I’m a fan of Andy Revkin and his balanced and informative substack, Sustain What, but I think he’s wrong in his recent substack, “Keep Your Climate Goals in Your Pocket While Pursuing a U-Turn from Trump’s Lock on Power,” although that’s because he re-posted Matthew Yglesias’ Slow Boring post, “Doubling down on climate won’t win the Senate” and Revkin agrees with that post.
I am disagreeing with Revkin, who writes:
My reasoning comes in part from my conversations in recent years with long-time progressive communication strategist David Fenton, who has noted—over and over—that the essential task is gaining political power. That requires careful vetting of messages and planks in the context of what key voting blocs in key states focus on. It requires putting your personal passions in your back pocket.
Revkin’s political caution reflects the current fight going on within the Democratic Party, with one example being David Hogg, the vice chair of DNC, who is advocating primarying “ineffective” Democratic incumbents, as long as those incumbents are in safe Democratic Party seats. I agree with Hogg that the Democrats need to step up their game in Congress and that improving the level of Democratic Party activism in Congress is obviously necessary.
Yglesias’s post references as a cautionary tale that “Jay Inslee published a Washington Post op-ed announcing that the climate movement’s official theory of the case for Democrats is that they could win more elections by talking more—and more aggressively—about climate change.” And then he goes on to note, “there’s a push within the climate movement to try to force frontline senators to talk more about climate.”
Yglesias is quite clear that he thinks this is a bad strategy:
This is a terrible idea, and I believe most stakeholders in the Democratic Party know that it’s a terrible idea. But the climate movement is so over-funded and so shot-through with expressive politics and misinformation that I’m worried party leaders won’t say that it’s a terrible idea.
Talking about terrible ideas, who the hell actually thinks “the climate movement is so over-funded”? The eight top American fossil fuel corporations posted profits—not revenue—of over $100 billion in 2022, and a good chunk of that in 2023. Climate change movement funding is a tiny shadow of these funds.
But the real terrible idea is that Yglesia, along with the mainstay of Democratic Party establishment political consultants, presents another of the many examples of politic-think that continues to miss the point. The point is that fine shadings of policy—the correct way to massage the message, if you will—isn’t the point. The point is that being clear with a vision and policies that back the vision is what is needed, but only if the vision resonates with the body politic.
The Democrats didn’t lose in 2024, or 2016, for that matter, because the candidates were terrible. You can’t, quite possibly, ever get a worse candidate than Trump, considering the guy is a nasty, narcissistic, self-dealing asshole, to put it bluntly. No, the Democrats lost to Trump in both 2016 and 2024 because they weren’t clear about their support for most Americans’ economic well-being. It may even be that the establishment Democratic Party remains unaware or uninterested in most citizens’ economic well-being, instead still focusing on playing the long-running game of big money and incumbency in place of actual service to most citizens. By the way, when I talk about “most citizens” I’m talking about the bottom 70-80 percentile in income—that’s a vast majority.
Don’t get me wrong: Trump didn’t really have much to say substantively about improving the economic life for most citizens. In fact, with his tax cut extension goal he actively signaled his real constituency to be the top ranks of wealth holders in America. What Trump excels at is leveraging the frustration and anger of many in the bottom 70% who aren’t being spoken to truthfully about their decades-long slide into the margins of the economy. The Democratic Party establishment had reason to learn this is 2016, when an old white Jew from the powerhouse (joke) state of Vermont, who wasn’t actually even a Democrat, and whose delivery and demeanor was commonly cited as grouchy, came close to unseating the anointed candidate of the Democrat establishment in the primaries, and with a campaign operation based on small donations, to boot. Unfortunately, 2024 was a wash/rinse/repeat of 2016, and Trump re-ascended his throne.
It turns out that a lot of Americans remain sick and tired of the Democratic Party saying that they support working people, even while many peoples’ experiences of the Democratic Party says otherwise, when good general claims can be seen as bullshit when not followed by specific and effective actions. It isn’t even that action items are withheld, but rather there simply remains too much pussyfooting around core issues such as income inequality, tax policy, and health care. People are looking for clear and compelling leadership on the interests central to their concerns.
The vast number of Americans believe that their opportunities for success and their kids’ success have been long declining. This isn’t countered by pointing to stock markets or unemployment levels, but rather by laws that get people working for living wages, and support home ownership or other means of shelter, and for affordable retirement and groceries and a useful education, and all the other accouterments those of us of the Baby Boomer cohort grew up assuming was the American way of life. But most wages have been fundamentally stagnant for forty years, and education under chronic financial and cultural assault, and prices for essentials and housing and food—and health care!—are going up and up and up. The easy sense that if one works hard one will do well has long vanished and the absurd wealth inequality is a glaring sign that America has shifted its attention away from the working and middle class, and not for the better. Most of us live in a paycheck-to-paycheck world, one problem away from collapse.
This is not a situation that benefits from politicians remaining moderate. This is a situation of revolution, similar to what the country went through in the early 20th Century that resulted in the New Deal and, post WWII, the explosion of the middle class sharing in the jumps in productivity. Productivity gains continue, but the main share goes to the top income and wealth percentile. The so-called “centrist” nature of the electorate is a myth, and radical Trump’s election and re-election is the proof of it. The Democrats remain the embodiment of wishy-washiness, and it is hard to get more “centrist” than that.
This remains true on climate change, too. The punditry claiming Democrats shouldn’t talk about the climate is dead wrong. The real question is how should the Democratic Party talk about climate.
Here’s a clue: the renewable energy transition will cause energy to be less expensive and our children and ourselves healthier. The fact is that fossil fuels today are more expensive for power generation and will only grow ever more so. The fact is that fossil fuels kill or sicken Americans. The fact is that major American oil corporations have been generously profiting from consumers even while these corporations have been given a free pass to dump climate changing greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. The fact is that oil corporations spend vast sums to protect their profit, and such spending includes huge political influence campaigns and misinformation efforts against renewable energy akin to thedecades-long crimes that the tobacco industry finally had to confront in court. The fact is that climate change caused by greenhouse gases exerts significant costs that drag economic productivity lower and lower as climate change consequences present greater and greater economic damage. The fact is that the renewable energy transition can create better jobs and better economic development opportunities that can help redress the economic struggles of Americans, and keep costs in check, and even significantly lower the price of electricity.
If you want an “Us vs. Them,” you can’t do much better than highlight how the fossil fuel industry is fighting against our best interests and then show the voters what you want to do about it.
You want to win elections?
Show Americans how you will build a better life for them and their children. Talking about climate change is part of the shift toward improving the economic well-being of Americans and therefore one of the issues that wins elections. The Democrats shouldn’t remain quiet about climate change. Instead, the Democratic Party must proclaim the renewable energy transition’s role within any plan to bring back economic fairness and strong growth to most Americans.