Tossing Schumer (and Jeffries) would signal a great deal; AND (at the risk of sounding too kitchen-tabley) I think we also need a full-throated defense OF GOVERNMENT. We are still laboring under the Reaganesque framing of government as the problem. Mamdani gets it. Government--in the hands of the right people--can be positive, responsive, supportive...accountable. The whole damn country needs a remedial civics lesson. If only we had the world's biggest media/entertainment factory on our shores....
So we should table all the important issues for a civics lesson? Nothing again Mamdani, but he is a mayor and has not been in office that long. I'd say you overgeneralize.
How this divide and conquer / demoralization strategy is being achieved:
Ten Ways the 1% - Who Own Almost All Media and Which Have Radicalized Us Against One Another - Are Manipulating Us Right Now to Walk in Lockstep Into the Technocratic Incinerator, by Unknown
1) The first manipulation is the illusion of choice. You think you have two parties representing different visions for America but both parties are funded by the same billionaires, vote for the same surveillance bills, approve the same defense budgets, and serve the same corporate interests. The choice you are given is which color tie the puppet wears, not who controls the strings.
2) The second manipulation is emotional hijacking. The news does not inform you, it activates you. Every story is framed to trigger fear or anger or disgust because those emotions bypass your rational thinking and make you easier to control. You are not watching journalism. You are being subjected to psychological operations designed to keep you in a constant state of agitation.
3) The third manipulation is tribal sorting. The algorithm learns what makes you angry and feeds you more of it until your entire worldview is shaped by outrage at the other side. You are sorted into a tribe not because you chose it but because keeping you tribal keeps you predictable and profitable.
4) The fourth manipulation is false scarcity. You are told resources are limited and the other tribe is taking what belongs to you. Immigrants are stealing your jobs. Welfare recipients are draining your taxes. The other party is destroying your healthcare. Meanwhile the billionaire class has more wealth than any humans in history and could solve most of these problems tomorrow if they wanted to.
5) The fifth manipulation is memory holing. Stories that threaten powerful interests get buried or forgotten within days. Exposed crimes result in no consequences. Historical context that would help you understand the present is never taught. You are kept in a perpetual present with no past to learn from and no future to plan for.
6) The sixth manipulation is controlled opposition. The voices you think are fighting for you are often funded by the same interests they pretend to oppose. The outrage merchant on your side of the aisle is playing a character designed to keep you engaged and angry and tuned in while nothing ever actually changes.
7) The seventh manipulation is the Overton window. The range of acceptable opinion is artificially narrowed so that anything outside it seems extreme. Ideas that were mainstream fifty years ago are now treated as radical. Ideas that serve elite interests are treated as moderate common sense. You are not choosing your beliefs from the full range of human thought. You are choosing from a menu they wrote.
8) The eighth manipulation is learned helplessness. You are shown so many problems with no solutions that you eventually give up and accept that nothing can change. This is intentional. A population that believes resistance is futile does not resist. They scroll and complain and feel superior for understanding how bad things are while doing absolutely nothing about it.
9) The ninth manipulation is identity capture. Your political affiliation becomes your identity, and any attack on your party feels like an attack on you personally. This makes you defend politicians and policies that harm you because admitting they are wrong would mean admitting you were wrong, and your ego will not allow that.
10) The tenth manipulation is the most insidious of all: you are manipulated into believing you are too smart to be manipulated. Every person reading this thinks the manipulations I described apply to other people, the stupid people, the brainwashed people on the other side. That certainty is itself a manipulation. The moment you believe you are immune is the moment you become most vulnerable.
Here are well over a dozen Fox, CBS, ABC, & NBC local news stations all reading an identical script sent down from their singular overlord to crash & burn alternative media in order to enhance the Oligarchy’s Overwhelming threat to our democracy:
Ultimately we are not consuming news. We are consuming a product manufactured by the richest men in human history, and that product is designed to do one thing: keep us so busy fighting our neighbors that you never notice the chains being fastened around our wrists.
I really dislike the false equivalence of “both parties do it.” It’s lazy thinking and the worst of leftists’ doctrinaire purity tests. Same kind of attitude that made Nader a spoiler in FL and NH in 2000. So, thanks for Bush v. Gore. Brian’s right: that is the autocratic point of departure.
You can acknowledge your point about corporate interest while also recognizing how many small dollar-funded candidates there are. And that the parties are substantively different. But thanks for the indulgent, cliched psychological profile.
Like or dislike it the two party system is a divide an conquer apparatus that the billionaires wield against the population. If you’re interested in the mechanisms at mental hacks at play in this strategy you can find them here:
You’re just doubling down on the point I’m making. Here’s an us v. them frame for you: winners versus losers. Do support protecting democratic processes and liberal democracy generally? Then vote Democrat. But if you’re like a lot of self-righteous lefties I know, you’ll stamp off in a huff b/c reality doesn’t conform to your platonic ideal. You want change? Advocate for ranked-choice voting.
That is the most moronic useless, trollist, nihilistic observation of the day. I can only imagine your cunning plan to make government solve problems. Let me guess: some anarcho-syndicalist utopia?
“But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he said, the wolves will take over.” —Carl Sagan
TriiTorch’a Cunning Plan:
We first need to build a platform of local strength, self-reliance, and resiliency. Once done, and we have a solid foundation from which to stand, from there we begin working on taking back the higher levels: county, state, federal.
The following solutions were crowdsouced from various forums across the web. I have distilled them into this:
The solution is to get local, get self-dependent, get the common unity back in community by building webs of resilience with your neighbors, get control of your school boards, mayors and sherrif's office, and town councils (the last places we still hold all of the cards), get a garden in your lawn no matter how small, a single tomato plant is better than nothing, get bartering, get a well (water is your most important resource hands down), get ready, get moving, get doing, and, if so inclined, get God.
“Unless the people, through unified action, arise and take charge of their government, they will find that their government has taken charge of them. Independence and liberty will be gone, and the general public will find itself in a condition of servitude to an aggregation of organized and selfish interest.” —Calvin Coolidge
Everyone's looking for a savior instead of looking in the mirror. We are the ones we've been waiting for.
I remember all this because 2000 was the first presidential election I voted in, as a lefty radical college student (although I voted for Gore). So I spent a lot of my adult life frustrated with Dems for not being lefty enough, and I think a lot of what happened in the aughts was a holdover from Bill Clinton's centrist triumph in the 90s, and a lot of the politicians who came up through the ranks then (Schumer, Pelosi) still espouse this centrist prioritization of bipartisanship, as though New Gingrich and a recalcitrant wing of the Republican party didn't exist. (Which is to say, there were more reasonable Republicans in Congress prior to the Tea Party, but let's not pretend it was all hunky dory.)
Anyway, one thing I think a lot of commentators miss is that the filibuster benefits Republicans. McConnell-style Republicans care about two things: judges and tax cuts, and they can do both with 51 votes. That's why GOP senators insist on keeping it; it'll be far worse (to them) if the filibuster is abolished and Dems can pass voting rights bills and whatever other liberal priorities keep John Thune awake at night. (Before the McConnell era, the filibuster was most often deployed to stop progress, especially on civil rights.)
I think also sometime in the last ten years, elected Dems starting fearing being called radical to an irrational degree. They trust mainstream media too much and think the truth is on their side but don't make an affirmative case and let all of Trump's nonsense fill the void. I think that's also part of the current party infighting. Take New York. Tom Suozzi is so terrified of someone on Fox News calling him a Marxist that, rather than making a case for his own politics, he's lashing out at the DSA candidates in NYC, mad their very existence will give Republicans fuel to call the whole party communist (which Trump is doing now and doesn't seem to be getting much traction with). But the dynamic is such that Biden could have built the dang wall and Trump and Republicans would still be yelling about open borders. If the centrists think they're right, let them make that argument instead of punching left. Maybe they are right! The DSA movement seems to be one largely of affluent white liberals, but they'll have to win over voters of color to win bigger races.
But Dem establishment politics of the Trump era have been a lot of telling the base what we can't have, or just tinkering around the edges while problems get bigger and worse, and they should maybe be less surprised that voters are like, "we bided our time and did things your way for decades, and we got two Trump terms for it, so we're trying something else now."
Just finished reading and, while it rattles around my tired brain some more, for now I'll just say that even with how long this piece is, I still feel like it could be fleshed out *even further* into an entire series. It's that important.
Excellent analysis Brian. For me what caused the collapse of trust wasn't necessarily the 2024 election results but the party's response to it. After saying they would conduct a thorough assessment of what went wrong they couldn't produce an autopsy, leadership did not change, and strategy did not change. Party leaders advocating for doing nothing in 2025 was an astounding failure.
It was also demoralizing having consultants tell us that Kamala was doomed from the start and many people thought Biden would lose in mid 2024 while asking for our money and time. It feels like we were grifted. Or being told that "we lost less in places we campaigned." Imagine a football coach losing the superbowl and saying "we did good on first down".
Most infantilizing is the leadership doubling down on terrible candidates like Haley Stevens, doubling down on AIPAC spending and corporate spending, demolishing any sense of a policy or governing agenda, and then telling us to vote our way out of facism. We did it before and these people did nothing.
Thanks for writing this. It sums up my views and feelings quite accurately. I'm in Michigan supporting Abdul El-Sayed. I do have qualms from time to time, that I should be supporting Haley Stevens, the "safer" choice but I'm not budging.
In Michigan, the echoes of the Democratic Endorsement Convention on April 19, 2026 continue to linger. Haley Stevens was booed during her speech. I wasn't surprised. I might have booed too if I had been there.
The message from the Michigan Democratic Party elite and in particular, Haley Stevens, has been clear. Progressive voices don't matter. Progressives are supposed to show up and canvass and donate money but never have a candidate of their own.
When this started, I would have been happy with a progressive position or two like Medicare for All or Abolish ICE. But no compromises were offered. I wanted to hear that the progressive voices were heard and acknowledged.
According to the polls, El-Sayed has a decent chance of defeating Mike Rogers. My own view is that Rogers is a weak candidate and El-Sayed a stronger one. And that El-Sayed is a better choice than Haley Stevens for the nominee in 2026.
The Democrats somehow managed to be heavily complicit in or come to outright own in the public mind every Republican failure of the last 25 years, whether it be the financial crisis/bailouts, Iraq/Afghanistan War, War on Terror, Covid, Mass Incarceration, Income inquality, Gaza, you name it. Seems unsurprising the base has turned on its leadership.
The lack of visible efforts to oppose the painful dismantling of the federal government and its capabilities,, the disgusting grift/unbelievable corruption by the Trumps, the unbelievably unqualified nominees, wars on a whim, the list is endless. I pay reasonably close attention to the news and know very little about such D opposition. It's heartbreaking. Someone should be screaming from the rafters - ever day - and making the news cover it. People can't believe how the adults in the room have allowed our country to sink so low so fast with barely a whimper. Yes- they want to elect people who will do something or die trying.
>They’d given the country full employment, lower inequality, rising wages
Yeah, it turns out that none of those things impress people much when the cost of housing is up 50 to 100 per cent, grocery prices are shooting up, and twice-yearly insurance renewal offers produce sticker shock each time.
Newt Gingrich slaughtered Democrats in 1994 with his "Contract for America," framed as common sense reforms to how DC operated.
Democrats are not even talking about this year, they're blathering about "Project 2029," which might be the lamest marketing ever...and so far centers on banning teens from social media...while Trump and the GOP corrupt everything they touch.
There is so much real Democrats could be for: Re-establishing the Voting Rights Act and outlawing partisan gerrymandering, preventing elected and appointed Federal officials from trading stocks, outlawing US trade and peace negotiations by unconfirmed persons, removing "independent" agencies from the Executive and placing their rule-creating within Congress, un-packing SCOTUS, expanding the House with our population *as the Constitution required,* renewing and reasserting Congress' power of the purse, etc.
Individual Democrats run on some of these.
The Democratic Party can brand itself as the party of Democracy, but seems content to be "kinder, gentler" Republicans.
Pretty much all of this is wishful thinking divorced from any reality on how the public actually votes? Though also I agree it's pretty representative of the leftist mindset that is currently empowering the DSA and Sanders-backed wing of the party.
No, responding to Trump's popular victory in 2024 by escalating obstructionism, denying confirmation of any cabinet appointment whatsoever, would have only given Trump more political capital; ditto an absolute shutdown. As it is, the shutdown that did end ended not on Schumer's call, but the call of the specific Senators who broke, namely Tim Kain, Fetterman, Warner, and company.
And we could go down the list of recommendations for what to do now, but it's again this unhinged insistence that the voting public is suddenly going to materialize behind leftist views, when polling still indicates the country is still pluralistically conservative and moderate before it is liberal (self-described liberals still trail self described conservatives and moderates). But still, it's easier to throw stones at people on the same side as you than actually go do battle on the actual front lines.
Like let alone running against Moderates: where are all the DSA style leftist candidates running against Republican incumbents in 'safe' Republican districts? Where's the leftist challenger to Tom Cotton in Arkansas? Where's the leftist running for the open seat in Oklahoma? These losers can't be bothered, because they know they have no chance of making converts to their cause. They're just hear to complain that leadership can't deliver miracles to make them happy.
Superb post. Whenever I think of what has happened to the US in the last few decades I often think of W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming", where he wrote: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.
My Substack focuses on Article V of our nation’s second constitution and how the failure to use it has allowed structural political problems to accumulate for more than two centuries.
There are numerous structural failures in the system of elections namely elected officials ability to fire voters once elected to make sure they never face the same voters twice.
I am focusing on one systemic problem in campaigning and that is the way campaigns systematically lock out entire slices of the electorate by refusing to hire organizers who actually understand those communities. Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and other race‑ or ethnicity‑specific organizers are often treated as optional add‑ons rather than core strategists. Campaign leadership assumes these voters are already “activated” by fear, anxiety, or the stakes of the moment — as if fear substitutes for engagement. It doesn’t. No one is motivated by being ignored, and communities know when they are being sidelined.
This bias shows up in hiring decisions, message development, and field strategy. Campaigns choose consultants who don’t know the cultural, linguistic, or neighborhood‑level realities of the voters they need. They avoid hiring organizers who can run the type of campaign that actually works in their constituency. And because campaign payments — tens of millions for presidential races, millions for Senate, and millions even for competitive House seats — flow regardless of whether the campaign wins or loses, there is no financial penalty for getting these decisions wrong.
The result is predictable: campaigns fail to reach the voters who could have delivered victory, then blame the candidate or accuse the winning side of “unsavory tactics.” But the real problem is structural. When campaigns reward the same consultants whether they win or lose, and when they refuse to empower organizers who understand key communities, they build their own losses. It is another form of bias — and it has cost countless elections.
I do not work campaigns nor do I want to, these observations cover 1980-2024.
Sometimes I think Matt Yglesias, in his tendentious lectures to the broader left-of-center about “winning”, is having a debate with his younger self by proxy.
Are you and Matthew tellling stories that look at first glance to be diametrically opposed, but maybe are not?
I read you as saying, mainly, "this is how the Dem establishment lost the voters"
I read Matt as saying, "The left is marketing itself as the anti-Trump coalition but that is a scam, their are more focused on intraparty factional battles."
Right or wrong, these are not exactly opposite points of view. Him being right doesn't make you wrong or vice versa.
We have somewhat similar analyses (we depart on the particulars of what precipitated the collapse of trust. But we very different prescriptions. Mine is that if elected Dems want to put down the insurgency, they should recapture anti-Trump energy by fighting him harder, in real procedural terms. Matt’s (I think) is that we should expose and stigmatize the insurgents, to starve them of resources.
I used to read Beutler's pieces somewhere, then lost track of him. I hate it when voices on the left devote all their energy to tearing down the one party that believes in free and fair elections, health care for all, and freedom of speech. Not that he does not make some good points, but this seems to be the most important thing to him, criticize the only party that in most ways represents your own beliefs. I am a senior, I vote, I donate, I even helped with a door knocking campaign in my home town. I will not support anyone who doesn't understand that the perfect is just as much of the enemy as the MAGAts.
Tossing Schumer (and Jeffries) would signal a great deal; AND (at the risk of sounding too kitchen-tabley) I think we also need a full-throated defense OF GOVERNMENT. We are still laboring under the Reaganesque framing of government as the problem. Mamdani gets it. Government--in the hands of the right people--can be positive, responsive, supportive...accountable. The whole damn country needs a remedial civics lesson. If only we had the world's biggest media/entertainment factory on our shores....
I find it sad that Parks & Rec has been completely memory-holed by the broader culture. Zohran Mamdani is basically Leslie Knope.
Remember that episode when Leslie Knope met with the Iranian diplomatic delegation about American foreign policy? Yeah, me neither
No idea what you are talking about.
So we should table all the important issues for a civics lesson? Nothing again Mamdani, but he is a mayor and has not been in office that long. I'd say you overgeneralize.
How this divide and conquer / demoralization strategy is being achieved:
Ten Ways the 1% - Who Own Almost All Media and Which Have Radicalized Us Against One Another - Are Manipulating Us Right Now to Walk in Lockstep Into the Technocratic Incinerator, by Unknown
1) The first manipulation is the illusion of choice. You think you have two parties representing different visions for America but both parties are funded by the same billionaires, vote for the same surveillance bills, approve the same defense budgets, and serve the same corporate interests. The choice you are given is which color tie the puppet wears, not who controls the strings.
2) The second manipulation is emotional hijacking. The news does not inform you, it activates you. Every story is framed to trigger fear or anger or disgust because those emotions bypass your rational thinking and make you easier to control. You are not watching journalism. You are being subjected to psychological operations designed to keep you in a constant state of agitation.
3) The third manipulation is tribal sorting. The algorithm learns what makes you angry and feeds you more of it until your entire worldview is shaped by outrage at the other side. You are sorted into a tribe not because you chose it but because keeping you tribal keeps you predictable and profitable.
4) The fourth manipulation is false scarcity. You are told resources are limited and the other tribe is taking what belongs to you. Immigrants are stealing your jobs. Welfare recipients are draining your taxes. The other party is destroying your healthcare. Meanwhile the billionaire class has more wealth than any humans in history and could solve most of these problems tomorrow if they wanted to.
5) The fifth manipulation is memory holing. Stories that threaten powerful interests get buried or forgotten within days. Exposed crimes result in no consequences. Historical context that would help you understand the present is never taught. You are kept in a perpetual present with no past to learn from and no future to plan for.
6) The sixth manipulation is controlled opposition. The voices you think are fighting for you are often funded by the same interests they pretend to oppose. The outrage merchant on your side of the aisle is playing a character designed to keep you engaged and angry and tuned in while nothing ever actually changes.
7) The seventh manipulation is the Overton window. The range of acceptable opinion is artificially narrowed so that anything outside it seems extreme. Ideas that were mainstream fifty years ago are now treated as radical. Ideas that serve elite interests are treated as moderate common sense. You are not choosing your beliefs from the full range of human thought. You are choosing from a menu they wrote.
8) The eighth manipulation is learned helplessness. You are shown so many problems with no solutions that you eventually give up and accept that nothing can change. This is intentional. A population that believes resistance is futile does not resist. They scroll and complain and feel superior for understanding how bad things are while doing absolutely nothing about it.
9) The ninth manipulation is identity capture. Your political affiliation becomes your identity, and any attack on your party feels like an attack on you personally. This makes you defend politicians and policies that harm you because admitting they are wrong would mean admitting you were wrong, and your ego will not allow that.
10) The tenth manipulation is the most insidious of all: you are manipulated into believing you are too smart to be manipulated. Every person reading this thinks the manipulations I described apply to other people, the stupid people, the brainwashed people on the other side. That certainty is itself a manipulation. The moment you believe you are immune is the moment you become most vulnerable.
Here are well over a dozen Fox, CBS, ABC, & NBC local news stations all reading an identical script sent down from their singular overlord to crash & burn alternative media in order to enhance the Oligarchy’s Overwhelming threat to our democracy:
https://substack.com/@tritorch/note/c-208406729
Ultimately we are not consuming news. We are consuming a product manufactured by the richest men in human history, and that product is designed to do one thing: keep us so busy fighting our neighbors that you never notice the chains being fastened around our wrists.
I really dislike the false equivalence of “both parties do it.” It’s lazy thinking and the worst of leftists’ doctrinaire purity tests. Same kind of attitude that made Nader a spoiler in FL and NH in 2000. So, thanks for Bush v. Gore. Brian’s right: that is the autocratic point of departure.
You can acknowledge your point about corporate interest while also recognizing how many small dollar-funded candidates there are. And that the parties are substantively different. But thanks for the indulgent, cliched psychological profile.
Like or dislike it the two party system is a divide an conquer apparatus that the billionaires wield against the population. If you’re interested in the mechanisms at mental hacks at play in this strategy you can find them here:
There is something way bigger going on when you can divide everyone in the entire world into an 'us vs them' mentality on almost every single subject: https://tritorch.substack.com/p/there-is-something-way-bigger-going
You’re just doubling down on the point I’m making. Here’s an us v. them frame for you: winners versus losers. Do support protecting democratic processes and liberal democracy generally? Then vote Democrat. But if you’re like a lot of self-righteous lefties I know, you’ll stamp off in a huff b/c reality doesn’t conform to your platonic ideal. You want change? Advocate for ranked-choice voting.
Maybe read the linked article?
Left right politics is binary mind control.
Voting got us into this mess, it sure as hell isn't going to get us out.
That is the most moronic useless, trollist, nihilistic observation of the day. I can only imagine your cunning plan to make government solve problems. Let me guess: some anarcho-syndicalist utopia?
“But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he said, the wolves will take over.” —Carl Sagan
TriiTorch’a Cunning Plan:
We first need to build a platform of local strength, self-reliance, and resiliency. Once done, and we have a solid foundation from which to stand, from there we begin working on taking back the higher levels: county, state, federal.
The following solutions were crowdsouced from various forums across the web. I have distilled them into this:
The solution is to get local, get self-dependent, get the common unity back in community by building webs of resilience with your neighbors, get control of your school boards, mayors and sherrif's office, and town councils (the last places we still hold all of the cards), get a garden in your lawn no matter how small, a single tomato plant is better than nothing, get bartering, get a well (water is your most important resource hands down), get ready, get moving, get doing, and, if so inclined, get God.
“Unless the people, through unified action, arise and take charge of their government, they will find that their government has taken charge of them. Independence and liberty will be gone, and the general public will find itself in a condition of servitude to an aggregation of organized and selfish interest.” —Calvin Coolidge
Everyone's looking for a savior instead of looking in the mirror. We are the ones we've been waiting for.
I remember all this because 2000 was the first presidential election I voted in, as a lefty radical college student (although I voted for Gore). So I spent a lot of my adult life frustrated with Dems for not being lefty enough, and I think a lot of what happened in the aughts was a holdover from Bill Clinton's centrist triumph in the 90s, and a lot of the politicians who came up through the ranks then (Schumer, Pelosi) still espouse this centrist prioritization of bipartisanship, as though New Gingrich and a recalcitrant wing of the Republican party didn't exist. (Which is to say, there were more reasonable Republicans in Congress prior to the Tea Party, but let's not pretend it was all hunky dory.)
Anyway, one thing I think a lot of commentators miss is that the filibuster benefits Republicans. McConnell-style Republicans care about two things: judges and tax cuts, and they can do both with 51 votes. That's why GOP senators insist on keeping it; it'll be far worse (to them) if the filibuster is abolished and Dems can pass voting rights bills and whatever other liberal priorities keep John Thune awake at night. (Before the McConnell era, the filibuster was most often deployed to stop progress, especially on civil rights.)
I think also sometime in the last ten years, elected Dems starting fearing being called radical to an irrational degree. They trust mainstream media too much and think the truth is on their side but don't make an affirmative case and let all of Trump's nonsense fill the void. I think that's also part of the current party infighting. Take New York. Tom Suozzi is so terrified of someone on Fox News calling him a Marxist that, rather than making a case for his own politics, he's lashing out at the DSA candidates in NYC, mad their very existence will give Republicans fuel to call the whole party communist (which Trump is doing now and doesn't seem to be getting much traction with). But the dynamic is such that Biden could have built the dang wall and Trump and Republicans would still be yelling about open borders. If the centrists think they're right, let them make that argument instead of punching left. Maybe they are right! The DSA movement seems to be one largely of affluent white liberals, but they'll have to win over voters of color to win bigger races.
But Dem establishment politics of the Trump era have been a lot of telling the base what we can't have, or just tinkering around the edges while problems get bigger and worse, and they should maybe be less surprised that voters are like, "we bided our time and did things your way for decades, and we got two Trump terms for it, so we're trying something else now."
Your last paragraph there exactly expresses what I've been trying to say for a very long time! Thank you for the clarity!
Just finished reading and, while it rattles around my tired brain some more, for now I'll just say that even with how long this piece is, I still feel like it could be fleshed out *even further* into an entire series. It's that important.
Or shortened.
Excellent analysis Brian. For me what caused the collapse of trust wasn't necessarily the 2024 election results but the party's response to it. After saying they would conduct a thorough assessment of what went wrong they couldn't produce an autopsy, leadership did not change, and strategy did not change. Party leaders advocating for doing nothing in 2025 was an astounding failure.
It was also demoralizing having consultants tell us that Kamala was doomed from the start and many people thought Biden would lose in mid 2024 while asking for our money and time. It feels like we were grifted. Or being told that "we lost less in places we campaigned." Imagine a football coach losing the superbowl and saying "we did good on first down".
Most infantilizing is the leadership doubling down on terrible candidates like Haley Stevens, doubling down on AIPAC spending and corporate spending, demolishing any sense of a policy or governing agenda, and then telling us to vote our way out of facism. We did it before and these people did nothing.
That's because we were being grifted
Thanks for writing this. It sums up my views and feelings quite accurately. I'm in Michigan supporting Abdul El-Sayed. I do have qualms from time to time, that I should be supporting Haley Stevens, the "safer" choice but I'm not budging.
In Michigan, the echoes of the Democratic Endorsement Convention on April 19, 2026 continue to linger. Haley Stevens was booed during her speech. I wasn't surprised. I might have booed too if I had been there.
The message from the Michigan Democratic Party elite and in particular, Haley Stevens, has been clear. Progressive voices don't matter. Progressives are supposed to show up and canvass and donate money but never have a candidate of their own.
When this started, I would have been happy with a progressive position or two like Medicare for All or Abolish ICE. But no compromises were offered. I wanted to hear that the progressive voices were heard and acknowledged.
According to the polls, El-Sayed has a decent chance of defeating Mike Rogers. My own view is that Rogers is a weak candidate and El-Sayed a stronger one. And that El-Sayed is a better choice than Haley Stevens for the nominee in 2026.
But nothing is certain.
The Democrats somehow managed to be heavily complicit in or come to outright own in the public mind every Republican failure of the last 25 years, whether it be the financial crisis/bailouts, Iraq/Afghanistan War, War on Terror, Covid, Mass Incarceration, Income inquality, Gaza, you name it. Seems unsurprising the base has turned on its leadership.
The lack of visible efforts to oppose the painful dismantling of the federal government and its capabilities,, the disgusting grift/unbelievable corruption by the Trumps, the unbelievably unqualified nominees, wars on a whim, the list is endless. I pay reasonably close attention to the news and know very little about such D opposition. It's heartbreaking. Someone should be screaming from the rafters - ever day - and making the news cover it. People can't believe how the adults in the room have allowed our country to sink so low so fast with barely a whimper. Yes- they want to elect people who will do something or die trying.
>They’d given the country full employment, lower inequality, rising wages
Yeah, it turns out that none of those things impress people much when the cost of housing is up 50 to 100 per cent, grocery prices are shooting up, and twice-yearly insurance renewal offers produce sticker shock each time.
Newt Gingrich slaughtered Democrats in 1994 with his "Contract for America," framed as common sense reforms to how DC operated.
Democrats are not even talking about this year, they're blathering about "Project 2029," which might be the lamest marketing ever...and so far centers on banning teens from social media...while Trump and the GOP corrupt everything they touch.
There is so much real Democrats could be for: Re-establishing the Voting Rights Act and outlawing partisan gerrymandering, preventing elected and appointed Federal officials from trading stocks, outlawing US trade and peace negotiations by unconfirmed persons, removing "independent" agencies from the Executive and placing their rule-creating within Congress, un-packing SCOTUS, expanding the House with our population *as the Constitution required,* renewing and reasserting Congress' power of the purse, etc.
Individual Democrats run on some of these.
The Democratic Party can brand itself as the party of Democracy, but seems content to be "kinder, gentler" Republicans.
Pretty much all of this is wishful thinking divorced from any reality on how the public actually votes? Though also I agree it's pretty representative of the leftist mindset that is currently empowering the DSA and Sanders-backed wing of the party.
No, responding to Trump's popular victory in 2024 by escalating obstructionism, denying confirmation of any cabinet appointment whatsoever, would have only given Trump more political capital; ditto an absolute shutdown. As it is, the shutdown that did end ended not on Schumer's call, but the call of the specific Senators who broke, namely Tim Kain, Fetterman, Warner, and company.
And we could go down the list of recommendations for what to do now, but it's again this unhinged insistence that the voting public is suddenly going to materialize behind leftist views, when polling still indicates the country is still pluralistically conservative and moderate before it is liberal (self-described liberals still trail self described conservatives and moderates). But still, it's easier to throw stones at people on the same side as you than actually go do battle on the actual front lines.
Like let alone running against Moderates: where are all the DSA style leftist candidates running against Republican incumbents in 'safe' Republican districts? Where's the leftist challenger to Tom Cotton in Arkansas? Where's the leftist running for the open seat in Oklahoma? These losers can't be bothered, because they know they have no chance of making converts to their cause. They're just hear to complain that leadership can't deliver miracles to make them happy.
Superb post. Whenever I think of what has happened to the US in the last few decades I often think of W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming", where he wrote: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.
The irony is Yeats was a right winger. The poem is a complaint about conservatives not having resolve. I like the poem too
My Substack focuses on Article V of our nation’s second constitution and how the failure to use it has allowed structural political problems to accumulate for more than two centuries.
There are numerous structural failures in the system of elections namely elected officials ability to fire voters once elected to make sure they never face the same voters twice.
I am focusing on one systemic problem in campaigning and that is the way campaigns systematically lock out entire slices of the electorate by refusing to hire organizers who actually understand those communities. Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and other race‑ or ethnicity‑specific organizers are often treated as optional add‑ons rather than core strategists. Campaign leadership assumes these voters are already “activated” by fear, anxiety, or the stakes of the moment — as if fear substitutes for engagement. It doesn’t. No one is motivated by being ignored, and communities know when they are being sidelined.
This bias shows up in hiring decisions, message development, and field strategy. Campaigns choose consultants who don’t know the cultural, linguistic, or neighborhood‑level realities of the voters they need. They avoid hiring organizers who can run the type of campaign that actually works in their constituency. And because campaign payments — tens of millions for presidential races, millions for Senate, and millions even for competitive House seats — flow regardless of whether the campaign wins or loses, there is no financial penalty for getting these decisions wrong.
The result is predictable: campaigns fail to reach the voters who could have delivered victory, then blame the candidate or accuse the winning side of “unsavory tactics.” But the real problem is structural. When campaigns reward the same consultants whether they win or lose, and when they refuse to empower organizers who understand key communities, they build their own losses. It is another form of bias — and it has cost countless elections.
I do not work campaigns nor do I want to, these observations cover 1980-2024.
Sometimes I think Matt Yglesias, in his tendentious lectures to the broader left-of-center about “winning”, is having a debate with his younger self by proxy.
Are you and Matthew tellling stories that look at first glance to be diametrically opposed, but maybe are not?
I read you as saying, mainly, "this is how the Dem establishment lost the voters"
I read Matt as saying, "The left is marketing itself as the anti-Trump coalition but that is a scam, their are more focused on intraparty factional battles."
Right or wrong, these are not exactly opposite points of view. Him being right doesn't make you wrong or vice versa.
We have somewhat similar analyses (we depart on the particulars of what precipitated the collapse of trust. But we very different prescriptions. Mine is that if elected Dems want to put down the insurgency, they should recapture anti-Trump energy by fighting him harder, in real procedural terms. Matt’s (I think) is that we should expose and stigmatize the insurgents, to starve them of resources.
Yeah, the DSA wants to take over the Democratic party, but they didn't even endorse Kamala Harris against Donald Trump.
I used to read Beutler's pieces somewhere, then lost track of him. I hate it when voices on the left devote all their energy to tearing down the one party that believes in free and fair elections, health care for all, and freedom of speech. Not that he does not make some good points, but this seems to be the most important thing to him, criticize the only party that in most ways represents your own beliefs. I am a senior, I vote, I donate, I even helped with a door knocking campaign in my home town. I will not support anyone who doesn't understand that the perfect is just as much of the enemy as the MAGAts.