Are D.C. Democrats Scared of Their Employees?

If the years since 2020 have demonstrated anything, it’s that the elites of blue America and the elites of red America are both driven by fear of non-elites.

On the left, they’re afraid of disaffected underlings organizing on Slack. On the right, they tremble before enraged strangers yelling at TVs.

Consider two big political-media stories that bookended 2023. Both concerned events that took place in 2020 — and, in their contrast, say tons about the dueling political impulses that have shaped the country ever since.

Back in the spring, the big news was Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox, which had aired luridly false accusations about the company’s ballot-counting machines. Before the network settled for $787 million, the public got a chance to read thousands of damning words of internal Fox communications. The messages between executives revealed that higher-ups were aware that the stolen-election story was dangerous nonsense — but absolutely terrified of alienating regular viewers.

Last week, media chatter was about another 2020 controversy: New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet’s sacking amidst a staff uprising over a conservative op-ed. Bennet this month finally published his side of the story, making nuanced arguments about the alleged decline of open-minded reporting. But the organizational picture he paints is much simpler: The Times, in his telling, was led by some of the most accomplished names in American journalism — but absolutely terrified of alienating junior staffers.

On one side, an institution afraid of its base. On the other, an institution afraid of its team. Does this sound familiar?

It should: It’s the difference, in a nutshell, between the worlds occupied by the institutions of the right and the institutions of the left, particularly in Washington.

Kevin Phillips, the mastermind of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” famously said that he never understood Washington until realizing a core truth: “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.” The line, from the 1960s, got a lot of attention when Phillips died this fall. But by that point, it may already have been obsolete. In the 2020s, it turns out that the key to understanding politics is knowing who’s afraid of who.

At the very least, the concept can serve as a decoder ring to a lot of otherwise odd-seeming stories that have roiled Washington’s institutions — from nonprofits to Capitol Hill offices to political parties trundling toward the nomination of two historically unpopular candidates.

Take the world of think tanks and advocacy. On the left, a storyline of the past few years has been of institutions ground to a halt by staff-driven turmoil over workplace diversity. One particularly vivid story in The Intercept detailed leadership vacuums at top pro-choice organizations — the same month that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Less explosively, there have been high-profile departures like the exit of Ruy Teixeira from the Center for American Progress. A self-described social democrat, Teixeira opted to swing to the conservative American Enterprise Institute — because, he said, he felt stifled by the workplace culture created by young colleagues at CAP who, he said, distrusted his interest in the white working class and issues like crime.

Ordinarily, think tanks are eager to keep high-profile media stars, and advocacy organizations are even more eager to fight the clear and present danger. So why not pull rank and do what it takes to keep the big shots happy? It would be the rational move. But in the world of liberal America, a piece of power held by staff — the ability to call out racism and privilege — can lead to fundraising and reputational disaster. In part because of that power, there’s also been a spate of successful union-organizing drives, even though many of the junior-employee beneficiaries of that trend told me they still anticipated staying on the job just a couple years before moving on to grad school.

There’s no issue with hyper-empowered staff at D.C’s most famous conservative think tank. Quite the contrary. Over the summer, a pair of researchers at the Heritage Foundation were obliged to take their names off a free-market manifesto that had been making the rounds. Their crime? Signing onto a document championed by MAGA foes. Ordering the scholars to un-sign was kosher under Heritage policy. But still, why issue a ham-fisted edict that invites comparison to politburo enforcement of the party line? It’s also irrational. Until you realize that a good chunk of the answer boils down to this: Heritage, as a matter of some pride, gets its money from individual donors rather than corporations. And those small donors — the Trump base — want to bankroll political results, not abstract theory.

Or look at Capitol Hill, where the parties have spent the fall tied in knots in fascinatingly different ways. The GOP side of the aisle famously unseated the House speaker before spending weeks in an embarrassing Keystone Kops exercise of trying to pick a new one. The spectacle was entirely predictable to political pros. So why oust the speaker — or at least, having done so, why not just elevate some other long-tenured Lord of the House to the speaker’s chair? The dysfunction was in significant part the result of members not wanting to get out-MAGA’d in front of the base.

For Hill Democrats, meanwhile, a big internal struggle of the fall involved not nameless voters back in the districts, but nameless employees in Congressional offices (and they were nameless only because they kept names off their anonymous open letter lamenting Israeli brutality and calling for a cease-fire in Gaza). The missive didn’t spur the caucus to change its tune, but did manage to cause some embarrassment — and serve as a reminder that the office underlings are willing to flex their muscles.

I suspect the same dynamic comes into play as the two sides contemplate a general-election battle between two men party honchos view as flawed candidates who will squeak into office at best. What about looking around for the kind of candidate who might spur dreams of getting 60 percent of the vote? On the right, it involves fear of the party’s largest bloc. On the left, it involves fear of what might happen if they had to pick someone else besides Joe Biden — specifically, by passing over a demographic trail-blazer vice president. But surely, you say, Kamala Harris’ bad approval numbers are an indication that she doesn’t actually have a vast cadre of die-hards who would punish a party that spurned her? Yep. Except the place where the tumult would be most bitter wouldn’t be among election-day schmoes; it would be among the diverse employees who staff liberal offices and talk to the media.

The rival fears of right and left raise a question: Whose predicament is worse?

In their new book lamenting the decline of the Democrats, Teixeira and John Judis lay much of the blame on the staff who make up the “shadow party,” that constellation of interest groups and political organizations that effectively serve as a political party. The pair argue that the shadow party locks Democrats and liberal organizations into unpopular positions on immigration, crime and social issues — as well as a linguistic style that baffles people who don’t hail from the collegiate-professional class. From that point of view, it’d be much nicer to have an impassioned base to boss you around than an office full of self-righteous staffers to lead you astray.

This way of thinking, though, ignores what a slew of other recent books have implied: The care and feeding of the furious base locks Republicans and conservative institutions into possibly even more unpopular positions around abortion, insurrection and spending — and saddles the GOP with a snarling, ugly, doomsaying public image. The base may be larger than the pool of liberal institutions’ employees, but its grip is stronger, which is a challenge in a country where you still (usually) need to get 50 percent of the vote.

And as the year ends, there’s also some evidence that the fear-of-young-employees bubble may be deflating. As internal dissent against the Biden administration’s support for the Gaza war roiled the administration, higher-ups privately griped about all the hand-holding they had to do for junior staff distraught over the policy. But, for better or worse, the listening sessions didn’t lead to a vivid change.

Even more significantly, an anonymous open letter from White House interns against the policy blew up in authors’ faces. When news of the letter broke, reaction among the D.C. types I talk to broke down along generational lines. Older folks wondered what kind of crazy delusion the authors had if they thought a bunch of interns were going to embarrass the president into changing policies. Younger folks, who’d watched other institutions change gears to placate socially wired junior employees, saw it as a plausible theory of change (even if they didn’t share the letter’s opinion). Maybe it’s an accident of having an octogenarian career-pol president who’s more likely to care about a hackish state party chair than an impassioned intern, but the letter accomplished little. Worse, it soon emerged that the missive may actually have been organized by someone who wasn’t even a White House intern, lending it an air of inauthenticity.

Activists understand that staff dissent is a point of vulnerability in liberal organizations. But when someone’s caught trying to exploit that vulnerability, it offers yet another reason to resist.

Or consider the reaction to Bennet’s piece about the Times. The company argued, not especially convincingly, that he’d simply been booted for being a bad leader. A more convincing quibble came to me from a couple folks still at the paper who lament his absence: The essay, they said, described the paper as it was when he left, but didn’t reflect the vibes of today. This year, an open letter protesting trans coverage, and signed by a few Times contributors, didn’t lead to any major changes. A faction within the union this week organized against the News Guild taking political stands on non-workplace issues. Driven in part by other higher-ups afraid they might be next, the pendulum has swung subtly back.

As for the right, there’s not much evidence of an ebb in fear of the base.

Still, you never know when events may intervene. Take this month’s disastrous appearance of three elite college presidents at a Capitol Hill hearing, another storyline that dominated the news this month. On the face of it, it looked like a classic liberal-organization dumpster fire, with the university leaders afraid to give a full-throated answer to a question about condemning antisemitism for fear of alienating underlings — in this case, faculty and student activists. What drove their subsequent backtracking? You could say it was justified embarrassment over the public ridicule. But my money’s on a less noble factor, one that may still matter more than angry junior staff or a furious political base: The folks who write big checks.

In 2023, that’s a demographic that still gets a say.