It Is No Longer 2024, FFS

What year is it, Gavin Newsom, you fuck?

Last week Gavin Newsom slapped on the hair gel and oozed on over to the New York Times DealBook summit to pontificate on What The Democrats Need To Do. “We have to be more culturally normal,” Newsom, said. “We have to be a little less judgmental.”

On social media many people have argued that when Newsom says he wants people to be “normal,” it is an anti-trans dogwhistle. And those people are correct. When a cishet white guy calls for Democrats to be more normal, what he means is that you should vote for a cishet white guy, and toss all those LGBT people and non white people and women gently (or not so gently) under any passing conveyance.

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Since the beginning of the year Newsom has been deliberately positioning himself as the thoughtful, balanced, moderate voice of vicious anti trans bigotry. He’s sneered at the term “Latinx”, which is what you do if you want to leverage one marginalized group against another in the name of scapegoating your hair-gelled ass into the White House. He also invited the late Christofascist bigot Charlie Kirk onto his podcast so that they could both fearmonger and spew lies about scary trans women having dangerous advantage in women’s sports, all in the middle of a terrifying federal genocidal attack on trans people. Newsom is doing the equivalent of going on a national tour to ask if there is a problem with too many Jews in the media in the early years of the Nazi regime. It is disgusting, opportunistic, outright evil cowardice and everybody who has an opportunity should follow Halle Berry’s lead and tell him to fuck the fuck off to his smug fucking face.

But even setting aside the fact that Newsom is a bigoted asshole who looks like some sort of Hollywood parody of a slick soulless empty suit—and you should not set that aside!—his claim that he has the one true program to save the Democrats from wokeness is predicated on no one remembering that the Democrats do not need to be saved from shit because it is not 2024 any more.

I will say it again, in all caps. IT’S NOT 2024 ANY MORE. People like Newsom who imagine themselves as the “normal” white saviors swooping down with just enough bigotry to pull us from our pit of despond and leftism keep talking as if it is 2024 but, once again, it is not fucking 2024!

Following the 2024 election, Democratic consultants and serious centrist pundits were all running around like Yglesiases and Carvilles with their heads chopped off, spurting panic, centrist pablum, and scapegoating nonsense from their ugly neck stumps. “We have to elect men and only men!” “We have to figure out how to attack trans people, but reasonably!” “We need to secure the border!” “Blah Blah! Spurt Spurt!” It was like listening to a panicking Pat Boone sing an endless hymn to bad graphs. (Yes, I am well aware of Pat Boone’s politics. That is part of the joke/misery.)

But then a funny thing happened. Trump started to govern. Then his poll numbers tanked and kept tanking. Then Democrats started to win every election that wasn’t nailed down. A Democrat overperformed in an Oklahoma race by 50 points. A Democratic win in Iowa broke the state’s legislative supermajority. A Muslim Democratic socialist won the mayor’s race in New York. Democrats won the governor’s race in supposedly purple Virginia by 15. The much-touted “realignment” of Hispanic voters and young voters has completely reversed and more than reversed; Trump has gone from +10 with young voters to -46—an unbelievable 56 point swing.

Democrats don’t need to be more normal. They don’t need to be more anything, at least as far as electoral strategy is concerned. That’s because they did not do anything wrong electorally in 2024. Democrats didn’t lose because they were too pro trans (they were not particularly pro trans.) They didn’t lose because they were insufficiently hateful towards immigrants (they were pretty hateful.) Nor did they lose because they failed to oppose the genocide in Gaza (though they absolutely should have opposed that.) Democratic positions have not changed much on any of those issues, yet their electoral fortunes have transformed. Which strongly suggests that Democrats lost because people were pissed about inflation and the lingering economic dislocations caused by Covid and that they blamed the incumbent party. Now Trump is the incumbent, and they are pissed at him.

Newsom is selling bigotry and cishet white male identity politics as snake oil for a malady that does not exist. IT DOES NOT FUCKING EXIST! Democrats do not need to radically retool their message to win elections. What they need to do is to radically retool their tactics to fight fascism.

There Newsom has been on the right track in his decision to embrace a blue California gerrymander to fight Trump’s red gerrymanders. But he’s unfortunately coupled this aggressive procedural program with a cowardly call to fight fascism by asking fascists on his podcast so he can take notes on who to scapegoat and persecute.

When Newsom says he wants a more “normal” Democratic party, what I hear is that he wants a party that doesn’t welcome trans people like my daughter, that doesn’t welcome neurodivergent people like me, that doesn’t welcome Muslims, that doesn’t want to be too closely associated with women. He wants a party for white guys who take cues from Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk—and we already have a party like that. They are called “Republicans” and they are getting fucking crushed in election after election because they are losing fucking losers.

Yes, 2024 was horrific and traumatic. All the more reason to stop living there. It is 2025 and almost 2026; the Democrats have a winning electoral formula, which is to show the fuck up as Trump implodes. So let’s show the fuck up for everybody, especially the people who make Gavin Newsom and his hair gel uncomfortable. Fuck normal, and fuck Gavin Newsom and everyone offering themselves as a vaguely fashy solution to fake problems when we have enough fascist problems as it is.