Are the Democrats Bullshit?

On being in the upside down and wanting something better

“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” — African proverb

The other morning I woke up at 4 AM with my mind racing. I was ruminating again on the election and the question of why and how so many good-hearted people voted for Trump. It’s such a boring question at this point, but it’s still a heartbreaking one when I consider our common ground and all the things we almost certainly agree on.

So many things about the world feel utterly broken. Costs of living keep going up while wages have been stagnant for decades. For-profit healthcare is insane and psychopathic. Home ownership is out of reach for too many people. College tuitions are outrageous, and the student loan business feels predatory. The food system feels unsustainable. Ecosystems are collapsing. Fossil fuel companies are burning the world, and we feel powerless to do anything about any of it. Powerless. That’s a very tough thing to feel. 

A lot of us, I think, feel all of this acutely, and it’s validating when prominent figures in media or politics seem to feel it too, when they seem to be with us. That’s a low bar, just wanting them to recognize that shit is deeply broken. They don’t even have to have solutions. They can just tell jokes about it, like the late George Carlin or Richard Pryor used to do or Marc Maron does today. We appreciate just knowing that they see the same world we do.

There are also serious, smart, committed people out there who speak forcefully about the state of the world, people who have books full of ideas and solutions, who walk the walk. On the left I’m thinking of Matthew Desmond, Grace Blakely and others. Maybe even politicians like Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders, AOC.

Democrats are happy to celebrate people who recognize what’s broken about the world and who speak the truth forcefully, as long as they keep to the margins, as long as they don’t step outside their little boxes. From the margins, it’s OK to rage against the machine. It’s okay to say that the system is rigged, that the system is corrupt and disenfranchising. 

But as soon as one of these marginal voices attempts to step onto the big stage and vie, for example, to become a standard bearer for the Democratic Party writ large, this kind of talk is discouraged, minimized, dismissed, attacked even. This kind of talk alienates the great middle, the Democrats say, and hinders the party’s efforts to build a large enough coalition to get anything done. Maybe this is true, but it feels like hypocrisy. 

Those of us out here who feel that shit is badly broken want to elect people who appear to understand this. 

We wonder, is the Democratic Party afraid to say that the system is broken, or do they not agree that it’s broken? Do they not believe that it’s broken? We ask them, what are you going to do to fix the broken world, and the Democratic Party responds by offering what feel like tweaks, nothing too drastic. What they bring both policy-wise and and rhetorically feels small and cowardly, not remotely in proportion with the problems. It feels like bullshit. We see the disconnect between the forceful voices on the margins that they celebrate on one hand, and the platform they speechify about and promise on the other.

To folks in my family, RFK Jr is one of the smart and courageous people who recognize that the world is broken and who is out there speaking truth to power and walking the walk. And it’s true that if you have followed RFK Jr for a while, he does say a lot of things that anyone who’s committed to a better world would agree with. And he has some really admirable accomplishments under his belt. He also has said and done some things that are pretty far out there and some that are arguably dangerous. 

It’s also true that the mainstream media has prejudged him, only ever pointing to the most problematic things he’s said or done and giving no attention at all to the good things. I can think of valid arguments for this, but good-hearted fans of RFK Jr see it as an unfair bias in a mainstream media that bills itself as truth-seeking and nuanced. Fans of RFK Jr, you might say, took the mainstream treatment of him as a betrayal. Because of this, they abandoned mainstream news to outlets that are friendlier to their man. 

For what it’s worth, I agree with all of those who judge the Democratic Party to be lacking—lacking the integrity or perhaps the intelligence to recognize the brokenness of the world that is so obvious to us, and lacking the courage to speak truth to power or push back against the system. I agree with those who say that this is because the Democratic Party is too tightly bound up with the power and the system and therefore unwilling or unable to challenge it. 

Nonetheless, a lot of us recognize that the GOP is far worse. We see a choice between a dirt sandwich and a shit sandwich, and although we don’t want the dirt sandwich, a lot of us keep voting for Democrats because we really don’t want the shit sandwich. We vote for Democrats and hope we can push them to do better once they are in power. We aren’t fans of politicians and we think politicians should not have fans. It’s possible we are suckers and fools.

Again though, it’s our common ground that makes this all so heartbreaking.

We agree that we don’t want a corporate for-profit healthcare system, but of the two major parties, we have now voted in the one that receives overwhelmingly more lobbyist money from big pharma and big insurance and corporate healthcare. Of the two major parties, we have voted in the one that consistently opposes all efforts to make healthcare in America less corporate and less profit-oriented. People who imagine that RFK Jr can overcome this as head of HHS will very likely find out they are wrong. They might even find out they’re wrong about who he is.

I think we agree that we don’t like a food industry built on giant factory farms, toxic pesticides, and chemical additives, but we have elected the party that opposes all efforts to regulate what big corporations are allowed to do with our food. This is the party that mocked Michelle Obama for planting a vegetable garden on the White House grounds and her advocacy for healthier eating in general.

We have voted in the party that favors a big business approach to healthcare, and food, and prisons, and now wants to apply it to education, to replace the public school system with for-profit charter schools. We’ll see how well that works out for regular people who already can’t afford college, and who are therefore preyed upon by a for-profit student loan industry (another industry the GOP opposes any efforts to regulate, by the way).

As a side point, it strikes me that most Americans, including Trump voters, want to rein in the worst impulses of corporations when it comes to healthcare, food systems, and other things that impact our wellbeing, but one of the things Trump voters point to most often when celebrating his first term is how he “got rid of regulations.” We can’t have it both ways.

We agree that the economy isn’t working for regular folks, and the middle class is barely making it. Inflation hit people hard (even though the US outperformed all other developed nations on this front, and we are back down to the healthy target of 2%). Median age for first-time homebuyers is at an all-time high while wages are stagnant. Meanwhile, the wealthiest 1% are killing it. In response, we have voted in the party that gave this group big permanent tax cuts—unfunded tax cuts, meaning they came with no spending reductions and added an estimated $1.9 trillion to the federal deficit. And now the promised tariffs on Chinese imports are predicted to increase consumer prices once more, very possibly beyond what we saw from post-Covid inflation.

The GOP has conditioned poor working people to rail against socialism and vigorously defend the unfettered capitalist system that benefits people in my income bracket a lot more than it does them. It’s wild to see it, wild to see people so energetically defend a system that helps me and hurts them. But then it only helps me in the short term, given that it comes with so many other costs—costs to the world borne by all of us but disproportionately by vulnerable groups.

Again, there are many reasons to dislike the Democrats. They are bad at talking about these problems, pundits say. Many say it’s a messaging problem, but I think it goes much deeper. The Democrats don’t have a lot of credibility when they talk about these problems because they are so bound up with the systems that create them. This plus the fact that the media is more interested in clicks and dollars than the truth, and people can no longer agree on what is true anyway. We need something better. I don’t know how to get there, but I know the GOP ain’t it.

I know that good-hearted people who voted for Trump want a lot of the same things as me. I also know that no good-hearted person wants to believe a Trump presidency will be harmful to women, or families, or the planet. Similarly, no good-hearted Trump voter is able to consider the possibility that he’s a vile human being, and no RFK Jr fan can let themselves wonder if he might not have as much integrity as they thought, having thrown himself in with such a vile human being.

Facing these questions produces cognitive dissonance, a source of psychic pain we are driven reflexively to avoid. So next year or the year after that, when good-hearted Trump voters hear about immigrant families being ripped apart, they will tell themselves that it’s fake news, or that it’s only a few, or that those people had it coming, or that it’s actually a good thing for... reasons. They will tell themselves the same things when Gaza is flattened, and when more women die from complications related to pregnancy, just as they already tell themselves that Trump didn’t mean those vile things he said, or he didn’t actually say what he said, or all politicians do it, or all men are like that, and what about when the Democrats... and also that climate change isn’t real, and that the proliferation of military-style assault rifles has nothing to do with the uniquely American problem of mass shootings. Meanwhile, lots of us on the left tell ourselves that Trump voters can’t possibly be good-hearted people.

Telling ourselves these things quiets the cognitive dissonance and makes us feel better.

Finally, this gets at why these political differences fracture families and friendships. When I hear about immigrants being targeted or pregnant women dying, it’s upsetting. I want to be able to share my thoughts with the people I love and have them hear me, have them sympathize with me and empathize with the people I’m thinking about. Misery loves company because it soothes some of the misery. If instead they say something like it’s fake news or that they simply don’t care about those people or those issues, it’s heartbreaking. It genuinely hurts to hear that. So we end up avoiding each other in order to avoid that hurt.