Opinion | Why Democrats Aren’t Fighters

We are in a time that demands political creativity and a willingness to take risks, a willingness to pick fights. The algorithm is powerful, but it’s possible to game the attention economy. But it does require one to challenge the terrain, not fight on Republican ground the entire time. And that’s just not a skill set that anyone in Democratic Party leadership has been selected for. They’ve been selected for consensus. They’ve been selected for binding together a large and often fractious party. They’re not selected for articulating a set of principles, not backing down from them. And picking fights around them. And until that changes, I think that Democrats are going to have a hard time responding to these conditions. And part of the problem is that this is self-perpetuating. The people who have been selected for traits that are not good for this moment are themselves in charge of selecting candidates or recruiting candidates, and are demonstrably hostile, or at skeptical of people who don’t take that approach, who are more conflict driven, who do see the value in picking fights and establishing principles. That’s what fights do.