For millions of working people, to be talked at rather than talked to is a simple fact of existence. Your employer talks at you when they explain why you need to be in the office five days a week, or need to work overtime this weekend, or are required to smile while on the shop floor, or may have no more than six minutes of bathroom breaks per shift.
This is often framed in being in your best interest, even when you’re fairly sure that’s not the case. Many an email from senior management expresses regret that there’s no money for a pay rise this year, but it’s for the best to keep everyone’s jobs safe – even as profits soar.
The phenomenon doesn’t end at work. The bank tells you it can’t give you a mortgage, even though the repayments would be less than your rent. Officials from the welfare system talk at you when they explain what you’ve done that means you can’t access a particular benefit. All too often, your job is to be told what’s good for you, and to get on with it.
Such an existence is both grating and infantilising, and few people appreciate it. The cases are most extreme for those in factory jobs, or Amazon-like warehouse jobs where an app that in effect becomes your boss tries to turn you into a human automaton – but elements of it creep into the existence of almost all working people.
It is hardly a surprise, then, that people want a break from being told what to do, what to think, and what’s in their best interest. The feeling of someone speaking to you – or perhaps even actually listening to you, for once – might start to break the cycle.
If that’s what voters might have wanted from the Democratic Party, they’ve been waiting for years in vain. As the Democrats rip themselves apart in the wake of Kamala Harris’s resounding electoral defeat, different factions of the party are getting their explanations in early.
Before the votes of the 2024 election have even finished being counted, the answers are all over the podcasts, cable TV networks, and newspapers: it’s because the party is too woke, or not woke enough. It’s because the party didn’t shift enough on immigration – or because it worked too hard to appeal to Republicans.
It’s because Harris was too close to Biden – or because she wasn’t Biden. It was about Gaza. It was about Democrats not supporting American Jews enough. It was generally about the party not doing whatever the person speaking happened to personally support.
Except… almost every single demographic group in America shifted against Harris versus Biden. They didn’t lose some voters and gain others. In almost every single grouping you can think of, the party did worse.
That suggests there is going to be no one reason to tie everything together. It’s all going to be more complicated than that.
Naturally, it hasn’t occurred to any of these people to sit back and listen, even for a moment – because the party has forgotten what doing that might even look like.
Democrats have spent so long on broadcast, so long telling America’s working-class people the right thing to think and to do, that the idea of listening is now alien to the party’s culture.
In 2020, amid a cultural moment among America’s elite opinion that the party has quietly disowned – but never explained why – the Democratic Party convinced itself that a very particular form of racial and social justice was an essential response to Trumpism.
“Abolish the police” had serious cachet among mainstream Democratic politicians, taking the knee for Black Lives Matter was close to mandatory, trans rights and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) were top-drawer issues, land acknowledgements to recognise the ownership of indigenous peoples were widespread, and the mantra of “educate yourself” was king – people who didn’t know the right vocabulary were part of the problem, and were to be told that.
The primary process, though, decided rather differently: Biden, the candidate who had embraced the moment the least, overwhelmingly won the contest. With elite party opinion where it was, though, it was Kamala Harris that became his vice-presidential choice.
Harris, then a senator from California, did not bring the ticket any kind of needed swing-state boost. She had no personal relationship with Biden. She brought no significant following or machine – her own primary campaign had been so disastrous that she flamed out before the first primary or caucus.
Harris’s choice was the result of some very particular political circumstances of its time – something that could not be mentioned in what followed.
Biden won 2020, despite Trump’s protestations otherwise, but it was a narrow victory. Relatively early in his term, it was also apparent that voters would prefer Biden to serve only one term as president: polling from 2021 onwards showed clear majorities of voters thought Biden was too old to run again.
The Democratic Party insisted it knew better, and relentlessly told voters so: poll after poll showing Biden was the best candidate versus the others were leaked out to friendly media, and party bosses used their influence to dissuade any viable contenders from challenging Biden during the primary process.
Until Biden’s calamitous first debate performance, to suggest Biden was too old to run again, had terrible job approval numbers, was thought by voters to be too old, and would have to battle global anti-incumbency bias, was to be dismissed – you were wrong, you were helping the Republicans, and you would be shouted down.
In reality, the debate didn’t shift what American voters thought about Biden. They had already known he was an old man, and had factored that into their decisions. Biden’s numbers only started falling after the elites of his own party attacked him day after day in the media – sending his figures among Democratic voters tanking.
Overnight, the “correct” opinion that the public should hold changed. Biden had to go, and despite what everyone had said for months about how the candidate was now locked in, changing them was the better thing to do.
Eventually, the pressure worked and Biden stepped aside – but the Democratic Party instinct that its elites know best immediately kicked in.
Without a moment of reflection that America’s voters had come to their conclusion about Biden years before they had, the Democratic elite immediately pushed a new message that Kamala Harris was the only possible choice, the candidate who could beat Trump, and the right person to save America. No other options could even be considered.
Harris, like most vice-presidents, had gone largely unregarded and had been saddled with unpopular and doomed policy briefs – she had been saddled with ostensible responsibility for the crisis on America’s southern border, a lose-lose issue with Democrats and Republicans alike.
Against that backdrop, and the huge relief at the now electorally doomed Biden stepping aside, it should have been absolutely no shock that Harris’s numbers surged. It wasn’t meaningful information about the contest, it was simply an inevitable reaction to the change of circumstances.
Harris went on to run a technically almost perfect campaign. There are virtually no gaffes to point at, no flaws to pick – in part because the Democratic elite fell over themselves to agree on everything and try to paper over their crumbling strategy.
It was as if they thought that by pretending changing candidate a few short months before election day was a triumph, voters wouldn’t notice it didn’t work. Harris was left as a bizarre empty vessel of a candidate, looking as if she would say virtually anything put in front of her, and be cheered to the rafters by her party for doing so.
Harris jettisoned all of her West Coast hippie speak of 2020, but never repudiated any of it. Now she was happy to talk about locking up criminals and owning (and firing) a Glock.
She was the candidate who could protect democracy, but also the candidate who would protect women. She would boost the economy, but also fight big business (but not enough to stop them endorsing her).
She became the vessel of all of the messages the Biden campaign would have focused on, but in addition an extra series of issues that suited a candidate who was also a woman of mixed Black and Asian heritage.
There were so many messages that even those following the campaign closely would struggle to say which was supposed to be the most important. Democrats complained about attacks on Harris for her ultra-liberal 2020 positioning: when had she said “Latinx” during the 2024 campaign, they ask? Why does Trump bring up Harris’s support for state-funded gender reassignment surgeries for prisons when she hasn’t mentioned that for several years?
In the aftermath of her failed run, it’s not all that clear whether the ultra-liberal Harris of 2020 or the moderate of 2024 is closer to the views of the real woman.
Harris served less than a full term in the Senate, and was on the liberal side of that caucus, but had been seen as relatively moderate (by California standards) before it. In many ways, Harris’s own views are no longer of interest – her career in politics is almost certainly over.
The Democrats changed their avatar in 2024, but they never once actually changed their approach. Voters had clearly flagged the issues with Biden years before the party elite picked them up, and the Democrats didn’t listen until the debate made it impossible to ignore.
Instead of trying to even sample public opinion on where they’d gone wrong, they simply swapped the candidate to the one those same elites thought was best, and then broadcast her as the new answer to the same issues. The party remains resolutely stuck on “transmit”. Like the boss or the bank manager, they told working Americans they knew what was best for them. This time, the people of America had a chance to disagree.
The Democrats are not the Republicans. They aren’t rotten to the core, a zombified party acting as enforcer to a man who would be an autocrat. But there is no prize for being less morally bankrupt than the alternative.
The risk for the Democrats is they remain an empty vessel, a party unsure what it is, what it stands for, who it’s for and what it’s about. It’s more like a brand that’s lost touch with its loyal consumers than a movement looking for a figurehead to rally it.
Losing to Trump in 2024 should be a moment for soul-searching for the Democratic Party, but it is as if they are afraid to do so.
The danger is that if they actually start this hard work, they may find something even worse than having gone astray – is there still a soul of the party for them to find?
