I think part of what makes it tricky for them to do this is that they couched a lot of quite extreme policy preferences in the language of “civil rights.” Homeless people shitting on the streets isn’t an unfortunate side effect of lax policies on loitering, IT IS THEIR RIGHT TO SHIT IN THE STREET GODDAMNIT AND HOW DARE YOU SAY OTHERWISE. When you’ve wrongly picked an uncompromising frame for everything, it makes it very difficult to moderate without feeling like you’re selling out.
"Civil rights" - framing extreme policies as "human rights" - becomes the new "Because God / the Bible says so". This is eventually the core of everything.
“Civil rights” is just a thought-terminator at this point. You’re right, it’s the ultimate argument from authority. Call something a “civil rights” issue and it is automatically good, necessary, and impossible to resist without being evil.
Civil rights are essentially negotiated. Your choices in philosophy are either some sort of natural law or social contract: either negotiated in interpretation or negotiated directly. You have to be fairly disagreeable to argue "when did we enshrine this as a civil right?" Folks willing to raise that question are not going to be in the Democratic party for long: they'll join the politically homeless or react by going full Trump.
I’ll agree with most of this, but need to add things like universal health care and worker protections and higher taxes on billionaires and not supporting Putin. And there’s a coalition.
One of my MAGA friends (a union utility lineman that works 60+ hours a week and makes an easy $250k a year) laughed that "Democrats became that shitty public school teacher".
Public school teachers back in his day (the 90s) didn't have time for boys like him. He was literally that dumbass kid on the playground in 1992. He loves Rogan, drives a big truck, and laughs at offensive jokes. Served in the military, been to rehab twice. Like a huge percentage of men like him in California, he married a Mexican girl. He's fucking hilarious, loves football, and has had my back since 1992. We're extremely different people (I'm Blue No Matter Who, the son of public school teachers, and have multiple degrees).
He's also the one keeping your power on during storms, and is one of the most loyal and honorable and loving humans I know. He's also never seen the inside of a private school, so he has no idea about context.
Dems just have zero comprehension about who these types are. Explaining how or why is just perplexing; it's like trying to explain ancient Persians to my labradoodle.
It’s not really a matter of REACHING men; the Democratic has spent the last 8 years (at least) actively ALIENATING men, in general, and the last 50 (at least) alienating white working class men, in particular. It’s going to take more than a “rebrand” to get those men back. You can have the greatest policies in the world, but if people feel like a party is calling THEM deplorables and garbage, they are still not going to vote for that party.
The biggest blind spot associated with identity politicking is that you start to really believe the bullshit that people are just avatars of their group. You can treat Men like trash because Men aren’t a collection of individuals with real thoughts and feelings. Men are just a concept. An abstraction. Abstractions don’t get mad or hurt, so why worry?
Even though it seems some Black men voted for Trump, something like 80% of Black voters (majority women, but still a lot of men) voted Dem. I dont think Dems focus on Black voters because their vote is already pretty secure.
I think Godzilla will come to fight Metal Godzilla before Blacks seriously consider voting Republican in significant numbers. Dems don't cater to Blacks *now* and they STILL vote for them.
I read in an article that Black Americans would rather just stay home than vote Republican. So Dems should be more concerned with voter turnout going down versus Black people going red.
My main takeaway from this article is that Democrats dont want to be in charge because they prefer to be morally superior and prefer to view conservatives with open disdain. I think they are also banking on the next election not having a suitable replacement for Trump (who cant run again) so they can win by default. I think the DNC sabotaged Bernie? Like they didnt support him, right?
The Dems are fine with the status quo.
I think anyone interested in electoral politics should be focused on building out viable third parties, like in Europe.
I agree with a lot of this, particularly the part about Dems being quite content to sit back and lob bombs at Republicans. Most professional Democrats will keep their jobs regardless of which party is in power, so they care a lot less about all this than John Q. Voter. The only thing I'll say re black voting preferences is that while yes, it's quite unlikely that black people in huge numbers will swing Republican, it wouldn't take much of a swing to push Dems out of viability. A 10 point drop, combined with dips elsewhere in the coalition could make it functionally impossible for Dems to overcome the Reps, even in a low turnout race.
I am curious about the cadre of Black progressives who have sworn off politics (unless they are advocating specificaly for Blacks). There seems to always be a huge emphasis on getting Blacks in the South to vote, and I wonder what that will look like going forward.
Black politics tends to involve a lot of fear mongering ("we wont go back") and I think that might drive some people to the polls. I remember being on Twitter and seeing Black liberals say "our ancestors died for us to have the right to vote" and it really reminds me that Black politics is basically about leveraging the spector of Jim Crow over modern day Blacks to force compliance to whatever (liberal) ideals.
Anyway. I will be curious about governor, mayor, senator and so on elections as we go through these next few years re Black voter turnout.
The problem with trying to reach black voters by scaring them over a supposed return to Jim Crow is that increasingly, black voters are too young to remember Jim Crow. Demanding praise for rescuing people from a thing they’ve never experienced is a bad move.
For many decades in the 19th century and early 20th, black voters were rock-solid Republicans -- back when the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and the Union, and the Democratic Party was the party of the Confederacy and slavery.
But that changed. Republicans started taking black voters for granted, and Democrats saw a chance to broaden their coalition at the edges by emphasizing their working-class appeal and easing off the segregationism. Eventually they went beyond easing off and became full-throated supporters of civil rights (while Republicans went after the segregationist vote the Democrats had deliberately sacrificed). And now we live in a world where black voters are viewed as rock-solid Democrats.
Today Republicans are chipping away at a lot of previously reliable Democratic voting blocs, and that includes black voters, whom Democrats have taken for granted for quite a while. What's happened before can happen again.
It's hard to keep voters on board with an intense identity message when the people drafting that message are mostly well-to-do white people. And of course, if you go so hard on identity that you completely abandon your economic priorities, you're just a storefront full of crap that nobody wants. In other words, you're the Democrats.
Well said. Too bad they didn’t pick you for the next VC.
I guess the DNC would rather see their coalition shrink further than reconsider the messaging and policies that lost them millions of votes in the 2024 election.
I think it's not just that they don't want to moderate, I think they almost can't. The activist class, which is overrepresented in leadership, has espoused so many extreme ideas that to walk even a little of it back would mean acknowledging that they've been hysterically wrong about policies they considered life-or-death. That's a lot of humble pie to eat, and I don't know if they have the stomach for it.
all the leg aides I used to work with were awesome. I’ve been out of the game for a while, but I have to assume that working in a Dem political office is such a stultifying environment now, they can’t keep grounded without running the risk of seeming dirty to their bosses and coworkers.
What's funny is that JD Vance is also an Ivy League metrosexual, yet he manages to code switch effectively due to his upbringing. Props to David Hogg for leveraging his tragedy into Harvard and then this tho, nobody else has managed that. So it must take a meaningful degree of political talent to do what he's done even tho he seems unappetizing when we see him at the DNC. I wonder if he'll grow into the role or just pursue single issue advocacy that pushes away voters.
I think a central pillar of Vance’s appeal is that appears to actually be thinking about things. Pre-Trump Reps (and all Dems) are predictable. You can agree or disagree with them, but you’re never going to be surprised by them.
Where are they? Where is anybody? I'm sorry, but I sort of laughed when they announced the new "leadership"..... Are you kidding me? You're not going to have anything to lead if we don't do something...
The piece was too long to wedge this in, but I actually think it's a terrible portend that the fucking DNC elections are getting press at all. If the party had actual thought leaders and actual up-and-comers who were ready for prime time, we wouldn't have to be talking about national committee vice chairs. I've followed the Democratic party my entire life and I doubt I could name a single vice chairs prior to this slate. We need to get our shit together or we're going to spend a LONG time wandering in the wilderness.
Yes, you can go back into the 50s and there were actual thought leaders. Then at a certain point they disappeared and I don’t know why. There was Adlai Stevenson, Arthur Slesinger, Jimmy Breslin, and Norman Mailer. Even Mondale and Dukakis stood for something. They had a program other than just “let’s do the progressive stack so we know who rocks and who sucks.” Tax & spend! You may not like it, but it was a plan and a tradition. John Kerry, insufferable as he is, had certain ideas. Now it seems like it’s just party functionaries and posters.
My dad carried a picture of Adlai Stevenson in his wallet. I don’t know what happened to the party’s balls. Actually…yeah I do. You can’t project strength or boldness when a single errant comment can get you exiled for life.
An observation as someone who sits at a news desk 9 hours a day. I receive press releases...and I mean, a metric ton of press releases. I get no less than 20 to 50 a day from Trump and his various PACs and SuperPacs..and ofcourse, now the White House.....I hear daily from the Democrats...Not with respect to responding to what THEY ARE DOING about what is happening..A few, yes...but, Trump is taking the fucking Goebbles approach here.
I seriously think Democrats just don’t care anymore about winning elections and this will be the status quo for a long period, until a new group appears that replaces them. They are so cooked and I saw the writing on the wall before Hilary lost. It’s now 2025, 10 years later, and it’s like they’ve learned nothing?
Absolutely nothing. And no, they don’t care about winning. Because there are no real consequences when they don’t. It’s the party of well-to-do keyboard warriors. Their day-to-day is the same, whoever’s in power.
Hogg personally isn't the problem although he's got all the liberal shibboleth creds. This issue was created by a party that thought it was the resistance when everyone could see they weren't. They owned (and still do) academia, public schools, the press/media, the military, the three letter agencies, every government worker that wants a permanent job, corporate America (up until the tech guys decided at the last minute to go for the winner) and the EU, among so much more. The problem is you can't play victim and have all the levers of power. People see that and grasp the play acting. And they don't like it. Add to that an incredibly weak candidate and if you think Hogg is the problem, you're looking in the wrong place. Keep looking at 'winning groups' as your problem instead of talking about things that normal Americans care about, and you'll keep losing. Sure, Trump will lose at the midterms...but you will have missed the boat by then.
It's a little-discussed, but hugely important problem: if you wield extreme power, but still think you're a victim, you're dangerous. And people are going to start hating your guts. Every obvious Bad Guy in history had an element of this. Paranoid, hyper-aggressive control freak with a permanent victim complex.
The fact that Democrat have to be criticized for failing to “reach men” is full evidence that Democrats are a broken cult of crap that needs to be done away with.
David Hogg is off-putting partly because he is physically weak. 95% of guys between 18 and 30 and 25% of the girls in that age bracket know they can take him. I’m pretty sure I could take him, and I’m sixty.
I want to be just like David Hogg said no you man ever.
A laundry list of things for Democrats to keep and to dump if they ever want to win again nationwide.
Keep a woman’s right to choose for the first trimester. Dump abortion until birth unless the mother’s health is at risk.
Keep a concern for climate change and grow nuclear power. Dump intermittent, unreliable renewable energy.
Keep and develop new effective vaccines. Dump vaccine mandates.
Keep equality of opportunity for all. Dump equity of results based on discrimination against men, whites and Asians.
Keep the protection of gay and lesbian rights. Dump men in women’s sports, private spaces and prisons.
Keep an opportunity for selective high value immigration. Dump sanctuary cities and open borders.
Keep helping the homeless find jobs and a place to live. Dump camping in cities and allowing open drug use.
Keep a concern for due process in criminal justice. Dump letting shoplifters and other petty thieves off the hook.
Do all of the above and you might find your way back to power.
I think part of what makes it tricky for them to do this is that they couched a lot of quite extreme policy preferences in the language of “civil rights.” Homeless people shitting on the streets isn’t an unfortunate side effect of lax policies on loitering, IT IS THEIR RIGHT TO SHIT IN THE STREET GODDAMNIT AND HOW DARE YOU SAY OTHERWISE. When you’ve wrongly picked an uncompromising frame for everything, it makes it very difficult to moderate without feeling like you’re selling out.
"Civil rights" - framing extreme policies as "human rights" - becomes the new "Because God / the Bible says so". This is eventually the core of everything.
“Civil rights” is just a thought-terminator at this point. You’re right, it’s the ultimate argument from authority. Call something a “civil rights” issue and it is automatically good, necessary, and impossible to resist without being evil.
Civil rights are essentially negotiated. Your choices in philosophy are either some sort of natural law or social contract: either negotiated in interpretation or negotiated directly. You have to be fairly disagreeable to argue "when did we enshrine this as a civil right?" Folks willing to raise that question are not going to be in the Democratic party for long: they'll join the politically homeless or react by going full Trump.
Quite literally, too- the idea of inalienable rights comes from religious origins. See the American Revolution.
Nobody afraid of feeling like a sellout should be leading the DNC.
I’ll agree with most of this, but need to add things like universal health care and worker protections and higher taxes on billionaires and not supporting Putin. And there’s a coalition.
Sound. Eminently reasonable. No way on Earth, this can fail to appeal to anyone even remotely reasonable and has voted for T.
Lol. Yes, that’s definitely how it works! :P
This all seems very reasonable!
One of my MAGA friends (a union utility lineman that works 60+ hours a week and makes an easy $250k a year) laughed that "Democrats became that shitty public school teacher".
Public school teachers back in his day (the 90s) didn't have time for boys like him. He was literally that dumbass kid on the playground in 1992. He loves Rogan, drives a big truck, and laughs at offensive jokes. Served in the military, been to rehab twice. Like a huge percentage of men like him in California, he married a Mexican girl. He's fucking hilarious, loves football, and has had my back since 1992. We're extremely different people (I'm Blue No Matter Who, the son of public school teachers, and have multiple degrees).
He's also the one keeping your power on during storms, and is one of the most loyal and honorable and loving humans I know. He's also never seen the inside of a private school, so he has no idea about context.
Dems just have zero comprehension about who these types are. Explaining how or why is just perplexing; it's like trying to explain ancient Persians to my labradoodle.
Excellent stuff as always David — it’s always a breath of relief that someone is speaking common sense
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I second that!
It’s not really a matter of REACHING men; the Democratic has spent the last 8 years (at least) actively ALIENATING men, in general, and the last 50 (at least) alienating white working class men, in particular. It’s going to take more than a “rebrand” to get those men back. You can have the greatest policies in the world, but if people feel like a party is calling THEM deplorables and garbage, they are still not going to vote for that party.
The biggest blind spot associated with identity politicking is that you start to really believe the bullshit that people are just avatars of their group. You can treat Men like trash because Men aren’t a collection of individuals with real thoughts and feelings. Men are just a concept. An abstraction. Abstractions don’t get mad or hurt, so why worry?
Even though it seems some Black men voted for Trump, something like 80% of Black voters (majority women, but still a lot of men) voted Dem. I dont think Dems focus on Black voters because their vote is already pretty secure.
I think Godzilla will come to fight Metal Godzilla before Blacks seriously consider voting Republican in significant numbers. Dems don't cater to Blacks *now* and they STILL vote for them.
I read in an article that Black Americans would rather just stay home than vote Republican. So Dems should be more concerned with voter turnout going down versus Black people going red.
My main takeaway from this article is that Democrats dont want to be in charge because they prefer to be morally superior and prefer to view conservatives with open disdain. I think they are also banking on the next election not having a suitable replacement for Trump (who cant run again) so they can win by default. I think the DNC sabotaged Bernie? Like they didnt support him, right?
The Dems are fine with the status quo.
I think anyone interested in electoral politics should be focused on building out viable third parties, like in Europe.
I agree with a lot of this, particularly the part about Dems being quite content to sit back and lob bombs at Republicans. Most professional Democrats will keep their jobs regardless of which party is in power, so they care a lot less about all this than John Q. Voter. The only thing I'll say re black voting preferences is that while yes, it's quite unlikely that black people in huge numbers will swing Republican, it wouldn't take much of a swing to push Dems out of viability. A 10 point drop, combined with dips elsewhere in the coalition could make it functionally impossible for Dems to overcome the Reps, even in a low turnout race.
I am curious about the cadre of Black progressives who have sworn off politics (unless they are advocating specificaly for Blacks). There seems to always be a huge emphasis on getting Blacks in the South to vote, and I wonder what that will look like going forward.
Black politics tends to involve a lot of fear mongering ("we wont go back") and I think that might drive some people to the polls. I remember being on Twitter and seeing Black liberals say "our ancestors died for us to have the right to vote" and it really reminds me that Black politics is basically about leveraging the spector of Jim Crow over modern day Blacks to force compliance to whatever (liberal) ideals.
Anyway. I will be curious about governor, mayor, senator and so on elections as we go through these next few years re Black voter turnout.
I wrote about this here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dennisonwrites/p/democrats-have-a-problem-with-men?r=38gm6o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
The problem with trying to reach black voters by scaring them over a supposed return to Jim Crow is that increasingly, black voters are too young to remember Jim Crow. Demanding praise for rescuing people from a thing they’ve never experienced is a bad move.
For many decades in the 19th century and early 20th, black voters were rock-solid Republicans -- back when the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and the Union, and the Democratic Party was the party of the Confederacy and slavery.
But that changed. Republicans started taking black voters for granted, and Democrats saw a chance to broaden their coalition at the edges by emphasizing their working-class appeal and easing off the segregationism. Eventually they went beyond easing off and became full-throated supporters of civil rights (while Republicans went after the segregationist vote the Democrats had deliberately sacrificed). And now we live in a world where black voters are viewed as rock-solid Democrats.
Today Republicans are chipping away at a lot of previously reliable Democratic voting blocs, and that includes black voters, whom Democrats have taken for granted for quite a while. What's happened before can happen again.
It's hard to keep voters on board with an intense identity message when the people drafting that message are mostly well-to-do white people. And of course, if you go so hard on identity that you completely abandon your economic priorities, you're just a storefront full of crap that nobody wants. In other words, you're the Democrats.
In what dimension do Dems not cater to Blacks?
Well said. Too bad they didn’t pick you for the next VC.
I guess the DNC would rather see their coalition shrink further than reconsider the messaging and policies that lost them millions of votes in the 2024 election.
I think it's not just that they don't want to moderate, I think they almost can't. The activist class, which is overrepresented in leadership, has espoused so many extreme ideas that to walk even a little of it back would mean acknowledging that they've been hysterically wrong about policies they considered life-or-death. That's a lot of humble pie to eat, and I don't know if they have the stomach for it.
It’s definitely a difficult pivot, one that must be led by someone who is willing to (somehow) displace current party leadership.
I hope to see it in my lifetime.
It’s the leg aides. They’re the problem.
all the leg aides I used to work with were awesome. I’ve been out of the game for a while, but I have to assume that working in a Dem political office is such a stultifying environment now, they can’t keep grounded without running the risk of seeming dirty to their bosses and coworkers.
What's funny is that JD Vance is also an Ivy League metrosexual, yet he manages to code switch effectively due to his upbringing. Props to David Hogg for leveraging his tragedy into Harvard and then this tho, nobody else has managed that. So it must take a meaningful degree of political talent to do what he's done even tho he seems unappetizing when we see him at the DNC. I wonder if he'll grow into the role or just pursue single issue advocacy that pushes away voters.
I think a central pillar of Vance’s appeal is that appears to actually be thinking about things. Pre-Trump Reps (and all Dems) are predictable. You can agree or disagree with them, but you’re never going to be surprised by them.
Extremely well thought out and well written, thank you.
I sense supernaturally restrained as well, so good use of superpowers.
Even on my heaviest hitting days, I’m giving about 60% strength.
Where are they? Where is anybody? I'm sorry, but I sort of laughed when they announced the new "leadership"..... Are you kidding me? You're not going to have anything to lead if we don't do something...
The piece was too long to wedge this in, but I actually think it's a terrible portend that the fucking DNC elections are getting press at all. If the party had actual thought leaders and actual up-and-comers who were ready for prime time, we wouldn't have to be talking about national committee vice chairs. I've followed the Democratic party my entire life and I doubt I could name a single vice chairs prior to this slate. We need to get our shit together or we're going to spend a LONG time wandering in the wilderness.
Yes, you can go back into the 50s and there were actual thought leaders. Then at a certain point they disappeared and I don’t know why. There was Adlai Stevenson, Arthur Slesinger, Jimmy Breslin, and Norman Mailer. Even Mondale and Dukakis stood for something. They had a program other than just “let’s do the progressive stack so we know who rocks and who sucks.” Tax & spend! You may not like it, but it was a plan and a tradition. John Kerry, insufferable as he is, had certain ideas. Now it seems like it’s just party functionaries and posters.
My dad carried a picture of Adlai Stevenson in his wallet. I don’t know what happened to the party’s balls. Actually…yeah I do. You can’t project strength or boldness when a single errant comment can get you exiled for life.
Or maybe I was trying to type “poseurs.”
An observation as someone who sits at a news desk 9 hours a day. I receive press releases...and I mean, a metric ton of press releases. I get no less than 20 to 50 a day from Trump and his various PACs and SuperPacs..and ofcourse, now the White House.....I hear daily from the Democrats...Not with respect to responding to what THEY ARE DOING about what is happening..A few, yes...but, Trump is taking the fucking Goebbles approach here.
I seriously think Democrats just don’t care anymore about winning elections and this will be the status quo for a long period, until a new group appears that replaces them. They are so cooked and I saw the writing on the wall before Hilary lost. It’s now 2025, 10 years later, and it’s like they’ve learned nothing?
Absolutely nothing. And no, they don’t care about winning. Because there are no real consequences when they don’t. It’s the party of well-to-do keyboard warriors. Their day-to-day is the same, whoever’s in power.
Hogg personally isn't the problem although he's got all the liberal shibboleth creds. This issue was created by a party that thought it was the resistance when everyone could see they weren't. They owned (and still do) academia, public schools, the press/media, the military, the three letter agencies, every government worker that wants a permanent job, corporate America (up until the tech guys decided at the last minute to go for the winner) and the EU, among so much more. The problem is you can't play victim and have all the levers of power. People see that and grasp the play acting. And they don't like it. Add to that an incredibly weak candidate and if you think Hogg is the problem, you're looking in the wrong place. Keep looking at 'winning groups' as your problem instead of talking about things that normal Americans care about, and you'll keep losing. Sure, Trump will lose at the midterms...but you will have missed the boat by then.
It's a little-discussed, but hugely important problem: if you wield extreme power, but still think you're a victim, you're dangerous. And people are going to start hating your guts. Every obvious Bad Guy in history had an element of this. Paranoid, hyper-aggressive control freak with a permanent victim complex.
Nicely stated. Yes.
Best Substack post I've seen in the last 100. Bravo.
How about just owning up to their duplicity in the game they play?
https://open.substack.com/pub/christophernicholaschapman/p/its-not-fascism-its-worse-its-a-game?r=2bnro3&utm_medium=ios
They don’t like us. They don’t think we deserve to be happy. And they certainly aren’t going to try to listen to us.
It’s such a bizarre death spiral. They hate men, which causes men not to vote for them, which causes them to hate men even more, which causes...
The fact that Democrat have to be criticized for failing to “reach men” is full evidence that Democrats are a broken cult of crap that needs to be done away with.
David Hogg is off-putting partly because he is physically weak. 95% of guys between 18 and 30 and 25% of the girls in that age bracket know they can take him. I’m pretty sure I could take him, and I’m sixty.
I want to be just like David Hogg said no you man ever.