In 2016, I volunteered for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, despite not being a big fan of Hillary Clinton herself. That sort of statement can be controversial in and of itself, among both Clinton fans and Clinton detractors, so I should be clearer: I thought that Clinton was ideologically inconsistent, politically unsavvy, and had an unfortunate tendency to sound insincere and off-pitch every time she tried to make a grand, inspiring speech... and simultaneously thought that she had genuinely cared about her constituents as a senator, wanted to make a difference, and (importantly) was not Donald Trump. So I voted against her in the Democrats' primary, I didn't resent her for winning it anyway, and I spent several days a week in 2016 working at her local campaign headquarters, doing my best to turn Pennsylvania blue. (It didn't help.)
I worked under a paid campaign team member whose name, I believe, was Zach. Zach was a recent Ivy League graduate, with a degree in political science (obviously). He looked incredibly crisp at all times—the kind of "crisp" you can only get with several hours' work a day. His hair looked great, without looking completely slick. He wore the kinds of pullover sweaters that cost money. He had a specific flavor of enthusiastic energy that never seemed forced, exactly, but always seemed driven, as if it was dictated not by Zach's actual mood or personality, but by the particular job that Zach was endlessly auditioning for.
And Zach was always auditioning. He talked less about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton than he talked about his supervisor, his department head, and especially his coworkers. Zach was paranoid about his coworkers. He clocked every word of praise that his supervisor gave them. He tuned into group phone calls in the hopes that someone would speak his name out loud. He spent more time coaching us on how to loudly cheer when Philadelphia got mentioned in those calls than he spent telling us how to do our jobs; in fact, he got somewhat irritable when we had questions about how to do what he wanted us to do. To the extent that he cared about us reaching out to voters, it was because someone somewhere in his organization would give him points if we did better than other volunteer branches. He told me at length about his career trajectory, and about exactly how he'd climb the ranks after Hillary won the race. I didn't dislike him, exactly, but I clocked him as a certain kind of guy who, at a young age, I'd realized I didn't want to be, and I was fond of him in a way that meant a part of me was praying for his soul.
Zach was the platonic ideal of a Democrat. By "Democrat," I don't mean the kinds of people who vote Democrat—that's a broad umbrella, and it includes a wide variety of well-meaning and mostly-lovely people. I'm referring specifically to the party itself: the kinds of people who run for office as a Democrat, and who staff those Democrats' campaigns and offices, or who aim to have the ear of those staffers and politicians (as pollsters or theorists or whomever). Zach may have been smart, he knew how to present himself as "nice," and on some level he may have even wanted to do some good in the world. But Zach was also power-hungry. And the specific power he craved wasn't the ability to run the country. No: Zach wanted prestige. He wanted to look impressive: to his peers, to the people he viewed as beneath him, but most of all to the people he knew were above him. The people who could elevate him. And the main reason that Zach wanted to rise in stature was that, well, it would make him look even better, and impress even more people, in the hopes that one day Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or Warren Buffett might look him in the eyes and shake his hand and already know his name.
Hillary Clinton was herself often accused of being this type of person. Tom Perrotta's 1998 novel Election was a thinly-veiled satire of Clinton; the 1999 film adaptation saw Reese Witherspoon play Tracy Flick, an ambitious high schooler who can't speak without sounding like she's at a press conference. Tracy Flick has all the hallmarks of a modern careerist Democrat: she excels in school because that's how she gets into a better school; she picks up extracurriculars, not out of enthusiasm, but to pad her resume; she calculatedly says all the "right" things to her peers, the things that she thinks they want to hear, the things that she thinks will make them like her. When Tracy runs for class president, she earnestly thinks that she can make her school a better place... but she also, on some level, thinks that she deserves the presidency. She seethes when her fellow classmates decide to run against her, because to her mind they aren't serious about running—and it rankles when they receive attention that she doesn't, just for being more personable and likable than she is. That, to Tracy's mind, is beside the point. In fact, it almost counts as cheating. What matters is: Tracy worked the hardest, she's the most impressive, and the presidency belongs to her. Even if "class president" is itself just another rung on the ladder, another merit badge, another way to mark herself as the best candidate for the next thing she'll be running for, and the next, and the next.
Democratic politicians have been accused of following this exact rubric for over thirty years, since at least around the time that Bill Clinton became president in 1992. The accusation is that Democrats care less about political power than they do about status—or that they think that status is how to acquire political power, which amounts to the same thing. Barack Obama was seen by cynics as the high-water mark of this flavor of politician: incredibly good at making people like him, but ultimately only effective at winning accolades, without any attention paid to running his party or governing the nation. When Obama more-or-less vanished from politics after his presidency, surfacing mostly to post selfies of himself water-skiing or to start podcasts with Bruce Springsteen, those cynics saw it as confirmation that he had achieved the one thing he truly cared about: being respected, and turning himself into a household name.
You can take those accusations at face value or raise an eyebrow over whether they're truly fair... but it's increasingly difficult to deny that a plurality of national Democratic politicians, and perhaps the overwhelming majority, care more about the status of their position than they care about wielding political power. This reached a climax when Joe Biden, Obama's former vice president, attempted to run for re-election in 2024 despite being unable to reliably form coherent sentences. And it was telling that, when Biden stepped down, it was seemingly only because he was promised that every Democrat in the country would talk glowingly of his heroism and self-sacrifice. In fact, Kamala Harris's abject refusal to criticize a single action that Biden had taken became her most famous campaign gaffe—and possibly the decision that lost her the presidency.
What's curious about this particular flavor of ambition is that it is deeply, fundamentally authoritarian in nature. This kind of person craves power, but the power they crave is granted to them by the system. They're conspicuously playing a game, and they want to win the game—and they believe that, if the rules hold, they ought to get to win. It's why so many Democrats come out of Ivy League universities, which are the ultimate status symbol for young adults. Getting admitted to such exclusive, competitive colleges requires you to obsessively play the games you're arbitrarily told to play in school, and in turn proves that you're exemplary at those games—which matters a great deal if you believe those games demonstrate value, or if you're mostly trying to impress people who themselves believe in those games. The Democratic party as a whole is staunchly pro-capitalism, and more broadly pro-meritocracy: Democratic politicians reliably say that they want to create a country where everyone is given a chance to succeed, and the thinly-veiled subtext is that they deserve to succeed more than anybody else.
It's less a conspiracy theory than a public matter of fact that, in somewhat recent history, the Democratic party had strong ties to mobs and to organized crime. In certain cities—including Chicago, where Obama got his start—the party has not only had demonstrable mob connections but is still infamously under the control of the party "machine," which is another way of saying that it strictly enforces individuals' submission to the party's key operatives. At the same time, competition within those political machines is a fierce, intense game of dominance, with different factions of rival politicians attempting to stamp each other out in the name of acquiring the keys to the car themselves. It's hardly surprising that Democrats who rise to the top tend to be pro-business, pro-cop, pro-tech, and pro-institution in general. They're beholden, of course, to wealthy donors and to influential unions—as is true of most politicians, to be clear—but they're also the kinds of people who actively aspired to rise to power in a system that demanded blind loyalty to, well, systems.
I should state outright that a lot of the criticism aimed at Democrats along these lines is... loaded, to put it nicely. Accusations of Democrats being "ivory tower elitists" are frequently just attempts to stir up resentment, xenophobia, and division among different regions and demographics across the nation. They're also frequently hypocritical, as Republicans are typically byproducts of the same elitist institutions that the Democrats are; it should go without saying that there are serious antisemitic, racist, and homophobic dogwhistled in this framing of the Democrats, in the same way that staunchly pro-zionist colleges have nonetheless been accused of supporting Palestinians in a way that amounts to racist (and frequently inaccurate!) claims that these institutions are favoring a non-white population over a white one. Those same accusers then accuse Ivy League colleges of belonging to some vast Jewish conspiracy, which drives home that these claims are driven less by ideals than by various contradictory flavors of bigotry.
It should also go without saying that, by and large, the Republican party is more destructive and hateful than the Democratic party by a wide margin. Claiming that the parties are equivalently bad is—not to mince words—stupid and self-sabotaging. It's important to point out that the Democratic worldview is fundamentally rooted in authoritarian beliefs, but it's also important to differentiate between that and the open embrace of anti-democratic fascism happening among Republicans. I think that it's important to identify why the Democratic party is as inept and unpopular as it is, but it's important because they are letting America down at a time when their rival party is trying to flat-out destroy it. And it's important to study just why the Democrats are so loathed because, honestly, it's baffling that they've managed to become so utterly despicable. They are the opposition party to the single least-popular political party in American history. It takes effort to make Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator, more universally hated than not only Donald Trump but Elon Musk. For any sane, competent party, that sort of thing should not be possible.
And the reason it is possible is that, on some level, the Democratic party itself thinks that this sort of unpopularity shouldn't be possible. Time and again, as Donald Trump's Republican party shows an outright contempt for both political norms and the rule of law, Democrats respond with some variation of: "Well, that shouldn't be allowed." They complain to an invisible referee that there's some kind of rule-breaking going on. They complain to the American people that Republicans are breaking the rules, and beg the American people to vote for them, and then they get sworn into office and do virtually nothing to combat the Republicans, because nothing in the rulebook says that they're allowed to do more to stop Republicans. In fact, they point to their unwillingness to fight back against the Republicans as proof that they're doing their jobs—because, to the Democrat mindset, nothing will win them more accolades than people seeing how rigorously they stick to the rulebook. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 by huffily insisting that the Republican party just wasn't being sporting, and in 2025, the most powerful Democrats in the nation are gearing up to try and win the 2028 election by accusing Donald Trump of being unsportsmanlike again. They are congenitally incapable of recognizing the flaw in their own playbook, because their playbook was written to gain them power within the system, and because they see their job as blindly maintaining that system; they understand that the other team is breaking the rules, and that to some extent those rules don't actually exist, and still their only dream is to convince the nation to start playing by those old rules again.
This fails to persuade Americans because, by and large, the old system of doing things has failed them. In fact, Barack Obama himself demonstrated this to the nation when he became president in 2009, and immediately bailed out the financial companies that had just plummeted the nation into a recession. It's always generally been known that people with money wield more power, and are immune to more consequences, than people without money, but the Great Recession demonstrated, in a garish and public manner, that corporations could flat-out wreck the country and still not be held accountable for it—that the only genuine safety, the only real form of power, was having money, and that Democrats wouldn't do a thing to combat that justice even while they held both chambers of Congress and the presidency simultaneously. It's no surprise that Bernie Sanders became as influential a politician as he did as Obama was leaving office—or that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the ultimate party Democrat, in the wake of Obama's mediocre-to-failed eight years as president.
And in the wake of Trump's first disastrous term as president, the Democrats didn't just unite as one to oppose Bernie Sanders' run for president. They did so by nominating the most insider politician that they possibly could have: Joe Biden, who celebrated his fiftieth year as an elected politician while president, who had been Obama's right-hand man, who actively promised business leaders that "nothing would change" even as the country furiously demanded change, from both the right and the left. When every other Democrat dropped out of the primary before Super Tuesday, unanimously throwing their names behind Joe Biden in the process, they stated their deepest belief system as a party: that the system works, that the system is good, and that the key to winning American votes is to promise that the "democracy" that had bailed out the banks in 2009 would resume functioning as usual. Democrats believe this because it is the guiding principle that has driven them all their lives: the system is meritocratic, the system will reward those who deserve it most, and the proof of that is that it rewards them. Anything else is unfair; you know it's unfair, because the system is only fair when it rewards them. In this regard, their deepest beliefs aren't really that different from Donald Trump's. The Democrats just happen to believe in waiting for the system give them what they deserve, whereas Trump is completely fine with destroying any system that doesn't give him the results that he wants.
It results in a unique flavor of powerlessness, in this harrowing era of American history. To genuinely oppose Trump, Democrats either have to stop blindly trusting the system to hand them power again, or they have to find a political stance that isn't just blindly espousing the system and all its virtues. What we have seen, again and again, is that they're incapable of doing either. They refuse to fight hard against Trump, or to muster the kinds of opposition to him that their own system of governance permits, because they think that the only way to win is to demonstrate bipartisanship, to willingly cooperate, to restore democracy by making democracy "play nice." They are convinced—convinced—that they'll win back America's hearts if they show how happy they are to follow the rules, and to play the game without making waves. They wouldn't even let Tim Walz, the most likable person in a national ticket for at least a decade, call Republicans "weird"‚ despite their own data showing how popular it was, because "weird" felt too unsporting. Paradoxically, and perversely, Democrats have become powerless in the name of ambition, and ineffectual in the name of being cutthroat, because their ambitions were only ever to win by playing the rules, and because their cutthroatedness only ever consisted of playing the rules. They don't know how to wield the power they have, because they never cared about that power to begin with. They only wanted the prestige of holding power—and now, they're up against an enemy that couldn't give less of a shit about prestige, and is nakedly attempting to use their power to rewrite the rules of the game itself.
Who do Democrats genuinely wield power against? Other Democrats. When do Democrats wield their power? When members of their party dare to suggest that the system is broken, or dare to use what power they hold to try and mount a genuine resistance. Which Democrats does the mainstream party resent the most? Only the ones who receive acclaim, the ones who get approval, the ones who find their way to genuine popularity and legitimate prestige, by making moves that aren't in the mainstream Democrats' playbook. Even when those moves consist of telling the American people what the American people genuinely want to hear. Even when those politicians are saying things that directly reflect the Democratic party's stated ideals: when they speak out against sexism or racism or transphobia, or in favor of labor rights, or in favor of democracy itself. It doesn't matter, because those popular and effective politicians aren't playing by the rules. They didn't maintain a 4.3 grade-point average. They didn't stick to the talking points. They didn't sit back and wait for the system to approve of them. They don't let data-driven centrist political theorists like Nate Silver or Will Stancil or Matt Yglesias—if you're an ordinary, healthy person, I hope to God you don't know those names—tell them what they "really" ought to do in order to win elections, even though those theorists led both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris nose-first into their political graves.
What the data actually tells us is that Americans, by and large, respond positively to progressive politicians who commit to their ideals. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American who has been outspokenly opposed to Israeli genocide and Zionist politicians, was re-elected to her seat in Michigan with an overwhelming majority in 2024, outperforming Kamala Harris by 7 points and Elissa Slotkin by 6.3. (Slotkin, incidentally, is the Democrat who's currently in the news insisting that Democrats should stop using the word "oligarch," even as AOC and Bernie Sanders' "Fighting Oligarchy" tour draws record crowd sizes.) One of Bernie Sanders' main appeals as a politicians, even to people who disagree with his political positions, is that he's trustworthy: voters believed that he meant what he said. When Americans were polled nationwide about a hypothetical Sanders vs. Trump general election, he did significantly better than both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. If Democrat politicians really valued "data-driven politics" as much as they frequently claim to, they wouldn't just endorse progressive political positions more often than they actually do: they would see that their lack of genuine ideals, their inability to commit to genuinely fighting for what they believe in, is perhaps their greatest Achilles heel. But the data they point to is just a fig leaf. Democrats don't fight because Democrats don't believe in fighting. They believe in standardized test results.
The prestige that Democrats so cravenly pursue, the status that they mistakenly still believe they have, is dwindling at an astonishing rate. Chuck Schumer, ostensibly the most powerful Democrat alive today, has an approval rating of 17%, which is half that of the universally-despised Elon Musk. This week, he was clowned on for publicly saying that the Democrats had sent a "very strong letter" complaining to Donald Trump about the kidnapping and abduction of Americans to prisons in El Salvador. This is not a respected or well-loved party: it's hated from the left, from the right, and increasingly from Americans in the "center" who genuinely do still want a return to the America of 2009. Even people with those misguided ideals would like to see the Democrats do something. But the Democratic party, as ever, is far more concerned with berating and censuring its few party members who do take direct action—insisting that its members should make less of a fuss about El Salvador, trans rights, abortion, the collapsing economy, encroaching fascism, or anything really—than it seems to care about taking effective political action in an unprecedentedly alarming time.
The increasingly (and overwhelmingly) mainstream perspective on the Democratic party is that it's fundamentally hollow: concerned only with maintaining its power over its own ranks, and with the "prestige" granted to it by its own members. They don't seem to care about their own unpopularity. The solutions they discuss to regain their popularity is, essentially, to capitulate to Donald Trump's Republican party—a bizarre strategy, given that the Republican party is wildly unpopular itself. In fact, the Republicans only seem popular compared to Democrats—they are so unpopular that Joe Biden, who has tried and failed to run for president since 1988, finally succeeded on the technicality that Donald Trump had gotten millions of Americans killed with gross negligence amidst a pandemic.
There is a clear thirst for some flavor of opposition. Biden's presidency saw some of the largest and loudest protests against Democratic policy from the left that any modern Democrat has seen, and the protests against Trump in both his first term and today have set historic records. Any genuinely ambitious politician would see the tremendous opportunity here, and seize it at the first possible opportunity; in fact, Illinois governor JB Pritzker is seizing that opportunity now, despite only seeming progressive by the emaciated standards of the modern Dems. It should be concerning that so few Democrats are responding to this opportunity—particularly since they do have to be so nakedly, aggressively ambitious just to get to where they're at now.
Why, then, are so few Democrats capitalizing on this unique moment of unrest? Where is that ambition now, when the potential for ambitious Democratic politicians has never been so extraordinary? The simplest explanation, and increasingly the most plausible one, is that Democrats' ambition has always been for the prestige of the office itself, and that that prestige has been measured, not by the approval of the American people, but by the recognition of their peers. American politics, for them, has always been a game, played by and with and against their former classmates; political office is a status symbol, like driving a Lexus but with more gravitas and less explicit cravenness. Even as the country shudders and trembles with a never-before-seen threat, Democrats are concerned more with reputation and access than they're concerned with the stakes of the nation itself: they would be perfectly content to live in a country that was all-but-dominated by Republican values and Republican politics, so long as there was some glamor to their posing as the resistance.
The irony is that they're not unique, in this regard: careerist Republicans played this same game too, a fact which was generally acknowledged by both parties. Republicans and Democrats used to brag about what good friends they were with each other: they talked about how, even when the stakes of their game was life-and-death for millions of Americans, they still enjoyed grabbing drinks with one another, socializing together, and generally being closer to each other than they were to any average citizens. And the reason this changed was that Republicans lost: they became so unpopular after George W. Bush's presidency, and the Democrats became so popular with Obama's, that the 2016 Republican primary saw a dozen major establishment politicians get bulldozed, one by one, by Donald Trump, who was popular precisely because he debased and humiliated his opposition, and revealed that the Republican constituency held their representatives in contempt.
When Trump bested Clinton in 2016, it should have sent a shockwave through the Democrat party. It should have demonstrated that the American public's distaste and mistrust of Trump—and Trump has always been disliked and distrusted—mattered less to them than their contempt for the hollow ambition of modern party politicians. In fact, plenty of Democrats did see that demonstrated, which is precisely why politicians like AOC and Rashida Tlaib were voted into office, and why Bernie Sanders did so well in the 2020 primary. It wasn't that Democratic voters all decided to become radical leftists: it's that they all realized that something needed to be done, and gravitated towards politicians who seemed to care about taking action. (Meanwhile, a contempt for Democrats who didn't care began to form—a contempt which calcified over the course of Biden's presidency.)
Careerist Democrats didn't understand, and they didn't care to listen. Instead, they spent four years—and then another four years—fruitlessly reaching out to their contemporaries across the aisle, hoping that their fellow Republicans would see the light of day and join them in opposing Trump. Republicans, of course, failed to take the bait. They were paralyzed in the wake of Trump's win: they had been shown just how unpopular they were, just how despised, and just how eagerly their constituents would vote them out in favor of more aggressively pro-Trump politicians, regardless of how vulgar or stupid or sexually deviant those new Republicans were. The only way for them to maintain their prestige would be to support Trump through thick and thin. And after a lifetime of nakedly pursuing this and only this—and pursuing it in the same prestige-over-ideals manner as the Democrats—precious few Republicans were prepared to forsake that in the name of "saving the country" or "doing a good thing" or what-have-you.
The most scathing read you can have of Democrats here is that they were fundamentally playing the same game as Republicans were—they've just come up short. The same difference between stated ideals that led the Republicans to collapse in the mid-00s is the difference that opened room for a Trump-like figure in their party.
And despite resting on their laurels and doing perilously close to nothing, the Democrats managed to reclaim the House and Senate in 2018; they managed to claim the presidency in 2020; and then they managed to squander their majority for a second time, just as Obama squandered his in 2009. Simply by being nominally on the "right" side of the issues, Democrats draw voters in, no matter how little they seem to do or how uninvested they appear to be in their own ideals. Trump's abhorrent second term has always caused his standing to collapse among the American public, more dramatically than it did even in his first term; unless something drastic happens, Democrats will do incredibly well in the 2026 congressional races. Even if they're useless after that, they will at least have a fighting chance in 2028, particularly if they're running against any Republican but Trump. But that's damning with faint praise: the fact that there's any doubt about the Democrats winning against Republicans, even now, suggests a party that has uniquely failed to convince anybody that they're prepared to do a damn thing, despite this being a political moment where people are clamoring for more things than ever.
The possibility of them squandering an opportunity like this is flabbergasting in and of itself—just as it's flabbergasting that they squandered their shot at the presidency in 2020. It has never been easier for Democrats to act; it has never been clearer that Democrats will be lauded for taking action. And it has never been more despicably clear, in this moment, why Democrats won't act, and what they really want, and who they really are.
I worked under a paid campaign team member whose name, I believe, was Zach. Zach was a recent Ivy League graduate, with a degree in political science (obviously). He looked incredibly crisp at all times—the kind of "crisp" you can only get with several hours' work a day. His hair looked great, without looking completely slick. He wore the kinds of pullover sweaters that cost money. He had a specific flavor of enthusiastic energy that never seemed forced, exactly, but always seemed driven, as if it was dictated not by Zach's actual mood or personality, but by the particular job that Zach was endlessly auditioning for.
And Zach was always auditioning. He talked less about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton than he talked about his supervisor, his department head, and especially his coworkers. Zach was paranoid about his coworkers. He clocked every word of praise that his supervisor gave them. He tuned into group phone calls in the hopes that someone would speak his name out loud. He spent more time coaching us on how to loudly cheer when Philadelphia got mentioned in those calls than he spent telling us how to do our jobs; in fact, he got somewhat irritable when we had questions about how to do what he wanted us to do. To the extent that he cared about us reaching out to voters, it was because someone somewhere in his organization would give him points if we did better than other volunteer branches. He told me at length about his career trajectory, and about exactly how he'd climb the ranks after Hillary won the race. I didn't dislike him, exactly, but I clocked him as a certain kind of guy who, at a young age, I'd realized I didn't want to be, and I was fond of him in a way that meant a part of me was praying for his soul.
Zach was the platonic ideal of a Democrat. By "Democrat," I don't mean the kinds of people who vote Democrat—that's a broad umbrella, and it includes a wide variety of well-meaning and mostly-lovely people. I'm referring specifically to the party itself: the kinds of people who run for office as a Democrat, and who staff those Democrats' campaigns and offices, or who aim to have the ear of those staffers and politicians (as pollsters or theorists or whomever). Zach may have been smart, he knew how to present himself as "nice," and on some level he may have even wanted to do some good in the world. But Zach was also power-hungry. And the specific power he craved wasn't the ability to run the country. No: Zach wanted prestige. He wanted to look impressive: to his peers, to the people he viewed as beneath him, but most of all to the people he knew were above him. The people who could elevate him. And the main reason that Zach wanted to rise in stature was that, well, it would make him look even better, and impress even more people, in the hopes that one day Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or Warren Buffett might look him in the eyes and shake his hand and already know his name.
Hillary Clinton was herself often accused of being this type of person. Tom Perrotta's 1998 novel Election was a thinly-veiled satire of Clinton; the 1999 film adaptation saw Reese Witherspoon play Tracy Flick, an ambitious high schooler who can't speak without sounding like she's at a press conference. Tracy Flick has all the hallmarks of a modern careerist Democrat: she excels in school because that's how she gets into a better school; she picks up extracurriculars, not out of enthusiasm, but to pad her resume; she calculatedly says all the "right" things to her peers, the things that she thinks they want to hear, the things that she thinks will make them like her. When Tracy runs for class president, she earnestly thinks that she can make her school a better place... but she also, on some level, thinks that she deserves the presidency. She seethes when her fellow classmates decide to run against her, because to her mind they aren't serious about running—and it rankles when they receive attention that she doesn't, just for being more personable and likable than she is. That, to Tracy's mind, is beside the point. In fact, it almost counts as cheating. What matters is: Tracy worked the hardest, she's the most impressive, and the presidency belongs to her. Even if "class president" is itself just another rung on the ladder, another merit badge, another way to mark herself as the best candidate for the next thing she'll be running for, and the next, and the next.
Democratic politicians have been accused of following this exact rubric for over thirty years, since at least around the time that Bill Clinton became president in 1992. The accusation is that Democrats care less about political power than they do about status—or that they think that status is how to acquire political power, which amounts to the same thing. Barack Obama was seen by cynics as the high-water mark of this flavor of politician: incredibly good at making people like him, but ultimately only effective at winning accolades, without any attention paid to running his party or governing the nation. When Obama more-or-less vanished from politics after his presidency, surfacing mostly to post selfies of himself water-skiing or to start podcasts with Bruce Springsteen, those cynics saw it as confirmation that he had achieved the one thing he truly cared about: being respected, and turning himself into a household name.
You can take those accusations at face value or raise an eyebrow over whether they're truly fair... but it's increasingly difficult to deny that a plurality of national Democratic politicians, and perhaps the overwhelming majority, care more about the status of their position than they care about wielding political power. This reached a climax when Joe Biden, Obama's former vice president, attempted to run for re-election in 2024 despite being unable to reliably form coherent sentences. And it was telling that, when Biden stepped down, it was seemingly only because he was promised that every Democrat in the country would talk glowingly of his heroism and self-sacrifice. In fact, Kamala Harris's abject refusal to criticize a single action that Biden had taken became her most famous campaign gaffe—and possibly the decision that lost her the presidency.
What's curious about this particular flavor of ambition is that it is deeply, fundamentally authoritarian in nature. This kind of person craves power, but the power they crave is granted to them by the system. They're conspicuously playing a game, and they want to win the game—and they believe that, if the rules hold, they ought to get to win. It's why so many Democrats come out of Ivy League universities, which are the ultimate status symbol for young adults. Getting admitted to such exclusive, competitive colleges requires you to obsessively play the games you're arbitrarily told to play in school, and in turn proves that you're exemplary at those games—which matters a great deal if you believe those games demonstrate value, or if you're mostly trying to impress people who themselves believe in those games. The Democratic party as a whole is staunchly pro-capitalism, and more broadly pro-meritocracy: Democratic politicians reliably say that they want to create a country where everyone is given a chance to succeed, and the thinly-veiled subtext is that they deserve to succeed more than anybody else.
It's less a conspiracy theory than a public matter of fact that, in somewhat recent history, the Democratic party had strong ties to mobs and to organized crime. In certain cities—including Chicago, where Obama got his start—the party has not only had demonstrable mob connections but is still infamously under the control of the party "machine," which is another way of saying that it strictly enforces individuals' submission to the party's key operatives. At the same time, competition within those political machines is a fierce, intense game of dominance, with different factions of rival politicians attempting to stamp each other out in the name of acquiring the keys to the car themselves. It's hardly surprising that Democrats who rise to the top tend to be pro-business, pro-cop, pro-tech, and pro-institution in general. They're beholden, of course, to wealthy donors and to influential unions—as is true of most politicians, to be clear—but they're also the kinds of people who actively aspired to rise to power in a system that demanded blind loyalty to, well, systems.
I should state outright that a lot of the criticism aimed at Democrats along these lines is... loaded, to put it nicely. Accusations of Democrats being "ivory tower elitists" are frequently just attempts to stir up resentment, xenophobia, and division among different regions and demographics across the nation. They're also frequently hypocritical, as Republicans are typically byproducts of the same elitist institutions that the Democrats are; it should go without saying that there are serious antisemitic, racist, and homophobic dogwhistled in this framing of the Democrats, in the same way that staunchly pro-zionist colleges have nonetheless been accused of supporting Palestinians in a way that amounts to racist (and frequently inaccurate!) claims that these institutions are favoring a non-white population over a white one. Those same accusers then accuse Ivy League colleges of belonging to some vast Jewish conspiracy, which drives home that these claims are driven less by ideals than by various contradictory flavors of bigotry.
It should also go without saying that, by and large, the Republican party is more destructive and hateful than the Democratic party by a wide margin. Claiming that the parties are equivalently bad is—not to mince words—stupid and self-sabotaging. It's important to point out that the Democratic worldview is fundamentally rooted in authoritarian beliefs, but it's also important to differentiate between that and the open embrace of anti-democratic fascism happening among Republicans. I think that it's important to identify why the Democratic party is as inept and unpopular as it is, but it's important because they are letting America down at a time when their rival party is trying to flat-out destroy it. And it's important to study just why the Democrats are so loathed because, honestly, it's baffling that they've managed to become so utterly despicable. They are the opposition party to the single least-popular political party in American history. It takes effort to make Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator, more universally hated than not only Donald Trump but Elon Musk. For any sane, competent party, that sort of thing should not be possible.
And the reason it is possible is that, on some level, the Democratic party itself thinks that this sort of unpopularity shouldn't be possible. Time and again, as Donald Trump's Republican party shows an outright contempt for both political norms and the rule of law, Democrats respond with some variation of: "Well, that shouldn't be allowed." They complain to an invisible referee that there's some kind of rule-breaking going on. They complain to the American people that Republicans are breaking the rules, and beg the American people to vote for them, and then they get sworn into office and do virtually nothing to combat the Republicans, because nothing in the rulebook says that they're allowed to do more to stop Republicans. In fact, they point to their unwillingness to fight back against the Republicans as proof that they're doing their jobs—because, to the Democrat mindset, nothing will win them more accolades than people seeing how rigorously they stick to the rulebook. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 by huffily insisting that the Republican party just wasn't being sporting, and in 2025, the most powerful Democrats in the nation are gearing up to try and win the 2028 election by accusing Donald Trump of being unsportsmanlike again. They are congenitally incapable of recognizing the flaw in their own playbook, because their playbook was written to gain them power within the system, and because they see their job as blindly maintaining that system; they understand that the other team is breaking the rules, and that to some extent those rules don't actually exist, and still their only dream is to convince the nation to start playing by those old rules again.
This fails to persuade Americans because, by and large, the old system of doing things has failed them. In fact, Barack Obama himself demonstrated this to the nation when he became president in 2009, and immediately bailed out the financial companies that had just plummeted the nation into a recession. It's always generally been known that people with money wield more power, and are immune to more consequences, than people without money, but the Great Recession demonstrated, in a garish and public manner, that corporations could flat-out wreck the country and still not be held accountable for it—that the only genuine safety, the only real form of power, was having money, and that Democrats wouldn't do a thing to combat that justice even while they held both chambers of Congress and the presidency simultaneously. It's no surprise that Bernie Sanders became as influential a politician as he did as Obama was leaving office—or that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the ultimate party Democrat, in the wake of Obama's mediocre-to-failed eight years as president.
And in the wake of Trump's first disastrous term as president, the Democrats didn't just unite as one to oppose Bernie Sanders' run for president. They did so by nominating the most insider politician that they possibly could have: Joe Biden, who celebrated his fiftieth year as an elected politician while president, who had been Obama's right-hand man, who actively promised business leaders that "nothing would change" even as the country furiously demanded change, from both the right and the left. When every other Democrat dropped out of the primary before Super Tuesday, unanimously throwing their names behind Joe Biden in the process, they stated their deepest belief system as a party: that the system works, that the system is good, and that the key to winning American votes is to promise that the "democracy" that had bailed out the banks in 2009 would resume functioning as usual. Democrats believe this because it is the guiding principle that has driven them all their lives: the system is meritocratic, the system will reward those who deserve it most, and the proof of that is that it rewards them. Anything else is unfair; you know it's unfair, because the system is only fair when it rewards them. In this regard, their deepest beliefs aren't really that different from Donald Trump's. The Democrats just happen to believe in waiting for the system give them what they deserve, whereas Trump is completely fine with destroying any system that doesn't give him the results that he wants.
It results in a unique flavor of powerlessness, in this harrowing era of American history. To genuinely oppose Trump, Democrats either have to stop blindly trusting the system to hand them power again, or they have to find a political stance that isn't just blindly espousing the system and all its virtues. What we have seen, again and again, is that they're incapable of doing either. They refuse to fight hard against Trump, or to muster the kinds of opposition to him that their own system of governance permits, because they think that the only way to win is to demonstrate bipartisanship, to willingly cooperate, to restore democracy by making democracy "play nice." They are convinced—convinced—that they'll win back America's hearts if they show how happy they are to follow the rules, and to play the game without making waves. They wouldn't even let Tim Walz, the most likable person in a national ticket for at least a decade, call Republicans "weird"‚ despite their own data showing how popular it was, because "weird" felt too unsporting. Paradoxically, and perversely, Democrats have become powerless in the name of ambition, and ineffectual in the name of being cutthroat, because their ambitions were only ever to win by playing the rules, and because their cutthroatedness only ever consisted of playing the rules. They don't know how to wield the power they have, because they never cared about that power to begin with. They only wanted the prestige of holding power—and now, they're up against an enemy that couldn't give less of a shit about prestige, and is nakedly attempting to use their power to rewrite the rules of the game itself.
Who do Democrats genuinely wield power against? Other Democrats. When do Democrats wield their power? When members of their party dare to suggest that the system is broken, or dare to use what power they hold to try and mount a genuine resistance. Which Democrats does the mainstream party resent the most? Only the ones who receive acclaim, the ones who get approval, the ones who find their way to genuine popularity and legitimate prestige, by making moves that aren't in the mainstream Democrats' playbook. Even when those moves consist of telling the American people what the American people genuinely want to hear. Even when those politicians are saying things that directly reflect the Democratic party's stated ideals: when they speak out against sexism or racism or transphobia, or in favor of labor rights, or in favor of democracy itself. It doesn't matter, because those popular and effective politicians aren't playing by the rules. They didn't maintain a 4.3 grade-point average. They didn't stick to the talking points. They didn't sit back and wait for the system to approve of them. They don't let data-driven centrist political theorists like Nate Silver or Will Stancil or Matt Yglesias—if you're an ordinary, healthy person, I hope to God you don't know those names—tell them what they "really" ought to do in order to win elections, even though those theorists led both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris nose-first into their political graves.
What the data actually tells us is that Americans, by and large, respond positively to progressive politicians who commit to their ideals. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American who has been outspokenly opposed to Israeli genocide and Zionist politicians, was re-elected to her seat in Michigan with an overwhelming majority in 2024, outperforming Kamala Harris by 7 points and Elissa Slotkin by 6.3. (Slotkin, incidentally, is the Democrat who's currently in the news insisting that Democrats should stop using the word "oligarch," even as AOC and Bernie Sanders' "Fighting Oligarchy" tour draws record crowd sizes.) One of Bernie Sanders' main appeals as a politicians, even to people who disagree with his political positions, is that he's trustworthy: voters believed that he meant what he said. When Americans were polled nationwide about a hypothetical Sanders vs. Trump general election, he did significantly better than both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. If Democrat politicians really valued "data-driven politics" as much as they frequently claim to, they wouldn't just endorse progressive political positions more often than they actually do: they would see that their lack of genuine ideals, their inability to commit to genuinely fighting for what they believe in, is perhaps their greatest Achilles heel. But the data they point to is just a fig leaf. Democrats don't fight because Democrats don't believe in fighting. They believe in standardized test results.
The prestige that Democrats so cravenly pursue, the status that they mistakenly still believe they have, is dwindling at an astonishing rate. Chuck Schumer, ostensibly the most powerful Democrat alive today, has an approval rating of 17%, which is half that of the universally-despised Elon Musk. This week, he was clowned on for publicly saying that the Democrats had sent a "very strong letter" complaining to Donald Trump about the kidnapping and abduction of Americans to prisons in El Salvador. This is not a respected or well-loved party: it's hated from the left, from the right, and increasingly from Americans in the "center" who genuinely do still want a return to the America of 2009. Even people with those misguided ideals would like to see the Democrats do something. But the Democratic party, as ever, is far more concerned with berating and censuring its few party members who do take direct action—insisting that its members should make less of a fuss about El Salvador, trans rights, abortion, the collapsing economy, encroaching fascism, or anything really—than it seems to care about taking effective political action in an unprecedentedly alarming time.
The increasingly (and overwhelmingly) mainstream perspective on the Democratic party is that it's fundamentally hollow: concerned only with maintaining its power over its own ranks, and with the "prestige" granted to it by its own members. They don't seem to care about their own unpopularity. The solutions they discuss to regain their popularity is, essentially, to capitulate to Donald Trump's Republican party—a bizarre strategy, given that the Republican party is wildly unpopular itself. In fact, the Republicans only seem popular compared to Democrats—they are so unpopular that Joe Biden, who has tried and failed to run for president since 1988, finally succeeded on the technicality that Donald Trump had gotten millions of Americans killed with gross negligence amidst a pandemic.
There is a clear thirst for some flavor of opposition. Biden's presidency saw some of the largest and loudest protests against Democratic policy from the left that any modern Democrat has seen, and the protests against Trump in both his first term and today have set historic records. Any genuinely ambitious politician would see the tremendous opportunity here, and seize it at the first possible opportunity; in fact, Illinois governor JB Pritzker is seizing that opportunity now, despite only seeming progressive by the emaciated standards of the modern Dems. It should be concerning that so few Democrats are responding to this opportunity—particularly since they do have to be so nakedly, aggressively ambitious just to get to where they're at now.
Why, then, are so few Democrats capitalizing on this unique moment of unrest? Where is that ambition now, when the potential for ambitious Democratic politicians has never been so extraordinary? The simplest explanation, and increasingly the most plausible one, is that Democrats' ambition has always been for the prestige of the office itself, and that that prestige has been measured, not by the approval of the American people, but by the recognition of their peers. American politics, for them, has always been a game, played by and with and against their former classmates; political office is a status symbol, like driving a Lexus but with more gravitas and less explicit cravenness. Even as the country shudders and trembles with a never-before-seen threat, Democrats are concerned more with reputation and access than they're concerned with the stakes of the nation itself: they would be perfectly content to live in a country that was all-but-dominated by Republican values and Republican politics, so long as there was some glamor to their posing as the resistance.
The irony is that they're not unique, in this regard: careerist Republicans played this same game too, a fact which was generally acknowledged by both parties. Republicans and Democrats used to brag about what good friends they were with each other: they talked about how, even when the stakes of their game was life-and-death for millions of Americans, they still enjoyed grabbing drinks with one another, socializing together, and generally being closer to each other than they were to any average citizens. And the reason this changed was that Republicans lost: they became so unpopular after George W. Bush's presidency, and the Democrats became so popular with Obama's, that the 2016 Republican primary saw a dozen major establishment politicians get bulldozed, one by one, by Donald Trump, who was popular precisely because he debased and humiliated his opposition, and revealed that the Republican constituency held their representatives in contempt.
When Trump bested Clinton in 2016, it should have sent a shockwave through the Democrat party. It should have demonstrated that the American public's distaste and mistrust of Trump—and Trump has always been disliked and distrusted—mattered less to them than their contempt for the hollow ambition of modern party politicians. In fact, plenty of Democrats did see that demonstrated, which is precisely why politicians like AOC and Rashida Tlaib were voted into office, and why Bernie Sanders did so well in the 2020 primary. It wasn't that Democratic voters all decided to become radical leftists: it's that they all realized that something needed to be done, and gravitated towards politicians who seemed to care about taking action. (Meanwhile, a contempt for Democrats who didn't care began to form—a contempt which calcified over the course of Biden's presidency.)
Careerist Democrats didn't understand, and they didn't care to listen. Instead, they spent four years—and then another four years—fruitlessly reaching out to their contemporaries across the aisle, hoping that their fellow Republicans would see the light of day and join them in opposing Trump. Republicans, of course, failed to take the bait. They were paralyzed in the wake of Trump's win: they had been shown just how unpopular they were, just how despised, and just how eagerly their constituents would vote them out in favor of more aggressively pro-Trump politicians, regardless of how vulgar or stupid or sexually deviant those new Republicans were. The only way for them to maintain their prestige would be to support Trump through thick and thin. And after a lifetime of nakedly pursuing this and only this—and pursuing it in the same prestige-over-ideals manner as the Democrats—precious few Republicans were prepared to forsake that in the name of "saving the country" or "doing a good thing" or what-have-you.
The most scathing read you can have of Democrats here is that they were fundamentally playing the same game as Republicans were—they've just come up short. The same difference between stated ideals that led the Republicans to collapse in the mid-00s is the difference that opened room for a Trump-like figure in their party.
And despite resting on their laurels and doing perilously close to nothing, the Democrats managed to reclaim the House and Senate in 2018; they managed to claim the presidency in 2020; and then they managed to squander their majority for a second time, just as Obama squandered his in 2009. Simply by being nominally on the "right" side of the issues, Democrats draw voters in, no matter how little they seem to do or how uninvested they appear to be in their own ideals. Trump's abhorrent second term has always caused his standing to collapse among the American public, more dramatically than it did even in his first term; unless something drastic happens, Democrats will do incredibly well in the 2026 congressional races. Even if they're useless after that, they will at least have a fighting chance in 2028, particularly if they're running against any Republican but Trump. But that's damning with faint praise: the fact that there's any doubt about the Democrats winning against Republicans, even now, suggests a party that has uniquely failed to convince anybody that they're prepared to do a damn thing, despite this being a political moment where people are clamoring for more things than ever.
The possibility of them squandering an opportunity like this is flabbergasting in and of itself—just as it's flabbergasting that they squandered their shot at the presidency in 2020. It has never been easier for Democrats to act; it has never been clearer that Democrats will be lauded for taking action. And it has never been more despicably clear, in this moment, why Democrats won't act, and what they really want, and who they really are.