The question is how the Ivy League technocrats with oodles of cash and all their allies in legacy media, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley managed to bungle this so royally.
How did Kamala Harris lose to a crook and his campaign of “relentless lying,” as CNN recently characterized it?
The answer is: It was not a campaign of relentless lying. Relentless bullshit, yes, as my colleague Eli Lake has noted. Relentless hyperbole, absolutely. But lying? That’s just not how voters saw it.
For the past eight years, the Republican Party has been having an honest conversation about the real things that ail us: inflation; the hollowing out of rural America; the rise of China; the housing crisis; the opioid crisis; the chaos at our southern border; free speech; and the decline of American power.
Has the conversation been frenetic and, at times, weird and wrongheaded? Yes.
More to the point, it is what we cared about. What the average American voter wanted to talk about.
And the Democrats?
The Democrats haven’t been talking about any of these things. The reason that the culture wars are so deeply offensive to so many voters is not that they’re racist or transphobic. It’s that voters want to know why reparations or gender fluidity is more important than rescuing the hundreds of millions of Americans who have seen their way of life dissolve in the face of globalization, automation, and shifting labor markets.
The Democrats preferred to tell a self-congratulatory tale about how we arrived at this juncture: In 2016, the fascists took over the White House; in 2020, the party of democracy and justice took it back; over the past four years, that party has steered us back to normalcy; and, if they didn’t win in 2024, the fascists would come back, and this time it would be worse than ever. This time, the fascists really would lock up their political foes and abolish the Constitution, and it really would be the last election.
Except that there’s very little, if anything, about the Democratic Party that is normal in 2024. It’s not just that the party of the working man is now the party of the Davoisie. It’s that, in the midst of shedding its loyalty to the working and middle classes, the party has transformed itself into a corporatized, single-cell organism. It no longer appears to represent a true coalition of interest groups—the way parties normally do. It is made up of platform surfers building their social media audiences on the backs of the very people they claim to bleed for: marginalized peoples, birthing people, Gazans, whoever.
They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money. They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance. They should have spent the past eight years learning from the Republicans’ very honest, if flawed, conversation about the plight of America. But they insisted on talking to themselves about the things that made them feel morally superior.
They governed the way they swore their enemies would: shutting down free expression with their war on “disinformation,” politicizing the justice system, and locking down schools. (Yes, that started under Trump, but it was Trump who sought to return us to normal, who was ridiculed for promising that Covid would be over by Easter 2020.)
Worst of all: They did not appreciate the glaring dishonesty at the heart of it all. They seemed to think that Americans wouldn’t mind that they had pretended Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack,” that they actually orchestrated a behind-the-scenes switcheroo, that the party that portrayed itself as the nation’s answer to fascism nominated its standard-bearer without consulting a single voter. They just figured that no one would mind, that most Americans would feel the way they felt—happy that they finally had a viable candidate to challenge Donald Trump.
It was insulting, and it was deeply dishonest.
I’ve spent much of the past year on the road, in towns and cities like Flint and East Palestine and the suburbs of Phoenix and the backwaters of Pennsylvania and the California desert, and there was, everywhere, a deep and pervasive desire for an honest, wide-ranging conversation about what is to be done. How we move forward.
The only way out of this cul-de-sac—the only way for Democrats to win once again—will be for the party to tune out MSNBC and the campus and the progressive identitarians and return, once again, to the same Americans it has made a habit of disparaging.
Peter Savodnik is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Read his piece “The Great Scramble,” and follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @petersavodnik.
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