Democrats Are Saying No to Leslie Knope Politics

We’re in a post-truth, post-policy political world and it’s about time the American left recognizes it. 

For the entirety of the Trump era, Democrats and much of the center and left has wholeheartedly believed in the most adorable, naive way that Trump’s opponents could out-policy him to victory. If we only introduced one more popular policy that will make voters’ lives materially better, they will snap out of the fascist haze and leave the Big Boy for his more responsible and well-meaning opponents. The fascist fever, the thinking had gone, can be broken by the right mixture of economic policies. It’s only a matter of striking the right concoction of worker-friendly proposals.

After all, it’s “economic anxiety” forcing folks to vote for Trump over and over again, right? 

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I have a distinct memory of being in my basement, trying to get some sleep after getting up with my baby daughter a few times that night, and finally giving up the quest for rest and turning on the TV. I lay there underneath a Miami Dolphins blanket someone had given me for my 14th birthday and watched MSNBC coverage of an early Hillary Clinton 2016 press event. It was a bone-dry affair, with Hillary – the real-life Leslie Knope – presenting graphs and charts showing how her administration would solve various intractable economic issues once her coronation to the presidency was complete. 

Clinton’s proposals were very much in good faith and were meant to make life slightly more bearable for working people in our late-stage capitalism hellscape. These policies – like all squishy neoliberal policies – were designed with the hope that capitalism would spare workers (some workers, anyway) in its eternal need to grow or die. Clinton talked knowingly about how these policies could be implemented and what they might do in the short term and in the long run. It was all so boring – like a class presentation on the projector in seventh grade. Clinton cited white papers and research from various institutes in the US and in Europe. The A student earned her A.

Watching this crushingly boring spectacle through bleary, sleep-deprived eyes, I had the horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that this brand of politics would be so very easy to defeat. Clinton was treating voters as rational, self-interested actors when they are anything but. I stuffed this dread deep inside and didn’t revisit it until November 8, 2016, when the New York Times election needle pointed like the boney finger of the Grim Reaper toward a Trump victory. 

Policy details pave the way to hell. 

The Same Old Game No More

Mainstream media outlets and their columnists and reporters are what the zoomers might call “big mad” about Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign refusing to provide grist for the bad-faith mill by releasing hyper-specific policy details and goals. These mainstream pundits are seething over the Harris campaign’s refusal to play the same old game that these outlets rely on to create a close presidential race that will generate clicks and views and, of course, ad revenue. 

Journalists and pundits alike are throwing tantrums about Harris and her campaign refusing to spell out exactly how she might run the federal government when she wins the presidency. They very much want the Harris campaign to release a healthcare plan in which Americans might finally receive affordable healthcare services, something that improves on the Affordable Care Act. They want these details not because they plan to cover the plan fairly, but because they desperately want to run headlines about Kamala Harris’ healthcare plan costing $420 trillion or whatever the number would be (no one cares and cost doesn’t matter as long as folks get better healthcare). 

They fiend for those nitty gritty policy details so the bad-faith media beast can bellow from the deepest depths of its bowels: How are you going to pay for that? It is a question no Republican lawmaker has ever faced when voting in favor of tax cuts for Americans who have three yachts big enough to have their own zip code but very much want a fourth. It’s only when regular folks get a little treat – when children get free lunch or when working families benefit from the child tax care credit – that CNN and the New York Times and the Washington Post and Fox News ask in one disingenuous voice: How will you pay for that? 

Mainstream outlets are salivating at the thought of Harris and Tim Walz unveiling their border plan, which might be slightly more humane than the Republican plan to build a 700-mile wall and invade Mexico or whatever the hell they talk about when immigration comes up. They want to splash headlines on their websites and apps saying Harris backs open borders, a charge that will be interpreted by right-wing media in bad faith to mean Harris will allow the “border invasion” to continue unabated and is in on the insidious Great Replacement – the ultimate fear for those determined to maintain and defend white supremacy as national policy. 

Any details about a government effort to invest in so-called green jobs and the overall decarbonization of our collapsing climate will be instantly used as a cudgel against Harris and Walz. The eye-watering federal investment in such climate efforts would be the centerpiece of all media coverage, and people either cannot or choose to not understand the meaninglessness of government debt. This may explain why the Biden administration has undertaken a revolutionary approach to clean energy infrastructure and investment without talking about it in detailed ways. Simply doing what needs to be done – spending money to avoid a climate apocalypse – is enough for today’s Democrats. Avoiding the mainstream-media-to-bad-faith-right-wing pipeline is paramount. 

These mainstream outlets want nothing more than for Harris to talk about raising taxes, not on working people, but on those with their fangs sunk into the working and middle classes. This generates endless coverage of the Harris-Walz plan to raise taxes by $69 trillion a year with absolutely zero specificity about how that tax revenue would come to be. Stuff that information into the right-wing media project and you have entire segments on commie Kamala wanting to take more of your hard-earned money even though they know the tax hikes would be centered on the wealthiest of the wealthy. 

In the above referenced piece by Jay Caspian King, he worries that American voters need to know the truth about Kamala Harris’ stance on fracking, as if that matters to anyone but people making gobs of money from the environmentally hazardous practice. Fracking, seriously, is an issue for which Kang wants answers. The people must know if they will have their precious fracking in a Harris administration. Muh fracking, I need muh fracking. That no one give a shit about fracking beyond cable executives desperate to fill a 24-hour news cycle is apparently not part of this equation. Kamala must give an interview in which she answers 100 questions about her stance on fracking. 

It’s not only that the New York Times and other mainstream outlets would create the kind of coverage that is devoured and intentionally misinterpreted by far right propaganda outfits, but that these mainstream papers and news channels would run to the nearest centrist think tank or former Obama administration official now working for some insane right-wing Silicon Valley billionaire and ask them for their thoughts on the latest progressive policy ideas. The mealymouthed centrists, proudly proclaiming that better things aren’t possible, will dismiss the progressive idea was pie-in-the-sky and unrealistic and chastise the Democratic policymakers for not working with their Republican counterparts, who want a swift end to American self governance and have never asked Democrats for their input in policy making. Millennials know this formula well because we have seen it play out over and over again in what has been a maddeningly unfair fight between Democrats stuck in the 1990s and Republicans ready and willing to break down any democratic guardrail to get their way (All those supposed guardrails we read about after Trump’s election: They’re all gone). 

This kind of coverage feeds the far-right media echo chamber and puts the Democratic candidate on defense. Harris would be on her back foot, trying to explain away the cost of such vital programs and policies both to respectable mainstream outlets and bad-faith operators working for Republican propaganda outlets like Fox News. Harris’ people saw this happen to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who played the game the way major media companies want it to be played: You give us your ideas and we’ll cover those ideas in ways to open you up to Republican attacks. The Harris campaign, extremely online and clearly scornful of the Obama approach to politics, rightfully wants no part of that cycle, so the policy details will continue to be sparse. 

The Harris campaign is the first Democratic campaign to understand that once you throw policy details into the wind, they will be used against you, never for you. 

In a perverse way, the American left has learned this lesson from none other than Donald Trump himself. 

No Policies, No Problems

Trump has run for president for a decade now without ever spelling out one policy. Even the goals he holds most dear – forcibly removing and/or imprisoning immigrants – are vague and wishy washy. There’s no actual plan for rounding up millions of people and shipping them back to their home countries. That doesn’t mean that a far-right government wouldn’t try such a humanitarian fiasco. They would. But it would be a slipshod effort at best because Trump and his fellow fascists are lazy and not at all concerned about executing policy goals. 

Just this month during his frightening, meandering press conference at Mar-a-lago, Trump was asked about his stance on a Florida ballot measure that would undo the state’s horrifying near-total abortion ban. He answered the way he always does: By promising a subsequent press conference on it that, by design, never happens. He did the same when asked in the spring if he favored banning the over-the-counter availability to medication abortion. You won’t believe this, but there never was a Trump press conference in which he spelled out his thoroughly considered policy stance on the distribution of abortion pills in post-Roe America. Politico, the foremost devourer of bad-faith Republican bullshit, reported that Trump’s closest aides were “unaware” of a follow-up press conference before Big Boy mentioned it at Mar-a-lago. 

The nation’s most prominent media outfits have tried again and again to treat Trump, a deeply unserious politician, as an imminently serious leader of one of our two major political parties. Media outlets have outright laundered Trump quotes to make them sound sane, even when they were not. Look no further than how they treated Trump’s “speech on the economy” this week, which he used to name-call Harris and Walz and whine about Harris on the cover of TIME and the very unfair treatment he has had to endure as a criminal. 

You know how I know Trump has intentionally avoided all mentions of policy details over the past decade? Because the one time he was connected to policy details, his polling tanked and he flailed and screamed and bucked to try to free himself from any connection to said policy, as outlined in the fascist manifesto known as Project 2025. 

I knew Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for how to unravel democratic governance and strip historically marginalized groups of their rights, would be a two-ton anchor around Trump’s neck when I asked my mom back in June whether she had heard of the project. My mom was among the millions of boomers who was deeply apolitical for most of her life, until a never-ending cascade of economic and political crises forced everyone to become hyper political. She’s disgusted by Trump and always has been (I recall her laughing a little too hard at a Golden Girls joke at Trump’s expense in the early 1990s). But she’s certainly not one to actively research policy positions. 

I asked my mom where she had heard about Project 2025. “Whoopi,” she quickly replied. ABC’s The View had apparently hammered Project 2025 for days and days after the Biden campaign finally began posting about it online and talking about it in press conferences and interviews. That my mom was familiar with the various plotting and scheming of the terrifying fascist operators who had concocted Project 2025 as a way to seize permanent control of the United States government was telling. The word was out. Trump had finally been connected to some kind of spelled-out policy goals. They just so happened to be policy goals everyone fucking hated. 

Upwards of 80 percent of Americans say they have heard of Project 2025, a shocking number and one that probably gives Trump campaign officials night terrors and debilitating diarrhea. Unsurprisingly, hearing about the goals of the project – ending all environmental protections, ending public school, rolling back child labor laws, replacing the entire civil service with Trump worshippers, dismantling basic protections for LGBTQ people, launching a full scale invasion of Mexico for some reason – turned people off in big ways.

Trump has pretended not to know about Project 2025, even after appearing in public with the project’s architects and meeting with those in charge of implementing the dark plans spelled out in the 900-page how-to-fascism document. Unfortunately for the Big Boy, he said shit like this to right-wing organizations back in 2022, before anyone but the nerdiest political junkies knew about the project: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

When those denials and feigned ignorance did not work, Trump said Project 2025 didn’t really represent his agenda should he win a second term. When that flopped, his campaign had the head of Project 2025 fired and declared the entire unpopular project dead and buried. Because if we know one thing about the American right, it’s that they give up their seedy little plans when the public doesn’t support them. 

None of Trump’s efforts to shake off the Project 2025 connection worked. Everyone associates the plan’s goals with Trump and weirdo VP candidate J.D. Vance.

Trump has fought like hell to be as vague and nonspecific about policy goals for three presidential runs. And it has worked perfectly for him: Mainstream media outlets pretended not to know his views on abortion rights, pretended he would be a dove on military matters (he kinda was outside threatening nuclear war every third Monday), and wondered if he would betray his billionaire donors and support workers as president. This portrayal of Trump was palatable enough for him to win 306 electoral votes in 2016. He’s never had a reason to specify policies; the only time he won was when the media laundered his madman ramblings into someone coherent and respectable. Once Americans saw what he wanted, they rejected him outright. They will do so again in November by big margins. 

My hope is that Harris and Walz don’t give in to media members’ howling about sit-down interviews and a spelled-out agenda for what they will do when elected. I hope Harris and Walz remember that no one outside the media cares whether they’re offering one-on-one interviews, or how they handle carefully-crafted gotcha questions, or how they’re going to pay for this or that. 

Democrats are finally, at long last, rejecting the media-crafted game designed to put them on their back foot and feed the bad-faith machine. They rightly see no upside – only downside – to releasing reams of details about what they would do with power. Politics is a game, and the point of a game is to win. They are finally saying no to Leslie Knope politics. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads at @CDCarter13.