Chained to the Rhythm
A dark night foreshadowing darker questions about the future of the Democratic Party
I woke up this morning with a heaviness in my chest. I went to bed last night before 11:00. The election was nowhere close to being called, but I knew Donald Trump had won. There were just too many red-shifts in voting across too many regions to hold out any hope of a Democratic comeback. At 5:30 this morning I checked my phone and confirmed Trump’s victory. The heaviness in my chest grew heavier. It is the heaviness of sadness over our country facing another four years of discord, division, and dysfunction. It is a sadness for my daughters who question whether they should leave the country for college rather than risk staying in the United States where their rights as women are so vulnerable. It is a sadness for my parents who must endure their late 70s under the rule of a man who they can barely mention without their blood pressure spiking to dangerous levels. It is a sadness for American families struggling with the cost of living whose financial situation will only grow more dire under Trump’s ill-conceived tariff plan and his cozy relationships with real estate speculators who make owning a home so far out of reach. It is a sadness for innocent immigrants who will go to bed tonight not knowing if and when they will be forcibly removed from the country. It is a sadness for the earth, as Trump will likely gut the EPA and revoke the carbon reduction initiatives of the Inflation Reduction Act. Despite all my doubts about the competency of the Democratic Party, I cast my vote for Kamala Harris for a reason. I didn’t want to see our country have to endure another four years of Donald Trump.
But the heaviness in my chest is not entirely due to sadness. It is also due to hours of inhaling natural gas fumes into my lungs. On Monday night, while attending Kamala’s Get Out the Vote Rally just outside Pittsburgh, I stood not far from the gas generator lighting up a stage that had been set up in front of the eerie post-industrial landscape of the Carrie Blast Furnaces, once part of U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works. Hearing what we hoped would be the first woman president of the United States the night before a historic election day was well worth the hours of waiting and atrocious air quality. We couldn’t let ourselves be bothered by inhaled gas fumes now that the Pennsylvania Democratic Party adores fracking, just one of the many concessions to corporate power and pivots to the right we were told was necessary to get Kamala into the White House. As I joined in the chants of “We Won’t Go Back” and “When We Fight, We Win,” my inner doubts were silenced, and I felt invigorated as Kamala left the stage to rousing applauses.
Eventually, the clapping subsided and the crowd began to leave in droves, making their way toward the metal detectors where we entered the fenced-in high-security venue. I moved with the flow of bodies, which came to a momentary lull when over the loudspeakers the announcer shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, international pop superstar Katy Perry!” A handful of attendees turned back toward the stage, but most kept moving toward the exits. Katy Perry had been an announced guest, but since it was pushing 10:00, Kamala had already spoken, and most had a long trip home from the remote borough of Rankin, very few folks seemed interested in staying for the performance. Most of us just wanted to get home and prepare for the big day that loomed so large in our minds. We wanted to leave. But we couldn’t. The gates were shut, or at least exiting was somehow severely constrained. We were forced to stand for almost a half hour and listen to Katy belt out her pop hits. Surrounded by barbed wire fences and spotlights, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands and unable to return to our homes, the scene gave an ominous dystopian ring to “We Won’t Go Back.”
There are worse fates than having to attend a non-consensual Katy Perry concert, even if the experience didn’t adhere to the Democratic Party’s commitment to bodily autonomy. Thankfully, I was surrounded by mainly well-behaved Democrats whose lingering post-Kamala high kept us from worrying about this becoming a fatal crowd-crush disaster like some ’70s rock concert or European soccer match. We told ourselves that maybe this delay was just necessary to get Kamala and her security detail out of the venue. The mood barely dipped below mildly annoyed.
Still, as song after song played while the human centipede could not move, I felt dark waves of foreboding wash over me like oily well water tainted by fracking fluid. Maybe it was the superstitious contamination fears triggered by the fact that Katy Perry’s song Roar played such a prominent role in Hillary Clinton’s doomed 2016 campaign against Trump. Maybe the sudden change in venue from Pittsburgh’s Point State Park to Carrie Furnace reminded me of the Democrat’s haphazard if necessary switch of declining Joe Biden to Kamala Harris just a few months before election day. Maybe the campaign tapping Katy Perry over less famous but Pittsburgh-raised artists like Christina Aguilera or Wiz Khalifa reminded me of the Democratic Party’s constant emphasis on national political figures to get out the vote canvassing rather than building local, organic support bases with common folk. Maybe it was the fact that Perry’s work with accused sex pest producer Dr. Luke on her recent failed feminist anthem Women’s World (a criticism I heard voiced by several trapped rally-goers) mirrored the Harris campaign’s embrace of war-monger and surveillance-state architect Dick Cheney as an ally in the effort to defend democracy and protect freedom. Or maybe I was just tired, trapped, and wanted to go home.
Waking up the next morning, memories of the rally felt as surreal as the 80-degree sunshine baking down on Election Day in Western Pennsylvania. I spent the day with family and running errands, trying to take my mind off any dark omens gleaned from my absurd over-analysis of the Katy Perry concert from the night before. But that creeping sense of doom returned with a vengeance once the sun set and election returns began to be posted on CNN. From deep-red Kentucky to reliably blue Virginia, Trump was outperforming his margins in 2016 and 2020. The rout was on.
During an election the Democrats touted as a choice between Trump and Democracy, they lost not only the much-maligned Electoral College but also the popular vote nationwide. This is a stunning rebuke of the Democratic National Committee’s strategy dominated by two years of trying to scare Americans about the apocalyptic dangers of a second Trump presidency. In the coming aftermath of this disaster, the Party leadership must face the choice of whether they will accept some responsibility for what transpired or instead heap moral condemnation on the swing voters whose help they will need in four years to kick Republicans out of the White House. No doubt sexism and racism had a significant role in the undermining of Kamala’s intersectional candidacy. But we knew those risks coming into the race. We had years of racial reckoning and #MeToo scrutiny of misogyny to understand the formidable obstacles in Kamala’s way.
What we have not had in the Trump Era is a reckoning for the Democratic Party’s leadership and its drift toward a scolding elitist institution increasingly out-of-touch with Americans living outside a handful of coastal cities. The time for that reckoning is now, and tough questions must be answered. Will Democrats try to regain the votes of Americans and restore their faith in government by humbly serving as public officials on a local level, or will it be a repeat of the late 2010s, “Chained to the Rhythm” of social media outrage, hashtag activism, Instagram-worthy protest selfies, and incessant donation requests from a national party that cannot even defeat a convicted felon despite having a $1 billion campaign war chest? Will Democrats have the courage to become a legitimate left party that embraces bright-line policies separating them from the GOP, like Medicare For All or a National Job Guarantee, or will they continue to drift to the right to court wealthy former Republicans while most Americans toil in a profoundly unequal economic system where owning a home or starting a family seems increasingly out of reach? Can Democrats support decisive climate action that doesn’t simultaneously include record-breaking fossil fuel extraction and taxpayer-funded subsidies to the oil and gas companies that spiked global warming in the first place? Does the Party stand firmly for anything beyond reproductive rights, identity politics, and defending abstractions like democracy that do not affect the bottom line of corporate interests? Or is it little more than an anti-Trump fundraising operation whose policy preferences depend on the latest focus-group study run by paid consultants? Will Democrats have the guts to stand for a clear vision of material abundance for all Americans, or will their economic policies continue to be filled with more empty cliches than the average Katy Perry song?
On this dreary day, the words “When We Fight, We Win” feel more like an indictment of the Democratic Party than a hopeful campaign slogan. We didn’t win, which means we didn’t fight. Democrats can once again take the easy way out and blame the American people for being too ignorant, too misogynistic, too racist, and too gullible to resist the slimy salesmanship of Donald Trump. Or they can do the right thing and admit that the American people will not fight and win until they have a Democratic Party that clearly defines exactly what they are fighting for.