The Democrats have failed us. This isn’t in dispute by most people, I don’t believe. In 2026, it is clear that the job of the Biden presidency (2021–2024) was to prevent the resurgence of Trump and the MAGA movement. That wasn’t the directive to or initiative of Biden himself, as is clear by the infamous “Nothing will fundamentally change” soundbite, but it was what the electorate who voted for him wanted him to do. They failed catastrophically on that front: not only did Trump run, he had enough support that he could win. Kamala Harris, who eventually took over the campaign in 2024, did not motivate voters to support her against Trump. As is suggested by a provocative look at North Carolina voter registration, the fact that Republicans won is largely not because the Republican message resonated more strongly than usual, but because the Democratic approach has so consistently lost appeal. That is, it’s not that the country has gained more faith in the Republicans, it’s that they have lost so much faith in the Democrats that the Democrats do not have a secure foundation to win the presidency.
This isn’t new. Obama was also a failure, in the sense that the country gave him two consecutive terms as president hoping for pro-social change and then, at the end of his run, the country elected the man who was already despised as a fascist figure. Even though the first run feels like kid gloves in hindsight. Clinton was a failure because Clinton gave us Bush in a similar progression. You can point to the fact that the Democrats refused to run dynamic candidates in many races, instead opting for stale technicians like Gore and Kerry who may have been competent in the job but wouldn’t dare suggest exciting (and probably anti-business) policies. And if you are a socialist or an anarchist, or if you wanted to bring corporations to account, you have likely never felt as though the Democratic Party has been the kind of ally they pretend to be.
So why is it that we have to talk about the Democrats? I’ve noticed that it seems impossible for people, even those people who acknowledge that the Democrats are a party who will never deliver, to talk policy without referencing the Democrats. When it comes to stopping Trump, slowing down his agenda in any way, people will say “Schumer and Jeffries need to do this”, even though we know that Schumer and Jeffries are two of the most traitorous, pro-business, Republican-friendly legislators in the history of the Democratic Party, even though we have been shown time and time again that Schumer and Jeffries will not do the needful. People will say “In order to win the midterms, the Democrats need to do this” even as people wonder whether there will be any midterms, and Democratic governors are preparing not by welfare policy but by gerrymandering. “Where are our Democratic electeds? Why aren’t they on the front lines in Minneapolis?” People keep asking this as if the Democrats have ever shown any inclination to put themselves in danger to oppose the government.
Why do we do this? It doesn’t seem to make sense that we are giving advice to an entity that is committed to not hearing us, to not responding appropriately to our needs. But I don’t believe we are talking to the Democrats. I think instead that we are using the Democrats as a vehicle, a rhetorical vehicle, for us to communicate with like-minded people. By talking about the Democrats, by saying that the Democrats should do this or that, support this or that, we’re signaling to a certain group of people (anyone who would ever consider voting Democrat) that we are speaking in a certain register, or on a certain kind of topic (serious politics). It very neatly gets around basic questions about competency. To wit:
- B: “Oh you want to have free healthcare, do you? How are you going to organize that?”
- A: “The Democrats should legislate free healthcare.”
Does this really answer the question? Of course not. In the real world, you have to figure out how you are going to convince the Democrats to do this, since in all likelihood they simply won’t support free healthcare (for example) no matter how popular it gets. Rhetorically, conversationally, however, simply saying “the Democrats” works because we culturally assume that the Democrats would be interested in policy like this (for cynical reasons of appealing to voters if nothing else) and that they possibly have the political power to pass such legislation, and that the government is then capable of executing the plans laid out.
To break this apart into abstractions, we use the Democratic Party to talk about politics because it is useful to do so. Very broadly speaking, we can refer to the system by which two beings communicate as a code. Each being, when communicating, has both an intention and a desired goal. We can say that a being mentally travels from where they are to their desired goal along this code. For instance, if I say to myself “I would like a dessert,” I have the intention of bringing to mind the fact that I desire dessert, and the desired goal is that I am thinking about the fact that I desire dessert. If I understood the words “would like” to conform to my conception of “would not like”, however, the process of understanding changes. My intention may not have changed, but the code which I used has led me to a different place, which is the realized goal: I now think about not wanting dessert. This isn’t a brainwashing trick: I may disagree with the idea that I don’t want dessert. The point I’m trying to demonstrate is that we can say communication along the code is successful when the realized object is the same as the desired goal, and that it is unsuccessful when the realized object is different.
The utility or usefulness of each component in an utterance (act of communication) is key to understanding why it is being employed. When I was in high school, my friend Nate and I were doing a word puzzle of some kind and we came up with the nonsense word “wwvoxm”, which we defined as both “a color that can’t be seen by the human eye” as a noun and “to orgasm” as a verb. Now, if I was having sex with someone and I said “I’m about to wwvoxm!”, that wouldn’t mean anything on the face; you could use context clues to figure it out, probably, but it wouldn’t have any erotic component. For it to be erotic it has to be understood. I would have to say “orgasm” or “cum” or “get off”: these components are useful. If I was with someone who only spoke a different language, even these words might not suffice. And yes, I apologize if you found this paragraph distasteful, but I couldn’t help it: there really isn’t need to say “a color that can’t be seen by the human eye” and there aren’t any synonyms for that either.
To bring this back to our political discussion, we can say that in left-of-center/anti-ghoul politics in the United States, the Democrats are an incredibly useful component of the code that is our political understanding and expression. As I said before, simply invoking the Democrats allows one to skip past certain parts of a thorough conversation in order to reach ideas they are more interested in; to jump past the nitty-gritty of political leverage and go straight into policy proposals, that sort of thing. And I am not writing this as a criticism of that tendency (nor, I have to say, as an endorsement of it). I’m just laying out that this is a useful rhetorical function that the Democratic Party serves.
But why? That’s the question again. Why is it that the Democratic Party, a party of traitors and scheming viziers, is able to take up so much space in the thought of people who despise them? There are two reasons. The first is very straightforward: repetition. Because we have “always” funneled our politics through the Democratic Party, because we have worked so long through their structures and become used to the idiosyncrasies of that machine, we have established the Democratic Party as the conduit for our political action. As is said by Haiman in “Repetition and Identity”, “codes arise precisely from repeated performance”. Our current code is established by our continued interaction with the Democratic Party, such that each time we refer back to the Democrats, we are also reinforcing their position.
But I will come back to that point. The second reason that the Democrats have relevant ascendancy in the arena of anti-Republican politics. The meaning of this term is in itself: a level of prominence which is related to a particular issue or concept. The boxing world champion has a level of relevant ascendancy to the world of boxing; they are highly respected when making reference to that sport, and perhaps to similar sports. That ascendancy does not necessarily translate to unrelated matters, however. It does to some degree, but we’ll leave an analysis of these lesser degrees and the devolution of ascendancy for another time. An easy synonym for relevant ascendancy is “expertise”, but this is not an exact synonym. “Expertise” implies a verifiable knowledge or skill which “relevant ascendancy” does not. Not only does relevant ascendancy not rely on verifiability of claims, it does not even rely on verifiability of relevance or ascendancy, only that the interpreter (or receiver of the communication) believes that the being in question has the perception of such relevant ascendancy, however it has been gained. With all this said, the relationship that people have to experts and the domains of expert knowledge is very similar to that which people have to beings with relevant ascendancy: interaction with the expert/ascendant is consider to be highly useful in communication and understanding.
How is it that the Democratic Party retains its relevant ascendancy despite everything it’s done? This one is fairly simple, I believe, and so I lay this out not as an instruction for the reader, but simply so it has been laid out; I trust any observer of U.S. politics has been able to pick up on these elements.
- The Democrats have significant numbers of elected leaders, which means they frequently have the legislative and executive means to push across policy.
- The Democrats have, on average, been more willing to engage in pro-social spending and other such programs than Republicans have.
- The Democrats have a massive funding base which can make it possible for candidates to compete in and win difficult elections.
- The Democrats have among their electeds and employed staff a number of high-achieving and highly-placed individuals, among them lawyers, doctors, and former government officials.
- The Democrats are highly connected with non-government social leaders (such as religious leaders, community leaders, union leaders) which puts them in a good position to coordinate among these groups.
- The Democrats speak on pro-social and anti-misery issues often enough, and often align themselves explicitly with such movements (such as environmentalism, anti-racism, etc.).
- The Democrats are highly connected with the media and have the influence to gain publicity.
- The Democrats are a recognized group by the whole country, so association with them has the potential for reaching a nationwide audience.
For these reasons and more, it remains useful to speak about the Democratic Party when talking about anti-Republican politics in the U.S. All of these traits allow the Democrats to serve as a cipher for the enactment of certain ideas: welfare, social justice, anti-carceralism, environmentalism. The fact that Democratic leadership has so often betrayed the ideas which it ciphers for hasn’t changed this much because the situation of the Democrats’ relevant ascendancy hasn’t been challenged. And in January of 2026, despite everything, such a challenge seems unlikely.
So what do we do about this? Because I feel there is a big problem here. If we continue to push our ideas through the Democratic Party, not only are we reinforcing their position, we’re stifling our own desires by basing them on the idea that they need to be enacted through this moribund bureaucratic snake, this beast of bile and lethargy. We yearn for a third party and yet we have had only bad options, and therefore we keep talking about what the Democrats should do, how they should act, knowing that they never will.
For this I would suggest employing the technique of erasure, placing a word sous rature (that is, “under erasure”). While it was thought up by the Nazi
Heidegger, it was re-elaborated by Jacques Derrida, and I’m okay with an idea that’s been filtered through like that. Essentially, erasure involves understanding that a particular idea is inadequate, inexact, perhaps even harmful, but that it must still be used in order to be intelligible. This is usually accomplished by a clean strike through the word in question. The object is to indicate that the word or phrase is not what is truly meant while not actually (or fully, anyway) obscuring the phrase itself.
It will be impossible, I think, to simply dream up an alternative to the Democrats tomorrow. It has been tried and it has failed; we either have long-running fringe parties like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or short-run flashbangs like the People’s Party. This doesn’t mean there won’t or can’t be a third party which succeeds, only that it is going to be difficult for any group to very quickly replace the Democratic Party as the relevant ascendant (or being with highest relative ascendancy) in American anti-Republican politics. It may be that we are stuck with the Democrats for some time.
Despite this, we can’t continue to limit our options to the Democrats. While it is not the only or even the major factor pushing people to rely on the Democrats, it cannot be denied that continuing to appeal to the Democrats does help reinforce their position as people to be appealed to over these issues. Breaking this mental dependence could be an important step to people imagining a better way.
If you have to talk about policy using the Democrats, cross their name out. “The Democrats should pass this policy”, and cross them out. We know that the Democrats won’t do it. Somebody should do it. The Democrats have the power to do it. But while recognizing that, we also recognize that we can’t rely on the Democrats to do that. Cross out “Democrats” and “Democratic Party” just to demonstrate that while the Democrats currently occupy this space, we do recognize it as a blank space, a vacated space. We would put the Democrats in this place, but they no longer belong here, so we cross them out: we do not need the Democrats, we need the Democrats.
Now I want to be clear: this bit about erasure is half a joke. I may do it in future posts, I may not. I’ve previously been highly critical of ideas like Debord’s détournement and erasure, in this way, feels very similar. However, while I think that as a social “movement” this sort of usage is best employed in public work, the person to be changed is not the reader so much as the writer. It will constantly remind the writer, in a ritualistic fashion, that the Democrats have to be gotten over. What I find ridiculous about détournement is the idea that a piece of art will be so powerful and subversive that it changes people’s opinions, and I believe this has been borne out by the fact that détournement has never produced anything but art, even when used for political agitation. This use of erasure is meant more as a personal practice and a demonstration of position than as some grand political weapon.
Code arises precisely from repeat performance. This has been a very sparse treatment of the idea of code, partly due to my own current limitations. But briefly, erasure acts as a kind of overcoding: taking a code which exists and applying a different meaning to it, such that a code acquires new meanings, as if a road suddenly had a branching path built in. And by repeat performance, this new code becomes more salient in our minds. The idea of the Democrats can be linked not with the accomplishment of goals but the potential accomplishment of goals, an accomplishment which would be realized if the Democrats could be truly erased, which is to say, if they could be replaced. If their function was no longer necessary, if their claimed ascendancy lost its relevance. We can travel different roads and let these old ones get overgrown, but not if we keep tramping down the new grass.
Works Used:
- A Theory of Semiotics by Umberto Eco
- “Repetition and Identity” by John Haiman, Lingua (1997) Vol. 100, pages 57-70
- “Repetition” by Penelope Brown, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (1999) Vol. 9, No. 1/2, pages 223-226, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43102472
- “Erasure” by Michael Strysick, ed. V. Taylor & C. Winquist, in Encyclopedia of Postmodernism (2001) Vol. 1, pages 113-114