No, Democrats Don't Need Their Own Stephen Miller

The Atlantic

a day ago

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Do Democrats need their own Stephen Miller? That's what the Rolling Stone journalist Asawin Suebsaeng reports hearing from many people on the left. Imagining a progressive version of Donald Trump's far-right-hand man is hard enough, much less justifying why this might be a good thing. But the idea seems inevitable in a party that has already launched searches for a Democratic Joe Rogan, a Democratic Donald Trump, and a Democratic Project 2025. Even as voters keep telling pollsters that they find the Democratic Party inauthentic, some of its leaders are looking for cheap, left-of-center knockoffs of existing products.
Growing numbers of voters disapprove of Trump, but they don't see Democrats as a viable alternative. The party's own voters describe it with terms such as ' weak ' and 'apathetic.' Americans tell pollsters that Democrats are 'more focused on helping other people than people like me.' In interviews and focus groups, they complain that Democrats have muddled messages or are talking down to them. The New York Times reports today that Democratic Party registration is losing ground to the GOP in the 30 states that track these numbers.
The desire for a Miller Lite reveals Democrats' misunderstanding of their own problem. Democrats are facing a political challenge, as they struggle to communicate their goals to voters in an appealing way. But Miller hasn't been particularly successful at winning over voters. In fact, he's manifestly unappealing as a public figure and apparently as a colleague, to say nothing of his condiment preferences. Miller's own public approval rating is 11 points underwater, and as he's put his agenda into action, Trump keeps getting less popular, too. What makes Miller such an effective policy maven is his devotion to his worldview, and his willingness to sweep aside almost any barriers that might impede his ability to implement it—including public opposition. If Democrats actually got their hands on a Miller Lite, he might only make them less popular.
Suebsaeng's account of what he's hearing exposes this muddled thinking. He writes that people don't 'want the mirror image of the lawlessness per se,' but they do desire someone 'willing to do or say anything and force practically the entire government even people who technically outrank him to violate laws and norms.' Some people might imagine that you could find a ruthless champion of liberal policy ideas without Miller's unfortunate tendency to run roughshod over the rules, but that's part of Miller's full package: He's able to succeed because he has little respect for them. Though a liberal equivalent might be able to drive through some policies, the cost of further destroying the rule of law would be an abandonment of the party's most basic values. Leftist authoritarianism with good health-care coverage is not an appealing alternative to Trumpism. It's Cuba.
The search for Democratic dupes —pun very much intended—in other areas encounters similar challenges. 'The search for a liberal Joe Rogan has led Democrats to an unlikely candidate: Jaime Harrison, their former party chair,' Semafor reported last month. Quite unlikely, in fact. Harrison seems like a nice enough guy, which is perhaps one reason his new podcast hasn't found much audience in an ecosystem that values excitement and conflict. Another problem is the guest lineup, which is mostly Democratic politicians and also Hunter Biden. If Democrats think this is a response to Rogan, they're badly mistaken. Rogan is a podcaster who talks about politics, not a political podcaster. His appeal comes in part from his reputation as an everyman who is at least ostensibly open to persuasion.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has created a lot of buzz in recent days for X posts from his press office that mimic the Trump style—ALL CAPS, stilted diction, memes, and more. This has had the effect of bringing attention to Gavin Newsom, and also of trolling a clueless Dana Perino. Overall, these posts have the form of a joke—it's recognizable to everyone but Perino as a burlesque—but they don't really have any humor. What political project they serve other than entrenching Trump's style is obscure.
Some Democrats are also seeking to replicate the success of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led plan that has been a blueprint for the Trump administration. Here, at least, they seem to be closer to thinking about comparisons with the GOP in a parallel way: Project 2025 has been successful because it is a policy document, not a piece of political strategy. It begins with a worldview—for a religious, traditionalist society—and only then lays out plans to achieve it. But The New York Times reports that the people behind ' Project 2029 ' are trying to gather a range of thinkers from across the Democratic spectrum, which risks producing a great deal of infighting about priorities, rather than a unified plan.
During the Trump era, the GOP agenda has become flattened into whatever Donald Trump and influential advisers say it is. Other Republicans have either adjusted their views or left the party. A figure like Miller both creates and benefits from this uniformity. Democrats can't really replicate that. Their coalition is far more diverse, and there's no major ideological leader of the party, except Bernie Sanders, whose agenda most Democratic elected officials (and voters) don't subscribe to. (Both parties used to be much more ideologically heterogeneous than they are today, although the GOP coalition has narrowed faster than the Democratic one.) Democrats have a lot of policy ideas, some of them in conflict; the upside of a diverse coalition is lots of different approaches.
Every time I hear about the quest for a 'liberal Joe Rogan,' I'm reminded of a passage by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who quoted Saul Bellow dismissing African culture by asking, 'Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?' In reply to Bellow, the journalist Ralph Wiley wrote, 'Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.' This is a lesson about universality, but it can also be a reminder of the value of producing your own ideas and work. Joe Rogan already exists; the left needs its own authentic voice, and he or she won't sound like Rogan. For Democrats, imitation is the sincerest forum for getting flattened.
The Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives began debating a redistricting proposal this morning that could deliver five additional U.S. House seats to the GOP—legislation that is expected to pass.
U.S. and European military leaders have begun discussing postwar security guarantees for Ukraine, according to U.S. officials and sources. The White House said yesterday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, though the Kremlin has not yet confirmed a meeting.
Evening Read
A Tale of Sex and Intrigue in Imperial Kyoto
By Lauren Groff
In mid-April, I flew to Japan because I'd become obsessed with an 11th-­century Japanese novel called The Tale of Genji. I also had a frantic longing to escape my country. At its best, literature is a way to loft readers so far above the burning present that we can see a vast landscape of time below us. From the clouds, we watch the cyclical turn of seasons and history, and can take a sort of bitter comfort in the fact that humans have always been a species that simply can't help setting our world on fire.
I was bewildered that The Tale of Genji had such a hold on me at this particular moment: It is a wild, confounding work that many consider to be the first novel ever written, by a mysterious woman whose true name we'll never know, but whom we call Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki. The novel is more than 1,000 pages long, more than 1,000 years old, and larded with enigmatic poetry. It's about people whose lives differ so much—in custom, religion, education, wealth, privilege, politics, hierarchy, aesthetics—­from the lives of 21st-­century Americans that most of their concerns have become nearly illegible to us through the scrim of time and language.
Culture Break
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