"Something snapped", "I hope they get deported": Democrats stare into a hateful abyss

The abyss is returning the favor.

Image credit: NovaClip43 at DeviantArt.com

A lot of people are currently invested in performing post-mortems upon the Democratic Party in the wake of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump. I’m not here specifically to do that, though I will necessarily have to wade into aspects of this campaign season in order to make deeper points. My focus, however, will be more about how this loss has the potential to transmogrify Democrats as people, which is a fate far more serious than what just happened at the ballot box.

For years, the Democratic Party has been running on the theme of “democracy is on the line — vote at all costs.” This was presented in an inchoate form when Hillary Clinton was running under the Democratic banner, because Trump was somewhat undefined. This idea crystallized as Trump went through his presidency, culminating in his murderously inept handling of the spread of COVID-19. After he left office (instigating January 6th on his way out the door), criminal charges brought against him solidified the idea among liberals and leftists that Trump needed to be kept out of office at all costs.

If Trump gets back into office, democracy will die. That was the message pushed by the Democratic Party for the last three and a half years (and, one could say, nearly a full decade).

This message, urgent in 2020, grew less fervently communicated during Joe Biden’s term. He clearly still planned to run on the theme, but the punch was gone. Biden delivered a speech in 2022 where he called the MAGA movement “semi-fascist,” but the speech — unlike others up to that point in Biden’s presidency — was blacked out by mainstream media outlets. The rationale at the time was that Biden was cynically giving this rhetoric play so as to juice midterm turnout.

I believe that Biden was being sincere in his warning. However, it is telling that the message of a fascist threat fell dormant for much of the second part of Biden’s term, emerging again just as the campaign season kicked into gear.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again, because I know I can’t have been the only one with this thought process. Democracy is supposedly on the ballot; that’s a given. Why, then, when Biden began getting pushback for his unconditional support of Israel’s actions in Gaza, did his administration not course-correct? It was clearly having an impact in certain sectors of the electorate, namely the Arab- and Muslim-American communities with their precipitous drop in support for Biden. This was measurable as early as November 2023.¹

If democracy were at stake, wouldn’t Biden do all he could to ensure a Democratic victory by shoring up his support?

This is not an idle question. After Biden’s disastrous debate in late June with Donald Trump, he went through an extraordinary pressure campaign to step aside in the upcoming presidential contest, because it was clear that the American electorate had made a snap assessment and determined that Biden didn’t have the capacity to go on in his pursuit of the Oval Office. However, Biden resisted this pressure.

In retrospect, few should be surprised, as that’s human nature. But Biden hunkered down and demonstrated defiance, showing a remarkable callousness toward his own image at a crucial time in the electoral calendar.

Off the record, Democratic insiders told New York Times reporters that, in light of Biden’s intransigence, they had resigned themselves to a Trump presidency.

Wait! I thought democracy was on the line and that if Trump regained office that it would curl up and die. But these insiders were content to let Biden go on with his zombie campaign and lurch across the finish line in second place? Did I hear that right?

That put the lie to this refrain. Was democracy on the line? Possibly. Was Trump a fascist? Certainly. But how does one square that with this acceptance that Biden was going to lose, oh well, ho-hum…? It’s irreconcilable.

So maybe democracy wasn’t at stake. Of course, the people most willing to excuse that discrepancy were they ever to be confronted with it (admittedly, this fact was tucked away in one of many articles emerging during that time of Biden’s crisis) would be hardcore Democrats. These partisans had already internalized that assertion as fact. It was central to their narrative as to why the election was of such great importance.

Not only that, but the narrative informed who they are and what their value system is. It is very attractive to see oneself as a defender of democracy.²

To these democracy-identity Democrats, it’s simply true that the election was an if-then statement.

So, now that Trump has indeed won this contest, the crisis that these Democrats are suffering (not all Democrats but these hardcore partisans) is at least twofold:

• First, they know that they did what they could to ensure Trump did not win but he did anyway, so someone is responsible. Their mission now is to locate culprits and assign blame. 

• Second, their self-identity is threatened, not as Democrats but as defenders of democracy. The voters’ embrace of Trump seems a rejection of democratic values broadly speaking, and for these stalwarts the Democratic Party was the repository of those values. The seeming rejection of those values has left these people alienated and bereft.³

What have some of these people done? They have found scapegoats and are turning the firehose of their contemptuous anger against them.

I’ve scrubbed the usernames of the commenters, but each of these comments were written by separate people.

This trend alarms me, because it reminded me of the dynamic that befell liberals in Israel just after the October 7th attacks. Those liberal Zionists, who for decades had been advocating for the pursuit of a peace process and a diplomatic resolution to the ongoing and worsening conflict with Palestinians, underwent a sea change in sensibility. By many accounts, they fell into a state of shock, and when they emerged they bonded with the hardline right-wingers in their society. Their sympathetic feelings disintegrated. The Palestinians could all perish, for all that they cared.

I see this same psychological switch happening among people in the Democratic Party, people who long thought of themselves as liberals, as humanitarians, as people looking to lift all people up so as to make the world a better place. For some, their sympathy has been flicked off like a light switch.

The speed in which this change is happening is the frightening thing. This trend must be arrested if democracy is to survive. Because that’s the core of modern liberalism: caring for one’s fellow citizens. These people are openly embracing hate and anger and vituperativeness. This is incompatible with humanism. 

If this trend continues and engulfs the Democratic base as a whole, that’s the end of the Party. But, more than that, the welcome and eager incorporation of hatred and spite — that’s the destruction of the democratic spirit.

Yes, we should conduct a post-mortem on the electoral loss. It’s important because the Democratic Party wants to remain viable, and doing so requires learning from mistakes (which, in turn, requires admitting that mistakes were made and by whom). But indiscriminately lashing out at those perceived as today’s enemies — that will cement the hate, and one can’t get back from that, not easily. That’s a long-lasting if not permanent shift in personality.

That shift en masse — that would be the downfall of the country. If the supposition that the Democratic Party is the reservoir of the values that sustain democracy (which is liberalism itself), such a turn would mark a repudiation of those values at a fundamental level. That’s cracking the reservoir, letting that precious resource irretrievably leak.

1. I have underlined the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities on this score but, as Peter Beinart said in his recent New York Times piece, several other sectors of the electorate also recoiled against and rebuffed the Biden administration on its Gaza stance: Black Americans as well as young voters (many of whom are college students). “Many Americans roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction have no personal connection to Palestine or Israel. Like many Americans who protested South African apartheid or the Vietnam War, their motive is not ethnic or religious. It is moral.”

2. Again, don’t get me wrong. I do think that Trump is a unique danger to not just our way of life but to our system of democracy as we know it. My point is that the Democratic Party itself did not act as though that were true, thus exposing itself as inconsistent at best, jingoistic at worst. I don’t have data for this, but if I as a lifelong Democratic voter could suss this out, I would wager that independents sensed that inconsistency as well (and that’s not even talking about how that might bolster the cynicism of conservatives making similar observations).

3. A noticeable number of these folks have expressed that they are seriously looking at emigrating to other shores. Some even have spoken of taking their own lives — a move (even if only rhetorical) that indicates that they truly have no hope left and see their situation as inescapable.