How Do We Fix This?

November 29th, 2024

I don't expect to revolutionize anything by adding my opinions to the fray. I am not a political scientist or any kind of professional. I'm not a doctrinaire to any particular ideological stance, and I don't believe I know all the answers.

It's very Socratic of me.

Unfortunately, as the dust settles in the aftermath of the 2024 election, I get a strong sense that no one else knows the answers either.

Donald Trump was reelected. Not overwhelmingly, but decisively. Democracy has occurred. The details as to why this happened are a subject of a future essay, or more likely, several. But the damage is done.

I'm not particularly interested in relitigating the Kamala Harris campaign, much less all nine years of the Eternal 2016 Democratic Primary, because what's past is past. The institutional Democratic Party failed. It doesn't matter how unfair it might have been, how strong the headwinds against our party, or that we kept it close.

The stakes were set on January 6th. Raised when Dobbs dropped. Were cemented at “existential" by Trump v. USA. And we lost.

Already, Democrats in Congress are signalling a willingness to cede ground, to cooperate with the incoming administration to some extent. Luminaries such as Senator Fetterman have made it clear that Trump has the right to choose his own cabinet, no matter how many rapists he deigns to promote. The era of resistance is over. After all, it failed, didn't it? We went through the motions of opposing fascism, and all we got were these pussy hats.

I am certainly no revolutionary. I don't despise our constitutional order, or Kamala Harris herself. But for the last eight years, I have felt that liberalism was fighting a desperate rearguard action, one where the goal was to outlast Trump, stop our democracy from bleeding out, and hopefully emerge, scarred but wiser, in a place where we could stop it from happening again.

Clearly, this didn't happen. It was infuriatingly close, though. We did what we needed to do in 2018 and 2020, just barely. Then, when the dragon lay writhing in pain and vulnerable, we faltered. We let the bastard get away with all of his crimes, and we couldn't convince the electorate that his crimes mattered. And now we've lost to the most extreme political platform in American history, in part because our candidate, frantically tacking to the center, couldn't convince anyone that she was the less radical choice.

I see no future for the Democratic Party as it exists today. If the Trump administration fumbles the bag with the dictatorial powers they have been handed, if a Democrat is allowed to win the Presidency back in 2028, it won't fix our country. It may stem the bleeding until the next demagogue arrives with a carving knife and a pre-written manual for how to use it.

The future is more unknowable than it usually tends to be, because so much depends on the whims and attention span of a single man. There have been some signs that the very worst may not come to pass, that at the very least Matt Gaetz is a bridge too far. Trump's incompetence has always been our greatest blessing.

I'm interested in looking forward, though. What kind of progressive movement can we build that is not constantly on the brink of losing to such a cretin? What blind spots are the ones that really hurt us the most? What lessons can be learned, not from Democratic failures, but from Republican success?

Suffice to say, I have a few theories.