Lefties Must Learn from this Election and Change Things Too

We all lost. Let’s make that clear. Lefties, liberals, the entire 2020 Biden coalition lost this election soundly to Donald fucking Trump. If that doesn’t humble you even a little, then you are more sociopathic than he is.

I have spent the week attacking those responsible, and I want to end it by dishing out some suggestions to my compatriots on the left who own this to a much smaller degree. It’s not like we had much power over an election where the incumbent Democratic President stood athwart the tides of history to try to run for a second term, and he forced a chaotic and impossible situation upon a Vice President whose last national campaign for president went so well she dropped out before anyone could start counting votes. We had nothing to do with the actual Harris campaign, as she proved every time she brought Dick Cheney out while her boss’s administration helped to accelerate Israel’s genocide in north Gaza this past month.

But as part of the broader Democratic movement that we officially joined when the Bernie and Warren policy teams were established, and subsequently birthed genuine lefty victories like Lina Khan at the FTC, this means we have a hand in this mess too. There are harsh truths we must figure out over the coming months and years, and we must create a new strategy to both take over the Democratic Party and win national elections going forward.

This is not another predictable plea to give into the online man-o-sphere’s ignorance and bigotry and demand we move right on cultural issues to placate their lizard brains. If I was going to heel turn Splinter to the right, I would have done it while that sweet Kremlin cash was still flowing, and I didn’t have to worry about lawyering up against the DOJ. We’re dedicated to preserving the spirit of Gawker here at new Splinter, which means speaking truth to power and protecting the vulnerable. As a proven electoral chunk of roughly one-third of the Democratic Party, the modern Bernie/Warren left has some power, and thus some responsibility for losing to Trump.

I feel like I can speak for it a little given that I am one of those dreaded Bernie bros who wrote a headline that he put in his 2020 presidential announcement. Also, as I have disclosed before, my sister was the national political director of the Sunrise Movement. I have developed a pretty solid grasp of lefty spaces over the past eight years, and I think there are some things that we could have done a lot differently.

I don’t know what more we could have done on Gaza. Perhaps my general dismay over Israel’s genocide is obscuring something, but the extremely reasonable Uncommitted Movement and the simple ask of superficial representation alongside a Democratic coalition of anti-abortion Trump voters, cops and executives went unmet. I don’t blame the Arab American voters of Dearborn one bit for delivering their district to Donald Trump when this is how the Democratic Party treated everyone who sympathized with the Palestinians trapped under Joe Biden’s bombs. The Democratic Party endorsed and fueled a genocide as a matter of supposed electoral expediency, and the people who did that have to live with themselves for the rest of their miserable lives, their problems are not our problems right now.

But I do think that the way we try to execute and communicate our political vision is not very effective and we are absolutely a bunch of bullies who people feel like they have to walk on eggshells around for fear of violating some unknown and new cultural norm (being bullies towards people in power is good, being bullies towards voters is being a de facto Trump canvasser). I have come to believe that dressing everything in the flowery language of academic and therapy-speak is beyond idiotic and absolutely is part of the cultural backlash that Trump was able to take advantage of.

We have a direct hand in Latinos moving right culturally, as evidenced by the fact that no one says Latinx anymore. I am speaking as someone responsible, as you can go back to some of my Paste columns from the Trump years and see that word in print under my byline. I wish I had not done that, because it puts my fingerprints on this failure too. I was one of those classic avatars of a naive educated white lefty dudebro using words to describe a group of people that group itself does not use. Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Latino civil rights organization in America, said in 2021 that “The reality is there is very little to no support for its use and it’s sort of seen as something used inside the Beltway or in Ivy League tower settings.”

The role of radical lefty language in alienating our ostensible allies from lefty policy was found in a 2023 report by The Movement for Black Lives and GenForward Research which “suggests that language plays a significant role in support for alternative public safety solutions.” This report suggests that only fifteen percent of Black Americans support abolishing the police, “but when asked about supporting or opposing divesting from police departments and putting part of police budgets toward healthcare, education, and housing, support among respondents increased to 67%.”

Being inclusive is good. It is always better to make more people feel like they can be a part of your environment. However, using exclusionary academic language in your attempt to be inclusive is a political own-goal in a country where roughly half of adults do not have a college degree. I also think we need to drop the edgelord online radicalism act a little bit and try to be more realistic about what we can actually accomplish right now and build towards in the future. I wrote about the need for liberals to deprogram themselves away from their mainstream media diet earlier today, and we must do something similar in the way that we talk about supporting marginalized groups of people. There is something dismissive and infantilizing to how much us lefties emphasize the struggle of those stuck under the boot of America’s white male patriarchy.

Because they’re people. Just like you and me. White people are like Black people are like Latino people are like etc…etc…etc…People don’t like being defined by their struggles, and the lefty emphasis on social justice is good, but I wonder whether using it as one of the animating characteristics of our political language is bad. Realignment elections have a tendency to be kitchen table elections, and aren’t we the people who think that economic precarity influences right-wing cultural shifts? We need to think with our heads and not with our hearts and cut the problem off at the source.

I think our issues are mostly superficial and message-based. The one thing we did win in this election is the political argument over the populist economic fight in the Democratic Party, as Barack Obama’s favorite right-leaning centrist David Brooks is out here in 2024 writing humbling sentences like these:

I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.

Our policies are good, and voters find them more popular than they find the Democratic Party’s. Our mission is to become better salespeople, and advocate for our anti-capitalist platform in a way that meets some of the uncomfortable realities presented to us by a capitalist country built on genocide and slavery. We need more lefty Twitch streamers like Hasan Piker showcasing a healthier kind of masculinity to compete with the avalanche of right-wing misinformation online that has radicalized so many young men. We need to find better ways to message good policy, as this excellent thread from Vox‘s Rachel Cohen demonstrates about the complexities of the expanded Child Tax Credit that was responsible for the largest reduction in child poverty ever. One might think that fact alone would be enough to advocate for the wisdom of this policy, but America and its love of work requirements is a lot more complicated than that.

We must adjust our rhetoric for this new Trumped-up United States. No one should budge an inch to protect vulnerable people, and now is the time to become more defensive of especially vulnerable communities like transgender people, not less. Abandoning our LGBTQ allies when they need us most or “moderating” on abortion is only adopting the Democrats’ worst political instincts which have ensured that history will remember them as less competent than Donald Trump. But we have to find more inclusive ways to communicate our values, lest we continue losing primaries to history’s biggest group of losers.

This is a country who voted for Barack Obama and Donald Trump in back-to-back elections. It has proven it is willing to listen to a wide range of skilled salesmen selling something other than the status quo. It’s time for us to find new ways to market our ideas that meet this populist moment, stop using therapy and academic-speak to describe everything and just fucking talk like normal people, and accept our small share of responsibility in the calamitous loss of 2024.