Keep Cleaning House

If the downside of socializing when you’re a doctor is getting asked for free medical advice, the equivalent for journalists has always been: “Here’s what you guys should really be reporting on.” While traveling across the South and Midwest this summer, I noticed things starting to change. Instead of giving me unsolicited story ideas, people asked variations of: “When do we get to start hanging them?” Everyone I met, it seemed — including smiling, round-cheeked old Southern folks who spent their careers working with children — wanted to know what kinds of beheadings are permitted by the Constitution.

Last night’s results — in which the Democrats seized bicameral control and sent hundreds of GOP state officeholders home to reflect on their sins — suggest these people constituted a robust sample. 

This anger was not hard to see mounting over the last year, even if it was often impossible to print for Secret Service reasons. If you only emerged for No Kings rallies every few months like some kind of political cicada, the progression in civic mood was unmistakable. You could have made a tidy sum betting that the posters with the most legally actionable depictions of graphic political violence belonged to someone’s grandma.

As I wrote here one year ago, the opening bid was, is and shall remain vengeance. The diverse lampreys of the Beltway press have already begun staking claims to which constituencies, messages and tactics were the cause of (or vindicated by) last night’s results, but they are drowned out by the sheer implacable face of the outcome. The hapless vamping of Fox News’ election night panel speaks to that; there’s not a lot of “but actually…” and “well, the Biden administration…” that you can gloss onto Fuck You.

Legacy media stands ready to ensure that Democrats winning don’t amount to victories. The New York Times dipped its toe in this pond before 9 a.m., publishing an election analysis featuring the declaration, “While the night may have delivered a sweeping win for Democrats, it was far from a mandate.” That quote has since been deleted, which suggests tantalizingly that even a racist conservative newspaper is capable of being embarrassed.

Dishonest framing will get a lot of work over the next weeks and months from the same people who told you that Donald Trump’s 0.5% margin of victory in 2024 launched the Thousand-Year Reich. Mostly that will amount to perverting word usage in a way that would excite only William Safire. The above quotation hints at the easiest out: Mandates are only for something, not against them. Voting for Trump is a mandate for the things Trump does; voting against Trump and the things Trump does, however, is something else we can skip figuring out. In this way, the status quo retains its seat: America has one political party, and it has one large focus group, and periodically the latter fills out enough of the “How’s Our Governing?” comment cards and stuffs the box enough that we have to finally empty it without reading them.

But if the media and the hegemonic party have closed their ears to a plainly articulated “Fuck the fuck off, forever,” one hopes at least the party notionally in opposition hears it. If nothing else, last night should bury forever the theory that the Democratic Party can skip contesting any race. One would think that the politics of “assuming you’ll fail and preemptively quitting so you can guarantee you’ll fail” would have failed already. They absolutely have now. Again.

Leaving opportunity on the table and waiting for your opponent to mess up enough that it doesn’t matter remains a proud and time-tested strategy among Democratic leadership. Circumstances gifted Democrats a perfect storm of loathsome candidates, public predation and open crime with which to bundle an internally consistent and timely package of voting rights, court reform and anti-corruption legislation. Effectively addressing these issues is an existentially necessary pretext for anything else the party might hope to do. Yet candidates were left to pick and choose elements of that messaging, without any unifying outcome or party principle, while the overall institutional focus remained on hoping the president continued to be the Democrats’ best campaigner and saying the word “affordability.” Not only does that word not address any of the preceding concerns, it doesn’t even come with a plan for its own.

The good feelings produced by this blue wave are enough to wash away the piles of opportunities left on the table by Democratic leadership. Elon Musk — the fattest Nazi target since Göring took his last vitamin — managed to underwrite the GOP midterms without a Democratic Party clanging the same bell over and over again: Why is it that the world’s most famous Nazi, a guy three genocide-wishes deep on social media on a good day, thinks that the only good candidates in America all come from the party putting the Gestapo on our streets?

For such a great night, it still ended on a brown note. Any hope that those steering the ship know where they’re going was dispelled by presumptive Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer acting like he’d just rolled out of bed to read a note from his wife saying she’d left him. He described the Democrats’ win as coming “against all odds,” which naturally provokes the question, “If you were certain your good works would fail, why are you even on the job?”

Presumptive Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries fared little better. Already saddled with the messaging setback of being a leader with no discernible philosophy and no evident passion for any aspect of his job, he responded to his party’s historic victory with, “This is not a partisan moment. This is a patriotic moment. This is not a blue moment or a red moment. It’s a red, white and blue moment because America has won tonight.” America hasn’t seen anyone refuse to take the W this hard since the 2006 midterms. Next up is “accountability” without impeachment, whatever that means.

All told, leadership’s message was about what you’d expect for a party that watched the GOP try to roll back Roe v. Wade for 50 years without developing a legislative, legal or communications response if it happened. Schumer and Jeffries looked like the last people in America expecting their labors to produce something positive, and in this respect, they were correct for the last time. They couldn’t be more ill-suited to this moment without shoving them in the DeLorean and spinning the dial back 3,000 years.

The election already says as much, but with people determined not to read, you might as well say it out loud, and it’s a fair bet Schumer and Jeffries are about to hear it: Resign. The rest of us have work we want to do.