The Stench Of Weakness

It can’t be washed off without first learning basic self-respect.

(Photo by Gavin Newsom/X/Brian Beutler)

For my sins, I listened to Gavin Newsom interview the Trump loyalist Charlie Kirk for his new podcast. Ok, I listened to the first 35 minutes and seven seconds before I got pulled into another commitment, and haven’t been able to bring myself to finish the episode.

The Gavin Newsom Show is the first significant product of a Democratic Party wide effort to break out of old media habits and eat into right-wing media dominance. It’s an important objective. I wish there were a way to meet it quickly, and with certitude, but the gap is huge, ideas vary, and Democratic money is timid. Under the circumstances, the process will feature a lot of clumsiness. But you can’t find footing if you don’t stumble a bit first.

And stumble he did! At least in episode one, which left me confused as to who Newsom’s target audience is. Presumably Newsom wants to reach a broad audience, but I also presume he hopes to particularly impress either Democratic primary voters or general election swing voters, or perhaps both at once, though they are very different beasts.

This question—what is Newsom’s goal here?—tees up my main critique: Whether he hopes to impress primary voters, or swing voters or both at once, he’ll want different guests or to conduct himself differently.

Newsom can presumably interview every high-profile person in America, people with reach into all kinds of communities. But there’s extremely limited utility in conversation with professional Trump apparatchiks.

There are prominent figures in politics and culture who are legitimately cross-pressured, and capable of good-faith engagement, even if they aren’t really open to changing their mind on specific issues, or which issues are most important.

Kirk is not like this. He’s a propagandist and a full-time operator. His objective is to persuade through deception rather than reason. Many progressives are pissed at Newsom for treating a bigot-swaddling liar as a peer. But that’s not really my gripe. It’s that there’s no mind at work, no driving commitment to pick apart. For all his flaws and warts, literal and figurative, even an actor as malign as Steve Bannon will break character and be earnest from time to time, or engage on the merits with ideas that threaten his worldview. Not Kirk.

In absence of searching discourse, one potential source of appeal to a swing voter in this interview is the meta fact: Newsom welcomed the Trumpiest of the Trumpy into his sanctum, and didn’t treat him rudely. But that theory stakes basically everything on the hope that more than a handful of swing voters will ever hear that the episode happened, let alone listen to the actual conversation.

The only other potential value in engaging with a Trump sycophant like Kirk would be to embarrass him; leave him stammering. Proving to both swing voters and primary voters alike that Newsom (and by extension Democrats) aren’t to be trifled with.

But that’s not what Newsom did. What really put me off—what I think will be unappealing to voters of all kinds—was his willingness to eat shit.

SORRY, CHARLIE

Kirk begins the interview taking these digs at Newsom, who ignores them or laughs them off. He refers, over and over , to the “Democrat Party” and spits the word “Democrat” as an adjective in multiple other contexts, always to convey contempt.

Newsom let it slide. He let basically everything slide, but his tolerance for casual disdain is what made his broader passivity most evident.

Younger readers and readers newer to politics will be surprised to learn this, but the debate over how Democrats should respond to Kirk’s provocations is literally decades old.

In a different context, my old boss Josh Marshall took a view that drives a huge share of my thinking about modern politics—that Democrats suffer greatly by refusing to respond when Republicans intentionally demean them. He called it the “Republican Bitch-Slap theory of politics,” and it goes like this:

On one level, of course, the aim behind [swift boat-style] attacks is to cast suspicion upon [John] Kerry’s military service record and label him a liar. But that’s only part of what’s going on….

One way — perhaps the best way — to demonstrate someone’s lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves — thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can’t or won’t defend themselves certainly isn’t someone you can depend upon to defend you.

Demonstrating Kerry’s unwillingness to defend himself (if Bush can do that) is a far more tangible sign of what he’s made of than wartime experiences of thirty years ago.

This idea turns out to be generalizable; it isn’t an epiphenomenon of the GWOT era. In totally different contexts over many years, Democrats and liberals have bickered among themselves over whether and how to respond when Republicans say “Democrat Party” as a provocation.

Way back in July 2006, Hendrik Hertzberg called it “the partisan equivalent of flashing a gang sign.”

In the many years since, most Democrats have chosen to rise above the fray (or, perhaps more accurately, duck below the conflict) and take the bullying in stride.

In November 2006, perhaps from the other side of our living room, a young Ezra Klein wrote, “Do we have any actual data showing that the term [Democrat Party] hurts Democrats? Particularly given that, in fact, the proper plural for Democratic people is ‘Democrats?’ I'm not doubting that the right's intentions are malicious, but this bit of schoolyard-style word manipulation seems far below anything that will actually impinge on the electorate's preferences and sensibilities.”

In January 2007—long before he became a moderate squish who hates it when Democrats make any kind of scene, and long before Brian Beutler was established enough to Beutler-pill anyone—Matthew Yglesias responded to Klein.

I disagree. Very strongly. Primarily, this is not a question of Luntz-style linguistic manipulation, but a question of basic dignity and honor. It related to Josh Marshall's "bitch-slap theory" of electoral politics. The key charge against liberals is that we're weak. Weak on Communism. Weak on crime. Weak on terrorism. Weak-minded, soft-hearted, weak, weak, weak. Well, what's the key sign of weakness: a person who won't stand up for themselves.

To call someone by something other than the name he wishes to be called by is rude. To make a mistake is forgivable, but to persist -- deliberately -- in declining to use your adversary's proper name is rude and insulting. It's not a big deal unless you take standing up for yourself to be a big deal. When Democrats go on TV and let a conservative get away with the phrase "Democrat Party" it's signaling that Democrats are weak. They're too weak to stand up for themselves. They're too weak to have a sense of group solidarity or party loyalty. They're inclined to let things slide. They don't want to make a scene. They don't like to have a fight. They're weak. Is a political party that can't even protect its own name really going to keep America safe?

How’s that for blasts from the past?

This notion—the political importance of “basic dignity and honor”—was pretty foundational to my worldview even then, and has become much more so in the age of Trump. If you have basic dignity and honor, you don’t let a mediocre troll mouth off to you without pointing out that it’s wormy, passive-aggressive loser behavior. If you have basic dignity and honor, you boycott the State of the Union because you don’t tolerate being captive to abuse, anymore than you’d lie supine so a bully could more easily pin you down and poke you in the chest.

But if anything Democrats have moved in the other direction; become more inclined to submit. And I it goes a long way toward explaining why Democrats are so toxically unpopular. Swing voters don’t find Human Doormat to be an appealing character trait. But neither do Democratic primary voters, at least not any longer.

SLOT MACHINE

I got at this in a piece I wrote after the election.

Elissa Slotkin, then a senator-elect, had just attributed Democrats’ poor showing in the election to “identity politics” advocacy, which she said should go the way of the dodo bird. And my response in short was that Democrats like her could rob nettlesome activists of their power simply by not acting like empty suits. They’d made themselves susceptible to activists demands by being too timid to say what they actually believed about contentious issues, forcing them to choose between following the activist lead, or sitting out the discourse altogether.

Since then, Slotkin delivered the official Democratic response to Donald Trump’s joint congressional address. It was fine as abstract text, and competently delivered, but highly conventional. An uncanny way to respond to an hours-long defamatory tirade. Not how humans “with basic dignity and honor” react to being treated rudely in a public setting.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Slotkin granted special access to the journalist Tim Alberta, who took us behind the scenes as Slotkin prepared to ignore Trump’s provocations (both in word and deed) and instead allow the contrast between his vitriol and her poise to speak for itself.

Democrats “have been on their heels since the election,” Slotkin told me, and the party faithful have been agitating since January 20 for someone, anyone, to stand up to Trump. The announcement of Slotkin had already been met with grumbling from progressives online; anything short of oratorical firebolts would confirm the complacent, feckless approach of the D.C. governing class.

Slotkin viewed the stakes somewhat differently: This speech could, at least symbolically, commence a new chapter of Democratic Party opposition to a president whose success is inextricable from the tone-deaf ineptitude of Democratic Party opposition. If her team’s resistance to Trump’s first term was marked by hysteria and hashtags—all the land acknowledgments and pronoun policing and intersectionality initiatives—Slotkin saw last night the opportunity to set a different tone.

…

Watching yesterday evening as she rehearsed in front of staffers, I noticed that only once did she identify herself as a Democrat—in the final line of the speech. As we spoke a few minutes later, in a cramped corridor just beyond the set, I asked whether that was intentional.

“I think, at least in this part of the world, there’s real skepticism about Democrats. That they’re weak—” she paused, perhaps noticing her usage of the third-person plural.

It’s admittedly impossible for me to know whether these characterizations are Alberta’s alone, or a synthesis of Slotkin’s thoughts and his own. But her comments to Alberta, like the response speech itself, evince the same weakness I heard on Newsom’s podcasts, and that Slotkin apparently detects in her own party.

Why, I wonder, does she think her constituents believe Democrats are weak? Did they think Democrats seemed weaker in Trump’s first term, when they were supposedly a font of “hysteria and hashtags?” How does ignoring elephants in the room possibly help change that perception?

I can’t peer inside anyone’s mind. It’s hard to know which Democrats are fearful of confrontation, and which have simply been convinced that turning the other cheek day in day out is an admirable look. But to a casual observer, I imagine it looks like fear. The implication that anti-Trump resistance is synonymous with grad-school pieties and policy laundry lists is hard to read as anything other than evasion. Why collapse important distinctions between cringy activism and blunt assessments of Trump’s cruelty, corruption, and lies, unless the goal is to throw the baby out with the bath water and play dead?