It’s Nov. 6, 2024, the morning after Election Day.
To understand Kamala Harris’s narrow victory over Donald Trump, you have to think about Marie Kondo, the Japanese style guru famous for her ruthless minimalism, whose prescription for a cluttered home is to remove any object that doesn’t immediately “spark joy.”
The progressivism that infuses the contemporary Democratic Party can be a cluttered, claustrophobic worldview. In its Trump- and Biden-era form, it doesn’t just include a large array of interest groups, each making their own policy demands. It argues that all of these demands must be accepted and acted on together, that there’s an underlying philosophical or even creedal unity (“in this house, we believe…”), a seamless garment that can’t be divided up. Everything is intersectional and you can’t just pick and choose: Climate justice is reproductive justice is antiracism; trans rights are women’s rights are Indigenous rights; if you stand with migrants you also have to stand with teachers’ unions and vice versa.
This cluttered sensibility — a variation on what my colleague Ezra Klein once dubbed the “everything bagel” spirit in liberal governance — hasn’t prevented progressivism from becoming the most powerful ideology in American life. Even with the wilder forms of wokeness in partial retreat, progressive ideas still pervade the nation’s cultural institutions to such a degree that you can wander from an Ivy League faculty lounge to a corporate human resources department to a Hollywood gathering to a magazine editorial meeting and feel as though you inhabit a single-party state.
But for Democratic Party leaders, the combination of doctrinal clutter and sweeping cultural power creates political headaches and electoral vulnerabilities. The inflexibility of left-wing ideology means that if you dissent forcefully on its litmus tests, you’ll quickly feel like an outsider if not a heretic, choosing between a difficult life as a moderating influence (ask Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema how that goes) or a lurch into outright opposition. And progressive cultural dominance means that anyone who feels disillusioned with some arm of the American establishment — with the medical system or the modern university, with the F.D.A. or the C.I.A. — can end up feeling alienated from liberalism writ large. This creates a lot of very different kinds of swing constituencies that can be happy to see the left’s power tempered or rebuked.
Since 2015 the remarkable resilience of Donald Trump has depended on making himself an avatar for these varied discontents — a symbol of rebuke and rebellion, and a natural leader for a coalition of alienated and disappointed outsiders, plus a few disillusioned insiders as well. When Trump was riding high in the early summer of 2024, his outsider coalition seemed to be adding members at a rapid clip — picking up young men and recent immigrants and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, none of whom had necessarily embraced a consistent right-wing agenda, but all of whom were looking for a countervailing force against Democratic orthodoxy.
On paper Kamala Harris seemed like an unlikely candidate to stanch this bleeding of support. She was a consummate Democratic insider from a super-liberal state, perhaps more a machine politician than a progressive true believer but one with a long record of fealty to left-wing groups and causes. She lacked the history of moderation that made Joe Biden a reassuring figure in 2020 and had little experience with the sort Clintonian triangulation that Biden himself practiced intermittently at best. In the heat of July it seemed like the Democrats desperately needed a capable centrist, not a California liberal, and that turning from Biden to Harris would save them from a rout but still probably lead to a defeat.
Share
Print
