Democrats Stare Into the Abyss

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In the final days leading up to the election there were some stories that tried to sum up the closing arguments for each side. For Harris, the closing argument was described by some as “optimism.”

Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her closing argument to Michigan voters Sunday inside a raucous building full of MSU students, describing an optimistic and hopeful vision of the nation that contrasts sharply with former President Donald Trump’s dire warnings of pending world war and a nation in decline.

“We see our fellow American not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” the Democratic presidential nominee said to loud roars.

That must have sounded good when backstopped by the idea that your team was about to win and you were therefore effectively being generous in victory. It sounds a bit different now though I bet.

After a convincing loss Tuesday, Democrats are now struggling to make sense of where they went wrong. Today the NY Times published a story based on interviews with more than two dozen Democrats who are, metaphorically, staring into the abyss.

Many Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of American government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them.

They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda. They conceded that Ms. Harris had paid a price for not breaking from Mr. Biden’s support of Israel in the war in Gaza, which angered Arab American voters in Michigan. Some felt their party had moved too far to the left on social issues like transgender rights. Others argued that as Democrats had shifted rightward on economic issues, they had left behind the interests of the working class.

They lamented a Democratic Party brand that has become toxic in many parts of the country…

And many said they were struggling to process the scale of their loss, describing their feelings as a mix of shock, mourning and panic over what might come in a second Trump administration.

One thing that both the left of the party and the center may find agreement on is that progressive social politics are hurting them. Sen. Bernie Sanders who is from an older generation of left-wing politics blamed identity politics. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class,” he said.

Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts pointed specifically to the party’s stand on trans issues and the inability of anyone in the party to openly disagree. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting 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,” he said.

And Matt Bennett of the centrist group Third Way also argued the path forward would have to involve more moderation. “You must become the party that is more pragmatic, reasonable and more sane. That’s where we have to go,” he said.

If that sounds like a lot of agreement it is, but the story also quotes Rep. Jayapal who apparently has a trans daughter and isn’t backing away from that fight. There is still a divide in the party that won’t go away.

The other person taking the blame for the loss is Joe Biden. Basically, a lot of Democrats are coming around to the view I wrote about yesterday, i.e. that this might have been avoided if Biden had gotten out of the race a lot sooner or simply not run at all.

Personally, I think blaming Biden is sidestepping the real problem. There’s no doubt that Biden was wrong to think he could run again. He should never had made that decision. But he didn’t make it alone. He was encouraged by his family and supported by the political professionals around him who should have known better but somehow didn’t. He was also supported by a lot of the left-leaning media which spent two years downplaying his obvious decline instead of confronting it and forcing him to step back a lot sooner. Bottom line, you can blame some of this on Joe but he had a lot of help along the way.

So the divide in the Democratic party between the progressive left and centrist left continues to create problems. The centrists will blame the loss on the far left’s social extremism and the far left will blame the loss on the establishment’s tactical errors (sticking with Biden). 

While they blame each other, no consensus about how to move forward will be reached. That’s the real abyss that Democrats face. The ongoing division in the party which has been obvious since 2016 makes climbing out of this hole and presenting some kind of unified vision for the future very unlikely.