Kamala Harris speaks at the annual dinner of the Human Rights Campaign on October 29, 2022. (Paul Morigi/Getty Images)
“And I would say, ‘Well, what is the power of these groups — like, what is their leverage on you?’ And there was never an answer,” - Ezra Klein on how woke interest groups control the Democrats.
It was a trivial incident in the grand scheme of things. At one point in the campaign, Kamala Harris had to decide whether to go on Joe Rogan — a show with 18 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Here’s why she didn’t: “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” Jennifer Palmieri, an aide to Doug Emhoff, explained. (Palmieri later implausibly tried to walk that back, citing a scheduling conflict.)
There you have the core dynamic that has crippled the Democrats for the last decade. A tiny faction of usually young, well-educated, very-online social justice activists have been using the classic campus tactics of the far left to capture the interest groups and nonprofits that dominate Democratic policy-making. The weapon the activists use: classic internal accusations of racism/sexism/transphobia, empowered by staff revolts, Twitter mobs, and other social media. And then the Democrats, believing these groups represent actual public opinion, especially among minorities, take positions far outside the mainstream with scarcely any public debate — and become paralyzed when challenged.
The groups do not represent anyone but the clique of well-financed, super-rich donors and activists caught up in the elite cult of social justice. The LatinX groups don’t represent most Latinos (that is now blindingly obvious); BLM hostility to the police is a distortion of far more nuanced views among African-Americans; the transqueer groups have very different — and far more radical — priorities than most normie gay men and lesbians, who just want to live their lives in peace. And yet all these groups have long nailed Democratic elites to the cross of left-extremism, never more fatally than this year.
And obviously this is partly why Trump won: Harris had no way to distance herself from the crazies. I’m not apologizing for airing the trans issue as Exhibit A in this respect — because I was proven right in this election to an extent even I didn’t fully grok. Not only did Trump’s ads on the trans issue shift viewers 2.7 percent toward Trump in the states they ran in (more than his margin of victory), the issue was particularly potent for swing voters.
When swing voters were given 25 possible reasons for why they didn’t vote for Harris, the statement that she “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” was the most-cited reason by those who chose Trump. Number One. I repeat: more swing voters voted for Trump on that issue than on inflation or immigration. In a focus group conducted by the NYT, a 25-year-old woman in DC said:
I shocked myself and voted for Trump. No one tell my family. … I think I became radicalized on the men and women’s sports issue. The ad that said, “Kamala represents they/them. Trump represents you,” that was so compelling. While Trump is deranged, he represented normalcy somehow to me.
If that’s a Gen Z woman in DC, imagine the impact in a swing state. Now look at the Democrats’ public response to this self-inflicted wound. One blue-state congressman, Seth Moulton, tried to learn a lesson after Election Day. While he reiterated his support for trans civil rights in general, he drew a line at biological boys competing with girls in high school sports:
I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.
Moulton’s view is shared by 69 percent of the public, and a slight 48-47 majority of Democrats. There are very few issues with public support as broad and bipartisan as this. But as soon as he opened his mouth, the backlash was instant and extreme:
The Massachusetts Democratic Party said Moulton’s comments “do not represent the broad view of our party.” In Moulton’s hometown, Salem City Councilor Kyle Davis called on Moulton to resign, and state Rep. Manny Cruz of Salem said he was “deeply disappointed in my congressman who has been doubling down on his transphobic views.” ... Moulton’s campaign manager and director of his “Serve America’’ political committee, resigned.
Young Democrats of America branded him a “coward” and insisted, “Trans rights are not up for debate.” In a classic campus tactic, a group of former Moulton staffers and interns wrote an open letter demanding he apologize to “the LGBTQ+ community.” Moulton didn’t cave:
The backlash has only served to reinforce my original point. … So let’s stop cancelling and start having these important conversations.
One thing you notice about the SJW pushback: they never actually rebut any of the concerns about fairness in sports, which is the nub of the issue. They don’t rebut it, because they cannot rebut it, even though some have tried. Nor do they ever engage with the fast-changing facts and research on “gender-affirming care,” i.e. sex reassignment for children. In fact, they do all they can to suppress journalism and hound reporters because this subject has been determined “not up for debate.”
And so transness is sacralized, made inviolable, and any weighing of the evidence is regarded not as part of a reasonable debate but as a kind of blasphemy. Check out the CNN panel when the question of biological boys competing with girls in sports came up. Instantly, one panelist cried foul:
They’re not boys! I’m not going to listen to transphobia at this table!
Even to raise a position backed by a massive majority is deemed bigotry on CNN.
Or think of two high priests of wokeness, John Oliver and Jon Stewart. I’ve covered their willful disinformation before. But they still both cling to the idea that the science is settled on transing children (it sure isn’t), and mock all skeptics as bigots (most European governments would disagree). That CNN panelist dismissed voters’ concerns over trans athletes — “a tiny, tiny sliver of the population” — as if the scale of the issue resolved the essence of it — or its political potency. And Oliver long ago dismissed any debate about fairness in sports: “But even if there were more [biological boys competing against girls], discriminating against them would still obviously be wrong.” Obviously. Not a difficult trade-off. No trade-off at all. And no argument. (It reminds me of the most nauseating political sign of the campaign: “Kamala. Obviously.” If that didn’t make you want to vote for Trump, what would?)
In Stewart’s post-election take this week, he simply insisted that the Dems had not run on woke issues, and so the trans issue couldn’t be blamed. But, of course, the Trump campaign made the Dems run on the trans issue — by highlighting their actual positions in a devastating ad campaign. And all Harris could say in response was that the issue was “quite remote” and she was merely following the law. She ran no ads to counter the attack— because she neither wanted to lose votes by backing taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal aliens and inmates, nor alienate the trans activists who control her party. The worst of all possible worlds.
It’s encouraging that Ezra Klein cops to this dynamic and had Dish-fave Michael Lind on his podcast this week to explore it some more. Here’s Mike on how the groups distort everything:
Lind’s law of nonprofit advocacy [is]: You go as far as the voters support your position, and then you go beyond the border into further territory where the next position is unpopular ... And this is a deliberate strategic move, because if you just are advocating for what everybody believes anyway, then you’ve won. Nobody’s going to write you a check.
But if you go 10 or 20 or 30 percent further, into the controversial realm, then you will be attacked. And in the case of progressive nonprofits, you’re being attacked by the right, which is what you want. And you can say, “We’re being attacked for this.” And then you can link it to your previous gains by saying, “They don’t only oppose this bridgehead in enemy territory, but they want to roll back everything we’ve done in the last hundred years.”
This is precisely what has happened with trans rights. Thanks to Bostock (2020), transgender people have full civil rights under the 1964 Act; and large majorities of Americans oppose trans discrimination. It doesn’t get any better for a minority than that. So a few years ago, this topic seemed settled.
Then the advocates of critical gender and queer theory captured the gay groups and pushed “10 or 20 or 30 percent further,” as Mike put it. The groups decreed that “affirmation-only” fast-track medical transing of pubescent children and allowing biological men in women’s sports and showers were non-negotiable civil rights. They then used the usual bullying tactics to get their way. Declaring that “no compromise” was possible, Biden thereby ended all distinctions between boys and girls in schools and colleges by executive order on his first day in office. Authoritarian much?
Harris’ backing of federally funded sex-change operations for incarcerated illegal aliens — what sounded at first blush like an invented parody of woke nuttiness — was the result of an ACLU questionnaire. That’s how it works. The groups are captured by radicals (in this case by the extremist lawyer, Chase Strangio), just as our campuses have been. The groups get the pols on the record by threatening to call them bigots if they don’t. The pols then run for election with a huge woke albatross around their neck — on an issue they haven’t even had a real debate about. The activists subsequently bully the media to prevent any airing of the debate.
To buttress their authoritah, the transqueer activists then portray themselves as merely the latest people to be “on the right side of history” and equate their struggle to sterilize children and end women’s sports with, say, marriage equality. And no one in the gay rights movement — apart from, ahem, a few writers already exiled from legacy media — demurs. But of course, medical experiments on children and ending women’s sports have nothing to do with a civil right like the right to marry. They’re social and cultural policy revolutions rooted in neo-Marxist postmodernism.
And unlike marriage rights — when we patiently advocated for our position and, in 20 years, turned public opinion around from 2-1 against to 2-1 in favor — the transqueers, despite their hyperventilating, have been losing ground. In May 2021, 62 percent of Americans opposed biological boys competing with girls in sports; by 2023, that went up to 69 percent. Why? Not because of transphobia, but because it’s bleeding obvious to any sane, breathing human who has ever lived on planet earth that males are stronger and faster than females — on average, and especially so in competitive sports. You can yell and scream at people all you want, but you can’t force them to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears, as Orwell put it. Nor of course, should you.
The extremist groups don’t even represent most trans people, especially those over the age of 30. Many (including Brianna Wu and Tara Ella) are fed up:
One said progressive activists are like “locusts” who move from one cause to the other, “exploiting marginalized groups and using them to spark unwinnable fights and leaving them in a worst place than before.” Another said trans people feel like the Left’s “pikemen” saying “we were placed in the front lines by people who have nothing to lose if the battle goes badly.” She added “we just wanted basic rights and instead we lectured people about pronouns.”
We all live on campus now, as I once wrote. In a truly Karmic development, that’s now especially true for the Democrats. Until someone in that party develops an ability to say no to the ideologically-captured groups, they will keep losing — and deserve to keep losing.
Defend trans rights for adults: absolutely. Do so without apology. But don’t deny biological and human reality. And don’t impose your fanaticism on vulnerable children. That’s not hard, is it? But for the Democratic Party, it appears permanently impossible. Advantage: Trump. Until someone in the Democratic leadership finally has the balls to say no to the groups. Whoever does has a bright political future.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a long chat with Anderson Cooper on grieving the loss of loved ones; a bunch of readers dissenting over my post-election piece; 10 notable quotes from the week in news, including Yglesias Awards for AOC and a drag queen; 13 pieces on Substack we recommend reading; a Mental Health Break of trippy pinball; a lovely window from Madison; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a happy subscriber:
From an Irish listener to your always balanced and thoughtful podcast — thank you. The $5 subscription is less than the price of a coffee a month. Hard to beat that!
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I’ve been wrestling with the grief and anger of having to listen to the sociopath-in-chief for the next four years. I’d been unable to find a way to let my mind let go, and your perspective last week was a huge step toward doing so. Your view of our country as uniting around a relatively cogent reaction to runaway wokism is incredibly hopeful. I hope it’s enough to overlook the fact that the figurehead leading the charge is entirely unworthy.
New On The Dishcast: Anderson Cooper
Anderson with his father and brother in 1972. (Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty)
Anderson doesn’t need an introduction, but he’s a broadcast journalist who has anchored Anderson Cooper 360° for more than two decades. He’s also a correspondent for 60 Minutes and the host of a podcast centered on grief, “All There Is.” He invited me on the pod after the death of my mother this summer, and this Dishcast episode is the extended version of our conversation, which covers my experience of the AIDS crisis and the deaths of my parents and my beagle, Bowie. I was not expecting to talk about my AIDS memories, so forgive me for some choking up.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find three clips of our convo — on Anderson losing his brother to suicide, how he coped by seeking out warzones, and coming out of the closet on the Dish. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s election post-mortem with Damon Linker, along with reader reflections on the Trump win.
Coming up: Reihan Salam on the evolution of the GOP, John Gray on the state of liberal democracy, David Greenberg on his new bio of John Lewis, Christine Rosen on humanness in a digital world, and Mary Matalin on anything but politics. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
When I opened your Dish column last Friday, I fully expected a big serving of both-sides-y handwringing — as in, “Trump is bad, but Harris is also bad, because wokeness/inflation/illegal immigrants … poor voters, what were they to do?” But I was also hoping for an acknowledgement of how terribly painful it is that the lawless kakistocrat has been reelected, more resoundingly than the first time.
Instead, I got a celebration of the multiracial, multiethnic coalition that brought us Clown Car Horror Show 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Not a single solitary goddamn word about all the reasons why Agent Orange deserved to lose. Attempting to overturn a free election in 2020? Inciting a mob to attack the Capitol? Running on “retribution” and promising to deploy the justice system against his political opponents? Routine use of crass, ugly insults and normalizing his surrogates’ use of same? Musing about how he wants to be “dictator for a day”? Wanting to fire government workers and replace them with incompetent sycophants? Never heard of it.
Read my response here, along with three other dissents. More debate is on the pod page. As always, please keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Trump’s pick for the Cabinet, cutting the budget, and stigmatizing masculinity. Below is one example, followed by a brand new substack:
Does the world’s oldest map reveal the location of Noah’s Ark?
Outpost is a new substack showcasing new documentaries.
If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s an entry from last week’s contest, written by the self-described wine geek in San Francisco:
The first time I was in New Orleans, I tried a Sazerac. I had heard of the drink but had no clue what it was or how it was made. I loved the name and loved the drink too. So I started making them from time to time.
A friend of mine found out about my interest and told me a story that stuck with me. His father grew up in New Orleans and joined the Army during WWII. I think he was a medic; he later became a doctor when he got back to New Orleans after the war. He also was a huge Sazerac fan and kept his Sazerac recipe on a 3x5 card in his wallet. According to my buddy, his dad had this recipe in his pocket when he landed on the beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944. It’s a damn fine recipe.
The VFYW’s resident mixologist went with a Sazerac for his weekly cocktail:
New Orleans is a special city for me, and I’ve visited it probably a dozen times over the years. My wife and I got engaged there in early 2016, in a private dining room of the Tableau restaurant on Jackson Square, and we’ve gone back for several trips for anniversaries and vacations since then. If you like food and drink like we do, you can’t go wrong. We generally avoid the Bourbon Street craziness, instead opting for out-of-the-way restaurants and bars, and there’s no shortage of those.
One of our favorite restaurants is Compere Lapin, where they serve a drink (or used to) in a copper bunny. I bought a set of the same bunny drink vessels for our 7th anniversary last year:
I did do a cocktail this week, but did not serve it in a copper bunny. By coincidence, my best friend Andy and his wife were visiting New Orleans the week before, and our trips overlapped by a day. We hung out with them on Friday night and had drinks in the Sazerac bar inside the Roosevelt Hotel, where we were staying.
Whenever I tell Andy I’m ordering a Sazerac, he makes the joke, “Ah, you are ordering the Kwisatz Sazerac” — a pun on the name of the prophesied messiah from the Dune books (and movies). When Andy comes up with a joke, he rides it for the rest of his life, and he literally says that every time I mention or order a Sazerac.
So this week, my drink is “The Kwisatz Sazerac” — a play on a Sazerac with some Spice added. Here’s how it turned out:
And the recipe:
Add some ice to a bar mixing glass
Add 2 oz of rye (I used Rittenhouse)
Add 1 oz sweet vermouth (I used Dolin)
Add 1 tsp of Liber & Co. Chai spice syrup
Stir until mixed
Take a rocks glass and do a rinse with Absinthe or Herbsaint (I used Herbsaint since I didn’t have Absinthe in my bar). To do a rinse, just pour an ounce of the liqueur, swirl it around the glass and pour it out in the sink.
Strain the cocktail into the rocks glass. A Sazerac is typically served neat, but I like a small ice cube to keep it cold as the last warm dregs of the drink aren’t pleasant to me, but the ice is totally optional if you prefer the traditional.
Express a lemon peel and add it to the glass.
Sip and stare out at the buskers and magicians performing in Jackson Square.
My wife is running a conference this week, so she wasn’t around to taste it, but I found the Kwisatz Sazerac a really nice take on a traditional Sazerac. The chai spice syrup gives it a nice savory quality and plays well with the Herbsaint.
