They'd Rather Be Left

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat of New York) is abundantly intelligent. She has shown signs of pragmatism suggestive of a career plan in which the phase of leftist advocacy is but a stepping-stone. Nevertheless, when she addresses a crowd at the side of Senator Bernie Sanders (independent democratic socialist of Vermont), affinity will out:

It will always be the people, the masses, who refuse to comply with authoritarian regimes, who are the last and strongest defense of our country and our freedom....

Now, "the masses" is part of a political vocabulary that grates on most American ears. It suggests the new politics of old countries, in which intellectual gods reach down to touch fingertips with an agglomerated hoi polloi. So does another term Ocasio-Cortez used in the same speech, "class solidarity". That may be an accurate shorthand for what is needed in place of racial solidarity, but it's an alien code to the majority of Americans in all walks of life. To succeed in American politics at the national level, one must bow to the American ethos of individual dignity. Politicians and activists whose hearts belong to the Left simply cannot bow — not to an individualist ethos, not to the traditionalism of many working people across ethnic lines, not to the possibility of progress without progressive ideology in full regalia.

Ocasio-Cortez apparently understands the need to bow but can't quite bring herself to go beyond alluding to it. Nothing less than a cathartic repudiation of her political debut would make any difference in her own standing with the electorate, and then probably not enough. Her established divisiveness is at least as limiting as Hillary Clinton's was. It's easy, too, to portray her as a phony: the architect's daughter who laundered her life story through a post-college job as a bartender and thus can let her supporters begin the story with "Working girl walks out of a bar...." Nevertheless, she's being touted widely as a leading contender for the next Democratic presidential nomination. Within progressive circles, the familiar upward spiral of enthusiasm for "rock star" figures is occurring in chronic isolation from the currents — and the stillnesses — of actual politics.

Individual figures aside, enthusiasm for progressive articles of faith is rapidly overwhelming the initial recognition that they hurt the Democratic Party in the 2024 elections. The party's national committee has chosen as its leader a denialist who says, "We've got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with voters." The erstwhile vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, a singularly gray eminence who, when photographed in the midst of orating, has the alarmed look of a school principal in a youth movie at the moment when things get out of hand, regrets that Democrats "weren't bold enough to stand up and say: 'You're damn right we're proud of these policies.'" He was referring to the faddish campaign of social coercion known as DEI, which was in retreat even as he spoke. Reaction against the outrages of Donald Trump is once again approaching symbiosis with them as Democrats prize those displays of diametric opposition that fail to click with the general public.

There are three ways, possibly all correct in various combinations, of understanding this perversity. It may be that the Democrats in question are suffering such extreme effects of intellectual incest that they really think a substantial majority of voters will start to like what they've been standing for if only the message gets through. Or it may be that they think each part of the message, such as the urgency of drastic action on climate change, is so important that there's no question of leaving it in the background; that one must simply keep expounding it. Or it may be that they find themselves in an endless game of musical chairs with other Democrats and can't bear to risk being ejected from the progressive circle.

The perversity is complicated by a false alternative: a message that concentrates on economic positions while leaving cultural ones implicitly unchanged. William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, in a conversation with Yascha Mounk and Galston's colleague Elaine C. Kamarck, puts his finger on the fatal flaw in that strategy:

Elaine and I came to regard cultural issues as a kind of credibility threshold. That is to say, unless people thought that you shared their sentiments and values, they wouldn't really give you a hearing for your economic message. There is a kind of economic fundamentalism that's at work in a lot of progressive thinking. And to use familiar language, the idea is that economics is the base and culture is the superstructure. And that economics does a lot more to shape the culture than culture does to shape the general mindset of the electorate. And the more we thought about that, the more we concluded that that was just wrong, that that might be true for progressive intellectuals, but by and large it was not true for average Americans.

Kamarck explains,

Yeah, and it's very simple. Look, the cultural issues are emotional. They scare people, they frighten people, okay? It's something they don't like. Emotion will always trump intellect.

It shouldn't take a think tank to arrive at that insight, but rigorously progressive minds are bound to skirt it. After all, it implies that they must give way to a different set of minds within the Democratic Party. One can hardly pretend to share sentiments and values that are antithetical to one's very persona; and even the most skillful pretense would fail with the electorate. So beleaguered party strategists ponder the superficial task of messaging and not the fundamental task of metamorphosis, while internal ideologues and external pressure groups redouble their rigor.

❖

"I had rather be right than be president."
— Henry Clay, 19th-century American statesman

Henry Clay never became president. Since his notion of being right was to strive for the best available modus vivendi between slaveholders and abolitionists with a view to eventual emancipation, he can be said to have upheld his principles by striving. Moreover, he actually succeeded in maintaining peace and national unity for a time by negotiating compromises.

In the Senate, leaders of the new generation, such as Jefferson Davis, Stephen A. Douglas, William H. Seward, and Salmon P. Chase, sat with giants of other days, such as Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. It was Henry Clay who divined the high strategy of the moment. The Union was not ripe to meet the issue of secession. Concessions must be made to stop the movement now; time might be trusted to deal with it later. On 27 January 1850 he brought forward the compromise resolutions that kept an uneasy peace for eleven years. The gist of them was (1) immediate admission of California; (2) organization of territorial governments in New Mexico and Utah without mention of slavery; (3) a new and stringent fugitive slave law; (4) abolition of the domestic slave trade in the District of Columbia. Such was the Compromise of 1850.
— Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People

Before that, however, Clay's adroitness had suffered a fateful lapse. In his fourth bid for the presidency, in 1844, he obfuscated his opposition to the annexation of Texas (a slaveholding republic). The upshot was that he failed to reassure the South while losing crucial support in the North and, with it, the election. An ambiguous approach to a great moral question must have seemed intolerable to abolitionists, but history's alternative to Henry Clay was not a foursquare abolitionist. It was James Knox Polk, a slavery expansionist who set in train the series of events that led to the carnage, and the legacy, of the Civil War. Of course, we'll never know what a President Clay would have wrought.

❖

Insist on a forcefully anti-slavery president, and you may get a disastrously pro-slavery one. Insist on the most rapid advancement of the climate agenda, and you may get a devastating reversal of it. It's not just the one agenda, either. On every head, Donald Trump's second presidency is far worse for leftist objectives than any Democratic moderation would have been. Successive Republican administrations will perpetuate the harm.

It matters who becomes president. It matters who occupies a seat in Congress and not in some coffee-shop retreat for righteous losers. Therefore it matters what mix of principle and practicality a candidate or a party offers to the electorate. If the Left can't bring itself to behave like the minority faction it is, then the Democratic Party can't afford to keep it.

❖
Fight Fire with Water
You American Intellectuals
Out of the Looking-Glass

Consummation

Donald Trump is a complex human being only in the sense that he's a mess. Otherwise, the man and the political phenomenon form one sodden lump that's confoundingly simple. Observers go on trying to make out his aims and his strategies long after having learned that everything about him is just an emanation from the lump, because it's unbearable to think that the world has come to this.

At the start of Trump's first presidency, there was a spirited public debate about his mental state centered on the question whether this was a clear case of narcissistic personality disorder. February 2017 brought a letter to The New York Times, signed by thirty-five mental health professionals, noting traits typical of people who "distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists)." It concludes,

In a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed. We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump's speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.

The next day brought a rebuttal from another professional: the eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances, who should know.

I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn't meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn't make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

To this non-professional, the requirement of distress and impairment seems odd. Perhaps it's due to the origin of psychiatry in medical science, with its assumptions of suffering and succor. At any rate, Dr Frances's defense of professional standards is by no means a defense of Donald Trump.

He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.

Take away the technical dispute — which has, in fact, disappeared from the public forum — and the two letters to the editor merge in prophetic accuracy. It doesn't matter whether we think that Donald Trump is having more and greater episodes of mental illness or that he's wreaking havoc in a perfectly normal transport of rage. The successive cases of Donald Trump and Joe Biden dispelled any hope that the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution would ever be invoked when the president was conscious and determined to remain in office, much less when also surrounded by sycophants as Trump is now.

Trump's psychological motivations are obvious, as Dr Frances wrote eight years ago. One might add that psychological motivations are basically the only kind he's got. Intermediate aims such as the demolition of the rule of law and the reduction of the economy to an access racket serve the ultimate purposes of protecting him from the consequences of his undisciplined selfishness and providing a plush nest for his wingless soul. He carries on blighting public life, inflicting pain on innocent people, and isolating America from decent international society because blight, pain, and isolation are personal grievances calling for tenfold revenge.

With Donald Trump, everything is personal; and everything personal is going to be an affront. His first administration showed how he hates the inevitability of having more competent people around him. Even in the clown show that is his second administration, the most ridiculous figure of all is the one at the center. It was an impossibility to surround himself with dimmer bulbs, so he surrounded himself with people who unfailingly pretend that he outshines them.

Consider the letter Trump wrote to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2019:

Dear Mr. President:

Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy — and I will. I've already given you a little sample with respect to Pastor Brunson.

I have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don't let the world down. You can make a great deal. General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy of his letter to me, just received.

History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don't happen. Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!

I will call you later.

That's the president of the United States conducting direct diplomacy with another national leader. If he'd been capable of writing like a normally intelligent adult, regardless of education, he'd have done so. But, then, if he'd been capable of understanding the task and judging that he wasn't up to it, he'd have let someone prepare a draft for him. That one incident should have ended all speculation and spin about the face Donald Trump presents to the world. It's not a theatrical mask, but the face of an appalling truth: that while other human beings were growing and maturing, he was not. Oh, yes, he knows it. His life has been one frenzied construction project, a ceaseless piling-up of pretenses and distractions before the door of the old nursery where his character died of neglect. He never laughs. If he ever cries, it's for the little fellow curled up in the nursery.

Mary L. Trump's 2020 book about her uncle, Too Much and Never Enough, bears the subtitle How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. That seemed a bit hyperbolic, at the time. Five years on, the whole world is in fact suffering through the consummation of one man's wretched life.

❖
The Tiny Man Theory

The Rites of Spring

There are things one believes even though they're unknowable. I, for example, believe that since the advent of the elevator every child has wanted to push the button. I believe that soap bubbles will be chased hither and thither, vainly but gladly, for a brief period across generations. I also believe there's a solemn ritual that has taken place in a greater number and variety of homes than you could shake the most prolific stick at. It goes like this:

A friend of the parents who is a stranger to the child comes to dinner. On being introduced, the child hides behind her mother's legs and buries her face in the fabric that presents itself. It would be possible at this point to write down how the story will proceed to a happy ending and set aside the prediction in a sealed envelope for the child to marvel at in about an hour (if she could read). For a while, she'll listen to the grown-ups' conversation in woolly darkness. Then she'll peek out and study the visitor's face for another while. Presently she'll be standing in front of her mother, her body now relaxed though she keeps close. She'll allow herself to be implicitly included in the conversation, the grown-ups being wise enough to leave it implicit. By the time her mother must withdraw behind the kitchen counter, she'll be ready to show her toys and books. Then it won't be long till she's taken the visitor in hand, explained how one plays with the toys, and proposed a collaborative effort. When at last the dinner bell rings or the cook hollers, the new friends will troop to the table having pledged to play again. All in the space of an hour at most.

There's a lot about a child's early progress in life that you could chronicle beforehand with a fair degree of accuracy: the rite of bubble-chasing; the rite of deliberately stepping in puddles; the rite of shunning broad walkways for narrow edges to be negotiated like high wires; the rite of asking for the same story, read in precisely the same manner, again and again; and so on.

Such things are written in the stars beneath which each individual child gets to know the world. Our love for the particular child is undoubtedly infinite in itself, and yet it burgeons with adoration of the universal child. While actively studying a single child's uniqueness we passively witness the freemasonry of children and other primal elements, only slipping into the plural to note ad hoc what "they" do at this or that age; not quite accepting that they belong to an unseen society from which we have been cast out.

Before rational insight and religious belief comes pagan affirmation. In childhood we're mirthful little sylvan deities, each of us a whole string of them performing the rites of one brief existence after another. The end of an existence always grieves the surrounding grown-ups but not the child (save for one ripple of longing to be a baby again just for a little while). The child is unconscious of loss because, at least in this, nature is gentle.

Fight Fire with Water

"They've got to fight fire with fire!" "It's time to DO SOMETHING!" Such are the reader comments that have lit up the website of The New York Times since Donald Trump and his enablers started off on their current rampage.

Being told to fight fire with fire is a bit hard on Democrats in Washington when the Republicans have won control of everything. About the only "fire" that comes to mind is obstructionism of one kind or another. That's not fighting with fire, but playing with it. Some people have suggested that congressional Democrats should force a partial government shutdown next week — thereby becoming the ones directly responsible for the consequent suffering and inconvenience. Yesterday, the irrepressible Representative Al Green (Democrat of Texas) disrupted Trump's address to Congress until he was ejected, despite the party leadership's prior plea for members to maintain decorum. Other Democrats booed and shouted catcalls. They may have garnered credit with the "do something" faction of copartisans (not that they could restrain themselves anyway), but it was no way to get the country behind them. Most people just don't like heckling.

Most people just don't like street protests, either. Even demonstrators for a patently good cause risk rubbing the general public the wrong way unless they stay on their best behavior and, for good measure, look like the general public's most flattering image of itself. The famous student demonstrations against the Vietnam War, which did dissuade Lyndon Johnson from seeking re-election, did not end the war and were never viewed favorably by a majority of the American people. The world over, "most massive rallies fail to create significant changes in politics or public policies."

Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters' demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that produces real change in government.
— Moisés Naím, "Why Street Protests Don't Work" (The Atlantic, April 7, 2014)

More recent research confirms that observation and finds demonstrations becoming less productive as convening them becomes easier. Last May, Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic reported on a working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research showing that efforts to organize mass demonstrations do succeed at consciousness-raising.

Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail — including the Women's March and the pro-gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators — they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.

...

Protests are crowding out the array of other organizing tools that social movements need in order to be successful — and that has consequences for our entire political system.

The something that needs doing by Democrats is not anything noisy. It's not a response that adds to the din surrounding Donald Trump or that seeks to evoke a sense of crisis before Trump has done so himself. It's a long game of noting the pits Trump digs for himself, the liabilities his minions bring on him, and the workings of his patrimonial administration. Note well, in detail, how it serves the rich and the well-connected at the expense of ordinary Americans, and store up the most damning examples. When a tale of betrayal has begun to coalesce in people's own minds, then give it voice for them. No argument is so forceful as one that's already incipient in the hearer's mind. All along, hold councils and evolve novel plans for a truly national response to Trump's malfeasance. Begin at once to instill discipline in the Democratic Party so that it can credibly recommit itself to the service of shared interests above all; above any assortment of special interests.

Don't pull Trump's chestnuts out of the fire by answering tantrum with tantrum. Let him scorch his chestnuts. Then douse the fire with the water of sane leadership.

The Test of Genius

Donald Trump has always confessed his weaknesses by asserting the opposite strengths. The premier example is his almost endearingly clumsy response to doubts about his mental fitness: "I'm a very stable genius." As always with Trump's boasts, there was none of the self-aware irony that can give éclat to otherwise struggling personalities. He was in earnest. His boast thus reinforced the doubts and left the impression that his only portion of intelligence was the low cunning which he had, at any rate, demonstrated.

Now, in the grim game to decide the fate of the republic, low cunning appears to be the essence of genius. Donald Trump has peered into the constitutional system he despises and grasped the way to defeat it in four steps:

1. Become President of the United States.
2. Work his will by means of executive action without regard for the Constitution or federal law.
3. Order his minions to ignore unfavorable judicial rulings, including those of the Supreme Court.
4. Pardon his minions as promised.

As for the president's own liability, all official acts are protected by the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. United States (2024).

Now that Trump has accomplished (1) again, who can stop him from repeating (2) — (4) until he has turned the United States of America into a literal dictatorship of the federal executive? An uncorrupted military? It would be terrible to owe the restoration of constitutional government to a military coup. Incorrupt generals would themselves abhor such a solution. Who, then? And how?

At this writing, the civilian defenders of the rule of law are mostly biding their time while Trump piles up malfeasance, inflicts pain, and presumably rouses the American public against himself. Already, people and organizations that supported him while he sowed the wind as a candidate are declaring their displeasure at the whirlwind of his presidency. An aroused public may soon be ready to back a plan for breaking up Trump's game — if a workable plan emerges from somewhere. Impeachment is a dead letter. Taking to the streets willy-nilly won't get the job done. There's got to be an intelligent plan, wisely implemented. The republic awaits a mind or two superior to Donald Trump's.

The Tiny Man Theory

"The History of the world is but the Biography of great men."
— Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship

No ordinary man could play the part that Donald Trump is playing now. No great man, either. Only the tiniest moral entity — mind, heart, character — could leave such a vacuum within the human shell. A vacuum is no mere hollow. It's a hungry hollow that endangers the world around it.

I used to work with a man who craved attention and praise every bit as much as Trump does. He was unlike Trump in most other ways but equally needy; truly love-starved, to judge from the few words he let drop about his mother. He'd boast to us of his accomplishments and then almost weep at the silence that followed. One co-worker strove mightily to help him out of his morbid state with sympathetic attention and lavish praise. He ate it up, but it made no difference in his need. The man was a perpetual vacuum. He didn't care to be otherwise, either. At some point in life he'd become aware of his obtrusive egoism and had learned the trick of declaring it when starting to speak in a group, warning that he was apt to go on and on about himself. Having done so, he seemed to think he had sidestepped any obligation to behave considerately. We were at his mercy.

It's impossible to know whether Donald Trump is aware of his egoism beyond noticing that others accuse him of it. However, there's no need to play amateur psychologist in his case. His niece has observed him with a professional eye.

Because of the disastrous circumstances in which he was raised, Donald knew intuitively, based on plenty of experience, that he would never be comforted or soothed, especially when he most needed to be. There was no point, then, in acting needy. And whether he knew it on any level or not, neither of his parents was ever going to see him for who he truly was or might have been — Mary was too depleted and Fred was interested only in whichever of his sons could be of most use — so he became whatever was most expedient. The rigid personality he developed as a result was a suit of armor that often protected him against pain and loss. But it also kept him from figuring out how to trust people enough to get close to them.
— Mary L. Trump PhD, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

Any chink in Donald Trump's armor becomes a vulnerability for others: an orifice through which the inner vacuum tugs violently at the outer world, sucking in what it can and wrecking much more.

And that is the whole story of the part Trump is playing now. It's the reverse of a crime novel in which the apparent obsession of a madman turns out to be explainable as a rational scheme. One can look at his welter of actions on resuming office and make out some rational objectives, but the unifying factor is obsession. After all, the revocation of certain people's security clearances or Secret Service protection serves only to inflict punishment for injuries to his pride. The rooting-out of FBI agents and government lawyers who had any part in investigating him is a wanton vendetta. The breathtaking departures in foreign policy are of a piece with his vain pretense of knowing better than anyone else when the gnawing truth is that he knows practically nothing about anything and can only trust to luck for vindication. The slashing and smashing of agencies is a grotesque mockery of small-government conservatism. It's all a tantrum, the final towering rage of one poor little rich boy who sits atop the world's highest pile of toys and still can't catch a glimpse of love. It's Donald's bitter wish-fulfillment dream, and we're in it.

Now the vacuum commands the whole world with its inrushing roar. Tall buildings tilt toward the tiny man from every city. Forests tremble. The oceans rear up, and the clouds lower.

But you must excuse me. I've just this minute heard a thumping at the window. It's February, two years on, and I do believe the thing is back.

You American Intellectuals

"You English intellectuals will be the death of us all."
— Exasperated revolutionary to blundering co-conspirator in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

The case of America's Democratic Party is a bit different. With us the complaint is not between revolutionaries, but between those Democrats and affiliates who just want to bring about progress and those who want to distinguish themselves as progressives. Members of the second set, uncontestedly the more intellectual, exhibit habits of thought and failures to think that could at least make us all irrelevant. Here are a few.

The mountaintop redoubt
One of Kamala Harris's liabilities as a presidential candidate was her laugh. Not the fact that she laughs, but the nature of the laugh — a mechanical hahahahahaha — and the impression that she's deploying it to cover some vulnerability or void. Trump and his supporters had a field day exploiting that laugh. It may not have made a great difference, but it must have done some harm when none was affordable. Her supporters ought to have faced that. I was one, and I did so.

A writer in The Atlantic had another idea. The result was an article that ran under the headline "Kamala Harris and the Threat of a Woman's Laugh" with the sub-head "Criticism of emotional expression has long been a weapon of choice for those wanting to cut down women in political power." Note the progression from "Kamala Harris" to "a woman" and then women, and from a certain laugh to "emotional expression" and a pattern of misogynistic mischief that "has long been" repeating itself.

Even before you get into the article, you know where it's going: up the side of a rhetorical mountain to a safe height. Instead of confronting the untoward effect of Harris's laugh (but then there might have been no article at all), it subsumes that awkward little blot on the landscape into an accommodating overview that entertains generalities and lets them float down over the actual subject like a blanket of snow.

Those who seem triggered by Harris's laugh, though, might feel the way they do for a reason. In her book The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, the media scholar Kathleen Rowe Karlyn remarks that when women laugh on film and television, they reframe themselves as subjects rather than objects, asserting their right to an emotional response "that expresses anger, resistance, solidarity, and joy."

Suddenly it feels like 2018 or so, when creative feminist spin pieces enjoyed a seller's market, but now such an essay lacks even the faint resonance it would have had then. The essence of Kamala Harris's liability was no grand "threat of a woman's laughter." It was a personal tic, and spinning it into something noble or something positively advantageous served no purpose but to gratify people who already supported her.

This trick of managing problematic bits of reality by escaping to the rhetorical mountaintop bears a familial resemblance to the "motte and bailey" move: taking tendentious positions until challenged and then falling back on innocuous principles.

The dog-eared ace in the hole
After the election, which had failed to produce an abortion-driven groundswell for the Democratic ticket, The New York Times ran a conversation among four of its writers in which the movie Wicked serves as a text for sociopolitical critique. The headline is "Women Deserve Rage. We Have a Lot to Be Angry About." The critique sometimes goes like this:

Everyone in my world is still deeply distraught about the election. The election turned on propaganda about power and scapegoating of women and feminism. Frankly, we see the antifascism message [in Wicked] clearly because we see fascism so clearly in our everyday lives.

...

The identity politics of the film are arguably more about gender and liberalism. The long history of persecuting witches has been tied to political campaigns to acquire land, own the labor of workers and control women's economic freedom.

...

But I like female rage. I don't want it tempered with social graces. I want Elphaba to burn down whatever she wants, including Glinda if she gets in her way. Women deserve rage. We have a lot to be angry about.

Again we're abruptly transported back a few years. Some readers made it clear that they had felt the bump and found it tedious. One simply quoted "Women Deserve Rage. We Have a Lot to Be Angry About" and rejoined, "This again?" No more can a polemicist count on making the echo chamber ring with "Find your rage." But when talk turns specifically to the lost presidential election, an old community of echoes comes to life like Brigadoon.

In late December, the Times published a long analysis of Harris's unsuccessful campaign under the headline "Will the U.S. Ever Be Ready for a Female President?" The article itself examines an array of possible factors in Harris's defeat as well as arguments for and against the proposition that she lost because she was female or because she was both female and non-white. However, the headline peremptorily treats the election as a referendum on America's collective attitude toward women who run for president, and the authors finally signal that view by their choice of closing anecdotes and quotations (a common practice in high-toned journalism).

Readers overwhelmingly took the hint. Comment after comment formulaically blames the outcome of the election on misogyny or racism or a compound of the two. Immersed in that choral chant, you'd never imagine that the Democrat had been sure to face structural disadvantages and inescapable complaints, much less that she had personally failed to inspire confidence just as her white male running mate had failed to inspire it. You'd never know that the Democratic Party had vainly counted on sweeping up women's votes with the single issue of abortion. You certainly would never entertain the thought that Harris had managed to come close only because the alternative was Donald Trump. And that's the point. Misogyny and racism are great evils, but they're also great resources. One needn't respond to political failure by coming to grips with hard truths as long as one can produce a pat explanation that's at least unfalsifiable: "Harris is a woman, isn't she? She lost, didn't she? Well, there you are." The resort to ordained conclusions is a favorite means of self-deception among progressive intellectuals. We see it in the routine Marxist response to anti-communist sentiment among workers (that the workers have been duped by capitalists) and its neoracist variant (that black police officers who brutalize a black suspect, or black voters who support Donald Trump, have been infected with white supremacism). As for the many women who decline to rally around the female candidate of the day, why, they've been infected with patriarchic assumptions. Such an explanation becomes a precious ace that can be brought out, played, and returned to the hole any number of times. In political competition, though, that's a losing game.

The view from the carrel
Years ago, when confronted with the news that working-class voters were angered by illegal immigration across the southern border, which they took as a threat to Americans' livelihoods, the standard progressive response was to say that those migrants mostly did jobs Americans didn't want and that, anyway, they didn't depress wages. To this would be added the information that most illegal immigration occurred through ports of entry with people coming in on temporary visas and then staying. As for the idea of providing illegal immigrants with medical services at public expense, it was explained — by those progressives who understood that appeals to altruism wouldn't cut it — that this was a practical necessity in order to maintain public health. It was all so enlightening, if only those angry voters would read it and appreciate it like the placid intellectuals who wrote it. Moreover, there was a lot of truth in it. It just couldn't make the political issue go away. In the first place, most workaday Americans live outside the range of intellectual explainers' voices. The explainers ought to have grasped that long ago. In the second place, people don't always name their fears with rigorous precision. Brush aside the economic anxiety, and you find anxiety about a surging influx of newcomers from other cultures. One can respond by playing the dog-eared "racism" card; but if one thinks that's an adequate response, one is a careless thinker.

So it is with inflation. Many Democrats, including some professional commentators, sighed as complaints about inflation kept on coming throughout election year even though inflation had slowed markedly. They seemed to think voters ought to let that subject go if not positively rejoice at the slackening pace of price increases. They wanted people to understand that their pain was, in the great scheme of things, transitory; that their wages would presently catch up to the new level of prices. But when your wages catch up to high prices, you don't feel that all is well. You feel that you're treading water, barely. The greater failure of imagination was that of the cerebral explainers, not the viscerally resentful workers.

The guiding star
Three kings are riding across a desert on camels. It's a long journey by night.

   "Are we there yet?" asks the youngest king, not for the first time.
       "No."
   "When will we be there?"
       "When we've gone far enough."
   "Maybe we're lost."
       "Impossible. All we have to do is make straight for that star. We just haven't gone far enough."

And, yes, they get where they're destined to be by dint of pressing on in a straight line. That works for the kings in the Christmas story because God wrote the script. It's unlikely to work for followers of scripts written by mortals with theories. Nevertheless, the Left's general reaction (apart from potshots at sexism or racism) to the presidential election of 2024 was that the Democratic Party, via the Harris campaign, had not gone far enough in setting out a leftist program. Talk about faith. And these are people, in large part, who frown on religiosity.

The desperate times
Donald Trump dealt his most telling blow to truth and justice in an instant: the instant when it was known that he had won the election of 2016. The instrument with which he struck that blow was the blunt mind of the progressive elite. Within hours, enlightened Democratic youth was rumbling in the streets chanting "Not my president" and in some cases committing acts of vandalism. Cooler heads among Democrats tended, in their own way, to treat Trump's victory as somehow less than legitimate. Many seemed to feel that it was just not to be countenanced, legitimacy aside. Such is the origin story of a solipsistic Resistance that would later deplore Trump's election denial without blushing.

True, the temptation to derangement in those early days was great. An impudently vile television personality and real-estate developer had surprised even himself and his team by capturing the presidency of the United States of America. The world was aghast. It really was disorienting, but responsible people had a duty to re-orient themselves and get to work on a wise strategy of containment that would serve also to let the electorate see a sane alternative in action. Instead, the Resistance slid and slid toward mania, pulling even senior Democrats into its vortex. Soon the logic of desperate times swallowed it up. In reaction to the cult of Donald Trump, it became a cult of desperate measures. Trump was to be opposed at every turn, reflexively and diametrically. If Trump was anti-Muslim, his progressive antagonists would be categorically, uncritically pro-Muslim. If he wanted to stop illegal immigration across the southern border, they would grandly welcome it. They would stigmatize the very word illegal and leave literal-minded Americans to work out what kind of people would obfuscate law-breaking. Activists would see opportunity in anti-Trump sentiment and respond with their wildest nostrums. Fledgling journalists would scorn the pursuit of objectivity (a pursuit without end, but a noble one) and enlist in service to the progressive cause. Online champions of the cause would routinely condemn any mention of injustice on their own side as traitorous bothsidesism or counter it with blithe whataboutism. Operatives of the Biden administration, abetted by influential sympathizers, would perpetrate a brazen fraud about the president's fitness. The respect paid to integrity had no apparent value in the currency of desperate measures, so they all disdained it.

❖

The Democratic Party could have systematically sealed Donald Trump's political fate during the past eight years. It got enough help from the man himself. However, the progressive elite squandered too much of the party's advantage on self-gratifying maneuvers and undisciplined gambits — all conceived without the least foresight. As for hindsight, note this report by Jess Bidgood of The New York Times after having "watched the candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee discuss their plans for the future while showing very little interest in examining what went disastrously wrong in the very recent past."

The candidates were quick to point their fingers at outside forces, like the influence of billionaires as well as the effect that racism and misogyny had on the chances of electing the nation's first Black female president. They talked about Republicans' dominant messaging operation and Democrats' bad branding.

But when it came to evaluating the party's own role in its failures, or promising a detailed look at what went wrong? Not so much.

"We've got the right message," said Ken Martin, the leader of Minnesota's Democratic Party, who is widely seen as the race's top contender [and who did win]. "What we need to do is connect it back with the voters."
— The New York Times "On Politics" newsletter (January 31, 2025)

A message can be right for these times only when it tells of a changed party, a different political community with a different consciousness. Americans of every description call for action on great common interests and challenges — but the illuminati of the Democratic Party will keep their eyes raised to a sacred little constellation of guiding stars.

This is the perennial lesson of the Left, that one can be intellectual without being wise.