A couple of years when I was writing
about the failures of the Justice Democrats I used the following anecdote which
was originally told about Henry Jackson in 1976:
The
chairman of the board of a well-known dog-food manufacturing company called in
his directors, sat them around a long table and, somberly, said to them:
“Gentlemen,
we make the best dog food. We use the best ingredients. We have the best
container. We have the most attractive label. Why doesn’t it sell?”
There
was silence in the board room for several minutes, and then a solitary voice is
heard at the far end of the table:
“Dogs
don’t like it.”
This
basically describes the problem with what the Justice Democrats attempted to do
when they were founded in 2018. They were attempting to sell the kind of
product they have tried to sell to the voters periodically over America’s
history. They were attempting a repackaging of the progressive ideals – which
are good ones – with a newer message and a more attractive label. It was
certainly a more diverse one, featuring an overwhelming number of female,
minority, and LGBTQ+ candidates. And in 2018 the voters basically gave the same
message they inevitably give the left whenever they make a concerted effort
into electoral politics on their own. They told them, in no uncertain terms,
they don’t like the product.
Prior
to the 2024 election I made the argument that rather then try to change the
product the Justice Democrats would try to change the packaging or the labels.
We saw in the leadup to the midterms that in fact the left tried to do just
that when they tried to sell Graham Platner to run in Maine as a 'working class
progressive'. Even before that campaign spectacularly crashed and burned it was
already clear that he was just using the progressive platform while cosplaying
as working class. In Michigan Abdul El-Sayid is currently trying to run for the
Senate while using that same label, though he may ultimately be more
successful.
By
and large, however, in the last two years the left has basically stuck to the
same formula it has that I argued that they would: by repackaging progressive
ideas and in some cases socialist ones with a newer message, more attractive
label and more diverse candidates. But by and large the typical Democratic
primary voter, even two years into Trump's second term, still has no use
for the product. We've seen that play out with Justice Democrat candidates
losing more primaries then they won, with DSA candidates winning just 8 of 28
primaries and with voters rejecting Francesca Hong, the DSA candidate for
governor in Wisconsin, in favor of David Crowley, a moderate who is looking
very much like he will pull it out a victory.
And
despite that there remains no sign the left will learn the right lessons from
this. You get this reading their articles at the New York Times or the New
Yorker, you can see it from so many celebrities. If anything they've actually
modified the argument I made two years ago to its natural outcome. The problem
isn't with their dog food; it's with the dogs.
As
long as I've been alive and have argued in many previous articles, the left has
always refused to accept how politics works.
As early as the first election by direct democracy in 1828 elections
have never been about a respectful debate of ideas but which candidate
the voters find more relatable, which one has the biggest celebrity, which one
has the catchiest slogan. We've seen it with the election of so many generals
to the Presidency from Jackson to Eisenhower. We've seen it with so many
campaign slogans from the hard cider campaign of Tippecanoe and Tyler too to
Harding's Return To Normalcy to I Like Ike. All television really did was move
to a mass medium the idea of making a candidate relatable to the masses, it
didn't brainwash the voters into doing something they weren't already doing for
over a century.
Historically
the intellectual has always disdained this process whether in books such as The
Selling of the President' in regards to Nixon (ignoring how Kennedy also used
TV to great effect) to Reagan's ability to relate the masses to so many
negative campaign ads for the last half century. They say such emotional
appeals degrade both the voter's intelligence and the electoral process. They
ignore the evidence that it almost always end up working and always for the
Republican. They will yell about how the Fairness Doctrine's gave the right a way
to brainwash the voter with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and all the old talking
points. And while there is always a grain of truth in this, there's a bigger
issue.
Late
night TV like The Daily Show and other comedians for decades have always
mocked any time a politician held a rally or tried to act like a regular guy years
before Trump whether it was a Republican or a Democrat. That's because, by and large, so much of
Hollywood and the left feels that this kind of behavior is silly. There's
always been an idea among so many in the left that when a candidate tries to
relate with the average voter – most of whom the left openly feels is
intellectually bankrupt to begin with - -they're acting 'undignified and
silly'. And that really does speak to how the left sees the whole process of
politics.
They
really do think they're smarter that the average person in Kansas or
Arkansas or for that matter someone who comes to a Republican rally at all well
before Trump. They can't believe people are dumb enough to buy what politicians
are selling. And while there's again a grain of truth to that, it's also
showing a remarkable contempt for the electoral process.
They
truly think that because the average voter doesn't have a college
degree, doesn't spend several hours each day watching cable news, doesn't drown
himself in policy details and doesn't know every single detail about electoral
politics, the ability to chose who represents them in Congress or for Senate or
President is wasted on them. They should make their decision for who to vote
for based on an interview they gave to the Atlantic in 2014, not because of a
campaign ad that the voter saw three days before Election Day!
The
left has also always believed that whatever flaws are in a candidate, either
through policy or character, should automatically be a demerit against them to
the point it should disqualify the candidate from running for office or even an
elected official to resign. But they've always underestimated how much personal
appeal plays better with the voters then policy and that hasn't changed in the
21st century. They've always had a different set of standards for
ideal elected officials then the average voter – that no human being could meet
them, much less a politician, is irrelevant – and they hold it against the
electorate for not having the same set of standards they do.
To
be a successful politician you have talk and interact with the voters and that
means you have to act like you're one of the people. There's really nothing
wrong with that, I'd actually argue that it is this humbling process that
brings an elected official down to the average citizens that is one of the virtues
of democracy. But historically the media, academia and other areas in which
intellectuals, usually left-wing, often
use it as a way to humiliate elected officials that it finds lacking because
they themselves find the process undignified of their time.
When they mock a presidential hopeful at an
Iowa state fair pretending to be interested about cows or crops it's because
they hold in disdain both the elected official and the voter for
believing the politicians cares about anything but getting their vote. That's even more contemptible then the most
cynical politician – and by nature most of them are pretty cynical. What do
they expect the average dairy farmer to care about? The candidate's position on
NATO?
The
most successful politicians – and regardless of my personal feelings Donald
Trump is one of them – have a basic understanding of a simple axiom: Ninety
percent of success is just showing up.
And it's clear to me that with
DSA candidates and Justice Democrats they're not willing to do even that
much. The only places they'll go are college campuses or student rallies,
places where their people are. They engage in the same kind of mottoes
and slogans that every right-wing politician does and they care as much about
crowd sizes as Trump does. The difference is he would go to Alabama and
Oklahoma and Kansas, places that he holds in as much contempt as the average
left-wing intellectual and with a similar disregard with the citizens. But he
showed up over and over. Yes, it was about him far more than them, no question,
but he still showed up.
And
the way that some columnists will act like Janelle Boule, a prominent Times
columnist and say: "There are no
redemptive qualities for a Trump voter," proves their own arrogance and blindness. No
redemptive qualities? All 63 million of them are monsters? Even the ones who
voted for him three different times in New York City? You really think you can
speak for every single one of them because they made a decision you disapprove
of?
That
is the kind of arrogance that frankly rivals POTUS on his worst days (or his
best days, for that matter) and it also gives another in the seemingly endless
amount of ammo that the Republicans can use to prove that all Democrats are
elitist snobs who think nothing of the working class American. Just to be clear many Republicans are also
elitist snobs who think nothing of working class Americans – but if you hum
a few bars, they can fake it better then the left who are deliberately tone
deaf in this area.
And
this leads to the kind of foolish thinking that makes many intellectuals walk away
from the right answer and head to an even more wrong one. In the aftermath
of the 2024 election the left seized on the idea that because Trump had
appeared on so many right-wing podcasts that had led to his victory over Kamala
Harris. This led to many people in
prominent columns wondering why the left didn't have its own Joe Rogan and a
search for his equivalent, which was essentially trying to get a new mascot for
a brand of dog food the dogs had made clear they didn't like.
Which
led them to make yet another blunder which was to seize on the idea that Hasan
Piker, a very popular left-wing podcaster, might be the answer to their
prayers. Even by the standards of dumb ideas the left have had this ranks as one
of the dumbest.
First
of all Joe Rogan is a Hollywood millionaire who just hasn't embraced the
liberal Kool-Aid. He's not a working class American any more then anyone else
in the industry but like so many conservatives and Republican he can fake it far
better than most liberals can. Now I've never heard his podcast except in the
occasional quoted excerpt so I can't speak for the kind of message he has.
Frankly he sounds less radical then Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones ever did – I
admit that's a low bar to surpass – but even when he was acting he had very
much an everyman persona that worked very well for him. He isn't one but he has
experience playing one.
Hasan
Piker, to be very clear, is very much closer in his rhetoric to Jones or Carlson and every part of the idea of
him being the left-wing equivalent of Rogan is dumb. For one his audience is far
closer to that of Jon Stewart and the rest of late night – it's college educated, upwardly
mobile progressives whose values have proven to be kryptonite to the kind of
voters we need to reach. And what he's cosplaying at isn't an everyman in
shirtsleeves but a college protestor wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. This is a
man who when interviewed by the satirist Ziwe was asked: "Did you always
want to be a champagne socialist?" didn't hesitate before saying yes and
then talked about meeting Jeff Bezos at the Oscars with a straight face.
It
speaks to where the Democratic Party has been in the last few years that there
were some people who actually thought Piker could be our salvation was a
good idea. We've been spending so much of our time pretending that the average
Democrats is not a coastal elite nepo baby limousine liberal socialist
cosplayer and here comes a guy who seems like he could make every point on a
Fox News bingo card before he opens his mouth. Honestly with
George Soros getting along in years the GOP was going to need a new boogeyman
to scare working class-voters and Piker seems straight out of central casting
for them.
In the aftermath of 2016 the
Democratic Party was torn between two competing factors: had they lost because
of those Sanders' primary voters who felt betrayed by Hilary's winning the
nomination or because of Hilary's receiving a record low 28 percent of the
white working class vote? The Justice Democrats were founded on the former foundation and it was clear almost immediately
that the electorate at large had no more taste for it then they had the Sanders
campaign. But the left, engaging in the selective reasoning they do after every
election, chose to argue that the Squad were where the party should go, rather
then the center. They've spent far too much of the 2020s trying to sell the
Democratic Party as a whole on their brand of dog food and the Party seemed
willing to buy it even after it led to Trump returning to power.
It's now clear looking at the
Democrats recruitment drives leading up to 2026 as well as the increasing
successes of moderates in primaries that aren't in the bluest districts
in America that the national party is resuming the big tent strategy and that
it has made it very clear that while the DSA and Justice Democrats will have a
place inside it, it's going to be in the corner and they're not going to let
the Republicans make them the main attraction. In other words they're going to
sell a brand of dog food dogs actually like.
Churchill once said the biggest
argument against democracy was five minutes in conversation with the average
voter. Even he might have issues with how the left has approached it these
days. First they refuse to engage in conversation with the average voter at
all. Second they assume that they know everything that average voter will say
without even having to talk them. Third they hold in complete contempt anyone
else who has a conversation with them. And last when they learn what the voters
have to say, they argue very clearly that the voters don't know what they're
talking about it.
That all of this has essentially
yielded ground to the right is something that is never their fault: it is
gospel the political powers that be or will are only supposed to listen to them
and them alone because they clearly make the best dog food with the most
attractive label, the best container and the best ingredients. That they've
never even eaten it themselves has done nothing to convince them of the
falsity of this claim; but they know the other brands are worse and the dogs
who eat it don't know what real dog food tastes like and they've actually been
sold cat food.
As I said back in 2024 the most
damning words on the Justice Democrats come not from their enemies but the ones
who know them best. Kyle Kulinski and Cenk Uygur, the
founders of the movement in 2017, would criticize it in falling short in
cultivating a unified cohort of legislators able to champion priority bills.
Those who might see this as sour grapes should note that in November 2019 Uygur
filed to run for Congress in California – but not as a member of the
group he had founded. In a recent interview with the New York Times Sean
Maloney, a Democratic Congressman from New York has referred to AOC more of an
influencer then an elected representative,
someone more interested in creating content then legislating.
And
that really sums up with what AOC and Ilhan Ohmar have been and very much what
likely new members this cycle would become: more interested in improving their
brand among their followers under the 21st century version of 'No
press is bad press'. For them a follower on Instagram or being called a
left-wing radical by Sean Hannity counts the same in their eyes. That it's
basically turning them to the left's equivalent of the Freedom Caucus both in
word and deed is another in the endless line of things they choose to ignore
but any rational Democrat does so at their peril.
Myself
I'm done listening to their brand of marketing and I think the Democratic Party
is to. They gave them four election cycles between 2018 and 2024 to sell their
brand of progressive dog food to the masses under the Democratic Party label
and the masses have no appetite for it. The Democrats have made it clear in
this election cycle just how little use they have for it on a national level
and that they are done both letting the far left – and by extension the
Republicans – use it to define them. They have problems to work out to be sure
and it will take more than a blue wave to repair it. But that they've been
pushing the far left more to the backburner this cycle then the previous ones
is the smartest thing they've done in a long time.
At
a certain point the politicians have to listen to what the voters are telling
them they want from their candidates and their parties and not what those who
consider running for public office beneath them believe they should stand for.
Until the Justice Democrats and the DSA can find a way to improve their brand
of dog food so that dogs actually like it, I'm going to assume that the
electorate knows better then them on this particular issue. The problem is with
the consumer; it's with your product. And calling the electorate idiots and
racists for not buying has never been a great marketing tool. Try to remember
that in two weeks.
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