Since Vice President Kamala Harris’ election defeat last week, the chorus of liberals willing to blame everyone from Green Party voters to the American electorate’s inherent racism and sexism has only gotten louder. Democratic strategists have called for the party to cut loose parts of its coalition, like trans people, immigrants and Muslims, in order to more readily appeal to the American center.
Philippe Reins, a longtime ally of the Clintons and aide to the losing presidential campaigns for both Hillary Clinton and Harris, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt that the Democrats are being “held hostage to the far left.” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass, said in an interview with the New York Times that he didn’t want his children to be “run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” And Elie Mystal, a columnist at the Nation, wondered angrily if, in the face of news that the incoming Trump administration will pull out of the Paris Agreement, Green Party candidate Jill Stein had “anything to say about this or nah.”
This is, quite frankly, loser shit. And it’s the exact type of loser shit that’s guaranteed to continue the Democratic Party’s slide into electoral irrelevance, losing support and cultural cachet at a time when the threat from the right is higher than it has been in a generation. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie posted on Bluesky on Nov. 9 that something has to change. “It really is imperative to clean house,” Bouie wrote. “Setting questions of ideology aside, the passivity of Democratic political strategists and politicians has been a disaster.”
Democrats are throwing the most marginalized members of their coalition under the bus.
Cleaning house doesn’t appear to be on the agenda, at least not yet. Facing down the danger of an ascendant far-right Republican Party, Democrats are throwing the most marginalized members of their coalition under the bus. The reason for this is two-fold: inherent reactionary politics just under the surface for most liberals and the iron law of institutions. The reactionary politics are self-explanatory; faced with catastrophe, people tend to withdraw and indulge their most fear-based, angry politics.
But the iron law of institutions — Jon Schwarz’s idea that people in power within institutions will act primarily to protect their position at the expense of the institution — is the exact type of loser mentality that has brought us to this point. You can see it in how Democratic thought leaders are flailing around to attack whatever marginalized group they can rather than face up to internal failures, and how they would rather blame powerless political factions like the Green Party instead of looking at the sclerotic party leadership that brought us to this point.
The current debacle precedes the Harris campaign. Faced with the possibility of another Trump term, President Joe Biden could have stepped down and let the party nominate a replacement — allowing the octogenarian to fade into the background as a transitional figure. An added bonus, to Biden’s defenders, is that this would have muted much of the criticism related to his advanced age and clear mental decline.
That wasn’t what Biden wanted to do. The president’s ego, and not much else, was in charge of his brain and making decisions. He decided to run again, even as the evidence of his mental slips and verbal miscues started to mount. His aides were faced with a decision. On the one hand, they could support a president who the White House’s own internal polling showed losing to Trump with the Republican projected to win a staggering 400 electoral votes. On the other hand, they could speak out and potentially stop a Trump return but with the likely loss of their jobs and ability to stay within the lucrative Democratic Party orbit. It was an easy choice. They backed their boss.
Disastrously, Harris and her people weren’t immune to this mentality. They refused to separate Harris from Biden on economic issues or the unpopular war on Gaza that the White House is enthusiastically bankrolling. The campaign was apparently unwilling to capitalize on released recordings of notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein discussing his friendship with Trump because to do so would have implicated former President Bill Clinton — a lecherous boor the party should have cut loose a decade ago. The Clintons and their political machine have outlasted their usefulness and should have been put out to pasture after 2008’s racist presidential primary campaign against Barack Obama. But the staying power of the Clintons has proven stronger than common sense.
The 44th president can’t get off the hook either. This should be the last time Democrats allow Obama and his coalition to take a lead role in an election. The politics of technocratic competence that Obama ran on 16 years ago no longer holds water, and the blame for that is squarely on Obama himself for his response to the financial crisis and the disillusionment of a generation of liberals. The 44th president’s rhetorical legacy, at this point, is a political message that asks Americans to trust the people whose stagnant leadership have not meaningfully improved their lives — and scolding them as racist or sexist if they have doubts in that approach to politics.
The politics of technocratic competence that Obama ran on 16 years ago no longer holds water.
That is not a message that works. And we’ve seen how badly it fails now as Trump rides into office once again after facing a candidate and party that have no new substantive ideas and no effective way to message their base. In a healthy party system, the people who fail are jettisoned and new leadership takes over to lead the next election. This is not what the Democrats do, because they have developed a loser approach to elections and internal party governance that has left them incapable of challenging their leaders, who have control over donations, cash and hiring decisions.
Confronted with a decision between holding the people behind the purse accountable or punching down and left, Democrats will choose the latter unless forced otherwise. It’s no surprise we’re seeing anti-solidarity politics rather than a well thought out counter to the far-right danger Trump presents. Taking a stand against the people who can crater your career is an act of courage Democrats have proven allergic to — because they’re losers.
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