Democrats, Channel Your Inner Zelensky
A letter to President Biden about the Midterm Elections
Dear Joe,
So, I hear that you and the Democrats are looking for a story to frame what’s at stake this November and beyond. I know you’re not asking for my help but, if you’ll forgive me, the story is staring you straight in the face.
It’s simple. It’s direct. And it comes from the Bible. In it, a small underdog Good Guy — a little Jew, if you can believe it — takes on a big bully of a Bad Guy.
Yes, I’m talking about Zelensky and Putin. I mean David and Goliath.
I’m hardly the first person to make that connection. But that’s the point. Volodymyr Zelensky has captured much of the world’s imagination precisely because he embodies the kind of heroic tale we all recognize from when we first encountered heroic tales.
He’s the courageous little guy fighting seemingly insurmountable evil in the face of all odds. He is not just David doing battle with Goliath, but also Moses opposing the Pharaoh and Jesus opposing Rome.
And those are just the Jews. Look at Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker aligned against the likes of Voldemort and Darth Vader.
And what is this hero’s goal? To free his people from corrupt, boundless, and brutal authoritarianism so they may determine their own destiny.
He seeks not national power but national emancipation. And not just of white Christian nationalists or ethnic Russians — not just of Slytherin or Gryffindor — but of all houses and all peoples everywhere. Including and especially the marginalized and dispossessed.
In short, the hero, at least figuratively, is a Democrat. For this reason, the Democrats must claim Zelensky as one of their own and associate their own with Zelensky
Not literally, of course, lest you insult the real-life hero and trivialize the ongoing suffering of his people. But you can rest assured that the real-life Zelensky has no desire to see Trump return to the Oval Office. So he’ll probably go along.
Apart from its obvious narrative appeal, this strategy would divide an otherwise complex and ambiguous political universe neatly in two. Zelensky vs. Putin, Biden vs. Trump, authoritarian nationalists vs. defenders of liberal democracy, MAGA Republicans vs. Democrats (all of them, even Joe Manchin).
You should be clear, by the way, that one need not be an actual Democrat to be a Zelensky. Some of your Republican critics — Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Brad Raffensperger, for example — are Zelenskys.
Offer them credit as such. To be a Zelensky, one need only be willing to speak truth to power — sometimes at the risk of one’s own career and self-interest but always on behalf of democracy.
Recently, in fact, the Democrats have begun to discover the Zelenskys in their own midst. You just phoned one of them to congratulate her. In a five-minute speech, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow took down an authoritarian MAGA bully, Senator Lana Theis.
Senator McMorrow stood tall as a white, Christian mother in defense of her democratic — and Democratic — beliefs.
Yet another Zelensky is Ian Mackey, a gay Missouri state representative. Mackey spoke in passionate opposition to a Republican representative who had proposed legislation to ban transexual women from playing on women’s sports teams.
“I was afraid of people like you growing up,” he said. “For 18 years, I walked around with nice people like you, who took me to ballgames, who told me how smart I was and then went to the ballot to vote for crap like this.”
As The Atlantic’s Molly Jong-Fast has recently underscored, stories are powerful policies. The Republicans, who have no policy goals at all, know this perfectly well.
They tell tales about endangered white masculinity, about the incursion of the Black and the Brown, about parents and schoolchildren threatened by LBGTQ Monsters under the bed, about Making America Great Again. These stories are simple, direct, and all too effective. They scare millions and offer them white national pride in place of jobs and guaranteed daycare.
The story of the Ukrainian David is equally simple. It’s so compelling that not even Donald Trump and Rand Paul dare speak against it.
For it is itself about a little guy with the chutzpah to fight Goliaths — the Putins, the Trumps, the MAGA bullies — on behalf of his people. It’s the original epic tale of the Good Guy standing up to the Bad Guy.
So, as they prepare to do battle this fall, tell the Democrats (and their pro-democracy allies) to stop touting policy gains over story; to stop playing defense against MAGA culture wars attacks; to stop wringing their hands and trying to understand the other guy’s — read the anti-democratic — point of view.
Tell your troops that it’s no longer the time for ‘national unity’; that, as John McCain would surely put it were he still alive, we are all Ukrainians now standing strong against the moral equivalent of Putin. Tell them that we are in a war for democracy in which they must channel their inner Zelensky.
Moral clarity is on your side. Nothing else matters. Please be well. We need you to be our Commander in Chief.
Paul Cohen