We lost in 2024 because of delusional thinking that we can bully people into voting for us. Convincing people to vote for your side starts with not being a rude pompous ass. It starts with not announcing that you know voter’s wishes and beliefs better than they do. If voters get a whiff that you feel that you are entitled to their vote, they will punish your side out of spite. You can whine about this fact of human nature, but your whining won’t help you win any elections. Elections have never been some dispassionate utilitarian balancing of policy platforms, and voters get annoyed when you pretend that they are.
Democrats lose when they forget that they’re supposed to represent voters first and foremost. This is why white progressives usually fail when they go into minority communities looking for their votes. They’ll try to brow beat racial minority communities. They’ll say, “surely, our policies of government programs and redistribution are in the best interests of your community!” while at the same time not really trying to represent the issues those folks actually care about. Maybe UBI would be a great boon for members of a racial minority group. But that doesn’t mean members of that group will vote for you, or that they have to. They may simply have other political priorities and would prefer politicians that will push for those priorities first. This is the difference between ruling and representing.
I have no doubt that attitudes like yours cost Democrats far more votes than the few progressives that actually stayed home. Your message is meant to browbeat people who are honestly almost always going to vote for your side anyway. But people who are more moderate see your message, see that you feel entitled to people’s votes, and vote against Democrats as a consequence.
The number one complaint people have about liberals is “liberal arrogance.” And this is a great example of the arrogance that causes Democrats to lose elections. You believe you’ve diagnosed all of society’s problems. You believe you know the solutions to them. You believe you have all the answers. When other people tell you that their priorities are different from yours, and so your balance of issues are different from there’s, you insult them, bully them, and try to shame them to vote for the Democratic candidate.
You are why Democrats lose elections. Your hubris dooms us all. It’s condescending. It infantilizes voters who have a different ethical system than you do. And ultimately it shows that you want to rule people, not represent them. Liberal arrogance in its purest form.
These people are unhinged militant centrists.
It may seem paradoxical, but it is actually possible to be an extreme centrist. The hard truth of American politics is that there are no actual centrist voters. You won’t find any significant number of people whose views largely lie right between the platforms of the two parties. What you have instead are voters whose views simply don’t align well with the existing party coalitions. Their views may still be extremely strong. Think someone that is extremely pro-choice while also owning a dozen AR-15s. Maybe they have a home in the Libertarian Party, but they have no real home in either major party. They believe passionately on both subjects, they are anything but moderate for both their support of abortion choice and guns. But because their views don’t map cleanly to one side or the other’s arbitrary grab bag of chosen issues, this voter is called a centrist. But they’re not really a centrist. They just have weak partisan alignment.
But people like these? They are actual militant centrists. In many way these politicians are the only true centrists in America. They have formed a worldview that concludes that the right answer to any single issue must lie right in the middle between the two sides. One side wants to raise taxes on the rich while the other wants to cut them? The obviously correct answer must be to keep the taxes steady. Trump wants to turn millions of legal immigrants into illegal immigrants and then deport them, while progressives want to deport no law-abiding person? The correct answer must be to brutalize merely a few thousand innocent people. Progressives want to protect trans rights while Republicans want to liquidate trans people in ovens? The obvious answer must be some roll back of trans civil rights.
People like Schumer, Fetterman, etc. are militant centrists. They will obsessively tack to the very middle of any issue. And this is fundamentally a purely ideological position, the same as any extremist. A militant racist is so committed to theories of racial superiority that they’ll want to see racist policies enacted, even if they hurt the country, even if they hurt the racist themselves, regardless of even if white people are hurt. A militant socialist might demand state ownership of every type of business and enterprise, even if there’s no market failure and private companies can run those things just fine. You would have to be a pretty extreme socialist to think that the government should be running bars for example.
This is the defining feature of extremism and militancy - a willingness to put one’s own ideology above everything else. All that matters is the ideology. It is correct with a capital C. It is truth with a capital T. Any evidence against the ideology is dismissed or explained away.
These people are not moderate. They are militant centrists. Pick an issue, no matter the context or the evidence clear for all to see. They will always tack right in the middle between the two sides. They believe, in their heart of hearts, that the middle path is always the correct one. And they don’t care how many people have to die to keep their cherished view of centrism preserved. They are as extreme and militant as any far-right militia member. They just follow the ideology of centrism rather than conservatism.