Strong Opinions, Loosely Held: Launching a Space for Honest Dialogue

Advice for Democrats from an Independent

By: Matty Ochmanek | November 12, 2024 | (5 minute read)

One week ago today, Donald Trump was elected President for the second time in eight years. As an American patriot who considers myself rational and cosmopolitan, and who is deeply concerned with both environmental sustainability and economic issues affecting the lower and middle classes, the reelection of Trump is depressing and shameful. For the past week I have been wracking my brain to comprehend how a majority of the American electorate could have voted for someone to lead this country who is so patently unfit for the job, AGAIN?!! Trump is clearly a pathological narcissist with zero intellectual convictions, who earnestly proposed that drinking bleach could be a viable method of preventing Covid, and who has demonstrated fascist tendencies, including by making concerted efforts to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, which itself should be disqualifying. 

I am in the small, but what appears to be rapidly growing, club of political moderates who are not in the tank for either the Democrats or the Republicans but are nonetheless passionate about politics and civics. From this vantage point, Donald Trump is a potentially existential risk to American democracy who has no business being in the same zip code as the nuclear football, let alone in the Oval Office, and Kamala Harris was an imperfect yet eminently reasonable center-left candidate. And as I process the results of the election from this perspective, I am left wondering how to channel my passion for politics and civics (and intellectual inquiry more broadly), and my dread for the worst plausible permutations of a second Trump administration, into a productive undertaking. And that has inspired me to write this blog (which will not be solely, or even predominantly, focused on politics, because there are many other areas of inquiry that are more interesting!).

I have come to adopt a politically moderate, if impassioned, stance because I have been fortunate in my life to have had opportunities to engage in many deep conversations with brilliant and intellectually honest people from diverse backgrounds, who collectively hold a multiplicity of viewpoints. Conversing with such a wide variety of interlocutors has taught me the value of heterodox thinking, i.e., engaging in dialogue with “a vibrant community of inquirers investigat[ing] a broad range of questions about the world by bringing diverse perspectives to bear, thereby enlivening the pursuit of truth, knowledge, and progress.” Hence, the name of this blog is “Loosely Held,” an homage to the phrase “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held” attributed to Stanford University professor Paul Saffo. This expression embodies the virtue of engaging in discourse (whether it is about politics, philosophy, work, relationships, or anything else), initially arguing passionately for a point of view that you sincerely believe reflects objective reality, while being easily persuaded to change your mind in the face of logically sound arguments opposing your viewpoint.

As I have wrestled with the question of how so many voters could have collective amnesia causing them to forget the chaos and disgrace of the first Trump administration (when there were at least some adults in the room who weren’t all unabashed boot lickers!), I have often found myself engaging in passionate discussions with friends who, like me, live in San Francisco. As you might imagine, most of my local friends lean to the left of the political spectrum. And while I am commiserating with them over our shared fear of the damage Trump could wreak on the American democracy, my vantage point from outside of the progressive bubble allows me to critique the Democrats election loss more objectively.

My conversations with liberals about the results of the 2024 presidential election over the past week have convinced me that the overarching reason Kamala Harris lost is that, even though Democrats’ policy proposals are more in line with the interests and preferences of average voters than the proposals of their Republican counterparts, the Democrats employ rhetoric that is unpersuasive and alienating to blue-collar voters. Granted, the fact that the inarguably senile Joe Biden dropped out of the race too late, and the fact that Kamala Harris was anointed the party’s nominee without any chance for voters to weigh in, certainly kneecapped the Democrats’ chances. But in an environment in which, 1 year prior to the election, according to an ABC News/Ipsos Poll, 76% of Americans believed the country was headed in the wrong direction, including 95% of Republicans, 76% of independents, and 54% of Democrats, any Democratic presidential candidate would have been facing a massive uphill battle.

Over the past two decades, even as corporate profits have reached record highs and the Dow Jones and S&P 500 indices have experienced compound growth, real wages have stagnated or even declined in the face of inflation. Necessities like food, gasoline and car insurance have all gotten much more expensive, electricity and water utility bills have steadily ballooned, and prices in the sectors of housing, health care and education in particular have exploded. Both the Democrats and Republicans have presided over the White House and Congress at various points since 2004, and neither party has fundamentally addressed the disparity between Wall Street and Main Street. It is not surprising therefore, that over the past 20 years the share of Americans who identify as Democrats or Republicans has steadily declined while the share of Americans who identify as independent has hit record highs, and a strong anti-incumbent tendency has materialized.

Unfortunately, simply voting against the incumbent party does not actually result in meaningful change. Due to an incentive structure that is misaligned with actually addressing the needs of constituents, the 2 major parties have generally doubled down on a strategy of pandering to their respective bases and lambasting the opposing party while leaving unresolved problems like the degradation of our environment, a broken immigration system, and the affordability of housing, health care and education.

In this environment, any Democratic candidate running for President in 2024 who failed to genuinely listen to the voices of blue-collar Americans and respond to their concerns by engaging with them in a sincere dialogue did not stand a chance. The only way to combat this level of anti-incumbent sentiment as the party in power is to demonstrate convincingly that you are listening to voters’ concerns, and then patiently explain how you will implement new policies to address them. Yet, instead of making the requisite push to meet swing voters where they were, the Democratic Party insisted on running a campaign that was focused on denouncing Trump and mostly appealing to voters that were already in the bag for the Democratic candidate. And when Kamala lost, many of my liberal friends responded by blaming voters’ racism and misogyny. 

I challenge my liberal friends to examine their assumptions that a truly decisive portion of the electorate voted against their own economic interests based on racial and misogynistic animus. If Democrats want to win future elections, they will need to take a long look in the mirror after this November, challenge their assumptions about what truly animates white working class voters, and revise their policies and messaging to address the core concerns of the working class. It is my strong belief, loosely held, that while there remain some woefully ignorant holdouts clinging to racist and sexist ideologies, and there are certainly echoes of centuries of overtly racist policies that have systematically disadvantaged minorities, especially black people whose ancestors suffered the indefensible injustices of slavery, and who as recently as 60 years ago suffered under the appalling regime of Jim Crow laws, for children born in America in the year 2024, regardless of whether they are born in a red state or a blue state, the total household income of their parents is far and away a better predictor of their future prospects rather than their race, gender, or sexual orientation. In light of this economic reality, Democrats have been alienating a lot of poor white voters by focusing heavily on the politics of identity instead of the much more salient and universally applicable politics of class.

Meanwhile, I challenge my conservative friends to accept their victory last week with magnanimity, and to recognize that those of us on the left and in the center who expressed concern for Trump’s fascist inclinations were not merely inventing concerns out of whole cloth; rather, we are referencing his actions and direct quotes, and the admonitions of Trump’s former closest advisors, many of whom were lifelong Republicans and/or career military servicemembers, including  Mark Milley, John Kelly, John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, and Mike Pompeo.

Ultimately, my goal with this blog is to inspire constructive dialogue. If I am objectively wrong about something, I want to know as soon as possible and refine my worldview accordingly. In general, I think absolutism is a bad approach. No single person or political party has a monopoly on truth or good ideas. If you disagree with anything I say here, I encourage you to comment. If you engage in discourse with me in good faith, I pledge to hear you out with an open mind. In that spirit, here’s wishing that, despite my strongly held convictions about Trump’s unsuitability for office, the next four years are peaceful and prosperous.