Even the losers
They didn't get lucky this time, so they're punching down
As Democrats continue to reel from their devastating loss in the general election this month, party hacks and their allies have decided to blame the weakest members of the coalition.
On Saturday, former Harry Reid aide Adam Jentleson—most recently chief of staff to Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman—penned an opinion piece for the New York Times summing up this down-punching urge by framing the election results as the consequence of the party listening too much to activist groups.
These “activist groups” weren’t anyone with meaningful power in the party. Nowhere did Jentleson point at wealthy donors, corporations, or lobbies with influence like AIPAC. Instead, he attacked, well, you can guess:
When Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test, despite the fact that current law already gave prisoners access to gender-affirming care. This became a major line of attack for Mr. Trump in the closing weeks of this year’s election. Now, with the G.O.P.’s ascent to dominance, transgender Americans are unquestionably going to be worse off.
Attacking trans people is an easy swipe for Democrats and many liberals and it’s not hard to tell why: a marginalized group that’s facing threats from all levels of government doesn’t have the influence to push back.
Jentleson’s former boss Fetterman did something similar, hitting at Muslims for not voting Harris and telling them to enjoy Trump’s policies. As I noted on Twitter: “You would never hear him say that white women—who voted for Trump—are going to love the next abortion ban. Part of that’s bigotry but a lot of it is cowardice because one group is powerless and easier to attack.”
Last week, I wrote about this tendency to attack the weakest members of the coalition in an article for TruthDig:
Cleaning house doesn’t appear to be on the agenda, at least not yet. Facing down the danger of an ascendant far-right Republican Party, Democrats are throwing the most marginalized members of their coalition under the bus. The reason for this is two-fold: inherent reactionary politics just under the surface for most liberals and the iron law of institutions. The reactionary politics are self-explanatory; faced with catastrophe, people tend to withdraw and indulge their most fear-based, angry politics.
But the iron law of institutions — Jon Schwarz’s idea that people in power within institutions will act primarily to protect their position at the expense of the institution — is the exact type of loser mentality that got us here. You can see it in how Democratic thought leaders are flailing around to attack whatever marginalized group they can rather than face up to internal failures, and how they would rather blame powerless political factions like the Green Party instead of looking at the sclerotic party leadership that brought us to this point.
A serious party would do some serious thinking about why they lost—but Democrats like Jentleson aren’t open to that. They’re not interested in delivering necessary post mortems that might make people in power uncomfortable.
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