It’s okay, even necessary, for a political party to do some soul-searching when it loses as badly as my party did last Tuesday. But let’s make a distinction between sober reflection and finger-pointing.
I will not point a finger at any person. I’ll blame history. I’ll get to that in a bit, but first let me list all those I will not blame.
I will not blame Kamala Harris. She turned out to be an excellent candidate who ran a near flawless campaign. I thought her messaging and the persona she presented were terrific. She worked hard and she had plenty of money and organization. The problem was not the candidate.
I will not blame Joe Biden. It’s true that Biden should never have sought a second term and he stayed in the race too long after his disastrous debate performance. It’s also true that he only finally got out, kicking and screaming, when Nancy Pelosi engineered his departure. But none of that cost Harris the election. In fact, I’ll argue that the lack of a bruising primary and the way Harris — helped by Biden — was able to quickly bring the party together behind her was an advantage.
I will not blame Tim Walz. If the election had come down to Pennsylvania we might second-guess Harris’ choice of a running mate. Josh Shapiro might have been better. But in the end it didn’t matter.
I will not blame the progressive or moderate wings of the party. Everyone set aside their differences and pulled together, from Bernie Sanders to Rahm Emanuel.
In Wisconsin, I will not blame party chair Ben Wikler. The guy has done amazing work, from far out-fundraising the Republicans to running circles around them in the ground game. And, in fact, in the races Wikler actually ran, without national party interference, for the statehouse he did great, picking up the four seats he targeted in the Senate and at least 10 in the Assembly. This election was not lost for technical reasons.
All right then, so who do I hold responsible? Well, it’s not who, but what. Right now Democrats are just on the wrong side of history.
By happenstance, I find myself reading Age of Revolutions by Fareed Zakaria. It’s helping me understand what’s been going on since about 2016 and it’s helping me put Tuesday in perspective.
Zakaria points out that in 2006, Tony Blair observed that the new tension in the world was no longer going to be between traditional left and right, but between open and closed societies. Open societies have dominated the West in the last couple of centuries or more. They’re for free markets, trade, immigration, diversity, and free-wheeling technological progress. Closed societies want to restrict trade and slash immigration while they view diversity and technology with suspicion.
When the economic benefits of open societies start to accrue to a mostly urban elite, things start to get tense. And when the economic and cultural gap between urban elites and the larger numbers of less affluent and more culturally conservative people outside of cities become untenable, something snaps. There’s a backlash and open societies close down. It’s just a question of how much.
Zakaria gives the example of what happened in the Netherlands, arguably the world’s first truly open society. Technological and organizational advances in shipping helped make Holland incredibly rich while limited land availability made it more urban than any other place on earth. Moreover, the cooperation needed to reclaim land from the sea and maintain it created social and governmental structures that produced benefits in other realms. By 1600, Holland had the world’s first real republic.
Then things started to unravel. The efficient government — led by urban, educated merchants — saw wars as drains on commerce and so sued for peace with Spain. But that meant disinvestment in rural defense works, which produced a widening gap between rural and urban regions. At the same time the rise of guilds produced organized entities that sought protectionism, which the liberal government thought to be inefficient (because it was), while they were also religiously conservative (which the liberal government was not).
So, the republic was deposed and a modified monarchy reinstated. Eventually, of course, Holland returned to its liberal course, but recently Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom are making gains in their efforts to bring the Netherlands back to a more closed society. The same thing is happening in France and all over Europe and other parts of the world. This is not just America’s problem and it certainly didn’t start with Kamala Harris or even Joe Biden.
So, in short, Harris and her party have simply been caught in an historical moment that isn’t new and might have been predicted. The frustrations of those left behind by trade and technology have found a voice in Trump’s hard-right populism. And no amount of money, organization, polling, focus groups or message massaging would have made much of a difference.
The challenge is to find a satisfying classically liberal answer to the frustrations felt by those left behind when societies embrace openness.
But here’s the problem. There is a lot wrong with the Democrats. Maureen Dowd summed it up nicely. It’s “correctness, condescension and cancellation.” But even if they were to expunge the party of wokeness (and I doubt they can, given how ingrained it is among the Democratic elite), that still leaves an unbridgeable divide. I’m happy to shed my party of political correctness. But classically liberal, Enlightenment values are what I believe in to my core. I can’t just suddenly decide that things like free trade, technological progress, science, reason, tolerance, free speech and the rule of law are negotiable. I won’t willingly return to the Dark Ages.
The old gradations of right and left, when we all agreed on the fundamentals. were manageable. But the new (and also very old) disagreement between open and closed societies is a chasm — alternative realities really — that doesn’t lend itself to a happy middle.
A version of this piece originally appeared in Isthmus.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
“She turned out to be an excellent candidate who ran a near flawless campaign. I thought her messaging and the persona she presented were terrific.”
An opinion (IMO) not shared by many; another view:
“Of course, it was obvious that Joe Biden was in decline. Republicans saw it clearly in 2020. I still maintain that the plan (likely without the knowledge of Joe, Dr. Jill and their staunchest supporters) was to give him a year in office before his health issues had progressed sufficiently enough that he could be forced out and VP Harris installed as the historic first female black(ish) President with all the glory, honor and regnal adoration that would involve and everyone who questioned her competence was both racist and sexist.
“But as the President’s health progressively got worse, the realization that the Vice-President really was an empty suit set in and they were stuck. Articles began appearing about how she wasn’t being given much to do and that her massive unpopularity was confusing.
“So the decision was made to just keep the President under wraps and enlist KJP and the advocacy media to cover for him while engaging in lawfare against Trump to ensure he wouldn’t be the Republican candidate. It didn’t work.
“Making sure that no one could challenge Biden – after all, if he beat Trump before, he could do it again – they kept up the same drumbeat they did in 2020 (racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and NationalAbortionBanProject2025HitlerNaziFacist).
“And then came the debate. Panic ensued, they couldn’t run Biden and they couldn’t ditch Harris without upsetting the loudest Progressive voices and offending their captive African-American voters. Biden and his enablers were digging in their heels. The DNC, including – probably – Barack Obama, told him he would be removed via the 25th Amendment if he didn’t withdraw from the race. If he did that, he would be permitted to stay in office until the new President’s term began.
“Closed convention time! The DNC – in order to save democracy – anoints the candidate. As Bernie Sanders found out, the voters don’t matter. Watching Kamala Harris refuse to do unscripted, unedited interviews and failing to articulate her policy points (or reversing some of them aka lying to get votes as Sen. Sanders said), the media – either out of resentment or because they could tell where the prevailing winds were blowing – decided to avoid endorsing anyone.
“Desperate, the Harris campaign turned to its friends in Hollywood who came out in droves with fundraisers and endorsements. Barack Obama was trotted out to lecture African-American men on their required fealty to the Democratic Party/a black(ish) woman. It didn’t work.
“AMERICANS IN THE MILLIONS SAW THROUGH IT ALL” (bolds/caps/italics mine)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Had they gone through a primary, I’d say there was a 75% chance that Harris would have been the nominee anyway. And she would have had to then try to unite the party behind her. Moreover, she might have had to move left to capture the nomination or do the uniting after she did. And finally, contributors would have spent a lot of money in the primary, making them less likely to spend in the general.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I appreciate this take…but it’s really important to recognize that hardly everybody –– even most –– who voted Republican align with the archetype of the “forgotten man.” There are some striking shifts in certain parts of the country, but most of the votes that Trump got out of Waukesha County were the same votes that Romney, Bush and Reagan could count on.
And let’s not forget that one of the major trends in this election was the embrace of Trump by a group of business/tech elites who have benefited more than anybody from globalization & technological progress. And we all know that it is these people, not laid off factory workers, who will be driving the agenda in the next Trump administration.
This was going to be a tough environment for any Dem, but I am absolutely disgusted with Biden and the party establishment that enabled this situation. Considering how close the margins were, I definitely think this is an election that could have been won if we’d had a primary that produced a better candidate. Kamala has strengths, but she also has glaring weaknesses (her inability to go off-script) that embody the “authenticity” issue dogging the Democratic Party.
LikeLike
The GOP establishment does support Trump and it’s the most disheartening and infuriating thing about the whole Trump mess. People like Liz Cheney are in such a tiny sliver of the party. But I also think it’s pretty clear that Trump made gains everywhere: In a November 11th interview in the Wall Street Journal, centrist Democrat Ruy Tiexiera laments what’s happened to his party and says that their “thumping” last week was even greater than he had expected: “he Democrats have come to regard white working-class voters as “reactionary and racist,” Mr. Teixeira says. Those voters already defected to Mr. Trump in 2016, but what killed the Democrats this year was “losing nonwhite working-class voters hand over fist.” Mr. Teixeira notes that Barack Obama “carried the nonwhite working class or noncollege voters by 67 points. Harris has carried them with 33. That’s a halving of the margin among those who should have been the bulwark, the core, of the Democratic Party.”
“The outcome doesn’t surprise Mr. Teixeira: “It was clearly in the cards that they could lose.” What does surprise him is the extent of the loss and the “uniformity of the rightward movement across geographies and demographic groups.” The startling voter results back him up. Mr. Trump appears to have carried all the swing states. He improved his margins in red states and reduced the Democratic advantage in blue ones. He made particular advances among Hispanic voters, carrying traditionally Democratic Texas border counties including Starr, which had voted Democratic in every election since 1892. He also took Florida’s Miami-Dade, which hadn’t gone Republican since 1988, and heavily Puerto Rican Osceola, where Joe Biden led in 2020 by nearly 14 points. His improvement among black voters, especially men, helped close the gap in Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee and push him over the top in their three key “blue wall” states. Mr. Trump could become the first Republican since 2004 to break 40% in California.”
LikeLike
“And let’s not forget that one of the major trends in this election was the embrace of Trump by a group of business/tech elites who have benefited more than anybody from globalization & technological progress. And we all know that it is these people, not laid off factory workers, who will be driving the agenda in the next Trump administration.”
This is an excellent point, and an extra tragic coda to this election.
LikeLike
What if it’s not that deep? What if people just can’t handle the idea of a female president? Also, the double standards about age and declining mental capacity are maddening. Trump is the oldest president ever elected and in addition to all of his character flaws and the horrible things he has said and done, people never mentioned how haggard and awful he looked the past couple of months and his increasingly bizarre behavior at his rallies. People aren’t willing to even talk about the fact that perhaps any female president on either side would not be elected in this country or that Trump’s age should have been a factor disqualifying him. Why wasn’t that talked about?
LikeLike
The Democrats did try to hammer away at the age issue, but they couldn’t get any traction. I don’t think gender had anything to do with it. Harris even lost the female vote.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You suppose all females would back a woman? I have heard many times over the years from female colleagues who “just can’t work for a woman.” It’s real. And, I don’t recall hearing much about Trumps age, actually. Everyone, me included, is just guessing at the reasons. Probably a bit of everything we guess. But it sounds like young male voters really showed up in a new way and that they supported Trump scares me alot.
LikeLike
“Also, the double standards about age and declining mental capacity are maddening.”
Yet you’re O.K. with democrats lying/hiding/gaslighting/bull$#!tting the public about Biden’s mental fitness over the last ~four (4) years, IMO, the biggest cover-up since Watergate.
The left, with >90% of the media as a backstop, tried to convince people that Biden could do 6 dimensional chess, while solving a Rubik’s Cube while hopping on one foot backwards in the dark.
After that came to a screeching halt on June 27th, the left completely forfeited any claim of any expertise whatsoever in the diagnosis of cerebral acuity.
LikeLike
Free trade is by definition negotiable, as it should be, and does not really belong on this list.
LikeLike
Ah, the post election spin is here, a combination of a lot of things, I would say, no right answer, no wrong answer. Harris ran into a buzz saw, and that happened. Old Joe goes down in history as a failed president, and unlike Carter, very little time, if any to rebuild his legacy.
LikeLike