I want you to imagine for a moment that there's a leaky pipe in your basement.
You have no plumbing experience or tools. As much as you wish you could, you're not able to fix the leak on your own. So, you turn to the local plumber.
He's not great, only ever stopping the leak for brief periods rather than fixing it altogether. You'd call another, but he's the only one people in your town really take seriously. You don't want your basement to flood, and you definitely don't want to seem like someone who's blasé about a flooding basement, so you call the guy who's managed to stop the leak before, even if "before" was a long time ago.
But this is not before. The leak has become more than just a drip. The pipes are clattering against your basement's stone walls and they sound like they're threatening to come apart.
The plumber goes down the basement with a relaxed confidence that inspires a little bit of concern. He works on a patch, one that probably would've worked two or three leaks ago, but anyone with eyes can see that this is more serious than that. Frustrated, you ask if maybe we shouldn't be thinking about ways to fix the pipe rather than letting it start leaking again every few years. The plumber laughs, attempting in vain to patch the unpatachable.
"I've been doing this a little longer than you, pal" he says, as water sprays around you both. You ask him again, please, please, can we just fix the goddamn leak you're sorry for getting angry but this is actually really scary for you because you live in this house.
The plumber looks at you, bewildered and offended.
"C'mon man."
The pipe bursts.
Water flows forth uncontrollably, first up to your ankles, then to your knees. You beg the plumber to help you somehow, to at least do something before he leaves. He just mopes towards the stairs and looks around at his handiwork.
"Your basement's flooding." he says.
He's gone. Things seem more hopeless than they maybe ever had. The water's at your chest and it's cold. You don't know if there's time to call another plumber, to call the fire department, or to attempt to fix it all yourself. You don't know if anything can stop the flood. You don't know if you can even save the house.
In fact, there's only one thing you know.
You're never calling that goddamn plumber again.
Everybody fails. We blow it in a job interview, the last-second Hail Mary falls short, we embarrass ourselves in front of a crush, it happens to the best of us. It never feels great, but it's part of life. Failure is the greatest teacher, as the old saying (read: line of Yoda dialogue) goes. Our missteps present us with a chance to learn about ourselves, to look at what brought us to this low moment and figure out how to avoid it in the future. When handled with a mature hand, failure can be the first step towards reaching new heights of success.
One would think that just over a month after blowing one of the most important elections of our time, the Democratic Party would be doing a little bit of that post-failure soul searching. In an ideal world, Democratic leadership would look at the campaign they ran, one predominantly centered on the message of "At least we're not the other guy!" and targeted mainly at the eternal white whale that is moderate Republicans, and think "maybe we've been approaching this all wrong!"
In this ideal world, Democrats would begin to understand that maybe, at this moment where so many Americans feel that things are getting worse every day, marching around with Liz Cheney, Charli XCX references, and little else wasn't enough. Maybe they should've fought harder for the working class, or taken their last minute shift in candidates as a chance to rid themselves of the shame of Biden's support for Israel. At the very least, they'd recognize that "Vote for us or they'll take more rights away from you" isn't as compelling a hook when you're currently in power and people are still losing rights.
It would dawn on them that they've lost touch with the American working class and the youth, putting the money of wealthy donors ahead of the people they ostensibly got into politics to serve. They'd embrace the progressive fervor so many of their younger members have been dying to share and stop forcing them all to sit at the kids table. They'd begin fighting tooth and nail against Trump just as Republicans fought against Biden and Obama and in a few years, the primary would give us a wide variety of more progressive options to choose from, running on common sense, popular policies like healthcare reform, women's rights, and protections for workers. But we're not in that ideal world. We're in this one. And in this world and all the Democrats are doing right now is washing down dementia meds with gin and testing out new and innovative ways to shake their heads in shame at an authoritarian rise they have no plans to stop.
In the two months since they lost to a man who visibly didn't want to be president (but needed to be to stay out of jail), the Democrats have been responding to defeat by inventing a fake version of their own campaign that they say leaned too heavily into LGBTQ issues. (Never mind the fact that the actual campaign was relatively silent when that community was in dire need of their support this election cycle.)
But their desire to check out of what they consider fringe, youth, issues doesn't extend only to them. Their response to the efforts of younger party members to get more involved in this time of rebuilding has been nonstop obstruction. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made an attempt lead the Senate Oversight Committee, many younger and more left-leaning voters were excited. Could this be a sign that the Democrats were ready to embrace a new strategy?
Turns out, no! Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi campaigned behind the scenes for AOC's opponent, Gerry Connolly, a 74 year old man with a recent cancer diagnosis. Asked to comment on the race, Virginia Democrat Don Beyer spoke in favor of Connolly saying, "Gerry's a young 74, cancer notwithstanding." A sterling choice for a party in need of new blood.
This blatant, public, snub of one of the party's youngest rising stars came as a shock to many. This didn't seem like an action that should be taken by a party restructuring in the wake of a massive defeat. Hell, even the Republicans are embracing their next generation! Every young Republican is more embarrassing to their party than the last but they find themselves ascending through the ranks despite it all. Why is it that when a young Democrat tries to do the same, they walk out to the parking lot to find Nancy Pelosi keying their car? What reason could Democrats have to not embrace the future of their own party? Don't they want to win? Don't they care about their party?
Well, that's easy. They're not a political party anymore. The post 2016 era and its abundant fundraising off the threat of The Other Guy has transformed the messaging of a party that was already dealing with aggressive West Wing Syndrome into that of a glorified ad agency. They make very sentimental commercials and they're the losingest team in baseball. The party itself has become a loosely affiliated group of ultra-wealthy individuals and highly compensated consultants put in charge of defending the interests of the socially-conscious wing of the ruling class without ever endangering their bottom line. They're at best incompetent and at worst profiteering so openly off industries they're meant to regulate that the conspiracies Republicans push about their corruption are beginning to rhyme with the truth. All they need to do to maintain their personal status quo is fundraise every few years and move their substantial assets to the right places at the right times.
Part of this is the age problem. Our country has become a gerontocracy across the board, but the Democrats' inability to embrace anyone under 50 makes it particularly obvious that its marching orders are coming from a disproportionately high number of people who won't have to live through the entirety of the second Trump administration, let alone its consequences. This problem seemed like it should have sorted itself out when Biden was forced to step down, but it seems as though Harris's loss has campaign analysts thinking that his age wasn't the issue we all made it out to be. Set aside the fact that at 82, Biden is so old that he regularly called Harris, who will turn 61 this year, "kid" and we all were like "yeah, for sure."
But this will never be seen as an issue so long as the Democratic Party is run by other, older, people. Nancy Pelosi is 84, Chuck Schumer is 74, Dianne Feinstein "served" until she died at the age of ninety. These people would have been forced out of any other job decades ago, but for some reason running a country is something they claim can be done indefinitely, a particular affliction of people their age.
They're members of a singular generation, one that didn't have to fight in either of the World Wars but got to reap all the economic benefits of the prosperity that followed. They bought houses, sold them for ten times what they paid, and watched their stock portfolios boom regardless of who won at the ballot box. Their prosperity was so vast and so great that it likely feels to them as if all of human history was coalescing to enable their charmed lives. But nothing lasts forever. No matter how rich or powerful you are, life only ends one way.
Still, these older Democrats don't want to hear it. Rather than contend with their own mortality, they've convinced themselves that they can hang onto their power forever rather than hand it off to those next in line, even if that comes at the cost of every bit of progress they've won throughout their careers. They are an aging grandparent on a national scale, unwilling to stop driving no matter how dangerous it becomes for everyone they pass. They will hang onto Senate and Supreme Court seats until the exact moment of their deaths because to do otherwise would be to acknowledge that their great, prosperous, ride is coming to an end. Not satisfied with 70 years of dancing to Benny Goodman as their wealth ballooned, they're determined to crank up the volume and Sing, Sing, Sing.
But the party needs to end, one way or another, and whether the Democrats in charge know it, they set that ending into motion last month. The last decade of Democratic party politics has been defined by opposition to Donald Trump. He was the perfect political opponent, a loud, hateful, oaf with no respect for the decorum of politics. His shocking win in 2016 was a boon for Democratic messaging. They'd gone from having an opponent to an antichrist. We were all in this together and they were going to help us get out of it. In 2020 they called every favor they had with activists, young voters, and organizers in minority communities, and managed to rack up a win by too thin of a margin. In 2024, they tossed aside those same activists, young people, and minorities to run a photocopy of the campaign that lost in 2016, an undeserved victory lap. The modern Democratic Party's thinly veiled disdain for the working class was on full display as the race to win moderate Republican hearts and minds began. They'd planned to legitimize themselves, fully transforming themselves from a party for the working class into a party for billionaires who are fine with gay marriage. Then, they lost.
The 2016 loss came out of nowhere. But 2024 was not a surprise. 2024 was the most visible own-goal in electoral history. Had they won, Democrats could've coasted for years on having fulfilled their promise to rid America of its Donald Trump problem. Instead, they failed to undo most of the damage done during his first term and hand delivered us to hell for his second. It's a loss that's going to do incalculable damage to the lives and safety of American people, but it's also broken the spell of the Democratic Party.
Electoral common sense for left-leaning voters has always been that it's far better to hold your nose and vote for a spineless centrist than to abstain and pave the way for a grasping fascist, but that only works if the centrist wins. If the old school approach can't meet the crucial moment we're at, if all holding our noses did was put us one step closer to a situation we can't vote our way out of, then that approach has to go.
That approach dictated that we had to play to the middle. It said that things like healthcare reform (despite being popular) were too ambitious for a country like this. It said that the way forward was through small, measured, changes to the massive damage republicans would manage to do in each of their terms. But if that worked, we wouldn't all be stuck watching the country's richest men ride to the capitol like medieval emissaries offering gifts to the new king, thumbing their noses at a party that thought it had them in the bag. It's time for a new approach. It's time to let a new generation of politicians and policymakers take the reins, and not just the ones who are willing to parrot the beliefs of their elderly counterparts.
In a year or so when midterm chatter picks up, there will be a new wave of progressive candidates who need support, and if the Democrats can't give it to them, then they shouldn't feel like they have your vote. This problem will not get solved until we start winning elections again, and that can't start until the Democratic Party is rebuilt into something that excites people, rather than a bunch of focus grouped non-stances propped up by guilt. And we can win, just not the old fashioned way.
This won't stop them from fighting for the old fashioned way of course. Even now, they sit in an underground lab, trying to figure out a way to weld Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg into one centrist homunculus that constantly trails off about its respect for John McCain. But we can't put our trust in them again. We can't trust a group of wealthy geriatrics who seem determined to compromise with a pack of hungry dogs. We can't keep calling this same goddamn plumber.
So as this inauguration day brings our enemies into power, don't forget whose inaction brought us here. Because even as things look hopeless, we've been allowed to go forward without the delusion that they're fighting for anyone other than themselves. All that's left for us now is to organize with the only resource we have that they don't: time.