On Lessons In Cope - Part 1: The Center Won't Hold

But it Will Try to Gaslight You.

I’m not going to belabor the point. We all know what happened this past Tuesday, and while we may not fully know what it means for the future, we have a pretty good idea that it won’t be good.

I started writing about politics in 2016 after the first Trump victory caught my liberal friends and family by surprise. My goal was to try to explain both the phenomena of Trumpism and a leftist theory of change to an audience of mostly die-hard democratic party voters who had been failed by a liberal media who could not provide them with a coherent explanation for what they had just witnessed.

Time is a flat fucking circle I guess.

My audience has grown modestly since then. I’ve been able to reach a wider audience with some bylines in popular leftist magazines. I’ve made some connections with other leftist creators and even got the chance to interview a sitting U.S. congressman. But right now, I want to talk directly to my democratic party voters, who are sitting with unfathomable dread and sorrow for what the next four years and beyond hold for the country and the world at large. In the coming days, weeks, and months you are going to hear several different explanations and theories for what went wrong with the Kamala Harris campaign. If your media diet consists primarily of mainstream liberal media institutions and pundits, most of what you will hear about the election is going to be grade-A, uncut, unadulterated bullshit.

You’re going to see a lot of blame directed at certain groups who failed the democratic party. You will see white women blamed for voting against their own reproductive freedom, Latino voters blamed for supporting mass deportations, Black voters blamed for being illiterate, and Muslim voters blamed for not understanding that it's obviously better for a Democrat to fund the murder of their friends and family overseas than a republican.

And if you’re really unlucky you might encounter this tweet by Matthew Yglesias:

In case you’ve deleted your Twitter account in protest of its owner’s prominent role in Trump’s victory, this tweet contains Yglesias’s “principles for Common Sense Democrats to reform governance in the blue zones and be competitive in the red zones — delivering a coalition that can win on health care, reproductive rights, the safety net, and quality for all.”

These nine simple principles effectively amount to a call for the Democratic party to completely repudiate the progressive and leftist parts of its base and adopt an anti-woke conservative position. By doing so, in Yglesias’s estimation, the Democrats can reconstitute a winning coalition of voters who will support undefined deliverables for bedrock liberal priorities, including “quality for all” as opposed to equality for all. Because equality is some woke nonsense.

There are so many bad takes from liberal pundits right now, fighting for media space and the chance to turn their reader's brains into Andrew Sorkin-seasoned mush, and we will talk about them in due time. But for now let's just focus on Matty’s nine-point plan for abandoning any and all opposition to movement conservatism and by extension Trumpism because it is sickeningly indicative of the massive amount of gaslighting directed at you, my liberal friends.

1. Economic self-interest for the working class includes robust economic growth.

What is so maddening about these “Democrats need to move to the right in order to win” takes, is that the only way they make sense is if you’ve experienced the last three elections through one of Jordan Peterson’s medically induced health comas. “Robust Economic Growth” is the centrist code for pursuing a neoliberal economic strategy centered on the whims and concerns of big corporations and Wall Street. Things like austerity and deficit hawkishness, a gentle regulatory hand, and allowing businesses to discipline their workers.

Believing that neoliberal economic theory is the key to building a winning electoral coalition certainly is a take, but the problem for Yglesias here is that it’s a take that the democratic party already pretty much believes in. For all the talk of Biden being the best president for workers and unions in a generation ( a bar lower that was lower than the wreckage of the Titan submersible) this was also the party that spent the last three years lecturing voters that the pain their wallets felt at the grocery store was all in their heads because the stock market was doing great (Some are still doing this). This was the administration that couldn’t wait to roll back the generous expansion of public assistance necessitated by the pandemic recession that pulled millions out of poverty and kept the economy limping along. This was the president who stepped in to break a potential railroad worker strike, a strike that was partly meant to address the safety concerns with freight train operations that led to the disaster in East Palestine. 

Reports are trickling out describing the inner workings of the Harris campaign. While Kamala began her run calling out predatory businesses and promising to fight on behalf of workers, she quickly abandoned that angle at the behest of her Uber lobbyist brother-in-law. For Yglesias to insinuate that the Democrats didn’t spend this election cycle running on “robust economic growth” is to assume his readers are idiots. 

2. Climate change is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey. 

“I’m sorry to tell you this but you have lung cancer. Are you still smoking?”

“Yes, I smoke two packs a day. Does this mean I have to quit?”

“Well, lung cancer is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey. We want you to live a long life but we also have to consider how depriving Phillip Morris of their income would affect the economy.”

Shut up, Matty.

3. The government should prioritize the interests of normal people over those of people who engage in antisocial conduct.

Now every single one of these nine principles is vague to the point of being completely useless as any sort of roadmap to electoral success. But the vagueness of this one feels kind of sinister. Who are the “normal people” Matty? What is your definition of “antisocial conduct”? 

He could be referring to crime here, or he could be referring to homelessness which some cities would very much like to treat as a crime. Is he talking about protests for Black lives or Palestinian freedom? Or is he talking about hate speech and harassment on social media platforms? I honestly have no idea. 

These are kind of important questions because you know who else thought the government should prioritize “normal people” by curtailing the actions of “antisocial” individuals? I’ll give you a few guesses, but it seems like Matty did not see the potential genocidal pitfalls in his third principle here. 

I ain’t afraid of no Godwin's Law.

4. We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. 

Now I’ve written extensively about the misappropriation of MLK for the purposes of preserving the vestiges of American white supremacy, but let’s remember this is supposed to be a list of things that the Democrats should have done and didn’t do in this election cycle to build a winning coalition.

Hey Google AI, give me a list of all the times that Kamala Harris touted her racial background as a reason to be elected president.

…..

…..

…..

Shut up, Matty. 

5. While race is a social construct, biological sex is not. 

Here is where the mask starts to slip for ole Matty and his list of principles. This is where we begin to realize that this isn’t a carefully thought out plan for Democrats to regain the trust of the working class vote that either stayed home or defected to the leopards-eating faces party. This is where it becomes evident that this is just a list of centrist grievances that Matty has against the broader left, which has very little to do with the Democratic party that just lost an election to a game show host. Again.

Kamala Harris didn’t make trans issues a central part of her campaign. But Donald Trump certainly made it part of his. Trans people make up less than 1% of the population yet took up 41% of Trump’s $95 million worth of ads leading up to the election. Whether or not you believe that biological sex is immutable or that gender and biological sex are separate aspects of a person’s identity, the existence of trans people is only a political issue because movement conservatism runs on demonizing minorities.

It’s all in the tagline from those anti-trans ads: “Kamala is for they, them. President Trump is for you.” As if non-gender-conforming people aren’t also Americans. The main avenue of attack was the fact that Harris supported gender-affirming care for inmates. Or as Trump’s campaign put it “tax-payer funded sex changes for criminals and illegal immigrants”. The simple fact is that in a country that imprisons such a large part of its population as a matter of course, some of those prisoners will be transgender people. And since we constitutionally restrict cruel and unusual punishment for people who have been convicted of crimes, we typically provide medical treatment for those who are residents of correctional facilities.

Conservative animosity toward trans people is not a genuine political attitude that deserves respect and compromise, it's an astroturfed witch hunt built on lies and bigotry. But let's leave aside the morality of Democrats allowing Republicans to foment violence against vulnerable populations in the interests of political expediency. This is about results, right? Then I’d like Matty to explain why Colin Allred in Texas and Sherrod Brown in Ohio both lost their senate campaigns after affirming that trans athletes shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women's sports. 

6. Academics and nonprofit staffers do not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private sector workers. 

What does this even mean? In what way was this a part of the Democrat's message to voters in the election? Again, it’s pretty clear here that this list has little to do with the campaign Harris actually ran and everything to do with people who annoy Yglesias on Twitter. 

7. Politeness is a virtue but obsessive language policing alienates normal people and degrades the quality of thinking. 

Isn’t this the most tedious bullshit? But again, here we are referencing normal people without explaining who constitutes a normal person. The qualifier “obsessive” is also conspicuously undefined. Maybe there is a reasonable debate to be had over the concerted effort to force the adoption of certain neologisms or the difference between genuine cultural sensitivities and PMC gatekeeping. But I get the sense that Matty isn’t interested in a genuine conversation here, more so he’d like to set the bounds of what is obsessive language policing based on his subjective opinion on who constitutes a “normal person” and who is a woke culture warrior.

But that’s not the biggest problem with this principle and number six before it. If these are meant to be principles that the Democratic party is supposed to follow, then why are we talking about conservative gripes that primarily exist in the domain of liberal arts colleges and private institutions looking to appear more inclusive. The only way this makes sense as a plan for Democratic party coalition building is if Matty is suggesting that Democrats adopt a Ron DeSantis program of using government power to force colleges and businesses to be less woke.

Sounds kind of obsessive to me. 

8. We are equal in the eyes of God, but the American government can and should prioritize the interests of the American citizens. 

So I take this one to be obliquely referencing the issue of immigration. I know he’s not talking about the massive sums of money we are spending to finance a war in Ukraine and a genocide in Gaza because he supports those interventions. So if this principle is about immigration and indeed a call for Democrats to be tougher on border security and to spend less money supporting asylum seekers in favor of citizens, why is he phrasing it in such a nebulous and obscure way?

Could it be because the Democrats already tried to outflank Trump on the issue of immigration and lost anyway?

Nah.

9. Public services must be run in the interests of their users, not their providers. 

Now I had no idea what he meant by this but a reply to the original tweet provides a bit of context:

Yglesias lets us know that this falls under principle nine, even though the principle doesn’t make this clear in any way shape, or form and he admits that the whole thing needs some work. (Ya think, buddy?)

To be clear, the trend of banning gifted programs in public schools is not a part of the national party's message to voters and we should expect that by now. What is happening is that some democratic mayors and school boards, along with individual schools are removing gifted tracks because there is some evidence that these programs exacerbate racial and class segregation and cause some students to give up on the prospect of higher-level academic achievement before they get a chance to start. It’s important to note that the schools getting rid of these advanced placements and segregated tracks aren't getting rid of advanced courses, they are just making those courses accessible to all students and in some cases making them mandatory. 

As with most issues related to the complex and complicated field of pedagogy, there is some debate on whether removing gifted tracks actually benefits the students who wouldn’t qualify for them and/or harms the students who do. It’s not hard to imagine that there are students who aren’t good test takers but would still thrive in advanced courses. Conversely, one could make the argument that segregating classes based on test scores allows teachers in advanced courses to make the most of their time without having to compensate for students who aren’t as adept or require special services. 

But what you can’t say in good faith is that ending these advanced tracks is an attempt to run public schooling in the interest of teachers rather than students. That doesn’t really make sense. These schools are canceling segregated achievement tracks precisely because they believe doing so is in the best interests of their students. All of their students and not just the ones that make them look good on standardized testing metrics. 

10. Democrats should just adopt whatever positions so as to not annoy center-right pundits like Matthew Yglesias. 

I’m adding this last one on Matty’s behalf because it’s so obvious that this is all that any of this amounts to. He’s not interested in any substantive or nuanced post-mortem of the Democrat's disastrous election. If Harris had won, he’d be gloating about how her campaign abandoned the politics of virtue signaling wokeness and leftist purity to speak to center-right republicans or “normal people”, promising to steward a growing economy, lead in domestic energy production, secure the border and put American citizens first. 

Yglesias isn’t a stupid person, but he believes his readers are. That’s the only way to make sense of his plan for common-sense Democrats. It’s a cynical attempt to gaslight liberal Democrats into believing that Harris tacked too far to the left by campaigning with (checks notes) Liz Cheney as her endgame surrogate and that she ended up with even fewer Republican votes than Biden did in 2020. 

Of course, there’s the elephant (pun intended) in the room. Voters who are motivated by the conservative framing on issues like immigration, campus political activism, and trans people are just going to vote for the party that made these into issues in the first place. He’s permanently stuck in the heyday of neoliberal power when Bill Clinton had his Sister Soulja moment and along with Joe Biden temporarily made Democrats the tough-on-crime party. Of course, the results of this shift were disastrous on the ground, and the Clinton era laid the groundwork for the proto-fascist right wing that we just elected into power. 

This has been a lot of words spent on a lot of nothing, but I wanted to begin this series on post-election cope talking about Yglesias because he is so blatant in his self-serving mythology about what just happened on election night. Once you notice how empty and vapid this kind of rearview punditry is, it becomes easier to spot elsewhere.

And boy there is a lot of it to go around.

Till next time.

Solidarity Forever.