The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Collective Grievance, Collective Guilt, Collective Rage: A Case Study

Posted on | September 20, 2025 | Comments Off on Collective Grievance, Collective Guilt, Collective Rage: A Case Study

What’s wrong with the Democratic Party? There are two ways to approach this question. Democrats ask what’s wrong with their party in order to fix it, so that they can win more elections. Republicans ask the question in order to make the argument that nobody should vote for that dysfunctional trainwreck of a party. Because some of my friends and relatives are Democrats, I am always available to encourage them to sulk and pout and grumble about their party’s problems whenever Democrats lose. Like, counseling the young “Bernie Bro” fellows: “Democrats are sold out to their corporate donors!” Or advising my Jewish Democrat friends: “Kamala might have won if she’d had Josh Shapiro as her VP, but she had to pander to the Hamas caucus in Michigan.” Just doing my part to stoke grassroots discontent and demoralization. Anyway . . .

This week we started getting excerpts from Kamala Harris’s new book, in which she accepts zero responsibility for getting Donald Trump re-elected, and instead points the finger of blame elsewhere. Such is the background situation that sparked this online colloquy:

VeeCeeMurphy76: “I really don’t need white people tone policing Kamala Harris when their demographic is responsible for why we’re here.”
WendyDFW78: “So we need to treat Kamala Harris differently because she’s a Black woman? Is that the message? It is not white people’s fault that Harris lost.”
VeeCeeMurphy76: “Go cry to your people about it.”

You need seek no further for an answer to the question, “What’s wrong with the Democratic Party?” That’s it, right there.

The fundamental organizing principle of the Democratic Party is, and arguably always has been, to scour the landscape in search of people with grievances against whatever the status quo might be at any given moment, to persuade these people to view themselves as a distinct and coherent class, and then to promise them that the only solution to their collective problem is simple: Vote Democrat!

Among the several predictable consequences of this political strategy is that, first of all, people will begin to view election outcomes as a measure of their own well-being — if Democrats win, “we” win, but if Democrats lose, “we” lose. And it doesn’t matter which constituent identity grouping is your membership ticket in the party, this sense that you’re better off simply because Democrats win elections (or suffering because Republicans win) is the same. That’s the psychological identity trap which Democrats construct by the nature of their rhetoric.

Once you see this for what it is, and step back from your personal feelings — to assess the truth claims of Democratic Party rhetoric objectively and rationally — you begin to understand a lot of things that otherwise don’t make sense. Why, for example, does VeeCeeMurphy76 consider herself entitled to insult white people categorically, and to respond so rudely to WendyDFW78? Both of them are Democrats and the underlying question is: “Why did Democrats lose the 2024 election?”

If you wish to understand why this exchange between two Democrats is so hostile, I recommend you read Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Hoffer observes that collectivist and/or totalitarian movements tend to attract certain types of people — “Misfits,” “The Inordinately Selfish,” etc. — and once you’ve read his analysis, you will never see politics the same again. Hoffer’s insight confirms the observations of Friedrich Hayek about “Why the Worst Get on Top” (Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom).

While I could write thousands of words on that subject, the immediate point is how the blame-game among Democrats over the 2024 election is doomed to failure because of this collectivist groupthink problem. Millions of Democrats are committed to a belief structure in which Kamala Harris cannot be responsible for her own defeat. She is a WOC (woman of color) and therefore any criticism of her is racist and misogynist. To someone like VeeCeeMurphy76, there can be only one answer to why Kamala lost, and that answer is white people. By contrast, WendyDFW78 seems to believe that maybe Democrats would win more elections if they actually tried to get more votes from white people.

Having walked away from the Democratic Party about 30 years ago, I smile in amusement at such quarrels among Democrats. Do I want them to win more elections? No, I do not, and therefore refuse to offer them any helpful advice. As far as I’m concerned, they should continue nominating dingbats like Kamala Harris forever, and should spend the rest of their lives blaming each other for their predictable defeats.



 

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Category: Democrats

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