democrats being better than the alternative isn't good enough
we dems are much better than the GOP, but we still need to improve
A lot of liberals I know are aghast that Trump was elected again and are sort of perplexed at how it could have happened. I want to challenge fellow Democrats and liberals to flip the question around and focus on where we clearly need to improve, because as it stands we’re losing the persuasion war to Trump and Republicans.
Let me provide some clear examples.
Many liberals…
have an ethos of “everyone is welcome here” while opposing construction in their own neighborhoods that would house actual people.
love education, but are wary of the innovation and businesses that education generates.
say they care about climate change, while supporting environmental rules that effectively make building clean energy and other infrastructure illegal.
focus on process, propriety, and language over outcomes for people.
There are many such examples. This is not to say us Dems are bad, but we do have our blind spots. And I think we do actually have a problem of our activist wing not acting as team players with the rest of us. But I don’t think our problem in general is one of philosophy, it’s one of execution.
I hope we can retain our love of equality and desire to help less fortunate people, while putting those principles into more effective practice.
One important thing—we’re not going to improve internally by just focusing on the failures of Trump and the Republicans. I am a proud Democrat and I must say I am already weary of elected Dems criticizing every little move of the Trump administration, or using snark as a response to all of his moves. Such communication speaks to the converted. But to speak to those who voted for Trump but are lukewarm on him, I think we need to take a different tack. That means crafting a big, broadly appealing message about what we do well and what we stand for.
Let’s start by asking a question that might seem insane to you: what does Donald Trump do better than we do?
Trump communicates in plain language and big, clear strokes. When COVID checks went out, his name was on them. He speaks like a regular person with a total lack of academic jargon. He uses words in their casual sense rather than their technical sense. So, for Trump, “inflation” does not mean “the year over year rate of price change” but some fuzzier but more understandable notion of “how much has this thing gone up in the recent past.” Trump will use words as people generally understand them but in ways that are wrong if you have a PhD, and then Dems will criticize that Trump doesn’t have the PhD-level understanding of the concept. Uh, who cares!
Trump did Operation Warp Speed. We made COVID vaccines in a year, which literally nobody thought was possible. A big part of this was Trump wanted it to happen. Would a Democratic president have been as non-deferential to the consensus that it would take longer and push on it? Shockingly, the Biden administration actually told people not to use the name Operation Warp Speed anymore, and Trump semi-disavowed it because his hardcore fans believe COVID was fake. So both sides have disavowed this incredibly successful effort to do something never before seen in world history that saved millions of lives… maybe Dems should have picked up the mantle as a symbol of how they aren’t just rabidly anti-Trump but oppose him for actual reasons. We could have adopted Warp Speed!
Trump at least understands that there are too many confusing barriers to doing things like starting businesses and building stuff. One of the first actions of his second term was to ease permitting requirements to building energy—but only the dirty kind. So, kind of a win? Not really. But by acknowledging the underlying reality that it is too hard to do stuff—even if he wants to do the wrong kind of stuff—he is speaking to a real frustration that everyone feels when they go to buy a home or a company goes to build some energy infrastructure or the forest service goes to do controlled burns (which are prevented for half a decade by people suing under enviro laws). The traditional Republican critique that it is too hard to do stuff has not always been true, but is certainly true today, and Trump is picking up some of that mantle while many highly visible Dems—Gavin Newsom!—are not.
Trump is not in love with process. During the backlash to Trump during his first term, I think we Dems fell in love with process too much. Any time he did something which was not the proper process, we got mad. Myself included. Having some time to think on this, it’s like, we can’t just be in love with every process itself. Some processes are dumb, some are good. Let’s defend the good ones and provide clear justifications for them. But also we need to be willing to challenge process when it has bad outcomes. For instance, the city of San Francisco permits virtually no housing and has lots and lots of process. Maybe we Dems should be against that kind of process. Just a thought.
This one is going to shock you—Trump talks about race and gender in a better way than many Democrats. Ben Wikler, who may be the next DNC chair and I think is great, said the following: “We unite our coalition by making sure everyone’s at the table. As DNC Chair, our leadership team will lift up our full coalition—with Black, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ, Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran, and Disability representation.” That is like, not how people talk about race outside of a sociology classroom. What is AANHPI? Who is identifying as that? Almost nobody! Note I’m not criticizing Wikler here, but the set of standards for how we Dems talk about race. Just say you include everyone! Note that Wikler is saying he wants to include everyone but if you EXPLICITLY say white people or men or white men, everyone will throw a fit. So literally we’re saying we include everyone and mentioning tons of small groups but NOT mentioning the big ones? Again, just say “everyone.” Way easier. In contrast, while I personally cringe when Trump talks about race, at least he says stuff that people can understand, like “I love the Black population of this country.” And he clearly speaks directly to both men and white people, which we Dems should try doing sometime because men, white people, and white men are all citizens that we seek to represent and include in our coalition.
I don’t mean to say that Trump is good, or anything close to it. And I’m kind of stretching here in praising him. But it’s juvenile for us Dems to just keep assuming that anyone who voted for Trump is an idiot and that he doesn’t do anything well. He clearly appeals to people—mostly by the first point above about communication—and he has actually accomplished a few good things that I am skeptical Democratic administrations would have been able to. That should make us reflect on why.
So—we Dems should use this time to look inward and in my opinion do the following
Rekindle a love of non-governmental progress. This means it’s great when businesses do stuff like build power transmission, solar panels, new homes, or otherwise innovate and move the ball forward for America and humanity. The vast majority of people grow up to be employed by businesses, and so it makes sense to see our work as Dems as facilitating businesses doing good things. We’re in servant mode here, serving the public to facilitate efficient and innovative behavior by companies—including our largest and most prestigious ones like Google or Amazon.
Understand the difference between activism (which seeks to change minds) and politics (which seeks to get votes given where people are opinion wise). We need our activists—who are a vital part of the Democratic party—to understand that party politicians will not be able to adopt the views activists want until the activists have successfully changed public opinion, or changed specific proposals to be in line with where public opinion is now. We need our politicians to resist the urge to make a small group of activists happy, and we need activists to avoid going nuclear on the mainstream Democratic party because they (the activists) have not been successful at changing public opinion. We are broadly on the same team but play different roles, and we don’t want to mix the roles because that’s political suicide. We need to have the ability to disagree, while remembering we’re on the same side, and avoid tearing each other down.
Focus more on outcomes that people feel. This means economic growth, housing costs, food costs, healthcare costs. We have been super successful on the healthcare front since 2008, and that’s amazing. Our healthcare system is much better than it was and while we need to keep iterating, many of the big battles are won. This means we need to move on to things like housing and food costs—where again the private sector must play a central role, and we must move into support mode facilitating the construction by making our government work in a predictable and fair way.
Anyway, those are just some thoughts. I hope I stirred the pot a little. Overall, I’m optimistic about the future of America and of the Democratic party. The next four years will be challenging, but let’s learn from our mistakes and from the good ideas of others, and come out the other side stronger.