Nate Silver seems somehow unfamiliar with the decade of remorseless political warfare waged by Democrats. Here’s a refresher.
E lections analyst Nate Silver is exhilarated. The Democratic Party has been batted around like an orca’s breakfast for long enough. Suddenly, “perhaps for a change,” he wrote, “they’re in the mood to fight back.”
He cites the polling that has long shown that Democrats want a more pugilistic party. We don’t need survey data to confirm that. It’s the little things, like the Democratic base’s desire to see their elected officials get shot and their insistence on taking every morsel of bait served up by Donald Trump, that suggest a restlessness is abroad on the Democratic left. That’s hardly oracular wisdom. Still, Silver contends, the Democratic Party’s willingness to throw sharp elbows is something new.
“The initiative marks the end of a decade-plus of a ‘when they go low, we go high’ attitude among Democratic leaders, which the party base has increasingly soured on,” he wrote. “And here, the base has the right strategic instincts.”
Maybe. But having the “right strategic instincts” is not the same thing as having a strategy. The absence of long-term strategic thought is what Democratic voters resent, even if they cannot articulate it. And they cannot articulate it, perhaps, because of the undue self-reverence apparent in Silver’s post that hinders the party’s ability to critique itself. After all, Democrats do not “go high” nearly as much as they seem to think they do.
It was Michelle Obama who electrified Democrats during her July 2016 address to the delegates at the party’s presidential nominating convention. “How we explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level?” she averred. “No.” That’s when she admonished her party to model the behavior they want to see in their neighbors. It was a high-minded appeal to a sort of civility that her party never exemplified and that has served as an embittered excuse for the Democrats’ mercenary legerdemain ever since.
The former first lady’s husband campaigned for reelection tacitly endorsing the tendentious claim that Mitt Romney’s “vulture capitalism” rendered him complicit in a negligent homicide (Obama’s 2012 campaign later tried to distance itself from the attack before Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter was revealed to have coordinated it). That was the year Joe Biden accused the GOP of seeking to reimpose chattel slavery on black Americans, a year in which Democratic strategists of all stripes tried to convince you that words like “Chicago,” “golf,” “Constitution,” and even “cool” were coded messages that only white racists could hear.
After four years in which the president channeled Americans’ rage (“I don’t want to quell anger, I think people are right to be angry!”), advocated confrontational politics (“I want you to argue with them and get in their face”), and embraced the Chicago Way (“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”), few Republicans were shocked by the Democrats’ muscular politics in 2012. But that was nothing compared to what would come.
Barack Obama cultivated a bad habit throughout his term — one that he evinces even today — in which he castigates partisan politics as though he were above it. In reality, he and his party were expert practitioners of hard-nosed politics.
No issue was too sacred for Obama to demagogue it. “What’s more important to you: our children or an A-grade from the gun lobby?” he argued during his failed 2013 push for new gun-control legislation. Republicans didn’t just oppose the implementation of Obamacare; they were engaged in “blackmail.” Obama’s staff borrowed the act. “What we’re not for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest,” current podcast bro and former White House strategic communications adviser Dan Pfeiffer said of the GOP’s approach to banal debt ceiling negotiations. “It is not a negotiation if I show up at your house and say, ‘Give me everything inside or I’m going to burn it down.’” In a display of the Democrats’ inviolable commitment to holding one arm behind their back, that was the year that the late Harry Reid “nuked” the filibuster for judicial nominations — an act of civic restraint that Democrats have regretted ever since.
The following year would see the Supreme Court take up the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor, whom the federal government compelled to violate their religious principles by forcing them to provide contraceptives and “pregnancy-related services” to employees. That was the same year the Court liberated the crafts store Hobby Lobby from Obamacare’s mandates, prompting congressional Democrats to accuse the “five men” on the bench of oppressive sexism.
In 2015, as Donald Trump embarked on his successful quest for the White House, Obama delivered an oblique address commemorating the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. “Remember that our freedom is bound up with the freedom of others, regardless of what they look like or where they come from or what their last name is, or what faith they practice,” he observed. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest clarified that what Obama meant was that the GOP today is probably pro-slavery. “I’m not going to wave you off consideration of the idea that that message stands in quite stark contrast to the rhetoric that we hear from a variety of Republican candidates for president,” he said. “So, I think it’s appropriate for you to notice the difference in those messages.”
Obama kept on accusing the GOP of lacking a proper appreciation for slavery throughout 2016, though he made his objectives explicit in September of that year. “I will consider it a personal insult — an insult to my legacy — if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election,” Obama warned black America. And yet, Democrats seemed sincerely perplexed by the notion that the 44th president was in any way politically divisive. The charge is not just “positively deranged,” columnist Paul Waldman insisted, “it’s projection. They’re blaming him for their own shortcomings, their own misdeeds, the political divisions that they have worked so hard to exacerbate.”
The first Trump administration was hardly typified by excessive displays of civic propriety and deference from the GOP. Nor did the Democratic Party live up to its delusional self-image. It was the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee that, after April 2016, funded the work done by Christopher Steele — work that produced a campaign of innuendo and implication around the charge that Donald Trump colluded with Russia (and was entrapped by Moscow after engaging in some licentious behaviors with prostitutes). When those claims were investigated by an independent counsel and found wanting, the party would not let the matter go.
“Attorney General Barr’s regrettably partisan handling of the Mueller report” has “resulted in a crisis of confidence in his independence and impartiality,” Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer wrote in a 2019 letter excoriating the Mueller probe’s findings without attacking the liberal dashboard saint who conducted the investigation. “With this report’s release, we can confirm that U.S. individuals took actions that helped Russia undermine the United States and its government,” former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer insisted.
Twenty-eighteen showed how desperately the Democratic base was spoiling for the opportunity to cast off the bounds of civility. That summer, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was turned away from a Virginia restaurant explicitly because the place would not serve Trump administration officials. Sanders’s snubbing was preceded by the harassment of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in similar settings, but it was Sanders’s mistreatment that set off “a national debate over civility and decency in a time of political differences,” as CNN put it. We know what side California Representative Maxine Waters came down on. “And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd,” she told a cheering crowd. “And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Then there were the 2018 hearings to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Only book-length treatments capture the scale of that sordid episode. Suffice it to say, the embarrassingly thin accusations of childhood sexual assault leveled against Kavanaugh from multiple interested sources would not have passed journalistic scrutiny if any such scrutiny were applied. The rules were suspended in this special case, but, ultimately, not to Democrats’ benefit. The guardrails having been withdrawn, liberal columnists, commentators, cultural figures, and elected officials tripped over themselves to showcase the rank bigotry that had captured the progressive zeitgeist.
“Guess who’s perpetuating all these kinds of actions? It’s the men in this country,” Senator Mazie Hirono insisted. “Just shut up and step up.” Like “a lot of white men,” Kavanaugh did “not know what it’s like to feel threatened, powerless, and frustrated,” Hillary Clinton’s 2016 communications director Jennifer Palmieri observed. Fortunately, amid the “reckoning of this lopsided power balance, there’s going to be a lot more of this” in the future. Georgetown University associate professor Christine Fair advocated “miserable deaths” and posthumous castration for the “entitlement white men” who declined to convict Kavanaugh in the court of public opinion. Indeed, the very act of defending himself against the charge of rape was somehow untoward. The emotion he displayed in that moment was a display of “trauma for white men unaccustomed to trauma,” then–Times reporter John Harwood insisted. Kavanaugh was just one of many “entitled white men acting like the new minority,” columnist Maureen Dowd insisted, “howling about things that are being taken away from them, aggrieved at anything that diminishes them or saps their power.”
The Democrats lost that fight, and there were more losses to come. The following year, amid the rise of an incipient antisemitism that would come to dog the party in the next decade, the party had the opportunity to censure its members who accused American Jews of dual loyalty, of having mesmeric powers over gentiles, or of being motivated by their obsessive need to extract wealth from productive sectors of the economy. They passed on that opportunity, preferring instead to go as low as possible rather than follow the GOP’s lead from earlier that year when the party kicked Representative Steve King off his committee assignments over similarly bigoted remarks. The price for going “high” in this case was just too steep.
Donald Trump lost the 2020 campaign, but the seeds of his comeback were sown even before the votes were cast. The former intelligence officials (including some of the highest echelons of the Democratic national security apparatus) who signed their names to a letter alleging that Hunter Biden’s laptop was the most sophisticated Russian disinformation operation ever executed led social-media companies to throttle Americans’ access to the New York Post. Democratic media allies maintain that their co-partisans cannot be blamed for their roles in that affair. After all, the so-called “Twitter files” revealed that the GOP’s representatives made their share of requests to censor offending posts. It’s not clear how exculpatory that is. After all, Silicon Valley didn’t act on the GOP’s demands — only the left’s.
Then the lawfare began. Whatever you think of the merits of the federal cases brought against Trump — charges that will never be litigated — the accusations that were put before a jury were travesties. The “hush money” trial, in which a single transaction was spun out by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg into 34 felony counts, succeeded in saddling the former president with a federal conviction. It also tainted the other charges pending against Trump with an air of frivolity. Likewise, the appeals court that threw out the half-billion-dollar fine a jury imposed on Trump after he was found liable for fraud in New York State Attorney General Letitia James’s case exposes just how picayune that prosecution was. The Trump Organization was accused of engaging in behaviors that rarely see the inside of a courtroom and of defrauding investors who did not bring the complaint because they actually made a return on their stake.
What do you call all this if not political hardball?
It’s not as if the Democratic Party has observed Quaker-like passivity in the years since. “MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards,” Joe Biden insisted during an official presidential address in prime time, flanked by a U.S. Marine honor guard. “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.”
Vice President Kamala Harris goaded the national press into spending a week establishing tortured and tenuous connections between Donald Trump and Benito Mussolini after her 2024 contention that voters do not want “a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
Even today, driven by the mania that persists in online forums, congressional Democrats are justifying their unremarkable obstructionism by insisting that they’re trying to uncover the sordid truth buried in those so-called “Epstein files.” Chuck Schumer went so far as to deem Congress’s August break the “Epstein recess.” The GOP’s evasiveness isn’t “just odd,” he added. It’s “alarming.” Democrats have alleged point-blank that Trump was fully appraised of Jeffrey Epstein’s illegal behaviors and, at the very least, did nothing about it. And make no mistake; this is a strategic initiative. “Trump administration officials are either lying about the file and keeping it covered up to protect themselves, or they lied about its existence in a shameless political ploy to get elected,” Democratic National Committee messaging adviser Tim Hogan claimed. Message received.
Nate Silver didn’t seem to find any of this recent history especially informative when formulating his recommendation that Democrats finally take the gloves off. “Democrats don’t merely have to reciprocate,” he wrote; “tit-for-tat might be a game-theory optimal strategy over the long run, but it doesn’t work as well if you’re always a half-step behind. They should also consider acting preemptively, something few Democrats other than Beto O’Rourke of all people have dared to suggest.”
Silver can pull from obscurity the advocacy of a former congressman who lost the last three elections he waged for higher office, but he seems somehow unfamiliar with the decade of remorseless political warfare waged by Democrats. None of this is to say that the GOP’s hands are clean. It is to say that the Democratic Party’s impression of itself is the product of delirium. For that reason, the opposition party should probably reject Silver’s advice. If a decade-old strategy is no longer working, doing more of the same and expecting different results would be crazy.