I think a lot of us are still reeling from the devastation, leading us to us to tend to be rigid instead of being able to perceive nuance.
I have said this before – I believe there is not just one true faith and that there is not just one reason we landed in the shitty place we’re in. It was a perfect storm, change any one of them and we would have squeaked by with a narrow victory. But now we’re in the shitty place, and our primary goal needs to be getting out of the shitty place we’re in. When the house is on fire, your only goal is to get everyone out of the house alive; if you don’t make it out of the fire, then nothing else matters.
It seems to me that the most important thing right now is getting 51 seats in the Senate and a bunch more seats in the house. Let me be clear, that does not mean I’m wiling to sacrifice anyone’s human rights to get those seats, but it does mean that we have to work with allies that have the same end goal, even if the members of the coalition have a 100 different priorities they feel are most important.
When you’re at war, you don’t throw out the experienced general because they are older than you like, or they said or did something you don’t like, or because they made a mistake about something. Age is definitely a consideration, and I am more than tired of the seniority system that rewards attendance over performance.
And yes, the median age of elected Democrats in the House and the Senate is too high. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be thrilled that it looks like there’s a good chance that Sherrod Brown will run for the Senate in 2026, regardless of his age, because he is our best shot. The same thing is true for some of our other leaders. Age should be a consideration, but not the only consideration.
What we need to do FIRST IS WIN.
Unlike the other side, we are intellectually sophisticated enough to understand and accept the need for nuance. In a crisis, it’s human nature to become more rigid. The more threatened I feel, the more rigid I become, and I know I’m not alone in that.
So I think we need to fight that tendency to be rigid in our thinking. At every level, we need to be more flexible. I think that could be our secret weapon, if we can embrace it.
I met my best friend at work – we both worked in the same unit at the University. At performance review time, we had to review ourselves and then turn that in to our bosses, and then they reviewed us. Tina always said that there were plenty of people who would criticize or tear you down, and she wasn’t going to help them in the process by giving herself bad marks on anything. There was a lot of wisdom in that, I thought, and I would apply the Tina Principle to the situation we’re in.
The fact that we lost does not mean that we weren’t doing a lot of the right things. It doesn’t mean that our messaging was terrible. It doesn’t mean that the Democratic party is broken. It doesn’t mean that we have to change everything.
Yes, we lost. It’s mind-blowingly awful. But there were a lot of foreign actors with their thumbs on the scale, and I believe the election could have gone the other way, and likely would have gone the other way, without all the bad actors. Russia. Israel. Hamas.
I want to come back to a point that Another Scott made recently, which is that many of the presidential elections for the last 25 years or so have been pretty close. A third party candidate here. Hanging chads there. A series of slim wins and slim losses on both sides.
I simply do not think that our loss in November means the Democratic party is broken and that we have to throw half of the Dems overboard. Yes, the mean age of Democratic elected officials is too high. I don’t think we need to change course as much as we need to do some changing with the times, particularly with respect to how we get our message out in the age of not just social media, but corrupt social media and mainstream media.
Speaking of flexibility, I think the consultants and the fundraising machines are blind to the fact that they have taken things too far, and that what was once a good approach is no longer working. They cry wolf a thousand times a day, and crying wolf even louder and more frequently is not working. That’s a course correction I can get behind.
We talked about fairness in yesterday’s post, Democrats: Making Your Life Better.
The smart move is to learn the right lessons from our loss, and learn from what has come since then, but we will surely lose if we continue to shiv our allies and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even here, sometimes we resemble dogs with their hackles up, and once those hackles go up, it’s hard to have any outcome besides a fight. Maybe learning to recognize when we are being rigid would be a good first move.
Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater?Post + Comments (145)
