Mailbag: A Timely Whupping Of The Democratic Establishment

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Michael: How important, in political terms, is the ability and willingness to speak hard truths to your political side? This is a skill or practice that seems to have mostly vanished from the Democratic party. To be clear, I don't mean performance for the cameras, like Seth Moulton did on trans sports. I don't mean punching left in the style of Joe Manchin - a performative left puncher might be able to win some elections but is never going to unite the Democratic party behind him. I certainly don't mean having Charlie Freaking Kirk on your podcast and kind of sucking up to him.

I've been thinking about this since hearing 2 interviews: Ezra Klein's interview with Sarah McBride, and Tim Miller's interview with Zohran Mamdani. Both subjects were good interviews, showing some charisma and that ability to speak off the cuff that is sorely lacking among so many Democratic politicians. But McBride was willing to speak some hard truths that will get her in hot water with some of the Democratic base, and Mamdani shied away from it (specifically, he failed to condemn the slogan "globalize the intifada" while running for mayor in a city with a large Jewish population - which should have been an easy layup for him).

Anyway, just wondering how much of an issue you think this is?

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To the extent that “speak hard truths” is one item in a basket of good-faith dealing, which also includes honesty, a spirit of generosity, and a commitment to fostering mutual comprehension, I think it’s an extremely valuable skill. Valuable to the individual who has the skill (insofar as it will help him or her climb ranks within the party) and valuable to the party at large, insofar as it will help keep the party unified.

There are no great exemplars of this at the moment, but not too long ago there were. Nancy Pelosi circa 2007-2010 comes to mind. So does Barack Obama. It’s mostly lost to history now, but Pelosi rose through party ranks as a top House progressive, and as an appropriator. This, along with her whipping talents, made her the rare congressional progressive representative who managed to break into top tier of caucus-wide leadership. When she became leader in 2003 and speaker in 2007, it was a huge boon to the left wing of the party. Suddenly the most influential progressive in the House was the most powerful Democrat in Washington. A lot of good came from this over the years, but not as a bonanza to the progressive caucus. As every faction does, progressives still had to eat a lot of shit. What made it go down with a spoonful of sugar was that Pelosi had their trust. When she came to deliver “hard truths” they didn’t suspect her of double dealing. When she cut deals with Republicans out of necessity, they didn’t feel taken for granted. I think she ended up captured by leadership, and the bad ideas that pass for CW in that realm, but for an important moment in time, her credibility across the party (indeed, across the House) was a huge asset.

Obama, in a different way, won trust across the party grassroots, which gave him a lot of flexibility to tack left or right in Washington, and to take positions (as on same-sex marriage) that disappointed big swaths of the party. They didn’t see him like they now see Moulton as punching left to burnish cred within his faction, because that’s not what he was doing; they saw him as someone whose instincts and judgement they trusted, who deserved grace, so that he might become president and change the country for the better.

I would like to see one of today’s progressive leaders “speak hard truths” in encouraging fellow progressives to show similar grace to (e.g.) Senate candidates in Louisiana, Alaska, Maine, and North Carolina, whose views on issues like guns and climate policy and border security are unlikely to be progressive. I’d simultaneously like to see moderate leaders “speak hard truths” to fellow moderates who intentionally conflate “cultural authenticity in red America” with things like cryptocurrency and AI and the carried-interest loophole, and then lash out at progressives critics for “trying to shrink the tent,” when they call the bluff. That’s not moderation, it’s soft corruption, and it makes party unity much, much harder.

I don’t know if Mamdani has been “speaking hard truths” exactly, but notwithstanding his response to Tim Miller¹, he has set aside many elements of the progressive catechism that he used champion just five years ago. It’s easy to imagine young progressives who, say, care about social and criminal justice, interpreting this as some kind of betrayal—they wouldn’t trust a centrist candidate who ran a cost-of-living campaign. But he fostered trust with them, and so they gave him leeway to run a winning campaign; he similarly reached out to centrists and found ways to incorporate their ideas into his platform and rhetoric—another trust-building exercise that will hopefully create some running room on his right.

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Gordon Reynolds: My question is: what exactly IS the state of the Democratic Party now? I read it’s somewhere between awful and terrible but at the same time I read how democrats are over performing in special elections. Trumps policies are horrifying large parts of the population, which leads me to wonder where exactly those people going to cast their votes. Republicans will always dislike the democrats, so is the unpopularity with their own voters?

I’d distinguish here between the anti-Trump opposition (the democracy within the country) and the Democratic Party establishment. Or between the grassroots and the grasstops, if you prefer. The former strikes me as in pretty good shape. They’re showing up in the streets and at ballot boxes. As you say, they’re delivering Democratic candidates huge victories in off-cycle elections. They’re organizing around cross-cutting themes (No Kings) instead of constituent interests (the March for Science, the Women’s March, the March for Our Lives) that, though well intentioned, tended to leave many Trump skeptics out in the cold during term one.

The Democratic Party—its institutions and institutional leadership—is by contrast in shambles.

Mamdani’s victory underscores this distinction pretty well. ...