Earlier today, a colleague forwarded me a thread of messages from an email list serving left-wing inside-the-beltway PR professionals. The consensus of the group could be summarized as follows: the Biden campaign is an embarrassment; the president is not paying enough attention to people like themselves and heeding their advice; this is the sole reason his polling numbers are in the dumps; and now, as a result, the entire 2024 campaign is effectively doomed from the start.
A few of them even said, in effect, "I'm giving up on this round. I assume Trump is going to win; so I'm just going to wait out the next four years and come back when there's a younger, more lefty candidate running in 2028."
There were several things annoying about all this at once. First, there was the incredible hubris of their self-satisfied belief that, if only the administration would listen to people like them, their problems would be solved. There was the enormous self-complacency involved in refusing to learn any of the lessons of the past ten years, during which progressive advocacy organizations adopted ever more radical left-wing rhetoric and posturing, and only seemed to alienate the U.S. public more in the process.
There is the cowardly type of cynicism involved in predicting doom, and declaring preemptively that no one listens to them, so that when disaster falls they can claim to have been right all along. There is the total obliviousness and unwillingness to even consider the possibility that it may be precisely because Democratic politicians listened to people like them (like me, too, I must add—I have been one of them; was I not a policy and comms strategist for a liberal NGO?) that we are in this mess.
But the worst—the very most obnoxious thing—about the whole thread was undoubtedly the line about sitting out this election and waiting for a more inspiring progressive candidate in 2028. Because here, the depth of the self-complacency truly emerges. After all—what makes these people think that there will be a 2028 election, if Biden loses? What makes them think that there will be another chance, an opportunity for a do-over, if people "sit out" this election?
In short: as D.H. Lawrence wrote, "Why should the deluge wait while these young gentry go on eating good dinners for fifty more long years?" Why should they "expect such a long smooth run for their very paltry little bit of money?"
I'm sorry to keep quoting from this same short poem—but it just keeps coming up. If the world wants me to stop quoting it, they should stop doing things that make it so apropos. It captures and distills so perfectly the eerie obliviousness and complacency with which people—especially people who ought to know better, such as professional activists on the left—keep confronting the Trump era.
The PR professionals' proposal to "wait out this election" tells us everything we need to know about the world of beltway professionals. They assume that their world is fixed, and unchanging. There will always be new elections; the merry-go-round never stops. There will always be campaigns to work on and jobs to get in the world of political theater.
Somehow, they have managed not to notice that Trump is planning to staff his campaign with people whose sole mission in life is to hollow out such a world—which, flawed and smug as it may be, is worth preserving as a perhaps inevitable adjunct to democracy. They have not noticed that Trump has no intent to preserve this or any other adjunct to democracy. They have not considered seriously that Trump may actually mean exactly what he says, when he declares that he intends to be a "dictator on day one."
They have not noticed that Trump is spending his time lately with a literal prison choir of convicted January 6 insurrectionists—the implication being, since they seem to have missed it, that his first plan of action after being re-elected will be to pardon the lot of them, and mobilize them to do his bidding as a sort of army of MAGA brownshirts.
They say they can "wait out" this election, and back a more "inspiring" candidate in 2028. But why do they think there will be a campaign in 2028? Why do they think we will still have things so quaint as elections—let alone jobs for political consultants and comms strategists—as late as 2028? Do they not understand the nature of the fascist revolution Trump is proclaiming? Do they really think, to echo Lawrence, that the deluge—the looming political apocalypse—will give them fifty more years of good dinners—or even just four more years—before it comes?
Why do people assume their world is safe? Why do they assume that nothing will change? Why do they take for granted that, undefended, the world they know will keep on guaranteeing them a handsome living—and they don't even have to fight for that world to get it? They can "wait it out"?
It is hard not to think that we might well look back on that thread, a few years from now—and regard it with something of the same dread with which we view the petrified corpses of Pompeii. Good god, we think: they didn't know what was coming. They took as something permanent what could actually be snatched from them in an instant...
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