We Are Losers

And we need to examine why and attempt to change it

One of the only blessings of last night was that the scale of Kamala Harris’s defeat was so devastating that there won’t be much room for if-not-but-for-ing. There’s no equivalent to 2016’s “Why didn’t she campaign in Wisconsin?” (the leading candidate would have been “Why didn’t Harris choose Josh Shapiro”?). Harris got absolutely destroyed.

I hope, but am not holding my breath, that the thoroughness of the thumping will drive home a point that has been clear to many of us for a while: The anti-Trump movement is a broken, ineffectual, frequently self-sabotaging mess that cannot be salvaged. It needs to be burnt down (NOT LITERALLY) and rebuilt into something more effective and less delusional. This movement consists of far too many individuals who, having gotten way too high on their own supply, have spent the last few years wandering around like zombies, chanting strange mantras and scaring the normie neighbors. They need to be taken by the arm and guided gently to the nearest comfy chair for a long, restorative rest while people whose eyes are less bloodshot take over.

I don’t mean “the anti-Trump movement” in a derogatory or conspiratorial way. I simply mean the large group of individuals who get paid, at least in part, to fight Trump and Trumpism. The existence of such a group isn’t unusual; Trump happens to be the most powerful conservative politician in the United States (and probably the world¹) right now, so naturally there’s a great deal of opposition to him. Between 2000 and 2008 there was a similar anti-Bush movement, and from 2008 to 2016 there was an anti-Obama movement. 

The anti-Trump movement is a diverse group which spans multiple fields, including media, activism, and academia. It also spans a sizable chunk of the political spectrum, from relatively hard-left to center-right. As much as I would like to distance myself from this group, I’m at least a part-time member, because I do sometimes write about politics from an anti-Trump perspective.

Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to make sweeping claims about a big, diverse group — especially one beset by frequent disagreement and infighting. But in this case, I think there’s more than enough evidence to conclude, with all precincts reporting, that we are absolute losers. 

Or maybe I shouldn’t use we — maybe I can weasel out of it because I don’t endorse every claim of the anti-Trump movement and because politics really isn’t my main thing by a long shot. But the point is simply that the anti-Trump movement’s decade-long attempts to define Trump as beyond the pale, as racist, as evil, as a threat to America, and on and on and on, has failed utterly and completely and spectacularly. By nearly every available metric, at the level of averages, American voters have marched away from these claims: Trump has gained significant ground among just about every group supposedly threatened and/or offended by him, including black and Latino voters (that’s an interesting NPR interview from this morning that is worth listening to). 

While I find some common anti-Trump claims to be exaggerated, I endorse a lot of them. I have extremely negative sentiments toward the man and think he’s unfit to govern. That’s the thing, though: while my feelings may be important to me — I feel them very strongly, in fact! — to a certain approximation they don’t fucking matter, because I am so far from the median American voter. 

“My feelings don’t really matter to this debate” is a difficult thing for any human to understand, since we’re all trapped in our own heads, creating our own fake little universes. But it’s particularly difficult when it comes to the anti-Trump movement. They — okay, back to we — consist disproportionately of highly educated, intellectually self-satisfied individuals who are confident in the moral and intellectual rectitude of our worldviews. And for those of us who enjoy genuine platforms, who make a living with our words, smugness is a ubiquitous temptation — we are the winners, enjoying the spoils of having somehow come out on top in an increasingly winner-take-all attention economy.

But I think it’s important to realize that we’re only the winners in a shallow, materialist sense. Which is more important: our own personal prosperity or the direction of our country? On that latter front, we aren’t the winners. We are the losers. Our most treasured values have been repudiated by our fellow Americans in two of the last three elections. The question now is: What are we going to do about it?

One possible route is to pretend we are the winners. This is going to be particularly tempting for those at the very top of the pyramid. For example, last night Joy Reid was on her Joy Reid kick about white women and the patriarchy. Joy Reid gets paid very well to Joy Reid, and for a lot of normal, human reasons, she is likely to endorse the view that she is the winner, and that all those losers — the losers who outnumber her and who keep voting for someone she views as the embodiment of human evil — will just have to get in line. Maybe if she criticizes them enough, the Democrats will eke out a win in 2036 against whatever truly grotesque sequel to Trump and J.D. Vance the GOP comes up with.

I don’t generally want to blame people for their emotional day-after tweets and takes, but the stuff I’m seeing from pundits again pinning the blame on racism or sexism, like this one from Joan Walsh…

…really is delusional and, if I’m being honest, infuriating. Pundits like Walsh have been banging the same drum for a decade, and it hasn’t worked. If Walsh wants to spend the rest of her career feeling good about herself, and making her audience feel good about themselves, sure, keep it up. Pornography is a recession-proof industry. But if I were in Walsh’s position, and viewed fighting Trump as a major part of my professional identity, at a certain point I’d start to feel a bit of shame over my track record.

Now: My argument is not that a lot of voters got annoyed by Joan Walsh and/or Joy Reid and therefore decided to vote for Trump. The average voter does not know who even Joy Reid, the bigger of the two names, is. My argument, rather, is that a very large chunk of the anti-Trump movement’s resources are being squandered on people and ideas that are ineffectual at best or counterproductive at worst, and that if defeating the present, curdled incarnation of the GOP is as important as anti-Trumpers claim it is, a lot of the ‘winners’ within the anti-Trump econsystem should stand down (LOL) or be replaced. Because they are failures! They are undeniably failures. That doesn’t mean they’re bad people or irresponsible pet owners, or that every word they’ve written is false, or that they don’t have insights on this or that issue — it just means that they set out on a big, important quest, and they’ve failed miserably. In well-functioning human institutions and movements, people who fail get demoted or replaced. Will that happen here? Have they really earned more chances?

There are a few reasonable-sounding objections to my indictment of the anti-Trump movement. I don’t have it in me to respond to all of them, so I’ll just choose one: Trump won because of a combination of economic concerns (perceived or real) and widespread dissatisfaction with the Biden campaign’s handling of the border, and other issues, and no anti-Trump movement (or Democratic candidate) could have really done anything about these difficult on-the-ground facts.

I don’t think this gets the anti-Trumpers off the hook. First, a lot of them confidently averred that these weren’t real problems, pointing to charts and graphs showing this or that fact about border encounters being down, or inflation not being as bad as many people think, and on and on and on. In some cases, they may have been right, technically! But voters don’t vote on the basis of what some nerd with a chart says; they vote on their vibes about how certain things are going. Which means that if your goal is to beat Trump, you need to understand their vibes and come up with an argument that meets the voters in question where they’re at — not one that sounds like something from a message board for macroeconomics PhDs. 

Second, if your argument is “there was nothing we could do about this,” that’s not an argument. There are plenty of people who aren’t quite so fatalistic, so maybe hand them the keys and go retire somewhere if you’re not up for this.

Third, look at this (as-yet-incomplete) map from the New York Times showing what we know so far about which counties shifted in which direction relative to 2020:

Maybe this is my most circumstantial and least careful argument, but I just think that if the anti-Trump movement had had any success painting Trump the way they wanted to paint him, we wouldn’t have seen this sort of bloodbath in both red and blue states. Orange Man Bad has just failed, entirely, as an argument, or at the very least it has proven puny in the face of other factors.

It could be that certain media properties, like Joy Reid’s, can enjoy continued profitability by producing pornography for Trump opponents. She and MSNBC have every right to make this business decision. But if left-of-center American politics is to have any meaningful success at the national level in the near-term, the voices of whiny losers need to be marginalized in favor of newer, more reality-based, and less sanctimonious ones. That won’t guarantee any sort of success in the future, of course, but it’s an absolutely necessary first step.

I’m not offering a lot of solutions here, and the fact is I’m hoping to really turn away from politics for a while and back to this newsletter’s red meat (let’s see how successful I am). In terms of the rough contours of a possible way forward, I leave you with Matt Yglesias:

There has been a lot of strategic investment in a deliberate project of narrowing the progressive tent both by purging a few and by intimidating others out of speaking their minds and it’s basically worked. 

The problem is you just lose!

And with Rachel Cohen:

[I] am doubtful that most groups will do serious reflection and reconsideration of their strategy and demands because their organizational incentives are primarily not about actually winning, one of the saddest dynamics to me about contemporary politics

At the end of the day, much of this really will come down to a choice: How important is winning to you versus feeling good about yourself and being congratulated by your peers at your ever-shrinking coalition’s annual conferences and galas? I strongly suspect that in the case of many anti-Trump stalwarts, I know the answer — and it’s depressing as hell.

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Questions? Comments? Citizen petitions for me to take over Joy Reid’s slot on MSNBC? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal.

Image: US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris arrives to speak during a campaign rally on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 4, 2024. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

1. Kill me.