, by the end of this race, she still wasn't right-wing enough.
Recrimination 4: Democrats weren't economically populist enough or "didn't deliver on substance for working class voters"
Preposterous. Biden actually oversaw the most economically populist administration in our lifetimes. He completely departed from any lingering "neoliberalism" of which the left could still accuse the Democratic party. Look at his positions on antitrust, trade, protectionism, industrial policy, etc.
Also, Biden did deliver on substance. Indeed, that was all he did. Biden staked his entire presidency on the theory that if you deliver enough on substance, it will actually help your party win elections. He came through on major job-creating industrial policies and strengthened the party's ties to organized labor. Real wages rose over the course of his presidency.
The disturbing thing that this election revealed is, not that Democrats didn't do enough on policy substance—but rather that you can deliver the kitchen sink on policy substance and still no one will care. You can accomplish everything you promised, and people will not actually reward you for it—or even be aware that it happened.
So what does this election actually tell us?
What people don't want to acknowledge is that sometimes you can do everything right—and still lose. It's easier and more comforting to find someone to blame—that's less frightening than the conclusion that there was actually no way for a Democrat to win this election.
But why was there no way to win? Part of the answer surely lies in the fact that millions upon millions of people arrived at the ballot box with a completely distorted picture of reality in their heads. Elon Musk had purchased a major social media platform and used it to promote disinformation and spin an alternative version of the universe.
Contrast that with how Biden and Harris responded to electoral defeat. They graciously conceded the race and pledged to uphold the peaceful transfer of power—tamping down flickers of election disinformation and terrible "bar Trump under the 14th amendment" proposals that were appearing on the far left corners of the internet.
Why did Biden and Harris respond to this left-wing disinformation so differently from how Trump and Musk respond to right-wing disinformation? Because Biden and Harris are not actually willing to use lies to get ahead, or to mortgage the future of democracy for the sake of their own short-term private ambition. So how could they prevail against people who have no such scruples?
How could you compete/ Being honor bred, as W.B. Yeats once wrote, With one/ Who, were it proved he lies/ Were neither shamed in his own/ Nor in his neighbors' eyes.
The Democrats took it on the chin with honor—because they are honor-bred. And I will never fault them for that. Because our democracy will only survive so long as at least some people in this country are willing to put honor above their own crass self-interest, even if it means taking an honorable defeat once in a while.
But can disinformation really explain everything?
Maybe not. There's also people's selfishness, obliviousness, short-term thinking, and lack of understanding.
There's the fact that people don't recognize the existence of policy trade-offs. They don't want to admit that the COVID relief, which they liked, might also have exacted a toll from them by later on raising prices. They don't want to acknowledge that the temporary inflation they loathed so much might have been the price we had to pay for staving off a pandemic-era global economic depression and returning the economy in a matter of months to full employment.
There's also the fact that large numbers of people apparently think there's nothing wrong with Trump's racism and dictatorial ambitions. There's the fact that millions of people all over this country were apparently willing to vote in favor of mass detention camps and deportation of their own friends, coworkers, and neighbors. They were willing to vote for a man who borrows from the rhetoric of fascist dictators to describe racial out-groups as "poisoning the blood" of the nation.
Whatever is going on with such men and women, it is a pathology too deep for any Democratic candidate to take the blame. I don't think there's any great lesson for us to learn from people so utterly warped in their sense of morality that they simply don't care that Trump makes open threats of violence against vulnerable populations, because they don't see how it affects their interests directly.
I don't think the timeless spectacle of human greed and selfishness and stupidity—the triumph yet again of the basest appetites of human nature—has any great lesson to teach us, or that we just need to listen harder to the people who voted for fascism at the polls. I say with the poet Hugh MacDiarmid: It is a god-damned lie/ To say that these saved, or knew, anything worth any man's pride."
The best we can say instead, with MacDiarmid, is that: "In spite of all their kind, some elements of worth/ With difficulty persist here and there on Earth."
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