The following article was written several months back—and, needless to say, much has changed since then. However, the issue I describe in this article is probably still relevant to some extent, and despite my perfectionism I just need to get this out. And so, though belated, I present “Post-Election in Blue.”
I’ve been bracing for Trump 2.0 since Trump 1.0 ended, but that makes seeing it upon us hardly any easier. After all, nausea remains a wholly appropriate response when a belligerent color out of space—that color, of course, being orange—ascends to power and beams waves of anti-intelligence across the globe.
Despite the dire implications of this development, I have hope. Unlike many liberals right now, I harbor no illusions that fascism is somehow a separate phenomenon from American society as a whole. The putrid flowering of it we now observe was only a matter of time, and the solution is as it has always been: a wholesale, bottom-up replacement of the system.
But some Democrats appear to be handling the situation not only poorly, but in precisely the wrong way, and despite my prior experience in the party in my electoral days, seeing them stoop to these levels still startles me.
I’d missed the broadcast in my post-election stupor, but apparently Mike Figueredo at The Humanist Report posted the above video on November 8th, chronicling a series of pundits and Democratic advisors advocating a strategy of appeasement against the Republicans. Figueredo characterizes their “advice to Democrats in the face of another loss” as “to try to peel of more Republicans by adopting more of their policies, in particular get transphobic.”
Philip Reigns, an advisor to the 2016 Clinton and the 2024 Harris campaign, starts off the squelch by whinging about how “a small portion of [his] party is pretty much dictating where [they] are.” He clarifies his intention, when pressed, by asserting: “most Democrats I know think there’s a huge problem at the border. Most Democrats I know think, frankly, that males at birth shouldn’t play in women’s sports and vice versa.”
A peculiar assertion, given that most Democrats I know think the problem at the border is the treatment of the refugees and support immigration reform. They also vocally support trans rights.
Reigns was merely the warm-up. The coterie of conformists culminates with this cavalcade of crapuscules:
This is not Joe Biden’s fault, it’s not Kamala Harris’s fault, it’s not Barack Obama’s fault: [it] is the fault of the Deomcratic Party in not knowing how to communicate effectively to voters. We are not the party of Common Sense. […]
Listen—language has meaning. When we address Latino voters as Latinx, for instance, because that’s the politically correct thing to do it makes them think that we don’t even live on the same Planet as they do. When we are too afraid to say that, hey, college kids: if you’re trashing a campus, Columbia University, because you’re unhappy about some sort of policy [emphasis mine], and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that that is unacceptable. […] when we put pronouns after names and say “she/her,” as opposed to saying: “you know what, if I call you by the wrong wrong, pronoun call me out. I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.” But stop with the virtue signaling!
Figueredo does not clearly identify the speaker in this instance, except as a “Democratic Party strategist.” If he is correct, then I find this diatribe most disturbing, because, as someone who holds political correctness in distaste himself, I can say that this individual is doing exactly the wrong thing by assuming this tack. Indeed, she presents no critique of political correctness at all: it is a reversion to a more conservative form of political correctness that the social justice of manners arose (ostensibly) to combat.
The left-wing critique of totemic identity and the social justice of manners is precisely that superficial micromanagement of people’s language supplants substantive action. It’s not an excuse to ignore or disrespect the interests of marginalized folk, or to outright forget our manners. It’s about exposing the futility of arguing over whether or not a person’s taste in gender is a sexual orientation or a sexual preference, instead of giving the disproportionate number of homeless trans youth a lifeline and, maybe, tackling homelessness on the whole alongside it. It’s about the absurdity of painting a Pride flag on the flank of a bomb you’re dropping on some poor country and thinking that somehow makes it okay.
But now, centrists are both disrespecting and disregarding immigrants and queer folk while advocating dropping more bombs. The protests mentioned above, after all, were against the genocide in Gaza, which the United States willfully supplies and bankrolls. These were grown-ass adults taking direct action to stop a war machine, exercising courage their older counterparts had somehow never developed as they went long in the tooth. About six years ago, Democrats and liberal commentators argued that sixteen-year-olds should be offered the franchise, but now they paint eighteen-to-twenty-somethings exercising their political autonomy as babies throwing a tantrum.
I would call this reversal remarkable, but it isn’t. It’s pre-meditated. As much as they try to paint the Dems as kowtowing to pro-Palestinian sentiments and losing because of it, the reverse is true. Harris adamantly resisted assuming a pro-Palestinian stance, and as of May this year the vast majority of Americans supported a ceasefire. The people above doubtlessly have access to the Gallup poll saying as much. They are not ignorant: they are lying. They fully intended to jettison the pro-Palestinian left, and Palestinians themselves, all along. I expect they fully intended to toss immigrants, gays and trans folk into the fire as well.
Most insulting of all, centrists have appealed to the safety of immigrants at the border, queer and trans folk, and other marginalized groups to browbeat dissident leftists into line for decades. Leftists who are indeed far more radically pro-immigrant, anti-racist, pro-woman and pro-LGBTQ than the Clintons, the Bidens and the Harrises of the world. “Sure, we’re not the best on these matters,” they’d say, “and we don’t give a fuck about the economy. But don’t worry. We’re better than the alternative.”
But when Biden made it into office, everyone stopped talking about the border. The present administration codified Trump’s heinous border policy. Harris ran on “tough on immigration” rhetoric. As soon immigrants ceased to be a pawn they could use to keep progressives in the game, they cast them aside. Now it’s Palestinians and student activists. And also, apparently, trans folk. Studies show that the most “politically correct” people on the planet aren’t actually leftists, but centrists. These centrists, despite excoriating everyone around them for not being as PC as them, nonetheless covertly hold bigoted views. The great irony behind this Democratic strategist’s admonition to “stop with the virtue signaling!” is that it’s usually the political center who virtue signals and weaponizes political correctness against its opponents. Bernie gets called a sexist and a racist for bringing up class issues. Black progressives get called white for supporting Bernie. Arabs and their allies get called antisemitic for supporting Palestine. Now that the ploy is failing them, they’re jettisoning their progressive veneer, clearly vying for the role of junior partner in the flowering of American fascism.
In fairness, some Democrats aren’t going down this road and have decided to articulate a more grounded, constructive and ethical alternative. But given the proclivities of the establishment, I expect this is moot. What really must be done, if we give a damn about queer liberation, antiracism, decolonization, ending class domination, women’s liberation, and just freedom in general, is to build from the ground up the world we want to live in, not the world the parliament of heads tells us we must accept. Democracy was never about delegating your power to politicians. That’s what a Republic does, and we can leave that to the Republicans. It’s about going into the agora every day, discussing the issues of the day with your peers, coming to a decision and implementing it yourself. Local elections, in principle, can play a role in establishing the alternative institutions necessary for a stateless, direct democracy—but at best, it’s a minor, tentative one. What we need is dual power constructed through direct action, without asking permission from bosses, bureaucrats, or the political class.
As for me, I might have to start adding my pronouns to my bio out of sheer spite. I’m thinking He/Him/Ore/Omai/Ano Hito.