Among many other things, Election Night was, for me, a pleasant reacquaintance with the lost art of channel surfing. As it was in its glory days, channel-surfing represented the opportunity to see all these disparate, microcosmic worlds, each secure in its own bubble. There was The Free Press’ gaggle of hosts and guests slowly getting blotto over the course of the night; there was PBS’ geriatric panel that seemed to be aging in front of my eyes, there was Brian Williams positioned for some reason on a county road in the middle of a field; there was CNN sinking deep into denial (Van Jones at one point had the refreshing honesty to admit that he simply couldn’t process what was happening); there was MSNBC continuing to drink the Kool-Aid long past closing time.
The ideological discrepancies were mostly amusing, a harmless distraction from a probably irrevocable turn in the country’s history, but it’s worth taking them in, because, in some ways, the spin is as important as the election itself; and how the election is shaped in people’s minds — especially in this current, critical period while the clay hardens — will likely have ramifications for a long time to come.
Going around the horn, from worst to first, we start of course with MSNBC and the Democratic progressives. Their response has been, in a word, demented. MSNBC host Joy Reid’s declaration that Harris’s campaign was “flawless” — and that only racism and sexism could possibly account for her loss — was so out-of-touch-with-reality that The New York Post re-ran Reid’s comments out of a sense of general stupefaction. Not to be outdone by Reid, Peter Beinart came up with the post-mortem strategy that Harris would have won if only she had run harder on Gaza. The purported logic here is that the Democratic base was turned off enough by the Dems’ moral hypocrisy that they declined to come out and vote for Harris — even if they neglected to mention any of that to pollsters. “Ms. Harris thought it wiser to campaign with [Liz] Cheney than, say, Representative Rashida Tlaib,” complains Beinart, which is the kind of statement that’s not even worth arguing with. Let’s just think for a minute about how exactly campaign surrogate Rashida Tlaib have played to swing voters.
A somewhat more serious — and therefore disconcerting — variant of this line of thought was articulated by former White House press secretary and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki. “The most important groups of voters to listen to in this moment, in my view, are the ones who didn’t show up,” Psaki wrote. “The Americans who may have felt aligned with the Democratic agenda at one point, but now feel left behind or forgotten. These are not all white working-class voters.” What I take that to mean is Psaki arguing that the focus on white working-class voters is misguided and that the Dems just have to double down on the progressive base — and, above all, with young progressives. If that’s really the narrative that progressives are coming up with, they are going to lead the Democratic Party to loss after loss.
The truth is that the election reveals a total hollowness in the position of the MSNBC left. Their belief has been that the American people really are progressive in their heart of hearts, that they have been brainwashed by the right and basically just need to be brainwashed back — and that the best use of media is to hold moderates’ feet to the fire if they move too far to the center. The decent thing to do, after a result like this, would be for MSNBC to close up shop. But, instead, MSNBC — and the left in general — seems to be giving in to the dark side of the same coin. If America doesn’t accept the shining progressive vision, then America deserves nothing, runs the logic. “America has revealed to us her true self and we have to decide what to do with her from here,” Waikinya Clanton, the founder of Black Women for Kamala, told The New York Times. In The Nation, Elie Mystal, doing his best Jeremiah Wright, actually wrote, “We, as a country, absolutely deserve what’s about to happen to us. We, as a nation, have proven ourselves to be a fetid, violent people, and we deserve a leader who embodies the worst of us.”
Compared with that, Fox News actually does seem fair-and-balanced. The Fox hosts are getting more and more of that stormtrooper look by the second, but Fox’s Voter Analysis renders the election as all about bread-and-butter issues — Trump’s focus on the economy and immigration. Flipping the channels on Election Night, I was more disturbed by the anchors on the mainstream network channels than I was either by Fox or by the meltdowns amongst the progressives. The talk was all about ‘unity’ and these kinds of bread-and-butter issues — exactly as if it were just any other election and Republicans had emerged as the party of common sense. This is kind of how Republicans are feeling right now, and that delusion, I expect, is going to last about ten days of a Trump administration — when he starts to pursue deeply-polarizing policies and to weaken the US’ hand all over the world.
Within the Democratic establishment, the split is about whether the real problem is media or messaging — and this dispute may well grind out over the next years. The sensible people have been arguing that the Dems need to tack hard to the center, cut off the left and regain their working-class roots — basically that the Dems need to be the party of John Fetterman. As Tommy McDonald, a former strategist for Fetterman, put it to Politico, “A party based on championing and identifying with the working class can run and win everywhere. A party based on championing and identifying with subgroups cannot win everywhere, and even does worse with the subgroups they rightfully champion.” On Twitter, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy wrote, “Real economic populism should be our tentpole. But here’s the thing — then you need to let people into the tent who aren’t 100% on board with us on every social and cultural issue, or issues like guns or climate.”
That’s kind of the intelligent response to the election, but it feels a little short-sighted. That’s really not so different from what Biden and then Harris did and, at least in the case of 2024, it wasn’t enough. The point is that that horse has left the stables. Trump won not really because his messaging on economics or immigration was all that more credible than what Democrats were saying, but because he manipulated the conversation better. “Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country,” wrote Michael Tomasky in The New Republic. That’s a somewhat conspiratorial way of framing it, and Tomasky’s solution — that Democrats should “get their own media” — ignores the very real liberal media empire that the Democrats already have, but Tomasky is on to something. The beautiful liberal battleships — New York Times, Washington Post, etc — simply aren’t reaching swing voters in the heart of America (battleships don’t fight river wars), and Democrats haven’t really embraced new media with the same alacrity that the right has. The turn of the wheel would be that Dems would have to start seeing themselves as the party of opposition, rather than the party of the establishment, and embrace the aesthetic of screaming-from-the-void. The message would come after the tone.
The people I’m paying the most attention are the ones who are trying to elevate the conversation a bit and see the big picture. This isn’t about the proximate cause of the 2024 election results — whether inflation or immigration reform or anything else. And it’s not even about thinking through the demographics of a winning coalition or the media echo chamber needed to achieve it. It’s about style, political talent, and tapping into the subconscious of America. Bret Stephens and David Axelrod both said this in reasonable ways in their post-election analysis. “Democrats have become the smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party” was David Axelrod’s take. “The Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity,” was Stephens’. That may be obvious, but the problem can’t be overstated. The Democrats have become the scolds — the party of taxes, of regulation, of right-speak, even of grammar police. As Stephens wrote, “How’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?”
Let’s leave the last word with the unlikely one-two punch of David Brooks and Marianne Williamson. The two of them have, since 2020, been sounding a similar note, which is, basically, that the Democrats need to find religion. Williamson has argued that Trump has tapped deep into the psyche of the nation, that Democrats need to learn from him, and, as she put it in the 2020 election, meet that hate with love. As Williamson said in an interview with The Free Press:
It’s very clear to me that the elites of the Democratic Party and media don’t know how to read the room. The Democratic elite should resign their positions tonight. Many of those people have not sauntered out of their gated communities long enough to have made sense of what is going on out there.
It’s a bit odd to look to Marianne Williamson as the voice of reason but….that’s where we are. And, by the way, the platform Williamson ran on in her quixotic 2024 campaign is worth a look. It’s, basically, the populism of the ‘60s — a muscular compassionate government that gives the impression of being genuinely dedicated to fighting corporate interests and improving the lives of regular people.
Brooks says basically the same thing in somewhat more sedate terms. “The Biden administration tried to woo the working class with subsidies and stimulus, but there is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect,” he writes. Brooks’ chronology is similar to Williamson’s. It’s decades of neoliberalism leaving a deep cultural scar across the heartland. “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect,” he writes. “People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible.” Trump was the first major-party politician to really identify the psychic wound and, at least nominally, to offer a path out of it — “his Queens-born resentment of the Manhattan elites dovetailed magically with the class animosity being felt by rural people across the country,” Brooks writes — but that doesn’t mean that Democrats can’t identify the same wound and work in their own way to salve it. The real point here is that the Democrats have already tried wonkiness and stay-the-course caution — and that has only led to their coalition withering away. They, now, are going to have to profoundly change the conversation.
Judging by the post-election finger pointing at everyone and everything other than themselves, MSNBC Democrats have their heads so far up their ass it might as well be Plato’s cave
Beautifully written, as usual. “Battleships don’t win river wars” — love it.