Maybe Losing Is The Real Goal

A new Democratic think tank believes they know why they lost to Trump. It wasn't because they abandoned public health and ignored genocide, while catering to billionaire donors and touting neoliberal solutions to the climate crisis. It was because they promoted human rights, listened to LGBTQ communities, stood up for access to healthcare services like abortion, and talked about climate change.

The head of this new group, Adam Jentleson, promotes himself as a veteran political organizer and strategist. He worked for the Kerry campaign in 2004, John Edwards in 2008, and Elizabeth Warren in 2020. He also served as chief of staff to John Fetterman, before gaslighting him over his mental health and leaving. For what it's worth, Fetterman's mental health is currently the least of my concerns, unless you count his slide into MAGA fascism as part of his ongoing mental health crisis.

I wish I could make this up.

This new group simply brands something moderates have been doing for a little while now, moving further right and insisting that they can win elections by adopting MAGA policies and abandoning their own voters.

They call it "being flexible."

They call it "big tent."

It doesn't work.

It's bad enough that groups like this exist, but platforms like The New York Times work overtime to sane-wash them, presenting their opinions as sensible when they're so clearly out of touch with reality. Meanwhile, some of us know exactly why Democrats lost in 2024. It was because the campaign said virtually nothing about any issue that voters cared about. They walked on eggshells around MAGA, then turned around and used Trump as a threat to silence dissent among their own ranks.

Campaigning with the Cheneys didn't help.

Meanwhile, you might've been hearing the name Ezra Klein a lot recently. After praising Charlie Kirk for "doing politics right," he also proposed that Democrats abandon issues like abortion access in battleground states like Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri, when those very states recently enshrined abortion access in their constitutions. Honestly, it's downright painful to listen to someone like Klein overthink every aspect of the world, especially when they don't even seem to understand basic facts. Klein doesn't understand public health. He doesn't understand disease. He doesn't understand climate change. He doesn't understand human rights. None of these think tanks do, either. If they did, they wouldn't be sitting behind a desk telling us to stop talking so much about these issues. They would understand them as existential threats.

It's interesting how mainstream news outlets never give us a voice. They never acknowledge that Americans might care more about climate change if someone in a position of authority actually explained the stakes to them, you know, showed them how climate change was wiping out their retirement funds, or how it was going to make it impossible for them to own a home.

If Americans heard that every day, because it's the truth, they might sit up and pay attention. They might actually vote for candidates who promised to do something about these problems, however late it might be. They might even vote for a candidate who made clean air a part of their platform, if they truly understood that Covid is stealing three IQ points from them every infection.

That's the problem with guys like Klein and Jentleson. They don't want to talk about real problems. They don't want to offer real leadership.

They're cowards.

On the one hand, they praise violent fascists like Charlie Kirk. But they ridicule the Charlie Kirks on their side. They defend the right when they're blunt, rude, or just plain aggressive. But they're constantly shushing those of us on the left, telling us to be more polite in order to get our ideas across. Then they go one step further, telling us we should be willing to compromise over and even abandon core issues to "win over" an opposition that has no interest in working with us, an opposition that declares their intent to exterminate us every single day.

For what it's worth, Democrats have already tried compromising on the climate crisis. They already made historic concessions to oil companies in exchange for renewable energy projects. They already tried common ground over immigration. They already built parts of Trump's wall. They already backed down over LGBTQ rights, over public health, all of it. Not only did they abandon mask and vaccine mandates, but they also started passing mask bans. None of that worked.

Compromise doesn't make sense when your opponent sees any degree of compromise as a sign of weakness. Besides, you can't compromise on problems that represent an existential threat to humanity. If you compromise on something that means life or death to you individually, or your entire species, guess what happens?

You die.

For guys like Klein, it's not about doing the right thing. For them, these issues only exist in their headspace, as issues to debate, not as problems that will actually kill you if you don't do something about them. That's the problem with allowing privileged twerps like him to run our political discussions. They have no skin in the game, or they're so insulated that they don't believe they have any.

If you don't support clean air, if you don't believe in human rights, if you won't talk about climate change or even abortion, what does that make you? What does it matter if you win elections, if you govern just like your opponent?

Guys like Klein and Jentleson don't get it.

Or maybe they do.

I'm starting to think these political strategists and opinion columnists aren't liberals or leftists at all. They never were.

They're simply neoliberals, and their job is to push the entire public sphere to the right. They either don't know or don't care about the stakes. They care about their columnist gigs. They care about their podcast shows. They care about winning the next election. They don't have any framework for grappling with existential threats to humanity. For them, talking about problems in blunt terms is... polarizing.

These types follow a predictable pattern. They target issues that are actually popular. They spend years convincing the public they aren't. They promote rightwing policies and ideas that aren't popular. They go to great lengths to convince everyone they are. Time and again, they create self-fulfilling prophecies.

You have to wonder who these strategists are actually working for. Are they actually working for the politicians who hire them, or are they working for billionaires and conservatives who want Democrats to abandon us?

I think it's the latter.

We saw this pattern with masks and vaccines. They enjoyed widespread support. Then "liberal" strategists and columnists embarked on coordinated campaigns to convince everyone otherwise. They paved the way for RFK Jr. They're doing the same thing with practically every other issue, from climate change to abortion to transgender rights, undermining them and creating self-fulfilling prophecies. They convince politicians to abandon these policies, and then they blame those policies when they lose elections. It's the most ass backwards strategy you could imagine.

So, it's no surprise that the supposed liberals who pushed for the deconstruction of public health are now praising Charlie Kirk while wagging their finger at Greta Thunberg, telling us on the one hand that it's a great thing to be a stubborn, loud, rude white man who promotes evangelical Christianity while simultaneously telling us we should be worried about radical leftists who care too much about the planet, or speak up too much about genocide. The double standard is flashing red.

You don't even have to like Greta Thunberg or Zohran Mamdani to realize that they're the answer to the Charlie Kirks. If we have any future at all, we're not going to protect it with more compromise or more sugarcoating.

Perhaps this is why so many of us have either abandoned politics or have one foot out the door. Although I'm going to keep talking about politics, it occurs to me that I have preps that need tending to. It's worth it to keep checking in on the political sphere, if only to remind yourself of the reasons you prep.

Anyway...

The more you listen to these think tanks and their ideas, the more you realize just how bad their ideas are. You look at their credentials and you see they've been losing elections for decades. They call themselves strategists, but their strategies keep failing. Maybe their goal isn't to help Democrats gain support.

Maybe their job isn't to win elections.

Maybe it's to lose them.

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