Bury the #Resistance Once and For All

It had a bad run, and now it’s over.

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

You can also read this piece at The Nation.

The truism that insanity means trying the same thing again and again and expecting another result is as threadbare as they come. But the Democrats—who seem to love nothing more than redeploying the same losing tactics, even against the same candidate, and expecting to win—are powerful evidence of why that cliché sticks around.

In late September, I warned about the reemergence within the Democratic coalition of the failed #Resistance mindset that defined the 2016 election and the response to Donald Trump’s first term. Among that movement’s defining features were trying to shame or scare voters into voting against Trump, rather than for the Democrat, an over-reliance on pop culture signifiers rather than policy, and a hope and a prayer for the system, in particular prosecutors and the FBI, to deliver us from evil. If anyone doubted that this kind of politics is a dead end, the reality that set in on election night—when, in an almost spooky echo of the scene at Hillary Clinton’s 2016 gathering, Harris sent her supporters home rather than give a speech—hopefully settled the argument. And now that we’re on the other side of the 2024 debacle, it’s more important than ever that we bury the #Resistance mindset once and for all.

Rather than engage in meaningful self-reflection, though, many top Democrats are looking for someone other than party leadership and their own candidate to blame. Just like after Clinton’s 2016 loss, they’re landing on the progressive wing of the party and voters from marginalized groups.

They’re also flailing wildly.

We need a Joe Rogan of the left! No, we don’t! Harris lost because of woke! She lost because she was insufficiently supportive of Israel, despite being a heartbeat from the presidency in an administration funding its genocide! She should’ve picked Josh Shapiro as her running mate, not Tim Walz! Perhaps the worst argument yet was Adam Jentleson’s take that the Democrats actually tried too hard to coalition-build with progressives, which is rich coming from a former John Fetterman staffer, who should know something about squandering goodwill by embracing one interest above all others. Jentleson’s op-ed, which earned praise from others who helped get us here, also argued for jettisoning identity politics in favor of “supply-side progressivism,” whatever that means.

At the most loathsome end of this spectrum, some liberals are descending into pure unfiltered racism, seemingly clamoring for Arab and Latino voters to be deported and for Gaza to be leveled as a hateful form of retribution for the election result.

Better answers about why Harris lost are abundant, and many of them stem from the party’s reliance on the same kind of #Resistance tactics that have failed so many times before.