Autopsy: Part One: Authoritarianism

Nov 13, 2024

On the night of November 5, 2024, I tried to sleep. I knew that results would not come out until at least early the following morning, and so I settled into bed at 9 PM knowing we might not even know when I woke up in the morning. Then I woke up at 1:30 AM.

I was still awake when Pennsylvania was called for Trump. It crushed me. I had spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania over the previous couple months training canvassers to get out the vote for Harris. I trained hundreds of people over several weekends to go out and knock doors. It did not seem to matter. I can tell you though that on the ground in Pennsylvania, the energy was there. People traveled for hours, stayed in hotel rooms, knocked on doors for full work days over multiple weekends, and were excited to do so. Anecdotally, the energy at the Democratic office I worked from in Pennsylvania was high. The whole way along however, we were stymied by the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania.

It seemed that every week at that office there was a different literature packet we were leaving at people’s doors, not because it had been updated, but because we kept running out of parts of the packet. The county I operated from had a large Spanish speaking population, and we had multiple canvassers who wanted to walk turf with high densities of Spanish speakers because they spoke Spanish, so that they could connect better with the people who lived in those neighborhoods. Not only did the Democratic Central Committee not aid us in doing this, they refused to let us create our own Spanish language turf from what data we had on hand. Perhaps this flagrant refusal to do Spanish language outreach outside of extremely densely Hispanic areas is part of why Latina women shifted 17 points towards Trump, and Latino men shifted 35 towards Trump. Furthermore, the Democratic Central Committee was frequently putting up roadblocks to our ability to recruit volunteers, including making it impossible for volunteers to sign up to canvass at our location online for a brief period.

This on-the-ground feeling of being unheard and actively punished for initiative appears to be relatively common for the people who work around Democrats, especially this election season. Democratic and adjacent operatives from across the nation had repeatedly asked the Harris campaign to stop campaigning with the Cheneys and trying to court never-Trump-Republicans, showing over and over that it was not a winning strategy, only for their cries for a pivot to fall on deaf ears. Meanwhile, it has been revealed that internal polling from the Biden camp shows that he was incredibly far behind during his run, perhaps with Trump winning over 400 electoral college votes had he continued in the race. Yet Biden was allowed to run until there were barely more than 100 days left in the election, and was allowed to pick his successor without challenge.

All of this comes together to paint an image of a party that is internally authoritarian. This may seem like a bold statement to make about a party that, for the entirety of Biden’s term, was wracked with internal indecisiveness that halted practically all attempts Biden made to operate on his agenda. However, this autonomy among members at the top of the party is an illusion. For one, many naysayers caucusing with Democrats are currently independents, either because they always have been, or because their breaking from party wisdom forced them out of the party. Bernie Sanders has always been an independent, while Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin became independents after constantly butting heads with the Biden administration. Meanwhile, in the house, socialist members of the democratic party like those in The Squad hardly ever vote against party interests, and when they do, the democratic network primaries them in a shower of money and influence so spectacular it nearly causes spontaneous vomiting upon reading about the subject. (Look up Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush) When I say “the Democratic Party is internally authoritarian” I don’t only mean the Democratic National Committee. I mean the Democratic National Committee, the broader Democratic Party, and their hangers on (influencers, nonprofits, celebrities, PACs) as a network of operators that are not always technically affiliated with one another, but essentially are. To be fair, this is also true of the Republican Party. It was true before Donald Trump and it is much more true in the Trump era. The difference is in values.

One of the key points that the Democratic Party hammered home in its final message was the defense of democracy as an institution. Setting aside the ineffectiveness of that strategically, the fact of the matter is, that kind of messaging fosters a culture around your party of democratic norms, which include dissent, criticism, and analysis. It seems, however, the Democratic Party does not like dissent, criticism, or analysis. There’s much evidence of this, key among them the treatment of pro-palestinian protestors.

Republicans on the other hand, have entirely abandoned the democratic messaging, in favor of dogged Trumpism. This means that the hangers on to the Republican Party are going to be significantly less likely to criticize, analyze, or dissent, because the democratic culture is gone.

This creates an entirely different culture around the Democratic Party than the one around the Republican Party, and, rather than embrace that different culture, the Democratic Party cannot seem to stand it. The authoritarian nature of the Republican Party does not hurt it, because its messaging and professed values are inherently authoritarian. The Democratic Party at least attempts to look like they are not, but gets angry whenever their hangers on or their base criticize them.

Having an authoritarian structure can cause a lot of pain for any institution, more on that later, but the disconnect between values and structure matters too. If the structure of an institution does not match its professed values, it will have trouble recruiting people to work within it. This absolutely murders talent recruitment and worker morale. In Pennsylvania, while our volunteers were incredibly enthusiastic, we in the inner circle were constantly angry at the party itself for its ineffectiveness, unwillingness to see reason, and inability to match professed values. This low morale and difficulty in talent recruitment likely hurts the party all the way to the top. Furthermore, it creates the appearance of corruption, even in the rare instance where there is none. If professed values do not match outward policy or interior construction, then many people will ask what values are actually being used to construct the party, and at present, the answer is unclear. That lack of clarity makes people distrust the party.

Republicans do not have these issues because their professed values are nakedly authoritarian and have been for decades. They support patriarchal family values, more control by bosses and landlords over the lives of their subjects, fewer voting rights, more lethal, more invasive, police, less social safety net, and often naked bigotry. Their professed values have been for the entire lives of most readers “more control over the individual by institutions of power” and so will attract authoritarian minded people into their orbit, who enthusiastically embrace authoritarianism. There is no disconnect to create issues of recruitment, retention, or morale.

The authoritarian nature of the party causes its own issues, separate from its disconnect from its professed values. Firstly, it creates a party where new candidates for office are often selected not by a free and open primary, but by the party picking a favorite, falling in line behind them, and pushing on them over all opposition to victory. Having worked in the primaries in Maryland, I can definitively say that this was key to Angela Alsobrooks winning the democratic nomination for senate. David Trone spent millions of dollars on the primary and still lost to Angela Alsobrooks because the party had decided that she was going to be their nominee. This did not require the direct interference of the central committee. Instead, the hangers on: nonprofits and political celebrities aligned with democrats simply backed Alsobrooks with time and media clout until Alsobrooks won, and none of the millions David Trone spent truly mattered. To be clear, I am not supporting election by auction, money needs to be out of politics, but, there has to be some kind of structural change within the Democratic Party to make it more capable of recruiting talent that is liked by voters instead of by insiders. I do not know what that looks like. The Republicans do not have such a structure. Donald Trump simply bullied his way to the front of the party and now rules it with an iron fist. I believe that the Democratic Party should get rid of superdelegates. Other than that I have no suggestions on this front.

Finally, authoritarian institutions always have a blindness problem. Leadership of the structure is surrounded by yes men because the authoritarian leader does not want to listen to naysayers or detractors. This means that it is impossible to say what public opinion actually is. Criticism will get you locked in the prison camp, fired from the company, or beaten with a “We Love Joe” sign (A real thing that happened at the DNC, check source 7). So most people do not raise criticisms. This means that the party simply cannot tell what policies and strategies will work with voters, and what will not, and have to rely on indirect indicators in order to check on how policies and messages are working. This problem had disastrous consequences in 2024.

To demonstrate this catastrophe, there are three sets of exit polls published by CNN I would like to draw the reader’s attention to. Firstly are women and Christians:

Abortion was a key issue in this election, after the Dobbs decision, abortion has mostly been achieving electoral victories across the nation. However, here we can see that for Harris, discussion of abortion was done in such a way as to lose Christians, who are generally opposed to abortion, while also losing women. Maybe Trump and the Republicans’ victories on abortion are such that Christians were already going to move in his direction, and Harris needed to press on the abortion issue harder to appeal to women voters. Maybe other issues, such as the economy, were so on the mind for women that they were always going to swing towards Trump, but discussing abortion alienated Christians and so the campaign should have discussed it less. We simply do not know. We just know that the messaging on abortion did not have the desired effect.

If the party had some kind of internal democratic structure, perhaps naysayers, on either or both sides of the issue, would have come forward and offered their warning signs, and the campaign would have adjusted accordingly.

This all is not to say that we should not support abortion. Far from it, abortion and other reproductive justice issues are critical to my personal support for a candidate. This is just a question of messaging. I lean towards discussing it more than the campaign did, as abortion ballot measures won a majority of votes in nearly all jurisdictions they have been put forward. The important thing is, in a more democratic party, these discussions would have been had months ago, rather than as an autopsy after the fact.

The second set of exit polls I would like to draw the reader’s attention to regards household income.

This, in my opinion, shows a pronounced shift within the Democratic Party away from being the party for the lower classes, towards being the party for the higher classes. Firstly, and most importantly, this means that there is no party for the impoverished, working, or middle classes, only parties for the wealthy. Secondly and almost as importantly, it shows that wealthier individuals felt better under a Biden administration than they did under a Trump one, and the opposite was true for lower class individuals. The following graph, made entirely from data found at the Bureau for Economic Analysis, is a pretty strong indicator of why this shift among income groups might have happened.

Unfortunately, we do not have 2023 data or 2024 data to see if these trends continued or changed, however, the story shown by this graph is clear. For the poorest 60% of Americans or, roughly those who live in a household making under 100k per year, the pandemic itself did not stop income growth, and in fact, may have made incomes grow faster during the pandemic proper. Many people lost work for a few months, but this was offset by supplemental unemployment and stimulus checks, or work in other fields offering significant overtime and hazard pay. However, the pandemic hurt growth for the higher 40% of wage earners. When pandemic policies ended, all of these factors were part of that. The end of those factors, coupled with stagnant wages and sky high inflation cut real income for huge portions of the poorest 60% of Americans, while the very wealthiest made off like bandits.

Were the Democratic Party at all internally democratic, they would have been able to understand that the economy was in fact bad for a slim majority of Americans, even as popular economic indicators improved in the years following the pandemic. To the credit of the Harris administration, the most significant break from the Biden administration was on economic policy, and her proposed plans for dealing with housing and grocery costs, while disfavored by orthodox economists, could have been easily perceived as aiding the hardest hit Americans.

However, large portions of the Democratic Party and their hangers on attempted to plug their ears and shout away the economic fire they had on their hands. Just because most classical indicators of a healthy economy are good, does not mean that your average voter is not hurting. If they say they are hurting, disbelieve them at your own peril.

The last set of exit polls I want to show you is different from the other two. It shows the percent of votes cast that were cast by registered democrats. For this table, I will include 2016 counts as well.

As I write this, a few western states, including California, are still counting votes. However, it does not appear that voter turnout in 2024 will be at the level of voter turnout in 2020. Even if it is, this indicates that almost one out of every six registered democrats who voted in 2020 either changed their party affiliation, or sat out of the election.

Imagine if Netflix lost one out of every six subscribers in four years. The company would be shattered, stock prices would tank, even if the company continued to exist, it would be a radically different entity, with an entirely different strategy. Heads would roll in Netflix’s C-Suite. Yet the Democratic Party continues on after this massive defeat, after hemorrhaging support by every imaginable metric except funding, and the party leadership is left mostly intact. The leadership of the Democratic National Committee will change, but the rest of the party will remain largely the same.

Only kings are insulated from this level of failure. It is time we do like those who came before us, and reject kings. The only question in my mind is whether we depose those kings from within, or if we secede from their nation in a revolution. Do we attempt to forcibly reform this broken party, or do we simply leave it?

Sources:

Beyond November 6, 2024

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