My name is David, welcome to my new blog. I’m starting this as a personal project for several reasons:
First, I realized in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the 2024 U.S. presidential election that I spend way too much time writing out my opinions on the internet. This happens across a variety of platforms, and yet none of it felt constructive or useful long-term. A blog gives me a place to do this writing more thoughtfully and constructively.
Second, I’ve been inspired by a spate of writers, including Anil Dash, Gita Jackson, and others to make halting steps away from centralized social media and towards a freer, more personalized internet. Corporate control of the internet has made it less democratic, effective, and fun. Blogs, blog-rings, personal websites, and independent news/social media are part of a broader vision for a decentralized and open internet.
This is congruent with the vision of the internet espoused by some of my personal heroes. In particular, Aaron Swartz died in the fight for an open internet, and hundreds of others have faced either incarceration, death, or censorship to make and protect the idea of the internet as an egalitarian, progressive space. With the internet largely consolidated to three or four big websites owned by awful billionaires, this kind of project feels more necessary than ever.
Third, as we approach a new year, I’m hopeful that this can become a means of building community and making the web a more fun and interactive place. I’ll endeavor to link to and discuss the work of others that I appreciate and admire, and it’s my hope that the folks who read this (all two to four of you!) will share things with me too. Together, we can turn this into something beautiful.
So, this past week, my girlfriend and I traveled to Jamaica to celebrate her birthday. We stayed in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth, which I thought would provide us a more authentic Jamaican experience vs. a major city like Montego Bay.
It didn’t disappoint: Treasure Beach was lovely, the people were all kind and helpful, and my girlfriend and I had a blast. But one thing that really fascinated and frustrated me was the quality of the roads in Jamaica. One could see how much Hurricane Beryl had damaged them. However, disasters often highlight already existing inequities. In the case of Beryl, it laid bare the ways in which colonialism and its lingering race and class divisions have bifurcated Jamaica. Because I am the way I am, I decided to dig deeper and investigate why the roads are like this.
To begin, a brief word on the political importance of roads. Beyond their literal importance (we need them to get around), roads are uniquely political. “Roads […] become dynamic sites for reflecting on the political, economic, and social issues facing the region…”(Fadellin 2020). Public roads built and maintained by the state show who and what the state deems to be important. The ways in which the state builds,maintains, and polices roads show its priorities.
What gets built and who it is built for means something.
Roads “press into the flesh” certain attitudes, assumptions, and modes of being (Fadellin, citing Appel et al. 26). In certain, non-sensational ways, roads and other infrastructure can be used to enact “violence” upon certain populations. Id. For example, look how the interstate highway system in the U.S. was used to destroy Black communities.
A Short Political History of Jamaica (and its roads)
Colonial Period
The history of Jamaica’s roads is largely tied to its history as a British colony and major site of chattel slavery. When England took Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, it was largely due to the fact that Spain had not been able to turn the island into a profitable enterprise and had failed to significantly invest in it. This disinterest in building infrastructure in the island was reflected in the island’s geography, where pretty much all development was concentrated in the north of the island or around ports and plantations.
This didn’t really change when the British took over — while plantation infrastructure was relatively well-developed, the roads connecting other parts of the island was virtually non-existent. This has not really changed in the time since the abolition of slavery. As Soile Ylivuori notes in “Settler Colonialism and Infrastructural Decay,” “the general condition of Jamaica’s road infrastructure seems to have changed surprisingly little in the past three hundred years.” (2024). She goes on to note that the geography of Jamaica’s infrastructure (and by extension its roads) is deeply tied up in race and class:
“On a social level, [infrastructure] contributed to the production of racialized, classed, and gendered difference in the West Indies. Muddy roads were easier to travel for a White man on horseback than a White woman in a carriage (which often got stuck in the mud or capsized) or a Black enslaved person traveling on foot. On plantations, enslaved workers were generally housed in “miserable huts” with “bare earth” floors, often placed in damp and unhealthy parts of the plantation, as the “planters have wisely fixed their own habitations in general upon elevated spots, in order to be secure from floods, which have sometimes been so violent on the lower grounds, as to sweep away buildings, cattle, and Negroes.”
She relates this to the idea of decay. The island’s climate rapidly destroyed things like roads, bridges, and houses, and race, gender, and class dictated whose infrastructure was maintained. The housing for enslaved folks was poorly maintained by the white settlers, while their own plantation homes were built up high with strong materials. This was doubly cruel because it was the enslaved folks forced to do the repair labor.
On the flip side, the challenging tropical climate was a useful tool in Maroon (those who escaped captivity and fought for freedom) resistance. As Ylivuori notes, “free Maroon towns, such as Nanny Town in the Blue Mountains, were deliberately built in remote and challenging locations for strategic reasons. Difficult to access and therefore to maintain, […] Maroon dwellings were also more vulnerable to tropical decay than those of White settlers.”
While the decay inherent to the island climate often meant that Black Jamaicans had to deal with poor roads and other bad infrastructures, it also assisted them in the fight for freedom. “[S]ince slavery was organized as an infrastructure network, it was highly dependent on material things such as ships, roads, and plantations—the decay of [those things] could also work to destabilize existing power structures.” Id. at 15. In this way, the poor general quality of Jamaica’s roads had the dual effect of entrenching and destabilizing power relations.
This became especially clear during the Maroon Wars, where the Maroons effectively exploited the lack of roads as part of the guerrilla tactics they employed against the British. Id. However, once slavery was abolished in Jamaica and Black folks won the right to vote, these structural disadvantages again served as a hindrance to Black political and economic progress.
The 1938 General Strike, The Rise of the Two-Party System, and Independence
At the turn of the 20th century, a Caribbean-wide workers movement washed ashore in Jamaica, bringingnew light to plight of Jamaica’s working class and, by extension, the deficient infrastructure that they had to deal with. The Great Depression basically killed the Jamaican sugar industry, leaving millions without work or with unlivable wages. In response, workers turned to organizing to try to improve their lots. This was met with brutal repression. The workers uprisings that began in 1929 came to a head in 1938 with a general strike that shocked the British Crown and presaged the end of colonial rule on the island.
Workers organized into a few different organizations. The two most prominent (at least at first) were the Trade Unions Council (TUC) and the People’s National Party (PNP), a left-wing/democratic socialist party. The PNP’s platform was fairly radical at the time, seeking independence from the British, universal suffrage for Black and brown Jamaicans, a strong social safety net, and spending on infrastructure.
One of its founders, Norman Manley, was inspired by British left-wing policies to pursue an aggressive reform program. The PNP’s project was initially fractured when one of its leaders — Alexander Bustamante — formed a rival organization — the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, split the PNP/TUC base. Bustamante, arrested by the British and released after an intense wave of public outcry, became a folk hero and, riding this wave of popular sentiment, became the “uncrowned king” of Jamaica. Bustamante’s influence was augmented by the sudden interest that the United States, mobilized by World War II, took in the island. In 1944, the British relented and passed major electoral reforms, including establishing a parliamentary government and establishing universal suffrage. While well-short of the demands that initially animated the uprising, it was a major win.
In 1943, Bustamante formed the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), a political outfit that was largely meant to expand his already considerable influence on the eve of independence. In the 1944 elections, the first with universal suffrage, the JLP beat back the PNP thanks largely to the support of working class Jamaicans.
Despite this working class mandate, Bustamante’s JLP government quickly became an organ of the British Empire and a defender of American economic interests. He defended British economic interests with verve, most notably moving to prevent the nationalization of Tate and Lyle, a British sugar company that had a near-monopoly on Jamaica’s agriculture. Tate and Lyle’s monopoly only exacerbated the centuries-long divestment in Jamaican road infrastructure, as public monies went towards bolstering the power and profits of a single conglomerate.
In addition, the JLP aggressively courted foreign companies using the promise of low taxes and no regulation — a precursor to the modern neoliberal cocktail — as a means of bootstrapping Jamaica’s economy. This worked on paper — GDP and other indices went up — but working class and poor Jamaicans didn’t see any material benefits.
This scuttling of working class and anti-colonial elements would continue into the 1960s, where a vote on Jamaica’s entry into the West Indies Federation — an effort by Manley and other progressives to build international anti-colonial solidarity — narrowly failed thanks in large part to Bustamante’s influence. This led to a stripped down freedom demand that culminated in Jamaica becoming a commonwealth nation. Nominally independent but still under the British Crown, the extractive relationship between Britain and Jamaica was maintained, now with rich Jamaicans as the island’s managers.
The Manley Moment
The pursuit of foreign investment and attendant lack of investment in the nation’s infrastructure and people caught up to Jamaica in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the collapse of the bauxite industry again created the conditions for an uprising. This coincided with the Black American Civil Rights and Black Power movements, which inspired similar freedom struggles across the Black Diaspora.
The co-mingling of class struggle and Black radical politics was very potent, and the JLP government used brutal violence to try to suppress it. In 1968, when the JLP government refused to allow prominent Black academic and activist Walter Rodney. The riots that this spurred ballooned into a broader reckoning that saw Jamaicans again embracing anti-colonial and worker-centric politics. This is the moment in Jamaica’s history from which its most well-known cultural products, most notably reggae, emerge.
The Michael Manley-led PNP undertook a series of increasingly radical reforms that sought to take full advantage of the popular mandate produced by the Black Power movement. An adult literacy program emulated the mass education programs in other left-wing nations, a public housing initiative sought to curtail homelessness. However, the two most radical programs are also the ones with direct implications on the state of Jamaica’s roads to this day: Project Land Lease, where the government acquired and then leased out land in hopes of putting it to productive use, and the nationalization of foreign-owned transport companies.
The purpose of both of these programs is clear — the PNP sought an industrial and economic policy of building up the poor and working class through direct redistribution of resources and the construction of both the physical and economic infrastructure needed for upward mobility. The land redistribution policy highlights exactly what the problem was for Jamaica’s road infrastructure — a small group of wealthy companies and landowners owned most of the land, and this led to asymmetric development and, in some cases, full-scale divestment. By ceding the lands to the poor and working class, the PNP government sought to shift this dynamic. The nationalization effort sought in part to unshackle the state of Jamaica’s infrastructure from bourgeois interests. In particular, the nationalization of trains and buses were meant to provide reliable transport across the country, connecting rural and poor areas to cities and wealthier ones.
This effort at fighting the vestiges of colonial rule and empowering the working class (and fixing the damn roads!) was ultimately cut short by an economic crisis and American meddling. As a result of socialist Jamaica’s staunch defense of other anti-colonial efforts in Africa and Asia, as well as its growing closeness to Cuba, the United States reduced trade with it and sought to box it out internationally. It also withdrew aid and discouraged tourism, which had become (and still is) a huge industry in Jamaica. Henry Kissinger, architect of some of America’s greatest foreign policy crimes, personally visited Jamaica to try and coerce Manley into abandoning Cuba. It did not work, and from then on, the U.S. actively sought to destabilize Jamaica’s government.
The U.S., through the JLP and its new head Edward Seaga, sought to use gang violence as a means of diminishing the PNP’s power. This strategy of using economic isolation and gang violence to challenge leftist governments in Latin America should be familiar to anyone with knowledge of the CIA’s activities in Argentina, Guatemala, or the Dominican Republic at that time. The resultant gang violence ravaged the country and further weakened Manley and the PNP’s political project.
In addition to the literal violence of the JLP’s gangs, Jamaica’s nascent socialism was stymied by insufficient funds. With foreign companies withholding investment and the IMF subjecting Jamaica to draconian loan terms, the country’s economic prospects darkened even as some of the government’s social spending produced meaningful increases in quality of life for the nation’s poor and working class. In 1977, after almost a decade of struggling against international capital, the PNP government accepted the IMF terms and began scaling back some of the major social democratic reforms that had ingratiated them to the working class. The living standards of the working class fell, and so too did efforts to fix the vestigial physical manifestations of colonial rule.
Modern Day — Neocolonial Retrenchment
Since then, Jamaica’s road infrastructure has largely been financed through public-private partnerships and loans from international organizations like the IMF. These efforts have concentrated development exactly where you’d expect — the U.S. and private lenders want to see return on their investments, and the IMF only wants to invest in economically “useful” developments (e.g., roads that bolster global capital).
Perhaps the most significant development has been the entry of China, who invested billions in Jamaica’s infrastructure through its Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI is China’s soft power colonial project, seeking to use debt and economic entanglement to force nations into its orbit. The United States and the West have largely let this initiative play out unimpeded, and the result has been a proliferation of fancy Chinese-backed infrastructure projects across the global South.
However, this kind of neocolonial parachuting is ill-fit to the actual needs of Jamaicans: the North-South highway largely connects two tourist destinations and isn’t regularly used by native Jamaicans. The tolls make the road prohibitively expensive for most Jamaicans, and the money doesn’t even go to the government, but to a private Chinese company. The near-billion dollar debt produced has made the economic plight of poor and working class Jamaicans even worse. In essence, it’s yet another example of how colonial (or neocolonial) attitudes have shaped Jamaica’s roads — the road serves the interests of the powerful, of foreigners, and of the wealthy, but not native Jamaicans or the working class.
The result of all this is the patchwork we see today. Some major thoroughfares are well-maintained, and the roads in major cities like Montego Bay are pretty good. But outside of that, the situation deteriorates pretty quickly. The Prime Minister of Jamaica, Andrew Holness (JLP) declared the poor roads a “national emergency” and pledged immediate funding and fixes, but it remains to be seen if these funds will go towards areas or projects that aren’t immediately beneficial to capital.
Why does any of this matter?
By this point, you’re probably thinking, “David, why couldn’t you just enjoy your vacation and not think broadly about the historical context and political implications of it?” Well, for me this is important for three primary reasons. First, I don’t like being frustrated or upset by something without knowing why that thing is how it is. To simply be mad that the roads connecting Jamaica are poor is, to me, a half-thought. The full thought is to ask why and to understand that why in context. This is the why and the context.
Second, I think there’s an impulse among Americans when traveling to see foreign countries as inscrutable. We go to these far-flung, “exotic” destinations and never stop to think about how those places are constructed or what led them to be how they are.
That bugs me. The intellectual benefit of travel isn’t just to lounge on a beach somewhere, but to expand one’s world, to test one’s assumptions against new knowledge and experience, and to use the product in service of something.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, is the continual recognition that the systems that I and other leftists rail against have material, real-world consequences. Capitalism’s evils are often abstracted out in leftist discourse, we talk about systems and dialectics and never quite make the connection between those things and the world that most folks actually live in. To paraphrase the late Mark Fisher, there’s a tendency among armchair leftists to live solely in the world of theory, with no intention of connecting that theory to the real world or any real political action.
But here, we have a very concrete (no pun intended) example of how colonialism, neocolonialism, and capitalism have affected the lives of millions of people. In Jamaica, the quality (or even existence) of roads is largely contingent on your subject position. The very structure of the Jamaican road network is a vestige of the plantation economy and colonialism, the locations of major cities a result of both natural and political forces. To see this is to better understand what shapes and animates our world, and that’s fascinating and frustrating in equal measure.
Additionally, it demonstrates yet again how the moment we’re living in is colored and presaged by what happened before. The modern crisis in Jamaica’s roads is not simply a product of this year’s storms, but of long-term divestment and colonial logics. The story of Jamaica’s dismal roads is also the story of British colonial violence, American imperial incursion, and of the Jamaican people’s resilience and fight. At every step of the way, the Jamaican people — whether it was the Maroons, the trade unionists, or the Black Power protestors — stood up against oppression and extraction and fought for the country (and the roads) they deserved. Every major shift in Jamaican politics has been driven in no small part by the valiant efforts of these freedom fighters. This serves as a potent reminder that politics is a bottom-up endeavor, one that only finds teeth when coalitions of the working class, the poor, and the petit bourgeois can come together and reject the status quo. That lesson is particularly salient in light of Tuesday’s post, where we discuss the ways in which the American Democratic Party’s defeat partially reflects its abandonment of the working class people that animated the New Deal coalition.
This is the first of what will probably be several posts about my trip, so I hope you all look forward to the next post, which will (maybe!) be less heady.
As someone committed to left politics and also oddly obsessed with the minutiae of American electoral politics, I was upset but not entirely surprised when Donald Trump won re-election.
The signs were all there. The so-called “vibe shift” incident to Kamala Harris being elevated to the top of the ticket had long worn off by the time the first votes were being cast. The Harris campaign itself went from something promising and oddly savvy — the pick of Tim Walz as her VP nominee was, to me, inspired and done with an eye towards the very constituencies she needed to win — to something dangerously similar to Hillary Clinton’s overly cautious, shambolic 2016 bid. I don’t know anyone who was won over by Harris’s calls for a more “lethal fighting force” or her nonsense gumbo of tax credits and regulatory reforms.
The 2024 result, like the 2016 one, was a small loss that looks worse than it is. Harris, like Hillary Clinton before her, fell a few thousand votes short across the seven swing states. Trump’s so-called “landslide” is a historically small win that closely resembles the coin-flip that this election was always purported to be.
Still, the Democratic Party is in the wilderness again. The Republicans have captured full control of the government, and this time promises to be even more barbaric and horrific than the first. While Republicans plot their revenge tour and speculate on how much violence they can enact on marginal people, Democrats are left wondering where it all went wrong.
This period of soul-searching is really exciting to me as someone who has felt disillusioned with the Party for a while. Beyond the self-serving recriminations and back-stabbing done by pundits, politicos, and others seeking to hold onto their grift, I think there’s a lot of good analysis coming out about the myriad issues that the Democrats are facing. Let’s discuss them.
Turbulent Indigo
The best and most intuitive answer that has come up in the discussions of Harris’s loss is that she was essentially an incumbent running in a global anti-incumbent environment, and that her failure to sufficiently break from the deeply unpopular Biden saddled her with baggage that kept her from fully outrunning him.
This makes sense to me and I think it’s largely correct, but I think that it’s a bit too pat. We’ve seen incumbent partiesacross the worldoutrun this anti-incumbent wave, and it would make sense that Harris, a charismatic and historic candidate with an enormous war-chest and unified backing of the party and its institutional boosters, would be primed to beat the odds.
In a way, she did: while Harris overall lost vote-share vs. Biden 2020 in basically every part of the country and across every demographic (oof), she did outperform Biden’s approval rating, turning what would’ve been a landslide against Joe Biden into a coin-flip race.
Another explanation that nicely augments the anti-incumbent wave idea is the fact that, despite some nice paper indicators, the American economy is still pretty dismal for most people. Inflation has driven up the cost of most goods. The post-pandemic safety net, which began under Trump, was unceremoniously killed under Biden, leaving people feeling robbed. I think this is really compelling and fills out some of the holes in the anti-incumbent argument. These anti-incumbent feelings aren’t simply the product of malaise or an ill-informed electorate that believes we’re in a recession even though we’re not. These feelings are animated by the very real sense that, even as the lines go up, people are being left behind.
Against this context, it’s clear why Harris lost: her administration was seen as responsible for taking away stimulus checks, sunsetting student loan pauses, and abandoning the expanded child tax credit. Her administration put banning TikTok over raising the minimum wage, put shipping weapons to a genocidal Israeli government over universal healthcare. Biden’s fairly ambitious Build Back Better plan died not because Republicans outmaneuvered him, but because centrist Democrats were too scared of “socialism” to lift a finger in service of the American people.
And the unfortunate thing for Democrats is that all of that is true. Centrists kneecapped the most popular parts of the Biden agenda in favor of…nothing in particular. Even the parts of Bidenomics that were enacted like the CHIPS Act and the IRA won’t yield results for almost a decade, and all the good things that regulators like Lina Khan and Rohit Chopra enacted were tied up in court. The material result of Biden’s presidency is a handful of half-measures and a lot of nothing, and voters reacted negatively to that. Kamala Harris could have run against this or tried to run on it. She did neither, and it hurt her.
The Missing Soul of the Democratic Party
To augment this, let’s look at some complimentary alternate explanations.
Dave Dayen at The American Prospect argues here that the Democratic Party lacks a core animating set of principles, and this allows both the Right and voters to fill in the gaps between the disparate network of policy prescriptions that a candidate like Harris lays out.
“In the end, the sum of all these discrete and disparate passions is a passionless party, one that relies on focus-group testing to set priorities rather than any animating set of principles. Democrats prefer to diagnose voters, rather than take care of their concerns. And there’s no leader currently available to mold this mass into anything coherent.”
I find this argument pretty compelling — the Democratic Party was at its strongest both morally and politically when it was the party of Rooseveltian social democracy. Once the New Deal consensus was abandoned in the Carter administration, the Democrats found themselves unmoored. The full history is a bit more complex — the Democrats’ electoral dominance was built in part on a reliable set of Southern pro-segregation voters that have since left for the Republicans. The conventional wisdom is that the party had to change to respond to a rightward turn by voters.
But Johnson’s 1964 win — an actual historic landslide — partly rebuts this. Johnson embraced Kennedy’s support for the Black American Civil Rights movement and launched his own “War on Poverty” that was largely aimed at improving the economic position of Black Americans. Barry Goldwater, his arch-conservative opponent, ran a campaign largely aimed at weaponizing this.
Johnson’s support of Civil Rights and social democratic anti-poverty programs lost him the South but won him literally everywhere else. Modern Dems looking for a lodestar could do worse than Johnson.
The post-Carter rejection of social democracy in favor of neoliberalism ironically calcified the “malaise” that Carter and other liberals had identified in the post-Watergate electorate. The Republicans were the party of corporate welfare and social revanchism, and the Democrats, set loose from any commitment to minorities, unions, or the working class, became the party of institutions.
The Clinton-era Democrats were nigh indistinguishable from Republicans, save for their insistence that the government — which had throughout the 1980s become a force for evil in the lives of most Americans — was actually good. The Clinton Democrats’ government did less and less for people while still parroting the value and virtue of government. Clinton and his Democratic Party shifted right on almost every major issue of the day, but still sought to wave the banner of the New Deal and the Great Society. The Democratic Party of Bill Clinton would sooner kill a man than show any kind of backbone.
The Democratic Party of today is hardly different, but the electoral consequences are more dire. The Republicans have been remade by paleoconservatives into a fascist outlet. The voices that were once marginal are now central. Every election now recalls the 1932 Weimar election. And like their liberal counterparts back then, the Democrats would sooner cede the nation to literal Nazis than ally with the Left.
The Republicans, however awful, have a clear and authentic vision for what they want to do with the country. They believe in something. Dayen argues that it’s unclear now what the Democratic Party stands for, and convincing people to vote for a party with no soul is a hard bargain.
The Left Needs a Joe Rogan, or, “It’s The Media’s Fault We Lost”
I think there’s a lot to like about this line of argument: it recognizes the long-standing Marxist idea that proper education is key to bringing about a working class revolution. It also repackages the “What’s the Matter with Kansas” argument into something less smug — “it’s not that people are stupid and easily duped, it’s that there’s a concerted effort across media to mislead people!”
It also holds a seductive appeal for liberals and centrists: it pushes past the soul-level issues that Dayen and others have identified and casts the blame on a situation that is both entirely outside the party’s control and that is (at least in part) solved by elevating people like the pundits offering it. “If we were as big as Joe Rogan, we would have won” is hauntingly compelling if you’re a center-left journalist or pundit looking to scale up.
While there’s definitely something here, I think that it confuses the platform with the message. Even if Democrats had the same kind of huge, captive audiences that folks like Rogan and Andrew Huberman do, it would still need a compelling message that moves people. Kamala Harris spent a billion dollars and was consistently in front of huge audiences on TV, podcasts, radio, etc. She was the biggest thing on TikTok, which is ostensibly where younger voters get their information. The issue wasn’t with getting an audience, the issue was what she was saying.
Throughout the campaign, voters in polls said that they couldn’t make sense of Kamala Harris, that they wanted to know more about her and her beliefs, and they wanted to understand why she wanted to be president. None of these questions had satisfactory answers from the campaign — Harris’s beliefs are whatever the Democratic Party says it believes, but also not; her rationale for running for president was, at core, that Joe Biden couldn’t. For an electorate looking for change and disruption, this message didn’t break through, no matter how many people got added to the audience.
I think this also skirts one of the biggest discussions in American politics, which is the question of discussion and debate itself. Since the Obama years, liberal orthodoxy has stated that liberal politicians going onto conservative media is a fool’s errand. This extends to the rank-and-file, with debates between liberals and conservatives seen not as useful political tools but as events that “platform” odious conservative thought, allowing it to become mainstream. This orthodoxy is on display even now, with millions of disaffected Twitter users decamping to Bluesky or Threads to escape Elon Musk’s crypto-fascist hellsite.
This discussion of platforming and mainstreaming has long lost the plot. There is a difference between lefties and liberals seeking as broad an audience as possible and platforming hate speech. There’s a difference between engaging people where they are and radicalizing them. The Harris camp was smart enough to recognize this, which is why she went on Bret Baier, and why she tried to go on Rogan. But these efforts were for naught because, again, it wasn’t who she was talking to, it was what she was saying.
The Body is Rotten and the Soul is Gone
John Ganz, author of the excellent “When the Clock Broke,” and the less excellent John Ganz’s Twitter, identifies a party that is too stuck on defending the status quo, which is a losing proposition in an environment where folks do not like the status quo. He writes:
“The basic terms of political rivalry that have prevailed at least since the New Deal have been turned upside down: The Democrats became Republicans and Republicans became Democrats. The Democrats, in retreat from any meaningful mandate of popular accountability, have transformed themselves into the party of the establishment: wonks, statisticians, professionals, hectoring nonprofit advocates, celebrities, reformers, lecturers (in all senses of the word), assistant professors, and corporate beancounters. They worship G-men, spooks, and generals as minor deities.”
I largely agree with this, but I also think that it’s a bit too nostalgic for the Democrats of yore. The Democratic Party’s always been anti-democratic. The Party of the 20th Century was defined by party bosses, backroom deals, and machine politics. George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election not because he was some inept liberal who couldn’t appeal to middle America, but because the Democratic Party elites, pissed that he’d taken power from them and put it in the hands of actual voters (especially minority voters), kneecapped him. The 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries were nominally “democratic” — voters were given options and were allowed to vote on them — but their decisions hardly mattered. Bernie Sanders, in both cases, lost in large part because the party establishment anti-bodies rejected him. This is not how a party that truly values democratic participation operates.
Ganz’s critique of the party goes deeper though — this anti-democratic tendency has resulted in a platform of technocratic nonsense (Harris’s big pitch to the middle class was a constellation of tax cuts and penalties that mostly help small businesses and upper-middle class folks), rhetoric workshopped to hell, and a total disconnect from the realities of the working class.
“By leaving their working-class base to fend for themselves under global trade accords like NAFTA and GATT, Democrats have forfeited credibility to speak convincingly on behalf of struggling workers.”
This critique is of a piece with Dayen’s, and I think they’re both getting at something really fundamental: that the Democratic Party has abandoned its body (the voters that made up its most durable coalition) and lost its soul (the ideological commitments that brought those folks in to begin with). The Party, body and soul, has rotted.
This rot extends to every policy area: in 2024, the Democrats sounded like Republicans on social policy (moving to the hard right on immigration and crime), on foreign policy (Biden and Harris were more outwardly bloodthirsty than any Democratic nominee since Bill Clinton, and their ambivalence to the suffering in Gaza had real moral and electoral consequences), and on economic policy (that Harris refused to add any kind of ideological glue to the Bidenomics policies that she helped pass is mind-boggling!).
Ganz ties these insights up with the recognition that part of Trump’s appeal, beyond just his populist bona fides and obvious political talents (“In his perverse way, he is a gifted public speaker…”), is that some folks just dig the racism. The bigotry can make Trump appear like a “tell it like it is” guy, someone who’s not afraid to trample over social mores to speak truth. What’s wild is that, in 2019, this was Kamala Harris’s shtick. She wrote a book about it. She made “speaking truth” and standing up against power a major part of her primary campaign, and it was perhaps the bit best aligned with her political identity. That she didn’t pick that up or expand on it in 2024 is, again, mind-boggling.
The upshot of this piece, like Dayen’s, is that the party has to remake itself into a bona fide social democratic party with true ties to the middle and working class. Reviving the New Democrats neoliberal posturing is a fool’s errand, simply retooling the New Deal pitch for the 21st Century won’t be enough. The party has to imagine a future and build itself around the realization of it. That’s going to take imagination, moral clarity, and courage. That there’s no real appetite for that among the party elite means that they are no longer well-suited to run the party.
A New Way Forward
Across all of these, there’s a throughline that I think is interesting. All recognize that America’s political system is failing in some way, and that the Democratic Party and its politicians have failed to respond to it. The party has, either because of elite capture or misapprehension, lost touch with the great American working class. The Republicans have filled that gap, either by weaponizing an unfavorable media landscape or by going full populist. Rather than recognizing that they are playing a rigged game in an unfavorable environment and adapting, the Democrats have come to defend the status quo. The Party defends the status quo even as they lose ground politically and conditions for their core voters — minorities, women, the working class — deteriorate. This deterioration pushed some to the Republicans, but it mostly just encouraged folks to stay home.
This root rot has had a physical dimension too: as the party has become ideologically and rhetorically disconnected from voters, the actual infrastructure that supports those connections has withered too. As Henry Farrell notes, the sites of civic life that used to animate the New Deal-era Democratic Party — union halls, community centers, party headquarters — have closed up. These closures are a literal abandonment of middle America. The resultant lack of meaningful connection to communities means that the Party has surrendered large swaths of the country to the Right. With no compelling message and no boots on the ground, the Democratic Party is absent in most parts of America. It’s no wonder that the Right’s insane caricature of the Democrats has hit so hard. In a lot of communities, they only hear about Democrats in attack ads and on talk radio.
I think this tapestry probably best reflects the reality of the situation. The Democratic Party lost its ideological soul in the late-20th century, and in doing so it lost touch with the voters that form the core of its coalition. The Party has largely abandoned its most effective organizational tools. Without an ideological soul animating it, the Party’s got nothing to say that will cut through the unfair media landscape.
Weirdly enough, those issues are not by themselves enough to lose elections. It took a year of near-unparalleled anti-incumbent discontent and a nominee so bad he had to quit to sink the Party’s chances. Even with the Party hollowed out, the people immiserated, and the media out for blood, Harris and Co. still fought the race to a near tie. Contextualized this way, it’s easy to see why some think that the Party can limp along like this, losing winnable elections by small margins or winning lay-up elections by small margins. Those in the party’s orbit can keep collecting checks, raising disgusting amounts of money, and feeling good about getting into “good trouble” and fighting almost (almost!) to a draw.
But for the folks whose lives are made worse by Republican governance — Black and brown people being erased from voter rolls, kicked out of housing, and killed by cops; trans folks forced to detransition as their identity is outlawed; immigrants lawful or not who are rounded up, detained, or deported — this fundamental failure to meet the moment and retool will be catastrophic. And when the Democrats come knocking at our doors in 2025, 2026, and 2028, hat in hand, asking for money and votes in “the most important election of our lifetimes,” I bet more and more folks will decline to answer.
I cannot profess to know what the best path forward is. But I do have some ideas about what some potential next steps could be:
The Party needs to embrace democratic participation and competition. This means allowing incumbents to face competitive primaries, it means removing superdelegates from the presidential nominating process, and it means allowing for open primaries across the country.
The Party must find its ideological core. The Republican Party is animated by Christian theocracy and racial resentment. It is horrible, but it is clear what the world that the Republicans want to create looks like. It is not enough for the Democrats to point in horror at that world and say “that’s not who we are.” The Democrats must articulate a meaningful alternative. Whether that is neoliberalism, social democracy, democratic socialism, or something else is probably immaterial, although I believe that social democratic or democratic socialist policies are best (they are popular and they will improve lives. Improving lives should be the goal of politics).
The social/civic infrastructure that once powered the Party must be restored. As Kamala Harris’s loss in Pennsylvania demonstrated, it is not nearly enough to mobilize an army of door knockers and volunteers in the last two weeks of an election. The “ground game” is a losing one. Democrats must seek to become permanent fixtures in the landscape of people’s lives. This extends to the media — shock jocks and conservative pundits are more than just ideological lodestars for their listeners, they’re entertainment. They make up part of the fabric of those people’s lives. There is no Democratic or left-leaning outlet that so neatly folds into the infrastructure of people’s lives (sorry Hasan).
These are obviously just a start, easier said than done. But fixing a half-century’s worth of rot takes a lot, and it will be an epochal project, just like the rebalancing of the Supreme Court or the long fight for racial and economic justice. Being clear-eyed about what the end goal is and taking strong steps towards it is imperative right now.
I want to talk a bit about what I’ve been into lately. I try to engage with a diverse diet of media and so, as a way of fostering discussion and to keep myself accountable, I’m going to try and maintain a weekly series where I briefly share and talk about what I’m into.
Feel free to reach out and share what you’re listening to, reading, watching this week.
Listening: “Sister,” venturing
This week was Spotify Wrapped/Apple Music Replay week, and my top artist was Jane Remover. venturing is her alt-rock side project/ARG/band. They’re gearing up to release an album in February and single “Sister” has been running my life ever since it dropped.
I’ve loved Jane’s music for a minute now, and I’ve been fortunate to see her in concert twice (once as an opener for brakence and then on the Designated Dreams Tour, where I actually got to meet her!). Her music as venturing exists in the space between Frailty, which leaned towards emo and alt-rock but with a healthy bit of electronic flourish, and Census Designated, a more conventional shoegaze/noise rock album. The project has mostly existed in ephemera — SoundCloud posts since deleted, then reuploaded by others, user-made compilation albums of snippets — but it seems like now that Jane is again pivoting to new sounds for the main project, venturing is a good place for her rock songs. An honest-to-god venturing LP is slated for official release in February.
“Sister,” both lyrically and sonically, feels like it could have been on Census Designated. The song details the singer’s alienation and anhedonia. She’s afraid, she feels like she’s already dead, and getting fucked up and going to the club are no solace.
There are lyrical echoes to artists like Rickie Lee Jones and Joni Mitchell that I really love, even if unintentional, and I appreciate the emotion in Jane’s vocal performance. She’s grown markedly as a vocalist since Teen Week, and it shows here.
Reading: “Detransition, Baby” and “Imagined Communities”
This week, I finished one book and started another, and they couldn’t be more different. “Detransition, Baby,” the 87th best book of the 21st Century per the New York Times, is a poignant story of three people — a cis woman named Katrina, an out trans woman named Reese, and Ames, a man who detransitioned after facing violence and hardship as a woman — who become linked after Katrina falls pregnant with Ames’ child. Torrey Peters does a really great job of giving every character, especially Reese, a unique voice and viewpoint. The broader discussion of womanhood, motherhood, and identity is really well-done, and I appreciate that, at various points, Peters explicitly points out that the characters’ subject positions (these are upper-middle class white or white-passing people living in a cute, progressive enclave of New York City) are pretty limited to their experiences. The experiences of Black women, especially Black trans women, varies greatly from the experience of someone like Reese, who for all her hardship is still able to fall in with the rich wine moms and housewives.
Despite being perhaps the most high-profile fiction book about trans people out at the moment (and certainly the only one getting feted in the New York Times), the book doesn’t seek to be the definitive treatise on tranness or motherhood or womanhood. I exists entirely on its own terms.
After finishing “Detransition, Baby,” I picked up Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” This one is a bit of a long time coming for me: way back in 2017 a friend of mine recommended the book and I tried, and failed, to finish it. The prose is readable enough for a work of political science and the points are well-argued and salient. But I just couldn’t get through it.
In light of the current fascist moment that we’re facing, I feel compelled to give it another shot. Understanding nationalism as a system produced by cultural and historical conditions will be important in understanding our politics going forward. I’ll probably write a blog post about this book and some of the ideas in it in the future.
Watching: Video Essays about the Internet Sucking
As I noted in the inaugural post for this blog, the internet has become claustrophobic. The walled garden social networks are cesspools, search engines are poisoned with AI slop, and everything from streaming services to job posting websites are designed to steal one’s data and exploit it for profit. Cory Doctorow’s written about the “enshittification” of the internet, but one of the issues with a novel (and kind of juvenile) term like this is that it makes this issue seem like it’s new when it is just the latest in a long line of utopian projects corrupted by capitalism.
“The Internet Is Dying…” makes a pretty compelling argument that the capitalist exploitation of AI has the potential to expel human control from the internet, creating a stagnant, entropic hellscape where humans only exist to passively consume and make money for the billionaires who run everything. If the internet is driven by humans producing signs that take on and shape meaning, then this expulsion would functionally strip any real semiotic value from the internet. The signs produced by the corporations and bots would lose any tether to reality.
In “The Internet Was Stolen From Us,” Jessie Gender traces the radical history of the internet, linking the internet with the radical potential for expression and community evinced by hacker collectives, TV show fandom, and queer message boards. There was a time when the internet promised to melt away the boundaries between folks and offer an opportunity to shape one’s identity in whatever way one wanted. This promise fell away as technofeudalism took hold and everything became monetized, commodified, or radicalized. The internet, instead of a break from the horrors of the world, became a twisted mirror of it.
Both chriswaves and Jessie Gender lament the loss of the internet’s radical, utopian past and both call for us to use creativity as a means of connection. Art is one of the best tools we have to connect and build with other people, the inherent emotive quality of good art makes it especially potent. Despite it’s best efforts, AI and corporations will never truly get this. Anything produced to satisfy a four-corners algorithm or made with advertisers sensibility in mind has a hard cap on what it can do emotionally.
Both of these videos get at what will probably be a theme on this blog — the slow, horrible death of the internet and how the ghosts of the internet’s dead utopian moment haunt the present in weird and unsettling ways. Again, we’ll probably come back to this idea in a blog post (woo, hauntology!).
Thanks for reading. Again, let me know what you’re engaging with or if you’ve seen/read/watched any of this stuff.
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