I Guess I’ll Write a 2028 Post

AOC’s appearance in Munich got people talking about 2028, and Steve M was moved to write a very Steve M piece about it yesterday. The gist is that some people “on the left” are saying they won’t vote for Newsom, and Steve’s point is that Newsom isn’t a fascist. Steve sees a Democratic bloodbath versus a disciplined, organized JD Vance walkover. I have some thoughts, even though I’d rather avoid 2028 speculation.

JD: We look at JD Vance and see a couchfucking dweeb or lying fascist. But he’s pretty popular with right wingers, in part because he’s such an accomplished sophist. He’s an excellent liar in the “I can spin out lies quickly and respond to being challenged with nasty bullshit” sense. So, he’s a serious candidate in 2028, maybe, but there are a lot of factors between now and then. The Trump personality cult has kept the lid on criticism of Vance and jockeying to replace him, but if Trump dies or is a diminished figure in 2028, there are going to be a ton of Republicans with knives out for Vance. I used to think that people who were hoping that Trump would die in office were missing that Vance would be worse. Perhaps, but there would be massive infighting and jockeying from people like Noem, Hegseth, Miller and the rest as they try to take Vance’s place.

The Lack of Unity on an Anti-Trumpist Message: At the moment, the Democratic Party is divided between those who believe that an anti-Trump message is sufficient (Jeffries and Schumer are in this group) and those who realize that the fight is against the Trumpist Republican Party. So whoever runs in 2028 will have to deal with this party fracture, which will probably get worse if the House (and maybe the Senate) are in Democrats’ hands, since the anti-Trump faction will think they won the election. Whoever runs in 2028 will be on one or another side of this divide, and I’d argue if they try to split it down the middle, they’re going to please nobody and lose.

The magnitude of the 2029 challenge. It’s conventional wisdom that sunny, hope-y messages win elections (Reagan, Obama, etc.). I don’t know how a Democrat can run in 2028 without setting the stage for a massive reform in 2029. And that massive reform is going to affect a lot of formerly sacred cows, including billionaires, the Supreme Court, etc. If you look back on transformational presidencies (FDR, LBJ), the stage was set by a major social upheaval (the Depression, the Civil Rights movement). Neither FDR nor LBJ had the medía deck stacked against them in the way that the 2028 Democratic winner will. The winner will have navigate between the rock of a public looking for quick fixes and the hard place of widespread pre-Trump institutional decay plus Trumpist wreckage.

Fighter vs Non-Fighter: People want to cast the refusal to vote for Newsom as a left vs center dispute, but it’s really a fighter vs non-fighter dispute in that a real fighter has sufficient durable convictions at the core of their character to keep them from doing weak-ass fear-driven shit like throwing trans people under the bus. Pritzker, AOC, and I’m sure others who will run in 2028 have shown that they’re pretty solid under pressure, even though I wouldn’t characterize Pritzker as a “leftist”. The perceived lack of fight, not the “leftism” of the Democratic Party, is why our approval ratings are in the toilet.

This is getting long, but what is really needed in 2028 is someone with some fight running on a broadly agreed-upon Project 2029 that clearly states what Democrats want to do if they have a trifecta.