The Good Fight

Written in anger and in love to the only party that even pretends the worker is its own—by the worker, who is sick to death of watching you lose

I write to you as a friend, which is to say I write to you furious.

I do not waste this kind of anger on the other outfit. I expect nothing from the party of the boss, and I am rarely disappointed. But you—you are supposed to be ours. You put it on your banners and in your speeches: the party of the working man, the party of the little guy, the party of the union hall and the kitchen table. You are the only one of the two that even bothers to claim us. And that is exactly why this letter is written in such a heat, because a man does not rage at strangers. He rages at the brother who keeps promising to show up and keeps not showing up—and then acts wounded when the family stops believing him.

So let me tell you the hardest thing first, plainly, the way a friend should. You are losing the very people you say you exist to defend. Not losing them in some vague, hand-wringing way. Losing them in black and white, in the returns, election after election.

Look hard at that picture, because it is the whole tragedy in two pairs of bars. You won the diploma and lost the lunch pail. You won the people who are doing just fine and lost the people lying awake over the light bill. One of your own old hands looked at the wreckage and said the quiet part out loud—that you have become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party. Even the other side's men have noticed; they now stand up and crow, with a straight face, that they are the party of the working class. Think on the shame of that. The party of the bosses gets to play the friend of the worker—because the self-described party of the worker handed them the part.

And do not comfort yourself that this was a thunderclap out of a clear sky, a fluke of one bad year. It has been a slow, steady walk away—election after election, while you kept assuring yourself the next batch of suburbs would more than make up the difference.

How did it happen? It happened because somewhere along the way you fell in love—not with the worker, but with the policy. You became convinced that because you had the better white paper, you deserved to win. You bring a binder to a brawl. The house is on fire and you are at the curb explaining your twelve-point plan for fire-code reform, subsection by subsection, while the other fellow simply points at the flames and screams. And here is the kicker, the thing that ought to keep you up at night: even now, staring at a movement that runs on raw feeling, your answer is to assemble—I am not making this up—another enormous library of policy proposals. A movement punched you in the mouth and you responded with a footnoted bibliography.

Now I want to say the thing that stings the worst, because you need to hear it from somebody who's on your side. You keep losing to weaker arguments made by lesser men. You sit there, manifestly the better-prepared debater, with the studies and the figures and the credentials all in a row—and you lose anyway, to people whose case would not survive ten minutes of honest scrutiny. And it drives you to distraction, and you comfort yourself that the voters were fooled, that they were too dim to see they'd been had. Stop that. That contempt is the very rot we're talking about. The other side is beating you because it understands one true thing that you, in all your schooling, have forgotten: people do not vote on the merits of a subsection. They vote for whoever seems to see them, respect them, and fight for them. They vote with the gut. And the gut speaks a language of grievance and belonging and dignity and fear—and your opponents speak it fluently, while you answer a man's pain with a PDF.

So look—and it costs me something to say this—at the people who actually know how to throw a punch in this fight. The disaffected conservatives over at the Lincoln Project and the Bulwark are not your friends on policy; I'd argue half of it with them till sunrise. But by God, they understand combat. When they went after the strongman, they did not commission a study and strip it to a core message and focus-group it and re-edit it and roll it out three weeks after the moment had died. They went straight for the throat, fast, and they made you feel it. They were proud to say they never ran a single ad about an “issue.” They grasped that you do not fight to be the smartest body in the room. You fight to win—and winning means landing the blow while it still lands. Borrow their fist. Leave their politics on the shelf, but borrow the fist.

Let me be fair to you, because fairness is the whole creed of this paper, and because the truth here actually makes my case sharper. The hard fact is that your policies are often the better ones for working people. More often than not, when the dust settles, it is your side that raised the wage, protected the union, fought for the doctor's bill and the old-age pension. That is exactly what makes the losing unforgivable. You are not failing because you are wrong. You are failing because you would rather be correct than connected—because you treat a campaign like a seminar you intend to ace, when it is a street fight for the soul of a frightened country. To hold the better hand and keep losing the game is not bad luck. It is a failure of nerve. And nerve can be found.

So here is what we ask of you, we who still want to believe you—and make no mistake, we are asking, not because you've earned it lately, but because there is no one else to ask. Quit acting entitled to a loyalty you have not lately deserved. Get up out of the faculty lounge and go stand on the shop floor and the loading dock and the diner counter, and not just in October. Talk like a human being to other human beings. Pick loud, public fights with the powerful—name them, take them on, and let the worker watch you do it. Feel something, and have the courage to make us feel it with you. And if you will not always deliver the goods—well, at the very least speak to the man's needs as though they are real and urgent, because they are. But better, far better: speak to them and fight for them, both, the way you used to before you got so refined.

Fight Like You Mean It

We do not write this to bury you. We write it because you are the only party that even pretends the worker is its own, and a pretense is no longer enough—not at this hour, not with this much on the table. Somewhere in your house there is still the memory of what you were: the party that walked the picket line, that wrote the worker's dignity into the law, that was not too genteel to throw a punch on his behalf. Go find that memory and put it back to work. Remember whose name is on your banner. Stop losing to lesser men with lesser arguments because you were too proud to fight on the ground where elections are actually won—the human heart. Stand up. Speak plain. Throw the punch. Fight the good fight, out loud, like you mean it, for the people you swore were yours. And—because we are not done with you yet, not by a long shot—don't you dare lose hope.

— From the rank and file, who are still, against all the evidence you keep giving us, on your side.

Notes On The Record