Here is a thing that Republicans do not do when they sweep into power: They do not bother brainstorming ways that they can signal a values match with the people who oppose them, and whom they have just defeated. They do not look around, blinking, from the hilltop they have just won, and fret about appealing to the vanquished foes lying half-dead at their feet. When Republicans win, they set about changing the laws, or using the existing laws to their advantage. That is the job. Republican lawmakers express their values through the laws that they make and enforce. They do not get sidetracked by the idea that they can make friends with progressives, and not only because they know that their voters do not want them to do that. They perceive an authentic mismatch of values, and their solution to that is to make progressives eat shit.
You will say that this is a weakness of their politics. You will point to their long-dwindling popularity and last week's electoral bloodbath, and say that their reflexive and idiotic tribalism is a terminal illness, and that Democrats should learn from it only that it is self-defeating. You fool. Here you have done them the favor of flattening the actual, substantive, qualitative differences between the goals of the right and the left.
You shouldn't do that, because those differences are important. People on the left want things—actual tangible things: laws and institutions and structures—that make sense, that arise from active, curious, engaged minds thinking deeply about how to run a community of any size or complexity. Those things are aimed at the goal of making society more equitable and less brutal, and making life more dignified and less degrading.
We vote for our guys in the often doomed-seeming but nevertheless morally and intellectually coherent hope that our guys, once in power, will do things that make sense, and that the things they do will be of great and lasting benefit to everyone, with the notable exception of, basically, Elon Musk and his pals. Our solution to the mismatch of values is to improve everyone's experience of being alive, so that even morons cannot deny that our way of doing things produces good outcomes. The conservative project, for longer than any of us have been alive, has been to make sure that the people who want to do all that never get a fair chance to do it.
The Republican Party stands today on the very brink of annihilation. The comprehensive flipping of Texas, the further banking of North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona, and the sudden shocking gains in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alaska, represent together an extinction-level threat to the modern GOP. Democrats have a first-ever, incredibly precious opportunity to do big immediate things to improve people's lives, to prove the case that progressives have been making all along, to make it impossible for all but the dumbest assholes alive to deny that progressive policies work. Housing affordability, student debt, healthcare, education spending, infrastructure, data centers, the job market, the social safety net—there are gains to be made across the board. The Metropolitan Abundance Project published a detailed how-to this morning for blue-controlled states to take housing affordability into their own hands and make rapid, significant, and enduring progress on behalf of regular working-class people. Democrats are empowered with a real and unmistakable mandate, and one which could prove long-lasting if they can lean on vulnerable threatened colleagues in state, county, and city legislatures, drag them into line, and get things penciled and moving. This is a rare, real chance to prove what good government can do.
Which party should be soul-searching today? Which party's members should be thinking about how to tell the people who oppose them why actually they are not so bad after all, and maybe deserve some small benefit of the doubt? Is it the people in control of all the buttons and knobs, who have just been handed the controls to the ship, or is it the guys who were just stuffed face-down into a trash can?
Ezra Klein and Adam Jentleson devoted a podcast episode this week to explaining why Democrats should be thinking about winning a supermajority of Congress in 2028. Toward that end, Jentleson, the founder of a think tank and the former chief of staff to John Fetterman, advises Democrats to devote effort, today, to adopting "heterodox" positions in order to strengthen their appeal with the kinds of granite-skulled death cultists who voted red even in these historically lopsided midterms. Jentleson identifies Democratic midterm victors who broke with party orthodoxy in notable ways—on fossil fuels, say, or abortion, or whether trans kids should be allowed to play high school sports—and uses them to make the case that the key to success is to maximize the capacity of the Democratic tent. He argues, quite stupidly, that Democrats have been guilty in the past of "chasing away" liberals who disagree "at the margins" of tentpole party values, as if Democrats haven't been running aw-shucks half-conservatives and grotesque prosecutors in red districts my entire fucking life, as if the largest part of the public's perception of Democrats as weak and malleable can't be pinned entirely on their refusal ever to fucking stand for anything.
Jentleson identifies with Klein some positions that Democrats can take, going forward, to further strengthen their identity as a big-tent party for everyone who is not literally Donald Trump. He considers a voter who is angry at billionaire CEOs but also wants to terrorize and deport immigrants to be holding "big, bold ideas," a category of ideas that Jentleson argues ought to be palatable to Democrats. Sharing too many of the ideas and values of your fellow progressives will signal to these big, bold idea-havers that you are not an independent thinker. You should sprinkle into your rational, ethical, evidence-based, and morally upright ideas some tasteful amount of ground-up glass. That will signal, to braindead focus-group moderates and also to the consultants who hope to be paid for giving advice like this, that you have authentically sustained the right kind of closed head wound. The kind that makes you electable.
You might try running against homeless encampments, for votes, says Jentleson, without offering any suggestion for where the people living there might be moved. You should try arguing against social promotion in school, not because it is a horror of a compromise thrust onto catastrophically under-resourced school systems precisely as a consequence of longstanding conservative contempt for public education, but because some subset of comically stupid NFL-brained assholes thinks that Democrats are the "everyone-gets-a-trophy" party. And the dumbest and cruelest of these: You should somehow make it known to your electorate that you are "open to spanking." It's culturally loaded, says Jentleson, but spanking connects with voters "on a values basis." Jentleson told Jeff Stein of the Washington Sun on Tuesday that spanking is from a group of "a lot of issues that carry very strong signal with voters that aren’t the ones we are constantly debating," as if that is an argument for raising them as a campaign issue.
Let's leave aside the question of how, exactly, a candidate for public office is supposed to signal to voters that they are unapologetically Open To Spanking without winding up on a public list of sex offenders. Let's also leave aside that voters can be wrong about things, en masse, and that being on the side of what is right, in opposition to what is popular or expedient at that moment, is pretty much all that is meant when you say that someone is a good person. There is also the matter of spanking not being a matter of broad public debate or policy dispute. The reason for that is because there is no lobby for terrified 8-year-olds. There are just children who are being beaten by their parents, behind closed doors, without telling anyone. The cynicism of making a show of your openness to that dynamic in order to make yourself palatable to the people doing the beating is breathtaking.
My own dad tried spanking. My impression, all these years later, is that the effort didn't last long. I hope that it was because he hated doing it. As an 8-year-old, it was terrifying and humiliating, and it hurt, physically. He did some other things well, as a parent. He was funny and engaged, and he talked to us and took us seriously. When I was old enough to decide for myself, I tried to basically never be in his company, for a period of years. The times where he was violent with me are now so much sharper and clearer in my memory than everything else that they have become the defining shape of the part of my childhood where we shared a roof; I barely remember anything else.
I did not learn discipline or accountability from being hit by my father. I learned to be terrified of my father. If violence was not the cause of the fucked-up and stunted notions of personal responsibility that I took all the way into adulthood, it certainly did not improve matters. The absolute idealessness that my father's violence demonstrated left me with the very strong impression that no one should be a parent, ever, because being a parent meant being so compromised and so overwhelmed by an 8-year-old that you have no choice but to beat them up, which you can do only because you are larger. Even today I sometimes feel panic at the little frail roots that my dad's violence left inside of me, in moments when my best intentions as a parent are falling short.
Probably there are studies that say not to beat up your kid—that it doesn't work, or that in any case it does not produce better outcomes than any of 1,000 other things that you can try that do not involve violence. I'll be damned if I am going to read those things today. The reason to oppose spanking is because it sucks; this is self-evident. Equally true and equally obvious is that a reason to oppose Democrats is that they tell you that signaling is how they intend to win your vote, rather than by improving your life. The reason to oppose a candidate who wedges in a note about their openness to spanking is because they have just told you that they are willing to traumatize kids, not necessarily because they believe it works as a parenting strategy, but because you seem to, and because they aren't invested enough in anyone's wellbeing to argue for anything better. They want you in the tent. That's all they want.
If you're going to beat someone up to prove that you should be voted into office, start with Democratic consultants.
