There is a persistent political fantasy, one I have often fallen into myself, that equates having the right ideas/message with winning. That may seem at first glance like an obviously naïve thing for anyone to believe, but it is actually a quite difficult thing not to believe. It is prone to evolving into ever higher and more refined versions the more one thinks they understand about politics. Because left-wing analysis rightly insists on examining the structures and forces of politics rather than their mere appearances, because it attempts to look deeper underneath the hood than liberals typically do, its adherents, myself among them, are sometimes prone to thinking that means we therefore also know exactly the ideas/message that would have worked, i.e., that we would have won, “Bernie would have won.”1
This is by no means only a feature of the left; liberals do a dumber, even less grounded version of it, and the right does perhaps the dumbest version of all. Self-exculpating postgame analyses are an unfortunate feature of politics, and we didn’t even have to wait for midnight on election night for the post-election Take Wars to begin.
Before we get to the 2024 catastrophe, let’s look back at an essay I wrote on Joe Biden in 2020 that exemplifies what I’m talking about. I still think it’s a good essay. I may have recently deconstructed the prophetic hopes behind it, but the thinking in that piece at least tries to be subtle. Overall, I think it got Biden right: it rejected the gauzy, sentimental view of him that predominated in the media and showed him to be a cynical, power-hungry politician with a significant capacity for petulance, all of which he put on grand display by trying to run for a second term despite being practically dead and then self-righteously resisting the effort to replace him. My essay had two major arguments, which were interrelated and reinforced each other: Biden was bad strategically because his entire career was about learning to “triangulate” with the right and sell out the Democratic base to succeed in politics, and he was bad ideologically because he has no substantive convictions or has even internalized right-wing ones. Beneath those two arguments was an additional implicit one: all of this was bad because what voters actually wanted was left-wing ideas—in other words, our correct ideas.
I don’t recall whether I actually thought Biden would lose in 2020 because of those things. I certainly performed that argument online and when I was canvassing for Bernie Sanders, but may not have fully believed it. (Propaganda, after all, has its rightful uses.) But one thing I did believe is that Bernie would do better against Trump because he did not have those weaknesses: he did have ideological convictions and, because of them, had refused to triangulate with the right the way Biden had. That meant he was the right person for the historical moment both for strategic reasons (voters wanted anti-system candidates) and ideological ones (the voters Democrats were losing to Trump, who wanted economic populism). Undergirding that logic was the classic left-wing belief that the working class is always right, always wants socialism deep in its heart no matter what it does on the surface. The strategic and ideological arguments fused together in a conviction that being ideologically correct—being pure—was the secret to winning. Voters wanted principle, they wanted ideas, they wanted Medicare for All. That was how to win.
The primary basically ended before my Biden essay was published, so I was forced to deal with a reality on the ground that I strongly disliked. That was the emergence of a clear overriding concern among Democratic primary voters: selecting the candidate most likely to beat Trump. The way this registered “on the streets” in a matter of weeks was extremely demoralizing. When I spoke with voters at their doors, no matter how much they liked Bernie or wanted Medicare for All, they said “electability” was the only thing that mattered. In the Bernie camp, one of our favorite takes was that MSNBC and the party leadership had brainwashed primary voters into thinking like pundits, trying to game out what “swing voters” or “suburban women” would want in the general election instead of voting for what they wanted from their own party. I put that framing into the essay: “After decades of alarming Republican politics, Democratic voters have been trained to set aside their hopes and interest for higher strategic purposes. … The fear election has, remarkably, opened the possibility for the empty vehicle of Joe Biden one last time.”
Of course, we also had a story about the general election. This was partly a standard campaign strategy. It was a plan for victory, for where the votes would come from: mobilized young people, people of color and the white working-class voters the Democrats were hemorrhaging to Trump.2 I’m not saying this was crazy, or even the wrong strategy to attempt. But it was partly inspired by the left-wing belief that because of our sophisticated theory—because of our Marxism, it’s probably not too much to say—it had to be true that certain social categories of people would respond to certain ideas, even if they had recently been sucked into the cult of Trump. What was needed was a decisive break with the compromises of the recent Democratic past; the watered-down Republican-lite ideas and messaging; the empty, purely strategic appeals of people like Biden to the shiny object of the moment: Bush bad and scary, Trump bad and scary, democracy under attack.3
A clear ideological contrast. I’m not saying that was crazy, either! But it was often fueled by the classic leftist conviction that our ideas were aligned with the forces of history—that we would win because we were right.
The left-wing analysis of how Democratic voters have been indoctrinated into low expectations and pundit-like strategy thinking was and remains plausible. It may, indeed, be the product of the long erosion of faith in a deeper, more substantive democratic process, and the resort to a type of ultra-mediated hive-mind behavior typical of the era that Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics.” The left analysis of the class forces in the 2020 election and what voters really wanted may also have been correct in some abstract, global sense. But in hindsight it seems that the 2020 election was immediately about one thing all along: putting an end to the four years of exhausting chaos that was the first Trump presidency. That doesn’t mean voters don’t have ideologies or care about policies, but that those play extremely complex and unpredictable roles in their behavior.4 Presidential elections in the era of hyperpolitics tend mostly to express a simple conjunctural verdict, a vote either of broad assent or protest. Yes or no on the way things are at the moment, we don’t like the way this is going or this is fine, why not keep it the way it is. Understanding this and responding to it pragmatically is the Democratic consultant class’s supposed claim to superiority over left-wing ideologues and idealists, but in reality they are often carried away by their own ideology and strategic inertia. They happened to get it right in 2020, but they often end up blowing things spectacularly the way they did in 2016 and now, again, in 2024.
To be just slightly unfair to myself, the thrust of my Biden essay reflected a certain voluntaristic idealism: Bernie would win or be a good president because his ideas were right, Biden would lose or be a bad president because his ideas were bad. But one of the few good questions liberals raised about Bernie in 2020 was how his presidency, in practice, would be any different than Biden’s or that of any other Democrat. He would not be suddenly at the helm of a revolutionary state; he would be the executive of the existing American state, possibly with a divided Congress and a hostile Supreme Court. This was not only a fair question, but possibly a more realist analysis of the constraints of the conjuncture than Bernie voluntarists like myself wanted to believe. And in practice, the Biden administration showed that the person in the White House also perhaps mattered less than we wanted to believe: on economic issues Biden governed significantly to the left of where he ran, reaching, at least haltingly, for some of the bold moves he and liberals had called “unelectable” during the primary. (This led to a flurry of overheated takes that described Biden as “the new FDR.”) Nobody saw COVID coming or could predict its effects, and historical forces mattered more than the individual, as a good Marxist might expect.
That brings us to, well, this.
The takes are already coming thick and fast: the Democrats sold out Gaza, they didn’t offer enough economic populism, they crushed Bernie twice when “Bernie would have won,” and now here we are. The liberal equivalents are, as usual, farcical. Kamala Harris, like Hillary Clinton before her, ran an “excellent” campaign, and the voters “let her down”; the voters are just too racist, too sexist, too fascist to be depended upon. In all of these takes, one’s preferred positioning can never fail, it can only be failed; everything bad happens because one’s preferred ideas weren’t tried.
But I want to suggest that any and all of these things could have been tried and it’s still possible that none of it would have mattered, because the election appears to have been a protest vote with a simple intent: punishing a very unpopular incumbent administration for an economy that most voters think sucks. It’s possible that various strategic choices, like not putting a corpse on the ticket in the first place, or making clear that the new candidate had an identity of her own, would have made a difference. At the very least they should have been tried, and Trump’s blowout in the popular vote suggests there was room to inspire potential Harris voters. This is the kind of thing—reading the data and playing strategic hardball—that the Democratic Party is supposed to be good at, and leftists (mostly) gamely suited up and cheered them on for trying. Spoiler alert: they are not good at those things! Those disapproval numbers were right there in plain sight the whole time, and the Democrats plunged ahead like they didn’t matter. But even if they had done otherwise, we don’t know for sure if it would have been enough to counteract this, and it beggars belief that any particular left-wing issue would have made a difference, either.
Without the rosy tint of my 2020 voluntarism, the 2024 election looked like a bleak index of the current American conjuncture before a single vote was cast: the third in a row with an electorate evenly partitioned between two competing fractions of capital, hysterically polarized on the surface but underneath locked into a strangely motionless stasis that rendered the whiz-kid forecasters’ shiny gadgets nothing more than an elaborate coin toss. The reactionary turn of the dial had come and the burst of left organizational energy and creativity that built across 2016 and 2020 had disappeared into near total reidentification with a Democratic Party it had now given up on changing. As grim as the ultimate result is, it is hard not to see it as the continuation of a deep-structural status quo. The opposite result might have proved only a temporary reprieve.
None of this is to say that we should not dig into the 2024 data and criticize the Democratic Party’s abject failure as thoroughly as deserved. But that should be done with care and time, and without assuming there was a magical solution that could have produced a different result—that prefabricated ideological incantations would have saved us this time or will do so the next. One of the reasons I identify with the left is out of respect for the powerful theoretical arsenal it has built for analyzing the historical forces that undergird politics. Another is its long tradition of turning that critical spirit on itself and looking out over the political terrain without undue optimism, sentimentality or panic. That has always been easier to espouse than to practice; to see oneself accurately and honestly is, alas, one of the hardest thing a person can do. But it seems obvious that the opposite of that would be to plunge immediately into a feeding frenzy of prewritten takes, of positions and counter-positions that that only express our dispiriting situation rather than examine it.
A version of this essay was first published on David Sessions’s Substack, Listening Sessions.
There is a persistent political fantasy, one I have often fallen into myself, that equates having the right ideas/message with winning. That may seem at first glance like an obviously naïve thing for anyone to believe, but it is actually a quite difficult thing not to believe. It is prone to evolving into ever higher and more refined versions the more one thinks they understand about politics. Because left-wing analysis rightly insists on examining the structures and forces of politics rather than their mere appearances, because it attempts to look deeper underneath the hood than liberals typically do, its adherents, myself among them, are sometimes prone to thinking that means we therefore also know exactly the ideas/message that would have worked, i.e., that we would have won, “Bernie would have won.”11. Some on the left mean “Bernie would have won” as a literal statement of fact, while others repeat it as an ironic, tragicomic summation of the left’s broader political-economic analysis of the past few decades. I am more sympathetic to it in the latter sense than my title suggests; it is amusing and strangely comforting—though perhaps too comforting.
This is by no means only a feature of the left; liberals do a dumber, even less grounded version of it, and the right does perhaps the dumbest version of all. Self-exculpating postgame analyses are an unfortunate feature of politics, and we didn’t even have to wait for midnight on election night for the post-election Take Wars to begin.
Before we get to the 2024 catastrophe, let’s look back at an essay I wrote on Joe Biden in 2020 that exemplifies what I’m talking about. I still think it’s a good essay. I may have recently deconstructed the prophetic hopes behind it, but the thinking in that piece at least tries to be subtle. Overall, I think it got Biden right: it rejected the gauzy, sentimental view of him that predominated in the media and showed him to be a cynical, power-hungry politician with a significant capacity for petulance, all of which he put on grand display by trying to run for a second term despite being practically dead and then self-righteously resisting the effort to replace him. My essay had two major arguments, which were interrelated and reinforced each other: Biden was bad strategically because his entire career was about learning to “triangulate” with the right and sell out the Democratic base to succeed in politics, and he was bad ideologically because he has no substantive convictions or has even internalized right-wing ones. Beneath those two arguments was an additional implicit one: all of this was bad because what voters actually wanted was left-wing ideas—in other words, our correct ideas.
I don’t recall whether I actually thought Biden would lose in 2020 because of those things. I certainly performed that argument online and when I was canvassing for Bernie Sanders, but may not have fully believed it. (Propaganda, after all, has its rightful uses.) But one thing I did believe is that Bernie would do better against Trump because he did not have those weaknesses: he did have ideological convictions and, because of them, had refused to triangulate with the right the way Biden had. That meant he was the right person for the historical moment both for strategic reasons (voters wanted anti-system candidates) and ideological ones (the voters Democrats were losing to Trump, who wanted economic populism). Undergirding that logic was the classic left-wing belief that the working class is always right, always wants socialism deep in its heart no matter what it does on the surface. The strategic and ideological arguments fused together in a conviction that being ideologically correct—being pure—was the secret to winning. Voters wanted principle, they wanted ideas, they wanted Medicare for All. That was how to win.
The primary basically ended before my Biden essay was published, so I was forced to deal with a reality on the ground that I strongly disliked. That was the emergence of a clear overriding concern among Democratic primary voters: selecting the candidate most likely to beat Trump. The way this registered “on the streets” in a matter of weeks was extremely demoralizing. When I spoke with voters at their doors, no matter how much they liked Bernie or wanted Medicare for All, they said “electability” was the only thing that mattered. In the Bernie camp, one of our favorite takes was that MSNBC and the party leadership had brainwashed primary voters into thinking like pundits, trying to game out what “swing voters” or “suburban women” would want in the general election instead of voting for what they wanted from their own party. I put that framing into the essay: “After decades of alarming Republican politics, Democratic voters have been trained to set aside their hopes and interest for higher strategic purposes. … The fear election has, remarkably, opened the possibility for the empty vehicle of Joe Biden one last time.”
Of course, we also had a story about the general election. This was partly a standard campaign strategy. It was a plan for victory, for where the votes would come from: mobilized young people, people of color and the white working-class voters the Democrats were hemorrhaging to Trump.22. The 2020 results would first register the movement even of voters of color toward Trump, a development that intensified in 2024. I’m not saying this was crazy, or even the wrong strategy to attempt. But it was partly inspired by the left-wing belief that because of our sophisticated theory—because of our Marxism, it’s probably not too much to say—it had to be true that certain social categories of people would respond to certain ideas, even if they had recently been sucked into the cult of Trump. What was needed was a decisive break with the compromises of the recent Democratic past; the watered-down Republican-lite ideas and messaging; the empty, purely strategic appeals of people like Biden to the shiny object of the moment: Bush bad and scary, Trump bad and scary, democracy under attack.33. It’s revealing to note that the left has not disagreed with any of these basic postures, but rather insisted they be taken up for the right reasons, or our way—an illustration of how easy it is to conflate ideology and strategy.
A clear ideological contrast. I’m not saying that was crazy, either! But it was often fueled by the classic leftist conviction that our ideas were aligned with the forces of history—that we would win because we were right.
The left-wing analysis of how Democratic voters have been indoctrinated into low expectations and pundit-like strategy thinking was and remains plausible. It may, indeed, be the product of the long erosion of faith in a deeper, more substantive democratic process, and the resort to a type of ultra-mediated hive-mind behavior typical of the era that Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics.” The left analysis of the class forces in the 2020 election and what voters really wanted may also have been correct in some abstract, global sense. But in hindsight it seems that the 2020 election was immediately about one thing all along: putting an end to the four years of exhausting chaos that was the first Trump presidency. That doesn’t mean voters don’t have ideologies or care about policies, but that those play extremely complex and unpredictable roles in their behavior.44. Something sophisticated Marxist thinkers in the Bernie movement readily admitted and argued. However, a somewhat simplistic, mechanical link between class and voter preferences predominated. Presidential elections in the era of hyperpolitics tend mostly to express a simple conjunctural verdict, a vote either of broad assent or protest. Yes or no on the way things are at the moment, we don’t like the way this is going or this is fine, why not keep it the way it is. Understanding this and responding to it pragmatically is the Democratic consultant class’s supposed claim to superiority over left-wing ideologues and idealists, but in reality they are often carried away by their own ideology and strategic inertia. They happened to get it right in 2020, but they often end up blowing things spectacularly the way they did in 2016 and now, again, in 2024.
To be just slightly unfair to myself, the thrust of my Biden essay reflected a certain voluntaristic idealism: Bernie would win or be a good president because his ideas were right, Biden would lose or be a bad president because his ideas were bad. But one of the few good questions liberals raised about Bernie in 2020 was how his presidency, in practice, would be any different than Biden’s or that of any other Democrat. He would not be suddenly at the helm of a revolutionary state; he would be the executive of the existing American state, possibly with a divided Congress and a hostile Supreme Court. This was not only a fair question, but possibly a more realist analysis of the constraints of the conjuncture than Bernie voluntarists like myself wanted to believe. And in practice, the Biden administration showed that the person in the White House also perhaps mattered less than we wanted to believe: on economic issues Biden governed significantly to the left of where he ran, reaching, at least haltingly, for some of the bold moves he and liberals had called “unelectable” during the primary. (This led to a flurry of overheated takes that described Biden as “the new FDR.”) Nobody saw COVID coming or could predict its effects, and historical forces mattered more than the individual, as a good Marxist might expect.
That brings us to, well, this.
The takes are already coming thick and fast: the Democrats sold out Gaza, they didn’t offer enough economic populism, they crushed Bernie twice when “Bernie would have won,” and now here we are. The liberal equivalents are, as usual, farcical. Kamala Harris, like Hillary Clinton before her, ran an “excellent” campaign, and the voters “let her down”; the voters are just too racist, too sexist, too fascist to be depended upon. In all of these takes, one’s preferred positioning can never fail, it can only be failed; everything bad happens because one’s preferred ideas weren’t tried.
But I want to suggest that any and all of these things could have been tried and it’s still possible that none of it would have mattered, because the election appears to have been a protest vote with a simple intent: punishing a very unpopular incumbent administration for an economy that most voters think sucks. It’s possible that various strategic choices, like not putting a corpse on the ticket in the first place, or making clear that the new candidate had an identity of her own, would have made a difference. At the very least they should have been tried, and Trump’s blowout in the popular vote suggests there was room to inspire potential Harris voters. This is the kind of thing—reading the data and playing strategic hardball—that the Democratic Party is supposed to be good at, and leftists (mostly) gamely suited up and cheered them on for trying. Spoiler alert: they are not good at those things! Those disapproval numbers were right there in plain sight the whole time, and the Democrats plunged ahead like they didn’t matter. But even if they had done otherwise, we don’t know for sure if it would have been enough to counteract this, and it beggars belief that any particular left-wing issue would have made a difference, either.
Without the rosy tint of my 2020 voluntarism, the 2024 election looked like a bleak index of the current American conjuncture before a single vote was cast: the third in a row with an electorate evenly partitioned between two competing fractions of capital, hysterically polarized on the surface but underneath locked into a strangely motionless stasis that rendered the whiz-kid forecasters’ shiny gadgets nothing more than an elaborate coin toss. The reactionary turn of the dial had come and the burst of left organizational energy and creativity that built across 2016 and 2020 had disappeared into near total reidentification with a Democratic Party it had now given up on changing. As grim as the ultimate result is, it is hard not to see it as the continuation of a deep-structural status quo. The opposite result might have proved only a temporary reprieve.
None of this is to say that we should not dig into the 2024 data and criticize the Democratic Party’s abject failure as thoroughly as deserved. But that should be done with care and time, and without assuming there was a magical solution that could have produced a different result—that prefabricated ideological incantations would have saved us this time or will do so the next. One of the reasons I identify with the left is out of respect for the powerful theoretical arsenal it has built for analyzing the historical forces that undergird politics. Another is its long tradition of turning that critical spirit on itself and looking out over the political terrain without undue optimism, sentimentality or panic. That has always been easier to espouse than to practice; to see oneself accurately and honestly is, alas, one of the hardest thing a person can do. But it seems obvious that the opposite of that would be to plunge immediately into a feeding frenzy of prewritten takes, of positions and counter-positions that that only express our dispiriting situation rather than examine it.
A version of this essay was first published on David Sessions’s Substack, Listening Sessions.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.