Why Democrats Are Inept At Politics

Ideological warfare, psychopathy, and the dream of post-political technocracy

The tides of American politics shift as each of the two major parties wins congressional representation of roughly half of the voting population and has gone back and forth with presidencies for a century and half. This might suggest the two parties are equally capable, but that suggestion would be far from true.

If politics is nonlethal warfare between ideologically driven populations and their leaders, a struggle to terminate not your opponents themselves but their values, ideas, and capacity to influence society, the Republicans excel at politics and the Democrats are politically inept.

Yet the Democratic leaders are, of course, politicians, which means their function is to do politics. Therefore, the Democratic Party is as absurd and useless as a fish that can’t swim. This means that since the end of the New Deal in the 1970s and ‘80s — and I’ll come to that historical transition when Democrats became incompetent — the United States has been effectively a one-party pseudo-democracy.

Proof of Democratic Ineptitude

Luckily, the premise of political malpractice can be proven swiftly to allow us to address the more interesting matter of the mystery of why this asymmetry has arisen. I can prove that the Democrats can’t do politics, just by observing that in 2020 Donald Trump got more votes than he did in 2016 and nearly won re-election. The results in several of the battleground states were extremely close, the Republicans picked up seats in the House, and the Democrats failed to flip any state legislatures. That latter loss will cement the Republican gerrymandering they’d put in place in 2010.

Given the pandemonium of Trump’s anti-presidency, the 2020 election should have been a wipeout. Have a look at the US election map from 1984 when Ronald Regan trounced Walter Mondale. Do you see how every single state was red apart from Minnesota, that being Mondal’s home state which he won with only a 0.18 percent margin? That’s how the map should have looked in 2020, but with 49 blue states instead of red ones. That’s how it would have looked if Trump had been a Democrat, and he were running for re-election against Republicans.

All by itself, the fact that the Democrats, after winnowing their field of a whopping 29 candidates couldn’t demolish the Republicans in the name of Humanity for perpetrating the travesty of Trump’s “term in office” demonstrates that the two parties have vastly unequal political skills.

However, if you’re inclined to want bonus evidence, I submit the fact that the two most skilled Democratic politicians since WWII, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were effective only in smiling and speechifying, not in selling or implementing their progressive values. If you’re great at getting elected, but as soon as you’re elected you betray the values you ran on, you’ve already lost the political war.

Remember, that’s what politics is: the attempt to negate the opposition’s policy agenda. If you negate your policies and principles because you turn out to be a centrist or a neoliberal rather than a progressive who strongly disagrees with the conservative’s so-called alternative vision, you’ve done your opponents’ work for them. You’ve failed as a politician and surrendered in the political arena. Running a campaign to get elected is not a politician’s main job. If democratic politics were a novel, getting elected would be the preface. As presidents, Clinton and Obama failed to write anti-Republican narratives. Therefore, they didn’t know how to do politics.

Notice how when a Republican is elected president or when Republicans gain control of Congress, the opposite happens: they attempt to destroy the Democratic Party’s stated values as going concerns. They wage the war they’re actually in, whereas Democrats “play nice” to “unite the country” because “they’re all Americans, after all.” That is, the Democrats are so obtuse that they don’t realize they’re at war with an opposing American ideology, so they surrender from the outset.

Politics is War Between Ideologies

But enough of that. Stating the obvious is in no one’s interest, nor is beating a dead horse, so let’s shift to solving the mystery of why this has happened to the US, before tackling the elephant in the room which is that although progressive Democrats are currently politically incompetent, in the first half of the twentieth century, progressives spearheaded the Progressive and New Deal eras.

The solution should reckon with several factors. First, there’s no reason why everyone should be equally effective in politics, just as we shouldn’t expect everyone to be equally brave as a soldier. In any large population some people will have the skills to wage ideological warfare, and others won’t. Those who have the skills may join forces to dominate the ideological landscape, or those with these skills will naturally see things the same way and gravitate to the same party.

That shortage of political skills, combined with the incentive to pool resources for total domination accounts for the inequality in question, but not for why the dominant politicians in the US should be Republicans rather than Democrats.

To see why Republicans currently excel in their job, we need to reflect more on what politics involves. Again, politics is warfare between ideologies. Morality, fairness, conscience, compassion, good faith, decency — these humanitarian values have no place in such a struggle, just as you don’t get ahead in military ventures by aiding your enemy. Literal war is a matter of mass murder, the very worst thing of which humans are capable. Similarly, ideological war is about discrediting an opponent’s ideology, myths, and ideals, and preventing the opposing policy platform from seeing the light of day.

Ask yourself who excels at fighting full-blown wars. If you’re unsure, have a look at the history of warfare and observe that ninety-nine percent of the world’s warriors have been coarse, fearsome, cold-blooded, physically powerful young men. The reason why is plain: the natural division of labor from the Paleolithic period has made women the primary managers of the household and specifically of children. The constructive, supportive values needed to raise children are the opposite of those needed to carry out mass murder in war.

Now take those amoral martial values of bellicosity, strip them of their military context, and set them loose in the nonlethal, sublimated, political struggle between ideologues. Instead of shooting people, now you’re shooting down policy proposals and your opponents’ careers and popular support. Instead of conquering territory and enslaving or slaughtering the defeated population, the political purpose in a democracy is to neutralize the opposing parties, gain a mandate, and implement your agenda for the nation’s sake. In democracy you do this with demagoguery unless telling the people the unvarnished truth happens to be politically advantageous, which is rarely the case, assuming the educational system is underfunded, as it is in the US.

In war, then, soldiers are adept at murdering, whereas politicians must master the art of lying. In politics you sell yourself and your ideas, not by reasoning with the public and with your opponents, but by outmaneuvering them so that the act of persuading them becomes a foregone conclusion. Politics is Machiavellian — which calls for quasi-martial values that are still the province mainly of cunning men.

Exemplary Politicians are Psychopathic

Those who should be attracted to politics because they’d naturally be proficient in that field are subcriminal psychopaths. They need to be sufficiently narcissistic to think they ought to try to rule over or to speak for many people, and they must be shameless to justify to themselves their litany of public deceptions, backstabs, arm-twists, corruptions, and calculations for counterproductive, transitory gain.

As a Psychology Today article on psychopaths points out, “Charm, lies, manipulation, and a lack of remorse — these are the marks of a psychopath.” And those traits are just what you need to get elected and to retain political power even when you’re constantly under threat by rivals looking to unseat you.

Psychopathy is associated mainly with men, but there are female psychopaths too. As the above article notes, though, “research suggests that the people who make management decisions will show little support for displays of coldheartedness or dominance in female leaders. Researchers recently undertook a meta-analysis of previous studies and reported evidence that psychopathic features tend to be tolerated or affirmed in men but not in women.”

In other words, because psychopathy is culturally associated with masculinity — perhaps because of the tens of thousand of years in which men did most of the killing in hunting and in war — men can afford to wear their psychopathy on their sleeves, whereas female psychopaths have an extra incentive to conceal those traits.

(Indeed, female psychopaths may have a conflict of interest because of their mothering instincts, which would explain why these women are less violent than male psychopaths. This would explain also why, “Unlike their male counterparts…females with psychopathic traits respond normally to emotional words. Despite impairments, they score better on emotional intelligence than males.”)

This is consistent with the infamous double standard in politics, detested by feminists. In her runs for president, for example, Hillary Clinton was criticized for her “robotic” efficiency and for her apparent lack of a genuine personality. The inane presumption in those news reports was that male politicians reveal exactly who they are to the public, rather than just a contrived persona.

Republican Masculinity and Democratic Femininity

In any case, here we have the makings of a partial solution to the mystery at hand. The skills needed for political excellence overlap with psychopathic traits, and those who can let fly their psychopathy flag, as it were, are men, not women. Now we need merely compare Republicans and Democrats with this question in mind: Is one of the two parties dominated by men and by masculine values?

The question is practically rhetorical. Recall that conservativism is a pseudo-philosophy to begin with, a self-destructive ruse to overturn the progress achieved by the advent of personhood as such, to impose animalistic social structures such as the monarchy or the plutocracy, only making empty excuses for succumbing to the default social dynamic of the dominance hierarchy. In practice, conservatism is an excuse to live like animals, to stop thinking so much, and to prevent the outbreak of any social organization that would maximize everyone’s creative potential. Conservatism is about making do with a tiny minority’s domination and exploitation of the majority.

But those are masculine values, the preoccupation with mastery and submission deriving from men’s role as Stone Age hunters of wild game. In most cases, women foraged for more reliable foods to feed the growing children, while men showed off to gain mating advantages, by hunting for meat that was harder to acquire. As a result, men are inclined to think in terms of zero-sum contests in which the predator prevails over the prey, or “the better man wins.”

By contrast, women prefer to think of compromises and of broader questions of welfare since they’re used to nurturing babies and raising children. While men hunted fellow mammals, destroying countless whole animal families in the process, women gathered materials in a more obviously sustainable fashion, picking only so many berries and mushrooms that would grow back in the very same spot within weeks or months.

Women’s prehistoric jobs promoted a mindset that favoured long-term and holistic advantages, whereas men’s jobs required them to focus on tactical gains achieved by ruthless methods. Women tended to be nurturing while men were remorseless killers and guardians.

As the so-called conservative party, the Republicans prize masculinity. This is apparent even from the tallies of women in Congress. As you can see, the numbers were roughly equal until the 1970s, when the Democrats started to double the Republican representatives and senators. The numbers even up again in the 1980s because of Reagan’s coattails, but the pattern resumes in the ’90s. In 1997, for example, the Democrats had 43 congresswomen, the Republicans 20. By 2019, the Democrats had 105, the Republicans 21.

These numbers are only crude indicators, though, since there can be masculine women and feminine men. The above evolutionary psychological explanation must be countered by our susceptibility to historical and cultural developments. We’re not still living in the Stone Age, after all.

The real issue, then, is the cultural difference between the rural, less-educated, fundamentalist, patriarchal conservative culture that’s voted Republican since at least the 1960s, and the urban, overeducated, secular, feministic, liberal culture that’s voted Democratic over that same period. Indeed, Republicans have even reached a toxic level of masculinity, under Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Sara Palin, and Donald Trump, while the cancel culture, progressive smugness, and “snowflake” values of overprotectiveness among Democrats have achieved the status of being hyperfeminine.

Why, then, are Democrats currently incapable of succeeding as politicians, as champions of their progressive, anti-conservative ideology? In part because politics calls for martial values that are antithetical to progressives since the latter tend to have feminine or mollycoddled, infantile characters. Feminists won political rights for women by fighting for progress in government, but in the long run feminism may prove counterproductive by negating the Democratic check on the conservatives’ troglodytic predilections.

Democrats’ Post-Political Technocracy

Still, hyperfemininity which naturally proves helpless in the shadow of overbearing masculinity only partly explains the Democrats’ weakness in reining in Republican savagery. The other side to this weakness stems from the nature of the progress that Democrats are supposed to promote. Ultimately, social progress consists in any society’s resistance to the tide of animal squalor. Many instincts and power dynamics steer us back into a pecking order or a master-slave relationship. We progress when we promote our anomalous traits of personhood, our self-awareness, reason, autonomy, and creativity.

Again, regardless of their obfuscating rhetoric which is always belied by the systematic effects of their policies, conservatives are opposed to any such progress. Conservatives are avatars of the natural order (of the wilderness) and are appalled by the prospect of a society that’s made purely for people rather than for human animals.

The problem is that the more you emphasize the conditions for social progress, the more you think we ought to have transcended the need for politics. Liberalism entailed that the economy would automate social progress, leaving room only for a minimal government of technocrats. Socialism, too, promoted Taylorism, the scientific management of society that would optimize government and business.

In both case, politics as ideological warfare seems barbaric and retrograde. If there’s such a thing as political science, there should be no need for Machiavellian shenanigans in government. You just gather the experts and reach a consensus on how to improve social efficiency. Supposedly, the capitalistic economy runs itself, and the minimal government or the socialist bureaucrats just calculate the most effective means of achieving the shared goals.

That is, liberals and socialists envision a time when everyone will agree on those societal goals: everyone wants to be happy, or the proletariat will inherit the earth and create a worker’s paradise. Those are precisely ideals that preclude politics since in those ideal worlds there would be no ideological dispute. This was the point of Francis Fukuyama’s speculation in 1992 that the end of the Cold War spelled the triumph of liberalism and thus “the end of history,” that is, the end of ideological conflict in the grand Hegelian sense.

And this is the point of the overprotectiveness and decadence we see in bastions of urbane liberalism, in the big cities not just of the US but of more thoroughly liberal or social democratic countries such as Canada and northern Europe. Liberals think they can afford to fatten themselves as jolly optimistic consumers, because the main battles have already been fought against fascism and communism. They think there’s no danger in infantilizing ourselves, in being preoccupied with trivial entertainments or idle academic disputes or with turning our governments into reality television spectacles, because we’ve already won: our democratic, capitalistic nations automate our happiness.

We’re running on autopilot: you work a day job, you shop, and you bring home some material goods to please your family. The merchandise will always be there, and the government will inspect the goods to ensure they have no disastrous side effects, based on the advice of experts. Even if nature halts such progress when a pandemic arises, we’re confident we’ll get through it and get back to where we were, because there’s no viable alternative.

Moreover, from this progressive perspective of modern decadence, philosophical and religious truth turns out to be subjective and relative and therefore not worth fighting over. This is the upshot of “postmodernity,” of the hyperskepticism that emerged when the forces of modernity recoiled back on themselves, leaving us shellshocked with crypto-nihilism, ennui, anxiety, and depression.

To the extent that these ideals and presumptions are at the heart of the late-modern Democratic Party, we shouldn’t expect Democrats to be effective at politics. Just as “libertarian” Republicans are foxes guarding the hen house, since they’d prefer a state of virtual anarchy and thus are tasked with the easiest job in the world, to sabotage government from within, Democrats also don’t belong in government.

Democrats don’t believe in politics, not even when faced with the implacable resistance to social progress in the US, from the rural dead zones, the hollowed-out slums, and the “Christian” equivalent of the antimodern Taliban. The Democratic leaders are either naïve, infantilized, and hyperfeminine progressives who don’t stand a chance against cutthroat Republican savages, or they’re centrist or socialist technocrats who think political warfare is obsolete. In either case, these pseudopoliticians would be suited to operating in a large, undivided bureaucracy, one in which there’s no truculent opposition or in which only technical questions of application remain.

This, then, is another reason why Democrats resemble Bambi in the crosshairs. They don’t know what they’re doing because their head is in the clouds. They think they’ve already won even when confronted with an international populist backlash against liberal democracy, and even when their country elects a troll as president to mock and desecrate the symbols of liberalism’s alleged eternal victory.

Democrats know that only half the US regularly votes, and that that vote is split roughly in half between the two major parties. Yet Democrats presume that Americans are united in patriotism. Democrats see no need to take off the kid gloves, because they’re taught to be sentimental about the triumph of modernity even as modernity undermines itself with hyperskepticism. Or Democrats are proud of being level-headed and scientistic — and thus blind to the depths of their country’s internal divisions.

Even if Democrats wanted to act as genuine politicians and to destroy the Republican’s regressive ideology, first by calling it out for the antihuman savagery it is and then by ruthlessly making it impossible for Republicans to defend it without embarrassing themselves, Democrats couldn’t wage this war without violating their progressive principles. Democrats think they’re enlightened Buddhas, whereas what they need to be are Bodhisattvas, because the barbarians are at the gates, barking nonsense and handing the twenty-first century to China.

The New Deal: When Progressives Were Effective

That, then, is my solution to the mystery. I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t address some obvious objections. First, it can’t be that progressives as such are inept at politics, because early American progressives produced the New Deal. This only complicates the picture, however, without overturning it.

Notice that the Progressive Era was led initially by the Republicans under Theodore Roosevelt. What happened was that the Gilded Age left the US in a state of unsustainable economic inequality. Under Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party was founded to pursue the progressive agenda of ending slavery. Roosevelt carried forward that sentiment, pursuing a policy platform of environmental conservation and antitrust legislation.

But in the early twentieth century, the Republicans were split between progressives and conservatives. Roosevelt groomed William Howard Taft to succeed him as a progressive Republican (a barely intelligible oxymoron today, of course), but Taft preferred regressive policies, which led Roosevelt to leave the party and which doomed Taft’s chances against Woodrow Wilson, who sustained the Progressive Era.

Thus, the early progressives in the Democratic Party had it relatively easy because the Republicans were divided. As for the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrats rode two waves: American patriotism during the first world war, and the need to rebuild the country after the Great Depression.

To be sure, Franklin Roosevelt was a skilled politician who twisted many arms in Congress to pass the New Deal. He had the additional advantage, though, of operating before the rise of computers and social media, which exacerbated hyperskepticism and trivialized art and ideologies, turning politics into infotainment for the masses. That cynicism further undermines high-minded progressive rhetoric and fuels Republican atavism.

In the 1970s, the American business community entered the fray against progressives such as Ralph Nader, via the Business Roundtable. Like Cornel West, Nader become a caricature of himself. Both progressive ideologues came to resort to tired, formulaic mantras about corporatism and oligarchy because they don’t confront the deep reasons why the Democratic Party rejected or snubbed them.

And in the 1960s, the Republican Party coalesced around the witch’s brew of the racial southern strategy, rabid Christian fundamentalism, and plutocratic American imperialism. That incoherent coalition nevertheless led to Reagan’s realignment of the discourse in the 1980s. From that point on, the Democratic Party effectively laid down its sword.

Indeed, then, when there was no united opposition and when Democrats could ride epochal transitions in history such as WWI and the Great Depression, and when the progressive message wasn’t yet commodified or trivialized by the all-encompassing neoliberal deference to the market, progressives and the Democrats could act technocratically and could implement Keynesian ideas about how to save capitalism from itself.

But when the battle was joined, as Republicans reacted to the civil rights movement by scapegoating the hippies for the loss in the Vietnam War, and by shamelessly combining Christianity and heartless social Darwinism, Democrats lost their nerve or perhaps showed that their ideology was flawed from the outset.

The Embarrassment of America’s Enduring Military Supremacy

One last objection to consider is that there seems to be plenty of social progress outside of the US, in the Scandinavian social democracies for example, so again the problem might not be with the progressive ideology itself. Despite recent setbacks in many of those more egalitarian or humane democracies, as in the populist backlash and surge of neoliberalism in some of the countries that follow the Nordic model, there is indeed an American complication that ends up supporting the above analysis.

The US was a global superpower after WWII, and once the Soviet Union collapsed, the US became the dominant military and economic force. What that means in this context is that the US has unique temptations on the world stage. For most of the twentieth century, the US could vent its masculine impulses on outward enemies. After the two world wars came the Cold War, which again enabled Americans to feel relatively united against a common enemy to “the American way of life.”

But once the soviets were eliminated as an existential threat, Americans’ masculine energies turned inward in search of a demonic foe. Fox News and various right-wing demagogues on talk radio exacerbated this internal culture war, the upshot of which was that snooty American liberals became the new existential threat for “real Americans.”

Other democracies have no such perverse, militaristic dynamic because their militaries aren’t all-powerful, and they have no realistic plans for world domination. The US had to transition from being a military superpower with genuine existential threats that had to be defeated or reckoned with, to a disingenuous superpower that kept its military dominance even after the enemies had been dispatched.

American culture had to remain largely xenophobic and jingoistic for Americans to have any chance of rationalizing the continuing expense of their military behemoth. The flames of masculine martial values had to be fanned, which required a new enemy. Militant Islam could do in a pinch, especially after 9/11, but that foe proved to be a paper tiger. George W. Bush’s exaggeration about the scale of the “Axis of Evil” should have proved humiliating, when it turned out that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. But these toxically masculine neoconservatives had little capacity for shame.

Humble, sensitive politicians wouldn’t be inclined to oversee military adventures that inevitably kill thousands of civilians. Again, the values that had to be preserved to maintain the American way of life were those of the Stone Age hunter and of the soldier. The US needed a hypermasculine culture to justify its military global dominance. Conservatives allowed the show to go on by weaponizing the culture war, by demonizing everything from Democrats to socialists, intellectuals, experts, and celebrities.

Other democracies have no such dubious imperative to maintain their equilibrium. Canadian liberals, for example, don’t confront the raw savagery that’s at the heart of all “conservative thought.” Canadian conservatives are as emasculated as American liberals and socialists. This is because Canada hasn’t been hijacked by a military-industrial complex that drains its progressive lifeforce.

Canadian “politics” is indeed technocratic and devoid of vision, which makes Canada’s political debates exceedingly boring. Canada’s welfare state is largely taken for granted, because the “conservatives” can publicly voice only niggling disagreements about how to implement certain policies. Canada’s conservatives aren’t driven by fundamentalist resentments and rank psychopathy because Canada has no absurdly oversized military to sustain or military imperialism to excuse.

Of course, Canada relies indirectly on American supremacy, so Canadian sanctimony should ring hollow throughout the world. But how much greater must be the surprise of American hypocrisy and of the ongoing irrelevance of the Democratic Party?