April 4, 2025

This just in: Nearly curtains for Eric Adams! Operators are standing by.

Rupert Murdoch, laughing at your party's weak messaging. Photo:Brendan Hoffman/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Today, I called up Rebecca Traister, who was hideously jet-lagged, to yell about politics for an hour, because she wrote a column about how all your cousins on Facebook are wrong and dumb for saying that caring about trans people and human fairness is what elected Trump.

You were TLDR’d on Bluesky, which is a hilarious thing to say, as writing “when Democrats were most woke, they won elections, and Kamala Harris did not run a woke campaign.” Correct?

That is an accurate TLDR for the factual historical argument of my piece. That is a very effective distillation of, Hey, everybody’s spent the time since the election explaining to all of us dumb people that it was actually wokeism and “defund the police” that just lost the election. I'm like, Kamala? She's a literal cop. Why are you talking about defund the police, James Carville?

I'm cracking up.

It's just been months of everybody explaining that it was like left excess woke identity politics that lost the election. There are centrists who are saying this. There are liberals who are saying this. There are purportedly dispassionate reporters who are saying this. By the way, they're not dispassionate. They're super-passionate about saying this! And then there are leftists who are saying it. I mean in fact the woke left has not gone too far. We need to be more excessive in our thinking about these things, not less excessive.

I have a lot of conversations about “defund the police” still, somehow, because it's now 2025, and I'm like, But does everyone not know that actually we overfunded the police?

We do know that after an entire summer of activists screaming “Defund the police,” purportedly the most toxic phrase ever, that then Democrats won a massive electoral victory with the White House and Senate seats in Georgia and Arizona.

One thing you make the point of is that this is an “elites” issue, but I do have “normal people” talk to me about pronouns a lot, and I'm not totally sure why. I think it's just because of the New York Post or something. I literally heard someone say “that pronoun bullshit” the other day, and I was like, “Sorry, I think you mean me, right?” But I don't know why that's attractive to them. Or does it motivate their voting?

There are plenty of people who don't like this stuff. But what are the demands on them? I'm thinking about this piece that was actually published after I wrote this one, by Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Oh, yes.

Which is about how we're living in a tyranny in which we're all forced to say “chestfeeding” or something. Nobody's ever said a word to me, not one ever in my life, about why I do not have my pronouns on my Twitter bio or on my email signature. So the idea that there is a tyranny of pronouns? Anyway. Do I believe that plenty of people don't love it or feel awkward about it? Sure. Do I think that's why they voted for Donald Trump? No — except, asterisk. In real life, these conversations are just worked out between people. But when it gets projected onto literal screens and ads, and then you have the side that is theoretically on the side of trans rights and protections going completely silent on the issue, being unwilling to say the basic things, that this is just human rights and dignity, when the side that is supposed to do that work in public discourse does not do that work and basically accepts the cruel and inhumane framing of a violent right wing, ceding that framing by not challenging it, by not having a goddamn word to say? The Democratic Party stopped doing that because they got spooked, and it was over several cycles that these same people kept saying, “It loses, it loses, it loses,” even as Democrats were winning when they were doing it. 

If you don't do the basic human-rights and civil-rights work of saying “Don't attack these people, they are our kids, they are our friends, they are parents, they're our partners, they're us,” what that does is create this space where then you have the right that can come in and actually do what political parties can do, which is shape the thinking of people. Do you want me to not go on this rant?

Oh, no, absolutely please do go on this rant. 

Okay here’s the thing. This is something of an obsession. It all goes back to the Clinton years, when they just started poll-testing everything. “How do people feel about this? Do they feel good about it? Then we'll run on it. Do they feel lukewarm about it? Then we're going to be quiet about it.” That totally cedes the possibility that you could shape opinion as a political party. You could shape how your voters see themselves and see you by actually getting out in front of stuff. No. For decades, the Democratic Party has done the opposite. The Republican Party, in contrast, has never met an unpopular issue that it doesn't want to lead with. I think about the tea party in 2010. All of the media said they just didn’t like tax policy or whatever, but in fact their goal was to defund Planned Parenthood as soon as they got to power. Everything they did every day was like hold up a little teabag and say it was a baby's diaper or whatever and do a whole theater-kids thing about defunding Planned Parenthood. Now, this is one of the least popular stances they could have taken. Nothing at that time was more popular than Planned Parenthood. We know that support for abortion and reproductive rights is super-high, even in purple states and even comparatively among Republican voters. If they had been going by polls, like Democrats do, they would've never uttered a word about it, but they didn't care. It's the same thing with NRA stuff.

Because they’re motivated by actual passions — is that what you think is happening there?

I don't know how authentic it is for all of them; certainly plenty of them have paid for a million abortions and whatever, and also they don't want their kids shot at school. They do it for a couple reasons. One, money. Two, what they are showing their base is that they will fight like fuck for everything. They are showing commitment. They are showing passion. Whereas Dems are like, “We could be this way or we could be that way, which way do you like better?” Like the eyeglasses guy who puts in the little lenses — “Better like this, or better like this?” That's how the Democrats do leadership. And over the past eight years, you had an active base that wanted passion from its party, and they showed it by going out in the streets.

While we saw Democratic leaders stop standing for anything. 

What the Trump administration permitted was for the Democrats, the party itself, to see briefly that the Democrats had an activated base. Then they didn't follow through on it. What's wrong with the Democratic Party is that people don't know what the fuck they stand for or would be willing to fight for.

Meanwhile, to bring this full circle, the Republicans are out there running ads on pronouns that are persuasive, that are actually changing people's opinions. So you're right. The entire system has been taken over by the right wing because the Democrats are not putting up anything. Instead, they’re running from the groups whose job out there is to push for the most extreme versions. That group's job is to beat you up, and you know what? You are supposed to be the entity that steers through and takes some of what they're saying and then incorporates it into an actual coherent leadership and worldview.

Well, yeah. They're actually called constituents.

This is how politics works. You have an edge to your base, and they are supposed to be pulling you in the direction that they want, and the idea is you should be meeting them part way and doing it with leadership and conviction. And if you do that, most of ’em are probably going to join you if you actually began to meet them. But what the Democrats do is they meet their opponents halfway instead. It’s like that stupid meme with the guy looking back at the other woman — they're like, “Oh, but what if we met the Republicans halfway here?” And I think that's terrible.

They're scared of a general-election population that they actually don't interface with and can't control while abandoning their actual voting base.

If you look back at any moment of any period in this country where there is clamor for shifts around power, around gender, around race, around sexuality, those issues are never popular. This is the whole myth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that he was this beloved hero. No, the polling was not great, as they like to say now. 

Sure. People thought they were “causing trouble.”

People forget that we literally did this with John Kerry. When Kerry lost, everyone said it was because of gay marriage and abortion. Don't make me go to the clips. I don't want to think about it again. This is a more complex point that I'm probably not capable of making right now, but it's because of the people who tell these stories — all of us journalists, pundits, pollsters, certainly Democratic Party leaders, academics, all the people weighing in on this and telling the story of American politics, are fundamentally representing a power structure. Feminism and anti-racist movements and movements for trans-rights protections, they're disruptive to a power structure.

The people who tell the story of how these dynamics work, all of us are near the top of that power structure that is being jostled. It doesn't always feel good to have our power structure jostled. What we enjoy is the power that we have to tell the story and get paid for it. So, do I believe that everyday Joes are irritated by pronouns, right? Yeah, sure. But I don't think it looms large. There was this whole bunch of stories about how they did it in Maine, and it was like, right, you actually try to change people's minds. You persuade people of the right thing to do.

Maine is such a great example because Maine is the state where you can say, “Oh, our values are about leaving people the fuck alone” — and you can talk about trans rights and gay rights in that category all day long.

We let the right eat up all the language of family, love, life, all these things that are fundamentally arguments for abortion rights and legality and access. These should have been framed as issues of independence. Abortion access makes stronger families, enables families to have more of their own power to make their own decisions, to live stably and healthily. We could have used religious arguments around abortion — there's tons of religious argument on the side of abortion access. We could have used the language of love and parenthood itself, but we ceded all that language to the right.

So they gave up.

This is the thing that I mean about so many people who are making the decisions of how to spin these narratives being near the top of the power structure. A thing that many of us have, if we are near the top of the power structure in this country, is not liking to be challenged.

And the media’s struggle against and with trans people is that they don't see that we’re discarding people who don't have power.

It's discarding people who don't have power who also had the audacity to make you feel remotely uncomfortable in your power. There's such a contrast between, of course, what is actually happening to trans people as they are denied health care, as they are denied recognition, versus “Oh, you got yelled at on Twitter?” If you're a powerful person getting yelled at on Twitter when you're used to not being challenged, and maybe you're a professor and you can't believe that your kids were in an encampment, there’s frustration. Many peers, who I have worked with for years and respect and think I agree with on a lot of issues, but sometimes they’re the ones who are like, “I'm getting canceled” — but they're writing about it on the cover of Harper's.

Like, you live in Paris. Everything's fine. You own an apartment uptown.

You're not getting canceled. You're getting challenged, And that sucks. I too have been challenged and I hate it and I hate it when it comes from people who don't understand that I'm a really good person, and I didn't mean it that way, and I know I get it, but you know what? I'm fine! And who's not fine? The people who we’re yelling about because they're being genocided or they have pronouns that you think you can't use easily in a sentence because you weren't raised using them that way. 

There is such an easy way to cast so many of these issues as fundamentally patriotic and the most beautiful things about this country and how we grow and how we change. Just tell a good story about this nation and tolerance and work in your discomforts and even when things are hard and even when things change, and it doesn't mean you have to have a hard conversation with grandpa. Tell the stories, incorporate the imperfections. Work with what you have. That shouldn't be so hard. But they don’t do it. You know who does do it? The right wing, who commits to literally any bit that they think might get them power or own the libs with scenery-chewing zeal. They will commit to any bit, and Democrats, just by comparison, they don't fucking commit. 

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Photo-Illustration: Margalit Cutler

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