That's the Ticket

Way back in 2004, the first election cycle I was old enough to vote, I’d initially gone all in for Howard Dean and later turned ride or die for Kerry/Edwards. Having been raised by ’60s people to be a European-style social democrat, and then outraged for Americans to be misled into a needless war in Iraq, I’d become a policy major at Brown and active member of the Brown Democrats (originally co-founded by JFK Jr.). Determined to kick Bush/Cheney out of office, I caravaned from Providence up to swing state New Hampshire to knock on doors.

When Kerry/Edwards lost that November I was sad but not especially surprised; I’d grown up in eastern Missouri, in the St. Louis area, and had spent the summer working in a warehouse—it never felt like the campaign quite caught up with the national zeitgeist. But in that disappointed aftermath came promising green shoots: much soul-searching among my fellow Democrats eager to understand how we’d lost Middle America to Darth Cheney and the Shrub, and consider how we might finetune our policy approach to earn back more support and trust. Many of my peers were suddenly that much more inquisitive about my blue-collar relatives out in flyover country, eager to expand our big tent.

In those auspicious days I managed to get elected Communications Chair of the Brown Democrats, or “Dems,” joining the Executive Board and becoming friendly with President Seth Magaziner, scion of a senior muckety-muck in the Clinton Administration and now a U.S. Congressman (D-RI). Seth was obviously plotting a political career and was pretty shrewd about electioneering, which couldn’t be said about most of the rest of the E-Board. They too were bent on careers as progressive politicos, but with little evident concern for policy details or what swing voters might think. Instead, they seemed all-consumed by culture wars and building little fiefdoms for themselves.

And so even as the national party grassroots were humming with exciting ferment, the party on campus was intellectually moribund and increasingly stifling. After a frustrating few months, I reluctantly decided that I’d wasted enough time on political vaporware and tendered my resignation: I could accomplish more substantive reform with my dudes in Students for Sensible Drug Policy. I remained a busy activist at Brown, but the Dems were irrelevant to that, as elated as I was by Republicans’ karmic “thumping” in the 2006 midterms.

Landing in New York the next fall to become a public interest journalist under PBS icon Bill Moyers, the direction of the Democratic Party remained up in the air: was it to be a full restoration of Clinton-ism with Hillary, or turning the page to a new generation with community organizer Barack Obama, or amping up the folksiness with the silver-tongued John Edwards, or settling for one of the more marginal candidates like Joe Biden or Chris Dodd? I personally was for Edwards, despite his sleaze and smarm, because he’d at least made class mobility the central theme of his candidacy.

But soon Obama’s big victory in the Iowa caucus and surging momentum marked the dispiriting end of an era: no longer did very many of my fellow young professional progressives seem so interested in empathizing with swing voters or reconsidering policy nostrums. Why would we bother, when we had such a glamorous rockstar as our standard-bearer? Why dwell on boring specifics when “Hope” and “Change” and “Yes We Can!” were answer enough to any question? We were awesome, we were on the right side of history, and we had nothing to learn; the only reason one could possibly oppose Our Guy—the perfect combination of Abe Lincoln, JFK, and Martin Luther King—was racism.

On the other hand, I’d studied public policy and took my job as a journalist seriously: Obama’s gauzy cult of personality offered little nutritional value and left me uneasy. He was a blank screen, all things to all people, whereas daunting policy challenges inevitably involve hard choices and painful trade-offs. Yet to hear Barack’s boosters tell it, including most of my colleagues, he was both the most progressive candidate since FDR and completely non-ideological; indeed, because the Republicans had gone so crazy, he also had fair claim to being the authentic conservative in the race. Unhip as it was, I happened to think Obama deserved the same skepticism and scrutiny as any other candidate. At very least, his sanctification was premature.

I’ll never forget coming into work the day after the 2008 election. It was like sepia-toned Dorothy stepping into Technicolor Oz: everybody was beaming, and vexing issues that had previously been dissected with furrowed brow seemed to have magically melted away. The whole world would love America now, we’d entered a new golden age, and it was all thanks to electing this world-historic genius whose only flaw was being perhaps too blindingly brilliant.

I remained cautiously optimistic, and there were some things I liked about Obama’s first term, including taking out Bin Laden and winding down the Iraq War. But, in my professional view, he also made some major policy missteps. For all its short-term pay-offs and promises of reining in Wall Street, the Dodd-Frank legislation seemed bound to entrench regulatory capture and abuse over time, particularly through the unusual absence of accountability engineered for the so-called Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And while what America’s health care system most urgently needed was targeted triage for hard-up regions and populations, the supposedly Affordable Care Act clumsily restructured health insurance infrastructure basically designed for the regularly employed middle class to subsidize much further-flung insurance coverage, which didn’t necessarily amount to actual care.

And yet among friends and peers almost any criticism remained verboten. Our duty was to circle the wagons, and to suggest that there might be any issue with Obama’s Brain Trust was to invite tension and anger, at least unless one gingerly posited that maybe Barack was a bit too Spock-like or not quite boldly progressive enough. So it was something of a relief when Bill Moyers closed up shop and I headed up to Columbia Journalism School in early 2011 to be the flack handling its centennial commemorations. I’d come to New York to do journalism, but a lot of what I’d been assigned had been closer to outright PR, or the ads I’d written for my college radio station. Perhaps by taking on a more explicitly PR-defined role I’d feel less conflicted and sleep better at night.

Even as my new job still consisted primarily of pandering to overwhelmingly Obama-adoring donors, it was indeed a relief to not have to directly defend some of the administration’s actions later in the term. One troubling omen was the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter pressuring colleges and universities to dramatically lower the standard of proof for sexual misconduct allegations, without the usual protocol or any meaningful public input. Then, egregiously, came the sudden executive imposition of DACA after President Obama had repeatedly acknowledged that doing so would be illegal, not only poisoning the well for any true ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ but igniting a constitutional crisis in the process.

Following big GOP gains in the 2010 midterms, and then the Benghazi incident, by fall 2012 most of my friends and colleagues were expecting Obama to lose against the inoffensive Mitt Romney. Wistfully, they lamented the impending return of small-bore politics as usual. Then on election day Barack not only won but won comfortably, and almost everyone I knew abruptly concluded that the Permanent Democratic Majority had arrived: maybe Congress might still change hands here and there, but the Presidency and thus soon the Supreme Court had been secured forever, and there was really no reason to ever compromise again. At long last, we enlightened adults in the room had scored total victory, and it was time to throw our weight around.

In the early weeks of Obama’s second term I moved across campus to start working for Columbia Law School as reporter and hagiographer, including for an endless array of VIP gatherings held at exclusive venues in Midtown. Much of that entailed glowing write-ups of networked progressive technocrats in the vast revolving door amongst government, Biglaw, academia, NGOs, and elite influence peddling—fancy folks who in their upscale workaholic ways really did mostly mean well, and fancied themselves fair-minded experts shepherding the peasantry for their own good. If the little people had views worth considering they’d have gone to the right schools and/or been there hobnobbing in the ballroom, or at least be more grateful to we the selfless meritocracy.

The essential outlook of such imperious Masters of the Universe had become largely post-national and fundamentally dismissive of the notion of representative governance. Global challenges took global solutions that could only be masterminded by the vanguard of visionaries like us, and the stakes were too high to let ignorant electorates stand in our way. As such, it was incumbent upon we sages of the managerial class to move as many issues as possible out of the political realm, where ordinary voters had some say, toward the purview of courts and diplomats and international institutions where the right sort of people would decide. I wish I could say that they were on to something, that the alleged meritocrats truly deserved the last word, but their intellectual incuriosity tended to be as impressive as their self-regard.

After a couple of years I couldn’t take it anymore: on one hand I was rubbing shoulders with wealthy and influential people at tons of open bars and free dinners, on the other I was selling out the democratic values I’d been raised to hold dear. It was time to abandon ship, and I was thrilled to leave the Law School, but continued working with Columbia Engineering to help make intimidating technical research more comprehensible.

And then in 2016 came the populist earthquake of Brexit, and particularly the shock election of Donald Trump, shaking the technocratic aristocracy to its core. The mature, responsible reaction would have been to take some cues from how a lot of progressives had reacted to disappointment in 2004: as a hard wake-up call, and golden opportunity to summon some empathy, self-awareness, and chastened humility that the electorate had decided the other ticket was the lesser of evils. Perhaps there was something to be gleaned for next time in that the most prominent establishmentarian in the country had been defeated by a dubious reality TV character rehashing the Jesse Ventura playbook. Perhaps it might have been the pendulum swinging after eight years, with independent voters having real concerns about the Democratic track record that the party might do well to ponder.

Instead, the response was simply rage, rage, rage—blind fury that our Permanent Democratic Majority had suddenly been snatched away. It couldn’t possibly have been that many might benefit from a few course corrections to reclaim the vital center, it had to be the Russians or the racists or the wicked purveyors of disinformation who needed to be censored into oblivion. Rather than any effort to seek a few inches of common ground with an inexperienced and ideologically flexible new POTUS substantially at odds with his own party, the progressive establishment writ large opted for dodgy lawfare and endless media cycles of the sort of fervid conspiracy-mongering I’d previously associated with the chintzier corners of right-wing talk radio.

With the coming of the COVID era, which I soon chronicled for Columbia’s School of Public Health, the discourse sunk even lower: left-leaning academics and public intellectuals unironically likening gaudy tabloid playboy Donald Trump to Hitler for not immediately imposing lockdowns at least as severe as China and New Zealand, incendiary rhetoric which probably helped encourage some of the rioting and unrest throughout 2020. The knives were out, as they’d been from the beginning, without ever earnestly seeking any opportunities for compromise.

Late that year, when Joe Biden squeaked into power by the narrowest of margins, I was hopeful that he’d prove just the man for the moment. With his middle-class background, quaint repartee, and decades of navigating thorny political divides to find the most viable center-left foot forward, he seemed ideally situated to help lower the temperature of American politics and push a moderate agenda that a clear majority of the electorate might find acceptable. That his administration proved something more like the opposite is perhaps the most compelling evidence that Scranton Joe might have been substantially diminished long before the infamous debate of June 2024.

The closest historical analogue to the Biden/Harris White House might be a bruised colonial potentate punishing its recalcitrant subjects after finally crushing an uprising, or perhaps the restored Bourbon Dynasty determined to roll back the clock. They’ve learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as the saying goes. Rather than attempt to unite the country or forge some new consensus, the administration resorted directly to cynical demonization: not just of the bulk of its political opposition, broadly smeared as violent insurrectionists equivalent to the thousand or so loutish rioters of January 6, but also of the legions of vaccine-hesitant citizens steadily hounded out of government and adjacent institutions for choosing “their body, their choice” over arbitrary whims of public health authority.

There were some genuinely good things in the huge pork barrel legislation Biden/Harris managed to push through Congress, even if the bills seemed likely to exacerbate inflation and mostly aimed at subsidizing special interests and extraneous administrators. Less defensible have been the mandates in all but name compelling citizens to adopt electric vehicles even in markets where it makes little sense, part of a larger effort to jack up the cost of energy for ultimately infinitesimal environmental benefit. Most appalling has been bending and breaking the law to open the floodgates to millions upon millions of impoverished migrants even as working Americans struggle, civic vandalism on a breathtaking scale.

It all amounts to why this pro-choice bleeding heart Upper West Side public interest journalist just can’t muster the rationalization to support the Harris/Walz campaign. I can’t say that I particularly like or dislike Kamala Harris—I’m not even sure if there’s enough substance there to form an opinion. In the same way that people felt George W. Bush would be a fun guy to share a beer with, I don’t doubt that she’d be pleasant enough company over a glass of wine. She’s reminiscent of a ton of people I met in my career as a professional progressive: glib, devoid of any discernible vision or values, and as ambitious as she is vacuous. I don’t know if I’d support her to be my condo board president, let alone Commander in Chief.

Most concerning about this particular election isn’t Kamala Harris or Tim Walz, but that their victory wouldn’t be thoughtfully received as a skin-of-the-teeth close call barely eked out because of Republicans’ self-indulgence nominating Trump yet again instead of Haley or DeSantis, but as supercharged confirmation of the Permanent Democratic Majority and justification for power players to double down ever further. Which would likely entail reopening the borders to many more millions of migrants (while finding means to let them vote), killing the Senate filibuster to enable packing the Supreme Court with ideological rubber stamps, extending the tendrils of discriminatory DEI into every aspect of American life, expanding the federal censorship apparatus targeting discourse conveniently deemed ‘disinformation,’ and broadly raising the costs of living for the beleaguered middle class. In short, replacing whatever last remnants of democratic representation in the American system with blinkered authoritarian managerialism emanating from just a handful of major metropolitan areas.

I was raised progressive as can be, most of my friends and family are progressives, and despite my many years of disillusionment I still consider myself essentially progressive in the classic sense. My values haven’t changed, but ostensibly progressive institutions have changed dramatically, and for the worse. Most rank-and-file progressives are good people who care about things like substantive representation and the rule of law and standing up for the little guy. But they’ve been busy living their lives, raising their kids, and taking partisan media stenography a little too much at face value, and thus retain badly dated wishful thinking about what the progressive establishment really is, who it actually serves, and the kind of future it is truly working towards. The unfortunate reality is that many, and probably most, avowedly progressive institutions have over the past decade or two betrayed much of what they’d traditionally stood for.

At the end of the day, America is a diverse, divided country that deserves just as diverse and divided and fractious and bumptious representation on every level. The top-down elite monoculture of transnational managerial technocracy is utterly inadequate to express and channel all of that cultural richness, and I dream of a legitimately progressive ticket that might once again respect that.

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Next: How Woke is Woke?

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