why the democratic party isn't working anymore

a leftist perspective and appeal for well-meaning liberals

a note on this post: this essay was written over the course of the two days immediately following the 2024 elections. while this essay, and several other upcoming political essays, are free to read, the manic pixie dream girl’s guide to existential angst is a reader-supported publication and relies on paid subscribers to keep itself running (i.e., help pay my bills and keep me well-fed). if you like this writing — if you think it’s good, if it helped you learn, gave you something to recommend to your friend, or are otherwise glad it exists — please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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from albert camus’s notebooks

the democratic party isn’t working any more. 

what the democratic party is refusing to understand is that neoliberalism has failed. trump understands his moment perfectly. he knows that people are exhausted. he knows that people are in financial despair. he knows that parents are looking at their children and recognizing that their children will most likely grow up in a worse world than they themselves grew up in — houses unaffordable, cost of living going up, and a dying ecosystem in which resources (and childlike wonder) will be harder and harder to come by. even staunch right-wingers and climate change deniers are not blind to commenting on the fact that it’s uncharacteristically warm in november now, or that there are no more butterflies passing through their farm — even if they are unwilling to connect the dots as to why that might be happening.

as neoliberalism and the moderate position fail to produce any substantial change for the american people, and the centrist philosophy underlying it collapses from the bottom up, the vast majority of people will go — have to go, by the sheer fact of the nature of the political spectrum — either to the right, or to the left. kamala’s campaign refused to move to the left, instead capitulating to the right in an appeal to win right-wing voters and the “median voter,” and leaving people for whom the right holds no appeal — or for whom genocide was a hard no — without a candidate to vote for. 

(for the record, this strategy of capturing the median right-wing voter or “undecided” republican has never worked. despite the fact that the harris campaign and affiliated groups raised over one billion dollars, and then proceeded to spend much of that money driving the campaign further and further to the right, the number of registered republicans who voted for trump remained squarely at 94% from 2020 to 2024.

it turns out parading liz cheney around in the final weeks of an election that you were calling “the most important of our lifetime” does not actually make voters feel like it is, in fact, the most important of our life. the majority of republicans, by virtue of being republican, are committed to voting for trump. pandering to the right does nothing to convince trump voters to abandon their candidate. all it does is give pause to the rest of the world to contemplate just how it’s possible to have learned so little between hillary’s disastrous 2016 campaign and now.

but despite another disastrous election year for the democratic party, progressive measures passed – even, and maybe most notably, in states that trump won. (plenty of right-wing bullshit passed in blue states as well, but that’s another essay.) missouri voted to increase the minimum wage and require paid sick leave, as well as rejecting an amendment to fund sheriff and prosecutor retirement funds with court fees. (nebraska also passed a ballot initiative requiring employers to provide earned paid sick leave.) alaska passed a minimum wage increase as well, raising the state minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2027. arizona, which trump also won, passed a resolution to the constitutional right to abortion, and prohibits the government from passing any restrictions up until the point of fetal viability, which is roughly twenty-four weeks (or six months, for those of you who — like me — were about to do division in your head). missouri passed a resolution protecting reproductive care, and this morning the state was hit with a lawsuit by planned parenthood of the great plains seeking to secure widespread abortion access. montana, one of the reddest states in the country, passed legislation establishing the right to reproductive care, including abortion. nevada passed a similar amendment as missouri, providing the right to abortion up to the point of fetal viability; the amendment also includes clauses for third-trimester procedures in cases of endangerment to the life of the pregnant person or child. georgia, too, has now enshrined abortion rights into their state constitution, despite a majority of georgian voters electing for donald trump (and with him, project 2025) to take office.

elsewhere in the southeast, 56% of florida voters said yes to weed legalization, while 59.2 percent voted to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. neither passed, due to a florida law that requires a 60 percent majority to turn amendments into law (the amendment that made that change, by the way, did not itself receive sixty-percent of the vote); but despite them failing to meet the rather un-democratic sixty-percent requirement, the facts remain the same: that these typically “blue” measures were still supported by a majority of voters in a state that otherwise went red.

(trump won the vote by less than sixty percent, according to the associated press, but this particular under-sixty-percent wasn’t second-guessed by florida officials as unsatisfactory to democracy.)

what this wave of progressive measures passing — or in the case of florida, garnering more than fifty-percent of the vote — shows, is that just because people are frustrated and desperate does not mean they are entirely past the point of reason. the people in this country still want progressive measures that will tangibly improve people’s lives, and kamala lost precisely because she did not give progressive or leftist voters a reason to genuinely believe her campaign would materially change things. kamala’s position on the israeli government’s ongoing genocide of palestinians, for example, was cited as an important issue amongst undecided voters in swing states:

in fact, as the genocide has gone on longer and longer, and we’ve all seen more and more children pulverized into sand and their bodies melted by the use of internationally-banned weapons over livestreams, the majority of usamericans now support an arms embargo against israel.

many muslims and arab-americans ended up casting their votes for trump precisely because in the last several weeks trump started talking about “ending the war” in palestine, although “war” remains a misnomer for the atrocities taking place. nevermind the fact that netahunyu appears to be genuinely thrilled to have trump back in the white house, or that trump’s entire gambit is saying whatever he needs to say in the moment to convince people to support him, or the comments j.d. vance has made about muslims, or trump’s muslim ban from early in 2020: people are so disgusted by the establishment dems’ lack of tangible action and conviction that anyone or anything else seems like a better option.

does this seem like a genocidaire who seems worried that his campaign of genocide is going to end, now that trump is in office?

the fact of the matter is that, since the initial excitement of the first week of her campaign, no one believed kamala would differ from joe biden in any significant way on palestine — or much of anything, for that matter. kamala’s announcement as the dnc’s pick marked a moment where she could have tangibly split from some of biden’s policies and distinguished herself as her own candidate, breaking with the places where biden was flailing and losing support. palestine would have been an easy and galvanizing place to start that distinction. but instead her campaign chose to stick with the main party line.

people were — are — desperate to see their families not be slaughtered anymore and their homelands bombed to ruin. gaza has been razed, to the ground. can you blame muslim- and arab-american for voting for someone who said they would stop the bombing, even if they couldn’t be one-hundred percent sure he would keep his word, rather than someone who refused to make the same promise, empty gesture though those words may be? what the democrats, sans bernie and the group colloquially known as The Squad, seem completely unable to understand is that politics is the distance between your public perception and your policies. it doesn’t matter if you have a better policy than the other guy. (i, for the record, think kamala’s stance on israel is a genocide-enabling disaster, but i digress.) what matters is that the voter thinks you have a better policy than the other guy. and the harris campaign did not make the effort to convince palestinian-americans to put their full trust in her campaign or back in her party. if you don’t believe me that her campaign was disastrously ill-efficient in outreach to this group of voters, let me remind you that kamala sent liz cheney, whose father helped orchestrate the iraq war, to speak to arab-americans in michigan in the final days of the election. if that doesn’t show a stunning lack of understanding of what people want, or stand as the quite literal visual representation of the intention to continue with the same old order as before, i don’t know what does. you sent a war crime nepo baby to preach to the international neighbors of the people that nepo baby’s dad war crimed. in what world is this considered a serious campaign tactic by people who want to understand and represent their voters’ interest? in what world is this even considered sane, let alone compassionate?

you or i can look at trump and think he’s a swindler and a con and a fascist. but wouldn’t you consider taking any break you can get from the current paradigm, too, no matter how wild or ahistorical it might look, if that risk could be the difference in whether or not your family being burned? wouldn’t you consider taking the calculated risk and voting for someone at least willing to acknowledge that israel may be somewhat in the wrong, rather than voting for someone who turns their nose up at you and refuses to concede even an inch toward your humanity? 

i think we would all be lying to ourselves if we said that we wouldn’t have to at least think twice, in their position. i do not think those of us not in the position of watching our families and communities and countrymen burning alive can say with full conviction we know how we would feel in such a position, because it’s a position so far beyond anything anyone in (white) america can imagine actually being in.

the truth is none of us know exactly how we would feel or how we would respond if our worlds came crashing down. trump won the majority of the white vote for far less than anything that occurred over the last four years of biden’s presidency to push arab-americans into voting for him. white americans voted for trump beccause they were afraid of no longer being the dominant racial group in the united states. arab-americans voted for trump because their people are being genocided.

the harris campaign failed because it failed to truly estimate just how desperate people feel right now. people need a higher minimum wage, and paid sick. people need affordable healthcare. people need — and as we just saw, will vote for — the right to bodily autonomy. and even though harris, unlike trump, has no intention of expanding abortion bans, the fact of the matter remains that the party which chose harris to represent them (without a primary vote, need i remind you) — the party which harris represents has had a million opportunities to encode abortion rights into national law and has refused to do so. biden could have passed an executive order on day one in office. we held a majority in both the house and senate, as well as biden’s presidency, for the first two years of biden’s term. had ruth bader ginsburg retired when she was urged to, she wouldn’t have left a vacancy during a far-right presidency, which was then, naturally, filled with a far-right justice.

the entire last four years of the democratic party’s existence has been misstep after misstep. and now they have lost monumentally, at a time when people are the most vulnerable they’ve been in ages. they lost precisely because they refused to acknowledge just how precarious the average person’s quality of life feels right now.

when trump won in 2016, he didn’t win on a strong policy outline or because of any political experience — he won because he said “make america great again.” he appealed not to common sense or the rational mind — he appealed to the people’s feelings. and what people are feeling, predominantly right now, is desperation.

neoliberalism is failing because it is refusing to provide a better quality of life for the average person living under it. AOC understood and expressed this in 2020, shortly before the election, in an interview with vanity fair:

But the ending of this story is the same, no matter which man wins. America is “still in a lot of trouble,” warns AOC. There is a temptation to view Trump as an aberration, she says, rather than a wake-up call to failures of American government at large.

Under a President Biden, “if his life doesn’t feel different,” she points to a cab driver whizzing by our table, “if their life doesn’t feel different,” she gestures to people walking by the beauty shop and Bengali Halal Grocery, “if these people’s lives don’t actually feel different”—now she is giving a stump speech over her omelet—“we’re done. You know how many Trumps there are in waiting?”

harris could have — and would have — won if she moved the needle back to the left. kamala could have — and would have! — won if biden had codified roe vs. wade into law, or ended the sale of arms to israel, or instated universal healthcare, or done any of the other many, many things that would have created a positive association between himself and his successor, and a general feeling of goodwill toward the party she represents. instead, biden flailed to produce any meaningful left-leaning policies that would have tangibly improved the lives of their voters, and harris inherited a milquetoast political legacy that veered further and further from everyday american’s interests with each passing day.

from “why biden’s team think harris lost” by franklin foer

harris was at her best and most compelling when she was on the offensive, because nobody in this country currently believes things are going well. people disagree vastly about the means to achieving something better for themselves and their children, but nobody, prior to the bump that maga supporters and neonazis have gotten in the past two days, feels like the state of the world is in good shape. people want someone to fight for them! people want their political candidates to seem like they genuinely give a shit! even if you or i can go line-for-line through trump’s candidacy and see every instance where he broke a promise and betrayed someone, the fact of the matter is his supporters believe he is going to fight for them. harris dropped the fight against big business after being urged by her brother-in-law, who is uber’s chief legal office, that this strategy wouldn’t win the support of CEOs. she dropped her “weird” comments (and muzzled tim walz) in an effort to win over moderates. she, again, decided to campaign with liz fucking cheney.

harris’s “weird” attack worked because it characterized the far right as not only fascists, but also just as fucking weirdos — which fascists always are. fascists want to believe — need to believe — that everyone else thinks like them. fascists and authoritarians in general have an undying desire, above all else, to appear normal, for their beliefs to be normalized. this is not something we can or should ever allow them to belief. harris calling shit weird when it IS weird is what energized people to feel like maybe this was a campaign she could win, because it did what politicians have refused to do for too long — it refused to take their arguments or methods as valid, and instead shut the far right down before they could even be debated further. when she abandoned these convictions, in favor of winning moderates, she didn’t just move her campaign to the right. she also normalized a boatload of far-right talking points by presenting them as legitimate policy options in an effort to capture moderate or right-wing voters, which will now be an issue that’s already been legitimized in every upcoming election season debate for the rest of our lifetimes.

trump is able to energize people because he taps into people’s economic fear, and like all fascists everywhere, redirects this fear of a lowering quality-of-life onto outside groups and agitators: antifa, mexican rapists, muslims from shithole countries, haiti-americans who want to kill and eat your dog, etc. not surprisingly, bernie emerged as the frontrunner for the presidential nomination in 2016 at the same time that trump was on his own rise to power. both bernie and trump recognized that the average u.s.american is deeply apathetic, feels betrayed by traditional party lines, and is struggling to make ends meet. trump directed that fear into anger at the proverbial other, stoking centuries of white american racism and xenophobia into a burning fire; bernie, meanwhile, offered a left-wing populist analysis (and fact-based explanation) for people’s general worry and malcontent: unchecked capitalism, wealth inequality, and the destruction of the welfare state over the past forty years through republican budget cuts and neoliberal privatization.

consider this map from the new york times in 2020 tracking where small donations to democrats running in the primary came from:

every candidate, besides bernie, is essentially wiped off the map except for in their respective home states. and a home state going to bat for their candidate means nothing in terms of converting any of the popular vote from other states into actual ballots cast — consider the case of the 1984 election, where mondale, running against reagan, won exactly zero states, except for his own.

people want candidates they can believe in and candidates that are firm in their convictions. bernie has been espousing the same “medicare for all” chant for forty-something years. he marched in the civil rights movement. he wears what looks like the same three suits. he is, for all and intents and purposes, one of the best chances at defeating america’s nascent and inherent fascist bent that we have ever had on the national stage. but it’s not just bernie. contrast kamala’s swing to the right and subsequent failure at the polls to ilhan omar and rashida tlaib, who received 75 and 69.7% of the vote, respectively.

or consider AOC, who actually received MORE votes from her district’s constituents than kamala harris did.

in dearborn, michigan, the biggest city with an arab-american majority in the united states, kamala lost to trump by nine percentage points. jill stein, who has famously spoken out in defense of palestine, won a whopping 15% of the vote — after the green party eked out only one percentage point in the 2020 election. (in 2020, biden won a massive 69% of the total vote, compared to trump’s thirty.) tlaib won precisely because she refused to capitulate to the national democratic party’s pressure to rally behind harris in a time when her constituents in particular are desperate for an end to the genocide. the public persona and policy that tlaib presented to the dearborn population while running for office has proved remarkably consistent throughout the last eight years, with the representative refusing to double back on her commitment to her community or throw her endorsement behind someone betraying the people she was elected to represent.

tlaib during netanyahu’s address to congress in late july.

kamala, meanwhile, lost not just dearborn, but all of michigan — by 82,000 votes.

by contrast, in protest of the genocide, more than 100,000 Michiganders voted uncommitted in the democratic primary instead of casting a vote for joe biden.

predictably, other democrats aside from kamala have fallen into line with the democratic party’s status quo and advocated for a more rightward shift — even after their own and many others’ losses from doing just that. democrat tom suozzi, a representative from new york, made a series of post-election comments stating that the election was lost because the democrat’s campaigns went too far left, predictably and immediately throwing trans people — one of the most vulnerable demographics on the planet — under the unstoppable bus of democrats blaming everybody but their own campaigns for their failure at the polls: a less than twenty-four-hour turnover to scapegoating the people he claims to represent. suozzi stated that democrats “have to stop pandering to the far left,” and then proceeded to parrot far-right transphobic talking points, presumably in an effort to balance out the radical far-left actions that the harris campaign has taken lately, such as harris saying, “i will ensure america has the strongest, most lethal military force in the world.” or what about the radical left belief that we need to further “secure” our borders from the threat of outside enemies? or the most leftist behavior of them all — befriending liz cheney.

representative suozzi, for the record, was outperformed at the polls by a ballot measure supporting trans right in his own district. the new york rep won but barely, scraping out a 51.3 percent majority of the vote compared to the equal protections measure, which specifically contains protections for gender identity and expression, and got 61% of the vote. which, hey, is good enough even for florida.

suozzi’s hard right turn following the widespread democratic loss is anything but isolated, however. democratic strategist david axelrod espoused similarly tone-deaf rhetoric on cnn, stating that kamala’s loss was at least partially due to, “the fear about israel not being protected—there was never a response from the campaign on that—” a view that, in spite of not being attached to reality in any significant or measurable way, both of the hosts vigorously agreed with. this is the mainstream democratic party’s takeaway from this failed election, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary: in spite of kamala’s unfailing and total support of israel, both financially and vocally; in spite of the majority of u.s. americans supporting an arms embargo; in spite of undecided voters (and in swing states, no less!) stating they would be more likely to vote for a nominee who would end the sale of arms to israel.

tlaib winning by a nearly 3:1 ratio when harris lost by nine full points are because tlaib, like sanders, is consistent, impassioned, and speaks to her constituents both honestly and as if she gives a shit about them — all of which should just be the lowest acceptable bar that we hold our politicians to anyway s. (harris, meanwhile, ignored palestinian protestors with a quippy, embroidered-on-etsy-shops-into-oblivion faux girlboss line: the ever-so-famous, nail-in-the-election-coffin “i’m speaking.”)

people do not trust establishment democrats right now, because the dems held near-total representational power for the past four years and failed to make the average american feel like their life had gotten any better. trump is twisting this moment of institutional distrust to his benefit. bernie acted on institutional distrust too; but unlike trump, his party ultimately refused to embrace him because doing so would mean a disruption to their own mega-donor class and financial windfalls. bernie’s campaigns were both sacrificed, alongside the fight for medicare for all and a living wage, precisely because the people in charge do not want things to change.

tlaib, like bernie, and even like trump, represents to her constituents a break from the mainstream political machine: a machine which, for middle eastern-americans in particular, is currently crushing their relatives and family members back home into a bloody fucking pulp. tlaib stands up for her constituents and for palestinians even standing when standing up alone, even in the face of political backlash — including being censured by the house of representatives. compare her steady, uncompromising performance to how most of the mainstream democratic party’s campaign promises have failed to materialize. just this summer, joe biden was begging campaign donors for money to help re-elect him so that he could retain the presidency and then — and only then — finally codify roe vs. wade into law. nowhere in the first two years of his presidency, when democrats controlled both the house and the senate in addition to the white house, did biden make any moves to protect abortion rights. he walked back his campaign promise to prevent new oil and gas drilling, instead signing off on the willow project, one of the largest oil projects ever undertaken on public lands. he embraced fracking (and kamala’s 2024 campaign followed suit, a flip from her position in the 2020 democratic primary), despite running on the popular notion that democrats are the party that believes in science. (what those kitschy little yard signs fail to understand is that believing in science is secondhand to worshipping the death cult of capitalism, and whatever inconvenient facts are trotted out that stand against profits will be disposed of as soon as they are acknowledged for electoral gain.) he failed to repeal trump-era tax cuts that benefitted the super-wealthy, a reversal which would have generated a pool of money for the national budget, money which could have then been used for programs that could have actually helped everyday americans through the current corporate price-gauging, cost-of-living crisis, and utter lack of affordable housing. (although probably if he had reinstated higher tax cuts on the wealthy, that money would have just ended up in the same place as the thirty-nine million dollars-per-day that washington, d.c. has voted to send to israel between 10/07/20203 and 10/08/2024.) his staff and party at large refused to acknowledge the truth of his cognitive decline, or the fact that israel is committing a genocide with our tax dollars, leaving him in the race well past the point of primary season. and then the democratic party nominated kamala, without a primary, without any sort of vote amongst the people, and set her up and running on the same platform as biden, and tried to galvanize voters by simply promising them more of the same.

trump didn’t win because he converted more voters, or because the general population became more right-wing than in 2020 when he ran against biden. according to current tallies, trump received less votes than he did in 2020. trump won because kamala didn’t give people anything to vote for.

who represents the working class? who represents bodily autonomy? who represents an alternative to late-stage capitalism cannibalizing the earth and itself in search of ever more higher GDPs and profits? and when will we have collectively decided that enough is enough, that we do give a fuck about the state of the world and the future of the planet, that we will hold politicians accountable and set out to remind us that they are accountable to us? other countries do it. france holds a riot every time the parliament there threatens to slash thirty minutes off their two-hour lunch breaks, which is how they get two-hour lunch breaks in the first place. french politicians are scared of the french people, because they know the french people will hold them accountable and take them to task on it. u.s. politicians, meanwhile, will call their own base idiots and then turn around and commit insider trading and then the people they’re tasked with representing will apologize for not supporting them harder. i return to the camus quote i offered at the beginning of this piece:

every time i hear a political speech or i read those of our leaders, i am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. it is always the same words telling the same lies. and the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble — yes, gamble — with a whole part of their life and their so-called “vital interests.”

the state apparatus only runs because we continue to let it run. turning the momentum even an inch to the left is going to be difficult, especially since trump told christian supporters just last month, “in four years, you won’t have to vote again. we’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

trump is dangerous precisely because he is mobilizing people on their emotions, instead of on policy or logical appeals. the democrats have shown they are unwilling to mount a serious campaign against him and are incapable of grasping what exactly voters need from an alternative to trump to lure them away from his edifice of lies. they are not incompetent; they are not the good guys; they are complicit.

the question is, will you be complicit too?

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the manic pixie dream girl’s guide to existential angst is a sometimes free newsletter (and the occasional poem) from joelle schumacher, as well as their weekly fake horoscope forecast. if you enjoy their work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, and/or subscribe to or write in to their advice column (but preferably and, instead of or).