Lessons from the Dems’ Post-Mortem

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There are no two ways to “spin” it. The Dems have saved US democracy, at least for four years. But aside from the presidential race, the 2020 election was a wipeout for them. Facing the worst and most outrageously criminal administration in American history, they won the big one but lost almost everything else. They may have failed to regain the Senate, and they even lost seats in the House.

You don’t point out your own side’s mistakes in the middle of a war. But now that the election’s all over except for rejecting Trump’s bogus claims of fraud, I can be frank with some points of advice:

1. Don’t be stupid. The slogan “Defund the police” has to be one of the dumbest I’ve ever heard. It reeks of a child telling his parents, “Give me a new toy, or I’ll break the old one.” It may be the only thing that Dems said or did in this election cycle that sank to Trump’s level of incompetence and childishness.

The type of political ad it enables I can compose in my head. A woman reaches for the telephone to dial 911. The camera pans to a gun smashing through the panes of glass in her front door and a hand groping inside for the lock. A robotic voice on the phone intones, “Sorry, we can’t help you; we’ve been defunded.” I recall actually seeing an ad of that sort. Think it might have played well in ghettos rife with guns and crime, let alone in white suburbs?

Speaker Pelosi is a marvelously effective legislative leader. But apparently she’s not much of a teacher. If she can’t do it herself, she needs to commission a class or seminar for new congresspeople to teach them the facts of life. No matter how young or inexperienced you are, and no matter how big an electoral mandate you may have in your district, election is not a license to be stupid.

2. Think beyond your own district; be a team player. Compared to the disciplined, lock-step Republicans, Dems have always been a herd of cats. Will Rogers said it best: “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

To some extent disorganization is inevitable; a lot of it comes from the Dems’ “big tent.” But Dems can do a lot better. Demographics and the future seemed to be on their side, but this time they blew their chances big time.

They hung “moderates” in red districts out to dry. Except for suburban women and seniors, they failed to broaden their tent. They fought fire with fire—not always a brilliant idea. Their most loyal “base” of college-educated women and Black voters saved them, and then only at the presidential level, plus maybe (and crucially for the Senate) in Georgia.

This was supposed to be a “base” election for Trump’s team, too. But at the last moment, in a multipronged surprise attack, Trump reached out in unforeseen ways to broaden his base. He creamed Biden with oil-and-gas workers by harping on Biden’s ill-expressed desire to phase out oil and fracking for gas, not just coal. In Florida Trump got Hispanic votes by damning socialism before crowds of Cubans and Venezuelans—whose political lives revolve around perpetual hatred for the Castros, Maduro and Chavez—and by emphasizing independence and self-reliance for all workers, plus machismo for men. Trump even gained traction with the small Native American Lumbee tribe on the border of the two Carolinas by promising its members federal recognition.

In all these ploys, Trump’s total lack of ideology and reliance on his own instincts and whim were advantages. They left him agile, flexible and free to feed voters’ wishes on the spur of the moment. It doesn’t matter whether he intended to fulfill all his promises or could conceive of any practical ways to do so. He got the votes. That’s how he rolls, and that’s how he became president.

Dems have to figure out how to counter these moves. Trump may be gone for good, or he may be back again in 2024. But either way, Trumpism is far from dead. In our social-media culture, which rewards a gnat’s attention span, this sort of hit-and-run promising has a long race to run. The only way honest pols can fight it is to understand what every sector of the electorate wants, nationwide, and refrain from supporting the opposite, even by implication, at least not without reflection and deliberate intention.

Barack Obama was the most gifted pol of my voting lifetime. There’s a reason why he spoke slowly and deliberately and often relied on his teleprompter. When he spoke extemporaneously, he knew he had to play three-dimensional chess in his head. New members of Congress have to learn to play that challenging game or keep silent.

3. Say it simply and often, and know your audience. The foregoing point segues naturally into the next. As Simon and Garfunkel sang in their iconic song, “The Boxer”:

I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles.
Such are promises,
All lies and jests.
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.”

That brilliant stanza tells the sad fate of duped voters. Trump’s short political career has been a successful exercise in exploiting it.

His voters forgave his lying, crudeness, vulgarity and bigotry—often even against their own gender, race or ethnicity—because, at the end of the day, he told them what they wanted to hear. He told them that he would preserve their jobs and industries and that, as crude as he is, he had their backs. For voters convinced that “the elites” had forgotten or discounted them, that was all they needed to hear.

Biden’s remark about oil and gas was absolute truth. We do have to phase out fossil fuels to save our climate. Even if we don’t, they’ll run out within a generation or, at most, two. [Click here for oil and here for gas.]

But however true it is, you can’t say that to oil and gas workers and expect to get their votes. You have to slant your message to your audience. By that simple remark, Biden probably lost tens of thousands of votes in Pennsylvania. It may be why he lost Texas decisively. (Texas is our leading state in wind-power capacity, but oil and gas are entrenched in its culture and history, especially among older voters and mostly-male drilling crews.)

Your doctor might not tell you when your chances of surviving are only 10%, because he knows that you and your immune system will fight harder if you think positively. Just so, a pol can’t be brutally honest with workers in dying industries. He or she must give them hope by speaking of better jobs in renewables and infrastructure and emphasizing natural gas as the best transition fuel. People, like horses, must be led to water, not have their heads dunked in it.

Trump’s habitual lying and exaggeration may have actually helped him here. Like a World War II fighter, he threw out a lot of chaff. Voters learned to ignore it and focus only when he said he had their backs. That, I think, is a large part of his demagogic genius. He purposefully threw out clouds of smoke to confuse his opponents, make them crazy, and make sure “his” voters heard only what they wanted to hear. The Dems have to make sure they don’t give him ammunition. (If you don’t fear Mike Pompeo, who’s as unprincipled and evil as Trump but far smarter and more disciplined, you haven’t been paying attention.)

4. Stay on message, which can be shaded from place to place. Compared to the Dems, Republicans are as disciplined and united as an ancient Roman legion. They relentlessly promote utter nonsense, like “job-killing taxes” and “job-killing regulations.” The Dems have to be just as relentless, and just as united, in pointing out that taxes and regulations create jobs and grow the economy, as well as lead to other benefits like greater equality, a stronger safety net, more reliable health care, a cleaner environment, and a more survivable climate.

Dems need to compose bumper-sticker slogans to express these more complex ideas succinctly and forcefully. That’s not easy. It took the better part of three centuries to figure out an apt, single-syllable word for oppressed Americans who descended from slaves, which can also include the subjects of “collateral damage” who didn’t. All it took was capitalizing the “B” in “black,” to create a proper adjective that’s apt, respectful, and covers the waterfront fairly precisely.

In my view, it’s no coincidence that this simple proper adjective arose during a vast awakening among Caucasians—a vast outrage over widespread and unjustified murders of Black people, and systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters. Did the name change precede or follow the awakening, or were they all part of the same political evolution? You decide. But Dems could profit immensely by taking lessons from Republicans in the often-dark arts of “applied philology.”

5. Agree on a message and how to present it in advance. As will Rogers jokingly noted, Democrats are famous for their circular firing squads. They spend their lives disputing nuances of progressivism, while their opponents push us back toward the nineteenth century and the Old Gilded Age.

By dint of extraordinary and unprecedented effort, they managed to avoid a fateful dust-up between moderates and progressives this time. Their failure to do so last time may have doomed Hillary Clinton’s campaign and left Trump to transform the entire political landscape.

The moral of this story is unity. Does this mean that true progressives should give up their fight and become moderates? Hell, no. What it means is that they have to become cleverer and more sophisticated about how they push their agendas. They have to use ju-jitsu and judo, not drunken roundhouse punches, to actually win their fight. They have to persuade and bargain rather than just put on a show.

No Dem I’ve seen, with the possible exception of JFK and Barack Obama, is anywhere near as good at putting on a show as Donald Trump. The reason has nothing to do with skill. Dems have trouble putting on a show because they also have to deal with reality and real people’s needs. So they have to pick their audiences and their timing with exquisite precision.

Making “progress” is what progressivism is all about. It’s not rocket science. It’s human relations, aka “politics” 1A. You’ve got to attract and persuade people, not repel them. These subsidiary points may help:

Principle 1: Work on your friends and allies first. If you can’t persuade your friends and allies, how in hell are you going to persuade your opponents, let alone voters whom Fox and Rush have brainwashed for decades? The Sanders/Warren faction of Democrats did this brilliantly in forcing changes in the Democratic Party’s platform after agreeing to support Biden.

A party platform is hardly binding on anyone. But in making those changes progressives improved their rapport with their party, honed their message and approach, and strengthened their alliances with the pols and constituencies they most need to make progress.

Best of all, the progressives did this mostly in private. A competent army doesn’t film its training exercises and hand the video to its enemies, does it?

Principle 2: Hone your message and your strategy before you go public. Listening to Fox and Republicans can drive you crazy. To them, up is often down and left is socialism and tyranny. But you can’t fight people who’ve been brainwashed, at least not right away. You’ve got to soften them up.

You do that by softening your message, not your goals. You say, “Stop police brutality,” or “Stop killing Black people,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Humanize the police,” or "Demilitarize the police,” rather than “Defund the police.” You state your goals absolutely precisely, with all their limitations, so as not to be tagged as extreme. You use simple language and avoid the last-century’s labels and banners (like “socialism”) as if they were a political plague, which they are.

Most of all, it’s best to leave methods and tactics unstated, because they often change with circumstances and with inevitable political bargaining. Keep your eyes and your slogans on the prize, not the means. Talk about saving our climate, reducing devastating hurricanes, droughts, wildfires and tornadoes, and providing good, healthy, clean-air jobs. Don’t talk so much about banning fracking and phasing out oil, at least not right away. There’s always more than one way to skin a cat.

Another reason for not talking methods is that it gets you into the weeds. Methods are subjects for experts, not voters. That’s why we have a representative democracy or “Republic,” not a direct democracy. Legislators and regulators hash out means; voters most want to know where their government is headed and at what cost.

Principle 3: If you must talk means, leave them to last. It’s far easier to get agreement on goals than on means.

If you express them right, almost everyone believes in progressive goals. Who doesn’t want universal health coverage, coverage of pre-existing conditions, greater economic equality, fewer gun slaughters, and people working a full week, but at the low end, who don’t have to get food stamps to feed their families? If you express goals like this, you’ll get broad agreement. It’s when you start talking means—like wiping out private insurance, soaking the rich, or a minimum national income—that disagreement starts.

Here a detailed example may be helpful. I’ve written a whole essay about raising, not reducing, the estate tax, especially on high-value estates. Doing that would raise much-needed revenue and retard the ascendance of a permanent economic aristocracy in America.

The means I proposed was simply raising the tax rates. That’s a simple, straightforward approach that demagogues can easily attack as “soaking the rich” or “taxing death.”

But I recently read about a subtler and perhaps more effective means of accomplishing the same end. The newspaper story I read didn’t actually specify the means. But I think I was able to figure it out: abolishing the “stepped-up basis” that estates get to use in applying the existing tax rate to calculate estate taxes.

The stepped-up basis works this way. When an estate-holder dies, the heirs get the decedent’s property with a “basis,” or tax valuation, calculated as of the date of death. For example, if the decedent had held a piece of juicy California real estate for a full half-century, the heirs would receive it at its modern fair-market value. All the half-century of appreciation (“capital gains”) would never get taxed at all, even if the heirs sold the property just a week after inheriting it. The story I read suggested that the means it reported (which it did not identify) would actually produce more government revenue than just raising the tax rates as much as politically feasible.

If my inference about the unspecified means is right, it would be positively brilliant for three reasons. First, it’s technically complex and so hard to characterize and oppose simply. Second, it sounds fairer than simply raising the estate tax rate, because otherwise decades of appreciation in the value of property would go untaxed. Finally—and most important—it can be sold as closing a loophole, rather than just “soaking the rich.”

* * *

At this point, some progressive readers may think I’m a moderate. But I’m not. I voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 until his campaign was no longer viable; then I voted for Hillary Clinton (although I’m no big fan of hers). I voted for Elizabeth Warren in this cycle, because I think she’s smarter and more strategic than Sanders, although Sanders is a persuasive speaker.

Yet I voted in this general election for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and I did so with some enthusiasm. My enthusiasm derived not just from the high stakes and the risk of tyranny. It also came from Biden’s experience, political skill and decency, and Harris’ intelligence, warmth, and ability to enlarge the Dems’ “big tent” as a woman of color. While I started out skeptical of Medicare for All, I ended up endorsing it after a horrible personal experience with the dysfunction of our current system.

My election epiphany came after Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina “anointed” Biden after his losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, and Biden blew away his opposition in Clyburn’s state. Clyburn taught us that Joe’s experience, moderation, decency and name recognition were the best way to beat Trump. And Clyburn was right. He spoke not just for his own state, but for the “silent majority” of confused and fearful voters nationwide.

I will go to my grave believing that we owe the salvation of our democracy (so far) to Clyburn’s experience, insight and timely leadership. Thank you, Jim! Now, looking backward, it’s easy to understand why no one but Biden was as well positioned to win, let alone heal the nation.

As Otto von Bismarck taught us, politics “is the art of the possible.” I love our new progressive “rainbow” of House members and am happy that they’re in Congress. But they’ve yet to fully internalize the fact that the rest of the nation is not like their districts. Maybe Trump’s ability to command over 70 million votes, even as he became more and more unhinged, will help them learn.

A truly national epiphany will take some time. And it won’t come without an epic struggle. In that struggle, the newbies have two disadvantages. First, they’ve never done a national campaign. Second, they are like raw recruits who’ve never seen total political war. They’ve yet to get over their euphoria from being elected. They’ve yet to fully internalize that winning warriors rely on their allies and warriors on their own side, as much as on themselves.

One last point: global warming is an existential threat to our entire species. But what does that fact suggest? Is it better strategy to fight for life itself by screaming and flailing about? Or is it better to think first, long and hard, and have a cold, hard, calculated strategy in which every tactic and every speech propels us toward the goal? (To see how Biden is preparing an all-fronts assault on global warming, using all the federal government’s resources, click here.)

So as much as I admire and cheer their youth and spunk, disappointed progressives will have to focus on the possible now. They can work with their local leaders to implement the most progressive policies that their districts will support. Then they can come to a larger public and say, “This works, and we’ve shown how.” In general, the best way to validate means is on a small scale, whether it’s in the laboratory or in the first clinical trial of a treatment or vaccine.

But for national programs, policies and approaches, everyone should follow the leadership of grizzled veterans like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Jim Clyburn. Barack Obama should lead, too, if he joins the struggle again now that Biden/Harris have won. (I’ve suggested that he serve as Secretary of State, exploiting his still-stellar reputation abroad to repair our alliances and global standing.)

These veterans have fought and won wars against the greatest propaganda and delusion machine our species has ever known. They’ve beaten history’s most talented demagogue ever. They’ve saved our democracy, at least for the moment, from an internal tyranny of lies and bullying that over 70 million voters didn’t just accept, but welcomed. Their victories, if not their age and long experience, deserve respect. They who won are the leaders to follow.

Endnote on Global Warming. As an ex-scientist, I’m acutely aware of the danger of runaway positive feedback in global warming. (See also, this earlier, more explanatory post.) I believe (but can’t prove) that the most alarmist official projections so far have been understated. In my view, global warming will, within a decade, dwarf the current Covid-19 pandemic as a cause of global human suffering.

So I fully appreciate, indeed laud, the zeal and persistence of youthful leaders like Greta Thunberg and our most progressive pols in pushing for a quick and comprehensive solution. But widespread political will must precede action.

The problem is twofold. First, our investment as a species in stranded assets for finding, extracting, refining and using fossil fuels is enormous, probably the biggest in our history. Much of that investment will end up being pure economic waste, although a some of it can be converted to new sources of energy. Second, millions of workers owe their livelihoods to an industry that we must phase out to thrive, and maybe to survive, as a species. If all those workers are left high and dry—or even believe they have been—we may have Trumpism 2.0 and perhaps even global conflict.

The problem is not science or engineering. We know we have already passed the first danger level of CO₂ in our atmosphere. We know that renewable sources of energy can meet our needs and that nuclear energy can be made safe with better power-plant designs. We know that we can convert, even globally, if everybody agrees and puts their backs to the wheel.

So the problem is not knowing why or how. It’s politics. It’s convincing the whole world to join together in a massive energy conversion that some nations and regions will find more difficult than others, and that will disrupt the lives and expectations of nations, regions, industries and tens of millions of workers.

We won’t get there by shouting, haranguing, or threatening, or by marching in the streets. We’re going to have to convince and cajole every nation, region, industry and worker on this planet to take part. That’s a political problem, not a scientific or technical one. And that’s why we need political leaders with extraordinary experience, talent and skill.

Like positive feedback, politics is nonlinear. It doesn’t proceed in a straight line. It acts in a series of epiphanies, awakenings and (in the worst case) revolutions. An example is US Caucasians’ vast awakening to the current systematic oppression of Black people and other minorities after the series of murders that culminated (but didn’t end) with the police murder of George Floyd. The huge discrepancy in pandemic suffering between majority and minority communities also helped spur the awakening.

Maybe next summer, after the fog of Trumpism and fear of the Pandemic have lifted a bit, people will see the looming threat of hurricanes, floods, wildfires, heat waves, tornadoes, rising seas, dwindling glaciers, waning supplies of fresh water, and poleward-marching tropical diseases. Maybe then they will have their epiphany about global warming. Maybe it won’t happen for two or three more summers of radically increasing “natural” catastrophes.

But whenever the inevitable agony comes, it will take talented, seasoned pols to turn it into prompt and decisive action. That’s when we’ll need not just the most zealous and committed, but the most experienced, realistic, veteran pols we have: the ones with the best global connections and the broadest trust among their own people. Only they can move us collectively from goals to collective will to means that work and that people support.

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