Democrats Are Fighting Back. Is This the Guy Who's Responsible?
Democrats Are Fighting Back. Is This the Guy Who's Responsible?
By embracing high-dominance politics, the party is following the blueprint laid out in a recent book—right down to the details.
Joe Biden is BEGGING.
Do you approve of Joe Biden?
[click Yes]
[Click No]
—Text message from the Save Democracy PAC, cited in M. Steven Fish with Laila M. Aghaie, Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge (Rivertowns Books: 2024), p. 75.
If you are like me, you have spent the past four years watching in dismay as the Democratic Party confronted the Trumpian menace with both hands tied behind its back. In the face of a GOP gunning for theocratic autocracy, leading Democrats remained wedded to risk-aversion. They avoided combativeness in favor of performative bipartisanship, shunned resoluteness and moral outrage in favor of pleas for better behavior, and eschewed high-octane conflicts over fundamental values in favor of bland statements on kitchen-table priorities.
It was, as researcher Will Stancil put it, a strategy “practically lab-constructed to repel any kind of emotional response outside of boredom.”
With the republic’s very existence in jeopardy, most Democrats responded with all the swagger of a note slipped discreetly under the chair of a middle school crush, epitomized in pathetic fashion by the campaign text message above.
Then, in an instant, everything changed. The ascendance of Harris ushered in a transformation which has left the party unrecognizable. Gone are the days when Democrats operated perpetually from the defensive. Instead, they are launching full-throated attacks on their opponents—and dominating the media narrative as a result. For once, Trump and the Republicans find themselves on the back foot, unable to mount a meaningful response.
A Democratic candidate holding forth before huge, enthusiastic crowds at standing room-only events? The novelty is hard to miss. The polls are shifting, too. Battleground states like Pennsylvania and Michigan are moving in the Democrats’ favor. States which had all but been written out, such as North Carolina, are suddenly looking like toss-ups.
The Democrats finally have a mojo. No, we cannot chalk it up to the generational change in their top ranks. The party’s new crop of leaders, including Harris, never previously showed much of a propensity toward the aggressive and dynamic style of politics we are now witnessing.
If the standard story is correct, Democrats should be able to beat Trumpism by doubling down on progressive economic policies and shifting rightward in the culture wars. The problem is that they have already tried that—and it did not work.
So, what happened? Nobody can say for sure. What I do know is that a book published only months ago proposed exactly this sort of strategy. Aside from a few high-profile media appearances, including an op-ed in the New York Times, it has not caught much fire among the general public. But it has been making the rounds among some influential people. The overlap between its prescriptions and the party’s revamped approach to messaging are nothing short of extraordinary.
In Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge (Rivertowns Books, 2024), M. Steven Fish shows how the Democratic Party’s retreat from a hard-nosed politics of strength and nationalism opened the door to the Republicans’ autocratic turn. If Democrats are to quell the threat for good, he contends, they must adopt these tactics themselves.
Fish is a professor of political science at Berkeley and an expert on authoritarianism and democracy. He also happens to be my former PhD adviser and has coauthored a number of pieces with me. He wrote the book with Laila M. Aghaie, his whip-smart partner and spouse. Despite having no formal training in the field, Aghaie has gained an impressive mastery of the literature and, to my mind, displays an ability to think about these issues on the level of any political scientist.1
Employing a mountain of data as well as evidence from psychology and political science, Fish demolishes what he terms the “standard story” of the liberal predicament. This tale, ubiquitous among liberal pundits, academics, and politicians, attributes Trumpism’s success to a number of oft-cited factors—namely, the Democrats’ failure to address working-class economic distress, a conservative backlash against cultural liberalization, and a constitution which puts them at a structural disadvantage.
If the standard story is correct, Democrats should be able to beat Trumpism by doubling down on progressive economic policies and shifting rightward in the culture wars. The problem is that they have already tried that—and it did not work.
When it comes to hot-button issues, Fish shows, it is the Democrats, not the GOP, with whom the public is aligned. The opportunity to lay down clear and resolute positions is there for the taking—if only Democrats seized it.
To win the battle ahead, the Democrats must appropriate two strategies Republicans have long-mastered but which liberals have neglected.
Dominance
“Politics,” Fish writes, “is a game of dominance, no less than business, sports, and war.” Dominance involves risk-taking, entertaining and emotionally-provocative rhetoric, us-versus-them framing, and the projection of strength. It requires one to stake out bold, principled, and unapologetic stances on controversial topics.
Democrats tend to dismiss dominance as beneath them, preferring insipid declarations on kitchen-table issues to the perilous terrain of culture-war politics. But Republicans understand dominance’s appeal and are experts at exploiting it:
At the root of the problem with Democratic messaging is party leaders’ apparent—and mistaken—belief that the Republicans hold the advantage in the culture wars and that the best thing liberals can do is steer the conversation to the economy. They are also driven by an obsessive risk aversion that marks low-dominance behavior.
When it comes to hot-button issues, Fish shows, it is the Democrats, not the GOP, with whom the public is aligned. The opportunity to lay down clear and resolute positions is there for the taking—if only Democrats seized it.
By avoiding conflicts over fundamental values, Democrats have adopted what amounts to a policy of unilateral disarmament, one that grants the GOP disproportionate influence over the media narrative. This is why Republicans are not constantly asked to defend themselves for fomenting violence and stripping away rights. Instead, it is the Democrats who must deny that they are defunding the police or causing a non-existent border crisis.
Consider the beloved rightwing pastime of “owning the libs.” It is a game in which the Democrats can always be relied upon to play their designated role. We all know the script. On any given day, some vile and idiotic thought spawns amidst the putrid, Adderall-infused broth in Trump’s cerebrum and spurts forth from his mouth. Liberals then “respond in a manner that reinforces his dominance and leaves Trump in charge of the political arena.”
Trump says it; scandalized Democrats play it back—did you hear what he said?! Trump savors the moment—then says it again, but worse. Frothed-up Democrats take the bait—can you believe he’s saying it again?! The mainstream media runs Trump’s statements and the Democrats’ reactions wall-to-wall. Playing their part to a T, FOX and kindred MAGA media roll out bemused reports on the liberals’ umbrage.
Forget punching back; as long as Democrats amplify Trump being Trump, they believe, voters will eventually abandon him. And so it goes. “As Trump’s fans watch us urbane sophisticates extend our elevated chins for the daily bitch-slap, their man never fails to deliver the blow.”
There is a reason why Trump is able to use dominance to such effect. Decades of findings in political psychology reveal how dominance taps into human nature. It triggers basic responsive instincts, ones psychologist Dan P. McAdams describes as “very old, awesomely intuitive, and deeply ingrained.”
Dominance goes a long way toward explaining why Trump won in 2016 and continues to exert such a hold on Republican politics. In an era where every election cycle threatens to end democracy, its survival will require more than the default, knife-edge victories on which the Democrats now depend; they need to demolish their opponents every time. But they cannot do it without learning the art of high-dominance politics. “Nobody longs to be led by those who are dominated by others,” Fish explains. “If a leader can’t get the best of his opponents, how can he be relied on to protect his followers—or the nation as a whole?”
This does not mean the Democrats should mimic Trump’s cruelty and bigotry. It does mean they should attack him with strength and gusto. Nor is dominance a trait that is restricted to men; many of its most capable practitioners have historically been women, a fact which Harris is ably demonstrating before our eyes.
Taking Back Nationalism
Dominance is not the only advantage liberals have ceded to authoritarians. The same is true of nationalism. This was not always the case. Midcentury liberals such as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., wrapped themselves in the flag and slammed their opponents as un-American. “Their messaging celebrated the nation’s triumphs under liberal leadership and offered a bold vision of a still-greater age to come,” Fish writes. “Their appeals spoke to the heart, not just the head.”
In the process, they crushed fascists and white supremacists at home and abroad. They also ushered in multiracial democracy and an expansive social welfare state for the first time in U.S. history.
By redefining their mission around protecting these values from the Republican threat, Democrats can transcend the interminable debate over whether to target centrist or progressive voters.
But ever since Vietnam, liberals have shied away from nationalism, associating it with chauvinism and foreign adventurism. By doing so, they allowed the right to monopolize this potent resource for themselves. Americans, more so than other nations, are a patriotic lot, and Democrats have left too much the table by ignoring this fact.
Embracing nationalism need not lead them down the path of ethnocentric hubris. The brand of nationalism Fish proposes, and which the liberal luminaries above once touted, includes all Americans, not a privileged segment thereof. Nor, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once showed us, does it preclude a reckoning with the nation’s past. The nationalism of our midcentury forebears successfully combined critical self-examination with an inspiring vision of the future.
The American story offers an abundance of material that can underpin a liberal national narrative. This narrative would celebrate America’s status as the world’s first experiment in self-governance, highlight the struggle to extend political and civil rights to all its citizens, recall its tradition of welcoming immigrants, and emphasize its role in defending its democratic allies from foreign dictatorship. It would also attack Republicans as un-American for betraying such ideals.
By redefining their mission around protecting these values from the Republican threat, Democrats can transcend the interminable debate over whether to target centrist or progressive voters. To win decisively and consistently, the Democrats must mobilize the base as well as Democrat-leaning suburbanites while also bringing on board a small but critical mass of centrist and center-right voters. Fortunately, vanquishing the GOP menace is an aspiration everyone can get behind.
What makes dominance and nationalism so promising for Democrats is the sheer hollowness of Republican claims to both. They pose as tough guys only to spend their days whining about how persecuted they are. They cosplay as patriots while kowtowing to Putin, selling out America’s interests, and debasing its ideals. When your opponents are traitors and frauds, attacking them with dominance and nationalism becomes easy.
How Democrats are Following the Script
To be sure, the parallels between the Democrats’ recent transformation and Fish’s recommendations could very well be coincidental. Reading through the book, however, one is struck by how closely they seem to be following his advice. Consider a few examples.
“The underlying cravenness of our opponents hands the liberals a priceless opportunity,” Fish notes:
But seizing it requires attacking our opponents’ smallness rather than just their cruelty, unfairness, or incompetence. It means ridiculing, belittling, and diminishing the worst of them, not just critiquing their policies. Above all, it means shutting down the umbrage factory, going on the attack—and enjoying every minute of it.
One is hard-pressed to find a better summation of the past few weeks than that. While making clear the danger Trump and his party present, Democrats are mocking them in ways which lay bare their buffonishness. This is exactly how dominance should be done. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” Harris declared in her acceptance speech. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”
This is why “weird” has proven so effective as a catch-all slur against the right. For one thing, it rings true—how else but “weird” to describe their creepy obsession with genital-reveals and female-submission? But it also works because it makes Republicans look small.
The similarities to Fish’s blueprint go on from there. “The overall tone in which effective leaders express their dominance is one of confidence, optimism, and exuberance,” he explains. “That means demonstrably having fun while owning opponents.” In this way, too, the Democrats would appear to be putting Fish’s counsel into action.
Scenes of joyous rallies at which Harris and Walz deride the GOP to rapturous cheers have become a media staple. And let us not forget Obama’s none-too-subtle suggestion about Trump’s penile deficit. Sure, it was lewd. But it served its purpose in cutting him down to size.
Another parallel is evident in the party’s abandonment of abstract and emotionless slogans in favor of “phrases that people feel, not just hear,” as Fish puts it. Political psychologists have long known that voters primarily act on emotion, not reason. Democratic rhetoric, at long last, is catching up. Timeless liberal catchphrases like “a woman’s right to choose” do not exactly stir the heart. Harris dispenses with such sanitized language, speaking instead of “children who have survived sexual assault potentially being forced to carry a pregnancy to term.”
it is hard to ignore the parallels between Fish’s work and the sudden about-face in the party’s messaging style.
The embrace of nationalism marks yet another notable shift. Not since L.B.J. has a Democratic candidate deployed nationalist language and narrative as forcefully as Harris is now.
For starters, she is expounding exactly the kind of positive and inspiring national-democratic story that Fish proposes. The contrast from past practice is difficult to overstate. From the 1970s onward, Democratic Party rhetoric was long on lamentations about how the country has short-changed its citizens and had few positive things to say about the American saga.
What a difference a few weeks can make. Take this passage from Harris’s acceptance speech:
We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world. And on behalf of our children and our grandchildren and all those who sacrificed so dearly for our freedom and liberty, we must be worthy of this moment. It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done, guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love, to fight for the ideals we cherish and to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American. So let’s get out there, let’s fight for it. Let’s get out there, let’s vote for it, and together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.
One can detect further echoes of Fish in how the Democrats have stopped taking joint responsibility for the nation’s ills. For once, they are expressing pride in the role they have played in the American epic—all while drawing a stark and appropriate contrast to the GOP. “Effective messaging will refrain from blaming ‘America’ for failures rather than identifiable culprits,” Fish writes. In the postwar era, those culprits have mostly been Republicans.
Just as surprisingly, Democrats are reclaiming the mantle of “freedom” from the GOP. Polls reveal that Americans value freedom to a degree that far exceeds other nations. For this reason, liberals should “use the language of freedom,” Fish advises. “It’s fine to include justice-talk, and it appeals to progressive audiences. But never forget that Americans as a whole care more about liberty than equality and fairness.”
The party has made freedom a core part of its identity in recent weeks—this after decades of leaving it to the GOP. In his convention speech, Walz went viral after turning the Republican conceit that they are champions of freedom on its head:
When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations—free to pollute your air and water. And banks—free to take advantage of customers. But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions. And yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.
Freedom is the not only cherished value the Democrats have wrested away from their rivals; they have done the same with national security—something which, again, is exactly consistent with Fish’s advice. “The Democrats haven’t even begun to tap the potential of Trump’s loyalty to Putin and relentless sell-out of American honor and security to dictators,” he writes. If the party is to get the mileage they need out of nationalism, he argues, they must take “political advantage of the Republicans’ anti-American treacheries.” By all appearances, they are finally doing so.
While Trump was in office, top Democrats mostly stayed quiet about his repeated betrayals of America’s security, preferring to leave the matter to investigative bodies and the courts. Under Biden, too, examples of leading Democrats taking Trump and his party to task on the issue have been few and far between.
Lately, however, it has become a key pillar of the party’s messaging. Trump “threatened to abandon NATO,” Harris reminded us in her speech. “He encouraged Putin to invade our allies. Said Russia could ‘do whatever the hell they want.’,” she continued. “I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un, who are rooting for Trump.”
The Guide Liberals Need—and Are Apparently Using
America remains a hair’s breadth away from autocracy. The question is why—and, more urgently, what to do about it. With uncommon clarity and verve, Fish shows how the standard story fails at both these tasks. Neither economic distress, cultural backlash, nor an outmoded constitution can tell us how we got here. Unlike its proponents, moreover, he provides a concrete blueprint for annihilating democracy’s foes.
Political scientists are good at explaining why things are the way they are. But they tend to come up short at giving practical advice to the good guys. In this regard, Fish stands out from his peers. Even more remarkably, he may very well be playing a role in the Democratic Party’s turn.
Look, I get it: The improbability that a single book—by a political scientist, no less—has exerted any influence at all on a major political party is not lost upon me. Ordinarily, I would never believe it was possible. To the extent that it had an effect, it likely did so not on its own but as part of a confluence of factors.
Still, it is hard to ignore the parallels between Fish’s work and the sudden about-face in the party’s messaging style. Of course, none of it matters if Trump gets reelected. For the time being, however, the Democrats have finally gotten their act together. Whatever is driving the shift, it seems to be working.
The book’s authorship is listed as follows: M. Steven Fish with Laila M. Aghaie, Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge (Rivertowns Books, 2024)
My gut tells me something like this dominance thesis is true. Maybe not the key to everything but it matters. I recently read a quote in Nixon Agonistes by Nixon’s campaign manager Chotiner which unfortunately I can’t give verbatim but it was about this kind of negative, attack-campaigning (not precisely the same as dominance but related to it)—that you just constantly hit at your opponent but don’t say much about yourself. You jab and jab and mostly defend.
This sounds right to me.
Totally agree about freedom. Right from the start, I was praying they would focus on freedom, and the GOP threat to freedom.
However, I disagree that the Democrats did not push patriotism and strength in foreign policy and all that stuff after Kennedy or Truman. They DID. They were constantly pushing a similar line as Republicans on that. But somehow they weren’t trusted. And it’s mysterious why, just as it’s mysterious why the public trusts the GOP more on the economy when they are constantly destroying the economy. (I guess Mike Dukakis in the helmet on the tank was not mysterious. He didn’t look like he belonged there to people? It’s interesting that this moment was viral before the internet, which we tend to associate with successful mockery. My point is—he got on the tank.(
They always got on the tank. But they were seen as traitors, etc. It was easy to create this false narrative that they didn’t care about this or that. They didn’t care about the working class. They didn’t care about the military. They didn’t care about families. Etc., etc., etc.
Somehow the narrative just doesn’t work the same way though. And I think it partly could be the REALITY of the GOP becoming too salient for them to be credible. It’s incredible this late in the game it is finally becoming salient given that’s always been the reality. But it seems possible that Trump’s general looniness and so many of them going way off the deep end into conspiracy theories and making friends with Nazis is just too much weight for the narrative to bear. The narrative was that they are the salt of the Earth, true patriots, they ‘really believe’ in this country, unlike the squishy Dems, etc. This requires the illusion of a fatherly family man, who will lead everyone out of the wilderness, who has wisdom and foresight and strength but might get mad and kick your ass, and so on. Just the patriarchal fantasy. Biden could be that, and so beat Trump.
But it’s just hard to hold onto the illusion that Trump is ALSO that. He was convicted of felonies, he’s speaking in word salad, he made a mess of things his whole presidency, and so on. Maybe it’s even his age that is revealing the cracks in the narrative.
They GOP will probably get back to that patriarchal dominance trip, and various things will make it tough to sustain the Democrats dominant energy. It will definitely help if fewer people belong to evangelical churches. If the power of the evangelicals wavers, the GOP will struggle mightily to restore their base. There just aren’t enough Nazis to keep the whole thing going with white people.