Why The Left Lost So Badly Against Donald Trump And What We Need to Learn from It

 

 

This year has marked the tenth anniversary of Donald Trump announcing his first run for President.  Not entirely simultaneously – there is some debate as to when the official battle began –  every coalition of the modern left: women, African-Americans, LatinX, the LGBTQ+ community, students, intellectuals, Hollywood has been engaged in a battle with him and the MAGA movement for 'the heart and soul of America'.

I think it's well past time to acknowledge a truth that they absolutely never will. They lost.  And I'm not simply saying that because Trump is constitutionally ineligible from running for a third term or the fact that at the most recent meeting of Turning Point the gathering said that they were endorsing JD Vance for President, the first time in nearly a decade a major conservative group has endorsed candidate that was NOT Trump. (Yes I know what a danger Vance might be, one article at a time.)

I mean that if we as a country are to move forward in this post-Trump future we are clearly heading towards now the left has to do something it has not done in any of the articles I've seen at this site, in other online publications, any magazine or really anything that is listed as having a left-bias.

Because the one common thread between all of these articles whether Trump was in office or not, every time 'the movement' suffered a horrible defeat – and there have been too many to count at this point  - every time a norm was violated, every time Trump said or did anything in office or that the conservative movement did during Biden's term, the one thing the left has not acknowledged is that is a defeat for them.

They've labeled it as a defeat for many things: America, people everywhere, society, institutional norms, harmony. Honestly they've mentioned a lot of terms. What they haven't done – and trust me, I've saved the receipts – is say that they personally lost. Oh to be sure, they might give surface talk to a minority group, if they are a part of it and I have no doubt that some of them feel that defeat more personally then others. I have little doubt that in their hearts and minds they feel outrage and despair. But the thing is after spending so much time around them I've always been able to detect two related things.

The first is a sense of detachment. Oh to be sure, they'll say all the right things about the defeat society has gone through, how America, the world, all groups everywhere will have a horrible loss that we may never recover from. But I always got a sense that for them, it was kind of an abstraction. I'll admit some of that may just be my opinion as a cis white male but it comes from something subtler that I noticed when Biden won election and took office.

For the past four years they had shrieked at the apocalypse how bad things were going to be and how we were all doomed. I naturally assumed that they would ease off when Biden was elected or that they would write fewer articles. Neither happened.

 First they basically immediately went back to their old standard of 'there is no real difference between the two parties." Every time I read that sentence I did a double take. Did they not live through the same four years I did? I know they did, they were complaining in the most strident possible terms during that period. But I truly believe that having lived through four years of the worst and most fascist President in history they would at least finally be willing to drop that distinction. I didn't expect them to all immediate register Democrat and swear fealty to that party for life but at the very least I thought they would drop that chestnut.

What happened was that their loyalty to Joe Biden clearly disappeared on election night 2020 and his honeymoon with them ended on Inauguration Day. One of the reason I suspect for Biden's horrible polling numbers throughout his Presidency is that the same party loyalty that kept Trump's numbers from every dropping below 40 percent was due to how ride or die his support with Republicans always were. Biden clearly never got that kind of loyalty from the Democratic base and I suspect much of that might have come from the left's decision to go back to their ideological purity standard once he'd done the dirty work of getting their enemy out of office.  

The left historically has always been more loyal to ideology then political party but the fact that they could say with a straight face that they had now labeled the GOP as effectively crypto-fascist was somehow  as bad as one that was keeping faithful to democratic institutions and norms caused me to lose whatever respect I had for their principles by the time of the 2022 midterms. As the red wave seemed increasingly inevitable I honestly thought the left was looking forward to it even more than Republicans were. I certainly got a lot of articles predicting, with something close to anticipation,  America fragmenting into several states during this period. When it never happened, naturally, they chose to argue this was a mandate for a leftwing agenda which is of course what the left always argues a Democratic win is a mandate for.

The left, I've come to realize, takes a 'heads we win, tails you lose' approach to elections. If the Democrats win, it is because they have embraced progressive values and it is their moral duty to enact them regardless of the majorities in Congress or the White House. If the Republicans win, it's because Democrats did not embrace a significantly left wing standard which the American people obviously want. How this latter part squares with their own description of the Republican party as being tantamount  to dictatorship based on far right ideology is a circle they have never bothered to square in any of their articles.

Conversely when Republicans win elections as they did last year, it is not the left's fault but rather proof that all things involving America – democracy, capitalism, politics – are irrevocably broken and that our society is a racist, oppressive regime with no redeeming values. You would think this would bother them but in so many of these articles I've always detected a sense of schadenfreude, as if they seem to be taken a perverse pleasure that the country they live in will suffer such horrible things.

I get this feeling from every member of the progressive coalition particularly in the aftermath of last November. They actually seemed happy that so many people in red states were going to suffer economically as a result of the policies of the administration, that they were going to lose so much of the social safety net that DOGE was going to take away, that they were going to suffer horrible sickness and death under Robert F. Kennedy's medical policies. All of this things were going to affect them too, to be sure, but that seemed to bother them less than the fact that everyone who voted for Trump was going to suffer just as much.

To be sure they will mark on how the administration  has been doing much to hurt their history, their beliefs, and even their rights and the attacks by the administration truly do horrify the conscience, certainly for me who believe in their values even if I question their approach.  But it's always done in that same detached fashion.

I've always sensed that detachment because during the decade of all things Trump I've always seen the left never choosing to fight the one battle that matters: political. They have fought on every single one that doesn't really: education, protesting, stating over and over how America got here in their articles, speaking out against the President in public forums on Hollywood stages, in art, in books – all performative and stylistic gestures that can be seen very simply as 'playing to your base'.  They have basically made it very clear that at least half the country, possibly more, is no longer members of a political movement or a party but an enemy combatant and barely human. They are not people worthy to be in the Democratic tent; they made their choice when they chose to register Republican. They are all racist, homophobic, misogynistic, pro-life, gun-toting people who want to keep all people – even themselves, oddly enough – under the thumb of the oligarchs, the fascists, the corporations, the dictator. They will suffer the most under the GOP and would seemingly benefit the most from these progressive policies. But they are not worthy of redemption.

I get this spitefulness in every Daily Kos post I read before I gave it up, so many of the articles I read in Harpers, so many Hollywood shows, really everything the left has written or done in the last decade. It is keeping with a movement that prefers burning things down to reform, that think institutions are irredeemable because of their history, who have convicted the past on the indefensible crime of being the past. It is not an attitude that is inclined to bring people together or find a way to move forward.

And that brings me to the real problem of the left during the era of Trump. For ten years they have focused their energy on a man who is the manifestation of all the things that they loathe and who against everything they say they stand for. Yet in ten years I have yet hear any leftist really say what they're for. To be sure the Justice Democrats and Bernie Sanders are very clear on all the problems society is facing but that movement has essentially failed for all intents and purposes because it was too unrealistic for the masses to accept in 2018. The Republicans have triumphed well before Trump's arrival on the scene by saying that all the things that Democrats will bring about if they win office and that if you vote Republican we can stop it. Morally it is completely bankrupt but as a way to get their agenda accomplished, it has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Historically and especially in the last decade the left has failed to come up with a unifying message to get people to vote for them in the same huge numbers that they have for Trump. This tracks because during the decades prior to 2016 while everyone from the Reagan revolutionaries to Newt Gingrich to the Tea Party has infiltrated the Republican party with the purpose of changing to its agenda, the  left has basically not done that. They will acknowledge every detail of their strategy – Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society – but always leave out that those same options were clearly available to the left at every step of the way and they didn't come up with an equivalent.

Perhaps that would mean admitting the greater truth the left has never really wanted to: by and large their policies and approach have historically never had as huge a following among the American public as those of the right. Far right candidates have always had an easier time winning elected office then far left ones throughout American history if not in most democracies.  The left has only been able to succeed in America when it is part of a party and its always been a fringe element of that party, whether Republican or Democrat. And those politics have always done well only in the urban sections of our country rather than the rural ones, with only one clear exception the Populist Party in the 1880s and 1890s.

This gets to the core of the left's problem over the 21^st century. When the Democrat Party built it New Deal coalition in the 1930s, it was the party of the working class American while the Republicans were the party of the elitists. In 2024 it is now clear that the reverse is true. There's also the issue that the one driving force for the electorate is now and has always been the economy and the average well-being of the American.  This has never been an issue that the left cared that much about. They've tried to deal with it in different ways – income inequality, the evils of corporations, the top one percent – but critically none of that involves has ever really involved the working class. Famously the left dismissed the idea that Americans cared about 'the price of eggs' as a euphemism for the racist standard that Trump was talking about last year.

This has always been their weakness. In the last decade they've done everything they could to negate the idea of Republicans being good on the economy while doing everything in their power to argue that economics, whether it be working class Americans, the national debt, inflation, are less important to people then the issues they care about. Basically if you're a working class American who's struggling to make ends meet, the left is telling you to vote Democrat because Republicans will not make your life easier and if you do you're a racist.

I remember reading an article in Daily Kos with the sentence: "The rich man has thirteen cookies; the white man has one cookie and the black man one cookie. Republicans win by telling the white man "The black man will steal your cookie!" The obvious solution – that all of these parties work together to loot and pillage ever single rich persons home to get all the cookies so that everybody has more – is always left out. Partly because all the left doesn't want to get its hands dirty and more likely because they themselves have six or seven cookies (but not thirteen that would be indefensible) and they don't want those poor people taking from them. It's why Hollywood and academics lecturing America on income inequality and corporate greed has always sounded tone-deaf in my ears. "We need to tax the rich!" they cry. "But not us. We're not that rich!"

Why am I bringing up all these old chestnuts? Because it looks that what is finally causing Trump's following to crack after ten years is the one weapon the left never once tried to bring him down with during that period: the economy, stupid. (That is a purposeful dig as David Hogg for attacking James Carville earlier this year. Good luck recruiting progressives by the way.)

It is very clear that November's election across the board as well as so much that has followed has been a referendum on the idea of affordability. That is what Abigail Spangenberger and Mikey Sherill campaigned on when running for Governors of Virginia and New Jersey respectively and won by ten or more points in their respective elections. It is clearly the issue that swing district Republicans are the most concerned about. And it is an issue our current President clearly has no ability to deal with, considering that he called affordability  'a Democratic Hoax' at a campaign spot, has given his economic handling an A with at least six pluses and that in his speech he basically argued that the economic was stronger than it had ever been.  That he is falling victim to the exact same problems that Biden fell ill too more than anything else during his campaign is another great irony. The fact that he is spending a fortune on renovations for the White House while Americans are suffering with bread and butter issues will bother them far more than the idea of his destroying a historic building or putting his name on the Kennedy Center, trust me on that.

Now to be fair there was a fair amount of hue and cry from the left about 'Liberation Day' and the havoc the tariffs have wreaked on the economy back in May. But almost immediately they moved on to the ICE raids, the National Guard in cities and more importantly to them Colbert being canceled and Jimmy Kimmel being suspended. They actually seemed annoyed that now Trump voters were upset because their pocketbooks being affected was causing them to turn against the man that to them they'd followed blindly for ten years with no deviation. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that they were more of touch with American voters then they wanted to admit and that white working class voters actually do care about pocketbook issues rather than being the racists they think they are. To be fair, they might be. Two things can be true at the same time, despite what the left thinks.

I suspect that we are going to come out on the other side of it staring with next year's midterms in the House and possibly the Senate. But I need this point to be clear. When it happens it will be despite everything the left has thrown in their arsenal to get the country to change, not because of it.

As always you fought the battles  only on the grounds you were willing to fight on: the ones that mattered to you alone and not most Americans. The Republicans fought the battle on the one front that mattered and they won. You got humiliated, crushed, slaughtered, annihilated, obliterated, and all the other synonyms I can think of.  I think that was the point because you've made it clear multiple times you would rather lose horribly in an election rather than sacrifice your ideological purity then win narrowly and be forced to govern.  Perhaps some of you were hoping that the Republicans would be so destructive that America would finally embrace the leftist utopia you've always wanted even though you've never been able to define it when I've asked.

To be clear, it has not destroyed America. It has done severe and blunt damage to our institutions but it hasn't wrecked them irrevocably. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have mourned their loss if they had; you've made it clear you didn't like them when Democrats and the liberal order was in charge.  As someone who never truly believed in your rhetoric during the first Trump administration I'm sure the only people disappointed they will survive is you.

But America will emerge and we will be  wiser. I certainly am. I don't know where our ultimate salvation will come from. But I now know sincerely it will never come from the left. America doesn't want what you're selling, if indeed you were selling anything but smugness and despair. And since I know you will neither admit defeat nor acknowledge your mistakes I will no longer look to you for answers. I'm pretty sure most of the world never was, so you won't miss me. And I certainly won't miss you.