David DePriest

Category: Politics

  • This one’s for the boys

    This one’s for the boys

    The moment we’re in

    With fascism ascendant across the world, there’s been a lot of ink spilled on what exactly is driving it. A lot of folks on the left are, in true Marxian fashion, pointing to material conditions: as center-left parties like the Democrats in the U.S., the Labour Party in the U.K., and SPD in Germany continue to embrace technocratic reform and neoliberalism, they fail to capture the zeitgeist and cede major political ground to the right, which has gotten more bullish and populist.

    But a lot of folks in the center-left are pointing to another issue: men aren’t doing so hot. We’ll call this the Man Question. Male-catering media is a cesspool of misogynist bile saturated with grifters and sex pests, men are falling behind women by a ton of appreciable measures, men are lonelier and more prone to suicide than ever. Hell, they don’t read anymore!

    Did Rey from Star Wars Ruin Life for Men? and Other Dumb Questions

    There are two strains of Man Question discourse. The first, most common in the center and even in parts of the right, argues that the 2010s feminist moment, typified by things like the #MeToo movement and the spread of pop feminism, did too much for women, turning society against men in a way that’s both unfair and having harmful effects.

    The second strain, which I think is a lot more defensible, argues that de-industrialization in the West has foreclosed a lot of opportunities for men to build a life for themselves. This precarity makes a ton of minor social changes seem cataclysmic: men who are bitter and struggling see women succeeding and become radicalized.

    I think both of these leave a lot to be desired.

    To quickly dispatch with the first strain, there’s precious little evidence that women gained anything from 2010s/millennial feminism — at the same time as Emma Watson and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made a mint extolling the virtues of an amorphous, apolitical feminism, #GamerGate forced the resegregation of an entire industry and cut down a generation of brilliant artists, developers, and writers. Even as popular politicians like Barack Obama embraced the feminist label, the concept’s popularity faded with no appreciable policy gains.

    Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid, which leaned heavily on millennial feminist imagery and rhetoric, serves as a useful example of this. Clinton, the ostensible feminist candidate, failed to win the presidency against a blundering bigoted man who represented everything wrong with traditional masculinity; the rejection of her can also be seen as a rejection of the movement she positioned herself as representing.

    All of that’s to say, it’s baffling to think that a movement whose biggest win was getting a woman to lead a few Star Wars movies did anything to meaningfully displace men in society. Even if perceptually it looks like men are on the back foot, the reality is that men are still on the whole wealthier, better connected, and more powerful than women in society.

    It’s possible that men could mistake perception for reality, or blame the broader worsening of quality of life under capitalism on feminism. But that’s not what the folks pushing this are arguing. They’re arguing that the excesses of millennial feminism, which amount to some Twitter posts and a raft of bad movies, was enough to displace men and invite fascist backlash.

    That’s bullshit.

    The Better Man Question

    The second strain fares a lot better, but still leaves something to be desired. There is a lot of evidence that men are struggling right now economically and emotionally, but not as a result of feminism run amok. The true cause, at least in large part, is capitalism — the only paths to upward mobility are bullshit jobs gatekept behind useless credentials, social spaces are turned to walled gardens, and the few free spaces left are digital grievance incubators tailor-made to sell junk supplements, self-improvement courses, and self-serving pyramid schemes. The infrastructure that build the modern man has atrophied, and men are uniquely worse off because of it.

    The sharpest and most incisive version of this argument is made by Christine Emba, who wrote years ago about how societal shifts under capitalism make prior versions of traditional masculinity unattainable for a lot of men. She argues compellingly that men, cut loose from the stability of traditional gender roles and beset by an economy that disfavors them, are unmoored. They are being lapped by women, who no longer look at them as viable partners.

    Put simply: we exist in a moment where the old is dead and the new is struggling to be born, and the resultant monsters are lashing out against the cultural milieu that birthed them.

    Past models of masculinity feel unreachable or socially unacceptable; new ones have yet to crystallize. What are men for in the modern world? What do they look like? Where do they fit? 

    I think there’s a lot to like about this articulation of the issue. She correctly identifies that the material issues drive the social ones — as status and stability become increasingly unattainable, men feel alienated from themselves and the world. She rightly disaggregates the power that some men — particularly rich, white men — still have in society from men writ-large, especially Black men and working-class men.

    Because men still dominate leadership positions in government and corporations, many assume they’re doing fine and bristle at male complaint. After all, all 45 U.S. presidents have been male, and men still make up more than two-thirds of Congress. A 2020 analysis of the S&P 500 found that there were more CEOs named Michael or James than there were female CEOs, period. Women are still dealing with historical discrimination and centuries of male domination that haven’t been fully accounted for or rectified. Are we really worrying that men feel a little emasculated because their female classmates are doing well?

    But millions of men lack access to that kind of power and success — and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.

    This is an important point that she rightly notes has been ignored by a lot of folks on the left. In the same way that capitalism has concentrated wealth amongst a small few, so too has patriarchy concentrated its boons in the hands of a small elite. The most powerful, the most attractive, the most well-connected all benefit greatly from patriarchy, but those who are not powerful, who are not conventionally attractive, or whose social networks are frail and failing are not benefiting as much.

    That being said, it’s silly to assume that men downstream don’t receive any of the benefits of patriarchy. It might be inchoate, but it is still happening. This is because patriarchy is not just manifested in attitudes and social mores but calcified in law, policy. Its operation is often invisible at the individual level. Or at least invisible to men: women are uniquely attuned to the myriad setbacks, microaggressions, and perils of being disfavored by patriarchy.

    What’s interesting about the men lamenting the failure of trickle-down patriarchy is that they aren’t necessarily arguing for more patriarchy. The men who feel left behind are not crying out for Trump-style machismo and oppressive patriarchy, they simply want the opportunity to be who they were told they should be.

    But survey data, academic research and interviews with Trump-voting men suggest that most don’t want to return to a more traditional masculinity either, one that requires men to be aggressive, dominant or stoic. Instead, they want Americans to have a different take on masculinity — one that is positive instead of negative, and broad instead of narrow.

    Men don’t want traditional patriarchal masculinity. Those embracing the Jordan Peterson/Andrew Tate school of revanchist sexist garbage are in the minority.

    But their numbers are growing. This is because, as Emba identifies, the center-left that so vocally embraced millennial feminism has not articulated a corresponding vision for the role of men in society. Instead, there’s mostly just vague gesturing at men like Barack Obama or Tim Walz as exemplars of a softer, liberal masculinity.

    This, of course, is peak silly. You can’t tell me that Barack Obama, a preternaturally attractive man with Ivy League pedigree who plays basketball, smokes like James Dean, and whose presidency was pockmarked by his epochal masculine bloodlust, isn’t a traditional man. You can’t tell me that Tim Walz, lifelong military man, hunter, patriarch, isn’t a man straight out of the traditional mold. This is not an alternative to the old definition of masculinity, it’s an embrace of it.

    So while she’s right that the center/center-left doesn’t have much to offer men right now, Emba is wrong in arguing that the progressive left is anti-man or has failed to offer an alternative vision of masculinity. Conflating the center-left’s silence or fumbling with the response of the broader left is a common issue in American politics, but it is especially egregious here because the left, especially the feminist left, has been engaging with the question of masculinity for decades now. This erasure of the left has major implications for this debate because it creates the illusion that the two poles are the silent and reductive “left” (really the center) and the hard right (offering trash).

    This is something I see a lot — folks looking to “both sides” the Man Question accuse the left of being too hateful or dismissive of men or the issue of masculinity. The evidence for this is usually some funky slogans and a few viral tweets.

    The truth is more complex: the left’s message to men has always been one of solidarity and empathy. The issues that men face are of a piece with the issues women face. Cis men facing displacement and identity issues can find common cause with trans men facing the same; white working class men can link arms with their Black and brown counterparts in a politics of mutual uplift.

    This, however, has not broken through to the mainstream. In addition to the aforementioned left-wing erasure, this is largely because the mainstream pretty much never fully engages with the substance of the left’s political positions. The constellation of diagnoses and prescriptions coming from the left are dismissed (like when left politicians predicted the Great Recession), are mischaracterized (like the years-long campaign to discredit single-payer healthcare in the U.S.), or are white-washed and straw-manned (critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, and defunding the police).

    Put a pin in this, we’ll return to it.

    Playing With Alternatives, or, “let’s re-read that one bell hooks book”

    While the left’s message is broad and egalitarian, it’s not especially punchy. Compare that to what the right offers. As Emba notes, their “impossible suggestion” is punchy and precise: “reenact the lives their grandfathers led, [and then] blame society when that inevitably fails.”

    This offers a clear directive: men should try to be Don Draper or Tyler Durden. When that inevitably fails — those men are myth and the men aspiring to be them are not — then just blame uppity women, feminism, Rey from Star Wars, Kamala Harris, or the redesign of Aloy in the Horizon Zero Dawn remaster.

    Oh, and the Jews. Always blame the Jews.

    It’d be laughable if it was not the animating force behind pretty much all of right wing politics right now.

    This alternate masculinity, really not an alternative at all, is bad. It may be “countercultural” and “aspirational,” as Emba notes, but it also “runs off the rails.” It’s “misogyny masquerading as being simply pro-male, advocating a return to a strict hierarchy in which a particular kind of man deserves to rule over everyone else.” It is “wildly antisocial,” predicated more on a reflexive hatred of women and feminism than on any effort to build a better future. For men or for anyone. It is proudly racist, homophobic, nihilist.

    I shouldn’t have to explain why those things are bad. But beyond the ethical issue with bigotry, there’s also the practical issue that a masculinity predicated on cis het able-bodied, neurotypical, wealthy whiteness excludes pretty much all men. It’s a definition of masculinity that has no utility for the vast majority of men. It only serves to make men bitter. For the right, that’s the point: a generation of men made to feel awful about themselves is a generation primed to accept that the forces of the left, whether it be feminists, racial justice activists, queer people, or economic populists, are robbing them of their birthright.

    This, arguably, is why Trump won a second term. Enough young men across racial and class lines were goaded into believing that their identities as men were under threat from the nebulous amalgam of left and center-left cultural and political forces, and that Daddy Trump was the bulwark against them.

    Again, this is bullshit. But it’s compelling bullshit that saw almost no answer from the center.

    So, to recap, Emba, and this strain of Man Question discourse more broadly, has done a pretty good job of articulating both the problem men face right now and the false promise of the right-wing alternative. That being said, they fail in articulating a useful alternative. To build a new and better masculinity, Emba advocates for a syncretic process by which some bits of traditional masculinity are saved (be strong, be hard-charging, protect others) and others are supplanted by a new ethic (don’t be an incel, be pro-social). Ok, sure. But this is, bafflingly, coupled with a weird biological essentialism and pot-shots at a progressive left allegedly vying for an androgynous society.

    But despite a push by some advocates to make everything from bathrooms to birthing gender-neutral, most people don’t actually want a completely androgynous society. And if a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes.

    Weird. Although, to be fair to Emba, she doesn’t seem to buy that this is a core part of the liberal project re: masculinity, and ultimately accepts that biology “is not destiny” and should not be core to anyone’s idea of gender. That she gives voice to this at all is striking because, as folks who regularly engage with center-left and progressive left gender conversations knows, there is no real rejection of the biological reality of sex. The nuanced idea that biological sex is, at core, a cluster of related traits that are coded a specific way by society is not a rejection of the reality of those traits. The recognition that we assign meaning to things is not a rejection of meaning!

    Still, squint hard enough and you’ll see echoes of bell hooks in Emba’s desire to rescue elements of traditional masculinity from patriarchy. And the idea that men should be strong, sexually vigorous, chivalrous, and driven isn’t bad in itself. However, it invites a slew of important questions that folks like Emba don’t seem to want to answer. What distinguishes the confident, sexually aggressive men of Emba et. al’s fantasies (it’s worth noting that Emba explicitly notes that these are the kind of men she’s attracted to) from the patriarchs of yesteryear? What are the bounds of this masculinity’s chivalry, are they similarly rooted in the idea that women are weak and inferior? What does it mean to be driven and motivated under capitalism? Are we making hustle culture core to what it means to be a man now?

    There’s no attempt by Emba or her interlocutors to answer these questions. Concepts like strength, self-mastery, sexual proficiency, and being a protector are taken as self-evident, removed from discussions of race, class, gender, or power. This, to me, dooms this as a viable alternative to traditional masculinity.

    Let’s just play with it a bit: the ideal man in Emba’s estimation is sexually driven. He “[has] the confidence to ask a girl out,” and takes great pride in his role as a “procreator.” But what does any of this mean in practice? Sexual drive exists in context, and a big part of that context is the reality of lopsided sexual violence against women. It’s the reality of gendered sexual expectation where men are expected to, without guidance, wake up and be master fornicators. It’s a reality where women are expected to at once be receptive to sexual advances and balk at any sexuality in order to stay clean and chaste. Packaged within this supposedly self-evident idea of a sexually driven man is a ton of questions: is our sexually driven “New Man” one who sees sex as a conquest, a conversation, or a currency? Are women to this man simply a means to an end (that end being his sexual gratification)? Are we supposed to see that as a positive virtue simply because it motivates the man to get off Reddit and take a shower?

    Let’s pick another: the idea of man as provider is bound up in the very questions of political economy that folks in the center refuse to engage with, and that they castigate the left for centering. Men can’t meaningfully become providers in a world where opportunities are scarce for all. And to be a provider at all implies a world where getting one’s basic needs met is contingent on one’s ability to play a specific, narrow social role. This new masculinity again asks men to be Willy Loman, but this time with rock hard abs.

    I don’t want to fully reject this “new masculinity,” if only because I see a lot of myself in it. I am physically strong, goal oriented, pro-social, and inclined towards protecting and providing for others, particularly the women in my life. But I also recognize that my being this way is contingent on a bunch of things — I’m able-bodied, neurodivergent in manageable and socially accepted ways, economically secure, conventionally attractive to a point. I’m highly educated, work a fairly prestigious job, and have a fairly strong social network. In other words, I’m exactly the kind of man that would succeed under the old mode of masculinity.

    Setting this archetype as the lodestar for all men without interrogating what these things mean and why they’re relevant means inviting in the same ideological trash that poisoned old masculinity into the new. And setting up a one-size-fits-all model for manhood risks doing the same thing that the right wing model does: creating impossible standards that, when not achieved, entrench anti-social, misogynistic attitudes.

    I think hooks has the better articulation of what a new masculinity could look like. In The Will to Change, she describes “good men” as those who seek to love and be loved, those who embrace feminist practice as a means of being “whole, authentic human beings,” those who reject domination because it cannot coexist with love. For hooks, being a good man is about living with an eye towards justice, embracing reciprocal healing, love, and mutuality. It means consciously rejecting and intervening to stop misogyny and receiving criticism with gratitude. In other words, good men are just good humans. They love and heal others, they work to create a context where others feel safe and valued. They don’t dominate, they lead.

    hooks’ articulation of a healthy masculinity is a lot more vague than Emba’s — there’s no “go to the gym and lay good pipe” in The Will to Change. But I think a more forgiving, expansive definition of manhood is good and necessary at a moment where the broader world makes attainment of more specific markers of masculinity hard. Telling men that they need to be uniformly strong and economically successful and sexually proficient will breed a bunch of men indistinguishable from the Men of the Past, while leaving a good chunk of the rest embittered failures mad at the world.

    That’s literally what’s already happening.

    By contrast, a masculinity that’s rooted in being empathetic and building community and common cause with others is more useful. It builds out the new ethics that Emba et al. try to include as an afterthought into a full practice. Being pro-social blossoms into a full-throated embrace of love. Being a protector isn’t limited to a classically minded swords-and-boards defense of damsels, but grows into a broader civic-mindedness. Men in hooks’ mold don’t let their undocumented neighbors get rounded up by ICE, they don’t let trans folks get harassed on the street. It’s an open question if the men Emba envisions would intervene to stop either, especially if their sexual desires and social cachet aren’t implicated. Put more simply, the men of hooks’ imagining live solidarity.

    The hooks model of masculinity has the knock-on effect of taking an issue that has political valences and making it explicitly so and tying its solution to a broader political project. Masculinity in Emba’s estimation is almost painfully depoliticized — her solution takes the classic centrist approach of taking vibes from the left and symbols from the right and Frankensteining them together into an apolitical whole. But hooks sees a better masculinity as an explicit goal of feminism and a core element of left politics. You cannot build a revolution out of bitter, hateful men who hate their comrades. You cannot build a better world outside of capitalism if the dominating logics of it are encoded into people’s sense of self and identity. If being a man is predicated solely on being a sexual athlete, protector, and provider, then the meaning of those things becomes core to his identity. And if being a sexual athlete means dominating women and coercing them into unfulfilling sex; if being a protector means being skeptical and hateful towards a mythic Other; if being a provider means fully embracing the rat race and capitalist accumulation, then those things will poison the new masculinity just like they did the old masculinity.

    Is This Even Real?

    What’s funny about the Man Question is that the discourse both under and overstates the issue itself. The much-vaunted “loneliness crisis” is more evidence of a broader social issue amongst all people vs. a male-specific one. There’s a strong argument that current elite concern with masculinity in crisis is more about politics than a legitimate issue in need of ink and action. There’s an even stronger argument that the crisis is not so much that masculinity is changing, but that the Old Guard is trying desperately to keep the corpse of the old alive, propping it up through violence.

    Therefore, bigots decrying the “woke” agenda of self-determination need to espouse, for example, that gender is biological or god-given in order to maintain the heterosexist societal status quo. They enforce their beliefs through both legal and illegal means—what we’ve seen in abundance most recently, in the form of executive orders, proposed and passed legislation, and harassment and violence. The very existence of these myriad conservative efforts point to the fact that masculinity is not an irrefutable biological fact but a social construct. It becomes a spectacle through ideological desperation to soothe the wounded egos of fragile men.

    Masculinity is socially constructed and is constantly changing. The generational fights to define it are not new, and the twin schools of thought that we see today are themselves descendants of long-standing ideological camps. Christine Emba acknowledges in her piece that elite discourse on the state and decline of men is as old as time:

    Anxieties around masculinity aren’t unique to this moment.

    As early as 1835, Washington Irving lamented the new American upper class’s tendency to “send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe.” His alternative? “A previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness … most in unison with our political institutions.”

    Skip ahead a few decades, and new worries about faltering masculinity turned into an obsession with fitness. An October 1920 issue of Physical Culture magazine advertised to men instructions on “How to Square Your Shoulders” (and to women, some advice: “Shall I Marry Him? A Lesson in Eugenics”).

    Still, by 1958, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that “the male role has plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline.” Writing in Esquire magazine, he added, “The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.”

    Worrying about the state of our men is an American tradition. 

    She, of course, notes that this new crisis is different — neoliberalism hollowed out industry in the U.S., leaving men worse than they have been since the advent of industry. Men are uniquely struggling in modern capitalism because they are groomed by patriarchy and capitalism to reject the kinds of skills and practices needed to succeed, skills that are coded as feminine. Because of this, women are doing better. There’s a palpable bitterness emerging among men, many of whom don’t know what they’re being asked to do.

    This is all true — the crisis of masculinity is both an elite obsession and a problem that deserves some discussion. But I think that it is better seen as a symptom of broader issues (patriarchy, capitalism, domination and hierarchy) than as a free-standing problem that can be rectified through books, podcasts, and gym memberships. In order to truly solve this crisis, to the extent it is a crisis, we must first address the fact that men and women alike are being exploited and dominated. We must address the fact that society asks both too little and too much of us all, and that the attendant expectations of being embodied are becoming too much for most folks to bear. How we relate to each other interpersonally and at a macro level must be interrogated and changed if we want to finally end these cyclical crises of identity.

  • It is no good bearing false witness

    It is no good bearing false witness

    I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message recently, and one thing that stuck out to me more than anything was the profound sense of obligation that he feels towards readers, his political allies, and the ancestors. His writing is less about him having great, illuminating truths to share and more about serving as a conduit through which other currents can flow. This self-effacing role for the writer — the one left once those who really drive history have done their work — is interesting to me as someone who thinks of writing not just as a a political, social act but an artistic one.

    Coates seems to imagine the role of the writer, the artist, as someone who discovers truth and remakes myth. Someone who “walks the land” in search of answers to tough questions and shares them with a world eager to hear them and willing to change in response. The writer is a combatant at the front lines of an epochal war over meaning in the world, their role is to not only defeat harmful established myths, but to establish new ones. This is a beautiful, albeit idealistic, way to cast the artist’s role. Put this way, the role of reporter or griot or poet or rapper or songwriter is deeply important sociopolitically — clarity on what the moment means comes not through elections or movements or violence, but through the pen.

    But what happens when this fundamental relationship between artist and audience breaks down? Can an artist truly move people if the people they’re trying to reach aren’t listening?

    This question has been swirling in my mind a lot in relation to Ethel Cain’s new album/EP/project Perverts. At first billed as her sophomore album and then recursively cast as an EP, a side project, or whatever else, the record is at turns horrifying and beautiful. It’s a record not just about Cain’s stable of trusted hurts — God and religion, shame, punishment — but also about the ways in which our relationship with the world shapes us. It very well may be the best record of the year.

    A lot of ink has been spilled about Cain’s frustration with the reductive way that critics, fans treat her art. Cain wrote on her Tumblr that she was frustrated that fans seem to treat her work more as a joke or a product than as something that’s worth considering intellectually and emotionally. There’s no discourse about her work, she contends, just memes.

    Perverts has been mostly considered as a response to this concern. It is almost hilariously antagonistic to modern pop sensibility — the first couple of tracks are minimalist drones meant more to evoke dread or anxiety than sublimity, the few traditional singer-songwriter songs (“Punish,” “Vacillator,” “Amber Waves”) undercut themselves with titanic length and uncomfortable subject matter.

    But I think this reading of Perverts is too reductive. Like Coates, I think Cain sees the role of the artist as a combatant who seeks to upset the audience’s pre-established narratives about the world. It seems to me that the aim of Perverts, more than some adolescent antagonism, is to force listeners to confront the ideas that they hold about the world and themselves.

    The characters populating Perverts, rendered minimally, are exactly what’s described on the tin, and their neuroses fill the album with an odd eroticism. This isn’t shock jock horrorcore, these are lovely rendered portraits meant to demonstrate the strange and haunting similarities between the listener and the ostensibly “bad” people populating these tracks.

    Coates writes that “[a]ll our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this–to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake.” He does this by writing explicitly political tracts that speak directly to history — the essays of The Message challenge the right-wing effort to censor anti-racist books, the near-century long ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and how his trip to Senegal reshaped his thinking on Blackness. Cain similarly does this by excavating the darkest corners of her heart, using composite characters and allegory to force discussions about our proclivities. One cannot listen to Perverts, a record filled with divine condemnation, sexual repression, and body horror, and not be haunted.

    This process, Coates notes, is difficult not only because it involves confronting the world, but also confronting oneself. It involves reckoning with the narratives that one has internalized and interrogating them. Coates does this constantly throughout The Message — he challenges his internalized anti-Blackness in Senegal, his cosmopolitanism when he decamps to South Carolina, and his tacit acceptance of Zionist lies when he visits Occupied Palestine. In each essay, he revels in his own initial ignorance, he’s almost gleeful in revealing how wrong he was.

    Cain, by contrast, seems to delight in playing the opposite role. She renders deeply unsympathetic characters in sympathetic hues, forcing the listener to sit with how much of themselves is reflected back in these portraits. Take a song like “Onanist,” which sketches out the character rejecting religious dogma in order to pursue sexual pleasure. There’s a lot here: there’s the seductive pull, the attendant shame, the climax. It’s pretty heavy. Through it’s nearly 7 minute runtime, we’re made to sit with that weight. Like Coates, Cain seems to revel in the confrontation between what we’re made to believe and what is.

    “Housofpsychoticwomn” sketches out the one-sided love that a woman has with an abusive partner (heavily implied to be God Himself). This track is wild in a lot of ways — it’s 14 minutes long of mantric repetition — but this central perversion of the traditional relationship between God and believer is so interesting. God in this song breadcrumbs our protagonist, promising again and again magnificent, fantastic love and never delivering. There’s hints of Genesis and Eden here, as well, which complicates the whole thing even further: a woman pleading with a God that’s rejected her for love. The core subversion here is a powerful idea: God as manipulator, as abusive partner. It challenges the listener to play with received ideas about the beneficence of the divine, and the overt sexuality of the dynamic calls into question the line between the sacred and the profane. All of this is couched in the language of perversion and obsession — nothing here is as it should be, nothing here is pure.

    I don’t want to draw too much blood from this stone: Coates’ book, like his previous masterwork Between the World and Me, is soulful and resonant in ways that Perverts isn’t and arguably doesn’t try to be. While both seek to dislodge socially constructed narratives and challenge their audiences, they do so for different reasons and in largely different ways. But it struck me in engaging with them both the strange affinities between them, and I felt the need to tease them out here. At core, both of them view the artist as a provocateur, someone who has a duty to challenge the audience and society at large. This duty is what the artist owes their audience, and we as an audience have a duty to engage.

  • The New End of History

    The New End of History

    One of the things that’s struck me the hardest about the new year is that nothing has seemed to change. Perhaps it’s my being naive, but there’s a part of me that still believes that the passage of time means something. I wanted to believe that the dawn of 2025 would ignite something in us, that we’d lurch forward clear-eyed and ready to do something.

    That has not been the case.

    The incoming Trump administration has not been met by a 2017-style Resistance, but by a series of prostrations, each more debasing than the last. The so-called opposition has crowed its acquiescence the loudest, with everyone from Ro Khanna to Bernie Sanders to Tom Suozzi kissing the ring.

    On the tech front, the A.I. bubble, like the crypto/NFT bubble before it, continues to grow unabated. Nevermind that A.I. has not demonstrated profitability, it has not demonstrated a valid use-case beyond bullshit content generation (already termed “slop” by actual humans and avoided like the plague). Nevermind that the resources required for it make it an environmental catastrophe. Companies continue to throw it into everything, regardless of whether anyone wants or needs it.

    On the artistic front, we continue to see heartless franchise films and soulless reboots dominate the cultural landscape at the same time as TV shows and movies that evince soul and artistry are met with crickets, crumbs, and cancellation. 2024 was the year that shows like “Our Flag Means Death” and “Scavengers Reign” were cancelled, while various permutations of the same Disney remakes and Marvel movies got billion-dollar budgets. Inventive games that received sterling reviews are apparently not enough to keep game developers on payroll. Various studios cut their best-and-brightest loose, all while executives talk up the promise of A.I. as if it can do anything to make a game good.

    It’s only been a week, and it’s enough to make you want to holler and throw up your hands.

    I recount all of this not because it is some new nadir but because it is the same old song. This has been the state of things for at least the past 10 years. The relentless march towards mediocrity, the failure to learn anything, the continued death of the future. Mark Fisher wrote extensively about this on his blog and in his published works.

    He wrote about the “slow cancellation of the future,” a phenomenon in which 21st-century culture is marked by “stasis” and “anachronism” wherein the psychological perception of progress is disrupted, and replaced by a “crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.” A cursory look at 20th century politics and culture reveals a wealth of future-facing expectations: flying cars, luxury communism, pan-Africanism, space exploration, scientific development, and more. However silly, there was genuine belief that there was something beyond the horizon of the present. There was discourse and deliberation about who would rule the future, but there was a collective belief that there was a future.

    Now, of course, there were limits to a lot of these visions. As writers like N.K. Jemisin have noted, many of these visions for what the future would be did not include Black and brown people, queer people, the disabled, etc. But for every vision of the world tainted by the bigotry of the present, there was something like Drexciya or the Arkestra or Combahee: radical, bold visions of a future not just populated with marginal people, but driven by us.

    These kinds of visions are few and far between, and largely “relian[t][…]on styles that were established long ago.” The futuristic sounds emergent in 2010s R&B have been trashed for 80s/90s revivalism and a revanchist eye towards cheap Motown imitation. The techno-utopia has become a feudalist nightmare, with the walled gardens of Meta, Apple, and Google growing taller by the day. The New Deal-era vision of social democracy that grew larger and more inclusive with each successive Democratic candidacy was first killed by Jimmy Carter, but even he can be held up as progressive in comparison to the trenchant conservatism of the Harris 2024 effort.

    This colonization and defanging of the new is part of the broader death of the future, and contributes to what Fisher, borrowing from Derrida, terms “hauntology.” Hauntology is a term meant to describe what happens when the colonization of the vanguard is successful. The victorious present, perpetually indebted to the past and devoid of new ideas, is disrupted — in fits and starts — by the echoes of the futures it has killed.

    We see this in the 90s and Y2K revivalism that’s occurring right now. People longing for something that’s new, something that evinces a future in which they can belong, are mining past sonics, aesthetics for guidance. The future that could have been had the promise of the 90s and 2000s not been killed in its crib haunts the present in the form of the garage and drum n’ bass revival, Y2K indebted fashion, the rejection of social media and of modern technology. It’s worth noting that some of this looking-back has been very harmful: instead of embracing the radical queerness and openness that defined the millennium, there’s instead been a turn towards traditional gender roles, antiquated ideas about sex and gender, and an embrace of strongman/authoritarian posturing. But even this is not new — in the same way that, post Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, the flower children cut their hair, went corporate, and turned out for Nixon, so too did the children of the 2020 uprising backslide into the comfort of Twitter gender wars and Trump.

    In some sense, this blog (both as a project and this particular post) are hauntological. The retreat into discrete internets, of blog rings and personal pages, is the ghost of the early internet lurching forward to haunt the present. Fisher’s writing, indebted heavily to Derrida and other post-modernists, haunts this post and a good chunk of my others. Alternate timelines and possible futures live on in us, even as the Real scares and confounds.

    But it’s not enough for us to dig up dead futures and wear them like thrifted jackets. Our imperative is the invention of a new future. We can, of course, look to the radical promise of the Black Panthers, to the writings of California socialists like Angela Y. Davis or Ruth Wilson Gilmore, to the cultural criticisms of Mark Fisher. But we cannot be so moored to them that we do not strike out and seek to break free of the cyclical death march of neoliberalism.

    Not to sound too Nietzschean, but it is incumbent upon us to create new ways of being, to make art that isn’t slave to the sounds and strictures of the past, to dream of new ways of governing, of living. We must discard the things that don’t serve us. It has been clear for almost a half-century that the systems of the present — of unlimited capital accumulation, of culture wars, of cis heteropatriarchy, of techno-feudalism and surveillance capitalism — do not serve us. They are killing what brings us joy, they are killing our future. But worse than that, they are killing us at a soul level.

    I can only hope that 2025 becomes the year that, instead of us, these necrotic value systems die.

  • Jamaica, Pt. 1 – Let’s Talk about the Roads

    Jamaica, Pt. 1 – Let’s Talk about the Roads

    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)

    A drawing of Cudjoe's Town (known as Trelawney Town by the British), a community of escaped Africans in Jamaica.

    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.

    An engraving of Leonard Parkinson, a Maroon captain.

    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.

    Jamaican Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante with American President John F. Kennedy, 1962.

    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.

    Michael Manley, leader of the Jamaican People's National Party and Prime Minister of Jamaica from 1974 through 1980.

    The political result of this moment was the elevation of a new PNP, one that partly rejected the moderation of the 1950s and 1960s and instead pursued a social democratic program. Led by Michael Manley, son of PNP founder Norman, the PNP remade itself into a left populist party that spoke the language of the people (at times literally, as Manley would often use Jamaican patois to campaign) at a moment when Jamaican nationalism had come into fullness.

    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.

    Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and Cuban President Fidel Castro, 1977

    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.

    Current Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness (of the JLP).

    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?

    Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica.

    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.

  • A 2024 Election Post-Mortem Round-Up

    A 2024 Election Post-Mortem Round-Up

    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.

    Supporters attend Kamala Harris's election night party at Howard University, 2024.

    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 parties across the world outrun 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.

    U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers a campaign speech, 1937.

    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.

    U.S. President Lyndon Johnson campaigning with then-U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, 1964.

    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”

    U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris sits for an interview with Bret Baier on FOX News, 2024.

    Another in-vogue idea is that the media landscape is uniquely disfavorable to Democrats and the left. Kate Riga at Talking Points Memo points to the right’s dominance of new media as part of the issue for Democrats; Don Moynihan points to this as part of the reason that the Democrats are being inaccurately maligned for doing “identity politics;” Michael Tomasky of the New Republic lays the blame for Harris’s loss on a right-wing media that “sets the news agenda in this country” and that “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information” that legacy media outlets were quick to parrot.

    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

    U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern campaigning in NYC in 1972.

    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.

    U.S. President Bill Clinton and then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

    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!).

    Then-U.S. Senator Kamala Harris with her book, "The Truths We Hold."

    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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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).
    3. 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.