Today's Politics Are Not Trapped In Amber
Americans did not speak for the final time in 2024. Some high-profile Democrats don't seem to understand this.
Gavin Newsom must believe politics is over, that what we have now will be with us forevermore, that the world has stopped spinning.
Newsom, as you surely saw last week, launched a podcast and hosted fascist youth whisperer Charlie Kirk, who, I’m proud to report, was dressed down by my sister-in-law at a D.C. protest in 2018. Newsom promptly agreed with Kirk on nearly every major issue, including Kirk’s attack on transgender women in women’s sports.
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It was a baffling unforced error by one of the country’s most unapologetically progressive governors and one of the only prominent Democrats with the American psycho energy to take on a radicalized Republican Party that has given up on democratic republicanism. With his absurdly perfect politician hair and his razor sharp jawline and the smile of the Joker if the Joker raised money from rich people in wine cellars during COVID lockdowns, Newsom was perhaps the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic nomination.
Hosting a far-right apparatchik and nodding along with all his dangerous propaganda marked the end of those presidential hopes. Eric Adams is now a more likely Democratic nominee.
Trans women playing against women athletes, Newsom said, is unfair.
“The issue of fairness is completely legit,” Newsom told Kirk, conceding the entire playing field to the right wing’s bad-faith assault on trans athletes, an attack that requires them to pretend to care about women’s sports after mocking and deriding and trying to defund women’s sports for fifty years. “And we’ve got to own that. We’ve got to acknowledge it.”
(Newsom casually mentioned during the podcast that his 13-year-old son is a big fan of Charlie Kirk. His kid is being radicalized by Musk's and Zuck's algorithms and he apparently does not care. If my son said he had watched Kirk and agreed with anything the man said, I would have no choice but to replace summer camp with reeducation camp.)
Newsom’s office then went on a gaslighting campaign in a furious attempt to clean up the governor’s podcasting mess. “[Newsom] rejects the right wing’s cynical attempt to weaponize this debate as an excuse to vilify individual kids,” the statement said. “The Governor’s position is simple: stand with all kids and stand up to bullies.”
It’s the kind of gaslighting that might make a Trump official feel a modicum of shame.
Denny Carter
“I’m not going to speculate on his strategy here, but I do know, in running for public office that you use addition, right? You try to earn more votes, and I see this as actually a net loss,” Democratic California Assemblymember Chris Ward told CNN. “People who are already decided on this issue are probably also pretty decided on him.”
Ward is not wrong. Newsom’s abandonment of transgender Americans comes just weeks after national Pew Research polling found 56 percent of respondents "expressed support for policies aimed at protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public spaces." Newsom must've seen the Pew results for trans people in sports, which showed two-thirds of respondents saying "trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth."
Even more tantalizing to an opportunist like Newsom: Respondents who identified as Democratic voters from 2022 to 2025 have increasingly supported trans athletes competing on teams that match their sex assigned at birth. The American right over the past few years has successfully shaped and changed opinion on trans freedom in the US, and Democrats like Newsom are all too happy to ride the wave of hate and fear.
That Newsom has long been one of the most prominent advocates of LGBTQ rights in the US makes this doubly alarming; he has calculated that it’s best for his national profile and presidential prospects to abandon trans folks when they’re at their most vulnerable. Like so many elected Democrats in the months since our insurrectionist president won back the White House, Newsom – long a boogeyman of the American right – is casually sacrificing transgender Americans at the altar of political expediency, and in doing so, is giving in to the logic of fascism.
Even if you do not hold strong feelings on basic rights for transgender people in the US, you have to see that letting the right devour one group – however marginalized – will only make the beast hungrier. You will only guarantee it will come back for more, belly rumbling, fangs glistening. Only then will you see how insatiable it truly is. Only then you will grasp the gravity of your miscalculation.
“You could say that about the Jews, Black people or Haitians, or any very vulnerable minority,” said Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble and a renowned feminist philosopher, when asked recently about liberal politicians who abandon trans rights in the face of fascist opposition. “Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?”
Their cruelty is astounding.
Perhaps you see the transgender issue as a distraction from the Real Problem: The coordinated plutocratic assault on western democracy and runaway capitalism – which must grow or die – threatening the very concept of self governance. When you read or watch coverage of trans rights (or lack thereof) you see a big batch of shining, jangling keys telling the public to look over here while oligarchs dismantle key institutions and steal government largesse. You, in all your materialist analysis, know the Real Deal.
Denny Carter
The trans issue, you think, is but a convenient culture war topic that lends to lurid TV coverage and dominates the minds of Americans fearful of the dissolution of their idea of gender. Maybe you have never known a trans person, and you can’t personalize the issue and work up the outrage in the face of a downright genocidal campaign against transgender people in the US. Perhaps you see all this as a nonissue. You ask: Why all this fuss over a couple hundred trans athletes across the country?
None of your justifications matter right now. You are making a terrible strategic error in countering creeping authoritarianism that has over the past seven weeks transformed American life in fundamental and awful ways. If you care about your country at all, you’re going to advocate for the protection of all groups, however marginalized. You are not invulnerable to the beast. That you can’t recognize that right now, in this moment, doesn’t matter. No one gets sacrificed: That is the only strategy against fascism.
If there is one lesson to be learned from 20th century fascist takeovers, it is the fascist experimentation with dehumanization. They intentionally strip one group of their personhood and gauge public reaction. Then another. Then another. Even Bush-era right-wing hawk William Kristol understands this.
Someone like U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, doesn't get it. “While Republicans are focused on playing politics with children’s sports leagues, I’m focused on the issue that I hear about from constituents every day. I’m focused on lowering household costs,” she said last month when asked about trans women in women's sports. Elected leaders like Baldwin think they can drown out the genocidal campaign against transgender people with louder and louder talk of traditional kitchen table issues. Maybe if I yell louder about egg prices, the threat against trans people will vanish (the key, as always, is to hammer egg price increases and the right's anti-trans campaign).
Newsom, it seems, made the mistake of believing today’s politics are tomorrow’s politics. Maybe he won’t understand how wrong he is next week or next month or even next year. Maybe it’ll be two years or three (though I would be surprised if our next cultural turn took that long). But Newsom and the other cowardly, triangulating Democrats will one day find out that politics were not trapped in amber after the 2024 election.
Alien archeologists in the year 3500 were never going to land on our AI-destroyed planet and find that yes, 2024 marked the end of political and cultural change in the United States of America. The people, these aliens will find, had not spoken for the final time in 2024. In fact, many Americans most confident in their politics had endured the tough luck of fucking around and finding out that the fascists they had empowered because egg prices were kinda high were never, ever going to work for them.
These little green archeologists will file a final report before heading off to Mars to study the progeny of Elon Musk, each with a name more fucked up than the last: Politics and culture continued to evolve after the 2024 presidential election, and those who had made the terrible mistake of failing to predict these shifts had been left to rot on the vine full of politicians who had neither courage nor foresight, and suffered the professional and electoral consequences.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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