Fighting Gives Democrats Stories To Tell

It's easier to rally people when they have protagonists to cheer on.

Fighting is most important because it’s a predicate to winning. Good, hard fighters combine strategic thinking with aggression, and that mixture alone will change an opponent’s behavior. It’s also important as a character trait: We admire people who don’t take injustice lying down; we feel inferior emotions—pity, contempt—for people who are afraid to stand up for themselves and others. But there’s another, ancillary benefit of fighting: It creates context for members of the public who don’t know whom to root for.

Fighting generates suspense and dramatic tension, stories about good guys and bad guys. It gives audiences narrative arcs to follow, causes and characters to favor. It provides plot, which is the essential ingredient in so much of our cultural production—from high literature to professional wrestling.

I spent Friday in New Orleans talking to Democrats of many stripes about the merits and urgency of fighting right now, mostly as it pertains to those first three facets. Beto O’Rourke’s assessment of the political moment, which you can watch here, underscored the value of the fourth.

For instance, what do you think when you hear or read this chapter summary?

Just to bring everyone up to speed, you know that Trump asked Greg Abbott, our governor, to give him five congressional seats in Texas. And thick as thieves, he and the Republican state legislature have been busy at work carving up the state. They were going to vote on these five new districts on Monday, but thank God for the Texas Democrats, 54 of them left the state, broke quorum, said the hell with that, and um defied Donald Trump and stopped this power grab in the state of Texas.

And these motherfuckers are panicking right now. Okay. So, the reason that Greg Abbott is trying to vacate their seats, charge them with second-degree felonies, sending DPS state troopers to quote-unquote 'hunt them down. The reason John Cornyn has been working with Kash Patel to send the long arm of the FBI after them as well is because they get this. If they cannot steal these five seats, if they cannot hold on to power in the House of Representatives, there's going to be a check on Donald Trump's lawlessness. There's going to be accountability for his corruption and crimes, the cover up of his complicity with Jeffrey Epstein and everything else that he is doing. And there's going to be a real prospect of free and fair elections in 2028.

So they're going to do everything they can to stop us not just from fighting back, but more importantly from taking the fight to them. So yes, they're trying to [stop] our group Powered by People, which is the largest registrar of eligible Texans to vote in the state. It's an organization during the winter freeze in 2021 that made more than a million phone calls to elderly Texans to make sure that they were okay, that they had water, that we could get them to a warming center. We staffed the food banks all across Texas during the middle of of COVID. And we're trying to help everyday Texans vote in a state that makes it harder than any other in the nation to cast a ballot.

So, you know why they're afraid and you know why they're responding in this way. We've got to make sure that we are not afraid and we take this fight to them and we win it with whatever it takes.

If you were just tuning in, who would you be rooting for and against? O’Rourke’s been delivering remarks like these at almost-daily town-hall events across the country. The stories he tells are both topical and thematic, but he is to some extent limited by the fact that most elected Democrats aren’t following his lead.

Democrats could have a story to tell about themselves as scrappy, tireless underdogs. In a different world, they could summarize the first 200 days of the Trump presidency like this:

First he broke the law and stole your tax dollars, so we took him to court. But we know he’s already rigged the courts, so we did two other things: One, we put the corrupt justices on notice—there will be a reckoning for them if they participate in the dismantling of the Constitution. Two, we refused to fund his government, unless and until he brought his crime spree to an end. Now the choice is his. And we’re going to rise against him over and over again until he stops treating the majority of Americans as second-class citizens, or we drive him from office.

Every part of that story is unavailable, because they didn’t do any of those things.

QUALM AND GERRY

The Democratic response to the GOP’s attempted theft of five House districts in Texas, and likely many more districts in other red states, provides a mostly happy exception.

Here at least the argument among Democrats isn’t over whether to fight, but rather how hard.

California Democrats have structured their response to Texas Republicans as a straight up disincentive. They plan to ask California voters to sanction a new, highly gerrymandered map, but it will be conditioned on Republicans moving first. If Republicans retreat (which does not seem likely) California’s independently drawn maps will remain in place.

O’Rourke, by contrast, wants to see blue states gerrymander proactively, no matter what Republicans ultimately do. Building a truer democracy is the ultimate, shared goal, he argues, but it can’t happen unless Democrats gain power, so they need to do whatever’s necessary under the law to win first.

It’s a real division.

“I think the trigger is good,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told me. “If they do it, we do it. It's not just on our own. I disagree with Beto on that one.”

But the disagreement is amicable because in either approach Democrats would be imposing consequences on Republicans for bad behavior. They simply tell different stories about how good should respond to evil. I suspect disillusioned Democratic voters will rally behind Bonta and Gavin Newsom no matter which approach they choose. A problem only arises if they lose heart or drag their feet and miss their window for action.

LIKE A RECKONING BALL

There remains the small problem that Republicans wield much more power than Democrats.

In the near term, Democrats will lose most of the fights they choose to join. They might even, in numerical terms, lose a nationwide gerrymandering race-to-the-bottom with Republicans.

But the margin of defeat will be much larger if Democrats choose not to fight. And fighting, losing, then getting up to fight more keeps a good story going.

O’Rourke has taken to promise-not-a-threat style warnings of a reckoning to come.

“If we…win the House, [Trump’s] crimes and corruption will be exposed for all to see,” he said. “The girls traded with Epstein, the bribes taken from foreign governments.”

This approach can be generalized. It can apply to every corrupt act and crime that ought to be reckoned with. It can apply to draconian policies that will be reversed. It can apply to the rebuilding of things that have been destroyed. More people will want to be with the good guys than the bad guys, but only if they know the good guys have a sense of mission and purpose, that on the other end of the fight, it will have all been worth it.

MAGA is to a great extent powered by storytelling—elaborately spun fictions about a topsy-turvy world in which Trump’s both underdog and all-powerful, fearlessly vanquishing imaginary evils that make America worse.

Democrats had true stories to tell. But for four years after defeating Trump, they told almost none. They retold, in greater detail, the story we saw unfold on our televisions about a plot to steal the 2020 election. But they did not see it as their role to write the next chapter, where justice is done. They toyed, for a few short months, with a plot line in which they got the country back on its feet after a pandemic, before they convinced themselves the public didn’t want to hear about the pandemic anymore, and shelved the project. All the partisan potential of a story about who got us into the COVID nightmare and who got us out, lost.

The decision to refer to Trump as “the former guy” served in essence to forswear compelling stories, about the past, present, and future, by writing the main antagonist out of existence. Democrats oversaw—no, ushered in—the best economic recovery from the pandemic in the entire world, but never tried in earnest to weave that into a story about overcoming Trump’s pandemic failures.

They did not see public perception of their competence in office as up for grabs, and so they told no story at all. “Morning in America” is a story. “I feel your pain” is not a story; it is a branding exercise. A proxy for saying “we are more empathetic than our opponents.” But it of course concedes something deadly: that under our watch you experienced pain.

Republicans told that story, much embellished, because they were not afraid to fight. And they won.