A Thing I Can't Stop Thinking About

Saving democracy sometimes means looking inward, even though we all hate it

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

I had big plans for a research driven piece this weekend about the recent Catalist report about what happened to Democrats in the 2024 election, and instead I picked up my third head cold/fourth illness since December, so instead I’m going to ramble.

There’s this thing that happens on the internet that drives me absolutely crazy. A commentator, influencer, or even just a random person with a Twitter account will highlight something horrible Republicans have done recently - anything from kidnapping people and sending them to a foreign torture prison to passing legislation that kicks tens of millions off their heath insurance to yelling at a journalist in the oval office - and then turn it into a rant about how Democrats are too weak or feckless or cowardly or corrupt to have stopped it.

This drives me crazy for several reasons. For one, it lets Republicans off the hook. Republican politicians have agency. They don’t have to tie themselves in knots defending Trump’s efforts to dismantle our democracy and sell it for parts. They don’t have to go back on everything they’ve spent their political lives fighting for so that they can vote for his nominees. They don’t have to willingly give up all of their constitutionally endowed power so that Trump can do whatever he wants with reckless abandon. And yet just about every single elected Republican in the federal government, and many throughout state government have decided to do just that. Elected Republicans are morally, ethnically, financially, and spiritually cowardly and corrupt, and they should be called out as such.

For another, in a first past the post, winner takes all democratic system like we have, politics is in fact a zero sum game. We have a two party system because mathematically nothing else makes sense. For example, if we had three presidential candidates from three different parties (or two parties and an independent) one of those candidates would still need to get more than half the electoral votes to win. If they didn’t, the election goes to Congress where each state delegation gets one vote. There would need to be an even distribution of the third party in Congress to make this even close. Which is why when third parties have popped up in our history they have inevitably squeezed out one of the established parties and we’ve defaulted back to a two party system.

That means that all of the time we spend criticizing Democrats is time we’re not spending criticizing Republicans. Every issue we make Democrats’ fault is an issue that we can’t make Republicans fault. This isn’t to say that time spent criticizing Democrats isn’t valuable - it is. It’s how we make our own party better. But there’s a balance, and using Republicans’ bad behavior to criticize Democrats shifts that balance in a way that I personally think is unhelpful. If you’re going to talk about bad stuff Republicans are doing, let’s make Republicans the focus.

But another reason why this phenomenon drives me crazy is because there’s a part of me that agrees that one of the reasons we’re in this mess is because Democrats have not met the moment, and I hate that. I hate it because I am a Democrat, and I know that Democrats are the way out of this mess. And because modern politics have conditioned me to hate it. Lots of political scientists have studied this idea, which basically says that political party identification has become central to our identities, the way we see and understand ourselves and our communities. Or, to quote a paper I read the abstract of (okay I did a little research while writing this): “Partisanship has become one of Americans’ most salient social identities.”

To quote another: “There is extensive evidence that people engage in motivated political reasoning, but recent research suggests that partisanship can even alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgments. We propose an identity-based model of belief for understanding the influence of partisanship on these cognitive processes. This framework helps explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even truth.”

Basically, it’s not my fault. And if you’re mad at this piece so far, it’s not your fault either.

But Democrats are in the weeds right now, out in the Wilderness, as the Crooked Media podcast has posited for the past eight years. So it’s time to be brave, and push past it.

I’ve been reading Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produce Trump by Spencer Ackerman, yes, partially because I hate myself. But also because I want to understand more about how we got here. I’m barely a third of the way through the book, which was written after the first Trump administration, but it is remarkable how much of the 9/11 era reverberates through both Trump administrations. Republican immigration policy, such as you can describe racism and kidnapping as policy, is directly connected to surveillance and detention of Muslims after 9/11. Consolidation of executive power, undermining judicial authority, venerating anti-intellectualism, data with an agenda - all of the egregious and overt hallmarks of the Trump era grew out of post-9/11 conservative bloodthirsty fearmongering papered over with an SAT vocabulary.

But the book also highlights how liberal capitulation facilitated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan primarily through morally and ideologically incoherent, purely political positions that undermined Democrats’ credibility, credibility we’re still trying and failing to claw back today. And it doesn’t help when Cory Booker gives an incredibly powerful 25 hour long floor speech about the imminent danger Trump presents to our democracy and then turns around and votes to confirm Charles Kushner to an ambassadorship to France. Or when 10 Democratic Senators work with Republicans to pass a crypto currency regulation bill that does nothing to curb Trump’s blatant crypto currency grift. It’s hard to believe that Democrats are going to fight for people when the actual votes we see them taking belie that goal.

Democrats are in a really tough position right now. The Trump regime has attacked, dismantled, or destroyed just about every facet of our way of life - scientific research, international aid, education, libraries, medicine, the arts, elections, civil rights, diplomacy - you name it, it’s under attack. And while the potential and promise of these aspects of our government is good, together they represent a status quo that most people in this country feel doesn’t work. We find ourselves defending Harvard, because higher education is incredibly important. Bringing diverse talent from around the world to think, and write, and collaborate, to test new ideas, to be innovative and creative and rigorous is valuable not just for a productive society, but also to our humanity.

But Harvard also represents a higher education system that is prohibitively exclusive and expensive, where the price of a degree goes up as its value on the job market deteriorates. This is a system sustained by grad students paying tens of thousands of dollars for Masters degrees that don’t get them anything beyond student debt and adjunct professors living on poverty wages, and is often inaccessible for poor, Black, and brown students hailing from a k-12 education system that is also inequitable. Without the nuance that acknowledges the failures of this system while defending its higher purpose, we come across as shills for the halls of power so many distrust. But that nuance doesn’t translate to TikTok or YouTube where most people are getting their information.

The same goes for our democracy. Y’all know me - I am an ardent defender of our democracy. It is the title of this newsletter. And, in general, I believe in the kind of slower, consensus building democracy that lives at the heart of our constitutional system, and posit that it’s the loopholes and bad actors in this system that have made it ineffective when Democrats are in power and destructive in the hands of Republicans. Democracy is supposed to be a system of government where we all have a voice, where our time and our money and our energy matter. That is a system worth defending. But dark money, corporate power, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and even the purposeful inequalities built into things like the Senate and the Electoral College, both of which were meant to be a check on the power of the ,mean that our democracy has never really lived up to its promise.

So again, when we defend democracy without acknowledging that our system is too likely to entrench power and money in the hands of a few, without acknowledging that even members of our own party have used their position and their power to get rich off of stock trades and crypto currency, then we come across as the party that wants to maintains a status quo that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

It’s not really a fair place for Democrats to be. With Republicans wholly given over to the MAGA cult, consumed by hatred and bigotry and greed, Democrats have no room for error. They have to call attention to the harms of Trump’s rampant destruction while building something new out of the rubble. They have to abide by the rules while rewriting them and they have to exceed standards that Republicans are never even trying to meet. And they have to do that with an electorate that is somehow both clamoring for something new (Obama, Bernie, Trump) and retreating to the familiar (Biden, Clinton).

Maybe that makes it feel like you have to try to be everything to everybody. Maybe it feels so impossible that triangulated positions on the humanity of trans kids, a few solid social media digs, and a little something for yourself out of all this mess feels like all you can do. But I think we can do better, as a party and as politicians and as voters. What we’re all looking for, out here in the dark, is something to fight for, something to believe in. What we all want is someone to take our hand, break out a flashlight, and say come on, let’s go find it together. We want a long table, where everyone is safe and everyone has enough to eat and where we can all find solace and comfort and community in each other. The people who seek the power of elected office are responsible for how they use it to inspire, invigorate, and lead us. But we’re responsible too, for demanding it.

So to save democracy this week, let’s stop blaming Democrats for what Republicans do. But I dunno, maybe let’s also take a little peak inwards and start cleaning up our own house too.

(And come to Vote Save America book club where we’re discussing Democracy in Retrograde! You don’t have to have read it to join the discussion, but if you want to read sections 1-3 by tomorrow it’s a quick but smart read, and it’s also available to listen to on Spotify if you have premium)

(Also I thought this piece from

Amanda Litman

was really interesting and had some great general and more specific ideas about how we can make the Democratic party reflect more of what we want to see in the world. And as always, donate to Run For Something, one of my few recurring contributions each month)