What I Got Wrong About Politics Five Years Ago

Elections aren't about ideas, they're about coalitions.

Every now and then, when I talk to one of my artist friends, they’ll bring up their old work: you know, the stuff they made as a kid and now cringe thinking about. Maybe it was some awkwardly proportioned anime drawings they posted to DeviantArt or some stiff animation. As someone who’s never been much of an artist, I usually don’t give it much mind. After all, nobody gets good at a craft unless they're willing to repeatedly fail.

Unfortunately for me, my “craft” seems to be writing about politics. This means that when I screw up, I end up looking twice as stupid. And man, looking back at my old writing hurts. So I figured I'd at least take this week to correct the record, and perform a “do-over” on an old post I'm rather embarrassed looking back on. I was originally going to do this week’s piece on more tech news, but it’s reaching the end of the first month of my Substack Challenge.

(At the beginning of the year, I set a goal for myself to turn out one piece a week every week for 2025. This was in order to build writing discipline and learn to write shorter and quicker. In addition, at the end of each month I’d like to do a YouTube video going over the lessons I’ve learned throughout that month as a writer. So as I’ve been having to juggle working on that and this week’s piece, I figured I’d go for a topic that’s quick and kind of overlaps what I plan to talk about in that video.)

What I would like to talk about today is a piece I actually wrote for this blog back in 2020. Apart from being a horrible, unreadable mess of academic jargon and clunky phrasing¹, the central point it was trying to make was just plain wrong. My mental model of how politics worked and the assumptions I was working off of completely missed the mark.

But I do think there’s an opportunity here. The mistake I made is actually pretty common, having been made by all sorts of people from those new to politics to those who make careers out of it. In this post I plan to go over what the old post said, why it’s wrong, and what ideologues need to keep in mind when engaging with the larger world.

Before we can dive into all that, let’s first start by recapping exactly what that old essay was even about. I wrote that essay back in 2020, right around the time of the American presidential election. As a rule, I try not to get personally invested or involved in elections, so I was following this season entirely from the sidelines. Whenever I cover or mention currently relevant political figures in my writing, I’ve generally tried to do so with a level of caution and restraint.

So, I ended up writing that essay as a way for me to try and ‘objectively’ analyze what I was seeing, without having to take a side or get too much in the weeds.

The Old Theory

One thing didn’t sit quite right with me over the course of that season. In the primaries, the Democrats fielded a bunch of different candidates to run in that primary. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, the list goes on. There were a lot of different people to pick from, but a lot them were running on the same platform. They focused on the same issues and supported the same positions.

But, listening to the how bitter the fights got between each camp and their supporters, you wouldn’t think it. Media coverage treated the race as a brawl between the “left” of the party (represented by Bernie Sanders) and the “moderates” (pretty much everyone else). But the “moderates” and the “progressives” often agreed on the key issues: there wasn’t much debate on the Green New Deal or immigration and there almost wasn’t any debate on Medicare 4 All.² On nearly every single issue in this race, the so-called “moderate” position was still significantly to the left of how the Obama administration governed.

So, the question I had going into that essay was as follows: why is there conflict between these camps if they ultimately support the same things? The theory I went with at the time was that while both of these groups had the same short-term goals (fund social services, assist minority communities, fight climate change), their political philosophies were fundamentally different.

I tried to fit the “moderates” under the ideology of ‘social democracy’, which supports a larger government as a way to ‘balance out’ the market. This means countering poverty with welfare, corporate abuse with regulation, and inequality with taxes. The existing government and economy is meant to stay in place, with some slight tweaks around the edges. Standard liberal stuff.

Whereas Bernie and his supporters I categorized as ‘democratic socialists’. Democratic socialists believe in socialism — an economic system where decision-making is entirely handled by workers. Their long-term vision is an economy and government that looks significantly different from the one that exists. They think by doing stuff such as funding social services or regulating corporations, they can gradually work their way to a socialist society without a violent revolution.

So while both of them shared the same short-term goals, their long term goals would be different. And that would lead to them having different attitudes about “the system”. Social democrats would see the political and corporate establishment as possible allies in their goals, while democratic socialists would see them as opponents to topple before they could take power for themselves.

Should we approach the political and economic systems we already have in good faith?

At the time, it made sense to me. After all, Bernie’s whole message was combative. It was about fighting “the establishment”, “the elites”, etc. Whereas guys like Biden tried to stress their broad appeal and inoffensiveness. Everything seems to line up with the messaging. Not to mention that with this theory, it makes sense why there’s such animosity between the camps.

What I Missed

There’s one glaring, obvious issue I missed. Most people do not think in these abstract terms. When we talk about elections, we’re not talking about a game of ideas, we’re talking about a game of numbers. Candidates are tested not on how profound their ideas are, but whether or not they can build a winning coalition. Now, don’t get me wrong: ideas can help towards this, but their role is always secondary.

And even then, the way voters interface with and make sense of ideas is a lot more reflexive than how academics and theorists do. These kinds of ideas are meant to speak to people, to give them a language whereby they can make sense of their identity in this world. Interests, not ideology, are what really stand at the center of this.

When black Americans in the 1930s started moving over to the Democratic Party, they did so not because they abstractly reasoned themselves away from Republican entrepreneurialism into social democracy. They did it because FDR’s New Deal was speaking to the day-to-day issues they were facing as a demographic that was disproportionately working-class.

If you look at actual voters, you will quickly see that a lot of them don’t neatly “fit” on the political spectrum, and their notion of what is left/right/moderate has less to do with policy or ideas, and more with how a candidate positions themselves between both parties and the sorts of vibes they give off.

Elites have to be careful to not misread this. Where elites begin to miss this, they can try to position themselves in ways that might seem more “moderate” to them, but really are not at all relevant to the ways in which people think.

The recent 2024 election provides a rather clear example of this. Democrats were thrown for a loop when the data showed voters percieved Donald Trump as more moderate than Kamala Harris. On their model of the typical political spectrum, informed by policy, it didn’t quite make sense. They attempted to address this by touting the support of Republicans who would be considered conservative on their “political spectrum” (such as Liz Cheney), to try and counteract that. It didn’t work. Liz Cheney is even more unpopular among Republicans than Democrats, despite having more in common with the GOP on policy. But as an outspoken critic of Trump, in terms of vibes and loyalties, she may as well be considered “left” in the public imagination.

But that’s just voters. If you criticized my essay on those grounds five years ago, I’d probably try to defend the argument by saying it still applies to the elites and politicians of the party and its different factions. But even if we focus on them, the sorts of people you would most expect to be ideologically motivated, my analysis still isn’t quite accurate.

This becomes apparent when you take a second to actually look at the people and organizations in the orbit of the Sanders campaign in 2020. Yes, there were explicitly democratic socialist organizations such as the DSA and publications (such as Jacobin Magazine) which explicitly sought to replace capitalism in full. But it gets muddier when you look at other organizations, such as the Justice Democrats or Our Revolution which branded themselves as more broadly progressive and focused on policy reforms. One of the co-chairs of the Sanders campaign (Ro Khanna) brands himself as a “progressive capitalist”, has been known to represent the interests of Silicon Valley billionaires, and has a uniquely libertarian streak to his worldview. Other high-profile oddballs who were outspoken supporters of Bernie Sanders included Liz Breunig (a pro-life Catholic) and Anna Khaciyan (whose eclectic views have gone on to make her a darling of right-wing intellectuals).

This looks less like a coherent ideological programme and moreso a grab-bag collection of weirdos who were excluded from the Obama-era Democratic consensus for one reason or another. But that’s exactly it. Even at this level, politics is still factional. All of these different people have different long-term visions, but they have a common short-term goal in toppling the grip Obama and his allies had on the party. Bernie’s “vibe” was vague enough to serve as a vessel for all discontent with the Democratic establishment. He made for a good enough wedge for all of these different people to try and break their way into the top ranks of the party. This wasn’t “left” vs. “moderate”, it was Obamaworld vs. Bernieworld.

Other candidates who were more strongly aligned with the old guard (ex. Harris’ team being mostly comprised of old Hillary staffers, Biden being Obama’s VP, etc.) felt threatened not because of the specific platform or policies advanced, but because Bernie’s campaign was a vocal attempt to fully seize the driver’s wheel away from them.

And, I mean, that’s how Obama did it too, right? He got the support of Oprah, Ron Paul voters, and Jon Stewart, all of whom shared little apart from hating both Bush and the establishment that was backing Hillary.

Elites are ideological actors, but they’re also self-interested actors. Politics is a competitive game, and you have to make decisions with respect to your continued survival. Where you have moments like the past decade or two where Obamaworld completely shut out dissenting factions within the Democratic tent, latching onto anyone trying to mount a rebellion becomes more attractive.

Now, that’s not to say ideology is worthless. Each of these elites — while self-interested — also still have goals in mind, and ideology is the language to make sense of those goals. They’re in politics because they want to influence the country towards some end.

If ideologues want a better pulse on real events and real people, it’s not that they need to discard thinking in ideological terms. It’s that they need to better understand their position in society. Their job isn’t that of a missionary, having to educate every single person in their framework. Ideology acts as a navigator; it allows you to build up frameworks and models to analyze and apply so you’ll know what the best course of action is at a given time. As an ideologue, you need to look at the interests of those you need to convince, their own interests, and find that exact point where those interests align.

Because ideologues have this whole framework built up ahead of time, they have the ability to look at current events and process it through their mental models. They can seize on these moments to provide answers and guide both people (and elites) who look on these things disoriented and rudderless. If they play their cards right, they can be at the ready to provide a larger explanation of why things happen and what to do about them. They hold the map, they have the gameplan.

The mistake ideologues often make is in assuming everyone thinks like them, or that they should think like them. If you have a goal, reality isn’t an obstacle to be overcome, reality is the terrain on which you fight. You adjust to real people and real circumstances, not the other way around. And that process of having to navigate and negotiate your ideals against real constraints is precisely what makes the art of politics.

1. I plan to talk about this in more detail in the video. Will update the post with a link when it’s completed.

2. Dovere, Edward-Isaac. Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump. Penguin, 2021.