Swerving past Carville? Or time for more recognition, more cowbell, and less bullshit

     Carville is a metaphor. I’ve grown to dread text and email messages that bear his name, purport to be in his voice. This kind of panic-invoking messaging had an effectiveness once, maybe. That effectiveness is now an old horse which the nameless-thoughtless of the Democratic Party are beating to squeeze out the last little bit of life, hoping perhaps that this dwindling horse will leap forward once more, with pain and fright if nothing else. The Carville messages are among the shrillest expressions of the Democratic Party’s still dominant strategy of pandering and fear-mongering, variations on: we’ll say what we think you want us to say — you there; actually, no you there; you also! — and, by the way, don’t forget that they will destroy everything good. I’m exaggerating of course, and of course this isn’t necessarily about the real Carville. In fact, I would not be surprised if some of the slightly deranged messages that come in Carville’s name are falsely associated with him and the Democratic Party, but so, so many messages that undoubtedly come from Democrats have a similar tone. I’m not the only one who wants that tone to change.
     In our so far two-party system, I am much more aligned with the Democratic Party, even at their most neoliberal than I could ever be with the Republican Party at their most sensible-moderate, BUT the old Democratic Party — and by old I mean old — is stultified and has outdated tools. I am deliberately not using the word “corrupt” because the scale and scope of political corruption has changed so enormously in recent months, in magnitude, texture, and spread. The spread includes our increasing familiarity with a kind of bystander micro-corruption which is the tacit legitimizing of corrupt actions by looking away, forms of which we see among both Republicans and Democrats. 
    The strategy of pandering and fear-mongering in packaged messaging is no longer very effective, if it ever was. We’ve seen this for several years. Most of us know this. We need more honest and riskily direct speaking from genuine experience and commitments rather than simply media-trained voices using scripts created in response to focus groups and polls, and drawing on touching stories collected and deployed for manipulative purposes. And we need Dems to learn how to use social media, not just in packaged manipulative ways, but to be heard as real life voices of real people expressing hopes, concerns, leadership, uncertainty, commitments, competence, etc. Regardless, or perhaps even more because, of AI and the common performativity of social media posting, we need real voices, and they will be heard. We ceded that space to the Republican Party and their most extreme supporters, but not for much longer!
​     Among older politicians, Cory Booker and Tim Walz have started moving in that direction but they have very little party and strategy behind them. David Hogg (DNC Vice-Chair, so far) is very interesting. In my view he has the right instincts, but he’s not a good communicator. Even I, who agree with him on a fair amount, feel jarred and slightly repelled by his certainty. He is a very valuable strategist but he’s not a good voice of the party and he’s evidently poor at building consensus. He and Ken Martin could do fabulously working together but looks like that will not happen. Meanwhile, I’m noticing some really good communicators, who are bold, assertive, engaged, and engaging: Jasmine Crockett (Congresswoman from Texas), whom Hogg likes, and two Gen Z candidates Kat Abughazaleh (Michigan) and Deja Foxx (Arizona). A little older and more experienced than Foxx and Abughazaleh are Mallory McMorrow (Michigan) and Jake Rakov (California). I’m excited by these much younger-than-me voices, that sound much more attuned to life as it is today, and much readier to let go of the tired cliches and strategies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, much more willing to go with the urgencies of our time. 
     I’ve been reflecting that a  very important role of older people is to express knowledge that life cycles, everything cannot be forced, change happens.  The lives of younger people are woven with but also extend well beyond ours. Perhaps their most important role is to be the flesh and blood meeting places of their pasts and their futures,* and, in our current moment, to get us out of an epochal rut. Abughazaleh, Foxx, McMorrow, and Rakov may not win their races and may fizzle out but voices like theirs — “Democrats need to stop reacting to Republicans and just get back to basic humanity. We should all be agreeing, both parties, that the baseline is housing, groceries and health care with money left over. It's just common sense that, in the richest country in the world, in what many consider the greatest country in the world, that we should be taking care of our citizens” (Abughazaleh) — can, will, and must change the Democratic party and the sooner they converge into a broad band of thinking, speaking, and action, the better. Meanwhile, we older folk need to learn and show that we know when and how to step forward and, crucially, when and how to step back!
      So once more, I’m adding my voice to the many voices that have been saying, over and over again, versions of “the Dems have lost the plot.”
     It’s a complicated plot and I lean towards one side of it, founded on social commitments of the kind Bernie Sanders and AOC express, though they express these more stridently than I do. Within me, these commitments are woven with a longing for and experience of a kind of grounded and startling respect, not to be confused with politeness; a recognition of familiarity and strangeness in an encounter with another human; a re-seeing — the root of respect — that opens a profound, even if momentary, shift in perspective and at least a glimpse of connected living for both the seer and the seen, regardless of party, politics, color, religion, whatever. In the best cases, the glimpse stretches into constructive possibility and action for and with each other. While this sense of re-seeing has long interested me, I draw my current particular language of recognition from Isabella Hammad.
     Isabella Hammad gave a talk in September 2023 that has now been published as an essay: Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. In it she writes: “Individual moments of recognition are repeatedly overwhelmed by the energy of a political establishment that tells the onlooker: this is not what it looks like. It is too complicated to understand. Look away.” She is writing about moments of recognition in Palestine, Israel, and elsewhere in relation to Palestine and Israel, but she could be writing about contemporary politics in general in the United States, she could be writing about the Democratic Party.
     One difficulty is that individual moments of recognition are rarely strung into effective institutional politics. We’ve seen them strung into effective political movements, for example for civil rights, independence from colonization, removal of authoritarian governments, and dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. Institutions, however, are fundamentally bureaucratic and often insulate themselves from individual moments of recognition in aspiration of objective fairness and efficiency, while institutional politics — indeed flesh and blood politicians themselves — accrete layers of “strategy” and mutual self-interest until all of it feels like a disingenuous cloud of politicking above us the citizenry, with “branding” and “messaging” that is increasingly canned, repackaged, reactive, and self-promoting. Of course, there are genuine voices but they are thinned and marginalized by the weight of old patterns. I invoke Carville’s name as a summary metaphor for the old patterns that have increasingly weighed down the Democratic Party and Dem politicians over the last few decades. I don’t want to see Carville’s name again. Disclaimer: the real Carville may be a genuinely engaged person and unconnected to many of the Carville messages I receive.
     The Democratic Party — supported by us; by our cleverness, data, and technocracy — has relegated moments of recognition to art and poetry and quaint activism that is shut out from real decision-making. When Bernie Sanders, though institutionally entrenched and strident, made himself heard in the 2010s, we feared he couldn’t do it. We feared he couldn’t lead the changes he called for. And many of us in the ranks of “neoliberal alternative elites”** feared he would destabilize a system that served us well; we wanted more fairness, but also deeply wanted to protect our comforts. In terms of the gender politics of that time, many of us were also put off by perceived and experienced misogyny in the political system and from Sanders' campaign.  But, to give him his props, he spoke out, political risks be damned. He lost. He voiced an incipient movement but he could not withstand the weight of old institutional patterns and relationships. Now those patterns and relationships are in crisis; they continue but fragmented and flailing on the inside and unconvincing on the outside. This is a time for more Sanders, but not just Sanders. More cowbell, less bullshit. And more young people who don’t just protest from the outside, but also take responsibility for the re-shaping and effective activation of democratic process and institutions in and for our messy and complex country and world.
     Change is sorely needed, change will happen, and I do not know what change will bring.
     Now is a time for individual moments of recognition, for us here in the United States as for Palestine and Israel. Now is the time for those moments to be strung into aggregated and effective change movements. These movements will likely not be led by career politicians; politicians who keep throwing us versions of old moves or looking for “new moves” will prolong our time in this mess. It will take nothing short of a real moulting for old (-style) politicians to be agents of positive and sustainable change. Meanwhile, we will get new politicians from the change movements, able to knit the insights of their movements and individual moments of recognition into strategies and institutional process. That work of knitting is not for everyone and the weight of bureaucratic conservatism and disingenuous politicking will grow again.
     Yes, life cycles. But let’s take one step at a time. Let’s seek and amplify moments of recognition; let’s support and hold up movements that string them together. Let’s neutralize the sour rain of pandering and fear-mongering.
      In practical terms, you already know about showing up at public demonstrations, donating, supporting efforts to ensure legal and due process, and supporting efforts to hold back cruel government actions. Now it’s time to increase attention to the primaries and November elections of this year; inform yourself on activity directed at the 2026 midterms; amplify fresh and promising voices; notice, document, share, and act on precious new moments of recognition.
      In addition to the above, here is another suggestion drawn in part from Hammad and a book she quotes: "I draw from Yasmin El-Rifae’s brilliant book Radius about a militant feminist group protecting women from sexual assault in Tahrir Square toward the end of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. El-Rifae ponders the analogous issue of women appealing to or trying to educate men about misogyny and patriarchal violence. ‘Rather than wondering about the efficacy of addressing men,’ she asks, ‘can we think of breaking into their awareness as a by-product of us speaking to one another? Can we focus instead on our own networks, on thinking together, on supporting one another — openly?” While Hammad relates El-Rifae’s thinking to shifting the discourse and action on Palestine and Israel, I find the idea very relevant to any movement for social change, where part of the effort is to make both the movement and the change ordinary. It’s also a practice that has appeared in political and social movements of the past.
     Speaking to one another on the same “side” may seem easy, obvious, and commonplace. However, not only have I experienced the centre-left getting mired in and paralyzed by fine-point arguments, as a country we’ve largely lost a sense of ordinary living in community and shared public spaces. While experience of such social disintegration is particularly sharp and alienating in rural and economically depressed areas that remain strongholds of Trump supporters, it shows up in our centre-left lives as well, within and across segregated socio-economic, racial, and cultural communities.
     In today’s (June 9, 2025) New York Times, Arlie Russell Hochschild quotes a man in coal-country Kentucky who offers advice for Democrats: “I think Democrats need to … initiate a campaign of grand civic re-engagement,” Mr. Musick said. Federal funds could support the best local initiatives, he added, and help start ecology, drama and music clubs — “good local things that lack funding.”
      Warning: this can,  and must not just become another glib Dem talking point from far away. 
    It can be different. And, as El-Rifae and Hammad observe, we can start with ourselves. We can talk among ourselves in ever-widening and multiplying circles about our experiences and hopes, without rushing to be “right.” Our hopes and concerns arise from experiences in shared contexts. Political discourse and strategy will catch up as interest in new ethics slowly permeates ordinary conversations. So let’s talk about our lives and ethics; about fairness, kindness, and cruelty; about democracy and governance; about hopes and self-doubt; about humanity and ecology; about public discourse and renewed public spaces; about community; about our differences; about moments of recognition; about our parents and children; about the food we like; about this dissonance, that old tree, this tenderness, and the return of that bird. Let’s talk from the reality and sensations of our lives and listen for the reality and sensations of others’ lives. Let’s uncover, amplify, and act on shared needs and values. Does this mean that we cannot be angry at unfairness, cruelty, lawlessness, and manipulation? No! Does this mean that we can’t protest? No! But anger, as I’ve understood from Audre Lorde, is at its best when inviting attention to what is important, but not denying and excluding someone else’s subjectivity; when it communicates and both demands and allows communication in response, rather than excommunicates.

** I draw this phrasing of a meeting place between past and future from John Berger’s reading of Iraqi poet Abdulkareem Kasid, as offered in Confabulations, Berger’s collection of late essays.
** I am putting this phrase in quotation marks to acknowledge that this phrasing has been used by others, while at this time I don’t know who has used this exact phrase. What did influence me recently was John Berger's 1979 Preface to his Selected Essays (edited by Geoff Dyer), in which he scathingly says: “Liberalism is always for the alternative ruling class: never for the exploited class.” There is substantial historical evidence that a sustained and sustainable government system cannot be based on this insight (in other words by institutionally preempting the structural formation of a ruling class), but ignoring or denying this insight dangerously inflates both personal and structural blindspots, potentially to the point of self-delusion, hypocrisy, and incoherence.