How Democrats are Like Soviet-era Communists

We’ve heard forever from Fox and allies that Democrats are socialists, by which they either mean that we’re like Soviet-era Communists, or like Hitler-era National Socialists, depending on whatever lie they want to make up. All bullshit, of course — Democrats are hardly socialists of any stripe. If we were socialists, we’d at least be promising to nationalize SpaceX.

But there is one bit of truth to that charge: when it comes to “messaging,” the current incarnation of the Democratic Party moves like the Soviet-era Communist Party. The decision-making is slow and what’s churned out is late and weak. Politico encapsulates this with a headline: Dems seethe over war plan group chat. How to stick it to the GOP is an open question. 

The one piece of organized response to Signalgate that I’ve seen is a letter from Tim Kaine and some other senators. The Democrats lucked out because Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel were already scheduled for a hearing this morning and they were able to get a few good TV hits, and the hearings were on Fox so some truth got out. But luck isn’t a strategy, and despite the promised “rapid response” from Democrats, there is no, coordinated, long-term response to what should be major scandals.

The reality is that their decision making process about any kind of opposition is so fucking slow that they’re chronically days late and dollars short. There’s no contingency planning — part of the reason Schumer caved on the CR was that Dems were surprised by Johnson’s ability to pass the CR in the House. Their entire strategy was that Johnson would need Democratic votes, and when that didn’t happen, they had no Plan B. And their entire strategy to fight Trump is to focus on Social Security and Medicaid. Fine, as far as it goes, but it completely limits their ability to react quickly to other terrible things done by Trump and Musk, of which there are many.

It’s almost sad to look at the Democrats’ rapid response BlueSky account. It’s supposedly staffed by the same people who did the excellent KamalaHQ accounts on all the big social networks, but it only posts a few times a day. The content isn’t bad, but it’s, well, bland. Nothing like the quick-witted cleverness shown by the KamalaHQ accounts before the election. It’s called “Fact Post News” - if that name isn’t the product of a committee, I don’t know what is.

So am I just bitching in this post? Mostly. I woke up this morning and started to look for anything that even slightly resembled the avalanche of shit that would be falling on Democrats if the shoe were on the other foot. I found very little. Pete Buttigieg said something, a couple social media postings, etc. Kudos to all who did post, they’re not the problem. It’s the silent majority.

If Democratic leadership put half of the effort into messaging, that Schumer is putting into defending his leadership position, we’d be in a lot better shape. Not to mention the constant undercutting of our message by our supposed stars. Reader S sent in a good New Yorker piece on empty-suit pretty-hair Newsom’s disastrous podcast. The piece’s author, Jay Caspian Kang, imagines Newsom’s stump speech, correctly I think:

Newsom finally had a decent guest, Tim Walz, who noted, correctly, that Democrats are “unified in being pissed off at the Democratic Party.” Reader S also shared this graph:

You don’t dig yourself out of this kind of a hole with a rapid response team staffed by septuagenarians and a social media account that posts a half dozen times per day.