On September 25, 2024, Bill Kristol (a well-known conservative guy) tweeted:
First off, I can’t help but mention that “capitalism” and “free markets” are far from the same thing, but what I really want to talk about is how the DNC keeps trying to compete with the GOP for right-wing votes. If you prefer memes to essays, my thoughts are summarized with this:
We’re talking about the USA, so there really aren’t any moderate voters. The Democratic Party is right wing as a group, and the Republican Party is far right as a group; those “moderate” voters are actually right wing voters, and progressives are centrists for the most part. If you believe the Democrats represent the center because they represent the center of American politics, then apparently Hitler was also a centrist because he represented the center of German politics in his time.
The why of the DNC’s strategy is likely two things:
- It is well-established that the DNC responds to donor money and does not respond to its constituents. They certainly pretend as if they will serve their constituents, but then there is little to no correlation between their actual actions and what their constituents want. On the other hand, the wishes of their wealthy donors are well-reflected in the DNC’s actions. That’s partly because the donor class limits the actions that the DNC can take and partly because both parties are controlled by wealthy individuals, so policy that is beneficial to wealthy people is easier to implement.
- The individual politicians who have the most control over the DNC’s actions are they, themselves ideologically right-wing, and are able to gatekeep access to power within the DNC, thus preventing any real progressive from steering the direction of the party.
The DNC tries to appeal to right-wing voters even though it is a bad strategy because they are not capable of genuinely appealing to progressives. Sure, they can rhetorically appeal to progressives, but since they can’t take progressive action, they can’t appeal to them genuinely. (I’m emphasizing my point here because I’m sure someone will fail to read and comprehend all the words the first time.)
The DNC switched to Kamala Harris from Joe Biden not because Harris is more progressive, but rather because Biden is completely cooked at this point. Harris is just as right-wing as Biden, which is saying a lot. The choice of Walz was odd because he does seem to be a genuine progressive (i.e., centrist), but we can see from last night’s debate that the DNC has gotten to Tim Walz, and he fell into that same pattern of trying to appeal to right-wing voters and failing specifically because Trump and Vance can easily go further right.
One example from the debate would be the issue of the genocide in Gaza. Walz attempted to appeal to right-wing voters by saying that the US will always support Israel’s right to defend itself. In the meantime, however, the Trump campaign’s position on Gaza is that Israel/USA should “finish the job” meaning finish killing and/or displacing every Palestinian in Gaza so that Israel can proceed with it’s plan to make Gaza into a tourist beach with additional housing for Israeli citizens and a new canal (the Ben Gurion Canal project, first proposed in the 1960’s) that will provide an alternative to the Egypt-control Suez canal. The DNC has sabotaged itself in this by continuing to villainize Palestinians and pretend that the conflict began on October 7, 2023 (Walz himself did this during the first few minutes of last night’s debate); if the Palestinians are the unrepentant, unjustified villains that establishment Democrats say they are, then why would anyone want anything less than their complete and utter eradication as a people?
The next example would be immigration. Walz correctly pointed out that the Democrats have tried to pass hard-line immigration legislation and that the Republicans have (at Trump’s direction) shot down that legislation in order to give them the opportunity to falsely claim that Democrats are soft on immigration. The problem, of course, is that the Democrats have collectively created the impression that they agree that there’s an immigration problem in the sense of people coming into the continental US illegally, but that isn’t the case. In truth, the major issue is that there isn’t enough funding to evaluate applications for asylum, so there’s a huge backlog at the southern border, but when the agreed-upon position is “immigrants bad”, the GOP proposal for mass deportations makes much more sense than what the Democrats (especially Walz during last night’s debate) are saying. I suppose there’s a second issue of finding a legal way to allow non-citizen migrants to do the work required to produce food, but that seems odd given that the current system is working (except for the issue of inadequate pay for farm workers, but I dare you to try to frame it that way to a right-wing voter).
Perhaps the biggest issue with the DNC’s strategy of courting right-wing voters is the issue of empathy. Right-wing voters want vengeance no matter what the issue. Walz’s approach is to empathize with everyone and empathy is antithetical to vengeance. Meanwhile, Trump and Vance seem to have a distinct lack of empathy for everyone and a conspicuous comfort with resentment and hostility. The Trump/Vance attitude is simply more relatable to right-wing voters, and no matter how much anger Walz or Harris expresses, Trump and Vance will always be able to shimmy to the right of them and pick up those right-wing votes.
I do not want Trump to win this election; despite the fact that the Democrats do not represent my views, I agree that Trump is worse. When the DNC switched from Biden to Harris, I was hoping they would at least shut the fuck up about Gaza, but instead they dove right into alienating Muslim voters. I was hoping they would switch to a more “let’s have rules that make sense and enforce them” approach to the border, but they went right ahead with alienating immigrants. This dynamic is the reason why liberal democracies (i.e., anocratic tyrannies of capital) eventually slide into fascism.
Related: Why Liberalism Leads to Fascism