What Do Resistance Libs Want?

And what does that tell us?

There are parts of Nate Silver’s article about “Heather Cox Richardsonism” that I agree with and parts that I don’t, but the part that I think is emphatically true is that three groups are fighting for control of the Democratic Party. Silver calls these groups “Abundance Libs”, “Resistance Libs”, and “the Capital-L Left”, but I think it’s more fun to call them Techno Weenies, The Khmer Blue, and Trust Fundinistas. For the record, I’m a Techno Weenie, so be aware that this column is written by someone who is trying to foment a political sea-change based on support for single-stair buildings.

The most contentious part of Silver’s article is the part where he calls The Khmer Blue/Resistance Libs/Heather Cox Richardson types “the Democratic equivalent of the Tea Party”. There are ways that the group is like the Tea Party and ways that they’re not, and Silver spends his column describing which features he sees as similar and dissimilar. Of course, identifying political factions is hard, because they’re amorphous groups with myriad beliefs, and — since this is politics — everyone involved is at least slightly crazy. But I think a bit of clarity can be added by asking a question that’s common in screenwriting: What do these characters want?

“What do they want?” is the question that screenwriters ask ourselves when we’re totally blocked and convinced that the world is about to discover that we’re talentless frauds (>90 percent of the time). If you know what a character wants, you can get into their head and predict what they’re going to do next, which allows you to push the story forward. And that, in turn, allows you to keep scoring the free food and gratis airfare that were the reason you got into screenwriting in the first place.