In Praise of Hippie Punching

Phrasing like “Bolshevik smacking,” “Whackjob whacking,” or “Radical slapping” takes away some of the suggestion that it’s unfair and unprovoked to attack the lefty fringe of the party. But “hippie punching”? That’s sort of like “Amish kicking.”

Of course, this is wrong on a whole bunch of levels. For starters, we’re not talking about literal violence—I’m against literal punching in politics generally—we’re talking about arguments and, well, politics. Second, the lefty fringe of the Democratic Party punches rightward all the time (in much the same way the righty fringe of the GOP punches leftward). I mean Bernie Sanders and AOC denounce the dwindling band of moderates in the Democratic Party whenever it suits them. This dynamic is not new; it’s the way the parties have worked at least for a century. 

One last point on the wrongness of the alleged wrongness of hippie-punching: Fairness is overrated in politics. Or rather, fairness is misapplied in all sorts of contexts. If, for example, a Democrat thinks the government should nationalize the health care industry root and branch, it’s not “unfair” for another Democrat to say, “I disagree. I think that guy is nuts. And, I don’t think my party should have anything to do with such nuttery.” Whether it’s good politics to draw such distinctions is a prudential question. And, in this moment, I think it’s pretty obvious that the Democratic Party needs someone to do a whole lotta punching leftward. 

Very, very, very broadly speaking, there are two ways to win a presidential primary election: 

1) Say what your voters want to hear. 

2) Say what your party activists don’t want to hear.

The first one is so obvious and so often true, that it’s routinely taken as the only way to win. It’s what we expect from politicians. H.L. Mencken once said of Harry Truman, “If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayers’ expense.”

But that can’t be all there is to it, precisely because that’s what every politician tries to do to one extent or another. Which brings me to point No. 2. A lot of politicians confuse the activists for the voters. It’s an understandable mistake, given that base voters dominate the primary electorate and the base is often organized by activist groups—teachers unions, abortion rights groups, etc. To overly simplify it, AARP claims to represent old people, so it’s easy to convince yourself that AARP can deliver older voters. Sometimes this sort of thing can work. But it often doesn’t. Union leaders support Democrats, but they struggle to get the rank and file to follow directions at the ballot box. The NAACP endorsement isn’t worthless, but it doesn’t necessarily deliver black votes. 

Remember that thing about Kamala Harris supporting federal subsidies for sex change surgeries for illegal immigrants? That was the result of the ACLU giving Democratic primary candidates a questionnaire that asked for a host of lefty commitments, including:

As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care? If yes, how will you do so?

Harris checked “Yes.” The video clip of Harris endorsing this idea, which the Trump campaign played 8 trillion times, came from an ACLU event tied to the questionnaire. Lots of other Democrats filled out the form, too, including Pete Buttigieg and Tim Ryan. But you know who didn’t fill out the questionnaire at all? Joe Biden—because the campaign knew that this was a trap. Indeed, these kinds of questionnaires are a moronic form of ideological orthodoxy enforcement by party activists. 

In short, “party activists” and “base voters” are not synonymous terms. This used to be more true of the Republicans than of the Democrats, but these days the situation is reversed. 

The electoral base of the Democratic Party is basically middle-aged black folks, particularly women. That’s not it entirely, but without black voters you’re toast. And these days, the black vote is to the right of the party activist types. In 2020, the Democrats had a crowded field of contenders, including two African Americans, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. They flamed out, despite telling the activists everything they wanted to hear.

The guy who won? Joe Biden. Why? Well, for several reasons of course. But among them was the fact that he was seen as the most likely candidate to beat Trump. But one of the reasons voters thought he was the most likely to beat Trump was because he was the kind of politician who didn’t say idiotic things like “Defund the Police.” There was a time when, if you just watched MSNBC, you’d think that nearly all black people wanted to defund the police. But Biden rejected that position and won the crucial South Carolina primary by a landslide. The Democratic electorate in South Carolina is majority black, and he won the black vote running away. 

The benefit of saying things the activists don’t like isn’t necessarily that voters disagree with the activists, though that’s often the case. It’s that you’re signaling a willingness to do what it takes to win. 

In an interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa during the 2016 primaries, Costa asked Trump how he could bring the party together after brutalizing so many of his Republican opponents en route to becoming the nominee. Trump responded, in part, “Well, I think—it’s a great question, and it’s a question I’ve thought about a lot. I mean, I think the first thing I have to do is win. Winning solves a lot of problems.” 

Trump was right. Once Trump was the nominee, never mind president, most of the GOP and the wider network of conservative institutions pretty much fell in line. I’ve written a bit about that. 

Save for a few very important exceptions—chiefly guns and abortion, at least during his first campaign—Trump deviated from the party line on a host of issues. Moreover, because he was a former Democrat, there was a treasure trove of past statements showing he was a flip-flopper, including on guns and abortion. But it didn’t matter because, as his defenders constantly insisted, “At least he fights!” That image of “strength” and a willingness to plow through norms and rules was more important to lots of folks than any ideological litmus test. If hippie punching means attacking the lefty fringe of the Democratic Party, you might call the Republican version “country-clubber kicking.” And Trump was very good at it.   

Before there was hippie punching, the term for this sort of thing was “Sister Souljah-ing.” In 1992, Bill Clinton delivered a premeditated attack on Sister Souljah, a radical black activist and rapper who’d said some indefensibly stupid and vile things about killing white people, among other things. Clinton’s denunciation was entirely right on the merits, but the real reason for it was to signal that Clinton would not be cowed by Jesse Jackson and his wing of the Democratic Party. And it worked. Clinton demonstrated political independence and a willingness to do what was necessary to win. 

And guess what? The activists all pretty much fell in line. Yes, there were some protests and resignations when he signed welfare reform, but for the most part Clinton proved—long before Trump—that the party orgs, or “groups,” are cheap dates. Consider that the progressive left and the Democratic Party spent years elevating feminist concerns about harassment, sexual exploitation, etc. This was the party that demonized Clarence Thomas, sainted Anita Hill, and defenestrated Bob Packwood. They made feminists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin into intellectual lodestars. But once Clinton was exposed for playing baron-and-the-milkmaid with an intern, the entire party jettisoned all of that and rallied around Clinton.  

Power and partisanship are powerful drugs. 

So if I were a Democrat—or even someone whom Democrats listen to—I’d recommend finding someone willing to punch leftward—and who can sell it. I’m inclined to say that means bad news for Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, J.B. Pritzker et al. But maybe not. AOC isn’t going to engage in much hippie punching, because she’s one of the hippies. But I don’t put it past any of them to try to reinvent themselves. I’ve given up on doubting the cynicism and ambition of politicians.   

But if I had to pick someone who could sell it, in part because he believes it, I’d put my money on Rahm Emmanuel. Yes, going by the rules of history, he’s way too short. But we live in an era where the old rules of thumb have lost much of their utility. Emmanuel is smart, tough to the point of pugnaciousness, and has strong ties with the business community. After four years of Trump roiling the markets and freaking people out, a reliable old-school “corporate Democrat” might be just what many on Wall Street want.

But best of all, he has a long and proud history of hippie punching. And he’s already at it. On Bill Maher’s show he said, “In seventh grade, if I had known I could’ve said the word ‘they’ and gotten in the girls’ bathroom, I would’ve done it,” he said. “We literally are a superpower, we’re facing off against China with 1.4 billion people and two-thirds of our children can’t read eighth grade level.” 

According to Jonathan Martin’s profile, Emmanuel already has a stump speech in which he says stuff like, “I am done with the discussion of locker rooms, I am done with the discussion of bathrooms and we better start having a conversation about the classroom.” He even slapped around the New York Times for setting the agenda for the Democrats and the Democrats for taking the bait:

“We can lead a discussion and force a topic onto the agenda of this country that’s worthy of having a debate about,” Emanuel said about the dismal student data. Unlike, say, the fate of a heretofore obscure federal agency, whose demise dominated elite media coverage in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency. “The New York Times put crumbs all the way to the front door of the USAID headquarters and we just walked along back there,” he lamented of his party.

I have no confidence in my powers of political prognostication, so I could easily see the Democratic Party rejecting Emmanuel by simply embracing anti-Trump sentiment in 2028. And that could work! But a Democratic nominee from the hippie wing of the party will simply lead to a repeat of the mistakes Biden (or his handlers) made. In which case, maybe Democrats will embrace hippie punching in 2032.