I was cooking eggs on a recent Friday morning when the lights went out. First a boom! and then darkness. In the sudden quiet, we walked out to the road, where a squirrel lay stiff and dying under the transformer. A few neighbors came out, and we all stood around looking at the corpse. This is the third time it’s happened in recent years. Someone cracked a joke about making gumbo as we wondered how long it was going to take to get the lines fixed. I nudged the squirrel with my foot, but it was gone.
Something about this scene reminded me of the media landscape following Donald Trump’s recent election victory. With the corpse, of course, being the Democratic Party. Nobody saw this coming, they say. Certainly not the poor squirrel.
How long to get it fixed this time? Is anyone at the power company even paying attention?
Everybody’s got a theory and a soapbox. It was the rise of right-wing media, wrote New Republic editor Michael Tomasky (without asking why, exactly, more people are turning off the mainstream and liberal news, and turning on those once-fringe alternatives for answers). It was sexism, racism, and general deplorability (after decades of gains, and voting for our first Black president, why did the electorate suddenly decide to become more deplorable?). It was about ignorance and a massive failure of our civics education system (hard to argue with that, but isn’t education mostly run by liberals?).
A lot of the discussion, depressingly, went straight to identity analyses. Latinos did such and such. White women did so-and-so. Futures markets on Black men are down. This is the knee-jerk reaction, the safe space, where solace can’t be far away. Hey, let me fix that analysis for you: The trend was that many Americans, outside of the wealthiest enclaves, weren’t buying what the Democrats were selling, and many didn’t feel that the Democrats would do anything to actually address the country’s problems and make our lives better.
From my perspective, here in rural Texas with the squirrels and the Trump signs and the darkened lights, most of this discussion feels vaguely hopeless. Some would say ridiculous. Or infuriating. When is it ever going to get fixed?
If you want to know why people are turning off mainstream and liberal media, look no further than this: In the months leading up to the election, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and CNN (those are just the ones I tend to look at) ran a constant parade of articles glibly talking about how awesome the economy is, and how stupid and foolish Americans are to be unhappy with the current state of affairs. Look at the articles; the language could hardly be more condescending.
This is while large swaths of the population are struggling to buy groceries, can never hope to buy a house, can never get started on an independent life, are working ourselves into the ground, and have much less economic status than our parents and grandparents did. Every day we see the contrast between what the elites have and what we don’t. And what little relief we may have felt in our bank accounts during the Covid years has dried up. These celebratory, condescending articles deny what people are living through every day, and they explicitly sneer at people for voicing our plain experience. This is called gaslighting.
Meanwhile, more nefarious and noxious media outlets are attending to people’s feelings and concerns, respecting them, and offering some kind of vision of a way forward. One could say, “You know, our side really needs to pay more attention and put forth a convincing and pragmatic plan to address people’s material and psychological needs.” Instead what you’re more likely to hear sounds to many audiences like, “If only we could ensure that nobody else gets to speak, then things would be just fine.”
Some commentators expressed bewilderment about the ballot initiatives. How can people vote en masse for abortion rights and a higher minimum wage, and yet vote against the Democratic Party? That’s easy; large majorities of people support those initiatives. And many of them don’t like the Democrats. That’s how it is.
Some of this is related to the fact that, at least from the ground-level perspective here, the Democrats never seem to do anything about the goals that they purportedly represent. How are the Democrats the party of abortion rights when there’s nothing in recent memory that they can proudly point to at the nationwide level that they did to make it easier to get abortions? I don’t know anybody around here who sees the Democrats as the party of raising the minimum wage. When did they raise the minimum wage? They had the chance in 2021, when they had full congressional power, and they whiffed on it. When did they take down the corporations, or fix the Supreme Court, or enact any kind of systematic reforms? I must have missed it. All I hear is them crowing about how great the status quo is. Great for them, I guess. People are eventually going to stop taking your “message” or “position” seriously if you never actually commit to any serious action to pursue it. What is the point of going out to vote for Democrats on those issues, if they never actually do anything about them when they’re in office?
Some will say the Democrats’ hands were tied. They wanted to do it, so badly, but they just couldn’t quite manage. Many Americans will find that hard to believe. The Republicans don’t seem to have that problem when it comes to making use of whatever power they have to accomplish their sincerely held agenda. It’s particularly hard to believe this as we hear about all these tremendous bills that the Democrats passed, like the momentous Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—which, from where I’m standing, reads as more tax money gifted to corporations—and important initiatives such as forgiving student loans. How do you think that sounds to people who lived with their abusive parents, grinding it out and postponing their lives for years to pay off their debts, and finally put the last check in the mail? Or to those who had to pass on college and instead go to the cashier’s stand or to war because they knew they couldn’t afford the cost? So there’s nothing for us? We’re supposed to accept that the Democrats can get so much accomplished, so many industry investments, so many life-changing special interest handouts, but they simply aren’t able to raise the minimum wage, or protect civil liberties, or make the health care system functional? Do these kinds of perspectives strike you with the scent of deplorability? Or are they, perhaps, simply things that power doesn’t want to hear?
If you’re still wondering why many voters who value equality and rights don’t have a high opinion of the Democrats, then consider how often we have to lie about how we feel as we sit through cringey DEI seminars, and nod along to this shallow, pandering, virtue-signaling, corporate power–legitimizing, self-flagellating, clueless, constraining cant in order to stay employed. I’m speaking from the position of a queer person when I say this, if the identity of the messenger is what it takes to gain a hearing. Does anyone really think that stuff ever did a bit of good, other than for the scammers who are marketing it? To the extent that it is linked to the Democrats, all this does is make it painfully obvious that the party has become the human resources department of American politics, and that it certainly doesn’t work for the people.
Defend my civil liberties and raise my paycheck; that is what would actually work. Get money to gig and temp workers, in particular. Having spent 20-plus years working in restaurants, bars, delivery, and other service jobs, I can attest that much of what passes for Democratic politics goes right past us, and there seems to be little interest in recognizing us and improving our security. People in my position, whom I’ve sometimes heard described as the “precariat,” don’t have powerful organizations to speak for us, or motivated interests to extract political favors on our supposed behalf. But we can vote in elections, and you should be aware that the United States is producing more and more of us.
I feel that a lot of what circulates in the liberal media bubble is shaped by the fact that most of the writers have never faced eviction, have never been threatened by a rogue cop or an enemy soldier, have never lost the family farm, have never been required to choose between dignity and safety, have never been told that they have to revise their viewpoints if they want to keep a job that they need to survive. You don’t understand our priorities, and you simply don’t see most of the country; you’ve banished us for being too uncouth, and we’ve become invisible. At least until you need someone to make your food, fix your car, or deliver your packages. You simply can’t grasp how residually angry people are, how silenced they feel, or how much we need action and meaningful solutions.
Yes, this includes the specific anger of women and the specific anger of minorities. Obviously. But why should we be angrier with Trump than with the Democrats? The Democrats are the ones who lied and sneered at us and piled on the B.S. while doing basically nothing to help. Trump, for better or worse, intuitively understands this anger and can convincingly claim that he will do some kind of something to try to make it better. The Democrats can’t say that. I mean, they can say it, but nobody’s going to believe them, because all they’ve given us for decades is haughty “messaging” that never translates into substantial, meaningful, fair, and broad-based action. People talk about how Trump is going to take away our rights, and that may well be true, but it’s hard to even care about it when our rights are already thoroughly tiered, hardly existent, and contingent on constricting identity claims, and when every day we confront the stark inequality and looming precarity of our lives.
The Democratic Party, and the left-leaning ecosystem in general, have done precious little to acknowledge and directly address the real issues that Americans are contending with or to demonstrate that they can take action to support widespread freedom and prosperity. They say all kinds of things, but there is no actual plan. People tune into Trump because they believe he will actually do something, take serious coordinated action, to try to address the country’s problems—and people are willing to take a chance on that over the suffocating, disempowering, nauseating, soul-sucking status quo that we are forced to inhabit. Is that really so surprising? If you can understand why a Palestinian might favor Hamas, then surely you can understand why an American might favor Trump. The solution is the same as it has always been: Care about the lives and needs of ordinary people and do something, when you have the opportunity and the power, to defend our liberties, remove bad actors and scammers of all stripes, and reduce inequality in a fair, direct, and universal fashion.
Personally, I think Kamala Harris ran a good campaign. She avoided some of the worst pitfalls that have plagued Democrats in the past; she short-circuited the obvious point of criticism by emphasizing that she intended to earn the job on her own merits, she demonstrated that she very much had those merits, she made a brilliant VP selection in Tim Walz, and she tried to bring a bit of personality to what had previously been a rather stone-faced administration. But it was too little and too late to overcome the inertia of the past four years. There’s a bit of a tragic “glass cliff” phenomenon in her nomination, in which a woman or otherwise minoritized individual is advanced into a deteriorating situation to take the fall for something that is not her doing. And it definitely stalled out in the end, as people gradually realized that astroturfed “vibes” of hope and change didn’t seem to be translating into any kind of meaningful agenda that would actually be implemented. We’ve seen all this before, in previous administrations. Like the squirrel chewing on the line, when given a chance to take action, the party goes straight back to the shiny, comforting poison of their status quo patronage politics, thinking that they can rely on “messaging” and funding to bring it on home. How many more billions do you need to spend to finally convince people that two plus two equals five?
What’s frustrating is how much damage is likely to be done—to the environment, to Ukraine and liberal movements worldwide, to everything really—simply because this lumbering, overfed, overmanaged Democratic ecosystem is congenitally incapable of getting its head out of its rump and caring about ordinary people’s lives, allowing people to speak without censorship, listening to and believing their frustrations, defending liberty and equality, and taking direct meaningful action on fair and universal solutions to actually existing, real-world systemic problems in the U.S. That’s it; that’s what needs to be done, and it’s the only serious answer. Stop blaming everyone else for what the party failed to do.
