An electoral defeat like the one just suffered by Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party is guaranteed to keep the Recrimination Engine redlined throughout the weeks and months to come. Right now, it's impossible to turn on the news, read a mainstream liberal publication, or scroll through social media without immediately being confronted with someone's diagnosis of where it all went wrong for the Democrats, followed by a strident declaration about what needs to happen next.
The worst versions of this ritual are undertaken for the sake of self-preservation. Pundits and politicians are scrambling to define the terms of the defeat in whatever fashion will most easily allow them to hang onto their influence. This is why Bernie Sanders, who just spent the last four years enthusiastically stumping for Joe Biden and his administration, is suddenly reaming out the Democratic Party for having abandoned the working class. It's why a pundit like Matt Yglesias, a liberal in name only who just watched the Harris campaign completely eat shit while running on the kind of centrist policies he has long championed, has to quickly invent a new reality in which Harris lost because she somehow wasn't centrist enough.
As annoying as this song and dance can be to watch—yeah, Matt, Harris would have swept the battlegrounds if she had said "academics and nonprofit staffers do not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private sector workers" in her stump speech—it does bring with it a useful opportunity. A comprehensive and omnidirectional defeat like the one the Harris campaign just experienced essentially clears the decks, leaving every idea and policy position up for grabs to those who consider themselves responsible for charting the future of the Democratic Party. That makes this moment a rare period in which pundits and politicians—inherent cowards who spend every other waking moment calibrating and recalibrating their positions based on their shifting perceptions of what is acceptable and lucrative—are free to try to push the party in whatever direction they want, and to say the things they actually want to say.
One item on Yglesias's list of cures for the Democratic Party stuck out: "While race is a social construct, biological sex is not." That is nothing but polite pundit-speak for I would like for Democrats to engage more forcefully in anti-trans bigotry. It's a sentiment that was put in less polite terms by Democratic representatives Tom Suozzi and Seth Moulton, both of whom summoned the specter of "biological boys" playing sports with girls to make their case for bigotry as policy.
A talking point like this doesn't emerge spontaneously. Its arrival is a pretty clear sign that there is a faction within the Democratic Party that is eager to turn trans people into scapegoats. It's hard to think of any reaction to Tuesday's election results that could be more reprehensible or strategically inert than this one. The Democrats just watched practically every segment of the electorate, in every state in the country, turn its back on the party, and one of the first ideas that's been floated for winning back all those millions of voters is We need to get more aggressive about hassling the small handful of trans children and teenagers in this country who are just trying to have fun playing sports with their friends.
They're saying a lot more than that, of course. They are saying that their political imaginations cannot conceive of a world that doesn't require the constant sacrifice of someone else's rights and dignity. It's always easier to shove someone out of the tent than to investigate what's actually causing it to collapse, and now it is the trans community that has been deemed an expendable part of the coalition.
As distasteful as it is to watch this happen, it's also useful. None of us can cure people like Suozzi and Yglesias and Moulton of their bigotry, but we can leverage their cowardice against them. Equality in this country has only ever been advanced from the bottom up; politicians can only be counted on to take up the cause once it becomes politically unviable to do anything else. Back in 2020, Yglesias was making the case for Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee, because the ascendance of the Sanders campaign gave him the impression that doing so was the best career move. A year later, he was making the case that what the party actually needed was more Joe Manchins. A few days before the 2012 election, Joe Biden called the protection of trans people "the civil rights issue of our time." Today, his surrogates are claiming that, if he'd continued campaigning, he would have turned his back on trans people. These people can be moved in any direction, including the correct one, not because they are open-minded or particularly impressionable, but because they are punks with low character.
We cannot follow the cues that these bozos are now trying to give while they wait for new cultural and political winds to start blowing their sails. The Trump campaign just spent months spraying a firehose of anti-trans bigotry at every American who sat down to watch a sporting event, and now Democrats are signaling that they'd like to start pushing in that same direction. It's up to everyone else to push back.
