The point of politics

Here are two things that I think are true that seem contradictory:

1. I am a feminist.

2. I want the Democratic Party to say less about women and do less for us.

Here’s the thing that I think a lot of people forget a lot of the time. The Democratic Party is a political party. Success for a political party begins and ends with winning elections. I want Democrats in office to do the stuff I want them to do. I want the Democrats who are running for office to say the things I want them to say. But at the end of the day, if Democrats aren’t winning elections, they’re not succeeding at the one thing they really need to do.

Sometimes saying the right thing, doing the right thing, and winning the election all coincide. Those times are great. That usually happens when swing voters happen to be right about something.

Unfortunately, most voters know almost nothing about most issues. Most of what they do know is totally wrong. This goes triple for swing voters, who are, on average, even dumber and less-informed than voters broadly.

When swing voters are wrong about an issue, the winning move for the political parties is to shut the fuck up about it and guide the conversation back toward the winning issues. Talk about your policies that represent swing voter preferences better than the opposition.

In terms of gender, Biden and Harris just declared the Equal Rights Amendment the law of the land and then found out, in public, that that’s not how any of this works.

Democrats need to stop this kind of shit.

I cannot imagine many women were like, “I wasn’t sure who to vote for, then this happened and now I’m voting straight Democrat.”

In fact, people with any knowledge of this incident are not, statistically speaking, “persuadable.”

To the extent that the ERA stunt will have any effect whatsoever, it will further exhaust and demoralize Democrats (hello) and serve as grist for the mill of right-wing scaremongering. “Democrats are trying to force you into a matriarchy!!!”

The same is true of trans rights.

Here is a clear case wherein voters are, by and large, ignorant, bigoted shitbags.

Case-in-point:

source

When voters are wrong, parties have three moves with any real likelihood of success:

1. Be wrong with them

2. Change their minds

3. Change the subject

Republicans are absolutely killing the game with option 1.

Option two is the job of influencers and the intelligentsia, not parties.

I’d love it if the Democratic Party could actually help sway the beliefs of the broader electorate. I wish they had enough time, money, and talent to effectively promote trans acceptance and sex-positive feminism more broadly while winning elections.

Unfortunately, they’re currently half-assing both tasks and failing to reliably accomplish neither.

One of the Substack co-founders recently said something I’ve long believed. As a society, we undervalue high-quality content. We have yet to recover from losing monopolistic news media. Advertisers used to pay professionals to tell consumers what’s happening and what to think about it. Now we form our opinions based on AOC’s tweets and random TikToks. Increasingly, the few content creators who understand and can explain what transphobia is and why it’s bad only preach to the choir of fellow educated urban and suburban Democrats.

Writers used to tell everyone the “what.” Candidates and parties used to tell everyone the “who.”

Today, Democrats are trying to tell everyone the “what,” and alienating more than half the electorate in the process.

To some extent, this is a matter of people being too insulated from the results of bad policies. If nothing is personally on the line for you if Democrats lose, there’s no incentive to not want to bully Democrats into saying what you already think about the issues you already care about.

Other people are too close to the harms. A certain percentage of the people telling Democrats to talk less about trans rights and feminism are actual transphobes and misogynists. (A lesson I learned the hard way from libertarianism.) I don’t blame anyone with lived, direct experience with clear-cut gender wage discrimination or transphobia from having no patience for calls to ignore the ERA or anti-trans legislation.

But for everyone else, I’d love to see a smidge more pragmatism.

Because a Democrat who says and does nothing about feminism and wins is better than a Republican who wins and then does bad shit.

While Democrats have our thumbs up our asses about the ERA, Republicans are banning trans athletes and forcing pregnant women to die of sepsis.

Stop asking candidates and parties to keep trying to change voters’ hearts and minds. All they’re accomplishing is making you feel better and alienating the people who determine elections. Instead, pay writers and podcasters and journalists and academics directly to do that job and vote for the candidates who are promising to do the least bad shit.

It’s called harm reduction, sweaty. Progressives came up with it. Let’s put it into practice.