Sincerity is not the problem

As is inevitably the case after an election — and is especially the case after an election with an unexpected result — allies of the losing presidential candidate in 2024 looked for people to blame.

One quickly identified culprit was “the groups,” advocacy organizations that had built power and used it to pressure Democratic candidates to push for their positions. Organizations that demanded racial justice and climate groups like the Sunrise Movement have been targets of particular ire. They pushed Democratic legislators to take public positions that were seen as unpopular, ushering in Donald Trump’s second term.

Let’s set aside the central problem with that claim — namely, that inflation was almost certainly a far, far bigger problem for the incumbent party than, say, “wokeness” — and instead consider the supposed problem on its own merits. In particular, the role of climate politics on the left.

It is true that addressing climate change has not proven to be something that inspires many Americans to vote for Democrats, even if they agree that planetary warming is a problem. There just happen to be a lot of other, more pressing problems that voters tend to prioritize.

It is also the case that the world is warming and that is being driven by human activity. It is the case that this is a problem that is already manifest and that it threatens to become more immediate and more damaging as time passes. It is an issue that will necessarily affect people who are alive in the year 2100 more than those who will be alive in 2050, meaning it is an issue that has particular salience to younger Americans.

So, for many young and recently young Americans, climate change became a generationally defining problem. It was something that affected them more than older Americans and it involved a fight against deeply entrenched interests with deep pockets. It is analogous (in admittedly incomplete ways) to the baby boom’s fight against the Vietnam War. That, too, was something that disproportionately affected the young and it, too, involved a fight against established power.

It was also a fight that emerged along with an unusually large population of young people. Millennials were between 10 and 25 years old when “An Inconvenient Truth” elevated global warming to national attention. For every 100 boomers in the U.S. two decades after that generation emerged (that is, in 1984), there were 94 millennials two decades after its emergence (in 2016). It’s just that, in part because of the baby boom, millennials made up far less of the total population.

The generational fight against climate change did not see the same success as did the fight against Vietnam. There are a lot of reasons for that, including that Vietnam War produced immediate, visceral examples of death and immorality that were effective in moving public opinion. The fight against climate change featured plenty of imagery of the effects of warmer oceans and air, but it also ran into a system of denial that wasn’t possible in the 1970s. It wasn’t just a battle against carbon dioxide emissions; it became a battle over reality, with corporations and their allies settling on a strategy of contesting every single inch of rhetorical terrain.

For all of the cynicism that accompanied the anti-war movement a half-century ago, at least the war ended. Young people fighting for what they saw as an existential threat to the planet and themselves, incremental progress in reducing greenhouse gases hardly seemed like much of a victory. They fought the system — and the system won a robust victory.

There was an institution that was supposed to aid their fight: The Democratic Party. Often, though, Democratic politicians adopted moderate positions or advocated for carefully triangulated policy proposals aimed at building consensus. Americans generally and young Americans in particular were already drifting away from party membership in favor of political independence; the Democratic Party didn’t offer young people who cared about climate change much of a reason to sign up.

The Democratic Party is supposed to be the storehouse of political power on the left. But the increased polarization of politics and the increased nationalization of it (the centering of national issues even in state and local races) has trained the party to seek out the least offensive possible position as indicated by public opinion data. So those young people — and people of color and the (mostly) retirement-age women who spun up the Indivisible protests during Trump’s first term — built power elsewhere. Then they deployed it as they saw fit.

This is what stokes the frustration of those left-leaning pundits. Why are you applying pressure there, where it doesn’t matter, instead of here, where it does? Why are you doing something that polls say is unpopular? Why are you being so strident? This is why we lost Montana!

Never mind that there’s often little evidence that these pundits have any special insight into winning elections. We can agree that the Democratic Party needs to incorporate a more diverse array of policies and priorities than does the Republican Party (given the Senate and Electoral College benefits of there being a lot of heavily rural and heavily White states) while still arguing that there’s value in people advocating for what they believe in.

We can also point to recent evidence that poll numbers are far from static. President Trump’s approach to immigration was viewed generally positively until (over objections from some of the aforementioned pundits) the left began elevating the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Trump’s numbers went underwater and have stayed there. The rhetoric drove the polls, instead of the inverse.

With massive anti-Trump protests planned for tomorrow, this is important to remember. Sincerity, staking out a position rooted in one’s personal beliefs, has value. You can win elections by tacking to the middle; lots of people have. But you can also win elections by staking a moral position and convincing people to agree with you. You can earn support by demonstrating what is important to you instead of just being determined to nod along with what you hear.

If the problem for Kamala Harris in 2024 was the emergence of climate and racial justice groups that boxed her in, then the problem wasn’t with those groups. It was with a party that left space for those groups to emerge by failing to capture the energy and urgency of their members.

It is also worth remembering that the moment in which there was the most obvious grass-roots energy around racial justice and against Trump in recent years was in 2020. How’d the Democratic candidate do then?

Photo: 2014 Climate march in NYC.