A staffer gave us notice that we had to vacate the suite. “I did want to ask you,” she said to Raskin, “there is an influencer next door doing special coverage, they said they have 5 million followers. They’d love to talk to you.…”
“Can we take three more minutes?” Raskin asked her.
In Democratic circles, talk about politics often stays within such a narrow band of issues and horse race chatter that officials at the DNC often seemed intrigued to talk big picture. Raskin and I talked about how Biden would be remembered and about the coming election, which he seemed confident Harris would win. He had written a letter to Biden two weeks before he dropped out, and it eventually ended up being published in the The New York Times. “I said that he would retire to the overwhelming love and appreciation of the country,” he told me. “And it would usher in an extraordinary cathartic outpouring of progressive energy in the country. I believe those things, and I think it has begun to come true.” He looked out toward the floor. “It’s like a dam breaking in terms of progressive, youthful energy for the future.”
That night I went to a party hosted by Drop Site News, started recently by the left-wing reporter Ryan Grim. I ended up vaping outside with a big donor to both the site and to the Democratic Party, a dapper and erudite man who’d been a construction worker before he made a bunch of money in finance, who was now looking for ways to push the party toward a more populist and antiestablishmentarian worldview. We talked about a passage from Norman Mailer’s dispatch from the 1964 Republican National Convention, held at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Mailer had written it as a picture of a moment when a wild new energy of conservatives in the West and the Sun Belt formed behind the candidacy of Barry Goldwater and caught the old “Establishment of the East,” as Mailer called it, with its heartland stretching “from Maine to Nassau, New York to South of France,” off guard. This establishment had waited too long to find a moderately liberal candidate who bore its pedigree.
It took half a century and the emergence of Trump to finally complete the rebellion Goldwater had begun. Mailer wrote of hearing a band of bagpipers marching constantly through the streets that week. “There was a vast, if all private appeal in listening to the pipes shrill out the herald of a new crusade” he said, “Something jagged, Viking…hunters loose in the land again. And this had an appeal which burrowed deep, there was excitement at the thought of Goldwater getting the nomination.”
Against the pipers’ tribal skirl, the left’s answer had long been the promise of a utopian future built out of collective struggle. Their welling energies were summoned by songs like “Solidarity Forever,” “We Shall Overcome,” and “Which Side Are You On?”—the miners’ protest song written by a 12-year-old miner’s daughter named Florence Reece. A hint of this old energy came on the first day of the convention, from the United Automobile Workers president Shawn Fain. He played on the fact that JD Vance’s family came from the coalfields in Eastern Kentucky and accused Vance of abandoning his roots to align with billionaires like Elon Musk. “Which side are you on?” he asked.
But big-name Democrats and the consultant class these days often seem so professional, so competent, so well-trained, that this kind of energy no longer fits into their calculations about how to win narrow elections.
After the election I saw clips of a moving speech given by Cecil Roberts Jr., the West Virginia–born president of the United Mine Workers of America. He spoke to the “blood that flows through our body” as a generational memory of a multiracial and often violent struggle, lingering as little more than historical trivia to the technocratic-minded liberals who’d promised a “just transition” for laborers in “fading” industries like coal mining. He cast a pox on the house of everyone in power. “When you hear some rich person,” he said, “some CEO, some chairman of the board, talk about the patriotism of their company, or the patriotism of their board, understand something: Forgive me for what I’m about to say, but that’s pure bullshit. That’s what that is.”
Roberts knew full well that, at least in private, most senior Democrats saw him and his members as people who “cling,” in the infamous phrase Obama had used, to a lost world. But he argued that our economy is still, as much as ever, built on manufacturing and resource extraction—from lumber logged in Canada to industrial goods made in Chinese factories that are, in turn, powered by coal-fired energy.
“Democrats have needed a wake-up call now for some time,” he said. “And if there’s anything good that came out of this, I hope that they listen. At one time, everybody listened to me.”
“Union members voted for the vice president,” he said, “based on what we’ve seen from the polls. But working people didn’t do that.” He thought the age of Democrats being able to present themselves as the party of the working class were likely over. “I’m a Democrat,” he said.
“I’m going to die one, because I’ve been one forever. But here’s the problem. What about the next generation and the next generation?”
Later, a collection of luminaries and media figures from the beleaguered Sanders wing of the party gathered at an Irish bar, where hosts of the podcast Chapo Trap House and writers for places like Jacobin and the London Review of Books were getting drunk and talking with resigned cynicism about the proceedings. Not so long ago this crowd had looked like it might have a chance to become what the young bookish and online right has become for Trump—the intellectual vanguard of an insurgent new power in our politics. Policy aside, the Sanders movement had always represented something more than a push for a bigger welfare state. At times it had looked like it was building toward the kind of “regime change” dreamed of by conservative theorists like Curtis Yarvin and Patrick Deneen, one we may soon see. Conservatives today talk excitedly about a process of “elite replacement” that will see influential officials and power centers like New York finance and mainstream media lose place to newcomers from Silicon Valley or previously marginal conservative think tanks. Carried far enough, it’s a process that approximates a revolution.
During the election, many liberals had trouble understanding this kind of world historical dreaming, which animated people even at the edges of a campaign that bore the “mandate of heaven,” as the pseudonymous commentator Peachy Keenan said on Fox News. Keenan was only partly kidding. This kind of talk was always a bit tongue-in-cheek, hard for people who weren’t already in on the joke to get. Trump-backing tech figures talked dryly of a “preference cascade” that would see millions of people suddenly turn away from liberal cultural mores, media, even potential sexual partners. Others reveled in what it would all mean. Men were going to be ripped again. Blond women with large breasts would mark our standard of beauty. Muscle cars would be cool. People talked about outfits they were planning to wear to parties on “deportation day,” when America would finally begin sending immigrants back en masse. People were going to be getting rich making fantastic new drones, in sleek new American factories, in wars America would dominate. Everything was possible.
“Trump’s success now,” Jonathan Keeperman, the publisher of the growing right-wing house Passage Press, wrote in the days after the election, “the electoral sweep…the taste for revenge that animates him and his newfound allies, the titans of Silicon Valley”—all of it had come from a mythic journey that had seen them taste defeat and then back to the heights, a landscape of possibility before them. Keeperman himself was set to assume platinum membership in the new “counter-elite” of crypto entrepreneurs, disaffected veterans, and conservative intellectuals that would rise in a new Trump age. “American dynamism has been tamped down for decades,” he wrote. “The doorway out is now opened, and we need only to walk through it.”
The problem for Democrats wasn’t just that they had no golden dawn to promise. It was that, cut off in a separate media sphere, they had no way of even understanding the appeal of this whole cacophonous movement. “Hatred for institutions can hardly be overstated,” the Times Trump reporter Shawn McCreesh wrote in the days after the election, describing a campaign that had often seemed like a madcap second line, picking up new partiers as the parade rolled on. “It seems like they’re having a lot of…fun,” McCreesh said, cautiously, when I’d first met him at a Trump event that summer. I introduced myself to David Sirota, who had been a senior Sanders adviser and who probably would have had a White House role if the Bernie carnival had managed to roll on and win. But I ended up talking mostly that evening with a young and soft-spoken operative who’d run for Congress on a populist platform, trying to craft a Democratic message that would harness antiestablishment energy by appealing both to social justice–minded activist Democrats and disaffected types who’d turned Trump-curious in recent years. He now had a sensitive job and was, yet again, wary of being named. But the next day he agreed to talk anonymously. He kept trying to move us to a spot where we couldn’t be overheard, as celebrities and big-name officials filed by, and I made a joke about how I’d never expected to have to think so much about “security culture,” as radical leftist activists describe countersurveillance precautions, at a “joyous” gathering of liberal Democrats. “Well,” he said. “That’s how it is.”