People who would never tolerate being repeatedly lied to by close friends and relatives keep returning to vote for “their” political party because they believe the other party is evil and must be stopped at all costs.
What’s Wrong with the Democrats? They Need More Democracy
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What’s wrong with the Democrats and how can the party be fixed? When an insurgent outsider candidate from the party’s progressive left defeats a moderate endorsed by the establishment, Democratic leaders reject the results and deny the will of their voters. They refuse the infusion of new ideas and tactics every organization needs to evolve. They anger their voter base. They lose elections they should have won.
It’s time for Democrats to democratize their party.
Democrats’ top-down leadership style is currently being deployed against Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist winner of New York City’s mayoral primary who defeated corporate favorite Andrew Cuomo. The primary results came in over a week ago, yet none of the party’s big guns—Obama, Schumer, Jeffries, Pelosi, Buttigieg, Newsom, Harris, DNC chair Ken Martin—has endorsed Mamdani. Ever the happy warrior, Mamdani says he’s grateful for the kind words he has received from his ideological fellow travelers Bernie, AOC and other members of The Squad. But the establishment’s silence is hypocritical—when the primary winner is a centrist like Biden, the Left is expected to fall in line—and telling.
Not so behind the scenes, the top Democrats who are not that into democracy are following the backroom skullduggery deployed against Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders. Eric Adams, the incumbent mayor elected in 2021, opted out of the Democratic primary due to his rock-bottom approval ratings amid federal corruption charges, which Trump’s DOJ dropped in exchange for opening his sanctuary city to ICE deportation operations. Yet he’s still running for reelection in the general election, as an independent under his one-man “End Anti-Semitism” line. Adams’ base is big business and Zionists. Cuomo is currently running too.
There’s a Republican, too—Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels. But he’s not a major factor in an 11% Republican city.
Billionaire Trump supporter Bill Ackman, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, former hedge fund executive Whitney Tilson, Kathy Wylde of the Partnership for New York City, along with the Murdoch-owned New York Post, want the disgraced Cuomo and the marginal Sliwa to step aside and consolidate the anti-Mamdani vote behind the disgraced Adams.
Even with the Post’s rabid attacks (“Socialist Mamdani Wants to Pay for Government Grocery Stores with Money That Doesn’t Exist,” “Zohran Mamdani’s ‘No Billionaires’ Dream Fits His Goal — To Make Us All Live in Equal Misery,” “With Code Words and Dog Whistles, Mamdani Puts a Pretty Face on Hate”), it’s too early to tell whether Adams’ unlikely alliance of Wall Street and Black voters can defeat Mamdani. But primary winners tend to perform better in general elections when their party is united. Support from party bosses is essential.
Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War and appeal to young and minority voters positioned him as an outsider challenging the party’s entrenched leadership in 2008, when he challenged Hillary Clinton in the primaries. His diverse coalition and fundraising prowess forced the DNC to embrace him. They won.
Similarly, party leaders got behind AOC and Squadsters Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush after they won their congressional primaries. All won.
DNC sandbagging of Bernie had mixed results. The first time, in 2016, it led to Hillary’s defeat in a contest Bernie would have been likelier to have won. Biden/Harris, the establishment choice, prevailed in 2020 but progressives who sat out contributed to the vice president’s defeat in 2024.
Though they constantly characterize Republicans as enemies of American democracy, Democrats who want to democratize their party should consider emulating their rivals. With fewer superdelegates who skew primaries toward the establishment, the GOP is structurally representative of its voters. And its party leaders tend to set their personal preferences aside when voters prefer an insurgent outsider.
The results confirm Newt Gingrich’s observation that “by definition, the person who learns enough to become the nominee is almost certainly the best person for the general election.”
Donald Trump, a businessman and reality-TV personality with no political experience, entered the 2016 primary on a lark and defeated establishment favorites Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. Stalwarts like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan opposed Trump but, in the end, pragmatism prompted acceptance and a unified GOP defeated Hillary.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, another political novice, ran in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election. State GOP bosses preferred conservatives like Tom McClintock and Bill Simon because Schwarzenegger’s moderate politics (pro-choice, environmentalist) made him an outsider. After Schwarzenegger won 48.6% of the vote in a crowded field, GOP leaders fell into line. He won two terms.
In another insurgent campaign Rand Paul, a libertarian ophthalmologist, won the 2010 GOP Senate primary. Mitch McConnell and other Kentucky party bosses had backed Trey Grayson. The party embraced him to co-opt his Tea Party base. Paul holds a steady seat. J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Dave Brat of Virginia all followed the path of the outsider who defeated establishment-backed candidates and were nevertheless accepted by the party hierarchy.
Like Democrats, Republicans lose when they fail to coalesce behind their insurgent primary victors. Some state Republican officials were displeased when former news anchor Kari Lake, a former news anchor, defeated establishment-backed Karrin Taylor Robson in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial primary. The RNC supported her but it wasn’t enough. A similar fate befell Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell in their 2010 Senate races in Nevada and Delaware, respectively.
History is clear. The smart move for Democrats is to unify behind their winning primary candidates, whether they are establishment favorites or progressive insurgents. New York and national Democrats should endorse, fund and campaign Zohran Mamdani.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s WHAT’S LEFT.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.)
DMZ America Podcast Ep 194: Is This 1933?
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Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:
Hitler was elected democratically and consolidated his dictatorship after seizing power. Donald Trump just won a fair election. Is he plotting to subvert American democracy?
There are signs that suggest “yes.”
Presidents may only serve two terms, yet Trump repeatedly suggests that he ought to run and win a third term. A “Third Term Project” was announced at CPAC. This past week, Trump called himself “The King” and quoted the French Emperor Napoleon, who argued, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
More materially, Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and two other top military officers. He will be replaced with a MAGA loyalist. History shows that the military is key to a successful coup d’état or revolution. And Trump has a strong reason to want to stay in office: if and when he steps down, he again becomes vulnerable to criminal charges.
Is it 1933 in Germany? Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) talking about the prospects for democracy under Trump on today’s DMZ America Podcast.
The Outsourcing of Politics
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In many countries, politics happens 365 days a year. Citizens hold their governments’ feet to the fire when they’re unhappy. Not so in the United States. We outsource politics to the politicians and check in every two to four years to see how they’ve been doing.
Make Kamala Earn Our Votes
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Completely inexplicable, on the other hand, is the Democrats’ immediately creating an “I’m with her” cult of personality for Harris—the same slogan that helped sink Hillary Clinton in 2016 because it violated the #1 rule of politics: the politician is supposed to be with us. Why are gullible Democrats donating at record levels for a candidate who has yet to make a single campaign promise? They’re lining up to volunteer for an incumbent politician who didn’t accomplish a single thing in her current job—no new law attributable primarily to her, no policy initiative she pushed through, no big idea she championed. And they’re overlooking the prosecutor position where she did get stuff done, defending oppressive state policies and leaving behind a trail of broken lives shattered by injustice she helped perpetuate.
We know why: she’s not Trump.
That’s nowhere close to be being good enough. Mainly because it’s a faulty assumption. How do we know she’s better than Trump? Until Harris tells us what she’s for, there is no objective way to compare her to her Republican counterpart.
If a politician wants votes, they should earn them. They must identify our problems and develop policies to address them. They must explain why their solutions are better than those proffered by their opponents. They must defend their record. They must explain their mistakes and explain why they will not repeat them.
Kamala Harris is not doing any of this. And there’s no sign she plans to.
A social media ad distributed July 27th by the Harris Victory Fund says it all: “I am running to be President of the United States. If that’s all you need to hear, then make a donation to fund my campaign today.” [underline hers, not mine] No. It’s not. I need to hear a lot more—and so should you.
Reagan quoted a Russian proverb: “Trust, but verify.” When a leader asks you to trust her without offering any reason to do so, when she asks for a blank check, when citizens willingly suspend skepticism, when those who wish to wait-and-see are shouted down as party poopers in service to evildoers (in this case, Trump), you are observing a key democracy, votes, elections, Kamala Harris, record, promises, policies, Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton, blank checkcomponent of fascism: blind trust in The Leader. Jason Stanley, a Yale philosopher, noted: “Truth is required to act freely. Freedom requires knowledge, and in order to act freely in the world, you need to know what the world is and know what you’re doing. You only know what you’re doing if you have access to the truth.”
What is the truth about Kamala Harris? No matter what, her supporters say, she’ll be better than Trump. To which I ask, citing the Boston punk band The Lyres, “How Do You Know?”
This is a tough question to answer.
Which is outrageous.
In a democracy, a citizen should not have to resort to Cold War-style Kremlinology to guess how a candidate for president would govern the country. Yet here we are, casting our votes blindly.
Whatever you think of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s ambitious right-wing wish list for a second Trump Administration, or whether you believe Trump’s claim that he has nothing to do with it, you have to give Republicans credit for having a plan. Voters can read Project 2025 and watch Trump’s rallies and read the GOP platform and decide, as informed free citizens, whether or not they want to vote for a candidate who, more likely than not, would carry out those policies were he to be reelected. We know who Trump is. We know what he’s for.
The same cannot be said of Kamala Harris, a sidelined vice president whose record in the White House is startlingly sparse. New York magazine described the veep last year as “a minor character who has little role in the administration’s domestic and foreign policy.” She only served part of a single term as senator, the highlight of which was her grilling of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. No bill that she co-sponsored ever made it into law.
If anyone owes voters a detailed policy agenda, it’s Harris. Would she be Biden 2.0? Is she a progressive or a corporatist? She’s run as both. Democrats should issue their own version of Project 2025 so we know who and what we’re voting for—or against.
Unless we hold politicians’ feet to the fire, representative democracy is unaccountable and therefore worthless. When we give our votes away without any promises in return, we are reduced to speculation about what they might or may not do. Once elected, they do whatever they want.
They’ve promised us nothing. So they owe us nothing. We are worse, and our system is worse, than people in a corrupt autocracy who sell their votes for money or, as in some countries, kitchen tools. As voters, we are worse than whores. We are sluts of democracy—we give it away for free.
Without specific policy promises, our analysis of Harris must, by necessity, ignore the dictum that past performance is no guarantee of future returns. People change. But if Harris has evolved since her days as a prosecutor—the only period of her career that documents her own actions, in a position where she had wide discretion—we have no way to know that. Is she better than Trump? The only hard data we have is her record as a DA and AG.
That record is pretty bleak. Hers is the portrait of ambitious careerist who marketed herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor with a view toward setting herself up for a situation like the one in which she finds herself now, running for high office at a time when people are freaked out about street crime. (Bonus! Trump is a convicted felon!) Trouble is, like most self-styled crime fighters, she committed a lot of crimes herself. She violated due process, cheated the rules of evidence, fought to preserve flawed convictions, refused to pay wrongfully-convicted defendants and worked overtime to keep the innocent behind bars by denying DNA tests.
A different kind of evil than Trump’s—but not a smaller kind. What could be more disgusting than using your position as an officer of the court to oppose the interest of justice?
Fortunately for Harris, she can easily lay these skeletons in her closet to rest. She can apologize, say that she has seen the light, and write up a credible plan for criminal justice report that shows she has changed her views.
Hopefully we’ll see something before Election Day.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
Most Likely to Protect Democracy
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Between his terrifying debate performance and his refusal/inability to appear in public without reading from a Teleprompter, it’s pretty clear that Joe Biden hasn’t been the president of the United States for quite some time, assuming that he ever was. His big campaign argument was that he was defending democracy, but this lack of transparency is more indicative of a totalitarian state than a democracy. Who has been making the big decisions in the Biden Administration for the last few years? No one knows.
DMZ America Podcast #150: Lawfare v. Hunter Biden, Age v. Joe Biden, EU Elections
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Political artists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) aren’t just smart prescient analysts of news and current events. They are also best friends. So they’re not going to yell each other and try to talk over each other. They discuss and debate with courage and respect, making for easy-to-listen-to political discussion.
This week, the Wall Street Journal reports that Democratic and Republican White House insiders are all worried about the mental and physical fitness of the President of the United States. Biden nods off during meetings, doesn’t seem to know how to read the room, doesn’t seem to understand much about what’s going on. What can and should be done about this terrifying situation?
Also, Hunter Biden becomes the latest political figure targeted by a “gotcha lawsuit,” in which a relatively trivial offense is blown up into a major legal problem not because society must be protected from a villain but because it might score a few political points. Scott and Ted compare and contrast this trial over gun charges in Delaware with the conviction of former President Donald Trump in his hush money trial in New York.
Finally, elections in the European Union seem to indicate that the right wing parties are more likely to pick up seats than their rivals. Ted is authorized to vote in French elections and has received a bunch of propaganda from a myriad of political parties running candidates. Why can’t the United States have as much choice as France? Part of the answer lies in our stupid constitution.
Watch the Video Version: here.
Oppose Democracy to Save Democracy
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Democrats say they’re defending democracy–but only by opposing Trump. They’re happy to resort to anti-democratic tactics whenever they feel threatened.
Your Right To Choose What We Tell You
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Democracy, they say, is on the ballot this year and it’s really important to go to vote against Donald Trump. But the election itself has already proven itself to be anything but democratic. Third parties aren’t allowed on the ballot or to vote and the parties decided the choices in the primaries.
And Biden Is NOT Senile
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Team Biden responds to concerns that the president may be senile with assurances that, behind the scenes, Biden is energetic and sharp. We don’t get to see that, of course…not that we get to see much of the Leader of the Free World at all. Maybe it’s time for Team Trump to deploy their own version of “you don’t know him the way I know him” argument.
