When They Go Low, We Go... Low

To combat Trumpism, Democrats play the imitation game.

California Governor Gavin Newsom. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP.)

Writing about the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis, as the emperor of the French, Karl Marx coined one of his most famous phrases: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

I have been thinking about this phrase a lot in recent weeks, as it has become increasingly clear what shape the Democrats’ response to Trump 47 is going to take.

The first time Trump won office, the response to his presidency turned out to be a tragedy. There were mass marches. There was the repeated invocation not to “normalize” him. There was a general expectation that his administration would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. When all of that turned out to be false, many progressives responded by embracing a new and more radical political ideology.

With every passing year of the first Trump administration, the “resistance” to him grew more woke. To many on the left, his ability to win power seemed to vindicate the worst possible interpretation of their own country. Who could possibly argue with the idea that America is a deeply racist country, one whose nature is rotten to the core, when such a boorish demagogue resides in the White House?

Trump’s malign influence over the country also made it hard for moderates on the left to keep in check the extremists in their own ranks. There might, as many of them privately admitted, be much to criticize about the most radical theories and practices that were rapidly spreading in progressive circles, including a taste for cancellation that was ruining the lives of many innocent people and making key institutions deeply dysfunctional. But wasn’t it the duty of every right-thinking person to focus primarily on the threat posed by Trump—and wouldn’t they, if they disobeyed that apparent strategic command, be accused of doing his bidding?

A series of coincidences helped to ensure that the tragedy of the left’s response to Trump’s first presidency did not allow him to win a second consecutive term. Joe Biden, too old to understand where the mood of the party was supposedly going, and therefore less tarnished by the embrace of identitarian ideas than virtually all of his competitors, unexpectedly won the nomination. COVID led to widespread discontent with governments across the democratic world and showcased Trump’s managerial failings. More by luck than by strategic foresight, Democrats eked out a victory in the 2020 presidential elections.

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The Birth of Aspirational Populism

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But while the tragic consequences of the Democratic embrace of wokeness were put off, they were not averted. It is one of the reasons they proved incapable of building a sufficiently broad anti-Trump majority to force the Republican Party to moderate if it wanted to be competitive in future elections. It is a big reason for the Biden administration’s missteps on issues like the southern border, as well as for a broader loss of trust in key social institutions—such as universities and the mainstream press—with which the Democratic Party is now deeply associated in the minds of voters. And it helps to explain why so many working-class voters, especially from the minority groups that were supposedly in the bag for Democrats, fled the coalition, helping Trump to win a second presidential term in 2024.

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When Trump won reelection, the obvious question was how Democrats would respond to his second administration. Would they learn from the mistakes they made the first time around or fall right back into the same trap?

Optimists argued that Democrats were sure to course-correct. There was a “vibe shift” underway, after all. Exit polls made it unmistakably clear how toxic the party’s stances on cultural issues had become. And some elected officials were even cautiously starting to break rank on a few divisive topics.

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Pessimists, including me, cautioned that the ideological obsession with a particular conception of identity had by now become so deeply entrenched in progressive circles that it would continue to shape the movement’s language and instincts. Even if a few elected officials might course-correct on a few salient issues, the party’s basic framework for how to talk and what to do was unlikely to change. And as Trump committed one outrage after another, any attempt at moderation would once again go out of the window: All of the dynamics that pushed the resistance toward wokeness the first time around would repeat the same feat a second time over.

It is still early days. We are, after all, a mere 10 months into a four-year term. With the Trump administration growing more radical by the day, both the government and the opposition are likely to be fundamentally transformed over the next three years. But so far, I would say that the pessimists have more or less been proven correct—albeit with an ironic twist.

The initial instinct to moderate on key cultural issues has mostly petered out. There is precious little indication of the party learning to speak a different language. Even though faith in the most extreme shibboleths of the woke movement, such as the idea that fusion cuisine is a harmful form of cultural appropriation, seems to have evaporated, Democrats keep semi-apologetically semi-embracing the same practices and talking points. (One of many examples: The Democratic National Committee still performs land acknowledgments at its meetings.)

What is left is a bizarro version of the initial tragedy: a tendency toward radicalization and an inability to keep bad actors in check, shorn of all conviction. In fact, the best description of the emerging Democratic strategy may simply be that the party has decided to emulate Trump, in style if not in substance.

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Gavin Newsom, the governor of California who is currently favored by betting markets to become the Democratic Party’s 2028 nominee, is Exhibit A.

After last year’s election, Newsom’s first instinct seemed to consist of a ham-fisted attempt at “moderating” his political position, something he did by cozying up to key proponents and allies of the Trump movement. When he launched a new podcast, his first guests included the right-wing talk radio host Michael Savage, former Trump aide Steve Bannon, and a certain conservative very popular among young voters by the name of… Charlie Kirk.

But while this strategy succeeded in gaining public attention, it also led to massive blowback from the progressive base. Never slow to follow the shifting winds, Newsom quickly corrected course.

Instead of moderating his ideological position, Newsom decided to emulate Trump’s style. He started to echo the president’s unpresidential manner of tweeting, posting all-caps messages that imitated Trump’s distinctive diction. He started to dunk on opponents on social media in the no-holds-bar manner that fueled Trump’s rise. And despite having championed a California law that would impose prison sentences on anybody who spreads AI-created videos portraying real people just a year ago, he himself now posts deep fakes of J.D. Vance and other political opponents.

The recent selection of guests on Newsom’s podcast is a telling sign of his shift: They include resistance-y writers like the historian Heather Cox Richardson; liberal media figures like Jordan Klepper, the co-host of The Daily Show; Democratic Party stalwarts like Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy; and foul-mouthed firebrands like Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett. There’s no more trace of anyone who might upset the base.

Newsom is ideologically ambiguous: As a California Democrat, he has taken some very progressive positions. But he is also very much a member of the party’s establishment. Indeed, what’s striking about this moment is that the decision to imitate Trump’s style isn’t contained to one side of the ideological spectrum: Other elected officials who have done so include both avowed progressives like Crockett and relative moderates like J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois.

Take Abigail Spanberger, a former U.S. representative and the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Virginia. A CIA veteran firmly rooted in the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, she has voted against strict COVID restrictions and loudly opposed defunding the police. She made headlines in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, which left Democrats with a diminished majority in the House of Representatives, when she let loose on the radicals who had tarnished the party’s brand in an internal caucus call: “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. … If we are classifying Tuesday as a success … we will get f—ing torn apart in 2022.” But Spanberger, often named as one of a handful of moderates who could one day run for national office, is no longer nearly as willing to distance herself from radicals in 2025.

In October, National Review published shocking text messages by Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for attorney general of Virginia, in which he openly wished for a Republican colleague in the Virginia House of Representatives to be shot dead: “Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot [sic]. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” he wrote. Jones even wished harm upon Gilbert’s children, texting that he is “breeding little fascists.”

Repeatedly pressed on whether Jones still enjoys her support at a Virginia governor’s debate last month, Spanberger proved incapable of either defending or ditching him, reduced to sputtering the same empty consultant-written phraseology over and over. Pressed on whether she still supported Jones, she kept inartfully side-stepping the question: “Importantly, at this point, as we move forward, the voters have this information … and it is up to voters to make an individual choice based on this information.”

Nor does Spanberger seem to have learned from the issue that swing voters found most off-putting in the 2024 presidential election. Asked her stance regarding the participation of biological men in women’s sport in the same debate, Spanberger kept resorting to the same tactic of evasion: “In cases across Virginia, I think it is incumbent upon parents and educators and communicators, in each local community, to make decisions locally … My priority would be to ensure that local communities, importantly parents, and teachers, and educators, are able to work together to meet the unique needs of each school and each community, and that is important, and I say that as the mother of three daughters in Virginia public schools.”

The most striking refusal to engage in basic political hygiene has come in the debate over Graham Platner. Platner is a bundle of contradictions. He is running to be the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Maine, one of the most competitive races expected in 2026, as an unabashed economic populist. Cultivating a compelling image as an everyman straight-talker on social media, he quickly drew endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders and other progressive stalwarts. And yet Platner was born to an affluent family, attended a $75,000-a-year boarding school, and did a tour of duty in Afghanistan as a security contractor with the private firm Constellis (better known by its previous name: Blackwater). And he has turned out to have a rather checkered political past, with new revelations about the racist and homophobic comments he has made on Reddit seemingly trickling out every day.

The climax of these revelations came late last month, when old photos emerged showing that he had a large tattoo of a skull-and-bones in the style widely used by the SS on his chest. Platner claims that he did not know what the tattoo symbolized when he got it on a drunken night out in Croatia two decades ago, but a former acquaintance of his reportedly told Jewish Insider that he jokingly referred to it as his “Totenkopf,” the symbol used by the SS units that ran the concentration camps. (Only after news of the tattoo broke did Platner have it covered up.)

Distancing yourself from a political candidate who had a literal Nazi symbol engraved on his body until news of it broke would seem like a pretty minimal test of political decency for Democrats. This is especially the case—these things shouldn’t matter, but of course they do—when he hasn’t even secured the party’s nomination yet, and would likely make it much harder for Democrats to flip a much-needed Senate seat in a winnable race. But motivated by the frustration that Republicans are failing to discipline extremists and cranks in their own ranks, a surprising number of power players in the Democratic Party are failing this test.

Platner’s ideological allies have been especially quick to make excuses for him: “He went through a dark period. He’s not the only one in America who has gone through a dark period,” Sanders said after news of the tattoo broke. But a surprising number of establishment figures have ridden to Platner’s rescue, too. Jon Lovett, a prominent speechwriter for Barack Obama who is now a co-host of Pod Save America, for example, tweeted in an apparent reference to the Platner scandal: “Only perfect candidates off the harvard law conveyor belt pls, highly disciplined, all boxes checked, well liked and humble, absolutely no spiritual connection to having a physical body except for severe IBS, volunteered at a soup kitchen in high school, signs email ‘cheers,’ etc.” (Apparently, there are only two types of Americans: those who have graduated from Harvard Law and those who have Nazi symbols tattooed on their chest.) Meanwhile, the party base seems to be rallying to Platner’s side: In a recent poll, he leads his principal rival for the nomination by 34 points.

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Michelle Obama famously summarized the motto that (for the most part) defined the political style of her husband, the Democratic Party’s most successful politician of the 21^st century, by saying that: “When they go low, we go high.”

It is of course understandable that many Democrats are growing impatient with that principle at a time when Trump and his allies are breaking every basic rule of personal and political decency. I can even see the basic logic for why Barack Obama himself has recently recorded videos urging California voters to embrace a blatantly antidemocratic redistricting reform to counteract the effects of an equally antidemocratic effort at gerrymandering that has already taken place in Texas. When your political opponent is proudly embracing every dirty trick in the book—up to and including open calls to prosecute perceived enemies—staying true to your principles can feel like a sucker’s game.

But, in another ironic echo of the first failed wave of resistance to Trump, the problem with this strategy is not only that it is immoral; it is also that it is likely to backfire. Voters who want a shameless bully in the White House already have an impressive specimen available to them; in this respect, at least, it is hard to improve on the original. And as the leaders of Occupy Wall Street used to say in more idealistic times, successful revolutionaries tend to govern in the way they win power: If Democrats should, against the odds, succeed in replacing Trump by copying him, it is far from certain that they would prove any more loyal to the basic principles of the American Republic once they are back in the White House.

Watching the rise of woke during the first Trump presidency, I felt powerless to stop what looked to me very much like a giant train crash in the making. Watching the rise of Newsom and Platner and Jones—and the excuses made for them by everyone from Sanders to Spanberger—I now feel a similar sense of dread and inevitability.

Once upon a time, the #resistance was woke. Over the next years, it looks set to become soft-woke in content and soft-Trumpy in style. I never thought that I would one day feel nostalgia for the tragic mistakes that helped to cement Trump’s central role in American politics, but this new round of farcical missteps is likely to prove equally self-destructive.

This article originally appeared in The Dispatch.