I’m bored, so I feel like sharing this idea with somebody who might give some fucks: I’ve seen a lot of think pieces about why Democrats lost so badly in this past election. Somebody on Lemmy linked Adam Conover’s video yesterday, and that was one of the better ones. Adam’s thesis is that the decline of civil society institutions, like clubs and unions, have left the Democratic Party acting like a privately-owned business, rather than a membership organization. All of these analyses are good, but remind me of the parable about the three blind men describing an elephant. In my hubris, I think I have model which succinctly describes the elephant.

Most of the loyal Democrats, the “blue no matter who” people, and harm-mitigation people have a mental model which comes down to voters considering the facts and making a more-or-less rational decision based on how a candidate’s policies would serve the voter’s own needs. One can see this in the way that Democratic candidates are stuck in the mode of describing wonky policy details, seeming to assume that voters can extrapolate how those details would affect the individual voter’s life. That’s why we get exasperated outbursts of, “bUt he’S wOrSE!”, from people like the commenter above. Yeah, undoubtedly, but that’s not how the human mind works.

The model I prefer to use to understand humans is to see us as sensory processing machines, rather than rational minds. It works so much better at the population level. (Our logical frontal lobes are recent evolutionary developments on top of the ancient animal brain and nervous system, after all.) Our politics these days is all about fear. (Some of it well-founded, much of it not.) When people are in danger and afraid, our nervous systems enter the “fight, flight, or freeze” response state. Flight is off the table; few of us can afford to leave our homes for another country, and where would we go that’s not also in the same situation? Where we wouldn’t be the very immigrants that the local right-wing parties are promising to Fight? The right wing, with its strong-man bluster, is very explicitly offering Fight. That much should be pretty obvious, even if the details of their plans don’t make logical sense. The Democrats, on the other hand, do not fight. They compromise before the fight begins (see: the Affordable Care Act), fall back on decorum and norms, or debate whether they need to capitulate a little or a lot after an electoral loss to peel away centrist Republicans next time. And as Adam Conover pointed out, they won’t let us into the party to Fight for ourselves.

So what’s left? Well, the big elephant in the room that all the pundits struggle to explain with their think-pieces is why Democratic voters stayed home this past election. There it is: Flight is impossible; Fight isn’t on offer; so they Freeze. And what that looks like is disengaging from politics. Consider Yeats’s famous phrase from The Second Coming, “the best lack all conviction”. It’s almost like the same thing happened over 100 years ago, as right-wing populism surged then. Doesn’t that sound a lot like all the loyal Democratic voters today deciding to stop following the news, getting off of social media, and distancing themselves from politics? Why some of them (like the commenter above) seem to have turned into FAFO/accelerationists? Doesn’t that explain why The Adjuster unleashed a torrent of rage from seemingly out of nowhere, by offering Fight to people stuck in Freeze? And why some polls showed that a candidate (Bernie Sanders) offering even a mild version of Fight could’ve won as a Democrat in 2016?

Democrats need to either learn to fight hard, or get out of the way so that the rest of us can.