Dear Democrat.

It's not "them". It's your party.

It has been a rough week for American liberals, who still cannot seem to grasp why ~75 million of their Moral Inferiors voted “the wrong way” and “against their self-interest”. Was it unclear to the electorate that the Democrats were the party of SavingDemocracy™? Perhaps the next time Democrats want to try that line, they might think about having a democratically nominated presidential candidate rather than engineering another dud onto their ballot. The predictable, incredulous retort from American liberals is the rather tired, “But Orange Man Bad!” This has never been in dispute. It is equally true to say that there is an unfair asymmetry between the appeal of populist leaders and the standards to which their challengers tend to be held. However, such naive sentiments miss the point; this is politics, and a party must learn to play the game and the particular opponent. The 2024 election represents a complete failure by the Democrats to do so, and the result is that they thoroughly deserved to lose this election.

I want to be clear at the outset that nothing - not one, single point - made in this essay constitutes any sort of endorsement of Trump and the Trumpist Republican Party. As a man, Trump is uniquely unfit for high office in any country, let alone the world’s leading superpower. As a party, the contemporary GOP, defined by Trumpism, is a circus of incompetent sycophants and malevolent buffoons. The problem is that American liberals, in their infantile naivety, think all of this provides sufficient justification for them to win elections and that the Democrats do not have to win anyone over to them. They’ve chosen to be the party that hopes to be elected by omission rather than act. That may be sufficient for a party like the UK’s Labour Party in a parliamentary democracy like Britain, but the vagaries of the U.S. electoral system mean that to win elections one has to actively win votes, particularly in swing states. The reality of this election is that Trump’s total popular vote of ~75 million is similar to 2020 when he garnered ~74 million. The real story of this election is not that the Republicans won the election with any profound increase in overall support, but that the Democrats lost it because voters rejected them.

That reality is painful for American liberals to consider and should spark some serious consideration and reflection. Over the past decade, it has been infuriating and frustrating to watch as Left/liberals on both sides of the Atlantic utterly fail to grasp the changing political tides and currents underpinning resurgent national populism and the Right-ward political shift evident in democracies on several continents. Liberals have largely failed to grasp these shifting dynamics because they refuse to question their ideologies or reflect on their presuppositions of what electorates will respond to. Because for Left/liberals in the West, who assume that on every given issue they are automatically on the RightSideofHistory™, what is there to question? American liberals in particular appear devoid of the self-reflection and intellectual humility required to examine their ideological orthodoxies and political strategies, infused as they are with the uniquely firebrand American cultural Protestantism that views the world through the prism of Good and Evil, Pure vs. Sinful. For these Puritan Pilgrims of the 21st Century, if the Republicans are Evil, the Democrats can only be Good; if Trump is Sinful, Harris can only be Pure. How could anyone possibly vote for anything except Good and Pure unless they are Evil and Sinful?

Tired and Predictable Liberal Narrative Nonsense

Framed in such a way, it is unsurprising that there has been little by way of self-reflection or introspection on display among American liberals in the aftermath of the election. After all, what is there to reflect on? Americans voted for Evil and Sin, and that is confirmation of their racism, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, sexism, misogyny, stupidity, ignorance, White supremacy, ism this, ism that, phobia this, phobia that. The message is clear; Democrats might be complete political losers, but at least they remain Morally Pure and Superior to the heathens masses. And so it has been for over a week as American liberals take to social media to enforce their hand-washing narratives and stamp out any attempt at retrospection or examination of their party and the Progressive social movement it has come to represent. American liberals have retrospectively turned the election into yet another Purity Test, and as always with Progressive dogma, it is a pass/fail test with no exceptions, no deliberation, no evidence or understanding; just feels and vibes.

The narratives being carefully cultivated are so formulaic and predictable precisely because we’ve heard them all before; we heard them in 2016, we heard them in the 2022 midterms, and we're hearing them again now. American liberals have only one ideological framework through which to understand the world, and every event, whether domestically or globally, must be contorted and misshapen to fit the impoverished perspectives of identity politics. As a result of their commitment to this ideological straightjacket, American liberals appear to have no idea what has happened in their country, or at least be willing to pose the question as to why their party is so unappealing to vast swathes of the electorate, most strikingly among the working class. The narratives range from the reductive to the ridiculous:

“This is White supremacy in action!”

“Harris ran a flawless campaign!”

“American won't elect a Brown woman!”

“The Right weaponise a culture war!”

“The Republicans only won because voters are misinformed!”

“People voted for a misogynist, fascist, convicted felon!”

“Trump supporters are stupid, ignorant and racist!”

Given that cognitive rigidity is a primary outcome of identitarian ideology, these narratives are unsurprising; American liberals have no other language, no framework or construct, with which to understand this election, or the 2016 election, or even conflict in the Middle East. All they’ve done is draw on their partisan priors to explain away a result that they appear to have little interest in understanding.

To be clear, the idea that the fault for their catastrophic loss lies entirely at their feet is untenable. The global trend in this unique year of 2024, when more democracies went to the polls than in another single year on record, is that incumbents are struggling, from Brazil to South Korea to Finland to the United Kingdom and the United States. Electoral history is quite consistent in demonstrating how incumbents struggle when inflation is high, and people are struggling economically, and America is no exception. Global crises have overlapped with terms in office for the past four years: the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences, the war in Ukraine and its impact on global food supply chains and food costs, and the impact of the war on energy costs in the context of already higher energy costs post-pandemic. For multiple European countries and America, these factors have burdened a working class that has never recovered from the calamitous austerity policies of the post-2008 financial crash. There is an anger and disaffection in electorates that liberals have wholly failed to grasp. The Democrats were always going to struggle based on these extant economic realities.

However, specific common antecedents aside, the entire post-election narrative that American liberals are cultivating is an attempt to explain the result away by reference to the apparent deficiencies and prejudices of anyone who voted Republican, with a predictable emphasis on White people and, bizarrely, White women in particular. American liberals seem to be engaging in a mass collective act of self-delusion and deception as if the Democrats and their attendant social movement have no nexus to the election outcome. This requires some corrective course, starting with the predictable and cognitively impoverished catch-all explanation of “White supremacy”, despite a defining characteristic of this election being a shift in non-White working-class voters to the Republicans. To be clear, this “multiracial coalition” rhetoric that conservatives are now fond of proclaiming is largely hyperbole and not supported by the overall demographic data. But the averages miss some of the finer points of the shift.

The first is that the overall vote margin for White women voting Republican declined slightly from +11 to +8 between 2020 and 2024, dispensing with the absurd narrative that White women are to blame for Trump’s reelection. In fact, White college-education women voted for Harris by 15 points, so when you see these women online declaring that they were “let down” by other White women, what they’re really doing is punching down on their Moral Inferiors, i.e., White women without a college degree. Same for White men; if we factor in the 2016 election, Trump’s overall support has substantially declined among White men from +31 points in 2016 to +23 in 2024, and that decline reflected a shift in White men to the Democrats. Remember the cringe “White Dudes for Harris”? This election didn't turn on White women any more than it turned on White Americans in general; the data clearly show that the party lines in America are becoming less racially polarised compared to 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

This Election Was About Class, Not Identity, and the Democrats Missed the Memo

The real story of the 2024 election is the loss of Democratic support. That loss of support for the Democrats was driven by non-White voters, Latino/Hispanic Americans in particular, was most pronounced among the Latino/Hispanic working class, defined as non-college graduates, and was also evident among non-college graduate Black men. By any yardstick of the trends and issues in American politics since 2010, this election was always going to come down to about class. The Democrats made it about identity because they have no other way of understanding their world. Their ignorance of the difference, and the fact that they have had years to see this coming, is the main reason why they thoroughly deserved to lose this election. Consider that in 2021, Ruy Teixeira penned an article entitled, ‘The Democrats' Hispanic Voter Problem.’ To quote:

“It therefore follows that, if Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not cancelled out entirely, and that very influential Democratic theory of the case falls apart. That could—or should—provoke quite a sea change in Democratic thinking.”

But the trends didn’t provoke a sea change in Democratic thinking because of the aforementioned ideological straightjacket of identity politics to which the party are wedded. It takes breathtaking arrogance to ignore data like this, and it reveals the hollowness of the American liberal rallying cry, “Centre marginalised voices!” The truth is that American liberals only “centre marginalised voices” if those voices regurgitate Progressive orthodoxies on race, gender, and sexuality, i.e., if they have “the right politics”. Ironically, Progressive orthodoxies are derived mostly from White liberal academics, so when American liberals say “centre marginalised voices!”, they mean “centre marginalised voices who think like White Progressives!” You will never see a White American liberal “centre marginalised voices” of Black or Hispanic conservatives.

They don’t even listen to Teixeira, a lifelong Democrat, either, because his data are discordant from the self-perception of White American liberals as the paternalistic saviours of America’s minorities. This is evident everywhere in the liberal response to minority voting in this election; minorities are not assumed to have agency and their own unique perspectives and experiences. It is simply unconscionable to White liberals and Progressives that the minorities they speak on behalf of might not share their views. The more I think about where “White supremacy” lies in America, the more it is revealed, coded and veiled, among liberal Progressive thinking on race. Imagine the sense of superiority one must harbour to assume that “internalised racism” explains why people didn’t vote the way American liberals wanted them to.

This discrepancy is why the liberal narrative is so entrenched in blaming White Republican voters as “stupid, ignorant and racist!” Because minorities are deified in Progressive ideologies, a painful cognitive dissonance descends on the American liberal when they are confronted with the reality that people belonging to any minority group are not simply the abstraction that they read about in some Theorising postmodern bullshit course in college, but real people who have agency. In the abstraction and deification of minorities, American liberals paint a portrait of people in their Progressive image, rather than engaging seriously with the varied experiences and perspectives within that community. The net effect is that when minorities display behaviour that American liberals find aberrant, such as holding conservative socio-cultural views and/or voting Republican, liberals cannot understand it because their abstraction of minorities was dressed up as a Progressive.

John Burn-Murdoch’s excellent analysis in the Financial Times exemplifies the fact that voters no longer associate Democrats as a party that stands for class and economic issues, but associate the party instead with sociocultural issues, particularly those related to minorities. The problem for the Democrats is those very minorities evidently do not like how the Democrats think and speak on their behalf; this is also evident in the abundant data that White Progressive hold views far to the Left of minority groups. Since minority groups are deified, they obviously can’t be criticised, but neither can their behaviour be explained in a way that is congruent with their Progressive abstraction.

Thus, the unhinged rhetoric about “stupid/ignorant/racist” Republican voters is directed at White people because American liberals could never, ever call a Brown or Black person “stupid” or “ignorant”, but they must call someone these terms to reinforce their Moral Superiority. This is the biggest irony of the Democrats trying to rationalise the election through the lens of their identitarian worldview; for it to make sense in their ideology, they have to engage blinding cognitive dissonance to the demographics of the vote. And that cognitive dissonance is engaged to prevent them from having to reconcile that those very demographics represent the strongest repudiation of identity politics that the American electorate has yet provided. As the Democrats won’t learn from this, it probably won’t be the last.

Harris Was a Terrible Campaigner and the Democrats Are a Messaging Mess

The incompetent failure of the Democrats to respond to trends in minority voting that have been evident since 2016 leads to perhaps one of the most absurd narratives of the election that American liberals are desperate to uphold; that “Harris ran a flawless campaign!” This is utterly delusional. Yes, she was left in an unenviable spot by a DNC cabal that trucked a senile and befuddled Biden out to run when it was painfully obvious to everyone he was unfit for purpose. But this late start didn’t lose Harris the election, and the fact that she was NotBiden and NotTrump initially gave her a surge as a surrogate “third option”.

But the failure to capitalise on this initial momentum lies entirely on her and her campaign. Even when given cushy platforms like CNN and Anderson Cooper, Kamala Harris could not utter one single coherent sentence as to why people should vote for her, rather than not for Donald Trump. Hiding her from the media initially was a good strategy, but when it eventually came time to plead her case, her incomprehensible and vapid answers confirmed her to be the vacuous candidate and incompetent campaigner that her flawed 2019 presidential nomination campaign had initially revealed. Even the New York Times, that bastion of liberal narrative enforcement, had this to say of her in 2019:

“Yet, even to some Harris allies, her decline is more predictable than surprising. In one instance after another, Ms. Harris and her closest advisers made flawed decisions about which states to focus on, issues to emphasize and opponents to target, all the while refusing to make difficult personnel choices to impose order on an unwieldy campaign...”

Alas, for a party that adopted cats as their cringe mascot, this leopard did not change her spots. “Flawed decisions about what states to focus on”; Harris went 0/7 in swing states while Josh Shapiro, who would have provided enormous clout as a VP candidate in Pennsylvania, was relegated to the sidelines because he’s Jewish, i.e., persona non-grata to the Progressive Left of the party. But the key sentence here of relevance to her 2024 campaign is that Harris “made flawed decisions about which...issues to emphasise...” Back in April, Jared Abbott and Fred Deveaux of the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) urged the Democrats to campaign on messages of economic populism, highlighting their lack of campaign emphasis on economic issues in favour of cultural issues, which are less salient with working-class voters. Research by the CWCP clearly showed that populist economic messaging found the strongest support among non-college-educated, blue-collar voters, while the “threat to democracy” message ranked dead last in salience with voters:

“In line with our past research, we found that economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative fared best relative to Trump-style messages about Biden’s competence, immigration, corrupt elites, critical race theory, inflation, election integrity and tariffs. No surprise there. Meanwhile, Harris’s messages on abortion and immigration fared worse than any of the economic or populist messages we tested.

Yet no message was as unpopular as the one we call the “democratic threat” message.”

What did Harris and her campaign do? Focus the majority of their efforts on the “threat to democracy” messaging and campaign on a “Donald Trump Bad Man” rhetoric. They adopted the least effective messaging for working-class independent and moderate working-class voters, which is about as far from the “perfect campaign” post-hoc fantasy being dreamed up by American liberals. Given that data which could have been used to craft an effective message to reach voters was ignored, one can only conclude that Harris ran an incompetent and incoherent campaign. As the CWCP and other polling indicated, the Democrat’s messaging could have emphasised the “anti-elite” sentiments that should naturally feel at home on the Left, targeting corporate greed, corrupt lobbying practices, and special interests over working people. However, the Democrats are not a party of the working class “Old Left” but the identitarian Progressive Left, who also happen to be well-educated, corporate urbanites. People are not as stupid as American liberals insist, and this discordance is evident in the celebrities, media personalities, and Very Online activists that make up the vocal public face of Democrat support.

The post-hoc rationalisation of Harris’ “perfect campaign” couples with the narrative that “Americans won’t elect a Brown woman!” This is unconvincing; they elected a Black man, but if you remember what 2008 was like, Obama’s charisma, sleek public speaking, and relative outsider status all generated such momentum for him as a candidate that the initially favoured Hilary Clinton had no chance. America didn’t elect a Brown woman because that woman was completely inadequate for the task of luring voters away from Trump. America also didn’t elect a White woman either in the guise of Hilary Clinton’s cringe campaign, and it has little to do with their sex or colour, but the fact that they were both awkward, dull, uninspiring candidates who the party High Priests centrally planned without regard for the very clear fact that electorates were rebelling against perceived “elites”, and the Democrats foisted two women who wholly epitomise the very concept of a detached Democrat elite on to the electorate. An article in Jacobin entitled, ‘If Harris Loses Today, Here is Why’, highlighted this damaging perception:

“Harris almost appeared intent on doing Trump’s job for him. She was telling voters: “Washington insiders and reasonable billionaires agree, Trump is too dangerous to be president,” effectively positioning him as the enemy of a deeply unpopular establishment and status quo.”

This latter point is crucial in its nexus with the incredulity of American liberals that, “people voted for a misogynist, fascist, convicted felon!” This fails to grasp why populist characters, often unsavoury by any yardstick of decency, attract support because, in addition to class-based issues, status disaffection is a primary driver of support for populism. In this regard, it is the very fact that a Donald Trump or Boris Johnson represents a form of vandalism to the status quo that renders them attractive. As polling attitudes indicated, it was less about Trump’s character and more that Trump was the one speaking to corporate self-interests and institutional power at the expense of ordinary people. The veracity and honesty of this may be debated, but it is beside the point with regard to winning elections, because that rhetoric captures the mood of an angry and disaffected working class, irrespective of their ethnicity. A paragraph from Dustin Guastella, a CWCP researcher, speaks to the lack of effective messaging in the Harris campaign:

“If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people – a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations. A party incapable of communicating a simple, direct, progressive economic policy agenda. A party so beholden to a contradictory mix of interests that, in the effort to appease everyone and offend no one, top strategists have rolled out a vague, unpopular and uninspiring pitch seemingly designed to help them replay the results of the 2016 election.”

And so it has come to pass, and the blame lies only with the Democratic Party on this one because they have full control over their messaging. Campaigning on SavingDemocracy™ and Orange Man Bad was a terrible strategy, prioritising the least effective messaging for working class and moderate swing voters, and it was even worse because the person delivering, Harris, couldn’t string a sentence together to articulate why those voters should vote Democrat.

The Progressive Cultural Revolution is Political Poison

Political parties often become vehicles for socio-cultural movements, the Democrats have cemented themselves as the party of the Progressive Left’s Cultural Revolution. A chart from John Burn-Murdoch's analysis illustrates this point, and the substantial disconnect between the Progressive views of the Democrat elite and the rest of the country:

This election not only represents a repudiation of identity politics as conceived by Progressive elites, but implicit in that rejection is a repudiation of Progressivism as the defining doctrine of the contemporary American Left. This is particularly emphasised by another figure from Burn-Murdoch below, indicating how much farther White Progressives are to the Left of the minority groups they speak on behalf of. One striking example is the discordance in the widespread Progressive belief in lax law enforcement policies, with 73% of White Progressives supporting the cutting of size and resources of police forces compared to just 37% of Black Americans. The Hispanic Americans who were forced away from the Democrats are also repelled by some of the excessively socialist rhetoric that comes from the American Left, by gender ideology, and by the Democrat’s commitment to lax law and order. The luxury beliefs of the Progressive leisure class are indeed disconnected from reality, but also political suicide given that Progressives form a small proportion of the electorate.

The predictable retort from American liberals to the role of Progressive ideologies on race, gender, and sexuality influencing the perception of the party and its policies is that the 2024 Harris campaign wasn’t fought on these issues. In reality, it didn’t matter whether Harris overtly campaigned on these issues or not because the problem for the Democrats doesn’t necessarily lie with individual candidates but with what John Judas and Ruy Teixeira called “the shadow party”; the array of activists, foundations, NGOs, celebrities, and influencers linked to the Democrats who represent, and hold, far-Left Progressive views on identitarian issues. These are the kids cosplaying jihadis in Columbia, the activists driving mobile billboards around New York with the lying statement “The Science is Settled” regarding the pseudoscientific “affirmative care model” for gender dysphoric youth, the Very Online cancel culture warriors, and the idiot celebrities and influencers with heads full of Ibram X. Kendi’s tautological nonsense.

And it is crippling the Democratic Party as a political entity. The irrational, incoherent, unfalsifiable spew of Progressive ideologies on race, gender, and sexuality, are catnip for wealthy, college-educated White Progressives and liberals who want to demonstrate their Luxury Beliefs as a status signifier. This creates discordance between the “shadow party” of activists and vested interest organisations who represent views only a small minority of voters hold, and drives a wedge between the Democrats as a political party and their broader base of support, which traditionally would more socio-culturally conservative working-class voters. The consequences for the Democrats as a party, which the results of this election should make painfully clear to them, is that the Democrats didn’t “lose the working class” or moderate voters; they drove them away by being hostage to the “shadow party” on these issues.

An election post-mortem by Dustin Guastella and Jared Abbott illustrates this issue:

“Yes, it's not fair that the right wing has a well-built propaganda machine that can exploit these cultural flashpoints and tie them to the party, but the problem is inside the house as well. Ultra-progressive organizations have a distinct interest in forcing Democratic politicians to take incredibly unpopular maximalist stances to demonstrate to their donors and members that they have real influence. These organizations, of course, have no accountability to the electorate yet they make it increasingly difficult for Democrats to communicate their relatively popular economic policies.”

And that “well-built propaganda machine” did indeed exploit the Democrats association with the Cultural Revolution, encapsulated in two sentences that illustrated the difference between overtly campaigning on an issue and being the party associated with specific ideologies:

“The Democrats are for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.”

Irrespective of how one feels about this sentence, it must be admitted that it was devastatingly effective political rhetoric, shifting voters by 2.7% towards the Republicans and having a particular effect in swing states. American liberals are fond of crying foul of rhetoric like this, claiming that “the Right weaponises a culture war!” This is sophistry because it is Progressive culture in the first place. The Right is merely playing the ball that Progressives put in play, the Cultural Revolution that the Progressive Left has been seeking to impose on society, on institutions, enshrine in policy, and police in language and thought, not only concerning gender issues but across the entire Progressive identitarian agenda. Progressives are the ones who believe in biological fairytales, absurd language codes and games, and enforcing homogeneity in thought and speech. What did they think the political consequences would be?

In seeking to impose their New Morality of Identity on the nation and its institutions, Progressives have denigrated the very institutions that typically act as the bulwark against the rise of malevolent actors: a free and independent press, academic institutions and freedom of thought, and objective, reasoned resolution of conflicts of ideas and ideologies. Progressives have reduced academic institutions to parodies of absurdity and irrationality and reduced once-respected free press institutions like the New York Times and Washington Post to foghorns for Progressive narratives over rigorous and honest journalism. Science, to Progressives, is no longer based on scientific merit but on whether the findings bolster Progressive agendas; where disconfirming evidence can be found, activists force retractions, and firings, and engage in their usual hysterical online witch-hunts. Science-adjacent outposts like the Scientific American morphed into platforms for pseudoscience once it upheld Progressive agendas, supported by the Very Online world of liberal “SciComms” influencers. The standard for facts for American liberals has become “Sufficiently Truth-y Sounding”; gullibility to vague, pseudo-profound bullshit based on the preconceived acceptability of the statements.

If this election provides any lesson for the Democrats to learn, it should be the wise counsel of Teixeira that “a political party is not a social movement, media company or academic institution; it is a vehicle for maximizing votes, winning elections and getting things done.”

Progressivism isn’t repugnant to voters because they are racist, xenophobic, transphobic, or whatever; it is repugnant because it is little more than “fashionable nonsense”, which is being kind. The ideologies of Progressivism take causes that everyone in modern society, except those on the political extremes, accept as important, worthy causes in the arc of progress, and sucks the blood out of them to satisfy the over-educated vampires who feed on the moral narcissism their Luxury Beliefs provide. If the Democrats want to be a serious political party, they should drive a stake through the heart of these irrational ideologies because Progressives are political poison to them.

What’s Left of What’s Right?

The last two weeks have left me fairly convinced that there will be no reflection or soul-searching among American liberals. The American Left is a joke, and there appears to be little prospect of any sort of refreshed thinking or evolving worldview. There isn’t anyone in the party strong enough to force the divorce from the “shadow party”, and there isn’t anyone in the party strong enough to draw a line under Progressive bullshit.

The Democrats are what they are, and what they are is a party that has no idea how to communicate, is disconnected from the average American, is far to the Left of their deified minority groups, and has no idea what to do about any of it because the implications of addressing any of these issues would require a confrontation with the very elite special interests to which they are now a hostage.