For years I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Tom Edsall, the one-time Washington Post reporter and author who now writes a weekly column about politics for the Times. The love/hate has a temporal dimension. When I was first getting interested in politics as a teen and young adult I was very taken with Edsall’s books. They were very smart and opened my thinking to new ways to approach political questions, particularly how to think about political economy. In recent years he almost always drives me to distraction. I can’t tell you whether he’s changed or I have or, more likely, we’re just no longer in sync. In the 21st century, Edsall seems always to approach big questions with the idea that regardless of the situation it must be a disaster for the Democratic Party.

In any case, I was reading his latest column, which ends up raising some interesting questions about the politics of liberalism and freedom, building off a column by Noah Smith. Edsall starts with a premise that I think is clearly true. Over the last fifteen years or so, many of the more active Democrats (“strong Democrats,” they’re called in this piece) have moved significantly to the left not only of the median voter but even of the median Democrat on issues tied to sexuality, immigration, race, etc. It’s worth noting that being to the left of the median voter doesn’t mean you’re wrong. And it goes without saying — though it remains curiously unsaid in these discussions — that the same is true of party activists on the right. Still, that can create electoral challenges that need to be managed. That’s what the whole Jentleson/Favreau conversation about “saying no” is about.

So far, so good.

Let me return to something I wrote about yesterday and said I’d return to: Adam Jentleson’s piece in the Times on whether the Democratic Party can learn to say no to interest groups that often demand assent to various positions and commitments that are either obscure or toxic to a majority of voters. Trans rights aren’t the only issue Jentleson was talking about. But the larger debate clearly revolves around the ad the Trump campaign ran against Kamala Harris saying she supported tax payer-funded sex change operations/gender affirming care for prisoners. This was a question Harris checked “yes” to on an ACLU candidate questionnaire in 2019 as part of her 2020 run for the presidential nomination. There is at least the perception among some that it played a non-trivial role in turning the campaign against her

As a general matter I agree with Jentleson’s point. Not specifically about trans rights issues, but more generally. The goal of parties and campaigns is first to win elections.

But I can’t say that without noting some recent history.

Because these thoughts are provisional and in process, I’ve decided to package them seriatim, as a list of ideas, possibilities, counters and so forth.

• One of the shortfalls of the recriminationfests that come after a big political defeat is that the people getting the most attention are usually those shouting loudest and making the most totalizing claims. But there are important caveats and qualifiers to keep in mind. One is that anything obvious, sure-fire and without real costs would have been tried already. There’s no silver-bullet solution. This is just common sense, perhaps even conventional wisdom. At worst, it can be used to stifle new thinking or taking new chances. That’s another important pitfall. But it’s still true.

I’ve written in general against post-election recriminations since November 5th. This post may seem like one such recrimination on the surface. But I think if you bear with me, you’ll see that it’s really not. I should be clear, too, that being anti-recriminations, whatever that might mean, doesn’t or shouldn’t mean people shouldn’t try to figure out what was done right or wrong, criticize whoever needs to be criticized. Of course they should. What it means to me at least is that in the desolation of a really, really hard defeat, a very consequential one, people shouldn’t rush in to take shots at the folks they’ve always had it in for, using the devastation less as a wound to overcome than an opportunity for the old score-settling.

So here’s the issue I want to discuss.

Until his campaign began to come undone this last summer, it was widely understood and accepted among Democrats that Joe Biden, to the surprise of many, was the most progressive Democratic president, with the most consequential progressive legislative agenda, in at least half a century. This was widely believed because it was unquestionably true. Because of a series of decisions by both Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden ended up governing with a trimmed down version of the legislative agenda of the progressive left. What counts here as “trimmed down” is obviously a pretty critical question. There was no Medicare for All. But on lots of policy and regulatory positions, the left’s agenda was Biden’s. This isn’t just me saying this. Ask Bernie Sanders, or at least ask him until a week ago. The point I’m making here really isn’t open to much debate.

In the waning days of the 2024 presidential campaign, Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos became the target of widespread and deserved disgust for nixing The Washington Post’s policy of endorsing presidential candidates to avoid antagonizing Trump. As I wrote at the time, it’s not that there’s anything magical or even necessary about newspaper endorsements. The whole concept strikes me as a bit dated. The issue was why they were being dropped. Bezos wasn’t being paranoid. There is abundant and persuasive evidence that Trump used the levers of government to punish Bezos through Amazon and his Blue Origin space delivery company during his first term. The phrase many people used to describe this behavior is “anticipatory obedience.” (I’ve been told the phrase might originate with Timothy Snyder. I don’t know if he coined it or simply brought it to wider use.) But there’s another kind of anticipatory obedience I’ve seen like a torrent in the days since Trump won the election, and it’s more paradoxical because it comes from people who feel they are the most intense of opposers.

During harrowing times some people become overwhelmed and even lose hope. It’s not a one-way progress. Almost everyone has their moments. But there’s a particular kind of militant doomerism afoot at the moment. Any discussions of next steps in the battle against Trumpism or the preservation of civic democracy, any suggestions or strategies, are met with a chorus of, “don’t you get how it worked under Hitler and Stalin!!?!” Or “don’t you know rules don’t matter to Donald Trump!?!?!”

Today is the anniversary of this site, founded 24 years ago today.

It’s always been one of the features of TPM’s history that these anniversaries come right on the heels of elections — so either another milestone amidst the reverie and relief of good results or a reminder of the long view in the daze of bad ones. And it’s no accident. The site literally began as an effort to cover an election that was already over, or that was supposed to be over. That wasn’t the only reason the site began. I had it hazily in my mind to do something like it. There were even a few false starts at it in the few months before I did. But the election was the trigger. I had planned to spend a week with my then-girlfriend in New Haven after the 2000 election was concluded. But it turned out not to be over. The story was fast-moving, couldn’t wait on daily publishing schedules, let alone the weeks-long ones at my day job at The American Prospect, where I wasn’t going to have free rein in any case. So I just dove in and it never stopped.

I think this post will displease or even enrage some readers. But I have to write it. I’ve spent the last several days thinking through various things Democrats will need to do to confront and challenge the incoming Trump administration and things Democrats should now do differently. That is not only with what they’ve learned from this campaign and defeat but with a hand now free of the locked-in realities of Joe Biden’s incumbency and the first two years especially of his administration. That to-do list is critical to get right. The tasks are real, super-important and Democrats need to get down to work on them right away.

But for many people, the dire consequences of Trump’s election are distorting our understanding of just how he was elected. They’re not the same thing. And the difference matters. I see repeated headlines about how the Democratic Party and its political coalition have been “shattered” or are now in “shambles.” I’m having an, I hope, friendly email exchange with one reader who told me this morning that he felt no one, including TPM, prepared him for Trump’s “overwhelming victory.” Analysis pieces in the big papers state as a given that it will take years or possibly decades of rebuilding for the party to recover.

I really have no choice but to say that all of this is immense and innumerate bullshit. This isn’t even a subjective point. What we have is a bout of escalating competitive hyperbole in which the wild overstatement keeps getting ramped up because no one is willing to step up and state the obvious for fear of being shouted down as being in denial or naive or not recognizing the gravity of the crisis or whatever. Without anyone willing to push back, the chorus just keeps moving to more and more over-the-top claims. A party with a bit more self-respect and spine would be less bowled over by claims from the opposition and a press in the habit of portraying Democrats in the most negative terms. But here we are.

Running for president is a “no excuses” endeavor. If you win you become the most powerful person in the world and if you lose you become a dumping ground for disappointment, ridicule, blame, recrimination. And that’s just from your friends. It’s an enterprise both binary and brutal.

Democrats have much bigger challenges ahead than worrying about Kamala Harris’ feelings or future reputation. That’s not my concern here. But it’s important for every aspect of what Democrats have to do going forward to understand as well as they can what happened, why it happened and more. You know my opinion. I wrote the day before the election that I thought she ran a near-flawless campaign. I wanted to commit that to virtual paper in advance of the result because we inevitably judge campaigns by reading back from the result.

There’s a delicate balance in moments like this for anyone who has any level of megaphone. You don’t want to sound pollyannaish or appear that you’re in some kind of denial about the gravity of the situation. Just as much, though, you don’t want to affirm perceptions or feelings that are natural and even healthy but are still not altogether accurate.

America is not in or destined for autocracy. We took a step closer to it on Tuesday. And it was a pretty decent sized one. We elected a man all of whose instincts and desires are to govern as an autocrat. And that was after the country got a chance to see who he was up close once already. So we not only got that but we got that with a majority, though the tiniest of ones, voting for it with every reason to know who Trump is. I said in an earlier post that I don’t believe a majority of the country wants the future Trump is promising. In response, one reader wrote, with a lot of intensity, that I was letting voters off the hook. They knew exactly what they were getting, etc.

Our publishing interface tells me I’ve written well over 40,000 posts in just shy of 24 years doing this. The ones I remember most clearly are the ones I wrote after big electoral defeats and shocks. I think of 2004 and 2016, and then, of course, the more subsidiary setbacks. I think about what I believe people need to — or what would be helpful for them to — hear, or what scaffolding of analysis or meaning one can use to begin to construct a place to house those feelings of shock, disappointment, desolation. More than anything else I try to capture the truth of the matter as I’m able to make sense of it. Because that’s my real job.

What did this mean? Why did this happen?