Why the Democratic Tea Party Failed (and How It Could Succeed)

To see the difference, imagine you’re asked at work why you gave a customer a refund. You might say, “Because I thought it was the right thing to do,” or you might say, “Because my supervisor told me to.” The former centers the agency on you (it happened because of you). The second describes the same act but puts the agency on another person. Agency is important because it’s directly tied to our moral response (who we blame) and our emotional response (who we get angry at). Changing the bearer of agency in a story transfers blame and emotion with it. When we say, “Because my boss told me to,” we’re also saying, “Take it up with them, don’t get mad at me.” Likewise, in political narratives, agency informs not only our strategy but who we blame and how we feel.

The reason the Democratic Tea Party failed is the activists who organized it explicitly ran on a low-agency “reaction” account of Trump. When asked to explain Trump’s appeal, Sanders, in a 2020 New York Times interview, said:

How did Trump become president? ... Not everybody, but tens and tens of millions of Americans feel that the political establishment, Republican and Democrat, have failed them. Maybe The New York Times has failed them too.
Interviewer: That explains the appeal of racism?
Yeah. OK. What you have is that people are, in many cases in this country, working longer hours for low wages. You are aware of the fact that, in an unprecedented way, life expectancy has actually gone down in America because of diseases of despair. People have lost hope and they are drinking. They’re doing drugs. They’re committing suicide. O.K. They are worried about their kids. I have been to southern West Virginia where the level of hopelessness is very, very high. And when that condition arises, whether it was the 1930s in Germany, then people are susceptible to the blame game.

I call this combination of political progressivism and a low-agency account the “antiestablishment left.” Post-2016, it was the most common view within the activist class. In contrast, the most common view of democratic core voters is what I call “mainline liberal”: This is also progressive but combined with a high-agency account of Trump and MAGA. They stress affirmative actions the right takes—such as directly appealing to racism or sexism. (These labels aren’t one-for-one with how people describe themselves but are close enough to give a sense.)