Dems Need to Understand They Are In a New System

This started as a Blue Sky thread in response to another Blue Sky thread by a Democratic staffer. That might be the most dangerously internet sentence I have ever written. Regardless, I think the argument is worth expanding on and cleaning up a touch since I think it gets at why there is a disconnect between Dem leadership and normal people.

And yes, more politics. What can I say — we have the misfortune of living in interesting times. And, to be fair, this is as much about managing systems as it is about politics. And managing systems is at the heart of anything in tech much more complicated than “Hello, World!”

Hey, it’s my newsletter so I’ll make up terrible justifications for going off topic if I want to. And I’ll cry if I want to, but that’s less about the newsletter and more about the lessons of 60s pop.

After all that throat clearing, I think this thread by a Democratic staffer demonstrates why the Dem leadership is out of step with the needs of the moment: (The tone in his thread is largely defensively condescending. I still think you should pay attention to him because he is a staffer and I doubt that he would be saying these things without, at some level, permission. And things are tough all over right now. It cannot be easy being a Dem staffer at the moment — we can spare a bit of grace for people on our side. Even if they are acting like Aaron Sorkin pilled twerps.)

But the toughest lump to swallow is that the most effective options available to elected leaders in the minority party in the legislative branch often look like #2 and #3 below, neither of which are responsive to an immediate crisis. You saw this when Dobbs was handed down-

Effective- -

Create space for R's to oppose nominees -

Build pressure on R's to oppose Trump policies or flip on bills -

Strengthen Dems' '25 and '26 electoral response -

Buttress legal challenges to Trump actions

These actually help but rarely solve, and let's be real- you're already mad at me

The two points he wants to emphasize as being the right thing to do are Build pressure on R’s to oppose Trump and strengthen Dem electoral prospects in 2026 and 2028. The problem is that he thinks that being reasonable, and not being confrontational, makes it more likely that the GOP will be helpful in the worst cases:

2 examples. Senate Ds slow it all down & vote against every nom. Cathartic? Very! And it unifies R's and stops wobbly ones from breaking with Trump. Dems vote for noms like Duffy, saying 'we're reasonable, but RFK/Tulsi are uniquely bad.' Does it raise odds they go down? Yes! And people are big mad

He then goes on to assert that the Dems are choosing to be effective, but that is the gist of the problem. He cannot see that they are actually not, that he no longer works in the system he did before the 2024 election.

First, he mislabels the reason the election was lost. He asserts that the election was decided by economic issues:

The catharsis v effectiveness divide is widespread, but it's just massive on electoral strategy. "Price of eggs" is an in-joke on Bluesky 3 months after an election that hinged on inflation/kitchen table economic issues. Look at the dunks on this Klob piece vs what she said-

This is, at best, a wild oversimplification. And it’s not even believed by the Dems themselves. If it were really about economic issues, they would have felt free to shoot down the culture-war immigration surrender that was the Laken Riley Act. Instead, they helped pass it despite it not having any effect on the price of eggs. The issue was never the economy — it was always the information environment.

Trump won news deserts, for example, by his largest margin. The more people had access to facts, the better Harris did. If economics was the main issue, it was only because the Dems could not push through the information environment to get the facts in front of voters. Where Harris campaigned the most, her losses were the narrowest. Dem voters stayed home, in part (not entirely, mind you) because Dem messaging never really had a chance.

If you want to change that dynamic, you need to change the information environment. One way to do that is to do something big and unusual, like going to the Treasury and demanding to be let in and accosting all the little Musk sycophants trying to get into classified data, our social security information, and the payment system. All of that is illegal and it all would draw attention to the issues.

Merely talking about the fact that prices are not going down is not going to stand a chance in the face of a massive propaganda campaign equating higher prices with patriotism. By doing so, you are not communicating effectively, and you are diminishing the moral, and thus the engagement, of your base. You cannot win without that base. By trying to be reasonable, you thus diminish your electoral chances, especially in the midterms of 2026.

Now, that might be worth the cost if it had a decent chance of getting the GOP to vote against Trump and Musk. But that is not the most likely scenario. Trying that route, being quiet and “reasonable” in order to get help seems like trying to draw to an inside straight with missing cards. In fact, this strategy has already failed. Senator Tillis if North Carolina is perhaps the most endangered GOP senator. He could have killed the Hegseth nominee, but he chose not to. Why? Certainly not because he believes Hegseth is qualified. No, it most likely has to do with the fact that Trump owns the GOP voting base and Musk has threatened to use his fortune to go after people who deviate from the MAGA/Musk orthodoxy.

That is the system that we now live in. You cannot reasonable your way out of it. The GOP will not help you because their incentives are no longer amenable to that kind of persuasion. It likely would have worked in the past, but the past is a distant country, now. We need to live and work with the system we have until we can fix it. And that means you have to find something that the GOP is more afraid of than Trump backing a primary challenger that Musk funds. The only thing that could possibly overcome those hammers is the fear of voters.

But they will not fear voters unless voters are enraged about something. And voters won’t be enraged by something unless they know about it. Hence, the showy actions that the staffer is so disdainful of are also most likely to be the most effective. By rallying people against Musk’s takeover of the government, they put the only possible kind of pressure on GOP Congresspeople that has any hope of moving them off the MAGA/Musk line. And it has the added benefit of re-engaging your base, increasing your odds of winning in 2026 and 2028.

The thread by this Dem staffer shows just how badly the Dem leadership is misunderstanding the system they now live and work under. Probably because they don’t want to believe the nice people they work with really are that compromised, especially in the Senate, and because the new system makes it much more difficult for them to function. It requires more action, more effort, more thought than the one they used to inhabit. Change is never easy.

But unless they do change, I suspect that they are going to continue to find themselves pressured by people who understand the moment better than they do. And in 2026, a lot of them are going to find that they are no longer part of the system regardless of its shape. Either they depress the base so badly that they lose their seats, or they are swept out by the base’s rage in primaries. Either way, the sooner they recognize the new system they work in the better for them.

And the country.