As a trans woman, if you told me we could throw sports and locker rooms away but win back basic dignity and respect and an end to erasure, I think most trans people (and perhaps most Democrats) would probably take that deal.
But I don't think that's fundamentally the deal on the table for Democrats. Trans people have become unpopular not because we're evil or wrong, but because the narrative changed. People bought into the Republican vibe of scary foreigners and evil deviants more than they bought into the Democratic worldview. Good politics isn't just about following public opinion and cherry-picking all the most popular opinions on issues. It's also about telling a wider story, creating a narrative and a vision of where the country needs to go. Once you know what story the Democrats are telling, who its heroes and villains are, you can determine how their position on trans issues will fit into that story.
The correct story for Democrats to tell in 2028 is the Captain America story. In this story, Putin, Xi, and Trump are all the same person - identical fascist movements trying to conquer the world with authoritarian rule. These movements are taking over the world, and we, the defenders of Freedom and Democracy, need to come together and defeat them.
Liberal societies are prosperous and free, but fascists want to enslave us. Liberal democracies win by standing together, but fascists want to divide us. We're losing this war, and the world needs American heroes. This is the ur-story, the narrative from which all things must come.
How do we talk about Joe Biden and the past? How would Captain America talk about him? Acknowledge that Joe Biden is a good man who tried to do the right thing, but that he ultimately wasn’t the man for this mission. Intentionally or not, he deceived the American people about his capabilities, and his commitment to war against fascists wavered when matched against his ego. You acknowledge the failures of career politicians like him and say how you, a real outsider who knows right from wrong, can do better.
How do you handle the economy? Captain America again. You point out that liberal democracy is the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known, a power that has built the modern world. Without the fascists constantly looting our treasury and making us poorer, we’ll be able to both feed our hungry and keep our military strong. A welfare state that supports us in our retirements isn’t some impossible dream, it’s the birthright of living in a liberal democracy, a reward we share for doing the right thing.
How should we handle health care? Captain America would surely say that Americans deserve health care, and that giving to your neighbor is good. There’s a subtle difference in the presentation here though from previous Democratic offerings - you don’t want to present this as just about altruism, or suggest that health care and welfare are merely a moral obligation you give for being kind. Instead, you want to point out that stronger social systems are our birthright, something real Americans (aka, not fascists) take pride in and feel patriotism about. Make lifting ourselves up together and Doing the Right Thing and having the Best Health Care be a part of our national identity. We’re the kind of Big Damn Heroes who help the starving children, while the small-minded fascists let them die. This is what separates us from them..
How do we handle foreign policy? Captain America has the answers. Take all the aggression and swagger and pride that Trump has shown towards Zelensky and Canada and Ukraine, and apply it to the actual bad guys. America will hit back against the fascists, we’ll show strength, defend our allies, and never ever submit to fascist rule.
How do you answer tricky gotcha questions about trans sports bans designed to break apart your coalition? Try: “It’s up to the sports teams what their rules will be. Trans people are Americans, and we’re in favor of American freedom of expression, not top-down control - unlike the other guys.” Draw attention to Trump’s blanket ban of trans people from the military, and point out how it’s one more way that fascist movements would seek to divide and conquer us.
Politics isn't just about picking the right individual issue positions, it's about building a narrative. Trump has created a rogue's gallery of cartoonish comic-book villains and TV personalities and put them in charge of every branch of government. You couldn't ask for a better setup for Democrats to present themselves as the comic-book hero. They just need to get out of their own way.
This is, incidentally, also why the abundance narrative doesn't work as politics. It's a policy winner and we should absolutely listen to Klein about fixing the problems of government, but it's a political loser because it doesn't have a clear villain. Most people don't follow politics to increase absolute value, they follow politics to see the bad people punished and the good people rewarded.
Democrats might well need to fix their individual issue positions or policies, but all of this has to come from the wider narrative, the story that you tell. This is why Trump can fail over and over and all his people still love him - we expect our heroes to fail many times before they succeed. Democrats need to tell an equally plausible story, one where they're the good guys fighting for freedom and they'll punish the bad guys who aren't.
What’s a NIMBY? Sorry, not a serious question. But I think that’s the one you’d get from the broader voter base, and I can’t imagine how you explain it without the answer being “every homeowner who wants the value of their biggest investment to increase,” which is not a great enemy to give yourself.
Shouldn't solidly blue states like California and New York (where anti-urban populists will never conceivably win a state-wide majority) deprive localities of their zoning powers in order to disempower the NIMBYs?
One reason why Japan is a YIMBY country is that their zoning law was set by national rather than local government.
Not one with a personal avatar of some sort. In the public mind it may live as something closer to a disease like the flu, it can be widely acknowledged that it’s a bad thing but it’s a bad thing that doesn’t generally feel terribly urgent. As opposed to something like a typhoon where it’s very easy to point at the thing and say “we have a problem” and everyone nods and agrees.
Yes- I think that approach will work with partisans, because hate and vengeance are so important to them and key to mutual grooming and development of in-group cohesion and out-group othering.
The problem is that sort of primate/troop us or them attitude doesn’t really describe the middle 15 percent of the country when it comes to politics (there are other issues where they’d exhibit that primate behavior, of course).
A lot of them don’t care enough about politics to hate anyone nor crave government to act as an angel of vengeance nor even angel of mercy. How do you reach them?
Also, I think presidential politics is mostly baked into the macro cake. It is hard for a party to win a third term. It is hard to beat an incumbent running for a second term. It is hard for the incumbent party to win if we are in recession or the economy is doing poorly. “Wrong track” and approval ratings have some significance. Incumbent parties usually lose seats at midterms, etc. At the margin party views/policies make a difference, sure, and we know that Dem views were not popular. We also know people don’t like inflation.
Generally, though, politics follows the zeitgeist rather than leading it, and macro events have more impact on the zeitgeist than politicians do.
Having an inspirational and charismatic leader helps of course. People are often looking for a leader-type or a celebrity. When I saw the image of Trump’s assassination attempt and then heard Kamala answer a simple policy question with “I was raised in a middle class family” I figured it was over. I didn’t vote for either, of course.
There is a villain. When a mile of subway costs 10x per mile more in the US than Denmark, somebody is getting that other 9x. It's the lawyers, bureaucrats, and consultant gatekeepers all getting fat on the inefficient process that makes things so expensive and slow to build. The problem is that this particular villain is a major constituency of the Democratic party, which is why I think this "abundance agenda" is dead in the water.
Thank you for your comment. Your part about what can be 'conceded' via trans rights and what is received in return is something I've been thinking about lately that seems to be missing from the conversation in concrete terms.
As a queer person that supports trans rights, I acknowledge the complexity of things like trans women in sports and gender-affirming care for minors. The unstated premise (at least as I read it) of moderating on those issues is this turns the heat down and will create space in the conversation to focus on treating trans people in general (either those that socially transition in youth, or socially and medically transition in adulthood) with dignity and respect and recognize them as people who deserve basic rights. I know that some people on the left may not be willing to moderate on those issues, but for those that are, this seems to be the logic of hope behind it.
The problem is that this doesn't map onto the reality we're living through at this moment. Look at the language that the Trump administration is using to denigrate trans people in the military - the EO says that a different gender identity "conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle". They think trans people are are harmful to society and don't want them openly present in their families, communities, or popular culture. Focusing specifically on trans sports is the cover for all of this.
I wish I knew the answer for how to thread the needle of moderating on key aspects, staying silent enough to not draw enough attention to it and win power, while also continuing to support a marginalized community that has seen popular opinion backslide in a way that's affecting their everyday existence. This is a lot more difficult than a lot of pundits give it credit for.
Right. The idea always seems to be that if you "moderate' on trans sports, somehow all the anti-trans people will go away and leave us alone on the really important stuff like military bans.
But it just doesn't work like that! Public opinion on Trans Sports didn't change because Trans Sports is just such an important issue to people's everyday lives, it changed because the narrative changed! Because everyone started believing that Wokeness is bad and bullying vulnerable people makes you strong. So long as people believe that, they'll want to destroy us and they'll use whatever issue is most convenient.
Trans people won't get our rights back by moderating on individual issues. The sports piece of this is irrelevant, it's a dozen people. We'll get our rights when we're able to be a part of changing the cultural narrative to place Fascist Dictators as the enemy and not Wokeness.
The battle is always for the cultural vibe. You have to think about the overall story you want to tell, how you feel in your guts about where the country is going and what scares you the most - and then figure out how and where our individual issues fit into that story. If we can't win the battle for the vibe, we'll lose on everything anyway. And if we tell our story, the individual issues all can be fought on the new more favorable ground.
Trans Sports became a thing because... it became a thing that was happening. It simply didn't happen prior to 2015 because there weren't people defending the idea of men playing women's sports. Now there are. So the pushback has arrived.
The only people being bullied are the girls losing opportunity to do what they love (and being told to shut up about it)
Do you think there is some mechanism at play that caused large numbers of people to decide that a half-dozen middle school volleyball teams were vitally important national issues? How do you think that decision was made?
After all, the world is full of injustice. Kids all across America are bullied and lose opportunity every day, for all kinds of reasons. What mechanism do you think causes people to focus onto some of those instances of bullying or injustice and not others? Why does the injustice of the girl's volleyball team merit a national backlash, while other negative unfair experiences don't?
Is the negative experience of losing a girl's softball opportunity worse than the negative experience of being an immigrant, or trans, or a fat kid who is bullied? If we had to choose from all the kids in America to help based on triage, would the girls on volleyball teams who lose spots to trans women make the top of the list?
Could we even find very many of them? Trans women aren't dominating women's sports, with or without bans. Lia Thomas finished in 5th! This all seems to be a solution desperately searching for a problem.
I contend that this mechanism through which specific things get chosen backlash is what we can refer to as "National Narrative." A vibe, an overall story that people are feeling and telling about themselves. Trans issues earn backlash because they're a part of something bigger - a core idea that the greatest threat to the world is Wokeness and the Deep State and annoying liberals demanding endless self-flagellation and suffering. In this narrative, Trans People aren't people, we're volleys in the culture war, examples the right holds up of everything wrong with the world.
And so, the best way for the Democratic party to help ensure all of our the rights and safety is to break that narrative and settle on a new one. The Captain America framing is better for us, and it's better for the cis girls on the volleyball team too. We all benefit from standing together against the fascists trying to take over the world.
The actually correct answer to trans women in sports is that it depends on the sport and the trans woman.
Is the sport we're talking about Chess? MMA? College-level, professional, middle-school? Is there money on the line, or is it just kids having fun?
What do the players in the sports league want the rules to be? What do the organizers want? If there are parents involved, what do the parents want? Are the people who want to reject a trans woman acting solely out of bigotry, or are there legitimate safety and fairness concerns with a particular person?
Is the trans woman a tiny waif who's been on hormones her entire life and has no testosterone-induced muscle mass? Is she just starting her transition, or is she twenty years into it? Do the people around her know she's trans? Has she had surgeries?
What about trans men? They're often physically stronger because of hormone treatments they take. Many trans-men look male enough that women might become uncomfortable around them. So are trans men allowed to play women's sports? At what point are they required to stop?
In practice, these are all complicated questions and answering them in a fair way requires domain-specific knowledge of both the sport and of gender transition and its effects. If you want to say whether a trans woman playing a sport is fair, you have to have a specific trans woman and a specific sport that you're talking about. No one-size fits-all answer is going to make any sense. The entire idea of "settling this" on the national level at all is a fantasy, constructed by people who imagine that the world must always be simple.
Sorry. Most sporting organizations are not willing to admit or reject players based on that level of complexity. It may make you feel intellectually superior to delve into all these nuanced scenarios but sports is meant to be simple and this kind of eligibility criteria makes it anything but simple. You’re not going to flip many people with these arguments. I can guarantee that.
"Do you think there is some mechanism at play that caused large numbers of people to decide that a half-dozen middle school volleyball teams were vitally important national issues?"
It was clearly because the right decided to push it. It helped that there were some prominent examples they could point to (notably Lia Thomas). The right recognized that it was a great wedge issue that would break their way, especially by talking about "men in girls' locker rooms", and one that Dems would double down on, in spite of how few people it actually affected.
Had progressives moderated on the sports question 3-4 years ago, it would have taken a lot of wind out of the GOP's sails, making it harder for them to stir up anti-trans sentiment in other areas. Will moderating now help? A little. But I think bad political calculations over the last few years have set trans rights back a decade or more. Regaining that ground will not happen quickly.
IMO, the trans rights movement tried to move far too fast anyway. It appeared to many that the gay rights movement succeeded almost overnight; Obergefell was announced and within a couple of years everyone was just okay with it. But that perception ignores the fact that it took a good 3-4 decades to shift public opinion first. I do think the gay rights history helps trans rights to be able to move a little quicker than if we hadn't just made that change, but it's still going to take time for people to come to terms with a deep realignment in their views of what sex and gender are. Compared to those, sexual orientation was easy.
Note that I'm not saying it's *fair* or *right* that people find it difficult to accept trans people, just that it's reality. A reality I think we can change, but it will take time, and holding firm on the parts of the issue that matter less but generate more negative reactions will make it take longer.
It's easy to blame Fox News, but I actually think it goes psychologically deeper. Why was Fox News able to succeed with this line of attack now, when they weren't previously?
I haven't seen people write very much about this, but I think a lot of the anti-Wokeness backlash is really a COVID backlash. Because COVID lockdowns were very traumatizing and also very psychologically similar to Wokeness.
Living under Wokeness could be deeply demanding and difficult for the average person. Wokeness asks (rightly or wrongly) that you constantly second-guess yourself. It asks that you police your language and your actions. It wants you to learn new difficult concepts that challenge your self-perception, all to ensure you're protecting some vulnerable minority group. This was done with good reason in many cases, but it's a hard thing to ask of people.
Then along comes COVID, and lockdowns demand all the same things, only it's now on a much greater scale. Now, to protect the vulnerable minorities you have to give up everything - your social life, the ability to go to restaurants or watch movies, your place in the world. Lockdowns asked people to sacrifice large pieces of their soul in exchange for helping the weak.
A lot of ink has been spilled about how the COVID vaccine became left-coded, but I think a big part of it is that lockdowns simply felt like a supercharged version of Wokeness, a logical endpoint.
After lockdowns were over, people had a lot of pent-up trauma over this. They naturally wanted to blame the Woke for all their problems. They wanted to do things for themselves, to indulge in their human excesses - and so, they were vulnerable to a movement that told them that it's OK to bully the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.
Trans people, who mostly just want to live our lives, were caught in the crossfire of the culture war, and so the attacks on us (which were ever-present) started to land.
Fortunately, the culture moves on, and we will to. Americans are resilient and we'll put the traumas of Wokeness and covid behind us. When we do, we'll also remember who we are.
Moderating on girl's & women's will sports is, imo, essential at this point. If only because it's the right and honorable thing to do. Especially at the college and elite sports levels.
Regarding transitioning as a minor, maybe I'm not fully up on the current research, but taking a more EU-like approach to further document what I understand are already extremely low post-surgical regret rates will only help.
Meanwhile, straight Americans will watch or re-watch Le Cages aux Folles and other heartwarming films, and FOX News-inspired Trans-phobia will soon fade, just as it has already largely disappeared for Gay people.
Another, more militant option would be to copy the incredibly successful ACT UP playbook of the 1990's, and ambush GOP politicians in public places with impromptu ultra-Queer flashmob photo shoots.
William Thomas (who stole the woman's name "Lia") was declared the winner of the NCAA championship in the 500m freestyle in 2022.
The actual winner, Emma Weyant (say her name!), swam a personal best that day, and was the fastest woman in the race, but she was declared to have lost because Thomas, a male, was allowed to complete in the female category.
Here is an official University of Pennsylvania Athletics page about him:
From the report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls in sports:
>The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males. According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports.
Trans sports--the entire Trans-in-the-crosshairs moment--came about only because the official spokesnetwork of the GOP, FOX News, decided it was time to bully a relatively obscure part of the LGBTQ community as a new piece of Culture Wars programming.
Bashing Gays--albeit still super-popular among most hard-right types--had become off-putting to Independents, and even moderate conservatives. And so the GOP needed a new whipping boy, a new scapegoat. Trans people--a mere 1% of the country--were mysterious and "other-y" enough to perfectly fit the bill. Just like they did a few years ago with Critical Race Theory--an obscure grad-school course nobody had ever heard of--that was suddenly spun into something supposedly race-shaming white children in every public school in America--it suddenly became a thing. FOX News evoked images of hulking Trans athletes mowing down entire girl's field hockey teams; or of bulging-biceped cross dressers with unshaved legs barging into primary school girls bathrooms. FOX News did it's usual masterfully creative job of horrifying and enraging conservative viewers about this horrible new deviancy threating decent Americans.
FOX/GOP then knew that Dems would rush to defend the greater Gay community, and played on the Trans sports angle and transitioning as a minor, to really push it over the top with conservative voters. Just as they've successfully pushed the lie that illegal immigration is 100% caused by evil Dems, who want to give illegals the vote to steal elections. Just like they successfully pushed the lie that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was 100% Biden--instead of 90% Trump and 10% Biden.
My point is that conservative voters implicitly believe this nonsense, and then vote accordingly. And that the primary reason they take this drivel as gospel, is FOX News.
There was a time when West Virginia public schools' textbooks celebrated Christine Jorgensen's surgery (then called a sex change) as a triumph of human freedom and medical breakthroughs. That was late 80s/early 90s, in a setting where being gay was very much not smiled upon. I knew trans people in the late 90s, and while life sure as hell wasn't easy for them, I don't ever remember seeing anything like the whipped-up hated they're facing now.
The fundamental reason why "LGBT" are lumped together in the contemporary West is because the greatest threat to such people is often from their own straight family members (as opposed to non-related people, which racist bigotry comes from essentially by definition).
LGB on the other hand are far more closely linked than any of them is to T, and an even starker example of conflicting approaches to these two issues would be Iran, where sex change operations are common but homosexual activity is literally a capital crime.
Can confirm, being the target of a massive internet hate movement directed at your medical community is a lot of fun.
That's why it's all the more important for us to be resilient, though. Transitioning itself is still harder (though more rewarding) than dealing with a bunch of crybully clowns. Going through the process and all of its hardships demands a lot of personal strength, and it's not as if we haven't had the government try to oppress us before.
Of course, it's disheartening for us to go through all this again. It's hard for our community, who haven't done anything wrong. But dealing with these things is nothing new for us. If anything, it makes me more patriotic, and affirms that Liberal Democracy is worth fighting for in the face of such things. We're Americans. We should stand up to small-minded bullies and fascists, not let ourselves turn into them. That's the battle we need to win here.
Conversely, there’s no narrative that will change if you insist on trans women in women’s sports as a non-negotiable starting point. You’re going to continue to run into a wall because most non-political people are fundamentally against it and see it as a matter of unfairness to women.
There's also a parents' rights and government overreach argument to be made about trans kids, that extends more broadly to reproductive health care in general. Maybe you don't agree with puberty blockers and don't want your kid to get them. I'm okay with the idea that your 12-year-old shouldn't have the right to make an independent decision about that, just like she can't decide about a lot of other health care things like whether to have cancer treatment. But if I feel differently and believe that it's vital for my 12-year-old to avoid going through opposite-sex puberty, I should have the right to make that decision for my kid!
Instead, the GOP wants to arrest me as a child abuser and take my other children away from me too. Captain America wouldn't like that much!
That said, there's a version of this argument where it starts to get different for older teens, because we recognize in other contexts that they can make some health decisions. In most states, pregnant teens can consent to get prenatal care and sign off on having c-sections and epidurals. There's case law around whether older teens can be forced to undergo life-saving chemotherapy or choose to go into hospice, as well as to have their religious objections honored. In every state, teen mothers have unlimited power to consent to their own children's medical care. It's kind of ludicrous to think that they can make life-or-death decisions for their kids but not for themselves, so we implicitly understand that there are some edge cases. And, of course, there is the obvious link to abortion rights, where many states have some form of judicial override for parental consent.
I think ol' Steve would be broadly in favor of letting parents make decisions for their kids, with some guardian ad litem pressure valves for mature teens in truly exceptional situations.
In blue states, you have no right to prevent your 12 year old from getting puberty blockers and cross sex hormones. Your child can run away to a glitter family, and get ACLU or GLAAD or HRC to file a request for an emergency court order to get transed.
California pioneered this with SB 107 in 2021, and it has now been copied by multiple blue states.
From the SB 107 Bill Summary: "The bill would authorize a court to take temporary jurisdiction because a child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care."
(a) A court of this state has temporary emergency jurisdiction if the child is present in this state and the child has been abandoned or it is necessary in an emergency to protect the child because the child, or a sibling or parent of the child, is subjected to, or threatened with, mistreatment or abuse, or because the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care, as defined by Section 16010.2 of the Welfare and Institutions Code [definition quoted below].
(b) If there is no previous child custody determination that is entitled to be enforced under this part and a child custody proceeding has not been commenced in a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive, a child custody determination made under this section remains in effect until an order is obtained from a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive. If a child custody proceeding has not been or is not commenced in a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive, a child custody determination made under this section becomes a final determination, if it so provides and this state becomes the home state of the child.
(b)(3)(A) “Gender affirming health care” means medically necessary health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient, and may include, but is not limited to, the following:
(i) Interventions to suppress the development of endogenous secondary sex characteristics.
(ii) Interventions to align the patient's appearance or physical body with the patient's gender identity.
(iii) Interventions to alleviate symptoms of clinically significant distress resulting from gender dysphoria, as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition.
(B) “Gender affirming mental health care” means mental health care or behavioral health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient, and may include, but is not limited to, developmentally appropriate exploration and integration of identity, reduction of distress, adaptive coping, and strategies to increase family acceptance.
Thank you for this. People like me who aren’t particularly in trans spaces or discussions and certainly not the academia are in favor of trans rights in general. I do believe trans folks should be protected from discrimination, but once the discussion turned to sports and - especially - in schools, I think it put a lot of people off.
I don’t particularly care about the sports issue - as you say, it’s a vanishingly small number of folks - but I can see where people are coming from when it comes to schools and what their kids are being told. I don’t have kids myself, though, so I’m entirely not activated by the issue.
I’m a live-and-let-live kind of person and I think that there’s more of me out there than a lot of people think.
From the report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls in sports:
>The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males. According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports.
I think this is the big difference between the gay rights movement and the trans rights movement. Gay right succeeded in no small part because of live-and-let-live mentality. And where trans rights are limited to "live and let live", such as discrimination protection, it's still popular. It's probably also why Dems could capitalize on the trans military ban, it's a live and let live issue.
Trans sports were always a red herring. It's where they landed after bathroom bills kinda failed to take off. It's not about sports-- it's about the fact that right wing activists want to erase transgender people.
I wouldn't call it a red herring. Fairness is a major moral axis, and breaking the sporting categories we set up for fairness is seen a a transgression. I'd agree that right wing activists want to erase transgender people, but, as the charts show, most people support discrimination protection for trans people.
Whoa... Hold on a for just minute here! Depending what you mean (and demand) as "dignity and respect," that cuts both ways!
"Trans" people exist -- but they're not necessarily what they crack themselves up to be.
This has nothing to do with some putative "LGBTQ" identity, let alone "Queer." It's a disability issue.
A person genuinely suffering from a brain-body mismatch (due to a neurological or hormonal anomaly) deserves the same decency, compassion and access to medical treatment (if need be) as anyone with a deformity or disability. (As for "intersex"? Some people are born with eight toes.)
And bullying or harming the disabled is an atrocity in its own right (an atrocity for which Donald Trump is certainly guilty in his own right).
As for "gender"? All the rest is method acting — i.e., cosplay.
“Gender" (as distinct from biological sex) is a social fiction. Indeed, among gay males, drag is about REPUDIATING and RIDICULING the very concept of "gender" -- not “affirming” it.
FWIW, I experience stereotypically "feminine" emotions. Those feelings don't make me a woman -- and I'm certainly not about to cut off my dick to spite my crotch. In fact, reconciling such feelings with respect for my male body has been absolutely crucial to my self-acceptance as a gay male.
None of this requires that we redefine “male” and “female,” or adopt terms like “cis” and “trans” (let alone, teach this stuff in the public schools). And none of it is about "hate."
At age 74, I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud simply to be -- simply and uniquely -- myself. I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
Who picked this fight, anyway? There were no "bathroom bills" in North Carolina until the City of Charlotte decided to make "gender identity" a protected attribute (hence, making "Trans" a protected class).
In the end, the implicitly adversarial notion of "Queer" (or some putative “LGBTQIA+ community”) is a self-serving, self-marginalizing corral into which we’ve been herded by “The Groups.” It dilutes and jeopardizes the hard-won, widespread acceptance (and self-esteem, as individuals) that gay people have otherwise already gained — along with our fight against those who’ve medicalized our condition in the past. And those promoting that paradigm (thereby emboldening our adversaries) are running a protection racket, at our expense.
So yes, I’ll pull up the ladder behind me when some apparatchik (running a protection racket) starts clutching at my heels -- provoking and emboldening my adversaries while dragging me down.
Or we could simply stop calling a robust defense of classical liberal values something as milquetoast-sounding as “centrism” or “moderate.” Being a free speech advocate even for your opponents isn’t moderate. Fighting for human rights and enforcement of laws at home and abroad isn’t moderate. Defending economic liberties and free trade against left and right populist crusades isn’t lukewarm or moderate at all.
In short, we need policy and messaging focused on economically salient issues to compete and win electoral contests where the name of the game is persuading more voters than one's opponent.
I knew our Party was in deep trouble when the Progs came up with Defund the Police, arguably the most self destructive slogan ever coined. And most Americans, without malice, are simply confused by and about a focus on trans rights.
Agreed. We can also be loudest about the things that are most popular without throwing trans people under the bus. We can take power and enact popular programs while also continuing to wage the long fight to ensure dignity for all Americans.
I’d really like to hear Noah stand up for trans people for once, even if he thinks it’s a losing leftist cause in today’s America.
Yeah, except that “standing up for trans people,” as defined by trans activists, means harming women and children. Most Americans are opposed to that. As am I, a lifelong Democrat (currently very critical of my own party).
For most of us, when we say "stand up for trans people" it does not mean what the trans activists on Twitter means. It means we want them to be treated equally, exist and get the care they need. Most of us also see the nuance of the sports thing. The fact that people are making it so binary without seeing nuance is more of the issue, it's like people want to purposefully make the issue more extreme than it has to be.
How about actually sketching out what you mean by "stand up for trans people", instead of letting it be this vague amorphous goal, that activists can bend into whatever they want it to mean? Trans issues have become such wedge issues these days, because all the flashpoint fights are about trans rights versus the rights of others, but trans activists don't want to actually engage with the other side.
I think a lot of the "what kind of victory would that be" people must not be old enough to remember Clinton. The 1998 Democratic positions on race, gender identity, policing, and immigration were orders of magnitude less evil than Trumpofascism even as they were well to the right of the politically disastrous 2020 progressive consensus, and well to the right of my own views today. Building, or rebuilding, a supermajority coalition around those vintage-1998 positions would be a huge relief to the people now vulnerable to Trumpian oppression. It's a disservice to actual human progress not to take that opportunity.
I actually remember Clinton as a young queer person and no the fuck it would not be. A range of you’re subhuman animals who it’s your fault when you get beat up to you’re entitled to some small subset of rights but don’t really enjoy liking men isn’t better.
Fair. I spent that time in a liberal enclave which probably gave me an unrepresentative impression on that particular issue. But opinions on gay rights (as opposed to trans rights!) are so totally different now that there's no need to go back to 1998 on that particular issue.
That's not how I remember it, Andrew -- and perhaps you might learn something of history from at least one (more) person who's lived it as an adult.
By the Clinton era, I was already a gay male in my 40s. For that matter, by the early 1980s my family had welcomed my (then-)boyfriend to their Passover seder. Heck, I managed to get both Lou Reed and Patti Smith onstage before 100,000 people at NYC's Pride -- in 1977.
Now, at age 75, I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud to be -- simply and uniquely -- myself. OTOH, I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
FWIW, I experience stereotypically "feminine" emotions. Those feelings don't make me a woman: I'm certainly not about to cut off my dick to spite my crotch. In fact, reconciling such feelings with respect for my male body has been absolutely crucial to my self-acceptance as a gay male.
"Trans" people exist -- but they're not necessarily what they crack themselves up to be.
A person genuinely suffering from a brain-body mismatch (due to a neurological or hormonal anomaly) deserves the same decency, compassion and access to medical treatment (if need be) as anyone with a deformity or disability. (As for "intersex"? Some people are born with eight toes.)
And bullying or harming the disabled is an atrocity in its own right (an atrocity for which Donald Trump is certainly guilty in his own right).
As for "gender"? All the rest is method acting — i.e., cosplay.
“Gender" (as distinct from biological sex) is a social fiction. Indeed, among gay males, drag is about REPUDIATING and RIDICULING the very concept of "gender" -- not “affirming” it.
None of this requires that we redefine “male” and “female,” or adopt terms like “cis” and “trans” (let alone, teach this stuff in the public schools). And none of it is about "hate."
Who picked this fight, anyway? There were no "bathroom bills" in North Carolina until the City of Charlotte decided to make "gender identity" a protected attribute (hence, making "Trans" a protected class).
In the end, the implicitly adversarial notion of "Queer" (or some putative “LGBTQIA+ community”) is a self-marginalizing corral into which we’ve been herded by “The Groups” (as a pretext for their own self-serving ends). It dilutes and jeopardizes the hard-won, widespread acceptance (and self-esteem, as individuals) that gay people have otherwise already gained — along with our fight against those who’ve medicalized our condition in the past.
Those promoting this "queer" paradigm (thereby emboldening our adversaries) are running a protection racket, at our expense. And yes, I’ll pull up the ladder behind me when some apparatchik (running a protection racket) starts clutching at my heels -- provoking and emboldening my adversaries while dragging me down.
I would never force anyone to go back to the terrible homophobia of the early 90s. I’m not gay and didn’t experience it directly, but just remembering what it was like being adjacent to it makes me ill.
Nor would I! In retrospect I should have been more careful to distinguish the gender identity issue from the sexual orientation issue. They get conflated too often even though trajectories of public opinion on them have been very, very different.
I think people in the 80s and 90s felt exactly the same way about gay people as “normies” do when they say that this trans stuff is too radical. Of course the difference is that there were a lot more gay people. And of course, politicians wouldn’t touch it with a 10,000 foot pole.
It's not the same. The situations aren't even analogous.
By the early 1980s my family had welcomed my (then-)boyfriend to their Passover seder. Heck, I managed to get both Lou Reed and Patti Smith onstage before 100,000 people at NYC's Pride (as our answer to Anita Bryant) -- in 1977.
At age 75, I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud to be -- simply and uniquely -- myself. OTOH, I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
FWIW, I experience stereotypically "feminine" emotions. Those feelings don't make me a woman: I'm certainly not about to cut off my dick to spite my crotch. In fact, reconciling such feelings with respect for my male body has been absolutely crucial to my self-acceptance as a gay male.
Meanwhile, the implicitly adversarial notion of "Queer" (or some putative “LGBTQIA+ community”) is a self-marginalizing corral into which we’ve been herded by “The Groups” (as a pretext for their own self-serving ends). It dilutes and jeopardizes the hard-won, widespread acceptance (and self-esteem, as individuals) that gay people have otherwise already gained — along with our fight against those who’ve medicalized our condition in the past. .
So yes, I’ll pull up the ladder behind me when some apparatchik (running a protection racket) starts clutching at my heels -- provoking and emboldening my adversaries while dragging me down.
Someone in your likes referred to this kind of take as "shadowboxing along with the Christian right," and I liked that expression. So thanks for exposing me to it.
"Shadowboxing," my ass! I don't let my adversaries define me -- to determine who I am or the vocabulary (or the frame of reference that I use in defining myself), let alone to choose my friends.
If that were the case, I'd be a Stalinist (merely because Stalin was our "ally" [and Hitler's enemy] in WWII). The enemy of my enemy isn't necessarily my friend.
If that's the case, one of the lessons learned should be the folly of expecting politicians to lead public opinion on these sorts of issues. In retrospect we know that Obama knew in 2008 that supporting gay marriage was the right thing to do. But if he had run on that support in 2008 he would have lost, and the cause would have been hurt, not helped, by his explicit moral stand.
There are different levels of courage. Obama supported civil unions and other basic civil rights way before 2008. I’m not sure how to analogize this to trans rights, but it does not feel like we’re in a similar place at all.
I agree there’s no contradiction between fighting and moderation, and that moderation is good, in general. But I strongly caution everyone here against placing too much faith in it, by itself.
You indirectly hit the nail on the head when you mentioned, offhand, that Dems seemed to already *be* moderate on immigration, crime, and race, in 2024.
Biden said “fund the police” in his first State of the Union. He clamped down on the border in his final year. Kamala didn’t even mention her own race.
None of it mattered. None of his successes outside of culture war mattered. The entire Democratic Party might as well have been defined by the most braindead-radical Twitter leftist red rose trolls.
A big part of the problem is simply that in 2024, voters preferred the garish loud, cartoon version of reality, to reality.
At some point, it was just far more compelling, and gripping drama, in 2024, for voters to believe that all Democrats were cartoons from New York stuck in a faculty lounge. No matter what Biden said or did, no matter what Kamala said or did, no matter how normal and star-spangled their convention was.
That’s not to say that moderation isn’t good politics, on face value, or that there’s not merit in it. Clearly it is, and there is. But it’s very unlikely, I think, to be the most important, most paramount concern for Democrats to rebuild their tarnished brand. There’s something far transcending policy, platform, and position-taking at work here.
Unpopular opinion, at least on this Substack: Democrats *have*, in fact, moderated on these things.
Voters just haven’t seen it, don’t believe it, and don’t want to hear it. Or at least, they didn’t, this election.
Most of the time, ordinary voters don’t encounter leftist cultural radicalism in their own lives. They might see it from afar, way out in New York, through social media, or hear of it from their favorite podcaster while at work—the more so because high-speed internet can now be found across the country.
That media soup, that funhouse filter, distorts whatever view regular people get of the left.
And I, for one, don’t believe lining up behind trans girl sports bans, or minor puberty-blocker bans, or repeating positions on other cultural issues louder and with simpler words, are going to be the big fix that unfucks that funhouse filter, no matter how compelling it seems to some right now. (If you believe in doing those things on the merits, that’s another argument to be had, of course.)
Democrats do need, clearly, to do a better job of standing up for themselves and not letting their opponents define them in the light of the most braindead activist in Brooklyn. They do need to do a better job of engaging the public and speaking to their values, not simply “kitchen-table economics” or whatever.
They do need to do a better job of using social media and the Internet, which MAGA is—still!—running rings around them on. And they do need to stop campaigning as if they were robots plugged into a consultant data stream, taking a little chance on being themselves for once.
And while they’re at it, they can perhaps do moderation.
But that will be orthogonal at best to whether it helps them stop our slide into tyranny, if the evidence of the last four years is any indication.
P.S.: Many reading this, especially if you’re from a big, liberal city, will no doubt disagree.
To a centrist living in the heart of cultural leftism, it might seem like all the Dems you know are wild-eyed radicals on policing, immigration, culture, etc.
Perhaps the worst political run-in you had lately might have been with some radical lefty person being uncivil, either online or in person. (If so, I empathize. The only people I had to block on social media the last few months were all from the left, believe it or not. Usually over posts accusing me of “genocide” or some crap.)
That seems to be the shared experience of most center-left punditry, especially from New York and LA. Their collective conclusion seems to have been that Dems need first and foremost to, in the words of Josh Barro, “say they were wrong and they’re sorry!” (Exclamation his.)
I would suggest, however, that we all take a step back and consider just how representative our own, big-city, online experiences with the left are of reality.
Or how representative what voters see of Dems, through social media, filtered through ten New-York-tainted drunk lenses, is of reality.
When Dems get destroyed like this, by an open fascist, after an economic record that’s the envy of the world, with an incumbent administration actually notoriously hated by its own far-left (for reasons very related to culture!)—
—We need to consider the possibility that the online inversion of reality itself, and voters’ marination in it, may be more of a Dem imperative to fix than any “platform” advice we may give out, based on our worst Internet run-ins.
1. There’s no uniform party messaging on these issues. Without that, the loudest voices will win. That makes it hard for independents to notice the moderation.
2. There’s no strong leader in the Party after Obama who could drown the leftist voices because of his charisma and broad appeal. Biden was a very weak leader who had to keep making concessions to the left to keep the intra-party unity.
You can decide to moderate 3 months before the election but voters will not trust you given your record of 3.5+ years of leftist policies.
Yeah, the problem is that the worst excesses of leftists are all on display for everyone to see. Nuke social media from space, it’s the only way to be sure.
So are right-wing excesses, if anyone thinks it worthwhile to talk about them.
The biggest podcasts in the country are pro-Trump. The biggest Facebook pages are pro-Trump. Rogan and Theo Von both hosted open anti-Semites two weeks ago (really).
The opportunity is there to mention these things--but the incentives, apparently, are not. It is simply normal, popular, and tolerated to be a crazy sumbitch on the right. We perceive such things the way we perceive the sun in the sky, the seasons, the laws of physics.
Crazy sumbitches on the left, by contrast, are cringe, uncool, weird, lame, and an intrusion on our psyches. One of the main reasons you see them "on display for everyone to see" is because it is useful for the opponents of their putative coalition to put them on display, whether as a factional or partisan pinata to bludgeon. (Also, they happen to be concentrated, geographically, where the cameras and attention are.)
One wonders if simply being "cringe", as opposed to "crazy", or "extreme", or "moderate", are really what the public cares about. Excesses can easily be normalized, if nothing else via sheer exhaustion. We've seen that proven time and time again the last nine years.
It’s bad enough that Trump convinced smart people that Joe Biden was some radical leftist. If we fall into this same trap, we have only ourselves to blame.
Lots to think about here. I'm not sure the Democrats need to abandon all of the positions you describe, but what they clearly need to do is LEAD. Too often in American politics, nobody wants to argue, they just want to get a majority and enforce their will. That has become the American style of politics, and it stinks. The attitude across the board has become, "I don't need to persuade, I just need to win" and as a result many of both sides' victories are transitory. Look at the huge persuasive effort that went into gay marriage alongside the legal fight, and compare it to the right's push to outlaw abortion, or the current left's push for trans rights. If they believe in trans peoples' civil rights (as I very much do) they need to persuade the rest of the country that they're right, to put effort into convincing people to come around to that point of view. If they believe that migration is a human right (as I also do) they need to make the case, not just wait until they're in power and force it through. Victories that come about in that way are ephemeral and generate ill will.
I'll go further: The Democrats need to have an identifiable leader. Trump might have been out of power for four years, but he still led the GOP, and that gave them a weird combination of enormous flexibility and message discipline (or what passes for it when your leader is as weird as him). Social media has demolished message discipline, and being entirely out of power has left the Democrats in particular at the mercy of randos; in a country of 330 million people you can always find some dumbass saying some stupid thing and boom: half the country believes that's the position of the other half. (And if you can't find a dumbass, you can find a Russian bot) I think the way to combat that is by picking a spokesperson for the party - if they don't say it, the party doesn't stand for it. A shadow president, a shadow cabinet even, people who the media know to go to for quotes, people whose positions actually carry weight, and who can be in a position to persuade. I think that's what did Harris in. As Vice President, she plainly was not the party's leader; there was confusion about whether she spoke for the party, and so people just paid her very little attention.
Agreed, Democrats need to lead and have an actual policy idea that is pragmatic, abundance focused, optimistic and generally proactive. Too much of it right now is not centralized and has too many chefs in the kitchen. I guess that is good from a big tent perspective or maybe in swing districts, but it's terrible from a messaging perspective.
Yes to a shadow cabinet -- of Democratic spokespersons, each of whom can respond effectively to the daily craziness of the Trump/Musk in their areas of expertise and become the first responders, the go-to commenters for the media. Unfortunately, this is not how the "party" operates. With a Congressional leadership deferential to seniority and a narrowly self-interested base, we get Chuck Schumer peering over this glasses, Rosa DiLauro sending like Roseanne Rosannadanna from SNL and the oxymoron of Hakeem Jeffries appointing a task force on rapid response.
Really good comment in the Andrew Sullivan mould. Trump won because he was able to persuade voters and won in the court of public opinion on some issues like illegal immigration.
I'm not an activist but gender issues are like forever the most important fact in my life. I've been attacked several times in my life explicitly for my gender presentation & autism. Often times with slap on the wrist penalties for the perpetrators.
And like with each of the trans issues I could like see some sort of formulation that might want me to compromise. I've written a ton about how you might compromise on some sports, especially stopwatch sports. But on trans issues I think what scares me is that lurking beneath the actual points of the issue is a permissive attitude about the marginalization and violence that really defined my first 25 or so years of life. Like I could imagine a compromise with all those issues but what they really want is a wink and a replaying of me being beaten up in the bathroom at school while someone called me a fairy.
I feel like in principle I'm open to a compromise on all these things but a lot of them contain a fact that while we compromise and stop looking somebody will be hurt for doing nothing wrong. Whether that's people attacking some poor trans girl for being a trap, or we send some illegal immigrant back to be killed by her husband, or a bunch of legal police killings for petty crimes like Philando Castile.
I think the way to handle that wrt sports and marginalization is to emphasize that no one is being marginalized. I, a cis man, am not marginalized because I'm not allowed to compete on a women's team anymore than I'm marginalized because I can't compete in the Paralympics. A high schooler is not marginalized because they can't compete in the middle school division. Requiring that people compete in the appropriate category (or, more precisely, requiring the people stay out of categories created to protect from their advantage), isn't marginalization. I think the left made a mistake by framing these as "bans". The trans girl isn't banned from playing sports, she's not allowed to play on the team she wants to, but which category we play in was never our decision.
This works on the same internal logic as the trans panic attacker. It is to sort of loop around to the “are traps gay” dialog of ten or so years back.
Like the logic that trans women aren’t really women and are maliciously trying to trick normies if you accept it in sports I’m not sure why it doesn’t hold in a bar or nightclub.
The logical conclusion of your argument is that there will be more aggression towards trans women everywhere.
We can accept that trans women are women without accepting that they're female, and it's the female (or, more specifically, the 'no male puberty') part that's relevant.
It's not that they're maliciously trying to trick normies, it's that they have an advantage whether they like it or not.
Like I said in my original post I’d be open to specific compromises for specific cases. Especially if retaining access to sports even if T suppression leaves these people unfairly treated in both men’s and women’s sports.
But like if you are very publicly saying these are men and a threat to your daughter doesn’t cash out as greater rejection everywhere else. That seems hard to believe.
You think we can't distinguish between a social presentation (gender) and a biological reality (sex)?
I agree that we shouldn't be saying "these are men and a threat to your daughter," at least in the general case (prisons, for example, might be an exception). But I think there's a big difference between "this person has an unfair advantage" and "this person is a threat". By letting the right frame the conversation, they've combined those two points into one.
I mean from the perspective of someone who’s been held down or back and hurt for less of a gender bend I’m doubtful that can get out to the average person.
Maybe I’m letting my own trauma color everything but I just don’t really see it.
The Ezra interview with David Shor is an enlightening, data driven breakdown of why Kamala and the Dems lost and what we need to do to turn things around. Glad to see Noah promoting it. Here’s the direct YouTube link:
How many Americans don’t like the idea of a gay person sharing a locker room or bathroom with them? Is that really so far removed from anti-trans hysteria?
I agree with the premise of this post, and I am saddened by the trends at work in this country. The activists are probably pushing something too hard and too fast that folks are not ready for, and in so doing creating a backlash that is bigger than a slower and softer approach might render. There needs to be a lot more understanding and a lot less demonization.
The gross and oversimplified hypotheticals (like “kids with penises using gender identity as a pretense to use the wrong bathroom”) are really unhelpful and distorting.
Men have a visual sex drive, and women have a desire for modesty. Gays in locker rooms are rarely a problem, because men don’t care about random glances and lesbians don’t “peek” at other women in a creepy way. The core problem of trans activism is they want society to ignore these obvious sex differences.
Beginning in the 70s and continuing through the 80s and 90s gay men and lesbians battled with radical voices in our own communities which claimed that we were all radical sexual liberationists w/no wish to live like heterosexuals and consequently, no desire to avail ourselves of the rights to marriage and military service that later became the hallmarks of the LGB movement. Many of those claiming these things weren't even gay men, bisexuals or lesbians, in the case of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) they were pedophiles, something that enraged the vast majority of gay men when they tried to march in Gay Pride parades. All gay people were 100% clear that these groups and people didn't represent us. The fringes of the movement were gradually eclipsed by the voices of the majority but it was a process of defining a set of goals we could agree on and then agreeing to work towards those goals while forthrightly pushing the radicals out of the tent. HIV and AIDS brought home the stakes in a way nothing else could. Maybe trans activists need to go through the same thing. Many of the activists within their movement aren't even trans, they're cross-dressers or people with strange fixations on genitalia. Brianna Wu, who is trans, has been speaking out on this issue for months now. The process won't be pleasant, it wasn't for us either. I remember in the 90s attending ACT-UP meetings where these issues led to knock-down fist fights. But that process must get underway and it needs to come from within the trans movement - not outside of it.
I think you are getting at an uncomfortable truth that even very smart liberals like Noah are loathe to acknowledge: gay rights were advanced because people got to know that gays were normal people who just wanted normal lives and happened to be same sex attracted. But trans rights are going in the opposite direction because, empirically speaking, as a matter of the brute facts of reality, most people who call themselves trans women are essentially cross dressing fetishists or submission fetishists, and most people calling themselves trans men are autistic, anorexic, Cluster B or traumatized females who view “male passing” as a coping mechanism. Most of my colleagues in mental health secretly agree with me in principle, as almost any honest person can see this, even as we disagree about how best to respond to this reality. In my professional circles some of my most virulent critics have essentially admitted I am (factually, empirically) correct but that the plight of the “genuinely trans” minority demands a noble lie from the mental health professions.
This comment is kind of gross and I’m ashamed of this comments section that it got 9 likes. Reads like something from the 80s about how all gay men are obviously perverts and deviants.
There’s nothing wrong with having a fetish or a paraphilia. I don’t think that trans women are any worse than other biological males in this regard. The problem is the political project of demanding society treat them as the low risk population (females) when they clearly fall into the high risk bucket (males).
Also, i’m not sure precisely what you mean by deviant, but the conservatives who talked about gay hyper promiscuity were not factually incorrect. The pro gay marriage argument was just that this hyper promiscuous population was not relevant to the argument of gay marriage for those who wanted it.
Thank you for this! I think something else that has helped the cause of LGB rights is the fact that pretty much everyone has someone they love, friend or family, who is LGB. Issues like this come into focus for people when they impact someone they care about.
But it certainly helped, as you say, to have gotten the messaging from folks who just wanted to have the same rights with their partners that straight people had.
Trans folks aren’t as numerous and I could see where many people still don’t have someone close in their lives that is trans. I myself only have one, and it’s not like I live in the back o’ beyond - I live in coastal SoCal.
The goals of the gay and lesbian rights movement was to fully participant in the life of the nation - to wed, to serve in the military, to have children etc... The trans movement has badly marginalized itself by demanding things people are resistant to because they impact themselves or people they know. The foremost amongst those being allowing men to compete against women in sports. 80% of Americans are against this and there's nothing anyone can do to convince them they're wrong. The issue needs to be resolved in favor of genetic females and removed from public debate. Additionally - children deserve the right to puberty and should never be allowed to make their own healthcare decisions. Why trans leadership has chosen to focus on these issues vs. allowing trans people to serve in the military goes to their political aptitude and ability to think outside their own circles.
Obama buried that strategy and went for identitarian politics of division instead, empowering the “groups”.
Harris tried to move a bit in the triangulation direction but couldn’t, given her history, so fell back on Trump is an evil fascist as the campaign strategy.
Biden ostensibly ran as a “normal” candidate (despite being anything but) in 2020, but that was really amidst crisis, recession and Dem-fomented public disorder (that miraculously stopped post-election). He governed as a progressive.
There are some pretty “normal” -seeming candidates out there: Shapiro, Moore, Ro. Having been fooled by Biden, though, voters will probably look closely at what Dems do in Congress and at the state level to see if the party is really moving back toward “normal”. That’s one reason Schumer didn’t want a futile shutdown.
This (and Trump) have empowered the left again in Congress. Hard to tell if “normal” is really going to be on the menu. I doubt it. Or maybe we get the same crazy spice wild wings dressed up as bland chicken and biscuits.
Obama didn't invent identitarian politics, and he sure as shit didn't reignite the culture wars intentionally (remember "birtherism?"). He was a flawed candidate and president in many ways, but it's dishonest to insinuate that everything bad that's happened in the last 15 years is because of him.
<There are some pretty “normal” -seeming candidates out there: Shapiro, Moore, Ro.>
Interesting list: Shapiro and Moore come off as your standard centrist-types, but Rho Khanna explicitly promotes himself as a Bernie Sanders/Liz Warren progressive. Given that and the narrow margins Trump secured in November, it suggests that message control (rather than substantive ideological redirection) is the right move for Democrats. I'm somewhat sympathetic to this view: American voters don't really care about "wokeness" at the federal level (state and local politics are another thing entirely), so the Dems could nominate a (young) ham sandwich and win if they regain voters' trust in managing the economy.
State and local politics are the reverse: "the groups" have much more influence on policymaking at those levels, especially in deep-blue states. Cultural moderation and systematic reforms (the "Abundance agenda" that Ezra Klein champions) could revitalize the party. However, the benefits would arguably take some time to materialize (especially regarding housing in my home state of California).
Where did I say Obama “invented” identitarian politics?
Change your moniker to Toto if you like straw men so much.
After his 2010 midterms shellacking Obama could have chose triangulation but instead chose go to identitarian. He didn’t need to- he likely would have won in 2012 due to incumbency and tbe economy, but I think the tech bros gave him the tools to slice a dice the electorate and reach out to individual segments in a much more effective way than Clinton was able to with his micro-targeting initiatives for 1996. The Obama campaign just added a little more hate to the mix than Clinton and Gore were ever comfortable with.
Populists like Bernie and Trump saw that divisiveness was working, but picked different classes of enemies to punish (the 1 percent for Bernie, China and illegal immigrants for Trump) but a broader groups of people to allegedly benefit (working and middle class Americans of all races). Too bad the Dems didn’t go with Bernie in 2016.
I agree with your analysis in your last two paragraphs, except that Rho really isn’t in the Warren camp. He is progressive but he is not a hater, comes across as reasoned and rational, pragmatic and thoughtful. He appears “normal” in a way that Liz and Bernie do not. Similarly, while Obama had progressive views he came across in a similar way to Rho- thoughtful, pragmatic.
I don’t expect Rho to be the candidate, of course.
<After his 2010 midterms shellacking Obama could have chose triangulation but instead chose go to identitarian. He didn’t need to- he likely would have won in 2012 due to incumbency and tbe economy, but I think the tech bros gave him the tools to slice a dice the electorate and reach out to individual segments in a much more effective way than Clinton was able to with his micro-targeting initiatives for 1996. The Obama campaign just added a little more hate to the mix than Clinton and Gore were ever comfortable with.>
Do you have any proof that Obama rejected triangulation? Last I checked he was perfectly amenable to triangulation, especially on fiscal policy (explains why he caved to the Tea Party during the 2011 debt ceiling crisis) and on healthcare (using a Nixon-era healthcare proposal and accepting red state waivers on Medicaid expansion). You are ignoring the GOP's role in the polarization of American politics under Obama, especially when it came to racial issues. Where could he have triangulated and gotten a better deal? The only thing I can think of his populist-tinged campaign in 2012, and even that partly motivated by the sour grapes that emerged after the 2010 midterms.
This is correct. Obama could not have been a 2 term President or finished as as successful President if he hadn't opted for triangulation and making deals with Republicans in the Congress. He even came close to a grand bargain with Boehner, which would have put us on a more sound fiscal path than we got with Trump and Biden. Extremists like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor scuttled the Bowles Simpson commission recommendations.
I was talking about the post-2010 period and the 2012 campaign, yes.
The strategy was to motivate the base via microtargeting and division while demotivating swing voters from turning out for Repubs via “othering”. Pretty basic stuff for a political campaign. This worked for him in 2012 though was a disaster as a Congressional strategy.
This is merely my observation of his strategy and his rejection of “triangulation”. You don’t need to agree with it nor I am I going spend time linking to voluminous sources to defend my observations. The evidence is there if you look.
Nor did I make any judgment on Obama’s terms nor “blame” him for the “bad stuff for the last 15 years”. I am just talking about strategy. You can defend Obama’s presidency all you like (or not) but it has nothing to do with me or my comment. In the end, I suspect a part of the reason he chose this strategy was because the tech tools and the personal data existed to leverage it.
Ro Khanna may sound more normal, but it may be because he doesn’t seem very intelligent or thoughtful. He supports government funding homeopathic medicine, which is straight up insanity, and also while tweeting in support of building more housing in California added that it should only be done alongside expanding rent control and banning corporations from owning houses.
Ro Khanna is strong on individual rights and personal freedom part of the classical liberalism framework and very weak on the economic liberalism part of it. This is a common problem on the left. They just don't believe in a market based economy.
Yeah, I believe if he or his constituents want to throw away money on super diluted homeopathic water it’s crazy, but fine that he does that or supports it, but when he says the government should pay for it, I completely disagree.
Obama did the opposite of identity politics. It was a clear strategy from him and his campaign that if he ever made his race an issue in the election, he would lose. He was asked a direct question after he became the nominee whether he can win given that there are so many people who'd never vote for a black candidate. He said it didn't matter and there are enough voters who don't care about race. This is a lie being spread by racist scumbags in the Republican Party to cover their own racism.
Identity politics and "the groups" mostly were online in female spaces like tumblr, and then got boosted by the Hillary campaign. Obama had "the veal pen" which is kind of the opposite of the groups IIRC.
I can think of two restaurants in Oklahoma — a Red State — that have trans individuals working right up front, serving the public. Thankfully, I don’t see any people objecting. Whereas in some schools, trans kids have been bullied to the point they committed suicide. Say what you will about progressives and moderates, but life is very hard for trans kids in Red States. This is an issue about human dignity and rights.
Yes, but I think “trans ideology” is actually harmful for trans rights. Bullying is tough to fight; as someone who was bullied myself growing up, I wish there was something more we could do about bullying in general.
Then the focus should have been on these kind of issues which would have more public support instead of pushing the most extreme positions. That's what trans activists in blue states should have done if they actually cared about trans kids in red states.
I cannot understand how the "progressives" conflate trans issues with a modern day civil rights movement. The percentage of folks with actual gender dysphoria is vanishingly small, like less than 0.5% of the population. The percentage of folks who "identify with a different gender" is likely larger but still low single digits of the population.
Finally trans in women's sports (no one is objecting to trans in men's sports since they will get crushed!) is an issues of about low triple digit individuals in the entire country.
This whole obsessive focus of the micro minority blows the mind.
Violates Spock's Rule of "The needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few" :-)
All of the things you said, except “why are Republicans making such a big deal about oppressing this tiny minority” and the obvious answer is that oppressing gay people stopped working a few years back.
I am going to love watching the Dems die on this hill
It’s sad!
The reason the Trump ad “She is for they/them and I am for you” play so well is that otherwise normies who would likely vote blue are really concerned about “the boy in their daughter’s locker room”
The reason the GOP latched on is, unlike the Dems they saw the massive disconnect between the democratic obsession and normies stands and latched on.
That’s along why Trump pivoted away from the whole abortion thing and said it was a states right thing!
Brilliantly played
FFS women who fought for Roe V Wade now voted Trump as the “I will keep women safe” (reference to trans) resonated with them
The democrats are lead footed. I speak as one who had always voted blue and given handsomely to all “left of center” causes
The decay in strategic thinking is astonishing
Oh well…
We will have to wait for another Bill Clinton like figure to rescue the party from its worst instincts
Theres like a few people upthread who’ve said like all the issues maybe you can compromise on them but they and I think the right see tbem as stalking horses for are trans people normal acceptable people.
If only the American electoral system didn't punish third parties so harshly.
If you took the sane ideas of both parties and put them together, that platform ought to win. But alas, that's not to be, so you guys have to hope the blue cat herd of special interests and activists can find a moment of unity to make the simplest, most obvious move to counter the red cult of personality. Ouch.
There's no way for a new third party to go directly to the national level and be competitive. If they start at a smaller scale in a less populated state and win some statewide elections and House/Senate seats, they could try to expand from that position. This requires long term vision and probably a 25-50 year timeline. I don't think anyone has patience for that. They just want to become President straightaway.
Somewhere in all this, the essential issue tends to get lost. What is America? How do we define the nation we were designed to be? How do we understand our place as the first nation on earth to define ourselves at our inception as that place in which We the People might together find just enough of the courage, the honesty, the.tolerance, the compassion, the humility, the understanding, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up with as much justice and equity as humanly possible?
If that question does not lie at the heart of the way in which we understand who are and how treat each other, then everything else is moot.
I’m just past my 80th year. I taught American history for over 40 of those years. I’ve been in my time a construction worker, a soldier, a merchant seaman, a camp counselor and director, and a teacher and school administrator, snd yes, even a paper boy. I’ve watched my country progress from a heroic and crucial if flawed ally in a war to destroy one of the most horrendous dictatorships in human history to being the pawn and plaything of malignant narcissist and his billionaire buddies, and yes, everything we’ve been and done on the way here.
I get that people are concerned about the economy, the border, trans issues, the excesses of DEI, crime in the streets, etc. All those concerns are justified, but when they, either singly or together become more of a concern than the fact that we have twice elected to the presidency a man whose only concern is for his own wealth, status, obsessive desire for adoration, and safety from his own lawless and unConstitutional acts, who has proven time and again to utterly disdain and disavow our electoral process, our Constitution, and the rule of law, then something is badly out of balance, if only for the very practical reason that such a man will have absolutely no concern for any of our concerns and will do only what conforms to his own badly distorted vision of the nation whose interests he claims, utterly falsely, to have at heart.
Well that’s the point of this article. Trump only won because of how bad Biden, Harris and the democrats were, they brought about this because of bad policies and bad politics, especially since 2017. And the democrats in Congress giving up all their power to the executive branch when their party had the presidency, and the republicans doing the same under their have magnified the damage Trump is doing now by making the president have too much power.
Republicans are always trying to blame Biden and the Democrats for Trump. In fact of course, this is an transparently vain attempt to excuse themselves for voting for a man whom they know has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to disdain and to disavow the Constitution in pursuit of a tinpot dictatorship.
I’m not a Republican, and didn’t vote for Trump. Of course, as always, I voted for the Libertarian candidate so my vote is meaningless. But for Democrats to not acknowledge that just running a lackluster candidate whose whole platform was just ‘Trump will be bad’ is unproductive. Even now, the Democrats are not coming down hard on the Trump tariffs, which are demonstrably bad and will be more so as prices rise and stores get empty shelves, because they don’t really believe in free trade or capitalism. The one thing they hit Trump on is immigration, but that is the one MAGA policy that is retaining popular support.
My comment stands. It is entirely true about many Republicans, but if I assumed you to be a Republican in error, I apologize.
Ms Harris’s platform was far from just ‘Trump will be bad’ although even you acknowledge that to be true.
Many Democrats (and I’m not one) know that calling Trump out has become an exercise in futility now that there is no campaign in full swing. Now many of them are just following Napoleon’s dictum: “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake"
I mostly agree. Democrats might want to mostly focus on bread and butter issues, a “sewer socialism” that focuses on public good deliverables from infrastructure to efficient government services and sensible regulation. Progressives got over their skis on culture war issues. They don’t like incrementalism but they just got ahead of the country on too many changes that were pitched too moralistically. This left them open to attack on the most complex issue — trans — and made them seem out of touch.
One real challenge is for Democrats to address crime. It may well be the case that crime is a function of many factors from persistent poverty, racism, and neglect. Generationally, addressing those factors is important, but cannot take the place of creating a safer environment for everyone. it is too easy for Republicans point to urban (read, black) crime rates as the result of soft on crime liberals and hatred of police. it would be difficult to understate the damage caused by the mere phrase “defund the police.”
Since inner city residents bear the brunt of urban crime, most of them would support a serious effort to reduce crime. This will be very difficult and very expensive, which is why Republicans only complain and never do anything beyond harsh sentencing guidelines and fulminating. It will require many more police, new thinking and, most controversially, a great deal more security cameras as is found in most other advanced economies.
The homelessness issue is closely related, at least in the minds of most voters. The roadblocks placed by well meaning but unrealistic civil libertarians to provide assistance and treatment for unhoused people has left many of our cities looking out of control. The root causes for much of the homelessness today, the lack of affordable housing, will not disappear quickly. The opposition of many neighborhoods to shelters, treatment centers and other needed services to help people get off the street makes this issue even tougher.
Democrats should also put themselves forward as the real “family“ party since Democratic policies tend to be far more helpful to families than the Republicans, who wrap themselves in religion, but do nothing for actual families, other than scaring them.
I think in a lot of ways the Democrats could leapfrog Republicans on crime. Most Americans know that our police suck. They don't like the militarism, the bullying, and the corruption. But Democrats just say "All Cops Are Bad" and Americans know that's not true either. But Trump embraces not just the police, but especially the bad cops. He plainly loves the corruption and bullying, and that's the Democrats' in IF they can take it. The Democrats could become the "Party of the Good Cop". We need a well-trained professional police force, one that knows and obeys the laws, one that isn't arbitrary or cruel, a police force that has the moral standing and public respect to go anywhere and do a tough job. Trump's embrace of bad cops imperils all cops, the Democrats need to be saying, it makes it harder for the good cops to do their jobs.
In a 2023 Harvard poll 75% of Americans reported themselves as having a "positive view of the police", so I don't believe for a second that "Most Americans know that our police suck." "Police reform" (which is what activists are now calling what they used to call "defunding") is a deeply tangential issue for most Americans.
I see your point, but I'm not sure that poll really captures the way Americans feel about the police. What I've seen is that there's an urge to say "I support our boys in blue" and so on, because people like to feel like law-abiding citizens on the side of law and order, but to be highly critical of actual practices. The support is abstract, but as soon as you get concrete, I've found it gets negative fast. It's also why "defund the police" is such a terrible slogan: it runs face-first into peoples perceptions of themselves as vaguely supportive of law enforcement as a concept, even when they might overwhelming agree with any particular reform.
Yes, I agree with some of this. Americans are, at our core, deeply anti-establishment so some of that comes into play when people discuss particular police practices for sure.
As a trans woman, if you told me we could throw sports and locker rooms away but win back basic dignity and respect and an end to erasure, I think most trans people (and perhaps most Democrats) would probably take that deal.
But I don't think that's fundamentally the deal on the table for Democrats. Trans people have become unpopular not because we're evil or wrong, but because the narrative changed. People bought into the Republican vibe of scary foreigners and evil deviants more than they bought into the Democratic worldview. Good politics isn't just about following public opinion and cherry-picking all the most popular opinions on issues. It's also about telling a wider story, creating a narrative and a vision of where the country needs to go. Once you know what story the Democrats are telling, who its heroes and villains are, you can determine how their position on trans issues will fit into that story.
The correct story for Democrats to tell in 2028 is the Captain America story. In this story, Putin, Xi, and Trump are all the same person - identical fascist movements trying to conquer the world with authoritarian rule. These movements are taking over the world, and we, the defenders of Freedom and Democracy, need to come together and defeat them.
Liberal societies are prosperous and free, but fascists want to enslave us. Liberal democracies win by standing together, but fascists want to divide us. We're losing this war, and the world needs American heroes. This is the ur-story, the narrative from which all things must come.
How do we talk about Joe Biden and the past? How would Captain America talk about him? Acknowledge that Joe Biden is a good man who tried to do the right thing, but that he ultimately wasn’t the man for this mission. Intentionally or not, he deceived the American people about his capabilities, and his commitment to war against fascists wavered when matched against his ego. You acknowledge the failures of career politicians like him and say how you, a real outsider who knows right from wrong, can do better.
How do you handle the economy? Captain America again. You point out that liberal democracy is the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known, a power that has built the modern world. Without the fascists constantly looting our treasury and making us poorer, we’ll be able to both feed our hungry and keep our military strong. A welfare state that supports us in our retirements isn’t some impossible dream, it’s the birthright of living in a liberal democracy, a reward we share for doing the right thing.
How should we handle health care? Captain America would surely say that Americans deserve health care, and that giving to your neighbor is good. There’s a subtle difference in the presentation here though from previous Democratic offerings - you don’t want to present this as just about altruism, or suggest that health care and welfare are merely a moral obligation you give for being kind. Instead, you want to point out that stronger social systems are our birthright, something real Americans (aka, not fascists) take pride in and feel patriotism about. Make lifting ourselves up together and Doing the Right Thing and having the Best Health Care be a part of our national identity. We’re the kind of Big Damn Heroes who help the starving children, while the small-minded fascists let them die. This is what separates us from them..
How do we handle foreign policy? Captain America has the answers. Take all the aggression and swagger and pride that Trump has shown towards Zelensky and Canada and Ukraine, and apply it to the actual bad guys. America will hit back against the fascists, we’ll show strength, defend our allies, and never ever submit to fascist rule.
How do you answer tricky gotcha questions about trans sports bans designed to break apart your coalition? Try: “It’s up to the sports teams what their rules will be. Trans people are Americans, and we’re in favor of American freedom of expression, not top-down control - unlike the other guys.” Draw attention to Trump’s blanket ban of trans people from the military, and point out how it’s one more way that fascist movements would seek to divide and conquer us.
Politics isn't just about picking the right individual issue positions, it's about building a narrative. Trump has created a rogue's gallery of cartoonish comic-book villains and TV personalities and put them in charge of every branch of government. You couldn't ask for a better setup for Democrats to present themselves as the comic-book hero. They just need to get out of their own way.
This is, incidentally, also why the abundance narrative doesn't work as politics. It's a policy winner and we should absolutely listen to Klein about fixing the problems of government, but it's a political loser because it doesn't have a clear villain. Most people don't follow politics to increase absolute value, they follow politics to see the bad people punished and the good people rewarded.
Democrats might well need to fix their individual issue positions or policies, but all of this has to come from the wider narrative, the story that you tell. This is why Trump can fail over and over and all his people still love him - we expect our heroes to fail many times before they succeed. Democrats need to tell an equally plausible story, one where they're the good guys fighting for freedom and they'll punish the bad guys who aren't.
Aren't NIMBYs the villain?
Yes, but they’re a huge minority if not outright majority.
What’s a NIMBY? Sorry, not a serious question. But I think that’s the one you’d get from the broader voter base, and I can’t imagine how you explain it without the answer being “every homeowner who wants the value of their biggest investment to increase,” which is not a great enemy to give yourself.
Shouldn't solidly blue states like California and New York (where anti-urban populists will never conceivably win a state-wide majority) deprive localities of their zoning powers in order to disempower the NIMBYs?
One reason why Japan is a YIMBY country is that their zoning law was set by national rather than local government.
Not one with a personal avatar of some sort. In the public mind it may live as something closer to a disease like the flu, it can be widely acknowledged that it’s a bad thing but it’s a bad thing that doesn’t generally feel terribly urgent. As opposed to something like a typhoon where it’s very easy to point at the thing and say “we have a problem” and everyone nods and agrees.
"Aren't NIMBYs the villain?"
Not in my house, and not in my neighborhood, let alone my backyard.
In fact, NIMBYs aren't even the villain to anyone who wishes they HAD a backyard!
Unless it's *your* view getting trashed.
Yes- I think that approach will work with partisans, because hate and vengeance are so important to them and key to mutual grooming and development of in-group cohesion and out-group othering.
The problem is that sort of primate/troop us or them attitude doesn’t really describe the middle 15 percent of the country when it comes to politics (there are other issues where they’d exhibit that primate behavior, of course).
A lot of them don’t care enough about politics to hate anyone nor crave government to act as an angel of vengeance nor even angel of mercy. How do you reach them?
Also, I think presidential politics is mostly baked into the macro cake. It is hard for a party to win a third term. It is hard to beat an incumbent running for a second term. It is hard for the incumbent party to win if we are in recession or the economy is doing poorly. “Wrong track” and approval ratings have some significance. Incumbent parties usually lose seats at midterms, etc. At the margin party views/policies make a difference, sure, and we know that Dem views were not popular. We also know people don’t like inflation.
Generally, though, politics follows the zeitgeist rather than leading it, and macro events have more impact on the zeitgeist than politicians do.
Having an inspirational and charismatic leader helps of course. People are often looking for a leader-type or a celebrity. When I saw the image of Trump’s assassination attempt and then heard Kamala answer a simple policy question with “I was raised in a middle class family” I figured it was over. I didn’t vote for either, of course.
There is a villain. When a mile of subway costs 10x per mile more in the US than Denmark, somebody is getting that other 9x. It's the lawyers, bureaucrats, and consultant gatekeepers all getting fat on the inefficient process that makes things so expensive and slow to build. The problem is that this particular villain is a major constituency of the Democratic party, which is why I think this "abundance agenda" is dead in the water.
Thank you for your comment. Your part about what can be 'conceded' via trans rights and what is received in return is something I've been thinking about lately that seems to be missing from the conversation in concrete terms.
As a queer person that supports trans rights, I acknowledge the complexity of things like trans women in sports and gender-affirming care for minors. The unstated premise (at least as I read it) of moderating on those issues is this turns the heat down and will create space in the conversation to focus on treating trans people in general (either those that socially transition in youth, or socially and medically transition in adulthood) with dignity and respect and recognize them as people who deserve basic rights. I know that some people on the left may not be willing to moderate on those issues, but for those that are, this seems to be the logic of hope behind it.
The problem is that this doesn't map onto the reality we're living through at this moment. Look at the language that the Trump administration is using to denigrate trans people in the military - the EO says that a different gender identity "conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle". They think trans people are are harmful to society and don't want them openly present in their families, communities, or popular culture. Focusing specifically on trans sports is the cover for all of this.
I wish I knew the answer for how to thread the needle of moderating on key aspects, staying silent enough to not draw enough attention to it and win power, while also continuing to support a marginalized community that has seen popular opinion backslide in a way that's affecting their everyday existence. This is a lot more difficult than a lot of pundits give it credit for.
Right. The idea always seems to be that if you "moderate' on trans sports, somehow all the anti-trans people will go away and leave us alone on the really important stuff like military bans.
But it just doesn't work like that! Public opinion on Trans Sports didn't change because Trans Sports is just such an important issue to people's everyday lives, it changed because the narrative changed! Because everyone started believing that Wokeness is bad and bullying vulnerable people makes you strong. So long as people believe that, they'll want to destroy us and they'll use whatever issue is most convenient.
Trans people won't get our rights back by moderating on individual issues. The sports piece of this is irrelevant, it's a dozen people. We'll get our rights when we're able to be a part of changing the cultural narrative to place Fascist Dictators as the enemy and not Wokeness.
The battle is always for the cultural vibe. You have to think about the overall story you want to tell, how you feel in your guts about where the country is going and what scares you the most - and then figure out how and where our individual issues fit into that story. If we can't win the battle for the vibe, we'll lose on everything anyway. And if we tell our story, the individual issues all can be fought on the new more favorable ground.
Trans Sports became a thing because... it became a thing that was happening. It simply didn't happen prior to 2015 because there weren't people defending the idea of men playing women's sports. Now there are. So the pushback has arrived.
The only people being bullied are the girls losing opportunity to do what they love (and being told to shut up about it)
Do you think there is some mechanism at play that caused large numbers of people to decide that a half-dozen middle school volleyball teams were vitally important national issues? How do you think that decision was made?
After all, the world is full of injustice. Kids all across America are bullied and lose opportunity every day, for all kinds of reasons. What mechanism do you think causes people to focus onto some of those instances of bullying or injustice and not others? Why does the injustice of the girl's volleyball team merit a national backlash, while other negative unfair experiences don't?
Is the negative experience of losing a girl's softball opportunity worse than the negative experience of being an immigrant, or trans, or a fat kid who is bullied? If we had to choose from all the kids in America to help based on triage, would the girls on volleyball teams who lose spots to trans women make the top of the list?
Could we even find very many of them? Trans women aren't dominating women's sports, with or without bans. Lia Thomas finished in 5th! This all seems to be a solution desperately searching for a problem.
I contend that this mechanism through which specific things get chosen backlash is what we can refer to as "National Narrative." A vibe, an overall story that people are feeling and telling about themselves. Trans issues earn backlash because they're a part of something bigger - a core idea that the greatest threat to the world is Wokeness and the Deep State and annoying liberals demanding endless self-flagellation and suffering. In this narrative, Trans People aren't people, we're volleys in the culture war, examples the right holds up of everything wrong with the world.
And so, the best way for the Democratic party to help ensure all of our the rights and safety is to break that narrative and settle on a new one. The Captain America framing is better for us, and it's better for the cis girls on the volleyball team too. We all benefit from standing together against the fascists trying to take over the world.
Again with the downplaying of desires of girls and women. So common in this debate.
The actually correct answer to trans women in sports is that it depends on the sport and the trans woman.
Is the sport we're talking about Chess? MMA? College-level, professional, middle-school? Is there money on the line, or is it just kids having fun?
What do the players in the sports league want the rules to be? What do the organizers want? If there are parents involved, what do the parents want? Are the people who want to reject a trans woman acting solely out of bigotry, or are there legitimate safety and fairness concerns with a particular person?
Is the trans woman a tiny waif who's been on hormones her entire life and has no testosterone-induced muscle mass? Is she just starting her transition, or is she twenty years into it? Do the people around her know she's trans? Has she had surgeries?
What about trans men? They're often physically stronger because of hormone treatments they take. Many trans-men look male enough that women might become uncomfortable around them. So are trans men allowed to play women's sports? At what point are they required to stop?
In practice, these are all complicated questions and answering them in a fair way requires domain-specific knowledge of both the sport and of gender transition and its effects. If you want to say whether a trans woman playing a sport is fair, you have to have a specific trans woman and a specific sport that you're talking about. No one-size fits-all answer is going to make any sense. The entire idea of "settling this" on the national level at all is a fantasy, constructed by people who imagine that the world must always be simple.
It really isn't complicated at all. (And has nothing to do with "fascism" or whatever slogan-of-the-week you have)
Sorry. Most sporting organizations are not willing to admit or reject players based on that level of complexity. It may make you feel intellectually superior to delve into all these nuanced scenarios but sports is meant to be simple and this kind of eligibility criteria makes it anything but simple. You’re not going to flip many people with these arguments. I can guarantee that.
Agree with what you say, but the US public is not strong on nuance
"Do you think there is some mechanism at play that caused large numbers of people to decide that a half-dozen middle school volleyball teams were vitally important national issues?"
It was clearly because the right decided to push it. It helped that there were some prominent examples they could point to (notably Lia Thomas). The right recognized that it was a great wedge issue that would break their way, especially by talking about "men in girls' locker rooms", and one that Dems would double down on, in spite of how few people it actually affected.
Had progressives moderated on the sports question 3-4 years ago, it would have taken a lot of wind out of the GOP's sails, making it harder for them to stir up anti-trans sentiment in other areas. Will moderating now help? A little. But I think bad political calculations over the last few years have set trans rights back a decade or more. Regaining that ground will not happen quickly.
IMO, the trans rights movement tried to move far too fast anyway. It appeared to many that the gay rights movement succeeded almost overnight; Obergefell was announced and within a couple of years everyone was just okay with it. But that perception ignores the fact that it took a good 3-4 decades to shift public opinion first. I do think the gay rights history helps trans rights to be able to move a little quicker than if we hadn't just made that change, but it's still going to take time for people to come to terms with a deep realignment in their views of what sex and gender are. Compared to those, sexual orientation was easy.
Note that I'm not saying it's *fair* or *right* that people find it difficult to accept trans people, just that it's reality. A reality I think we can change, but it will take time, and holding firm on the parts of the issue that matter less but generate more negative reactions will make it take longer.
It's easy to blame Fox News, but I actually think it goes psychologically deeper. Why was Fox News able to succeed with this line of attack now, when they weren't previously?
I haven't seen people write very much about this, but I think a lot of the anti-Wokeness backlash is really a COVID backlash. Because COVID lockdowns were very traumatizing and also very psychologically similar to Wokeness.
Living under Wokeness could be deeply demanding and difficult for the average person. Wokeness asks (rightly or wrongly) that you constantly second-guess yourself. It asks that you police your language and your actions. It wants you to learn new difficult concepts that challenge your self-perception, all to ensure you're protecting some vulnerable minority group. This was done with good reason in many cases, but it's a hard thing to ask of people.
Then along comes COVID, and lockdowns demand all the same things, only it's now on a much greater scale. Now, to protect the vulnerable minorities you have to give up everything - your social life, the ability to go to restaurants or watch movies, your place in the world. Lockdowns asked people to sacrifice large pieces of their soul in exchange for helping the weak.
A lot of ink has been spilled about how the COVID vaccine became left-coded, but I think a big part of it is that lockdowns simply felt like a supercharged version of Wokeness, a logical endpoint.
After lockdowns were over, people had a lot of pent-up trauma over this. They naturally wanted to blame the Woke for all their problems. They wanted to do things for themselves, to indulge in their human excesses - and so, they were vulnerable to a movement that told them that it's OK to bully the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.
Trans people, who mostly just want to live our lives, were caught in the crossfire of the culture war, and so the attacks on us (which were ever-present) started to land.
Fortunately, the culture moves on, and we will to. Americans are resilient and we'll put the traumas of Wokeness and covid behind us. When we do, we'll also remember who we are.
Moderating on girl's & women's will sports is, imo, essential at this point. If only because it's the right and honorable thing to do. Especially at the college and elite sports levels.
Regarding transitioning as a minor, maybe I'm not fully up on the current research, but taking a more EU-like approach to further document what I understand are already extremely low post-surgical regret rates will only help.
Meanwhile, straight Americans will watch or re-watch Le Cages aux Folles and other heartwarming films, and FOX News-inspired Trans-phobia will soon fade, just as it has already largely disappeared for Gay people.
Another, more militant option would be to copy the incredibly successful ACT UP playbook of the 1990's, and ambush GOP politicians in public places with impromptu ultra-Queer flashmob photo shoots.
William Thomas (who stole the woman's name "Lia") was declared the winner of the NCAA championship in the 500m freestyle in 2022.
The actual winner, Emma Weyant (say her name!), swam a personal best that day, and was the fastest woman in the race, but she was declared to have lost because Thomas, a male, was allowed to complete in the female category.
Here is an official University of Pennsylvania Athletics page about him:
https://pennathletics.com/sports/mens-swimming-and-diving/roster/will-thomas/14590
From the report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls in sports:
>The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males. According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports.
https://docs.un.org/en/A/79/325
Trans sports--the entire Trans-in-the-crosshairs moment--came about only because the official spokesnetwork of the GOP, FOX News, decided it was time to bully a relatively obscure part of the LGBTQ community as a new piece of Culture Wars programming.
Bashing Gays--albeit still super-popular among most hard-right types--had become off-putting to Independents, and even moderate conservatives. And so the GOP needed a new whipping boy, a new scapegoat. Trans people--a mere 1% of the country--were mysterious and "other-y" enough to perfectly fit the bill. Just like they did a few years ago with Critical Race Theory--an obscure grad-school course nobody had ever heard of--that was suddenly spun into something supposedly race-shaming white children in every public school in America--it suddenly became a thing. FOX News evoked images of hulking Trans athletes mowing down entire girl's field hockey teams; or of bulging-biceped cross dressers with unshaved legs barging into primary school girls bathrooms. FOX News did it's usual masterfully creative job of horrifying and enraging conservative viewers about this horrible new deviancy threating decent Americans.
FOX/GOP then knew that Dems would rush to defend the greater Gay community, and played on the Trans sports angle and transitioning as a minor, to really push it over the top with conservative voters. Just as they've successfully pushed the lie that illegal immigration is 100% caused by evil Dems, who want to give illegals the vote to steal elections. Just like they successfully pushed the lie that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was 100% Biden--instead of 90% Trump and 10% Biden.
My point is that conservative voters implicitly believe this nonsense, and then vote accordingly. And that the primary reason they take this drivel as gospel, is FOX News.
There was a time when West Virginia public schools' textbooks celebrated Christine Jorgensen's surgery (then called a sex change) as a triumph of human freedom and medical breakthroughs. That was late 80s/early 90s, in a setting where being gay was very much not smiled upon. I knew trans people in the late 90s, and while life sure as hell wasn't easy for them, I don't ever remember seeing anything like the whipped-up hated they're facing now.
The fundamental reason why "LGBT" are lumped together in the contemporary West is because the greatest threat to such people is often from their own straight family members (as opposed to non-related people, which racist bigotry comes from essentially by definition).
LGB on the other hand are far more closely linked than any of them is to T, and an even starker example of conflicting approaches to these two issues would be Iran, where sex change operations are common but homosexual activity is literally a capital crime.
Can confirm, being the target of a massive internet hate movement directed at your medical community is a lot of fun.
That's why it's all the more important for us to be resilient, though. Transitioning itself is still harder (though more rewarding) than dealing with a bunch of crybully clowns. Going through the process and all of its hardships demands a lot of personal strength, and it's not as if we haven't had the government try to oppress us before.
Of course, it's disheartening for us to go through all this again. It's hard for our community, who haven't done anything wrong. But dealing with these things is nothing new for us. If anything, it makes me more patriotic, and affirms that Liberal Democracy is worth fighting for in the face of such things. We're Americans. We should stand up to small-minded bullies and fascists, not let ourselves turn into them. That's the battle we need to win here.
Conversely, there’s no narrative that will change if you insist on trans women in women’s sports as a non-negotiable starting point. You’re going to continue to run into a wall because most non-political people are fundamentally against it and see it as a matter of unfairness to women.
There's also a parents' rights and government overreach argument to be made about trans kids, that extends more broadly to reproductive health care in general. Maybe you don't agree with puberty blockers and don't want your kid to get them. I'm okay with the idea that your 12-year-old shouldn't have the right to make an independent decision about that, just like she can't decide about a lot of other health care things like whether to have cancer treatment. But if I feel differently and believe that it's vital for my 12-year-old to avoid going through opposite-sex puberty, I should have the right to make that decision for my kid!
Instead, the GOP wants to arrest me as a child abuser and take my other children away from me too. Captain America wouldn't like that much!
That said, there's a version of this argument where it starts to get different for older teens, because we recognize in other contexts that they can make some health decisions. In most states, pregnant teens can consent to get prenatal care and sign off on having c-sections and epidurals. There's case law around whether older teens can be forced to undergo life-saving chemotherapy or choose to go into hospice, as well as to have their religious objections honored. In every state, teen mothers have unlimited power to consent to their own children's medical care. It's kind of ludicrous to think that they can make life-or-death decisions for their kids but not for themselves, so we implicitly understand that there are some edge cases. And, of course, there is the obvious link to abortion rights, where many states have some form of judicial override for parental consent.
I think ol' Steve would be broadly in favor of letting parents make decisions for their kids, with some guardian ad litem pressure valves for mature teens in truly exceptional situations.
In blue states, you have no right to prevent your 12 year old from getting puberty blockers and cross sex hormones. Your child can run away to a glitter family, and get ACLU or GLAAD or HRC to file a request for an emergency court order to get transed.
California pioneered this with SB 107 in 2021, and it has now been copied by multiple blue states.
From the SB 107 Bill Summary: "The bill would authorize a court to take temporary jurisdiction because a child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care."
https://pluralpolicy.com/app/legislative-tracking/bill/details/state-ca-20212022-sb107/1035849
Family Code, Section 3424, as amended by SB 107:
(a) A court of this state has temporary emergency jurisdiction if the child is present in this state and the child has been abandoned or it is necessary in an emergency to protect the child because the child, or a sibling or parent of the child, is subjected to, or threatened with, mistreatment or abuse, or because the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care, as defined by Section 16010.2 of the Welfare and Institutions Code [definition quoted below].
(b) If there is no previous child custody determination that is entitled to be enforced under this part and a child custody proceeding has not been commenced in a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive, a child custody determination made under this section remains in effect until an order is obtained from a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive. If a child custody proceeding has not been or is not commenced in a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive, a child custody determination made under this section becomes a final determination, if it so provides and this state becomes the home state of the child.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=FAM§ionNum=3424.
Welfare and Institutions Code, Section 16010.2:
(b)(3)(A) “Gender affirming health care” means medically necessary health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient, and may include, but is not limited to, the following:
(i) Interventions to suppress the development of endogenous secondary sex characteristics.
(ii) Interventions to align the patient's appearance or physical body with the patient's gender identity.
(iii) Interventions to alleviate symptoms of clinically significant distress resulting from gender dysphoria, as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition.
(B) “Gender affirming mental health care” means mental health care or behavioral health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient, and may include, but is not limited to, developmentally appropriate exploration and integration of identity, reduction of distress, adaptive coping, and strategies to increase family acceptance.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=16010.2&lawCode=WIC
Thank you for this. People like me who aren’t particularly in trans spaces or discussions and certainly not the academia are in favor of trans rights in general. I do believe trans folks should be protected from discrimination, but once the discussion turned to sports and - especially - in schools, I think it put a lot of people off.
I don’t particularly care about the sports issue - as you say, it’s a vanishingly small number of folks - but I can see where people are coming from when it comes to schools and what their kids are being told. I don’t have kids myself, though, so I’m entirely not activated by the issue.
I’m a live-and-let-live kind of person and I think that there’s more of me out there than a lot of people think.
The number is not "vanishingly small"
From the report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls in sports:
>The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males. According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports.
https://docs.un.org/en/A/79/325
And here is more complete list of over 1400 medals awared to males who were allowed to compete in the female category:
https://www.shewon.org
I think this is the big difference between the gay rights movement and the trans rights movement. Gay right succeeded in no small part because of live-and-let-live mentality. And where trans rights are limited to "live and let live", such as discrimination protection, it's still popular. It's probably also why Dems could capitalize on the trans military ban, it's a live and let live issue.
Agreed!
Trans sports were always a red herring. It's where they landed after bathroom bills kinda failed to take off. It's not about sports-- it's about the fact that right wing activists want to erase transgender people.
I wouldn't call it a red herring. Fairness is a major moral axis, and breaking the sporting categories we set up for fairness is seen a a transgression. I'd agree that right wing activists want to erase transgender people, but, as the charts show, most people support discrimination protection for trans people.
"Dignity and respect"? "Erasure"?
Whoa... Hold on a for just minute here! Depending what you mean (and demand) as "dignity and respect," that cuts both ways!
"Trans" people exist -- but they're not necessarily what they crack themselves up to be.
This has nothing to do with some putative "LGBTQ" identity, let alone "Queer." It's a disability issue.
A person genuinely suffering from a brain-body mismatch (due to a neurological or hormonal anomaly) deserves the same decency, compassion and access to medical treatment (if need be) as anyone with a deformity or disability. (As for "intersex"? Some people are born with eight toes.)
And bullying or harming the disabled is an atrocity in its own right (an atrocity for which Donald Trump is certainly guilty in his own right).
As for "gender"? All the rest is method acting — i.e., cosplay.
“Gender" (as distinct from biological sex) is a social fiction. Indeed, among gay males, drag is about REPUDIATING and RIDICULING the very concept of "gender" -- not “affirming” it.
FWIW, I experience stereotypically "feminine" emotions. Those feelings don't make me a woman -- and I'm certainly not about to cut off my dick to spite my crotch. In fact, reconciling such feelings with respect for my male body has been absolutely crucial to my self-acceptance as a gay male.
None of this requires that we redefine “male” and “female,” or adopt terms like “cis” and “trans” (let alone, teach this stuff in the public schools). And none of it is about "hate."
At age 74, I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud simply to be -- simply and uniquely -- myself. I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
Who picked this fight, anyway? There were no "bathroom bills" in North Carolina until the City of Charlotte decided to make "gender identity" a protected attribute (hence, making "Trans" a protected class).
In the end, the implicitly adversarial notion of "Queer" (or some putative “LGBTQIA+ community”) is a self-serving, self-marginalizing corral into which we’ve been herded by “The Groups.” It dilutes and jeopardizes the hard-won, widespread acceptance (and self-esteem, as individuals) that gay people have otherwise already gained — along with our fight against those who’ve medicalized our condition in the past. And those promoting that paradigm (thereby emboldening our adversaries) are running a protection racket, at our expense.
So yes, I’ll pull up the ladder behind me when some apparatchik (running a protection racket) starts clutching at my heels -- provoking and emboldening my adversaries while dragging me down.
100% agreed Kira. Great post.
Or we could simply stop calling a robust defense of classical liberal values something as milquetoast-sounding as “centrism” or “moderate.” Being a free speech advocate even for your opponents isn’t moderate. Fighting for human rights and enforcement of laws at home and abroad isn’t moderate. Defending economic liberties and free trade against left and right populist crusades isn’t lukewarm or moderate at all.
I can't recall using the word "lukewarm". 😉
Maybe what we need to question is why "moderate" gets equated with "lukewarm".
In short, we need policy and messaging focused on economically salient issues to compete and win electoral contests where the name of the game is persuading more voters than one's opponent.
I knew our Party was in deep trouble when the Progs came up with Defund the Police, arguably the most self destructive slogan ever coined. And most Americans, without malice, are simply confused by and about a focus on trans rights.
Agreed. We can also be loudest about the things that are most popular without throwing trans people under the bus. We can take power and enact popular programs while also continuing to wage the long fight to ensure dignity for all Americans.
I’d really like to hear Noah stand up for trans people for once, even if he thinks it’s a losing leftist cause in today’s America.
Yeah, except that “standing up for trans people,” as defined by trans activists, means harming women and children. Most Americans are opposed to that. As am I, a lifelong Democrat (currently very critical of my own party).
For most of us, when we say "stand up for trans people" it does not mean what the trans activists on Twitter means. It means we want them to be treated equally, exist and get the care they need. Most of us also see the nuance of the sports thing. The fact that people are making it so binary without seeing nuance is more of the issue, it's like people want to purposefully make the issue more extreme than it has to be.
By your claim then a robust liberalist position ought to deliver trans-rights.
You don't speak for most and seem to ignore the actual evidence that exists.
I couldn’t disagree more. Your position is not based on the evidence or the lived experience of trans people.
Neither you nor I get to decide these matters for someone else. It is irrelevant if you are a lifelong Democrat.
How about actually sketching out what you mean by "stand up for trans people", instead of letting it be this vague amorphous goal, that activists can bend into whatever they want it to mean? Trans issues have become such wedge issues these days, because all the flashpoint fights are about trans rights versus the rights of others, but trans activists don't want to actually engage with the other side.
The term ‘radical centrism’ has been out there for a while. Not sure we need any new ones.
Great freakin’ essay by the way, Noah.
I think a lot of the "what kind of victory would that be" people must not be old enough to remember Clinton. The 1998 Democratic positions on race, gender identity, policing, and immigration were orders of magnitude less evil than Trumpofascism even as they were well to the right of the politically disastrous 2020 progressive consensus, and well to the right of my own views today. Building, or rebuilding, a supermajority coalition around those vintage-1998 positions would be a huge relief to the people now vulnerable to Trumpian oppression. It's a disservice to actual human progress not to take that opportunity.
I actually remember Clinton as a young queer person and no the fuck it would not be. A range of you’re subhuman animals who it’s your fault when you get beat up to you’re entitled to some small subset of rights but don’t really enjoy liking men isn’t better.
Fair. I spent that time in a liberal enclave which probably gave me an unrepresentative impression on that particular issue. But opinions on gay rights (as opposed to trans rights!) are so totally different now that there's no need to go back to 1998 on that particular issue.
That's not how I remember it, Andrew -- and perhaps you might learn something of history from at least one (more) person who's lived it as an adult.
By the Clinton era, I was already a gay male in my 40s. For that matter, by the early 1980s my family had welcomed my (then-)boyfriend to their Passover seder. Heck, I managed to get both Lou Reed and Patti Smith onstage before 100,000 people at NYC's Pride -- in 1977.
Now, at age 75, I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud to be -- simply and uniquely -- myself. OTOH, I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
FWIW, I experience stereotypically "feminine" emotions. Those feelings don't make me a woman: I'm certainly not about to cut off my dick to spite my crotch. In fact, reconciling such feelings with respect for my male body has been absolutely crucial to my self-acceptance as a gay male.
"Trans" people exist -- but they're not necessarily what they crack themselves up to be.
A person genuinely suffering from a brain-body mismatch (due to a neurological or hormonal anomaly) deserves the same decency, compassion and access to medical treatment (if need be) as anyone with a deformity or disability. (As for "intersex"? Some people are born with eight toes.)
And bullying or harming the disabled is an atrocity in its own right (an atrocity for which Donald Trump is certainly guilty in his own right).
As for "gender"? All the rest is method acting — i.e., cosplay.
“Gender" (as distinct from biological sex) is a social fiction. Indeed, among gay males, drag is about REPUDIATING and RIDICULING the very concept of "gender" -- not “affirming” it.
None of this requires that we redefine “male” and “female,” or adopt terms like “cis” and “trans” (let alone, teach this stuff in the public schools). And none of it is about "hate."
Who picked this fight, anyway? There were no "bathroom bills" in North Carolina until the City of Charlotte decided to make "gender identity" a protected attribute (hence, making "Trans" a protected class).
In the end, the implicitly adversarial notion of "Queer" (or some putative “LGBTQIA+ community”) is a self-marginalizing corral into which we’ve been herded by “The Groups” (as a pretext for their own self-serving ends). It dilutes and jeopardizes the hard-won, widespread acceptance (and self-esteem, as individuals) that gay people have otherwise already gained — along with our fight against those who’ve medicalized our condition in the past.
Those promoting this "queer" paradigm (thereby emboldening our adversaries) are running a protection racket, at our expense. And yes, I’ll pull up the ladder behind me when some apparatchik (running a protection racket) starts clutching at my heels -- provoking and emboldening my adversaries while dragging me down.
I would never force anyone to go back to the terrible homophobia of the early 90s. I’m not gay and didn’t experience it directly, but just remembering what it was like being adjacent to it makes me ill.
Nor would I! In retrospect I should have been more careful to distinguish the gender identity issue from the sexual orientation issue. They get conflated too often even though trajectories of public opinion on them have been very, very different.
I think people in the 80s and 90s felt exactly the same way about gay people as “normies” do when they say that this trans stuff is too radical. Of course the difference is that there were a lot more gay people. And of course, politicians wouldn’t touch it with a 10,000 foot pole.
It's not the same. The situations aren't even analogous.
By the early 1980s my family had welcomed my (then-)boyfriend to their Passover seder. Heck, I managed to get both Lou Reed and Patti Smith onstage before 100,000 people at NYC's Pride (as our answer to Anita Bryant) -- in 1977.
At age 75, I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud to be -- simply and uniquely -- myself. OTOH, I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
FWIW, I experience stereotypically "feminine" emotions. Those feelings don't make me a woman: I'm certainly not about to cut off my dick to spite my crotch. In fact, reconciling such feelings with respect for my male body has been absolutely crucial to my self-acceptance as a gay male.
Meanwhile, the implicitly adversarial notion of "Queer" (or some putative “LGBTQIA+ community”) is a self-marginalizing corral into which we’ve been herded by “The Groups” (as a pretext for their own self-serving ends). It dilutes and jeopardizes the hard-won, widespread acceptance (and self-esteem, as individuals) that gay people have otherwise already gained — along with our fight against those who’ve medicalized our condition in the past. .
So yes, I’ll pull up the ladder behind me when some apparatchik (running a protection racket) starts clutching at my heels -- provoking and emboldening my adversaries while dragging me down.
Someone in your likes referred to this kind of take as "shadowboxing along with the Christian right," and I liked that expression. So thanks for exposing me to it.
"Shadowboxing," my ass! I don't let my adversaries define me -- to determine who I am or the vocabulary (or the frame of reference that I use in defining myself), let alone to choose my friends.
If that were the case, I'd be a Stalinist (merely because Stalin was our "ally" [and Hitler's enemy] in WWII). The enemy of my enemy isn't necessarily my friend.
If that's the case, one of the lessons learned should be the folly of expecting politicians to lead public opinion on these sorts of issues. In retrospect we know that Obama knew in 2008 that supporting gay marriage was the right thing to do. But if he had run on that support in 2008 he would have lost, and the cause would have been hurt, not helped, by his explicit moral stand.
There are different levels of courage. Obama supported civil unions and other basic civil rights way before 2008. I’m not sure how to analogize this to trans rights, but it does not feel like we’re in a similar place at all.
I agree there’s no contradiction between fighting and moderation, and that moderation is good, in general. But I strongly caution everyone here against placing too much faith in it, by itself.
You indirectly hit the nail on the head when you mentioned, offhand, that Dems seemed to already *be* moderate on immigration, crime, and race, in 2024.
Biden said “fund the police” in his first State of the Union. He clamped down on the border in his final year. Kamala didn’t even mention her own race.
None of it mattered. None of his successes outside of culture war mattered. The entire Democratic Party might as well have been defined by the most braindead-radical Twitter leftist red rose trolls.
A big part of the problem is simply that in 2024, voters preferred the garish loud, cartoon version of reality, to reality.
At some point, it was just far more compelling, and gripping drama, in 2024, for voters to believe that all Democrats were cartoons from New York stuck in a faculty lounge. No matter what Biden said or did, no matter what Kamala said or did, no matter how normal and star-spangled their convention was.
That’s not to say that moderation isn’t good politics, on face value, or that there’s not merit in it. Clearly it is, and there is. But it’s very unlikely, I think, to be the most important, most paramount concern for Democrats to rebuild their tarnished brand. There’s something far transcending policy, platform, and position-taking at work here.
Unpopular opinion, at least on this Substack: Democrats *have*, in fact, moderated on these things.
Voters just haven’t seen it, don’t believe it, and don’t want to hear it. Or at least, they didn’t, this election.
Most of the time, ordinary voters don’t encounter leftist cultural radicalism in their own lives. They might see it from afar, way out in New York, through social media, or hear of it from their favorite podcaster while at work—the more so because high-speed internet can now be found across the country.
That media soup, that funhouse filter, distorts whatever view regular people get of the left.
And I, for one, don’t believe lining up behind trans girl sports bans, or minor puberty-blocker bans, or repeating positions on other cultural issues louder and with simpler words, are going to be the big fix that unfucks that funhouse filter, no matter how compelling it seems to some right now. (If you believe in doing those things on the merits, that’s another argument to be had, of course.)
Democrats do need, clearly, to do a better job of standing up for themselves and not letting their opponents define them in the light of the most braindead activist in Brooklyn. They do need to do a better job of engaging the public and speaking to their values, not simply “kitchen-table economics” or whatever.
They do need to do a better job of using social media and the Internet, which MAGA is—still!—running rings around them on. And they do need to stop campaigning as if they were robots plugged into a consultant data stream, taking a little chance on being themselves for once.
And while they’re at it, they can perhaps do moderation.
But that will be orthogonal at best to whether it helps them stop our slide into tyranny, if the evidence of the last four years is any indication.
P.S.: Many reading this, especially if you’re from a big, liberal city, will no doubt disagree.
To a centrist living in the heart of cultural leftism, it might seem like all the Dems you know are wild-eyed radicals on policing, immigration, culture, etc.
Perhaps the worst political run-in you had lately might have been with some radical lefty person being uncivil, either online or in person. (If so, I empathize. The only people I had to block on social media the last few months were all from the left, believe it or not. Usually over posts accusing me of “genocide” or some crap.)
That seems to be the shared experience of most center-left punditry, especially from New York and LA. Their collective conclusion seems to have been that Dems need first and foremost to, in the words of Josh Barro, “say they were wrong and they’re sorry!” (Exclamation his.)
I would suggest, however, that we all take a step back and consider just how representative our own, big-city, online experiences with the left are of reality.
Or how representative what voters see of Dems, through social media, filtered through ten New-York-tainted drunk lenses, is of reality.
When Dems get destroyed like this, by an open fascist, after an economic record that’s the envy of the world, with an incumbent administration actually notoriously hated by its own far-left (for reasons very related to culture!)—
—We need to consider the possibility that the online inversion of reality itself, and voters’ marination in it, may be more of a Dem imperative to fix than any “platform” advice we may give out, based on our worst Internet run-ins.
I’m not sold on these arguments for two reasons -
1. There’s no uniform party messaging on these issues. Without that, the loudest voices will win. That makes it hard for independents to notice the moderation.
2. There’s no strong leader in the Party after Obama who could drown the leftist voices because of his charisma and broad appeal. Biden was a very weak leader who had to keep making concessions to the left to keep the intra-party unity.
You can decide to moderate 3 months before the election but voters will not trust you given your record of 3.5+ years of leftist policies.
This is a phenomenal point and something I've been thinking about for a while. Thanks for putting words and a coherent narrative around it.
No problem! Been trying to figure out how to articulate this for a while.
Yeah, the problem is that the worst excesses of leftists are all on display for everyone to see. Nuke social media from space, it’s the only way to be sure.
So are right-wing excesses, if anyone thinks it worthwhile to talk about them.
The biggest podcasts in the country are pro-Trump. The biggest Facebook pages are pro-Trump. Rogan and Theo Von both hosted open anti-Semites two weeks ago (really).
The opportunity is there to mention these things--but the incentives, apparently, are not. It is simply normal, popular, and tolerated to be a crazy sumbitch on the right. We perceive such things the way we perceive the sun in the sky, the seasons, the laws of physics.
Crazy sumbitches on the left, by contrast, are cringe, uncool, weird, lame, and an intrusion on our psyches. One of the main reasons you see them "on display for everyone to see" is because it is useful for the opponents of their putative coalition to put them on display, whether as a factional or partisan pinata to bludgeon. (Also, they happen to be concentrated, geographically, where the cameras and attention are.)
One wonders if simply being "cringe", as opposed to "crazy", or "extreme", or "moderate", are really what the public cares about. Excesses can easily be normalized, if nothing else via sheer exhaustion. We've seen that proven time and time again the last nine years.
That goes without saying. I don’t tolerate the idiocy on the right, either. I’m politically homeless.
It’s bad enough that Trump convinced smart people that Joe Biden was some radical leftist. If we fall into this same trap, we have only ourselves to blame.
I wish I could like this post 10000 times.
Lots to think about here. I'm not sure the Democrats need to abandon all of the positions you describe, but what they clearly need to do is LEAD. Too often in American politics, nobody wants to argue, they just want to get a majority and enforce their will. That has become the American style of politics, and it stinks. The attitude across the board has become, "I don't need to persuade, I just need to win" and as a result many of both sides' victories are transitory. Look at the huge persuasive effort that went into gay marriage alongside the legal fight, and compare it to the right's push to outlaw abortion, or the current left's push for trans rights. If they believe in trans peoples' civil rights (as I very much do) they need to persuade the rest of the country that they're right, to put effort into convincing people to come around to that point of view. If they believe that migration is a human right (as I also do) they need to make the case, not just wait until they're in power and force it through. Victories that come about in that way are ephemeral and generate ill will.
I'll go further: The Democrats need to have an identifiable leader. Trump might have been out of power for four years, but he still led the GOP, and that gave them a weird combination of enormous flexibility and message discipline (or what passes for it when your leader is as weird as him). Social media has demolished message discipline, and being entirely out of power has left the Democrats in particular at the mercy of randos; in a country of 330 million people you can always find some dumbass saying some stupid thing and boom: half the country believes that's the position of the other half. (And if you can't find a dumbass, you can find a Russian bot) I think the way to combat that is by picking a spokesperson for the party - if they don't say it, the party doesn't stand for it. A shadow president, a shadow cabinet even, people who the media know to go to for quotes, people whose positions actually carry weight, and who can be in a position to persuade. I think that's what did Harris in. As Vice President, she plainly was not the party's leader; there was confusion about whether she spoke for the party, and so people just paid her very little attention.
Agreed, Democrats need to lead and have an actual policy idea that is pragmatic, abundance focused, optimistic and generally proactive. Too much of it right now is not centralized and has too many chefs in the kitchen. I guess that is good from a big tent perspective or maybe in swing districts, but it's terrible from a messaging perspective.
Yes to a shadow cabinet -- of Democratic spokespersons, each of whom can respond effectively to the daily craziness of the Trump/Musk in their areas of expertise and become the first responders, the go-to commenters for the media. Unfortunately, this is not how the "party" operates. With a Congressional leadership deferential to seniority and a narrowly self-interested base, we get Chuck Schumer peering over this glasses, Rosa DiLauro sending like Roseanne Rosannadanna from SNL and the oxymoron of Hakeem Jeffries appointing a task force on rapid response.
Really good comment in the Andrew Sullivan mould. Trump won because he was able to persuade voters and won in the court of public opinion on some issues like illegal immigration.
Great comment, thank you. Agree 100% on the persuasion part, and on having a shadow POTUS. Maybe an ex-President who cannot run again?
I'm not an activist but gender issues are like forever the most important fact in my life. I've been attacked several times in my life explicitly for my gender presentation & autism. Often times with slap on the wrist penalties for the perpetrators.
And like with each of the trans issues I could like see some sort of formulation that might want me to compromise. I've written a ton about how you might compromise on some sports, especially stopwatch sports. But on trans issues I think what scares me is that lurking beneath the actual points of the issue is a permissive attitude about the marginalization and violence that really defined my first 25 or so years of life. Like I could imagine a compromise with all those issues but what they really want is a wink and a replaying of me being beaten up in the bathroom at school while someone called me a fairy.
I feel like in principle I'm open to a compromise on all these things but a lot of them contain a fact that while we compromise and stop looking somebody will be hurt for doing nothing wrong. Whether that's people attacking some poor trans girl for being a trap, or we send some illegal immigrant back to be killed by her husband, or a bunch of legal police killings for petty crimes like Philando Castile.
I think the way to handle that wrt sports and marginalization is to emphasize that no one is being marginalized. I, a cis man, am not marginalized because I'm not allowed to compete on a women's team anymore than I'm marginalized because I can't compete in the Paralympics. A high schooler is not marginalized because they can't compete in the middle school division. Requiring that people compete in the appropriate category (or, more precisely, requiring the people stay out of categories created to protect from their advantage), isn't marginalization. I think the left made a mistake by framing these as "bans". The trans girl isn't banned from playing sports, she's not allowed to play on the team she wants to, but which category we play in was never our decision.
This works on the same internal logic as the trans panic attacker. It is to sort of loop around to the “are traps gay” dialog of ten or so years back.
Like the logic that trans women aren’t really women and are maliciously trying to trick normies if you accept it in sports I’m not sure why it doesn’t hold in a bar or nightclub.
The logical conclusion of your argument is that there will be more aggression towards trans women everywhere.
We can accept that trans women are women without accepting that they're female, and it's the female (or, more specifically, the 'no male puberty') part that's relevant.
It's not that they're maliciously trying to trick normies, it's that they have an advantage whether they like it or not.
I don’t really see how you can.
Like I said in my original post I’d be open to specific compromises for specific cases. Especially if retaining access to sports even if T suppression leaves these people unfairly treated in both men’s and women’s sports.
But like if you are very publicly saying these are men and a threat to your daughter doesn’t cash out as greater rejection everywhere else. That seems hard to believe.
You think we can't distinguish between a social presentation (gender) and a biological reality (sex)?
I agree that we shouldn't be saying "these are men and a threat to your daughter," at least in the general case (prisons, for example, might be an exception). But I think there's a big difference between "this person has an unfair advantage" and "this person is a threat". By letting the right frame the conversation, they've combined those two points into one.
I mean from the perspective of someone who’s been held down or back and hurt for less of a gender bend I’m doubtful that can get out to the average person.
Maybe I’m letting my own trauma color everything but I just don’t really see it.
The Ezra interview with David Shor is an enlightening, data driven breakdown of why Kamala and the Dems lost and what we need to do to turn things around. Glad to see Noah promoting it. Here’s the direct YouTube link:
https://youtu.be/Sx0J7dIlL7c?si=M4SpRdwR-mRlFaMm
How many Americans don’t like the idea of a gay person sharing a locker room or bathroom with them? Is that really so far removed from anti-trans hysteria?
I agree with the premise of this post, and I am saddened by the trends at work in this country. The activists are probably pushing something too hard and too fast that folks are not ready for, and in so doing creating a backlash that is bigger than a slower and softer approach might render. There needs to be a lot more understanding and a lot less demonization.
The gross and oversimplified hypotheticals (like “kids with penises using gender identity as a pretense to use the wrong bathroom”) are really unhelpful and distorting.
Men have a visual sex drive, and women have a desire for modesty. Gays in locker rooms are rarely a problem, because men don’t care about random glances and lesbians don’t “peek” at other women in a creepy way. The core problem of trans activism is they want society to ignore these obvious sex differences.
Beginning in the 70s and continuing through the 80s and 90s gay men and lesbians battled with radical voices in our own communities which claimed that we were all radical sexual liberationists w/no wish to live like heterosexuals and consequently, no desire to avail ourselves of the rights to marriage and military service that later became the hallmarks of the LGB movement. Many of those claiming these things weren't even gay men, bisexuals or lesbians, in the case of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) they were pedophiles, something that enraged the vast majority of gay men when they tried to march in Gay Pride parades. All gay people were 100% clear that these groups and people didn't represent us. The fringes of the movement were gradually eclipsed by the voices of the majority but it was a process of defining a set of goals we could agree on and then agreeing to work towards those goals while forthrightly pushing the radicals out of the tent. HIV and AIDS brought home the stakes in a way nothing else could. Maybe trans activists need to go through the same thing. Many of the activists within their movement aren't even trans, they're cross-dressers or people with strange fixations on genitalia. Brianna Wu, who is trans, has been speaking out on this issue for months now. The process won't be pleasant, it wasn't for us either. I remember in the 90s attending ACT-UP meetings where these issues led to knock-down fist fights. But that process must get underway and it needs to come from within the trans movement - not outside of it.
I think you are getting at an uncomfortable truth that even very smart liberals like Noah are loathe to acknowledge: gay rights were advanced because people got to know that gays were normal people who just wanted normal lives and happened to be same sex attracted. But trans rights are going in the opposite direction because, empirically speaking, as a matter of the brute facts of reality, most people who call themselves trans women are essentially cross dressing fetishists or submission fetishists, and most people calling themselves trans men are autistic, anorexic, Cluster B or traumatized females who view “male passing” as a coping mechanism. Most of my colleagues in mental health secretly agree with me in principle, as almost any honest person can see this, even as we disagree about how best to respond to this reality. In my professional circles some of my most virulent critics have essentially admitted I am (factually, empirically) correct but that the plight of the “genuinely trans” minority demands a noble lie from the mental health professions.
This comment is kind of gross and I’m ashamed of this comments section that it got 9 likes. Reads like something from the 80s about how all gay men are obviously perverts and deviants.
There’s nothing wrong with having a fetish or a paraphilia. I don’t think that trans women are any worse than other biological males in this regard. The problem is the political project of demanding society treat them as the low risk population (females) when they clearly fall into the high risk bucket (males).
Also, i’m not sure precisely what you mean by deviant, but the conservatives who talked about gay hyper promiscuity were not factually incorrect. The pro gay marriage argument was just that this hyper promiscuous population was not relevant to the argument of gay marriage for those who wanted it.
Thank you for this! I think something else that has helped the cause of LGB rights is the fact that pretty much everyone has someone they love, friend or family, who is LGB. Issues like this come into focus for people when they impact someone they care about.
But it certainly helped, as you say, to have gotten the messaging from folks who just wanted to have the same rights with their partners that straight people had.
Trans folks aren’t as numerous and I could see where many people still don’t have someone close in their lives that is trans. I myself only have one, and it’s not like I live in the back o’ beyond - I live in coastal SoCal.
The goals of the gay and lesbian rights movement was to fully participant in the life of the nation - to wed, to serve in the military, to have children etc... The trans movement has badly marginalized itself by demanding things people are resistant to because they impact themselves or people they know. The foremost amongst those being allowing men to compete against women in sports. 80% of Americans are against this and there's nothing anyone can do to convince them they're wrong. The issue needs to be resolved in favor of genetic females and removed from public debate. Additionally - children deserve the right to puberty and should never be allowed to make their own healthcare decisions. Why trans leadership has chosen to focus on these issues vs. allowing trans people to serve in the military goes to their political aptitude and ability to think outside their own circles.
Clintonian triangulation is the name of the game. heed Dick Morris.
Obama buried that strategy and went for identitarian politics of division instead, empowering the “groups”.
Harris tried to move a bit in the triangulation direction but couldn’t, given her history, so fell back on Trump is an evil fascist as the campaign strategy.
Biden ostensibly ran as a “normal” candidate (despite being anything but) in 2020, but that was really amidst crisis, recession and Dem-fomented public disorder (that miraculously stopped post-election). He governed as a progressive.
There are some pretty “normal” -seeming candidates out there: Shapiro, Moore, Ro. Having been fooled by Biden, though, voters will probably look closely at what Dems do in Congress and at the state level to see if the party is really moving back toward “normal”. That’s one reason Schumer didn’t want a futile shutdown.
This (and Trump) have empowered the left again in Congress. Hard to tell if “normal” is really going to be on the menu. I doubt it. Or maybe we get the same crazy spice wild wings dressed up as bland chicken and biscuits.
Obama didn't invent identitarian politics, and he sure as shit didn't reignite the culture wars intentionally (remember "birtherism?"). He was a flawed candidate and president in many ways, but it's dishonest to insinuate that everything bad that's happened in the last 15 years is because of him.
<There are some pretty “normal” -seeming candidates out there: Shapiro, Moore, Ro.>
Interesting list: Shapiro and Moore come off as your standard centrist-types, but Rho Khanna explicitly promotes himself as a Bernie Sanders/Liz Warren progressive. Given that and the narrow margins Trump secured in November, it suggests that message control (rather than substantive ideological redirection) is the right move for Democrats. I'm somewhat sympathetic to this view: American voters don't really care about "wokeness" at the federal level (state and local politics are another thing entirely), so the Dems could nominate a (young) ham sandwich and win if they regain voters' trust in managing the economy.
State and local politics are the reverse: "the groups" have much more influence on policymaking at those levels, especially in deep-blue states. Cultural moderation and systematic reforms (the "Abundance agenda" that Ezra Klein champions) could revitalize the party. However, the benefits would arguably take some time to materialize (especially regarding housing in my home state of California).
Where did I say Obama “invented” identitarian politics?
Change your moniker to Toto if you like straw men so much.
After his 2010 midterms shellacking Obama could have chose triangulation but instead chose go to identitarian. He didn’t need to- he likely would have won in 2012 due to incumbency and tbe economy, but I think the tech bros gave him the tools to slice a dice the electorate and reach out to individual segments in a much more effective way than Clinton was able to with his micro-targeting initiatives for 1996. The Obama campaign just added a little more hate to the mix than Clinton and Gore were ever comfortable with.
Populists like Bernie and Trump saw that divisiveness was working, but picked different classes of enemies to punish (the 1 percent for Bernie, China and illegal immigrants for Trump) but a broader groups of people to allegedly benefit (working and middle class Americans of all races). Too bad the Dems didn’t go with Bernie in 2016.
I agree with your analysis in your last two paragraphs, except that Rho really isn’t in the Warren camp. He is progressive but he is not a hater, comes across as reasoned and rational, pragmatic and thoughtful. He appears “normal” in a way that Liz and Bernie do not. Similarly, while Obama had progressive views he came across in a similar way to Rho- thoughtful, pragmatic.
I don’t expect Rho to be the candidate, of course.
<After his 2010 midterms shellacking Obama could have chose triangulation but instead chose go to identitarian. He didn’t need to- he likely would have won in 2012 due to incumbency and tbe economy, but I think the tech bros gave him the tools to slice a dice the electorate and reach out to individual segments in a much more effective way than Clinton was able to with his micro-targeting initiatives for 1996. The Obama campaign just added a little more hate to the mix than Clinton and Gore were ever comfortable with.>
Do you have any proof that Obama rejected triangulation? Last I checked he was perfectly amenable to triangulation, especially on fiscal policy (explains why he caved to the Tea Party during the 2011 debt ceiling crisis) and on healthcare (using a Nixon-era healthcare proposal and accepting red state waivers on Medicaid expansion). You are ignoring the GOP's role in the polarization of American politics under Obama, especially when it came to racial issues. Where could he have triangulated and gotten a better deal? The only thing I can think of his populist-tinged campaign in 2012, and even that partly motivated by the sour grapes that emerged after the 2010 midterms.
This is correct. Obama could not have been a 2 term President or finished as as successful President if he hadn't opted for triangulation and making deals with Republicans in the Congress. He even came close to a grand bargain with Boehner, which would have put us on a more sound fiscal path than we got with Trump and Biden. Extremists like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor scuttled the Bowles Simpson commission recommendations.
I was talking about the post-2010 period and the 2012 campaign, yes.
The strategy was to motivate the base via microtargeting and division while demotivating swing voters from turning out for Repubs via “othering”. Pretty basic stuff for a political campaign. This worked for him in 2012 though was a disaster as a Congressional strategy.
This is merely my observation of his strategy and his rejection of “triangulation”. You don’t need to agree with it nor I am I going spend time linking to voluminous sources to defend my observations. The evidence is there if you look.
Nor did I make any judgment on Obama’s terms nor “blame” him for the “bad stuff for the last 15 years”. I am just talking about strategy. You can defend Obama’s presidency all you like (or not) but it has nothing to do with me or my comment. In the end, I suspect a part of the reason he chose this strategy was because the tech tools and the personal data existed to leverage it.
Ro Khanna may sound more normal, but it may be because he doesn’t seem very intelligent or thoughtful. He supports government funding homeopathic medicine, which is straight up insanity, and also while tweeting in support of building more housing in California added that it should only be done alongside expanding rent control and banning corporations from owning houses.
Ro Khanna is strong on individual rights and personal freedom part of the classical liberalism framework and very weak on the economic liberalism part of it. This is a common problem on the left. They just don't believe in a market based economy.
Yeah, I believe if he or his constituents want to throw away money on super diluted homeopathic water it’s crazy, but fine that he does that or supports it, but when he says the government should pay for it, I completely disagree.
Obama did the opposite of identity politics. It was a clear strategy from him and his campaign that if he ever made his race an issue in the election, he would lose. He was asked a direct question after he became the nominee whether he can win given that there are so many people who'd never vote for a black candidate. He said it didn't matter and there are enough voters who don't care about race. This is a lie being spread by racist scumbags in the Republican Party to cover their own racism.
Identity politics and "the groups" mostly were online in female spaces like tumblr, and then got boosted by the Hillary campaign. Obama had "the veal pen" which is kind of the opposite of the groups IIRC.
I can think of two restaurants in Oklahoma — a Red State — that have trans individuals working right up front, serving the public. Thankfully, I don’t see any people objecting. Whereas in some schools, trans kids have been bullied to the point they committed suicide. Say what you will about progressives and moderates, but life is very hard for trans kids in Red States. This is an issue about human dignity and rights.
Yes, but I think “trans ideology” is actually harmful for trans rights. Bullying is tough to fight; as someone who was bullied myself growing up, I wish there was something more we could do about bullying in general.
Then the focus should have been on these kind of issues which would have more public support instead of pushing the most extreme positions. That's what trans activists in blue states should have done if they actually cared about trans kids in red states.
I cannot understand how the "progressives" conflate trans issues with a modern day civil rights movement. The percentage of folks with actual gender dysphoria is vanishingly small, like less than 0.5% of the population. The percentage of folks who "identify with a different gender" is likely larger but still low single digits of the population.
Finally trans in women's sports (no one is objecting to trans in men's sports since they will get crushed!) is an issues of about low triple digit individuals in the entire country.
This whole obsessive focus of the micro minority blows the mind.
Violates Spock's Rule of "The needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few" :-)
All of the things you said, except “why are Republicans making such a big deal about oppressing this tiny minority” and the obvious answer is that oppressing gay people stopped working a few years back.
I am going to love watching the Dems die on this hill
It’s sad!
The reason the Trump ad “She is for they/them and I am for you” play so well is that otherwise normies who would likely vote blue are really concerned about “the boy in their daughter’s locker room”
The reason the GOP latched on is, unlike the Dems they saw the massive disconnect between the democratic obsession and normies stands and latched on.
That’s along why Trump pivoted away from the whole abortion thing and said it was a states right thing!
Brilliantly played
FFS women who fought for Roe V Wade now voted Trump as the “I will keep women safe” (reference to trans) resonated with them
The democrats are lead footed. I speak as one who had always voted blue and given handsomely to all “left of center” causes
The decay in strategic thinking is astonishing
Oh well…
We will have to wait for another Bill Clinton like figure to rescue the party from its worst instincts
C’est La Vie …
Theres like a few people upthread who’ve said like all the issues maybe you can compromise on them but they and I think the right see tbem as stalking horses for are trans people normal acceptable people.
If only the American electoral system didn't punish third parties so harshly.
If you took the sane ideas of both parties and put them together, that platform ought to win. But alas, that's not to be, so you guys have to hope the blue cat herd of special interests and activists can find a moment of unity to make the simplest, most obvious move to counter the red cult of personality. Ouch.
There's no way for a new third party to go directly to the national level and be competitive. If they start at a smaller scale in a less populated state and win some statewide elections and House/Senate seats, they could try to expand from that position. This requires long term vision and probably a 25-50 year timeline. I don't think anyone has patience for that. They just want to become President straightaway.
Is it a coincidence that the AI art looks like Ezra Klein in combat uniform?
No
Somewhere in all this, the essential issue tends to get lost. What is America? How do we define the nation we were designed to be? How do we understand our place as the first nation on earth to define ourselves at our inception as that place in which We the People might together find just enough of the courage, the honesty, the.tolerance, the compassion, the humility, the understanding, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up with as much justice and equity as humanly possible?
If that question does not lie at the heart of the way in which we understand who are and how treat each other, then everything else is moot.
I’m just past my 80th year. I taught American history for over 40 of those years. I’ve been in my time a construction worker, a soldier, a merchant seaman, a camp counselor and director, and a teacher and school administrator, snd yes, even a paper boy. I’ve watched my country progress from a heroic and crucial if flawed ally in a war to destroy one of the most horrendous dictatorships in human history to being the pawn and plaything of malignant narcissist and his billionaire buddies, and yes, everything we’ve been and done on the way here.
I get that people are concerned about the economy, the border, trans issues, the excesses of DEI, crime in the streets, etc. All those concerns are justified, but when they, either singly or together become more of a concern than the fact that we have twice elected to the presidency a man whose only concern is for his own wealth, status, obsessive desire for adoration, and safety from his own lawless and unConstitutional acts, who has proven time and again to utterly disdain and disavow our electoral process, our Constitution, and the rule of law, then something is badly out of balance, if only for the very practical reason that such a man will have absolutely no concern for any of our concerns and will do only what conforms to his own badly distorted vision of the nation whose interests he claims, utterly falsely, to have at heart.
Well that’s the point of this article. Trump only won because of how bad Biden, Harris and the democrats were, they brought about this because of bad policies and bad politics, especially since 2017. And the democrats in Congress giving up all their power to the executive branch when their party had the presidency, and the republicans doing the same under their have magnified the damage Trump is doing now by making the president have too much power.
Republicans are always trying to blame Biden and the Democrats for Trump. In fact of course, this is an transparently vain attempt to excuse themselves for voting for a man whom they know has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to disdain and to disavow the Constitution in pursuit of a tinpot dictatorship.
I’m not a Republican, and didn’t vote for Trump. Of course, as always, I voted for the Libertarian candidate so my vote is meaningless. But for Democrats to not acknowledge that just running a lackluster candidate whose whole platform was just ‘Trump will be bad’ is unproductive. Even now, the Democrats are not coming down hard on the Trump tariffs, which are demonstrably bad and will be more so as prices rise and stores get empty shelves, because they don’t really believe in free trade or capitalism. The one thing they hit Trump on is immigration, but that is the one MAGA policy that is retaining popular support.
My comment stands. It is entirely true about many Republicans, but if I assumed you to be a Republican in error, I apologize.
Ms Harris’s platform was far from just ‘Trump will be bad’ although even you acknowledge that to be true.
Many Democrats (and I’m not one) know that calling Trump out has become an exercise in futility now that there is no campaign in full swing. Now many of them are just following Napoleon’s dictum: “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake"
I mostly agree. Democrats might want to mostly focus on bread and butter issues, a “sewer socialism” that focuses on public good deliverables from infrastructure to efficient government services and sensible regulation. Progressives got over their skis on culture war issues. They don’t like incrementalism but they just got ahead of the country on too many changes that were pitched too moralistically. This left them open to attack on the most complex issue — trans — and made them seem out of touch.
One real challenge is for Democrats to address crime. It may well be the case that crime is a function of many factors from persistent poverty, racism, and neglect. Generationally, addressing those factors is important, but cannot take the place of creating a safer environment for everyone. it is too easy for Republicans point to urban (read, black) crime rates as the result of soft on crime liberals and hatred of police. it would be difficult to understate the damage caused by the mere phrase “defund the police.”
Since inner city residents bear the brunt of urban crime, most of them would support a serious effort to reduce crime. This will be very difficult and very expensive, which is why Republicans only complain and never do anything beyond harsh sentencing guidelines and fulminating. It will require many more police, new thinking and, most controversially, a great deal more security cameras as is found in most other advanced economies.
The homelessness issue is closely related, at least in the minds of most voters. The roadblocks placed by well meaning but unrealistic civil libertarians to provide assistance and treatment for unhoused people has left many of our cities looking out of control. The root causes for much of the homelessness today, the lack of affordable housing, will not disappear quickly. The opposition of many neighborhoods to shelters, treatment centers and other needed services to help people get off the street makes this issue even tougher.
Democrats should also put themselves forward as the real “family“ party since Democratic policies tend to be far more helpful to families than the Republicans, who wrap themselves in religion, but do nothing for actual families, other than scaring them.
I think in a lot of ways the Democrats could leapfrog Republicans on crime. Most Americans know that our police suck. They don't like the militarism, the bullying, and the corruption. But Democrats just say "All Cops Are Bad" and Americans know that's not true either. But Trump embraces not just the police, but especially the bad cops. He plainly loves the corruption and bullying, and that's the Democrats' in IF they can take it. The Democrats could become the "Party of the Good Cop". We need a well-trained professional police force, one that knows and obeys the laws, one that isn't arbitrary or cruel, a police force that has the moral standing and public respect to go anywhere and do a tough job. Trump's embrace of bad cops imperils all cops, the Democrats need to be saying, it makes it harder for the good cops to do their jobs.
Make it pithier: Republicans are the party of black-uniform cops, and the Democrats the party of blue-uniform cops.
In a 2023 Harvard poll 75% of Americans reported themselves as having a "positive view of the police", so I don't believe for a second that "Most Americans know that our police suck." "Police reform" (which is what activists are now calling what they used to call "defunding") is a deeply tangential issue for most Americans.
I see your point, but I'm not sure that poll really captures the way Americans feel about the police. What I've seen is that there's an urge to say "I support our boys in blue" and so on, because people like to feel like law-abiding citizens on the side of law and order, but to be highly critical of actual practices. The support is abstract, but as soon as you get concrete, I've found it gets negative fast. It's also why "defund the police" is such a terrible slogan: it runs face-first into peoples perceptions of themselves as vaguely supportive of law enforcement as a concept, even when they might overwhelming agree with any particular reform.
Yes, I agree with some of this. Americans are, at our core, deeply anti-establishment so some of that comes into play when people discuss particular police practices for sure.