Democrats Need to Clean House Before They Screw Up Again

There are no adults in the room. That’s the reality, and the sooner we accept it, the better.

This is, as many have already noted, true in the Republican Party. Eight years ago, Donald Trump’s Cabinet and staff included a number of more sober-minded and establishment-friendly figures who did occasionally work to suppress his worst impulses.

Dubbed the “adults in the room” by a mainstream media eager to find narratives of resistance within the Trump administration, their influence was overstated but still occasionally effective. As Trump prepares to return to the White House, it’s already clear that there will be no comparable figures at his side: His second term will be radical, destructive, and above all unrestrained.

But in the wake of Tuesday’s catastrophic election, it’s also clear that the Democratic Party’s adults in the room have also abandoned us.  

Democratic leadership is still recovering from the whiplash of Election Day, asking itself how Kamala Harris’s exceptional campaign could have failed so spectacularly. But the answer is far simpler than they will admit: Instead of running on the bold, progressive, popular policies that helped win the White House in 2020, the Democratic Party abandoned its base to court an imaginary Liz Cheney superfan demographic.

Seemingly overnight, Harris abandoned her early efforts to stand apart from Republicans, ditching the (accurate) digs at Republican “weirdness” in favor of weird rightward pivots of her own: Tacking right on immigration, boasting about overseeing a “lethal” military, and subbing out early progressive policies like price gouging measures for a “charm offensive” on Wall Street.

So … what now? How do we keep the faith for a party that promised moral compromise for victory (or at least a close race), but instead delivered Mondale Lite results?

We don’t.

If the Democratic Party doesn’t want to do what is necessary to win races, then we— all of us—will. This isn’t a time to be nice. It’s not a time to be polite. We are about to head into a new fascist era and we cannot answer that with more castrated messaging. So it’s time to transform the Democratic Party, whether its entrenched leadership wants it or not.

Americans are suffering. They are scared. That’s why fascist movements, like Trump’s,  work in the first place. If Democrats choose to continue to couch their message with centrist pandering, rather than embrace bold, progressive populist policies that answer those fears, they will not win.

And frankly, they shouldn’t. Decorum and bipartisanship and incremental progress sound nice, but none of those are possible if the other side seeks your annihilation. Democrats must finally, belatedly, take that seriously. When so much is on the line, it’s time to take a page out of the GOP’s playbook and exploit every loophole, every sketchy contingency, every pressure valve to counteract Republicans’ political maneuvering. It’s not “playing dirty” if your opponent is trying to drown you in the mud.

It’s absolutely true that much of Donald Trump’s messaging hinges on the worst impulses of many Americans. It’s not up to Democrats to bring those most extreme voters into the fold. But it is the Democratic Party’s responsibility to provide a vision that will attract everyone else: the people who stayed home, the ones who feel abandoned, the ones who held their nose and voted for Trump because the promise of cheaper eggs (whether or not it materializes—and it seems highly unlikely) was more important than everything else. But it is especially important to prioritize the people who felt like their vote was pointless.

People are scared. So offer them an actual alternative rather than more fear—or for the faint hope of change four years from now. Stand for something rather than shapeshift to court whatever demographic of the day you think is a skeleton key for victory.

Joe Biden and the Democrats had the House and Senate for two years but refused to exert pressure on its problem children, Sinema and Manchin, to pass radical, popular, uncompromised legislation on abortion, voting rights, climate action, corporate guardrails, and Supreme Court reform. The failure to abolish the filibuster will haunt Democrats for years, and it should. When you choose to be ineffective, it’s no wonder many stayed home, while others who voted for Biden defected to Trump. And to not have run on a platform of real change—and, for that matter, in direct opposition of the current, wildly unpopular president, is shameful.

That’s why anyone who had a leadership role in this campaign should never be allowed within throwing distance of a political operation ever again. Any prominent Democrat who didn’t fight tooth and nail to recognize voter concerns  and fix the party’s trajectory should be primaried. And any person who sighs and chalks this loss up solely to racism and misogyny should be ignored.

Yes, racism and misogyny certainly played a role in this election. But many stayed home or switched their vote to Trump. That’s because they didn’t believe Kamala Harris when she said things would change. And can you blame them? She said it herself: “Not a thing comes to mind” of anything she would do differently from Joe Biden—aside from, she later clarified, the fact that she would have appointed a Republican to her Cabinet, vindicating the dozens of voters who were desperate to see Adam Kinzinger run the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Cowardice might be a favorite Democratic pastime, but if Harris had the courage to stand apart from Biden on even just a few issues, this election might have played out differently.

Ideally, a new party (or several!) would emerge from this clusterfuck, but America does have an affinity for binary choices. So the other option, at least in the interim, is to change the Democratic Party radically, aggressively, and without mercy.

Many in the party—both in leaderships and on cable television—are convinced that the only path forward is to tack even further to the right. But I’ll let you in on the dirtiest secret of politics and power: All of those people you see on TV are just that. People. They are just as fallible and weak as you and me. They have no innate or oracular gift of reading the electorate. And that means they are just as vulnerable. 

So if you are angry, be angry. But even more importantly, do something about it.

There’s a good chance you know your district better than your representative, especially if they’re in their third, fourth, tenth term. You—or someone in your community—have the ability to run against them or to support someone who is. Even if you don’t succeed, you can make them feel the heat. You can make them scared.

Right now, the Democratic Party depends on default votes. They can fail to take action and shout down criticism because the other side is worse. But these people work for us. And any healthy party should not only allow but also embrace criticism from its supporters (something the Other Guy refuses to do).

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Rather than handing incumbents our votes because we fear the alternative, we need to realize that we have the power. And if Democrats refuse to listen, they don’t deserve our votes. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vote or you should go to the right. It means new blood, motivated by radical change rather than stagnant power, needs to storm this ineffective gerontocracy and earn our votes instead.

So let’s stop compromising. Because we are the only adults left in the room.