Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
Have you been experiencing a strange sensation over the past week or so? Has your mood changed? Your heartbeat quickened? Has there been this vague sense of hope lingering within your subconscious, filling in some of the emotional real estate that dread had long occupied? Have things gotten so weird that you’ve even been enjoying political memes?
Don’t panic — you’re not having a stroke or experiencing some kind of psychotic break. This is actually what participating in civic life is supposed feel like, and as I’ll explain below, it’s a crucial element to winning in November and rebuilding the Democratic Party in the years to come.
Stick with me on this one — we’ve got our news updates and policy analyses coming over the next few days, so consider this a bonus edition of the newsletter.
Between his prolific output of bullshit and impossibly nasal Queens accent, the experience of hearing Donald Trump speak is like binge-listening to the high-pitched drilling sound that rattles around your head during an aggressive dental procedure. It’s tempting and probably healthy to fully block out anything he says, but once in a while, he accidentally says something worth considering.
The Trump quote that most sticks with me is something he said on the campaign trail back in 2016. He was at a rally in Montana, blathering on about how great he was, when he made a promise to his voters: “We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning.”
It’s tempting to reduce Trump’s appeal down to the fact that he permitted people to express their darkest and most anti-social impulses, and undoubtedly, that unbridled national id played a large part in his electoral success and ongoing appeal. But Trump’s pledge that his supporters would overdose on winning tapped into something different.
In a country that relentlessly isolates and beats people down, Trump offered them the opportunity to feel good about themselves, to buy into a larger goal and be part of a movement that exulted in its victories and laughed at its vanquished foes. Sure, nothing Trump did was meant to actually help any of his non-wealthy supporters, but the feeling he gave them cannot be underestimated. Winning was and remains a key part of Trumpism, which is one of the major reasons why he will never concede defeat in the 2020 election.
The Adults in the Room
For Democrats, this feeling has been far harder to come by, even when — especially when — the party has held unified control of government. Bludgeoned into a defensive crouch by Reagan and the rise of his New Right coalition, Democrats got very friendly with business in the early ‘90s, buried what remained of the New Deal era, and abandoned any pretense of collective mission.
Fear and outrage have been the only consistently successful sales pitches made by Democrats over the past two decades. Outrage at the stolen 2000 election, the Iraq War, and barbaric torture being carried out across the Middle East. Fear of full economic collapse during the 2008 subprime loan crisis. Outrage at economic inequality. Fear of the Tea Party. Outrage at Donald Trump, then fear of Donald Trump, then outrage at him once again.
To some degree, this pattern has been dictated by history. Republicans have repeatedly been given free rein to destroy shit, and then Democrats have had to be the adults in the room and clean things up. There is undoubtedly a double standard. It’s the toxic freedom of low expectations.
It’s always nice when economic freewill is halted and global pandemics are slowed, but relief is a short-lived and quickly forgotten feeling; nobody ever sticks around to watch the clean-up crew after a storm passes.
Until Democrats can win a larger, more progressive majority, they’re going to have to mitigate their internal weaknesses. One of the best ways to do that is flooding the zone with victories. That includes putting the national spotlight on local issues, especially when they offer the chance to both make a tangible difference in people’s lives.
Take Ron DeSantis, for example. The condescending fascist picks a lot of fights, but they’re always ones that he knows that he can win with executive power or with the help of mob of right-wing freaks. And once he flexes his muscle, DeSantis goes on Fox News to flaunt his triumph. For people that buy into his worldview and respond to all the phony fundraising emails, these regular victories brighten their entire day and become part of their own identity.
(It’s something I’ve been tracking for a long time, as members here know, but here’s a good story about it by a local journalist that now works for CNN)
The same thing goes for all those relentless attacks on public education — critical race theory, grooming, book banning, and religion in the classroom are all designed to rally people to an urgent cause.
Parents join local chapters of national groups, share the details of their ongoing battles, hook onlookers all across the country, and then overwhelm towns with raucous shrieks at school board meetings. In their dark fantasies, they are crusaders for some righteous cause, each success offers a hit of dopamine for the hooting, paranoid base.
Again, everything these people do is reprehensible. The universe would be better off without them. But it’s worth studying their tactics for building long-term power.
Winning is contagious
If political realignments followed the logic dictated by current events, the Republican Party’s purposely failed response to Covid and defense of the January 6th insurrection would have left the GOP on the brink of extinction. Instead, it was Democrats that looked to be on the ropes a little over a month ago. Biden’s polling numbers were so far beyond circling the drain, they were already rushing toward the sewer.
But the past week has witnessed a sudden role reversal in the daily political narrative. Democrats aren’t just beginning to notch some well-timed victories, they’re also rediscovering the swag and collective exhilaration of winning.
It started with the Kansas abortion amendment. Beaten down by countless months of exclusively bad news and feeling powerless to stop the onslaught, the resounding victory for abortion rights in Kansas of all places provided a jolt of excitement and permission to feel hopeful about the future. This was a galvanizing moment, inviting further collective action.
Then came the Inflation Reduction Act, another unexpected breakthrough. The extent to which it represents a significant policy win depends on the yardstick by which you measure it.
When compared with the semi-revolutionary policies that looked to be on the brink of passage last winter, the provisions that made it through the Manchin meat grinder are depressingly meager, but as of a month ago, nobody expected anything to pass. The surprise twist from Manchin and some decent hype work by Senate leadership transformed media perception of the climate and drug pricing provisions that did make it through reconciliation into what’s being hailed as groundbreaking and planet-saving. While those descriptions are probably not true, good headlines about a big win at a time as fraught as this one makes it worth playing along for the moment.
One of the key tenets of Trumpism is that it’s fun to win, and even more fun to watch your loser opponent eat shit. The Dark Brandon memes, though initially astroturfed, are an now act of defiance against a cruel conservative media, and their proliferation after the IRA passed represented a final twist of the knife to those tormenting liberals over the past year.
It’d be impossible to quantify the sense of sheer glee that consumed Democratic voters as news of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago unfolded across social media on Monday night. More than 18 months after Trump finished off the most corrupt term in presidential history by inciting an insurrection, the Department of Justice and FBI finally took some kind of action to hold him accountable for something.
It’s unclear just what they raided Trump’s banquet hall to find, and it’d be darkly funny if he wound up getting nailed on document handling of all things, but the sudden possibility that he’d pay some kind of price, combined with his pathetic whining about it, made for a certain kind of ecstasy. Memes, too. I was among the many people celebrating in front of Trump Tower when it became clear that he’d lost the 2020 election, and the mood Monday night was the closest thing to that kind of collective elation since.
Schaedenfreude is best when shared, which is why politicos trolling campaigns are so frequently effective. I’m not an advocate of outright bullying, but campaigns that invite supporters to mock a terrible politician in fun and creative ways are tapping into a more primal instinct we have as humans.
The unbelievable reach of Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. and Senate candidate John Fetterman’s relentless mockery of Dr. Oz is proof that needling campaigns can also effectively deliver key campaign messaging while also inviting a buy-in that is never fostered by rote campaign fundraising emails from the same few firms.
Standing defiant against deliberately mendacious conservative trolls, especially instead of insisting that we need a strong Republican Party, creates a rallying point that no appeal to bipartisanship could ever produce. It also leads to viral moments like the one below, which further empower and galvanize ideological supporters:
That blunt and unapologetic response has racked up nearly a million views in a short period of time because it feels like the rare victory over the mendacious nihilists on the right that have turned every school into a potential war zone.
There’s no legislation attached to this smackdown, nobody trying to sell some sort of complicated tax credit scheme. Instead, it’s a sign that it’s not just OK to be aggressive when the moment calls for it, but absolutely essential to do so. It’s hard to imagine getting sick of winning, but I’m willing to try it.
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