Critics like Barker and Teixeira should be seen as what they are. They have brands to promote (self-loathing Democrats), narratives to tell (Democrats are bad) and right-wing audiences to please. They're not ever going to acknowledge any improvement because they'd lose their audience and relevance. I hadn't heard of Barker until recently, but Teixeira has been doing his bit for years. Neither of them are arguing in good faith and both should be ignored.
You're doing great work at Searchlight just like you did for Matt. I subscribed to Searchlight the second I found out what it was and have been a fan of what it puts out. Keep fighting the good fight.
Substack kept shoving Barker in my face and, despite being theoretically open to her style of criticism of the party, she didn’t do anything for me. She definitely seemed more driven by self-regard and contrarianism than any ethical or intellectual pursuit.
It’s a lucrative place to be in and a great way to get attention. There’s always a demand for people who hate their party. That’s the only reason anyone cares what John Fetterman says. To be fair, it goes both ways. Plenty of people who used to be Republicans are now #Resistance liberals. We all have to make a living somehow but I’m always wary of anyone like that.
I don’t care about Barker but it drives me insane how many people I like don’t get Teixeira’s bit. He’s been writing the exact same thing for years and people still treat him like he cares about the party and wants it to be better.
I’ve worked on a handful of campaigns and even ran a congressional primary campaign in 2020 (didn’t win, did a little more political work then decided this work was exhausting and I felt burnt out, and I moved onto other things)
One thing I can say about political consultants is that they are capable of making any argument they are paid to make, and have deep ideological flexibility.
In excerpts I’ve seen from her book, she talks about adopting pronouns for people but seems to suggest she’s uncomfortable with it and does it to please people/fit in. Now she’s going on Gutfeld and talking about how much she likes dating Alpha males.
She didn’t just leave the Democratic Party and criticize it from the left, she all of a sudden adopted a whole bunch of right leaning political positions
It feels like she’s trying to be a contrarian on purpose, which is very boring and reads dishonest. But it’s a great grift.
I look forward to at some point when the MAGA project collapses and she writes a sequel to her book and calls it “Nothing Right”
Ruy for his part has helped shift my own views as a former Republican into someone who now pines for the type of liberal patriot that he and John Halpin wrote about at that eponymous publication.
You can see their words as hollow, but reading them did me a lot of good and make me wish that we had "BernieDogs" like Bob Brooks running here in Colorado this cycle.
To me the big problem is how willing these kinds of critics are to conflate “what seems to be exciting to Brooklynites who post a lot on TikTok” with “what literal candidates to the United States Congress are doing”. This is a mirror image of the phenomenon that presents amongst Republicans, where like e.g. lesbian-bar-posting means “Democrats are Crazy” as the literal US President goes around talking about invading Canada
Part of the problem is that liberals, especially our commentariat, are almost always unwilling to stand up for the Democratic Party because they consider it inherently “partisan,” and don’t like the way it supposedly reflects on them. (Listen to Ezra Klein describe his philosophy on this if you want to hear a really obnoxious self-congratulatory version of it.) The overcorrection holding Democrats to a higher standard that often seemed to permeate the legacy media 20-30 years ago has spread to basically everybody in the party who ever talks about politics “seriously.” People who dare point out our government would have easily outperformed the current one in geopolitics, interest rates and growth compared to Trump’s are mocked as “resistance libs.”
Joe Biden tried to argue that he had performed well in office, which seems to have been unacceptable to many people, despite basically being mandatory when you’re an incumbent. They demanded apology and promises of future improvement. The actual quantitative evidence that Biden had been wildly successful in pulling the economy out of the pandemic? Irrelevant, because all it does is “invalidate voters’ experiences” - those “experiences” usually consisting of reading catastrophic coverage, rather than actually struggling with bills, which they generally reported doing fine with.
Barker sensed the "vibe shift" happening in 2024, took advantage of the clout that comes with "walking away" to parlay that into op-eds and a best selling book. She burned all her bridges she spent a decade building since, in her words, she voted for Trump mostly to send a "middle finger" to the Dems. She can't go back now, it's part of her chosen identity to be a "disaffected former Dem", meaning she can't now admit that candidates are adopting some of the changes she explicitly asked for or else her entire premise of "Dems cannot change" would be wrong. And if she concedes there are Dem candidates doing exactly what she suggested, she loses the clout that makes her a favorite of Fox to book so she trash Dems based on idea that they cannot moderate on the issues she wants.
If MAGA eventually implodes as it seems to be doing, we can look forward to Barker writing another book where she regrets nothing and apologizes for nothing, then monetizes her "no one could have seen this coming" shtick for what I assume will be her sequel book "Nothing Right"
Stating a criticism is the easy part. But accepting part of the blame and learning from what didn’t work to propose other solutions is the toughest part. Many (regardless of party), cannot do that. That is why we don’t actually solved the problems of our people.
Texeira may not be completely wrong. Have any Democratic candidates actually expressed criticism of affirmative action or diversity mandates, or are they just quietly not making a big deal out of them?
Not in any significant capacity that I can recall, however, Republicans have not made affirmative action and diversity mandates a part of their campaigns. It's generally a low salient issue in this election
When is it ok to publish a book that questions your chosen political party’s direction?
When the party is in power but doing so gets you shut out of any future party decision making? (See Room Where It Happened by Bolton)
When it’s after the party loses the election but doing so gets you criticized for justifying the opposition’s criticism? (See Abundance by Klein & Thompson).
When it’s during the next campaign but doing so gets you criticized for not recognizing the party’s efforts to win back voters? (See Nothing Left by Barker).
I’m sure there are other left or right of center examples I could have used just as well that illustrate how narrow the window is to criticize a political party’s direction from those inside that party. It comes across from this post that the already narrow window for criticism must be further limited to criticisms that come with minimum ante of a few compliments.
Maybe that wasn’t the intent, but it’s how I read it. The reality is that party critics know going public comes with risk of being cast out from their party. This post only furthers that understanding.
Volunteers would go out and about, carry out number 1 on the list above, take notes while doing so, and report back to the people who will use the info to execute number 2 on the list above. I suppose volunteer recruitment and activation could be moved to action number 1. You're right, it's hard work, and there will be people prepared to do it (or if not, you don't stand a chance). It's the key to winning.
Ben, the cosmetic pandering has never been a priority of the left. Those on the left have been harshly the party for doing stunts like this (even all the way back in 2020 when Pelosi & others wore kente cloth stoles w/o passing legislation).
At the '24 DNC, the party refused to move left when it came to Gaza and refused to have a pro-Palestinian speaker (despite having multiple conservative speakers). If you asked "critics" like Barker and Teixeira about this, they would ignore this topic.
Both parties need to listen to the 48% of voters who are independents/unaffiliated’s. They have had it with Trump and Maga. They could just as easily turn against Dems in 28 if they govern from far left.
You want to win elections? Focus on: Affordability, corruption and ethics, immigration reform-no open borders, don’t be soft on crime, no more unwinnable foreign wars, ditch the culture wars. Pretty easy, all big tent concerns.
One other criticism I see of the party is often”. Democrat XYZ does surface level thing in response to what voters want. They genuinely believe thats enough to win. What’s wrong with them!!”
For one thing all the GOP does is surface level stuff and they still win based on it.
You do see a solid bench of candidates like Scott Weiner, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, etc…. who’ve done a huge amount to improve voters lives and somehow the critics can never point that out. Wes Moore talks all the time about funding law enforcement and speeding up housing. Under Gov. Moore Baltimore has become this amazing comeback story and yet the critics still call it a hellhole or drug market.
There are definitely criticisms of the party you can make but at what point will they admit things are headed in the right direction. It just feels like anytime you point out something good the goalposts
I find the people here at Searchlight and then Matt Yglesias to be the best critics because you criticize the party and then will also admit when things are going in the right direction.
"[Ruy Teixeira] continues, 'Today’s Democrats would seemingly rather lose an election than adopt any position deemed conservative—the horror!—even if that position is popular and correct on the merits.'"
Although Teixeira is ignoring the people who never acted this way, and ignoring the many, many of us who stopped after realizing what we were doing, he has a point: it has been VERY effective in left-leaning spaces to accuse people of embracing right-wing positions when they are endorsing normal liberal positions, to shame them into adopting your more extreme stance.
It's perpetrated by people who live by that "Fuck Democrats" flow chart (which I found very cathartic), but regular liberals need to wise up and stop letting themselves get pushed around by bad-faith rhetoric. Especially when the best case scenario is always the "NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!" we see on the left side of the chart.
"the party establishment swiftly and unequivocally backed [El-Sayed's] candidacy after the primary. This is for the incredibly obvious and boring reason that the party wants to control the Senate."
I guarantee you that most of the left-of-the-party people would say that they'd rather lose the Senate that have El-Sayed win. (Because they're motherfucking idiots.)
I’m confused about the goal here? Abandon advocating for marginalized people cause white rural communities are deeply bigoted? Really? I’m not signing up for that project. If that’s the party’s position lots of us will gladly “walk away”
Regardless of any political party affiliation, all people are prone to bias and irrational thinking. We must all be willing to agree to standards of behavior and be accountable. How do you personally feel about being held accountable to agreed-upon standards? Do you like the idea? It's not just a political problem; bias and irrational thinking are generic, universal problems. Please write an article that lists standards of behavior for all people and then start a group that asks people to commit to living the standards. I'll join and promote the group. Or if lots of people love the idea, I'll start the group and be responsible for it.
Critics like Barker and Teixeira should be seen as what they are. They have brands to promote (self-loathing Democrats), narratives to tell (Democrats are bad) and right-wing audiences to please. They're not ever going to acknowledge any improvement because they'd lose their audience and relevance. I hadn't heard of Barker until recently, but Teixeira has been doing his bit for years. Neither of them are arguing in good faith and both should be ignored.
You're doing great work at Searchlight just like you did for Matt. I subscribed to Searchlight the second I found out what it was and have been a fan of what it puts out. Keep fighting the good fight.
Thanks dude!
Substack kept shoving Barker in my face and, despite being theoretically open to her style of criticism of the party, she didn’t do anything for me. She definitely seemed more driven by self-regard and contrarianism than any ethical or intellectual pursuit.
It’s a lucrative place to be in and a great way to get attention. There’s always a demand for people who hate their party. That’s the only reason anyone cares what John Fetterman says. To be fair, it goes both ways. Plenty of people who used to be Republicans are now #Resistance liberals. We all have to make a living somehow but I’m always wary of anyone like that.
I don’t care about Barker but it drives me insane how many people I like don’t get Teixeira’s bit. He’s been writing the exact same thing for years and people still treat him like he cares about the party and wants it to be better.
Barker has a substack. I read one post and thought pure audience capture.
I’ve worked on a handful of campaigns and even ran a congressional primary campaign in 2020 (didn’t win, did a little more political work then decided this work was exhausting and I felt burnt out, and I moved onto other things)
One thing I can say about political consultants is that they are capable of making any argument they are paid to make, and have deep ideological flexibility.
In excerpts I’ve seen from her book, she talks about adopting pronouns for people but seems to suggest she’s uncomfortable with it and does it to please people/fit in. Now she’s going on Gutfeld and talking about how much she likes dating Alpha males.
She didn’t just leave the Democratic Party and criticize it from the left, she all of a sudden adopted a whole bunch of right leaning political positions
It feels like she’s trying to be a contrarian on purpose, which is very boring and reads dishonest. But it’s a great grift.
I look forward to at some point when the MAGA project collapses and she writes a sequel to her book and calls it “Nothing Right”
Ruy for his part has helped shift my own views as a former Republican into someone who now pines for the type of liberal patriot that he and John Halpin wrote about at that eponymous publication.
You can see their words as hollow, but reading them did me a lot of good and make me wish that we had "BernieDogs" like Bob Brooks running here in Colorado this cycle.
To me the big problem is how willing these kinds of critics are to conflate “what seems to be exciting to Brooklynites who post a lot on TikTok” with “what literal candidates to the United States Congress are doing”. This is a mirror image of the phenomenon that presents amongst Republicans, where like e.g. lesbian-bar-posting means “Democrats are Crazy” as the literal US President goes around talking about invading Canada
Part of the problem is that liberals, especially our commentariat, are almost always unwilling to stand up for the Democratic Party because they consider it inherently “partisan,” and don’t like the way it supposedly reflects on them. (Listen to Ezra Klein describe his philosophy on this if you want to hear a really obnoxious self-congratulatory version of it.) The overcorrection holding Democrats to a higher standard that often seemed to permeate the legacy media 20-30 years ago has spread to basically everybody in the party who ever talks about politics “seriously.” People who dare point out our government would have easily outperformed the current one in geopolitics, interest rates and growth compared to Trump’s are mocked as “resistance libs.”
Joe Biden tried to argue that he had performed well in office, which seems to have been unacceptable to many people, despite basically being mandatory when you’re an incumbent. They demanded apology and promises of future improvement. The actual quantitative evidence that Biden had been wildly successful in pulling the economy out of the pandemic? Irrelevant, because all it does is “invalidate voters’ experiences” - those “experiences” usually consisting of reading catastrophic coverage, rather than actually struggling with bills, which they generally reported doing fine with.
Yeah this is well constructed
Barker sensed the "vibe shift" happening in 2024, took advantage of the clout that comes with "walking away" to parlay that into op-eds and a best selling book. She burned all her bridges she spent a decade building since, in her words, she voted for Trump mostly to send a "middle finger" to the Dems. She can't go back now, it's part of her chosen identity to be a "disaffected former Dem", meaning she can't now admit that candidates are adopting some of the changes she explicitly asked for or else her entire premise of "Dems cannot change" would be wrong. And if she concedes there are Dem candidates doing exactly what she suggested, she loses the clout that makes her a favorite of Fox to book so she trash Dems based on idea that they cannot moderate on the issues she wants.
If MAGA eventually implodes as it seems to be doing, we can look forward to Barker writing another book where she regrets nothing and apologizes for nothing, then monetizes her "no one could have seen this coming" shtick for what I assume will be her sequel book "Nothing Right"
Stating a criticism is the easy part. But accepting part of the blame and learning from what didn’t work to propose other solutions is the toughest part. Many (regardless of party), cannot do that. That is why we don’t actually solved the problems of our people.
Texeira may not be completely wrong. Have any Democratic candidates actually expressed criticism of affirmative action or diversity mandates, or are they just quietly not making a big deal out of them?
Not in any significant capacity that I can recall, however, Republicans have not made affirmative action and diversity mandates a part of their campaigns. It's generally a low salient issue in this election
When is it ok to publish a book that questions your chosen political party’s direction?
When the party is in power but doing so gets you shut out of any future party decision making? (See Room Where It Happened by Bolton)
When it’s after the party loses the election but doing so gets you criticized for justifying the opposition’s criticism? (See Abundance by Klein & Thompson).
When it’s during the next campaign but doing so gets you criticized for not recognizing the party’s efforts to win back voters? (See Nothing Left by Barker).
I’m sure there are other left or right of center examples I could have used just as well that illustrate how narrow the window is to criticize a political party’s direction from those inside that party. It comes across from this post that the already narrow window for criticism must be further limited to criticisms that come with minimum ante of a few compliments.
Maybe that wasn’t the intent, but it’s how I read it. The reality is that party critics know going public comes with risk of being cast out from their party. This post only furthers that understanding.
This is what I want in a candidate How to be a “We the People” politician in 5 easy steps:
1. Get out and talk to the people (grassroots boots on the ground), listen and find out what their
needs are.
(Include: working and middle class in rural, suburban and urban communities.)
2. Shape policy around the people’s needs
3. Avoid billionaire and corporate donations.
(You report to the people; therefore you will not be owned by the billionaires/corporations)
4. Activate a vast number of volunteers all year long - every year
(We the People want to be involved. Find & organize things we can to do)
5. Repeat - all year long - every year. An ongoing process
Are you being sarcastic ?
Is there anyone you think is doing this well?
> Activate a vast number of volunteers all year long, every year
This seems really hard. What would the volunteers do?
Volunteers would go out and about, carry out number 1 on the list above, take notes while doing so, and report back to the people who will use the info to execute number 2 on the list above. I suppose volunteer recruitment and activation could be moved to action number 1. You're right, it's hard work, and there will be people prepared to do it (or if not, you don't stand a chance). It's the key to winning.
Ben, the cosmetic pandering has never been a priority of the left. Those on the left have been harshly the party for doing stunts like this (even all the way back in 2020 when Pelosi & others wore kente cloth stoles w/o passing legislation).
At the '24 DNC, the party refused to move left when it came to Gaza and refused to have a pro-Palestinian speaker (despite having multiple conservative speakers). If you asked "critics" like Barker and Teixeira about this, they would ignore this topic.
Both parties need to listen to the 48% of voters who are independents/unaffiliated’s. They have had it with Trump and Maga. They could just as easily turn against Dems in 28 if they govern from far left.
You want to win elections? Focus on: Affordability, corruption and ethics, immigration reform-no open borders, don’t be soft on crime, no more unwinnable foreign wars, ditch the culture wars. Pretty easy, all big tent concerns.
One other criticism I see of the party is often”. Democrat XYZ does surface level thing in response to what voters want. They genuinely believe thats enough to win. What’s wrong with them!!”
For one thing all the GOP does is surface level stuff and they still win based on it.
You do see a solid bench of candidates like Scott Weiner, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, etc…. who’ve done a huge amount to improve voters lives and somehow the critics can never point that out. Wes Moore talks all the time about funding law enforcement and speeding up housing. Under Gov. Moore Baltimore has become this amazing comeback story and yet the critics still call it a hellhole or drug market.
There are definitely criticisms of the party you can make but at what point will they admit things are headed in the right direction. It just feels like anytime you point out something good the goalposts
I find the people here at Searchlight and then Matt Yglesias to be the best critics because you criticize the party and then will also admit when things are going in the right direction.
Anyway rant over sorry about that😅
Evan Barker voted for Trump. That’s all I need to know.
"[Ruy Teixeira] continues, 'Today’s Democrats would seemingly rather lose an election than adopt any position deemed conservative—the horror!—even if that position is popular and correct on the merits.'"
Although Teixeira is ignoring the people who never acted this way, and ignoring the many, many of us who stopped after realizing what we were doing, he has a point: it has been VERY effective in left-leaning spaces to accuse people of embracing right-wing positions when they are endorsing normal liberal positions, to shame them into adopting your more extreme stance.
It's perpetrated by people who live by that "Fuck Democrats" flow chart (which I found very cathartic), but regular liberals need to wise up and stop letting themselves get pushed around by bad-faith rhetoric. Especially when the best case scenario is always the "NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!" we see on the left side of the chart.
"the party establishment swiftly and unequivocally backed [El-Sayed's] candidacy after the primary. This is for the incredibly obvious and boring reason that the party wants to control the Senate."
I guarantee you that most of the left-of-the-party people would say that they'd rather lose the Senate that have El-Sayed win. (Because they're motherfucking idiots.)
Teixeira (of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute) is flat out wrong about what's popular and correct on the merits.
https://substack.com/@drlaz/note/p-193322120?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=107o0
Good article.
I admit I get WAY too absorbed in punching left at times - mostly out of resentment to online lefties who only punch at moderate Dems.
These articles are important for me to read, cuz they help me "snap back" to what's important.
I’m confused about the goal here? Abandon advocating for marginalized people cause white rural communities are deeply bigoted? Really? I’m not signing up for that project. If that’s the party’s position lots of us will gladly “walk away”
Regardless of any political party affiliation, all people are prone to bias and irrational thinking. We must all be willing to agree to standards of behavior and be accountable. How do you personally feel about being held accountable to agreed-upon standards? Do you like the idea? It's not just a political problem; bias and irrational thinking are generic, universal problems. Please write an article that lists standards of behavior for all people and then start a group that asks people to commit to living the standards. I'll join and promote the group. Or if lots of people love the idea, I'll start the group and be responsible for it.
Nice chart and basically OK as a taxonomy of Democratic errors. The problem is not looking at the opportunity cost of the greater Republican errors.