polydad

The 2025 off-year election happened about a month ago. Democrats won a number of highly important races in places like Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, plus a large number of down-ballot elections at the city and county level, with the most notable being that of Zohran Mamdani winning the moyorship of New York. A lot of punditry came out and shouted, “The Democrats are winning!”

We’re not winning. It’s just that the Republicans have finally angered enough of the electorate that they’re beginning to lose. There’s a difference, and we need to understand it. As a wise old woman once told me, “Voting isn’t really how things are run. The career bureaucrats run things, voting is a way to object, mostly. Someone always benefits or they won’t do the work keeping the thing running. The fight is usually over who controls the benefit.”

That’s what’s happening now. The people who elected Donald J. Trump and the rest of his (now literal) clown cars are upset that he isn’t delivering. As Paul Krugman put it on his blog the other day,

Trump ran a campaign about bring prices down, cutting the price of energy in half, making groceries much cheaper. He obviously hasn’t delivered and hasn’t even made an effort to deliver. I’m glad that people feel betrayed.

That’s what happened on November 4th. The electorate objected to being mislead. They objecteda to being lied to by this guy. They objected to being betrayed. Oh, yeah, you can find a lot of “people” on 𝕏itter (most of them Russian robots these days) pumping the MAGA rhetoric, and it can be frightening when we read that these machines are better than we are at picking the best way to change an individual’s polticial opinions. But even all that psychological warfare can’t win when so many basic things like meat, coffee, and medication have seemingly doubled in price over the past year.

Therein lies the problem. They’re not protesting the mistreatment of their latino. They’re not protesting the economic tornado that has devastated America’s Black communities. They’re not protesting the wave of anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-lesbian legislation, or the end of the postal service, or the termination of America’s prominence in science and medicine.

All of these will make it harder to live together as a nation in the future. The high prices, though, those are what make it harder to live at all in the present, and that’s what the electorate protested on November 4th.

The reason the Republicans are still winning is because they’re promising people they’ll do something. It may be objectional, you’ll hate some of it, but at least they’ll be doing something.

The Democrats routinely promise to do nothing. The grim joke with Democratic activist slogans is that, if by some miracle an election wave powerful enough to give them control of the goverment is allowed to ever happen, whoever they elect will issue a ton of pardons, a few congressional committee will issue reports about how bad it was but that nothing should be done because it would disrupt and damage “the comity of America” or whatever.

For example, Hakeem Jeffries, the current Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives, floated the Democrat National Committee’s choice of slogan for 2026 as “Strong Floor, No Ceiling.” Like, what the fuck does that even mean? Let me propose a better slogan:

Arrest all them bastards.

With a few remarkable exceptions at the municipal level, nobody has said anything like that.

There is one (ONE!) politician right now who loves the same America I do. Who, every time he’s on camera, praises something great about it: the natural parks it preserves, the vibrant cities where so many people live together, the beautiful farms and countryside that feed us. Who loves the visions of the artists, the vibrancy of queer people, the excellence of Black and Muslim athletes and scholars.

That politician is America’s most noteworthy socialist.

When was the last time you heard a white Democrat Congressman praise someone who wasn’t white or male? I looked, and I can’t find a recent incident of someone else defending Ilhan Omar from the Republican’s constant barrage of abuse. I can’t find a recent report of someone else defending Sarah McBride, the only transwoman in the House of Representatives.

I don’t want to hear some half-hearted, mumbled concession that, “Yeah, they shouldn’t be mean to Mrs. Omar or Ms. McBride or Ms. Octavio-Cortez.” I don’t want them to look embarrassed or ashamed that hey have spend some effort defending a woman or a black person or a trans person or a latina. I want them to be proud of their colleagues, to say what admirable features, ideas, and perspectives those colleagues bring to the table.

I want to hear a white Democratic Congressman say, “Look, I don’t agree with representative Omar on everything— we’re Democrats, we’re allowed to think for ourselves— but these attacks on her patriotism, her citizenship, and her commitment to representing her District are un-American and must stop.”

I want to hear Democrats say that America is loud and proud in all its forms. That well-funded and well-run cities are necessary for the health of a powerful, dynamic country. That the very word “civilization” comes from a Latin term for “to live peacefully aside strangers.” That freedom isn’t made better when we take away students’ freedoms to be who they are inside, or citizen’s freedoms to travel without documents, or women’s freedom to live without having to marry.

Mamdani won on a simple idea: “New York City is a fantastic place to live. People are struggling, true, but history shows us a lot of successful ways to ease their burdens and make New York City an even better place to live.” It’s a progressive vision. It’s a postive vision.

Do that with the America, Democrats.

Embrace, admire, and defend the people whose life paths aren’t your own. Say how much you love America, even the conservative, rural parts of it. Say how great the country is, admit to its flaws, and say it could be even better.

And that you’ll arrest all them bastards.