The Insurgency Will Continue Until Morale Improves

You can read what follows as an after-action report on the Graham Platner saga—but that episode is a microcosm of something larger and more profound.

The Democratic Party has lost control of itself more completely than at any time I can remember.

Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 was the precipitating incident. It caused Democratic voters to experience a crisis of confidence in the party’s leadership, which, to rough approximation, hasn’t really turned over in decades. The leaders accelerated the collapse in trust by cowering for months as Trump and the GOP—through largely criminal means—remade the United States government into a right-wing autocracy.

As politics like nature abhors a vacuum, the void filled from the left. This faction (comprising a hodgepodge of politically liberal progressives and more genuinely radical actors) has fielded candidates strategically, in a manner designed to gain power within the Democratic Party, but without taking huge risks in reach states and districts, where losing races would undermine their movement¹.

This has been an opportunistic endeavor, but I don’t use that term in a derogatory sense—at least not entirely. Progressives want more power in, if not control over, the Democratic Party for ideological reasons. The only way to obtain that power is to defeat incumbent Democrats, who in turn select the leadership. If the Democratic base is suddenly fed up with the party machine, it’s fair game in politics to channel that energy toward factional causes or candidates—so long as those candidates credibly promise to wage the fight Democratic voters are actually demanding, and don’t do and say things that make them losers in the eyes of the general electorate.

But that’s not what happened in Maine. It’s not what’s happened in at least a couple other, lower-profile congressional races.

Democrats are thus on the cusp of doing at the congressional level what Republicans did in the Obama-era midterms: win, but suboptimally, losing certain pivotal races for dumb reasons.

Maybe they’ll pull together by November, in Maine and elsewhere, and this comparison will seem foolish in hindsight. We should also note that Republican disarray in the Obama years didn’t exactly turn out to be the death knell of the GOP.

But in either case, all of this chaos and bad blood gives rise to the question of why. What made rank-and-file Democratic voters decide to roll the dice with untested politicians rather than place their trust, once again, in candidates supported by the national party? The backstory here is very long—the length of a magazine feature. But I hope you’ll read the whole thing, in installments if necessary, and then sit with it. I don’t think it’s possible to make sense of the anger coursing through the Democratic electorate without this context.

Share

We know why the American far right rebelled against the GOP establishment, starting almost two decades ago: Barack Obama won the presidency with an approval rating that hovered around 70 percent, but the lagging 30—a good proxy for the Republican base, and for today’s terminal Trump loyalists—regarded Obama as an interloper. Possibly Muslim, certainly black, and—according to the right-wing influencers of the time—quite likely born in Kenya.

How could Republicans, the party of Real America, lose to this?! And then how could they do it again?!

Without resorting to birther-style calumny, today’s anti-Trump majority asks a strikingly similar question of the Democratic Party: How could you lose, twice, to this manifestly horrible person? In contrast to the Tea Party, though, today’s resistance lacks clear and satisfactory answers. George W. Bush’s presidency ended in a multi-front disaster. His failures, which were the Republican Party’s failures, allowed Democrats to win back-to-back landslides, in 2006 and 2008. Republican leaders responded to these failures not by forging a synthesis between conservative cultural values and rigorous, fact-based governing, but by pretending their failures were about something else entirely. They’d let deficits get too big! They’d grown government when they were meant to shrink it!

They thus remade their party in the image of scoldy plutocrats rather than, say, Actually Compassionate Conservatives™️ and into the void—from the right, but down the escalator—flowed Donald Trump and kleptocracy and fascism.

For the pre-Trump GOP, then, there was a moment—an easily identifiable moment—when the music stopped. Democrats lack an analogous moment. The discrediting of the party leadership isn’t rooted in one obvious failure, but in multiple cumulative ones—pivotal moments, when Democrats could have exhibited what we now call “fight,” but decided otherwise. This is my attempt to weave them all into a single story, because they all stem from the same defect.