How liberals should celebrate the Fourth

Fireworks at the Navy Yard in DC, 2024

Folks on the left are often accused of being less patriotic than conservatives.  There's something to this.  Every year, Gallup asks us questions about our feelings for the USA. This year, 92 percent of Republicans said they were extremely or very proud to be an American. Only 36 percent of Democrats feel that way. 

Trump has something to do with this, but the gap was still wide in the middle of the Biden administration, 52-36. And Republicans even had an 8-point edge in the Dems' most patriotic year of the Obama administration. The younger they get the less patriotic.  Gen Z Democrats were 42 percent less proud to be Americans than the oldest cohort of Dems over the last five years.

Why is this?  Many reasons, I'm sure, but here's one I've observed first hand in studying and teaching US history over the past 37 years, and as a parent of three children.  You might call it the Howard Zinnization of the American history curriculum. 

From what I can see Howard Zinn's very popular book "A People's History of the United States," has influenced a majority of teachers now teaching US history, and might be the single most popular book to assign in their history classes. To quote the website of the Howard Zinn Project: 

The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in classrooms across the country.... With more than 168,000 people registered, and growing by more than 10,000 new registrants every year, the Zinn Education Project has become a leading resource for teachers and teacher educators.

Zinn's book was first published in 1980, sold 4 million copies by 2022, has been translated into a dozen different languages, and was adapted for children and assigned to my my daughters in middle school.  Here's what Zinn had to say that was relevant to the topic of national pride in the original edition of his book (which, yes, I own):

We must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been.  The history of any country presented as the history of a family conceals fierce conflicts of interest … between conquerors and conquered masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

We've seen the problem with this thinking in recent years, as the left has been divided into a circular firing squad more intent on dividing itself into victims and oppressors so the latter can be cancelled, and some have exited the left in response.  The Philosopher Richard Rorty forsaw this way back in 1998 in his wonderful antidote to Zinnism, Achieving Our Country, a book that liberals and leftists should read in the town square every Fourth after they recite the Declaration of Independence: we should 

refrain from thinking so much about otherness that we begin to acquiesce in what Todd Gitlin has called, in the title of a recent book, "the twilight of common dreams." It means deriving our moral identity, at least in part, from our citizenship in a democratic nation-state, and from leftist attempts to fulfill the promise of that nation.

The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.

We of the Left—not the environmentalist left or the LBGTQ left or the feminist left or the labor left or the progressive or moderate left—but a broad left-of-center coalition capable of winning national elections have to believe that we are capable of moving the country toward a better future—like Lincoln and Roosevelt did. Otherwise, we abandon the government to a Right that seems to want more, not less selfishness and sadism. 

Notes

For some thoughts about reasons to feel patriotic about America, I recommend Isaac Saul's essay for Independence Day 2025  "Do I love America? On patriotism and my country," on the Tangle website. It includes a link to the Tangle podcast version where he reads the essay. Also, "How Democrats Can Maintain Their Patriotism in the Trump Era," by Michael Baharaeen on the Liberal Patriot Substack. And Yasha Mounk giving an outsider's view of his adopted country.

 

Violence drowns out explanations

From the peaceful Mayday protest in DC

If the success of a protest movement depends on winning converts to the cause—fellow citizens who will either join it or vote with it—then recent opinion polls should give an indication of how the movement is doing so far.

In early June, YouGov polled about 3,000 American adults before and after the June 14 No Kings rally. The results were encouraging. Before June 14, 33 percent said they strongly approve of the protests; after, that number climbed to 38 percent, with another 9 percent approving “somewhat,” and somewhere between 16 and 25 percent of others who could be won over. 

In my last post I suggested that a better theme could win over those fence-sitters. Since then, the Senate passed a federal budget that would throw millions off health insurance while giving lucrative tax breaks mostly to the wealthy.

It’s also crucial that the movement remain peaceful and that it distances itself from any violence that occurs in connection with protests. By a margin of 42 to 35, respondents told YouGov they believed participants in recent Los Angeles protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were mostly violent.

And note how closely those results track with opinions on public approval of the protest (45-36 percent disapproval).

These results are consistent with extensive studies of 20th century protest movements around the globe, which found that nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent ones.

But also, when individuals associated in the public mind with an otherwise peaceful movement commit violent acts in conjunction with or close proximity to protests, it tends to undermine popular support.

No one understood this better than Martin Luther King Jr.

By 1962, his movement had been succeeding in winning popular support, largely because of the contrast playing out on the nightly news between peaceful protesters and violent segregationists who opposed them, especially Southern cops with their dogs and fire hoses. In Albany, Georgia, the movement encountered a different dynamic.

Unlike segregationists in other cities, Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett restrained his men from retaliating violently and against protesters. When gangs of local blacks—characterized by King biographer Taylor Branch as “juke-joint” hoodlums who were not “movement people,” began throwing bricks and bottles at police outside a meeting of organized protesters at Shiloh Baptist Church, Pritchett pushed through the crowd and into the Church, walked up to the podium, and spoke to the crowd.

“We respect your policy,” he said but added: “I ask your cooperation in keeping Albany peaceful. This business of throwing rocks is not good.”

Of course the movement people inside the church agreed—but what power did they have against the hoodlums outside?

King was in jail at this time. Later during the campaign, when organized protesters marched to the jail with the goal of being arrested to show the contrast between their peaceful demands for basic rights and unreasonable Southern resistance, “angry Negro bystanders” started hurling beer bottles, rocks and bricks at the arresting officers.

During the riot Pritchett quipped to reporters: “Did you see them non-violent rocks?” Press reports included a photograph of a cop holding a rock that knocked out two of his teeth. The New York Times published a “lauditory profile of Chief Pritchet,” Branch wrote. It seemed that a Southern cop, "not King, was the “master of nonviolence that night.”

But now, King was out of jail. When one of his associates suggested he should rationalize the violence  as an understandable response to segregation in his comments to reporters, King refused. The violence, King reasoned, would drowned out any such explanations, Branch wrote.

Meanwhile, King declared a day of penance and went on a “peacemaker’s tour of Albany’s Negro dives” to explain the nonviolent strategy to its patrons and how their violent reactions had undermined the movement. “We don’t need guns and ammunition, just the power of souls,” King told them.

King was modeling his behavior on Mahatma Gandhi, who fasted whenever his followers resorted to violence.

It’s important to note the connection between the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement and the fortunes of the Political Party more inclined to support its goals and thus associated with it in the public mind. 

Princeton Politics Professor Omar Wasow studied press coverage of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and found that “when the [protest] tactics were primarily nonviolent, the counties proximate to nonviolent activism tended to vote more liberally.” But when violence broke out in connection with protests, those counties voted more conservatively. Violent protests in reaction to King’s assassination may have helped to elect Richard Nixon in 1968. “In the counties with violence, the Democratic vote fell by at least 2 percent, which was enough to help Richard Nixon win the 1968 presidential election,” Wasow said.

This year, a May 25 YouGov Poll had the Democratic Party’s popular approval under water by a whopping 20 percent (58-38% unfavorable). Having been blamed for lawlessness at the border, and rising crime in cities, the Democrats can’t afford to be associated with more of the same.

Of course the current anti-Trump movement has no one well-respected and credible leader like King to make the case to purveyors of violence.

Violent eruptions on the sidelines of peaceful protests—like those at the recent Los Angeles anti-ICE riots or during the George Floyd protests of 2020—are probably inevitable.

But it’s imperative that leaders of the movement and the Democratic Party unequivocally, clearly, unambiguously, and in unison condemn the violence rather than try to justify it as many did in 2020, ignoring King’s maxim that violence drowns out explanations.

For example, Nicole Hannah Jones, a prominent figure in the “race reckoning” of 2020 and mastermind behind the New York Times 1619 project, argued that property destruction isn’t violence if no one is hurt—this at a time when police stations were burning on the nightly news, once famously behind a CNN reporter describing “mostly peaceful protests.”

Ta Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most prominent African American advocate of the 2010s, proclaimed that "The people who are called on to be nonviolent are the people with the ability to do the least amount of damage; whereas, we don't call upon those who have the most power and actually can do the most damage."

The Nation published an article with the headline: “In Defense of Destroying Property: We cannot conflate the destruction of plateglass with the violence that is being protested.”

Any nuance behind comments like these are sure to be drowned out by images of burning police stations and Waymos, as the polls on the LA protests show.

Also in their June polling, YouGov asked people about their lingering perceptions of the George Floyd protests and found that 46 percent thought they were “mostly violent,” and only 33 percent remembered them as “mostly peaceful.”

You would think the party and the leaders of organizations behind the protests like Indivisible would learn from past mistakes, but I’m not hopeful.

When the Democratic pollster (and self-described socialist) David Shor posted Wasow’s article after violence broke out during BLM protests in 2020, he was attacked relentlessly on Twitter by fellow liberals and then fired from his job at Civis Analytics, a consultancy founded by one of President Obama’s campaign analysts.

At least one Democratic member of Congress is repeating the mistakes of 2020 and instead of unequivocally distancing the cause from violence as King did, asserting “nobody was shot, nobody was killed” and “there was no violence,” at a time when Waymos were burning in the background. 

Note

On the Albany protest and King's response to violence see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 604-621.

The role of protest in the opposition

 

I made this sign for the "No Kings" protest June 14 along the bridge over the interstate in Littleton. I had to leave early, while the protest was still going on, and as I was walking back to my car, displaying the sign for drivers waiting in a very long line of stalled traffic, a man in a pickup truck leaned over a child in the passenger seat and shouted “Fuck You” while saluting me with his middle finger. “Faggot,” he added, as the traffic inched up and I kept walking.

I was hoping to make a sign that would be persuasive, but instead it was provoking. Or maybe it wasn’t the sign so much as the protest itself, or the traffic jam it caused.

On Monday, the Caledonian Record ran a front page photograph of a 7-year-old girl at a similar protest in nearby St. Johnsbury Vt.  She was standing with her mother, holding a hand made sign with hearts and flowers and the words “Fuck Trump,” and smiling proudly for the camera. A letter-to-the-editor called the image “disgraceful, disgusting, and disrespectful.”

He was angry at the newspaper for printing the photo, but I was glad they did; it reminded me that nastiness in politics these days goes both ways. And neither side shields their kids from it.

Meanwhile, no one seems open to persuasion.

This was the first anti-Trump protest I’d attended as a participant since they began in 2016, though I had shown up at two others in DC in April and May as an observer.

My reluctance to join reflects the thoughts I expressed here shortly after the election, in agreement with Conor Friedersdorf’s article in the Atlantic arguing against a “Resistance 2.0” movement. History is full of protest movements that backfired, and Trump’s ever growing vote totals suggested to me that #Resistence 1.0—the congressional investigations, impeachment resolutions starting in the first months of his presidency, and widespread and persistent street protests that began in the lead-up to the 2016 election—hadn’t stopped more people from voting for Trump every time he’s been on the ballot.

Friedersdorf suggested that Democrats and their supports should act like a “normal opposition party” instead of a resistance movement.

For elected Democrats, that would mean cooperating with the governing party where possible and finding areas of bipartisan agreement on legislation that will improve the lives of Americans.

Senate Democrat Amy Klobuchar, for example, persuaded, the administration to get behind a bill she sponsored allowing victims of "revenge porn" to force social media companies to erase it. The Take-it-Down Act was signed into law last month.

Meanwhile, advocacy groups in the opposition can launch court cases against the administration when it violates the Constitution and degrades Democracy.  The Brennan Center for Justice is focusing intensively on this project. 

So far, Trump has obeyed most of the court injunctions, Klobuchar pointed out, including recently if belatedly, regarding two immigrants detained without due process, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and Mahmoud Khalil. Contrary to popular rhetoric on the left, we are not yet in a “constitutional crisis,” she said.

So what can the rest of us do in a normal opposition?  

The party in opposition and its supporters, Friedersdorf said in December, should keep in mind “that new House elections are just two years away” and Democratic candidates should be able to win away some of Trump’s voters if he reneges on promises he made that are important to them.

Trump has promised again and again that he won’t cut Medicaid. But the Big Beautiful Bill that he supports reduces its funding by almost a trillion dollars and could throw 20 million people nationally and 46,400 in NH off heath insurance according to estimates by Democratic legislators. That loss would be absorbed disproportionately by rural hospitals, about half of which are already operating at a loss.

New Hampshire is a purple state, but Littleton is the rural end of the state where health care providers are already scarce. The Record reported on Tuesday that Ammonoosuc Community Health Services, was closing its Franconia branch, in part because it expected to lose $524,430 if the House’s Big Beautiful Bill gets through the Senate.

It’s an example of how these cuts won't just hurt people who get thrown off Medicaid.  I have good employer-sponsored health insurance, but Ammonoosuc is my health-care provider. PBS estimates that 400 rural hospitals are vulnerable to closure because of the proposed cuts.

In the 2026 midterm election NH will have an open Senate seat. Protesters could help to make Medicaid cuts a more salient issue in the election.

Admittedly, my sign was flawed. Who was    
going to read all those stats from their car as
they dove by.  This woman had the right idea.

In planning for the next election, Friedersdorf wrote, Democrats need to “Focus on offering a better alternative to voters, not ousting the person they chose.”

The majority of the signs in all three protests I attended were aimed more at critiquing Trump than suggesting the better alternative.

In fairness to the sign painters, it’s not very clear what the Democratic Party is offering, aside from “Not Trump.”

In the last election, health care was the only one of the five top issues important to voters and which they trust Democrats more than Republicans to address. And the party won the 2018 midterms by promising to save the ACA (Obamacare). But in 2024, that was not a major focus of Democratic  campaigns.

I agree that Trump poses a serious threat to basic democratic and constitutional norms. But that’s an argument that the left has been making for 10 years and it just doesn’t resonate with the voters Democrats need to win over.

And voters polled in the last election said “delivering change that improves Americans’ lives” was more important to them than “preserving America’s institutions” by a whopping 78 to 18 percent.

They also said the next president needs to deliver a “shock to the system” rather than restore stability by 53 to 37 percent. The chaos of Trump 2.0 may change their minds.  But maybe it won't.

The No Kings Rally was an impressive accomplishment. Organizers estimate that 5 million people turned out in cities and towns in all 50 states. Clearly a lot of patriotic Americans want to do their part in opposing the current government and preserving constitutional democracy. But their efforts will be no more effective than those of #Resistence 1.0 if the Democratic Party doesn’t also offer Trump-voting fellow Americans a better alternative and if protesters don't target their messages to winnable voters--who may or may not include the guy in the pickup.  

Note: 

Updated on 7-6-25 to reflect new estimates of how many will lose insurance based on changes made in the Senate (Joint Economic Committee)

Handouts v. Opportunity: What does the Working Class Want?

One December afternoon in the 90s I wandered into the local Good Will store and was looking through the men’s shirts when another shopper tried to hand me a $5 bill. “I like to give to people shopping in these kinds of stores during the holiday season,” she said. I declined to accept, even though—grad student that I was—I could have used an extra five. 

I was reminded of this moment the other day while reading “Does the Working Class Vote Against Its Interests?” by John Vassallo in The Liberal Patriot.  Vassallo advises Democrats to stop asking what’s wrong with working class Americans who don’t support their candidates and instead ask why their policy menu is not more appealing to these voters.

The enrollment surge in means-tested programs such as SNAP since the Great Recession is not necessarily an unqualified testament to government’s ability to help the less fortunate,” he writes. “Rather than a tribute to Democrats’ good intentions and the effectiveness of the safety net, this trend could be seen as an indictment of America’s labor market policy and the deprivation that offshoring, anemic growth, lousy jobs, and chronic underemployment have created. Moreover, the explosion in food bank usage, crowd-funding to pay for medical procedures, and other forms of charity and nongovernment aid underscore the frequent inadequacy of these programs.

Working class people want the dignity of meaningful work and a living wage, not handouts. Vassallo calls for a return to the pre-1970 progressivism that “focused on promoting inclusive development while deterring economic predation and unfair business practices” rather than just managing poverty with “patchwork transfers.” 

Without old Democratic policies like the Wagner Act and the GI Bill my parents wouldn’t have been able to buy their first home and spawn my four older siblings—all while in their 20s. Dad made a living wage as a unionized low skilled laborer in a meat packing plant—back when meatpacking was unionized. 

(Side note: meat companies busted labor unions in the 60s by hiring illegal immigrants and Democratic administrations did nothing to enforce laws against hiring them; the party is currently divided about whether to penalized employers for hiring undocumented migrants) 

Such programs were based on Democrats’ “abiding belief in the importance, and feasibility, of continued enablement through decent jobs, schools, housing, and affordable family recreation.” 

But, Vassallo suggests, Democrats no longer offer a working class path to the American Dream. Vassallo leaves out one path the Party does advocate: go to college. In fact, I was the first among the siblings to get a bachelor’s degree thanks to the generous state-subsidy of higher education that’s been slowly eroded since then.  

But their policies have tended to increase student debt rather than make college more accessible to working class kids—Joe Biden’s bestowal of loan forgiveness to one cohort of debtors notwithstanding. And anyway, at a time when AI is poised to eliminate lots of white collar jobs, expanding the number of college grads competing for them doesn’t seem likely to solve the employment problem, when about 34 percent of America's college graduates work in professions that don't require a college degree. 

Michael Sandel’s excellent book, Tyranny of Merit identifies the origin of the liberal obsession with college degrees.  Beginning sometime in the 1960s, education leaders, led by the president of Harvard, began to think of public grade schools not as places to prepare students for citizenship, but as sorting machines to determine which students would go to which colleges—or no college at all. College admissions became the venue for determining merit and deservingness. Sandel shows us the many ill effects of this idea as it has somehow gotten general acceptance in the culture, but the effect most relevant to our purpose: it fosters hubris among the successful and humiliation among those who don't manage to get their Bachelor’s degree. “A system that celebrates and rewards ‘the best geniuses’ is prone to denigrate the rest, implicitly or explicitly, as ‘rubbish’” (161). 

Sandel talks about his book here.

Put Sandel beside Vassello’s article and it might look to some like it’s either college or welfare in the Democratic American-Dream playbook. Bill Clinton seems to be the chief architect of this approach. He embraced trade policies that led to the "China Shock" (the precipitous loss of US manufacturing jobs in the 2000s) and told American workers: “what you earn depends on what you can learn. There’s a direct relationship between high skills and high wages and therefore we have to educate our people better to compete.”  

For her book, Coming Up Short Jennifer Silva interviewed 100 working class adults who didn’t learn enough in school to compete successfully in the job market. She found that:

At its core, this emerging working-class adult self is characterized by low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health (10).

If the Democrats have done little to save unions and preserve programs like the GI bill, the Republicans have actively opposed those things. So why would an increasing number of working class people vote for Trump? Isn’t the Democratic party the lesser of two evils?  

Another piece on Substack, by Yasha Mounk, a political scientist who studies the global rise of populism, has a theory. Trump, he argues “has forged a brand of populism that has wide appeal and makes big promises about the future”: aspirational populism. Where Democrats are asking why working class people vote against their interests, billionaire Trump has somehow managed to address the sentiments of the white “losers of globalization” by raising tariffs and expelling immigrants, while pulling in an increasing number of non-white working class voters. He writes that anti-globalization

was and likely remains Trump’s appeal for one part of his electorate. But another part of his base—just as important—has a very different view of America. Hailing from groups that had once been banished to the fringes of American society or have immigrated more recently, they don’t want to return to a supposedly golden past. On the contrary, they are optimistic about the future and embrace entrepreneurial values precisely because they feel that their hard work is starting to pay off. They don’t picture themselves as standing in a long, static line [a reference to Arlie Hoschild’s book, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right] to enter a destination they covet; rightly or wrongly, they believe that the doors to it would be wide open if gatekeepers—from journalists to Democrats to elites self-servingly insisting on outdated norms [and, I might add, college admissions offices]—hadn’t cruelly decided to bar their way.

That the system is “rigged” by gatekeepers has been a theme of both of the great contemporary American populists—Trump and Bernie Sanders. The nature of that rigging is vividly illustrated in Mathew Stewart’s 2018 article in The Atlantic, “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy.”  

It’s no revelation to say that social mobility in the land of opportunity has decline drastically since the middle of the last century, and now lags behind most of Western European. I imagine that when Trump talks about making America great again, his rising number of non-white voters do not hear “bring back Jim Crow” as his liberal critics charge him with dog whistling; they’re thinking that he just might succeed in restoring opportunity to Americans even ones who don't attend a four-year college.

Effervescent Christmas

This ad appeared in the Boston Globe during the Christmas shopping season of 1919. Note the enticement to become consumers rather than producers of music.

The assembly hall at Phillips Exeter Academy is usually the site of serious, sometimes grim, subjects: global warming, war, poverty, the Supreme Court.

Last Friday, one of our music teachers, Eric Sinclair, got up on stage and sang Christmas carols.

This assembly used to be an annual event, but it hadn’t happened for long enough that the current students had never experienced it. I never heard an explanation for why it was stopped, but I’ve assumed that, in the spirit of diversity and inclusion, we had decided that the “harm” it might do to people who don’t celebrate Christmas was more important than the “collective effervescence” it inspires among those who know the words to the songs.

Was this experience of joining together with others in song more common before Netflix and doom scrolling? Before we traded in our pianos for record-players? Before we all had our own Spotify playlists and air-buds? Did we know the words to more of the same songs and sit around the fire or the piano and sing together?

Christmas and Christmas songs seem to be one of the few things that still permeate our national culture down through the generations. After the assembly, Eric said he wasn’t sure this youngest generation would know the words. They did.

They belted out “Deck the Halls,” and “”Jingle Bells,” and when Eric sang “had a very shiny nose,” they even knew to shout back: “like a light bulb!”

Adam Grant guessed that the numbers of depressed Americans quadruped during COVID quarantine because we were being denied “a special kind of joy.”

“Peak happiness,” he said, “lies mostly in collective activity.”

Grant’s NYT op-ed is where I learned the term collective effervescence. “We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence,” he wrote.

According to my AI friend, Gemini, the term was coined by Emile Durkheim in 1912 and describes the feeling of energy and harmony that people experience when they come together in a group with a shared purpose. It is a joie de vivre that manifests when we share moments with others, such as being in a stadium that erupts in simultaneous applause when a musician returns for an encore performance.

Grant described the feeling more broadly to include “creating together and solving problems together.” He chided Americans for thinking that the pursuit of happiness is a solitary endeavor and called for a “Declaration of Interdependence.”

Unfortunately, the end of pandemic lock-downs didn’t end what the surgeon general calls our loneliness epidemic. And there’s no end in sight.

It seems like every new invention and every social trend has the effect of pushing us away from each other. My parents’ first home was just around the corner from both of my grandparents. Then we moved to the suburbs. By the end of the day on Christmas, nine people will have spent a combined 60 hours driving to our holiday celebrations over the last few days in search of an effervescent Christmas.

I hope we were wrong about the harm these songs might cause.  I can't recall a single religious theme in the lyrics Eric sang. They were all about decking the halls and dashing through snow.  And one song at the end had an inclusive message, about German and British soldiers playing soccer during a Christmas truce in 1914.  The assembly ended with these words: On each end of the rifle we're the same.

Should Democrats change their approach to identity politics?

In the immediate aftermath of the election, the Times quoted Bernie Sanders explaining the results:

“It’s not just Kamala,” he said. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class. This trend of workers leaving the Democratic Party started with whites, and it has accelerated to Latinos and Blacks.”

Sanders’ always campaigned on economic populism, but he had felt it necessary go along with identitarian appeals in response to relentless woke criticisms during his presidential campaigns.

I reviewed the identitarian attack on Sanders here.

This was the first time Sanders criticized the woke left as far as I know.

Maybe others would follow. After all, in the past three elections, Dems have lost voters in just about every group their identity appeals tried to win over.

But in all the comments by Sanders since that time—and I’ve seen a lot of them—he has not repeated that critique, but continued to double down on economic populism.

That may be because the woke police are still on the beat over here on the left side of American politics. Seth Moulton is now likely to face a primary challenge for saying something that 69% of Americans agree with about trans athletes.

It won’t be enough for Democratic politicians to quietly back away from the most fringe woke positions they’ve embraced—either implicitly or explicitly. Harris tried that and it didn’t work. Undecided voters who watched the Trump ad showing her endorsing gender reassignment surgery for imprisoned unauthorized immigrants shifted from D to R by 2.7%. 

As someone who has lived through the hothouse years in one of the venues where woke fever took hold, I understand voters’ suspicions of the subtle signs that the woke left is not in charge anymore. There needs to be a recognition that the cancellations, firings, scoldings, shamings, struggle sessions, and other means of ideological coercion were wrong and that the leaders of the institutions that promoted them are either no longer in charge or acknowledge their mistakes. Until that happens and the party has its Sister Souljah moment, no one will believe they are safe to speak their minds. Or vote Democratic.

---

Notes

These are problems and questions I’ve been grappling with all fall. I asked if we have passed “peak woke,” in this post.

Today’s post was inspired by Ruy Teixeira’s blog post, "Economic Populism: Opiate of the Democrats."

An excerpt:

In a widely-noted finding from a post-election survey by the Blueprint strategy group, the third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” And among swing voters, this concern about cultural focus was the most powerful reason….

Other than that NYT quote, Sanders has refrained from the critique of identity politics and doubled down on his theme of economic populism. That, Teixeira, argues reflects magical thinking:

Changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work [on it’s own, I would add]—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done. 

None of this means abandoning trans people.  Moulton responded to criticism by noting that, although he doesn't want his daughter to play sports with biological men, he will continue to vote to protect trans rights, as he has done in the past.  When asked by a listener why trans people should work to elect Democrats who don't support every "edge case" of the trans-activists agenda, Podcaster Ezra Klein said this: 

What matters first is not everything the politician says but the power they have.... 

The questions they should be asking, I think, need to be more fully political — that the question is gaining power for the coalition that will listen to and work with you, not finding a coalition that says everything that you want them to say. Because the nature, the purpose, of the political coalition is to win political power, not to signal agreement.

 

Dems' next move: Oppose or #resist?

 

A bipartisan opening?

In the aftermath of the election, Democrats need to decide whether their relationship to Trump 2.0 is resistance (again) or the normal opposition of a minority party.

Resistance failed last time

It's not clear what #resistance 1.0 accomplished. Indictments in the past year and even 34 felony convictions didn’t hurt Trump in the polls and may have helped him. His standing with primary voters rose six points in the week after the first indictment, in the hush money case. And it bolstered his fundraising.

The court cases were the last chapter of the first resistance movement. The first chapter began during the 2016 campaign but the movement really got going after the election that year. #Resisters flooded social media and street protests erupted all over, culminating in the “pussy hat” march in DC. Pundits and journalists pledged not to “normalize” Trump, and introduced more “moral clarity” into their headlines, using the words “lie” and “racist” to characterize Trump’s pronouncements, instead of trusting readers to make those judgments. According to the Times, the #resistance was being “televised, podcasted, hashtagged, Snapped, Facebooked, Twittered and Periscoped.”

The “breakout hit” of the genre was “Pod Save America,” started by former Obama staffers, including the one who wrote the president’s speech at the White House Correspondence dinner that inspired Trump to run for president. That tells us something about why the #resistance failed.

The street protesters said they were marching against Trump, but you might excuse his 63 million supporters for thinking they were marching against their votes—or against American Democracy. According to Wikipedia,

Numerous petitions were started to prevent Trump from taking office, including a Change.org petition started by Elijah Berg of North Carolina requesting that faithless electors in states that Trump won vote for Clinton instead, which surpassed three million signatures.

Calls for impeachment began even before The Donald took office, and two Democrats filed formal articles of impeachment just six months after the inauguration.

And, according to an article in the Washington Post on inauguration day, 2017, the drive to impeach coincided with efforts by “Democrats and liberal activists” to “stymie Trump's agenda.” Let’s not talk about the pee tape.

Perhaps all the dire predictions and early talk of impeachment led to a boy-who-cries-wolf phenomenon when Trump actually did impeachable things during his presidency. At any rate, whatever the legal or ethical merits of all the protests, impeachments and indictments, their political impact was negative. Trump’s vote totals only increased every time he ran:

2016: 62,984,828

2020: 74,223,975

2024: 77,302,580

It’s not likely that there will be one unified approach to Trump 2.0 given the diversity of the Democrats’ coalition and the prominent role of the “shadow party” and random left-crazies, like the people calling in bomb threats and swatting cabinet nominees last week.

What would opposition look like?

Conor Friedersdorf makes the case for Democrats acting like a normal opposition party:

Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery. Don’t hesitate to criticize him when he does something bad, but avoid overstatements. They are self-discrediting. And know that new House elections are just two years away. Focus on offering a better alternative to voters, not ousting the person they chose. Meanwhile, oppose Trump’s bad ideas by drawing on the normal tools Americans use to constrain all presidents. Our constitutional and civic checks on executive power are formidable, frustrating every administration. So be the John Boehner to his Obama. Even if ill intent exists in Trump’s inscrutable mind, his coalition does not wish to end democracy. Some will turn on the president when he merely has trouble fulfilling basic promises.

Step one: cognitive empathy

One object of the opposition is to win the next election. Democrats won’t make a comeback if they don’t make a better effort to oppose Trump while winning back some of his voters. The first step is to try to understand them. (The fancy term for that is "cognitive empathy," which I've argued frequently on this blog is an essential capacity of democratic citizenship.)

I was not optimistic this will happen after I watched John Stewart interview professor Heather Cox Richardson, an Exeter alum whose Substack blog has well over a million subscribers, takes in more than $5 million annually and is deeply admired by my Democratic friends (one of them sent me the YouTube link). While Stewart kept bringing up the failures of the Democrats—their capitulation to Reagonomics and de-industrialization, Harris’s “hugging” of Dick Cheney and defense of the rigged system—Richardson kept putting the blame back onto the voters.

How do you explain the shift of so many Hispanics, Blacks and women to Trump? Stewart asked. Cox Richardson replied with an allegory involving 10 people in a room: “They are hearing stories that say you must turn against those two people at the bottom or we’re going to turn against you.” Trump voters, she said “carry confederate flags and carry Nazi flags” and include “white women who will die from lack of medical care” because of how they voted.

This condescending notion of false consciousness—of uneducated peasants perpetually acting against their self-interest out of gullibility, ignorance and wickedness—is a favorite hobby horse of the super smart denizens of the academic left and is really annoying to anyone who is the object of the analysis.

Unfortunately, it sometimes also slips out of the mouths of Democratic politicians, as when Hillary Clinton put Trump voters in a basket of deplorables and most recently when Obama said sexism was preventing Black men voting for Harris.

People who want the Democrats to do better in the next election should stop assessing the morality, or IQ, or rationality of the 77 million Trump voters, and focus on what the party can do to win them over in the next election.

Maybe Democrats could win back some working class voters if they said something like this about the election results (whether or not it’s true):

The American people understand that our economic and political systems are rigged. They know that the very rich get much richer while almost everyone else becomes poorer. They know that we are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. The Democrats ran a campaign protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges. Trump and the Republicans campaigned on change and on smashing the existing order. Not surprisingly, the Republicans won.

That’s Bernie Sanders, in an Email he sent to me, and a few other people I assume (Nov. 23). If, as he’s been saying for some time now, the system has been “rigged” against your interests for 40 years, maybe a vote for Trump isn’t completely irrational.

Maybe the system has been rigged after all

(For a counterpoint to the Stewart/Richardson discussion, here’s another Exeter alum with a different view)

Should Democrats Compromise?

Resistance implies that any compromise with the “fascists” in power is capitulation to evil.

But despite being in the minority, the opposition party is also part of the government and has an obligation to govern in the public interest. So, in addition to working on winning more votes in the next election and just trying to stymie Trump’s agenda (and the wishes of 76 million voters), they should be looking for opportunities to cooperate with the party in power whenever it could improve the lives of Americans or advance the national interest.

In the first Trump term Bernie opposed the USMCA (Trump's NAFTA renegotiation) but more House Democrats voted for it than Republicans and it did make some small changes that seemed likely to benefit American and Mexican workers and American dairy farmers. 

Other bipartisan legislation back then included reforms to the criminal justice system, addressing the opioid crisis, funding vocational training, reforming the Veterans administration, and granting aid to farmers.

(See “President Donald J. Trump Has Shown that Extraordinary Bipartisan Achievements Are Possible” at the UC Santa Barbara American Presidency Project.)

Trump may or may not have been sincere when he said: "When Republicans and Democrats talk, debate, and seek common ground, we can achieve breakthroughs that move our country forward and deliver for our citizens." But the fact that he said it shows he wants to be seen as open to bipartisan compromise.

Democrats must exit the campaigning mode and find issues where they can force him to honor this pledge. Trump’s party has a slim majority in the House and lacks a filibuster-proof Senate majority so Democrats will have some leverage between now and the midterms.

One promising area is labor. Trump selected a labor secretary backed the PRO Act, which would make union organizing easier, but half of Republicans oppose her. Democratic Senators will likely play a key role in her confirmation, but should also push the administration to follow her appointment through with concrete pro-labor policies. Democrats might also look for an area of compromise in Trump's appointment of a critic of the pharmaceutical industry to head HHS. 

On Sunday, Sanders tweeted his support for Elon Musk’s plan to cut defense spending and Musk responded: “cool.” Another possible area of compromise? 

Roadblocks

I see two characteristics of the Democratic coalition that will make it hard for the party to effectively perform a normal opposition.

First, the party has come to be dominated by educated elites who are just so culturally different than the working class voters who have been trending rightward, that cognitive empathy may just be impossible.

Second, the liberal values of Democrats often come in conflict with any populist impulses they may have and pose a difficult dilemma. A passage from Alan Wolfe’s Future of Liberalism identifies this problem:

There are and always will be issues in which liberalism's commitments to openness, proper procedure, or fairness will come into conflict with democracy's insistence not only on fulfilling the will of the majority but on doing so as rapidly as possible…. For all their commitment to equality, liberals do believe that the political views people sometimes hold are not, if they had more knowledge and were open to more deliberation, the political views they should hold.

Wolfe uses the Supreme Court’s Brown school desegregation decision as an example of liberal values properly trumping majority opinion. But he also praised the Court’s deference to majority sentiments in the South with their “all deliberate speed” ruling and the slow pace of desegregation in practice. The Court

opted to give those people, and the political institutions that represented their views, sufficient time to grow into the position they ought to have rather than the one they did have. Ten years later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, giving the decision in Brown ex post facto democratic legitimacy. The lesson was clear: liberals could and should break with public sentiment in order to ensure that what was popular and what was right could become the same thing.

This comment echoes the great historian of Populism, Lawrence Goodwyn, who coined the term "ideological patience."  

Some parts of the Democratic coalition have been promoting views that may or may not be the views that Americans “ought to have,” notably in the past election promoting transgender rights.

Polling has shown that an ad ridiculing Harris’ support for funding of gender re-assignment surgery for prisoners played a key role in moving undecided voters to Trump. As Jonathan Chait has argued, Democrats can live up to liberal principles by defending the dignity and legal rights of transgender people without going along with every demand of the most radical gender activists, especially those involving minors.

This is a delicate line to walk, however, and I’m afraid the over-educated people who dominate the party and it's many factions (the "shadow party), won't manage to come together along that line with ideological patience for their fellow citizens.