Detrimental victory

The largest city in America has a mayor, Zoran Mamdani, who is young, charismatic, energetic, and who seems more than ready to take on civic challenges and get things done. He’s also the first mayor of New York who is Muslim, and the first mayor of Asian descent. Crime rates are down, he seems to be delivering on key fiscal concerns like the city budget, rent controls, and raising the minimum wage (you can get an overview of all the issues he’s working on here).

It’s understandable that the Republicans would despise him (and they do). What is harder for me to grasp is that a lot of folks in the Democratic party seem to hate him, too. And Mamdani is not alone in drawing their ire. Across the united states, over this primary season, there have been a number of races where a strong Democratic contender has won, and there have been cries for censure or for party schism.

Now, I’m not the first to note these trends, for sure. What I want to do is to name and start to understand what I’m seeing, and hopefully get other folks into the conversation to help me think more about it.

I understand the idea of a pyrrhic victory - the kind of victory that is so costly that it might as well be a loss. Sure, you expended all your resources or all your strength to eke out the win, that’s a pyrrhic victory.

But that doesn’t seem to be what it going on in many of these cases. Instead, these democratic party wins often involve an upsurge of voter turnout, civic momentum, and often an increase in campaign donations, as well (one can think back to the first presidential victory of Barack Obama for an example of this). Not pyrrhic victories, but actual victories.

Almost as soon as these victories occur, however, there comes a backlash. We’ve been seeing it throughout this year’s Democratic primary races. “US Democratic Party Rattled By Left-wing Successes,” writes Robin LeGrand in Barron’s.

So I’ve started thinking about these victories as detrimental victories. They are bona-fide wins, but they are treated as if they are losses. They are examined by the Democratic leadership as if they are losses, and seem to be given more scrutiny than actual Democratic losses.

What are we to make of this? I don’t know. I’m not a member of the Democratic party myself (though these days I often caucus with the Democrats), but I very much want to understand. I would much rather see Democratic candidates win than Republican candidates, even as the Democrats continue to disappoint the hopes and expectations of entire generations.

We can understand that Republicans will think it is bad when Democrats win. What I can’t figure out is why so often it’s the case that Democrats also think it is bad when Democrats win.

There’s a short piece by Franz Kafka, “Reflections for Gentleman Jockeys,” that speaks to the spirit of what I’m trying to get at here. It’s short enough that I can reproduce it in its entirety:

When you think it over, winning a race is nothing to sigh for. The fame of being hailed as the best rider in the country is too intoxicating a pleasure when the applause strikes up not to bring a reaction the morning after.

The envy of your opponents, cunning and fairly influential men, must trouble you in the narrow enclosure you now traverse after the flat racecourse, which soon lay empty before you save for some laggards of the previous round, small figures charging the horizon.

Many of your friends are rushing to gather their winnings and only cry ‘Hurrah!’ to you over their shoulders from distant pay boxes; your best friends laid no bet on your horse, since they feared that they would have to be angry with you if you lost, and now that your horse has come in first and they have won nothing, they turn away as you pass and prefer to look along the stands.

Your rivals behind you, firmly in the saddle, are trying to ignore the bad luck that has befallen them and the injustice they have somehow suffered; they are putting a brave new face on things, as if a different race were due to start, and this time a serious one after such child’s play.

For many ladies the victor cuts a ridiculous figure because he is swelling with importance and yet cannot cope with the never-ending handshaking, saluting, bowing, and waving, while the defeated keep their mouths shut and casually pat the necks of their whinnying horses.

And finally from the now overcast sky rain actually begins to fall.

(This is the translation by Willa and Edwin Muir)

What gets me about Kafka’s insight here is how he twists the expectation inside out: You think you want to win? Well, just imagine how angry everyone will be with you when you actually do! That seems to speak at what I’m trying to get at here.

From what I can tell, the Republican party just wants to win, and they will burn everything down in order to do win (and they will also burn everything down once they do win). The Democratic leadership, by contrast, wants to win, but only if they can win in a very particular way. They seem to want to win just so. It’s almost as if they are afraid of the enthusiasm and energy of their voter base.

Normally I don’t write an essay like this if I don’t have a clear direction or a positive answer to offer. I don’t have one here. I am genuinely confused by this. I want Democrats to win, and I’m not even a Democrat. Why don’t they want that same thing?