Democrats Just Need To Decide What They Believe

They should do less complaining about activist tactics and more plain speaking about what they think is righteous.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Everyone working in Democratic politics has one idea or another—maybe even multiple!—about what happened on November 5, and (more importantly) how Democrats can be competitive in the next election. But the party leadership is particularly attuned to the concerns of frontline members, so it is their assessments we should look to for clues about what the party will change going forward.

At a press event for victorious Democratic Senate candidates this week, incoming Michigan freshman Elissa Slotkin explained, “I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo.” Democrats, she said, should try to sound more at home on “the assembly line” than in “the faculty lounge.”

Slotkin was synthesizing two common after-action critiques.

First, politicians (particularly those most likely to pick up the jargon of specialists, sophisticates, and elites) should not talk like specialists, sophisticates, and elites. At the very least, they should be natural code-switchers, who campaign in universal language, and reserve niche language for niche audiences. This is what Slotkin meant by taking language from the ‘assembly line” rather than the “faculty lounge.” It’s what incoming Arizona freshman Ruben Gallego means when he criticizes prominent Democrats and progressives who use academic or activist jargon like “Latinx.” It’s what I mean when I encourage Democrats to co-opt the language of truth, freedom, and patriotism to bludgeon faithless Trump-era Republicans: Defending democracy isn’t about the sanctity of “norms and institutions”—it’s about your freedom to choose your leaders, which they want to take away.

Second, people who want Democrats to win, but who also make specific policy demands or harbor controversial ideas about American society, should police themselves heavy-handedly. Some of them should just disappear, “the way of the dodo.” Progressive activists should not clamor for radical change—particularly when the goal is to address identity-based inequalities—and any ideas they do clamor for should be rigorously poll-tested first. Before pressing politicians for their views on various issues, they should ask themselves “are we raising the salience of something unpopular? Might their answers create ammunition for our shared political enemies?”

I don’t mean to single out Slotkin. Both of these views have become exceptionally common in liberal circles. Obviously Democratic leaders should be somewhat solicitous of their vulnerable members. At the same time, one of the pitfalls of treating their political analysis as gospel is that it isn’t always clear whether their ideas bubble up from experience on the campaign trail, or filter down from the hivemind of the strategic class.

But Slotkin’s paired suggestions (one about language, one about substance) are actually quite distinct. The first is unobjectionable, and should be relatively easy to implement over time. Of course politicians in a democracy should strive to speak in ways their constituents find compelling. The second may reflect fair-minded frustration with certain advocacy campaigns (or their prominence, or their merits, or their electoral implications). But it also reflects magical thinking about the worlds of politics and ideas—a forlorn fantasy wherein, if enough undisciplined and naive and clout-chasing pests would just turn down the volume, Democrats could politick exclusively on their best issues, which would thus become more prominent in discourse, and help them win elections.

Some activists do of course promote bad ideas, or good ideas in counterproductive ways, and American politics would be healthier if they didn’t. But they probably can’t be nuked out of existence, and few will be cajoled into exercising better judgment about how to advance their objectives.

Democrats like Slotkin have done what a psychologist might describe as “externalizing the locus of control.” They’re behaving helplessly, in a way that compounds the unpopularity of this suite of activists issues with the appearance of Democratic weakness.

If they want to communicate better, they need to commit to better practices—to hiring and learning from people who thrive socially in all settings, rather than from people with practiced vocabularies and mealy mouths. But if they want to be free of “unhelpful” ideas, they need to do more than just wish them away. They need to be specific about what the ideas are, and why they’re wrong.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

Slotkin and her allies should try to imagine a world where “identity politics goes the way of the dodo.” It’s actually a bit unclear, as a practical matter, what she means by this, but charitably I don’t think she means everyone should just pretend American society is perfectly or adequately equal—that there’s no longer any need to redress identity-based inequalities in the country. I assume she wishes for a world without The Groups™ and their litmus tests. Do Slotkin et al believe that progressive-thought is downstream of The Groups, without which bad and politically toxic ideas would be vanquished? Or do they believe progressive-thought begets advocacy?

Their pleading suggests they think it’s the former, when it’s obviously the latter. No matter how well progressives police their activism, or donors police their giving, there’s still going to be progressive thinking in the world. All of the Groups could vanish tomorrow, but eventually, somewhere in America, a teen trans girl will want to swim with cis girls, Republicans will make a federal case out of it, and reporters will chase Democrats around for comment. Invariably they will find progressives who think the fairest thing is to let the trans girl play with kids who share her gender identity.

There’s a trans-bathroom “controversy” unfolding in the House of Representatives right now—not because any Group asked for anything, but because Delaware voters elected a trans woman, and Republicans have decided to bully her for earned media and fundraising purposes.

This is why I say Democratic scapegoating—in this case of identity politics and its proponents—reeks of helplessness. These guys just need to figure out what they actually believe, and then express it compellingly, or else consciously betray their principles for narrow political advantage.

In the case of incoming congresswoman Sarah McBride, they would serve themselves best by ignoring what any Group says and asking themselves, “should the law allow trans people to use whichever bathroom makes them feel most at ease, or should it force them either into the closet, or the bathroom that matches their sex organs?”

Once they have an answer to that question, they can follow it up, “should I follow my conscience, even if it conflicts with my political needs?” And, then, whatever they decide, they need to be willing to articulate their position—ideally in a way that sounds thoughtful even to people who disagree.

But that’s an internal exercise for them—and it’s their fear of the exercise that’s driving them to lash out.

By contrast, John Fetterman, who also represents a swing state, undertook the exercise and came up with something principled and defiant.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez holds a safe seat, but she also undertook the exercise, too, and had this to say:

What Nancy Mace and what Speaker Johnson are doing are endangering all women and girls. Because if you ask them what is your plan on how to enforce this, they won't come up with an answer. What this inevitably results in is women and girls who are primed with assault because people are gonna want to check their private parts suspecting who is trans, who is cis, who is doing what. The idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trou in front of who? An investigator, who would that be? Because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans. It's disgusting. It is disgusting. And frankly, all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn't wearing a skirt because they think she might not look woman enough. People have a right to express themselves, to dress how they want, and to be who they are. And if a woman doesn't look woman enough to a Republican, they want to be able to inspect her genitals to use a bathroom. It's disgusting.

Is the idea that this kind of impassioned answer wouldn’t fly in Michigan? That a Democratic presidential candidate couldn’t take this stand and win a national election? That Fetterman and Ocasio-Cortez sound like they come from the faculty lounge rather than the assembly line? Is it that the Groups have forced Dems from blue and purple territory to say stuff like this?

It’s hard to figure. Banishing trans-rights activism would not make trans-identity politics go the way of the dodo, it would just mean no activist responses to various provocations. Vulnerable Democrats would still have to choose to either hold their ground or plunge their heads into it.

BAD SPORTS

Perhaps in the case of Sarah McBride, there isn’t much of a dilemma. Perhaps Democrats and The Groups largely agree about the trans bathroom issue.

But when they don’t agree, I think the correct approach for Democrats is much the same: Say what you believe, and do so in a way that’s maximally compelling.

A week ago I wrote about the climate of distrust and absolutism that drove backlash to Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) for expressing his view on the adjacent trans-sports culture war.

“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton told the New York Times. “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.”

Activists do make it harder to grow the Democratic tent when they treat Moulton’s underlying view as heretical. Likewise, lingering use of the term “Latinx” is less inherently damaging than the activist impulse to scold people who don’t use avant-garde progressive language. People are good at picking up on cues. They know when they can relax and when the must walk on eggshells.

But Democrats like Moulton and Slotkin serve their causes poorly when they subsume their substantive disagreement with progressives into pissing matches over how much clout activists ought to have. They would be much better off getting crosswise with these groups on principled bases than they are ignoring them or wishing they would go away.

Instead of complaining about how scary it can be to disagree with an activist, why not just disagree with them? “Republicans are obsessed with other people’s genitals and I reject their broad campaign of anti-trans hatred, but on the rare occasions when trans people say equal rights entitle them to play competitive sports on whichever team they want, I disagree. Not because trans people shouldn’t have equal rights, but because they are not taking other people’s rights into account.”

Democrats are worse off for whining about people who insist on saying “Latinx,” when they could just explain the objection: “Pressuring people to say ‘Latinx’ doesn’t advance sex or gender equality, but it does set both causes back by making people who care about equality seem like weird busybodies, who maybe didn’t notice that the entire Spanish language is gendered.”

Bad ideas are bad; but good ideas, articulated in activist jargon are still good—they just need to be workshopped a bit. It’s up to Democrats to stop outsourcing their thinking to consultants, strategists, and pollsters, and decide for themselves which is which.