Trump Laid a Trap and Democrats Went Into It Genitals-First
Nice job, dummies
I didn’t watch the State of the Union address; unfortunately, it aired at the same time as a 20 year-old episode of Peep Show that I’ve only seen seven times.1 But I woke up this morning to find this moment everywhere on Twitter:
IMHO, of course Democrats should have stood up. Obviously your “first job” as an elected official is to represent the people who elected you, not anyone else. The statement is true if you put any other group in the sentence: “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not Austrians.” Yes, of course — Austrians have their own weird, lederhosen-wearing government to protect them, the American government is for Americans. Plus, if Democrats had stood up, Trump would have been screwed — it would have been like the Louis CK joke about the “do you like apples” scene in Good Will Hunting.
Presented with an opportunity to literally stand up for the American people and leave Trump with his dick twisting in the wind, congressional Democrats instead provided a snippet for Republican attack ads this fall. I sometimes wonder if these people are simply not smart. But what’s done is done, and I’d like to talk about how I think this incident demonstrates why a leftward lurch won’t work for Democrats the same way that a rightward lurch has worked for Republicans.
Democrats are picking a new generation of leaders; we’re choosing congressional candidates and will nominate a president after 10-12 months of trying to get the candidates to say things that will make them unelectable. People like me think that a hard shift left would be disastrous for Democrats; for example, I think that Jasmine Crockett would be sure to lose in Texas,2 and I can’t imagine a world in which Democratic Nominee AOC clears 175 electoral votes. But there are other people — typically on (surprise!) the far left — who think that a leftward shift for Democrats could work. After all: Hasn’t the GOP drifted right and still stayed competitive? And weren’t all the Jeb-loving centrists in the GOP who thought that Trump couldn’t win proven wrong? Those are good points. But I think that a shift to extremes won’t work for Democrats for one mundane reason and one deep-seated psychological reason.
The mundane reason is that Democrats will never win the Senate if their 50 percent of the electorate is concentrated in 40 percent of the states. Democrats have to win in places like Texas, Iowa, and Ohio to control the Senate. The average number of states won by the Democrat in presidential elections since 2000 is 22,3 so the “normal” number of Senators Democrats can expect is about 44. “You win the red states and we’ll win the blue states” is a recipe for long-term minority status in the upper chamber.
The psychological reason is that I think people process extreme left-wing views more negatively than extreme right-wing views. To be clear: I don’t think that people like right-wing extremism. Trump’s success is partly due to the fact that he convinced people that he’s more moderate than he is — it probably perversely helped that Trump separated himself from Christian Coalition types by being That Philandering New York Guy for 30 years. But the modern GOP has banished moderates, their think tanks and media organs are shot through with extremists, and Trump often governs more like a 4th century warlord than a modern president. But despite all that, the GOP is still about as successful as it was when George W. Bush coined the term “compassionate conservative” to bring some Mommy energy to the Republican side.
But as much as people see extreme right-wingers as overzealous bastards, they’re at least overzealous bastards for the in-group. It’s the old “he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” thing. To the extent that Trump is more Chieftain than president, he’s unquestionably a Chieftain for the American tribe. And therefore people sometime dislike his methods but broadly see his goals as directionally correct.
Extremists on the left, though, are seen as siding with the out-group. And that’s because…well, because they often do side with the out-group. There’s a long history of far leftists siding with the Soviet Union, Cuba, or — more recently — Hamas. There is currently a dialogue on Twitter about a crazy woman taking a dump on a New York subway train, and a small number of people are siding with the subway pooper — some folks will do anything except take society’s side. This orientation is rightly seen as anti-social, and it’s hard to win people over when your message to those people is “you are the absolute worst”.
Trump’s SOTU gimmick was designed to place Democrats on the side of the out-group. And it worked — nice job, dummies. Democrats failed to stand up for the people who will be voting for them in November (or not!), so now, several months of backpedaling lie ahead. Just about the only saving grace for Democrats is that the gambit came nearly an hour in to Trump’s Heaven’s Gate-length speech, so most of America probably went to bed or dove into a pool of YouTube sludge before the crucial moment.
But Americans are not going to elect candidates who don’t put their needs first. And prioritizing Americans in no way implies indifference to non-Americans — in fact, a country’s priorities can very much include respecting the rights of foreigners. A smarter Democratic caucus would have stood and then explained afterwards that the whole problem is that Trump is doing a shit job at protecting Americans — that would be a lot more effective than the 70 different versions of “I didn’t hear the question” that we’re getting today. But…they sat. One last time: Nice job, dummies. And if Democrats think that Republicans’ mindless tribalism means they can engage in mindless tribalism of their own, I think they should think a little harder about who makes up the “tribe” in question.
I read the SOTU transcript, which you can do in ten minutes.
To be fair, IMHO Crocker’s shortcomings as a candidate have to do with more than her progressive politics; it’s also that she’s a divisive bomb-thrower, and I think that’s a turn-off to anyone except the most committed partisan.
Not counting DC — which shouldn’t count, because the goal here is to calculate expected Senate seats — and counting Nebraska and Maine for whichever candidate won most of their electoral votes.
Just a few weeks ago you argued that the average american voter doesn't have a long enough memory for the ICE shootings in minneapolis to make an impact. If you believe that, how can you believe voters will care about a "if you don't clap you're gay" style gotcha at the end of the SOTU months later? It isn't good optics, but saying democrats will have to spend months backpedaling is an overreaction
Why can’t a Dem who sat just say, when asked why he didn’t stand up, say “Because we’re not his monkeys”? Everyone can *feel*, viscerally, what Trump’s trying to do here. In fact, if they had played along and stood, I’d be the one saying “Nice job, dummies”