I appreciate the response, even if it was shorter than usual.
I still think there are contradictions in your framework that you haven’t really resolved.
You say it’s not your assumption that every MAGA voter is motivated by hate, but earlier you said “literally all of MAGA is hate and xenophobia.” Then you listed examples to back that up and concluded the entire movement is rooted in grievance. So when you now say “I don’t believe they’re all haters,” it reads more like a disclaimer than something that actually informs your analysis. If you believed these voters were more complex, your language and framing would reflect that.
The KKK comparison only reinforces the issue. Yes, the KKK created a toxic form of belonging. But the fact that belonging can be dangerous doesn’t mean it isn’t also powerful. Every successful political movement has used it: from labor unions to civil rights to Obama’s 2008 campaign. The challenge is to offer a better kind of belonging, not to pretend that the emotion itself is illegitimate whenever it shows up on the right.
Historically, the most powerful democratic movements, from the labor movement to the civil rights movement, did create cross-racial, emotionally resonant political communities rooted in dignity, justice, and shared struggle. Was it hard? Yes. Did it require organizing, leadership, sacrifice, and moral clarity? Of course. But it happened. And it can happen again. It requires a broad political imagination.
Here’s where your logic breaks down: You say “let’s talk to them,” but you also describe them in terms so sweeping and moralized that there’s no real political reason to do so. If they’re unreachable and beyond reason, what exactly are we planting seeds for?
And that ties into your point about Port Huron. You treat Hayden’s ideas like a quaint failure because they’re old, not because they’re wrong. But 60 years later, many of the same forces SDS identified (elite consolidation, political alienation, economic dislocation) have only gotten worse.
Regardless, what I’m proposing isn’t a replay of Port Huron or the campus-centered politics of the New Left. That vision, while idealistic, was often disconnected from the everyday lives of working people and too wrapped up in cultural rebellion to build majoritarian power. My project is rooted in material politics, not abstract moral appeals or lifestyle radicalism, but the concrete promise of dignity, belonging, and economic security for a multi-ethnic working class that has been abandoned by both parties. It’s not about purity or protest; it’s about winning AND building something real and durable in the process.
Meanwhile, the alternative strategy you seem to endorse (technocratic governance paired with moral condemnation) has left millions of voters feeling abandoned and fueled the rise of right-wing populism.
If Democrats want to compete on the emotional and cultural terrain the right has claimed, they can’t do it with moral distance and data points alone. They have to offer people something real, not just in terms of policy, but in terms of meaning and solidarity. If you thinks that naive, then fine. I think it’s how we start taking actual politics seriously again.
