"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.
