For nearly a decade, Democrats have been trapped in a paralyzing cycle of rhetorical hand-wringing. Ever since Donald Trump first upended the political landscape in 2015, the opposition party has faced an identity crisis over messaging strategy, endlessly debating how to counter racist social media trolling and raw cruelty as primary modes of communication. For years, the party line remained tethered to Michelle Obama’s famous “when they go low, we go high” doctrine — a philosophy rooted in institutional respectability politics. In turn, Democrats have been criticized as too cautious, too scripted and too obsessed with maintaining standards of political decorum that their opponents no longer recognize.
For progressives, the central challenge has evolved from a matter of etiquette to one of political survival: How do you communicate effectively on an internet built for conflict when your opponent treats human empathy as a punchline? Republicans, after all, have spent years normalizing political cruelty.
