I voted for Jill Stein in a supposed swing state (Georgia) and I’m not sorry. My decision was not because of racism or sexism, as Harris’ race and gender are not relevant to what was the dealbreaker for me. Genocide is a bright red line for me and I refused to cross it. I considered Harris when she was first coronated with the nomination in the hopes that she might be slightly better than the crypt keeper in charge. This cautious optimism went away when it was clear she was not only just more of the same, but mocked those who were appalled about what’s happening in Palestine. Rather than bring out her base, she appealed to people who either weren’t going to vote for her anyway (those mythical moderate Republicans) or the security state boys who were responsible for taking down the actual left decades ago. Apparently, the “big tent” of the Democratic Party is big enough for war criminal Dick Cheney, but not for anyone who wants actual progressive change.
These liberal ghouls who are out on social media talking about how they hope Muslims, Arabs, Black men, Hispanic men, and all the other scapegoats etc. are genocided, deported, or put in camps just verify what Malcolm X said about the treachery of white liberals. The ones who would rather be at brunch than deal with real issues because a Democratic administration was in charge are like the white liberals described by MLK, who prefer the illusion of a superficial tranquillity than real peace.
The entire reason that we as a country are in this situation is because the actual left was completely destroyed by the early 1980s, while the far right was allowed to do whatever they wanted. Joe Biden was in national politics for fifty odd years and Nancy Pelosi has been involved in politics basically her whole life. They and the other elder Democrats watched the religious right and their benefactors gain power and either enabled them or did nothing, because they still yearn for that sweet, sweet Solid South from the pre-Civil Rights days. Biden showed more empathy for that segregationist pervert Strom Thurmond than the children of Gaza and helped install Clarence Thomas. No one should be surprised about how we got here.
I’m sick of this “Black misleadership class” who just run interference for white supremacy and funnel a genuine desire for change into dead-end electoral politics. Our ancestors may have died for the right to vote, but they weren’t dying so we could have a Black woman presiding over a genocide.
As I said, I had never planned to vote the way I did. I'd been agitating for Biden's removal as a candidate for months, precisely because of the genocide in Gaza. My feelings on the situation in Gaza haven't changed. Perhaps I could be faulted for giving into a calculus of my own, insofar as I felt an obligation to not leave the top of the ticket blank as a resident of a swing state. I had planned to do just that, but local conditions changed (i.e., my awareness of the probable manipulation of sentiments by the news media in the form of the Washington Post).
I was surprised at how much Coates's words affected me. It was an hour-long interview, so the excerpt I cropped and displayed here was the most pertinent but was not the part that made me tear up. And I'm not a sentimental person, so the fact that I had such a strong reaction I must chalk up to how important this entire issue is for me. It was the part where he notes that Harris, were she to make it into the White House, has to be more than just that accomplishment, even though we may have had a dream of a Black woman in the White House. That was not a driving goal of mine, certainly not this cycle, but his point that she needed to be more than a symbol really touched a chord. I cannot tell you how this election season I have felt so much despair.
Now, what you've noted here about the comments by some in the Democratic Party (I cannot call these particular folks 'liberals', because that term means "free from bigotry"), I too have noticed! It's rather an extension of what I noted in a previous comment exchange with Meredith, where I spoke about how so many so-called progressives were slandering Arab- and Muslim-American voters as dumb and disloyal, so the point that the racism just leapt off the page. It was breathtaking. I stopped by Ye Olde Platform last night, which for the most part was a ghost town except for a few diaries that had some traction, and there absolutely were some folks there who were slagging anyone who in their minds fit the mold of a traitor to the Democratic Party. At least two people said that they hope certain voters (Arabs, Muslims, Latinos, Blacks) are rounded up and either imprisoned in camps or deported. One said that the next time he hears of an innocent Black guy getting slain by a White police officer that he won't feel bad. I mean, just stereotypical flip-the-gameboard behavior, except we're talking about people's lives here. It's really revealing and it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what a coalition is supposed to be.
The thing about that behavior is that it's a mirror of right-wing racial animus. It's anger directed at a scapegoat (just as you say) so as to avoid directing criticism at the ones with more power who are actually responsible for the screw-up. The leadership of the party needs to come in for serious criticism and scrutiny. But those who are into hierarchy and status politics can't countenance chewing out their superiors -- they have to kick down. Now, most people aren't taught to question authority, so they may be legitimately yet unconsciously afraid. But that's what grassroots politics are about: getting to the heart of problems so as to effect structural change. It just so happens that the change in this instance must be to our political structure -- the very house in which we live, and we have to make repairs while living in it.
So that's daunting, and instead of dealing with the stress that comes from that these kneejerk folk who are lashing out are blaming people for exercising their very right to vote. It's their vote! No one has a right to dictate what people do with their own vote. That they feel that these "traitors" should be pushed out into the cold or worse is indicative of the immense entitlement that these folk feel. They feel entitled to utterly ignore the concerns that these voters had but they feel completely free to demand that those same people vote as they are commanded. That's hubris. Yet these people are so blinded by their point of view that they will not see their intrinsic error.
Thank you for your reply. The quote from Coates reminded me of what happened when MLK tried to take the Civil Rights Movement to Chicago and discovered that although Black there could vote, most didn’t feel they had anyone or anything worth voting for. Similarly, I recall reading a TIME magazine from 1965 or so that smugly reported that although Mississippi Blacks could now vote, most of them weren’t, indicating that King was wrong about the desire for Southern Blacks to vote. Examples like these are why I can’t take the hysteria about “losing our democracy” seriously. You can’t lose something you never had in the first place.
John Dewey said something like democracy is a set of habits that have to be cultivated, and I don’t think that ever really happened, not just here but in other Western liberal democracies. We are told that democracy = voting in a multiparty election. But many places across the country operate essentially as one party states, and a lot of local races consist of one person from said party running unopposed. Not exactly a robust democracy. I think to many people, elections are just a very dreary reality show. As a former reality star, maybe that’s why Trump does so well.
The full on racism on display at the Other Site and other liberal social media sites illustrates what I meant last week when I said that such places are full of racists. A supermajority of Black men voted for Harris, but the fact that a minority didn’t is enough for them to wish for racially motivated violence on all of them. Compare the glowing articles from the Other Site pre-2023 about getting out the Muslim vote with today where they’re wishing genocide on them. These sorts of liberals only care about marginalized people when they can make it about themselves; look at me, look how liberal I am, unlike those rethuglicans who are ignorant and very different from me! But like conservatives, they fundamentally think that minorities should “stay in their place” and defer to their betters in the DNC about what is politically possible. If you chafe against that, then you’re ungrateful and deserve to be in a camp. In that sense, they are no different than old school segregationists, who frequently insisted to national news outlets that they loved “their Negroes”… if they stayed in their place. If they get outside of “their place,” whatever happened was their own fault. As Bill Clinton said earlier in the week when he was dispatched to Michigan to whitesplain genocide, the problem isn’t that the US is supporting a genocide, it’s that the voters feel the wrong way about it. This is a very conservative position, the idea that racism isn’t the problem, it’s you not accepting racism. I think it will only get worse, since the Democratic Party appears to want to transform itself into the GOP circa 2020.
Given that the WaPo and NYT have strong ties to the intelligence community, I think that any mildly pro-Palestinian articles that may appear in these publications should be indicative of wanting to sway public opinion for or against Biden. You’re never going to find the kind of visceral, unapologetic pro-Palestinian reporting that appears in Mondoweiss or Electric Intifada. Anything that appears in the WaPo has probably been vetted as being fit for publication by military fact checkers (some months ago, CNN admitted that all their I-P stories are vetted by the Tel Aviv office). The pro-Israel position is such a default across American discourse that it’s difficult to break, as the election saw two candidates trying to out Zionist each other. I guess every now and then, there has to be a human interest story about Palestinian suffering, but never about Palestinian resistance.
Edited to add: it’s funny that liberals kept saying, “This is not who we are” during his first tenure, but their response to their own election loss is very Trumpian, in that they’re threatening mass death, imprisonment, and gratuitous suffering towards their perceived enemies in unpopular minority groups. It’s almost as if “this” is exactly who we are.
Heh. I have a hypothesis about this, but I will save my thoughts for when I can flesh out my comments. I'll say that over the course of several years some Democrats (I don't know if I'd term them 'liberals') have yearned to embrace meanness. I think this expanded exponentially yesterday and into today.
I'm sure that the particular folks we're singling out would not consider themselves to want specific others to stay in their place. I think that such an idea would be so unfamiliar to them that they would reject it outright.
As an aside, I'll mention that there seems to be a parallel with pointing out someone's racism and pointing out that they may be in a cult. There's an automatic rejection of the idea, probably as a means of self-protection of one's ego. So, it's almost certainly going to be difficult to point this trend out to our friends on the left, who see themselves as nonracist and perceive racism as a failing of those in the other camp.
I don't have a comment about Bill Clinton and his comments at the moment, except to say that they dovetail with the overbearing comments by his wife, who has repeatedly announced that college students are actually intellectually impaired when it comes to understanding the Middle East. There's a common condescension there.
As for the types of articles I was seeing at WaPo that kind of clued me in retrospectively that they might be attempts to deepen anti-war sentiment, take this for example: "Is Israel carrying out de facto ethnic cleansing?" (Washington Post, October 25, 2024)
That appeared very early in the morning, but it was "above the fold". It was moved further down the page after several hours, then reduced to a mere headline before being shuffled off the front page altogether. But for a while the article was prominently placed. At the time, I couldn't help but think that this was quite an advance in the Overton window that the paper was willing to entertain on the Gaza conflict. I now am quite suspicious that this was a form of manipulation of the paper's readership.
Here's a thing. Algorithms have become so sophisticated now, that they can predict things like your divorce with great probability - 15 years before you've met your spouse. These algorithms can predict your educational attainment right about the time you've shown up on your sonogram. They can predict your death date, give or take a year. They can know from relational analytics what brand of peanut butter most appeals to you, what sort of car you are most likely to drive, and what career you will choose while you are still in kindergarten.
Algorithms knew Harris would lose, well before the DNC decided to anoint her. Yet, the elites still gave her the tap. The donors still flooded her with cash. The MSM still fawned on her joy act.
More, those same powers knew that had she moved left, rather than right, she still would have won, because DT is so intensely odious. Yet, she embraced the neocons and doubled down on the now debunked 10/7 lies.
Why? Who stood to make money with this investment?
I think that cynicism is apt to flow wild and free after a loss like what happened last night, so I want to clarify that I don't think that all of Harris's campaign was an act.
I do think she was plastic, and I noted that in a previous essay. There was an inauthenticity about her that triggered that sense of the uncanny valley. It was off-putting but very noticeable and thus attention-grabbing. It's a weird combination. So that was going on.
At the same time, I do think that the Democratic Party as a whole did experience a sense of elated catharsis once the Biden drama of July resolved so neatly and so quickly in Harris's favor. I didn't think that she should be the candidate, but many people in the party thought she should, either because she was next in line, because the money was tied to her name and would otherwise be hard to unlock, or both. Those things -- the feelings and the pragmatic concerns -- are separate but they played against each other in real time. So there really was a groundswell of energy that flooded the campaign in the early days. It's easy to compress that time period, looking back; but Harris expertly strung her veepstakes out day by day to sustain that sense of excitement and enthusiasm.
It was once the veep selection was completed and the DNC over that she and her team pivoted toward what I can only assume they felt was "the real campaign." Harris abandoned her sense of freshness and hunkered down for a typical campaign. Indeed, I would say that she just borrowed Biden's playbook wholesale. She didn't attempt anything other than a centrist campaign.
Why did donors open their wallets and pocketbooks? I think they could see that Biden was a losing proposition after his disastrous debate, and by comparison Harris looked like an even bet. So they were willing to back her, even though she was untested.
(As for "elites [giving] her the tap," I reiterate that it was Biden who's responsible for this. Pelosi and others, as reported at the time, were seeking someone other than Harris as a possible candidate. Biden circumvented Pelosi, almost certainly because he was nursing his wounded feelings. As I understand it, he hasn't spoken to Pelosi since July. So I think his tapping of Harris was his way of kicking the legs out from under those who pressured him to step aside.)
I would not have thought this before this election cycle, but I now see that leftist politics are not considered compatible with the economic system that has been in place since the '70s. I don't have a fully sketched-out thesis, but I think leaders of both parties, having embraced neoliberalism as an economic engine, believe that leftist politics would lead to policies that would interfere with the smooth machinery of the current financial system, and so moving anywhere to the left cannot be countenanced. I'd love to be proven wrong on this score. But I think this general dynamic fit even the socioeconomic realities of the 1920s & '30s, which is how it is that industrialists and businessmen felt aligned with fascist governments, because right-wing policies will not disturb capitalism as a venture. Labor-friendly politics, on the other hand, cause all sorts of perturbations.
I saw the headline of your article yesterday and purposely avoided because I knew it would be a painful read and I was right. And that is the entirety of right thinking that has come from my brain on the issue of this election. 1. Once Biden stepped aside or got pushed out, I was pretty sure Harris would be the best pick. I thought having any sort of contested convention or primary would be a disaster. 2. I strongly disapprove of American policy with regard to Israel and the genocide we are helping them carry out. But (always a but) I figured Trump would be far worse. Far worse. Still believe that too. He will keep supporting Israel because I think he likely enjoys watching certain people suffer. I had the far fetched hope that post election, Harris might change our policy toward Israel. I think Trump will see to it that there are no survivors and I think he will joke about it. 3. I thought Harris would certainly win and in the last week, or once early voting got underway, I thought she would win in a landslide. The important people kept talking about women voting in record numbers and first time voters and after Trump’s MSG rally, I thought he would lose significant numbers of Latino voters. So yeah. I was so wrong about so much, I think I should just stop voting completely. Plus, I am leaning into the idea that the entire political system is performative. We have a bunch of millionaires and billionaires who have captured the process and own it to the extent that they design the outcome and keep up an illusion that we call democracy. So I might have voted for the last time. Not sure. Ha. Trump might just end even the illusion of democracy so even my decision to stop voting, isn’t REALLY a choice at all.
I am pretty sick. Angry. Disgusted. And feeling foolish.
You'll have to forgive me for my stridency, still, in my very strong opinion about how all of this went down. I'm still affected by the point of view of being on the outside looking in -- and by this, I mean specifically about not being able to participate on DKos, not being able to influence opinion there but still reading what others leave there.
So much ultra-conformity and bullying occurred there during the month of July, through the tussle as to whether Biden would step aside or try to weather the storm. I remain firm in my view that he was on course for spectacular defeat. The polls were horrendous -- almost a straight descent in three short weeks. Anyway, that's when the 'bedwetting' slur came out to corral dissenters and get them back in line with what soon emerged as the dominant groupthink. It was remarkable to witness.
But Biden did step aside. These same boss-stick-holding figures issued recriminations, but they were swayed by the genuine outpouring of excitement that emanated from the party as Biden gave Harris the open lane. When people of my brand of thinking tried to raise the point that an open convention or mini-primary would have been preferable, they were shouted down. That, to me, was them attempting to re-establish their dominance in the discourse: Okay, whiners, you got what you wanted, now let the experts take it from here. That incensed me.
The wing of the party that understood that Biden was not the one to carry us over the finish line also had insight into how to proceed. But we were simply not taken seriously. The grand poobahs moved in and re-asserted what ended up conventional wisdom, when this was an election that demanded unorthodox thinking.
Essentially, they thought that this was a time for a standard play, when in fact we were running against a fascist. This was not a secret. We knew this. It was the height of arrogance to think that running a Black female in this environment, where White men were insecure about their place in the social hierarchy, was a winning strategy. It's just astonishing, looking back.
I wrote my essay yesterday as an attempt to get ahead of a potentiality. There was still a chance that Trump could have lost, and in that case his followers would have egged each other on so as to wreak real havoc in many sectors of society. Yet we still need to understand the underlying psychological mechanisms that tie his followers to him. That's something I've been working on for years. So even though the diary itself had a short shelf-life in terms of any impending violence, his bond is still quite resilient and deserves examination so as to gain understanding. So I'll be turning my attention to that, while also keeping abreast of the genocide in Gaza.
All of it seems like a global rise in fascism, to be straightforward with you. I don't think I can support the supposition that, because the West failed to rein in Israel and its ultra-right-wing tendencies, the entire West will suffer an influx of fascism as people sour on democracy. What's the point of democracy if the guardians of it don't protect against human rights violations and atrocities? Where's the compact with the citizenry?
I understand your cynicism. I hope you will keep an open mind about voting. Like I say, I had planned on leaving the top line blank and voting downballot; sometimes I thought about not voting at all (almost blasphemous in some ways, it feels). But I gave it another thought, remembering that some people sacrificed their very lives to earn the right to vote. So it must be worth something, especially if there are still so many people trying to remove that right to this day.
At this point, the Democratic Party should just go the way of the Whigs. I know it won’t, but its catastrophic failure and inability to learn from it (other than blame the electorate) indicates that it’s utterly useless as an engine for change. At the bare minimum, the people on the Other Site should be demanding that the entire senior leadership - Pelosi, Schumer, the Clintons, the Obamas- should be purged and replaced. Instead, they’re doubling down on the nonsense that the party cannot fail, it can only be failed.
Across various platforms, it seems like Democrats have just given up. There are no plans to fight back or reconstitute, just stew in resentment and resignation. Virulent racism against unpopular minority groups is being normalized among so-called liberals, who see them as the root of their problem. I don’t know what happens next, but it’s more clear to me than ever that liberal democracy is a dead end.
There are five stages of grief, and the folks on the Other Site are marinating in the first two (denial, anger). To point out a pattern, they did the same thing when Biden stepped aside. So that part to me is unsurprising.
Also, they were high on their own supply. I watched a Zeteo clip that featured Don Calloway (founder of the National Voter Protection Action Fund), along with Ryan Grim. Calloway made mention that Democrats will need to re-examine what went wrong, because at least as far as he was concerned what happened didn't match the vibe he was getting. He said, "This is the first time, at 45 years old, that I know that what I thought was going to happen was purely dictated by what was being fed to me through my algorithm." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOPJcZ7sybc
Same thing happened at the Other Place, because they clamped down on dissenting opinions and kicked people off the platform, calling them foreign trolls and Republicans who'd descended upon the site incognito to stir up trouble. Thus they were not exposed to counter-narratives -- which, again, would be counter-narratives from people in their own ideological camp. They warped their own information space.
I think folks are going through a period of disillusionment. This is not just with the party (in fact, many are making excuses, calling attention to the fact that Harris had just three months to fashion a full-fledged campaign). It's with the structure of politics. I've seen comments talk about how people were promised that all they had to do to keep fascism at bay was to turn out and vote every two or four years. (Every election from city council on up would be best, but you take what you can get.) That didn't happen this time. They're honestly puzzled why it didn't happen, and they feel betrayed by their own countrymen (forgive the heterosexist formulation). They feel alienated in their own land, and for many -- I suspect the plurality of this cohort is white and middle-class -- they've never felt this way before. They don't know what to do with these feelings. (I had my moment of disillusionment, when I saw Biden flat-out lie about beheaded babies. The mirror became see-through.)
I do see a danger in the urge to scapegoat that's going on. Again, some of that can be easily explained by denial. Many of Harris's fans don't want to admit that she did anything wrong in this campaign. That's one of the reasons why I titled this essay stating that she did indeed run a flawed campaign. Until these folks take a moment of self-reflection and -examination, they're going to externalize the pain that they're feeling. That needs to be nipped in the bud as swiftly as possible by party leadership and anyone else who may hold sway. This can't be allowed to fester.
I saw also that some of this anger is being funneled toward leftists, even though Harris did not run a left-leaning campaign. This is opportunism, IMO, to redirect that raw disappointment toward the ruling class's usual suspects. It's quite a self-serving maneuver. That, too, needs to be quashed as quickly as possible to avoid narratives being set, but I'm not sure what outlets could even start making a dent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0T1e8DklKI
Thank you for your reply. One thing that I never see mentioned anywhere is that the conservative movement as a whole has an entire infrastructure and sub culture devoted to achieving its aims. I’ve mentioned the evangelical homeschool movement before, but this also consists of talk radio, the whole Rupert Murdoch system, the Seven Mountains Mandate, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, etc, ALEC, etc. this doesn’t even get into the various billionaire benefactors that support these endeavors. There’s simply nothing like this for the Democrats. Much of this is because, being a centrist status quo party, they don’t see this as a threat to their own power. Indeed, Democrats will often poach ideas from the Heritage Foundation, causing the latter to accuse the former of “communism” (see Obamacare, which started out as a Heritage Foundation plan against HillaryCare in the 1990s).
Rank and file Democrats, however, need to understand how much they are badly outclassed by their opponents in this regard. Part of this is that many outlets for progressive culture building were destroyed during the Cold War, while those on the right were left alone to thrive. Too many Democrats think that just mocking and snarking at Trump supporting evangelicals is in and of itself a radical act. I’m not going to deny that MAGA supporters say and believe in incredibly stupid things. But these MAGATs have actual power and the rank and file Democrats don’t, so who’s actually stupid? As it stands, no one is happy with the status quo, albeit for different reasons, so marketing yourself as a status quo party is a dead weight.
Some of what you describe here traces back to the launch of think tanks, which set conservatives upon a particular path. Liberals have some think tanks, but not nearly on the order as their counterparts. Thus there's always something percolating over in the conservative camp. Their worldview is getting more and more concentrated; and, with their goal these days being power for power's sake, they're increasingly willing to entertain strategies for attaining that power that conservatives in the recent past would have disdained.
I recently came across a video on YouTube intended to explain Christian nationalism to a lay audience. This was from the conservative point of view, though not a POV fully immersed in the nationalist frame, so it was interesting to get a peek. I would project this into the MAGA camp, either directly or adjacently. (I still won't refer to my political opponents as vermin; I don't have it in me.)
What struck me about the video is that the four people (all white guys, but of varying ages and some gradations in level of conservatism) all took for granted that they would be stewards or in some positions of power in the community. The debate, when they got to speaking about this explicitly, was how much (rather than whether) Christian sentiment to bring with them into their secular positions. They simply assumed that they had the natural right to exercise public power. I don't see that same sort of presumptiveness on the Democratic side. Perhaps I'm mistaken or naive, but I think many liberals and moderates in the Democratic camp are still looking to turn their power into policy, and so they see their role in society in a somewhat different way.
I very much agree with what you say about being status quo. Harris's advisers, at least on background, acknowledged that she was and is an incrementalist. I'm sure they let this be known so as to knock down the idea that she's a socialist, but this was an election cycle where there was real hunger for transformative change. Democrats weren't offering it, so voters looked elsewhere.
I voted for Jill Stein in a supposed swing state (Georgia) and I’m not sorry. My decision was not because of racism or sexism, as Harris’ race and gender are not relevant to what was the dealbreaker for me. Genocide is a bright red line for me and I refused to cross it. I considered Harris when she was first coronated with the nomination in the hopes that she might be slightly better than the crypt keeper in charge. This cautious optimism went away when it was clear she was not only just more of the same, but mocked those who were appalled about what’s happening in Palestine. Rather than bring out her base, she appealed to people who either weren’t going to vote for her anyway (those mythical moderate Republicans) or the security state boys who were responsible for taking down the actual left decades ago. Apparently, the “big tent” of the Democratic Party is big enough for war criminal Dick Cheney, but not for anyone who wants actual progressive change.
These liberal ghouls who are out on social media talking about how they hope Muslims, Arabs, Black men, Hispanic men, and all the other scapegoats etc. are genocided, deported, or put in camps just verify what Malcolm X said about the treachery of white liberals. The ones who would rather be at brunch than deal with real issues because a Democratic administration was in charge are like the white liberals described by MLK, who prefer the illusion of a superficial tranquillity than real peace.
The entire reason that we as a country are in this situation is because the actual left was completely destroyed by the early 1980s, while the far right was allowed to do whatever they wanted. Joe Biden was in national politics for fifty odd years and Nancy Pelosi has been involved in politics basically her whole life. They and the other elder Democrats watched the religious right and their benefactors gain power and either enabled them or did nothing, because they still yearn for that sweet, sweet Solid South from the pre-Civil Rights days. Biden showed more empathy for that segregationist pervert Strom Thurmond than the children of Gaza and helped install Clarence Thomas. No one should be surprised about how we got here.
I’m sick of this “Black misleadership class” who just run interference for white supremacy and funnel a genuine desire for change into dead-end electoral politics. Our ancestors may have died for the right to vote, but they weren’t dying so we could have a Black woman presiding over a genocide.
I don't disagree with anything you've said.
As I said, I had never planned to vote the way I did. I'd been agitating for Biden's removal as a candidate for months, precisely because of the genocide in Gaza. My feelings on the situation in Gaza haven't changed. Perhaps I could be faulted for giving into a calculus of my own, insofar as I felt an obligation to not leave the top of the ticket blank as a resident of a swing state. I had planned to do just that, but local conditions changed (i.e., my awareness of the probable manipulation of sentiments by the news media in the form of the Washington Post).
I was surprised at how much Coates's words affected me. It was an hour-long interview, so the excerpt I cropped and displayed here was the most pertinent but was not the part that made me tear up. And I'm not a sentimental person, so the fact that I had such a strong reaction I must chalk up to how important this entire issue is for me. It was the part where he notes that Harris, were she to make it into the White House, has to be more than just that accomplishment, even though we may have had a dream of a Black woman in the White House. That was not a driving goal of mine, certainly not this cycle, but his point that she needed to be more than a symbol really touched a chord. I cannot tell you how this election season I have felt so much despair.
Now, what you've noted here about the comments by some in the Democratic Party (I cannot call these particular folks 'liberals', because that term means "free from bigotry"), I too have noticed! It's rather an extension of what I noted in a previous comment exchange with Meredith, where I spoke about how so many so-called progressives were slandering Arab- and Muslim-American voters as dumb and disloyal, so the point that the racism just leapt off the page. It was breathtaking. I stopped by Ye Olde Platform last night, which for the most part was a ghost town except for a few diaries that had some traction, and there absolutely were some folks there who were slagging anyone who in their minds fit the mold of a traitor to the Democratic Party. At least two people said that they hope certain voters (Arabs, Muslims, Latinos, Blacks) are rounded up and either imprisoned in camps or deported. One said that the next time he hears of an innocent Black guy getting slain by a White police officer that he won't feel bad. I mean, just stereotypical flip-the-gameboard behavior, except we're talking about people's lives here. It's really revealing and it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what a coalition is supposed to be.
The thing about that behavior is that it's a mirror of right-wing racial animus. It's anger directed at a scapegoat (just as you say) so as to avoid directing criticism at the ones with more power who are actually responsible for the screw-up. The leadership of the party needs to come in for serious criticism and scrutiny. But those who are into hierarchy and status politics can't countenance chewing out their superiors -- they have to kick down. Now, most people aren't taught to question authority, so they may be legitimately yet unconsciously afraid. But that's what grassroots politics are about: getting to the heart of problems so as to effect structural change. It just so happens that the change in this instance must be to our political structure -- the very house in which we live, and we have to make repairs while living in it.
So that's daunting, and instead of dealing with the stress that comes from that these kneejerk folk who are lashing out are blaming people for exercising their very right to vote. It's their vote! No one has a right to dictate what people do with their own vote. That they feel that these "traitors" should be pushed out into the cold or worse is indicative of the immense entitlement that these folk feel. They feel entitled to utterly ignore the concerns that these voters had but they feel completely free to demand that those same people vote as they are commanded. That's hubris. Yet these people are so blinded by their point of view that they will not see their intrinsic error.
Thank you for your reply. The quote from Coates reminded me of what happened when MLK tried to take the Civil Rights Movement to Chicago and discovered that although Black there could vote, most didn’t feel they had anyone or anything worth voting for. Similarly, I recall reading a TIME magazine from 1965 or so that smugly reported that although Mississippi Blacks could now vote, most of them weren’t, indicating that King was wrong about the desire for Southern Blacks to vote. Examples like these are why I can’t take the hysteria about “losing our democracy” seriously. You can’t lose something you never had in the first place.
John Dewey said something like democracy is a set of habits that have to be cultivated, and I don’t think that ever really happened, not just here but in other Western liberal democracies. We are told that democracy = voting in a multiparty election. But many places across the country operate essentially as one party states, and a lot of local races consist of one person from said party running unopposed. Not exactly a robust democracy. I think to many people, elections are just a very dreary reality show. As a former reality star, maybe that’s why Trump does so well.
The full on racism on display at the Other Site and other liberal social media sites illustrates what I meant last week when I said that such places are full of racists. A supermajority of Black men voted for Harris, but the fact that a minority didn’t is enough for them to wish for racially motivated violence on all of them. Compare the glowing articles from the Other Site pre-2023 about getting out the Muslim vote with today where they’re wishing genocide on them. These sorts of liberals only care about marginalized people when they can make it about themselves; look at me, look how liberal I am, unlike those rethuglicans who are ignorant and very different from me! But like conservatives, they fundamentally think that minorities should “stay in their place” and defer to their betters in the DNC about what is politically possible. If you chafe against that, then you’re ungrateful and deserve to be in a camp. In that sense, they are no different than old school segregationists, who frequently insisted to national news outlets that they loved “their Negroes”… if they stayed in their place. If they get outside of “their place,” whatever happened was their own fault. As Bill Clinton said earlier in the week when he was dispatched to Michigan to whitesplain genocide, the problem isn’t that the US is supporting a genocide, it’s that the voters feel the wrong way about it. This is a very conservative position, the idea that racism isn’t the problem, it’s you not accepting racism. I think it will only get worse, since the Democratic Party appears to want to transform itself into the GOP circa 2020.
Given that the WaPo and NYT have strong ties to the intelligence community, I think that any mildly pro-Palestinian articles that may appear in these publications should be indicative of wanting to sway public opinion for or against Biden. You’re never going to find the kind of visceral, unapologetic pro-Palestinian reporting that appears in Mondoweiss or Electric Intifada. Anything that appears in the WaPo has probably been vetted as being fit for publication by military fact checkers (some months ago, CNN admitted that all their I-P stories are vetted by the Tel Aviv office). The pro-Israel position is such a default across American discourse that it’s difficult to break, as the election saw two candidates trying to out Zionist each other. I guess every now and then, there has to be a human interest story about Palestinian suffering, but never about Palestinian resistance.
Edited to add: it’s funny that liberals kept saying, “This is not who we are” during his first tenure, but their response to their own election loss is very Trumpian, in that they’re threatening mass death, imprisonment, and gratuitous suffering towards their perceived enemies in unpopular minority groups. It’s almost as if “this” is exactly who we are.
Heh. I have a hypothesis about this, but I will save my thoughts for when I can flesh out my comments. I'll say that over the course of several years some Democrats (I don't know if I'd term them 'liberals') have yearned to embrace meanness. I think this expanded exponentially yesterday and into today.
I'm sure that the particular folks we're singling out would not consider themselves to want specific others to stay in their place. I think that such an idea would be so unfamiliar to them that they would reject it outright.
As an aside, I'll mention that there seems to be a parallel with pointing out someone's racism and pointing out that they may be in a cult. There's an automatic rejection of the idea, probably as a means of self-protection of one's ego. So, it's almost certainly going to be difficult to point this trend out to our friends on the left, who see themselves as nonracist and perceive racism as a failing of those in the other camp.
I don't have a comment about Bill Clinton and his comments at the moment, except to say that they dovetail with the overbearing comments by his wife, who has repeatedly announced that college students are actually intellectually impaired when it comes to understanding the Middle East. There's a common condescension there.
As for the types of articles I was seeing at WaPo that kind of clued me in retrospectively that they might be attempts to deepen anti-war sentiment, take this for example: "Is Israel carrying out de facto ethnic cleansing?" (Washington Post, October 25, 2024)
https://wapo.st/48GBewF (gift link; will get around the paywall)
That appeared very early in the morning, but it was "above the fold". It was moved further down the page after several hours, then reduced to a mere headline before being shuffled off the front page altogether. But for a while the article was prominently placed. At the time, I couldn't help but think that this was quite an advance in the Overton window that the paper was willing to entertain on the Gaza conflict. I now am quite suspicious that this was a form of manipulation of the paper's readership.
Here's a thing. Algorithms have become so sophisticated now, that they can predict things like your divorce with great probability - 15 years before you've met your spouse. These algorithms can predict your educational attainment right about the time you've shown up on your sonogram. They can predict your death date, give or take a year. They can know from relational analytics what brand of peanut butter most appeals to you, what sort of car you are most likely to drive, and what career you will choose while you are still in kindergarten.
Algorithms knew Harris would lose, well before the DNC decided to anoint her. Yet, the elites still gave her the tap. The donors still flooded her with cash. The MSM still fawned on her joy act.
More, those same powers knew that had she moved left, rather than right, she still would have won, because DT is so intensely odious. Yet, she embraced the neocons and doubled down on the now debunked 10/7 lies.
Why? Who stood to make money with this investment?
I think that cynicism is apt to flow wild and free after a loss like what happened last night, so I want to clarify that I don't think that all of Harris's campaign was an act.
I do think she was plastic, and I noted that in a previous essay. There was an inauthenticity about her that triggered that sense of the uncanny valley. It was off-putting but very noticeable and thus attention-grabbing. It's a weird combination. So that was going on.
At the same time, I do think that the Democratic Party as a whole did experience a sense of elated catharsis once the Biden drama of July resolved so neatly and so quickly in Harris's favor. I didn't think that she should be the candidate, but many people in the party thought she should, either because she was next in line, because the money was tied to her name and would otherwise be hard to unlock, or both. Those things -- the feelings and the pragmatic concerns -- are separate but they played against each other in real time. So there really was a groundswell of energy that flooded the campaign in the early days. It's easy to compress that time period, looking back; but Harris expertly strung her veepstakes out day by day to sustain that sense of excitement and enthusiasm.
It was once the veep selection was completed and the DNC over that she and her team pivoted toward what I can only assume they felt was "the real campaign." Harris abandoned her sense of freshness and hunkered down for a typical campaign. Indeed, I would say that she just borrowed Biden's playbook wholesale. She didn't attempt anything other than a centrist campaign.
Why did donors open their wallets and pocketbooks? I think they could see that Biden was a losing proposition after his disastrous debate, and by comparison Harris looked like an even bet. So they were willing to back her, even though she was untested.
(As for "elites [giving] her the tap," I reiterate that it was Biden who's responsible for this. Pelosi and others, as reported at the time, were seeking someone other than Harris as a possible candidate. Biden circumvented Pelosi, almost certainly because he was nursing his wounded feelings. As I understand it, he hasn't spoken to Pelosi since July. So I think his tapping of Harris was his way of kicking the legs out from under those who pressured him to step aside.)
I would not have thought this before this election cycle, but I now see that leftist politics are not considered compatible with the economic system that has been in place since the '70s. I don't have a fully sketched-out thesis, but I think leaders of both parties, having embraced neoliberalism as an economic engine, believe that leftist politics would lead to policies that would interfere with the smooth machinery of the current financial system, and so moving anywhere to the left cannot be countenanced. I'd love to be proven wrong on this score. But I think this general dynamic fit even the socioeconomic realities of the 1920s & '30s, which is how it is that industrialists and businessmen felt aligned with fascist governments, because right-wing policies will not disturb capitalism as a venture. Labor-friendly politics, on the other hand, cause all sorts of perturbations.
I saw the headline of your article yesterday and purposely avoided because I knew it would be a painful read and I was right. And that is the entirety of right thinking that has come from my brain on the issue of this election. 1. Once Biden stepped aside or got pushed out, I was pretty sure Harris would be the best pick. I thought having any sort of contested convention or primary would be a disaster. 2. I strongly disapprove of American policy with regard to Israel and the genocide we are helping them carry out. But (always a but) I figured Trump would be far worse. Far worse. Still believe that too. He will keep supporting Israel because I think he likely enjoys watching certain people suffer. I had the far fetched hope that post election, Harris might change our policy toward Israel. I think Trump will see to it that there are no survivors and I think he will joke about it. 3. I thought Harris would certainly win and in the last week, or once early voting got underway, I thought she would win in a landslide. The important people kept talking about women voting in record numbers and first time voters and after Trump’s MSG rally, I thought he would lose significant numbers of Latino voters. So yeah. I was so wrong about so much, I think I should just stop voting completely. Plus, I am leaning into the idea that the entire political system is performative. We have a bunch of millionaires and billionaires who have captured the process and own it to the extent that they design the outcome and keep up an illusion that we call democracy. So I might have voted for the last time. Not sure. Ha. Trump might just end even the illusion of democracy so even my decision to stop voting, isn’t REALLY a choice at all.
I am pretty sick. Angry. Disgusted. And feeling foolish.
Anyway, as always, your writing makes me think.
I always appreciate your feedback, FC.
You'll have to forgive me for my stridency, still, in my very strong opinion about how all of this went down. I'm still affected by the point of view of being on the outside looking in -- and by this, I mean specifically about not being able to participate on DKos, not being able to influence opinion there but still reading what others leave there.
So much ultra-conformity and bullying occurred there during the month of July, through the tussle as to whether Biden would step aside or try to weather the storm. I remain firm in my view that he was on course for spectacular defeat. The polls were horrendous -- almost a straight descent in three short weeks. Anyway, that's when the 'bedwetting' slur came out to corral dissenters and get them back in line with what soon emerged as the dominant groupthink. It was remarkable to witness.
But Biden did step aside. These same boss-stick-holding figures issued recriminations, but they were swayed by the genuine outpouring of excitement that emanated from the party as Biden gave Harris the open lane. When people of my brand of thinking tried to raise the point that an open convention or mini-primary would have been preferable, they were shouted down. That, to me, was them attempting to re-establish their dominance in the discourse: Okay, whiners, you got what you wanted, now let the experts take it from here. That incensed me.
The wing of the party that understood that Biden was not the one to carry us over the finish line also had insight into how to proceed. But we were simply not taken seriously. The grand poobahs moved in and re-asserted what ended up conventional wisdom, when this was an election that demanded unorthodox thinking.
Essentially, they thought that this was a time for a standard play, when in fact we were running against a fascist. This was not a secret. We knew this. It was the height of arrogance to think that running a Black female in this environment, where White men were insecure about their place in the social hierarchy, was a winning strategy. It's just astonishing, looking back.
I wrote my essay yesterday as an attempt to get ahead of a potentiality. There was still a chance that Trump could have lost, and in that case his followers would have egged each other on so as to wreak real havoc in many sectors of society. Yet we still need to understand the underlying psychological mechanisms that tie his followers to him. That's something I've been working on for years. So even though the diary itself had a short shelf-life in terms of any impending violence, his bond is still quite resilient and deserves examination so as to gain understanding. So I'll be turning my attention to that, while also keeping abreast of the genocide in Gaza.
All of it seems like a global rise in fascism, to be straightforward with you. I don't think I can support the supposition that, because the West failed to rein in Israel and its ultra-right-wing tendencies, the entire West will suffer an influx of fascism as people sour on democracy. What's the point of democracy if the guardians of it don't protect against human rights violations and atrocities? Where's the compact with the citizenry?
I understand your cynicism. I hope you will keep an open mind about voting. Like I say, I had planned on leaving the top line blank and voting downballot; sometimes I thought about not voting at all (almost blasphemous in some ways, it feels). But I gave it another thought, remembering that some people sacrificed their very lives to earn the right to vote. So it must be worth something, especially if there are still so many people trying to remove that right to this day.
Thanks for stopping by. What a day, eh?
At this point, the Democratic Party should just go the way of the Whigs. I know it won’t, but its catastrophic failure and inability to learn from it (other than blame the electorate) indicates that it’s utterly useless as an engine for change. At the bare minimum, the people on the Other Site should be demanding that the entire senior leadership - Pelosi, Schumer, the Clintons, the Obamas- should be purged and replaced. Instead, they’re doubling down on the nonsense that the party cannot fail, it can only be failed.
Across various platforms, it seems like Democrats have just given up. There are no plans to fight back or reconstitute, just stew in resentment and resignation. Virulent racism against unpopular minority groups is being normalized among so-called liberals, who see them as the root of their problem. I don’t know what happens next, but it’s more clear to me than ever that liberal democracy is a dead end.
There are five stages of grief, and the folks on the Other Site are marinating in the first two (denial, anger). To point out a pattern, they did the same thing when Biden stepped aside. So that part to me is unsurprising.
Also, they were high on their own supply. I watched a Zeteo clip that featured Don Calloway (founder of the National Voter Protection Action Fund), along with Ryan Grim. Calloway made mention that Democrats will need to re-examine what went wrong, because at least as far as he was concerned what happened didn't match the vibe he was getting. He said, "This is the first time, at 45 years old, that I know that what I thought was going to happen was purely dictated by what was being fed to me through my algorithm." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOPJcZ7sybc
Same thing happened at the Other Place, because they clamped down on dissenting opinions and kicked people off the platform, calling them foreign trolls and Republicans who'd descended upon the site incognito to stir up trouble. Thus they were not exposed to counter-narratives -- which, again, would be counter-narratives from people in their own ideological camp. They warped their own information space.
I think folks are going through a period of disillusionment. This is not just with the party (in fact, many are making excuses, calling attention to the fact that Harris had just three months to fashion a full-fledged campaign). It's with the structure of politics. I've seen comments talk about how people were promised that all they had to do to keep fascism at bay was to turn out and vote every two or four years. (Every election from city council on up would be best, but you take what you can get.) That didn't happen this time. They're honestly puzzled why it didn't happen, and they feel betrayed by their own countrymen (forgive the heterosexist formulation). They feel alienated in their own land, and for many -- I suspect the plurality of this cohort is white and middle-class -- they've never felt this way before. They don't know what to do with these feelings. (I had my moment of disillusionment, when I saw Biden flat-out lie about beheaded babies. The mirror became see-through.)
I do see a danger in the urge to scapegoat that's going on. Again, some of that can be easily explained by denial. Many of Harris's fans don't want to admit that she did anything wrong in this campaign. That's one of the reasons why I titled this essay stating that she did indeed run a flawed campaign. Until these folks take a moment of self-reflection and -examination, they're going to externalize the pain that they're feeling. That needs to be nipped in the bud as swiftly as possible by party leadership and anyone else who may hold sway. This can't be allowed to fester.
I saw also that some of this anger is being funneled toward leftists, even though Harris did not run a left-leaning campaign. This is opportunism, IMO, to redirect that raw disappointment toward the ruling class's usual suspects. It's quite a self-serving maneuver. That, too, needs to be quashed as quickly as possible to avoid narratives being set, but I'm not sure what outlets could even start making a dent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0T1e8DklKI
Thank you for your reply. One thing that I never see mentioned anywhere is that the conservative movement as a whole has an entire infrastructure and sub culture devoted to achieving its aims. I’ve mentioned the evangelical homeschool movement before, but this also consists of talk radio, the whole Rupert Murdoch system, the Seven Mountains Mandate, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, etc, ALEC, etc. this doesn’t even get into the various billionaire benefactors that support these endeavors. There’s simply nothing like this for the Democrats. Much of this is because, being a centrist status quo party, they don’t see this as a threat to their own power. Indeed, Democrats will often poach ideas from the Heritage Foundation, causing the latter to accuse the former of “communism” (see Obamacare, which started out as a Heritage Foundation plan against HillaryCare in the 1990s).
Rank and file Democrats, however, need to understand how much they are badly outclassed by their opponents in this regard. Part of this is that many outlets for progressive culture building were destroyed during the Cold War, while those on the right were left alone to thrive. Too many Democrats think that just mocking and snarking at Trump supporting evangelicals is in and of itself a radical act. I’m not going to deny that MAGA supporters say and believe in incredibly stupid things. But these MAGATs have actual power and the rank and file Democrats don’t, so who’s actually stupid? As it stands, no one is happy with the status quo, albeit for different reasons, so marketing yourself as a status quo party is a dead weight.
Some of what you describe here traces back to the launch of think tanks, which set conservatives upon a particular path. Liberals have some think tanks, but not nearly on the order as their counterparts. Thus there's always something percolating over in the conservative camp. Their worldview is getting more and more concentrated; and, with their goal these days being power for power's sake, they're increasingly willing to entertain strategies for attaining that power that conservatives in the recent past would have disdained.
I recently came across a video on YouTube intended to explain Christian nationalism to a lay audience. This was from the conservative point of view, though not a POV fully immersed in the nationalist frame, so it was interesting to get a peek. I would project this into the MAGA camp, either directly or adjacently. (I still won't refer to my political opponents as vermin; I don't have it in me.)
What struck me about the video is that the four people (all white guys, but of varying ages and some gradations in level of conservatism) all took for granted that they would be stewards or in some positions of power in the community. The debate, when they got to speaking about this explicitly, was how much (rather than whether) Christian sentiment to bring with them into their secular positions. They simply assumed that they had the natural right to exercise public power. I don't see that same sort of presumptiveness on the Democratic side. Perhaps I'm mistaken or naive, but I think many liberals and moderates in the Democratic camp are still looking to turn their power into policy, and so they see their role in society in a somewhat different way.
I very much agree with what you say about being status quo. Harris's advisers, at least on background, acknowledged that she was and is an incrementalist. I'm sure they let this be known so as to knock down the idea that she's a socialist, but this was an election cycle where there was real hunger for transformative change. Democrats weren't offering it, so voters looked elsewhere.