Martin Gurri Lost in the Funhouse Democrats need to find a way out of their house of mirrors.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-inauguration-democratic-party-2024-election
On Inauguration Day, January 20, all eyes will be fixed on the once and future president, Donald Trump, and the new faces that will populate his administration. That is proper. Trump has traversed an almost cinematic journey back to the White House, and he is associated with policies and personalities that, once in office, are certain to be fiercely controversial and magnificently entertaining.
The deep question in American politics today, however, concerns the fate of the Democratic Party. For Republicans, the future will look and sound like Trump and his band of young buccaneers, about to take Washington by storm. They may succeed or fail in arriving at their destination, but the direction is set. It is otherwise with the Democrats: the 2024 election shattered the party, and it isn’t clear how—or if—the pieces will come together again.
Democrats’ first step forward must be to acknowledge the scale of their repudiation by the voters. They failed to do this in 2016. Back then, they blamed Trump’s election on Facebook and fake news and the manipulations of that dark wizard, Vladimir Putin. The losers of 2016 absolved themselves from any responsibility for their defeat. Ever since, the Democrats have stumbled inside a house of mirrors, where wish is confused with reality and fatal errors appear as a mere failure to communicate. In that place of illusion, they embrace a mythology that elevates them into wondrous spirits—representatives of science, perpetual guardians of “our democracy,” saviors of a dying earth, adjudicators of perfect justice. By definition, only satanic forces could oppose such a chosen people. To abandon this mythology will be traumatic and identity-crushing.
For change to be possible, party leaders must exert pressure—yet the Democrats are currently bereft of leaders. Joe Biden was a hollow figurehead, his performance in office hovering between comical and terrifying. Kamala Harris parachuted into that sock-puppet slot, and then spent $1 billion for the privilege of dancing with Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. Tim Walz proved an embarrassment.
There are no heirs apparent, and the elder statesmen have served their cause badly. One might think that Bill Clinton would have something to say about triangulation and the forging of “New Democrats,” but his voice has grown quiet from disuse. Since 2016, the dominant Clinton has been Hillary—possibly the Platonic ideal of an out-of-touch elite. Nancy Pelosi is a brilliant tactician, but she resembles a spider at the center of its web: she cut the heart out of Biden’s candidacy to reduce the party’s loss by a few percentage points.
As for Barack Obama, he has wanted to have it both ways: ascend to the Hall of Fame reserved for former two-term presidents, while remaining the biggest star still playing the game. He failed at both roles, appearing too self-interested for a wise statesman and too remote to be an effective campaigner. After the strange episode in which he scolded his black “brothers” for their insufficient loyalty, he has emerged from the election a diminished figure.
Renewal will not arrive from this quarter, and the temptation has grown to grasp for easy answers. Democratic politicians and Hollywood stars are addicted to one another: one side craves glamor, the other gravitas. But where can one find the Democratic equivalent of Elon Musk? Or of podcaster Joe Rogan? Or even of a popular culture icon like Trump himself? Such questions, which assume that the election could have been won by swapping out celebrities, are a sign of intellectual blindness, of an inability to discern cause and effect. After all, Musk, Rogan, and Trump were all once Democrats, left behind by the party’s haphazard flight to the funhouse.
In the absence of real reflection, then, the mythology reasserts itself. Trump must again be viewed as the second coming of Hitler. The Democrats, to their own bleary eyes, resemble the French maquisards, carrying out a noble, if forlorn, “resistance.” Democratic governors are organizing to do battle—yet again—against such “threats to our democracy” as “fast-moving disinformation campaigns.” “Sanctuary” states will—yet again—seek to defy federal efforts to deport illegal migrants. Warned Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker portentously: “You come for my people, you come through me.”
This is like the dreadful sequel to a movie that itself bombed. The Democrats were just defeated on exactly the positions that Pritzker and others—like California’s Gavin Newsom and New Jersey’s Phil Murphy—are swearing to defend to the death. On issue after issue, they have ceded the strategic heights to Trump. They must somehow account for this if they wish to resist him. Rather than advocate censorship, they should invite diversity of opinion. Rather than promote illegality, they should propose generous but sensible immigration policies. There’s a middle ground to be reconquered, where most of the public can be found. Instead, Democrats have chosen to stray ever deeper into delusions.
Democrats have lost control of every branch of the federal government, but they still command most of the great institutions that buttress and bind American society. On the whole, this has been a tremendous source of strength. Every whisper from a Biden or an Obama became a thunderous conformist chorus of assent. Every partisan scheme, like the shadow-banning of critics on social media, was put into action without question. Solidarity with institutional elites is the raft that keeps the Democrats afloat when, like now, they are out of favor and out of power.
But such coddling distorts the field of vision. Amid the standing ovations and endless smiles, the Democrats often cannot see the frowns on the faces of the American public. They enjoy total access to institutional reality but lack windows into a world in which ordinary people suffer from inflation and fear the ravages of crime. There’s rich irony in the Democrats’ self-image as heroic protectors of truth against disinformation, because they go looking for truth in all the wrong places. The New York Times isn’t truth, but that’s where Democrats get their information. The CDC isn’t truth, but Democrats mistake it for infallible science. Hollywood isn’t within shouting distance of truth, but Democrats watch anti-Trump movies like Don’t Look Up and The Apprentice and come away believing that their opinions are universally shared.
The institutions are the warped reflective surfaces of the Democratic Party’s house of mirrors. They dazzle, but lie. To regain a foothold on reality, the Democrats, led by their chieftains, must relearn the difference between hope and fact, no matter how painful the process might be. The alternative is to stagger on for years through glittering chambers that lead nowhere, locked away from the American mainstream, chasing the mirage of their own propaganda.
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