By Chris Satullo

Trump voters are not the only people having a hard time accepting the results of the election. They’re not the only ones struggling to sift fact from fantasy – to grasp that, for them, the results still being tallied across the land smack more of repudiation than validation.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the progressive activists of America.

Yes, the same folks who are now busily instructing Joe Biden on whom he is and is not allowed to name to his Cabinet. And telling moderate Democrats who just lost legislative seats earned through hard effort in 2018 that the reason they’re out of a job now is this: They’re not as supremely woke and killer adept at social media as, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

I’m here to suggest that is not what happened in this election.

I confess: I don’t understand exactly why 72.8 million Americans decided to vote to return to the Oval Office the most corrupt, nasty, ignorant and incompetent human being ever to occupy it.  It’ll take a while to parse what happened there, to fill the gaps in my understanding of many of my fellow Americans.

But I will contend that Joe Biden managed (praise the Lord) to get more than 78.3 million people to vote him into office despite, not because of, the noisy cluelessness and self-righteousness of too many progressives, which functioned as a gift to Donald Trump and a drag on the Democratic ticket.

Don’t get me wrong. Big-name progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC did work hard and loyally for the Biden-Harris ticket. They kept their fans inside the tent this time, not wasting votes on the likes of Jill Stein. No complaints there. Progressives unquestionably turned out, helping provide Biden his breathless margins of victory in places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia. 

But they just as unquestionably served up rhetorical ammunition that Trump seized and trained upon Biden, enabling Republicans up and down the ticket to do far better than the pollsters (and yours truly) predicted they would. Progressive hopes crashed and burned in places like Ohio, Iowa and Texas, where they’d been crowing just days before that their ascendant message was going to turn red turf blue.

That’s why even moderates who did hang onto their seats, such as Pennsylvania’s Conor Lamb and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, are spitting mad.

Lamb said this to the New York Times about progressives’ insistence that their views on “defund the police,” “Medicare for All” and fracking bans are the only right ones: “The rhetoric and the policies and all that stuff – it has gone way too far. It needs to be dialed back. It needs to be rooted in common sense, in reality, and yes, politics.”

Spanberger was even more blunt in a caucus call with House Democrats: “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again….We lost good members because of that. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success…we will get f—ing torn apart in 2022.”

Some progressives are responding to these critiques not with soul-searching, but with primly lecturing op-eds, smug tutorials on how to use Instagram, and renewed “demands” that Biden appoint, say, Elizabeth Warren as Treasury Secretary.

Hey, I adore Warren; she was my top choice among that stellar field of Democratic primary contenders. She’d be a hell of a Treasury Secretary. But the idea of pushing her for that job right now is pure “bubble” thinking, failing all tests of political reality. Just like insisting on self-defeating slogans such as “defund the police,” “Medicare for All” and “ban fracking.”

Let’s deal first with the Liz-for-Treasury fantasy, then move onto policy.  

For the next few weeks, Democratic energy will be focused, properly, on the two Georgia Senate runoff elections. Sweeping them is the only way to defang Mitch McConnell and prevent him from thwarting even the most moderate parts of Biden’s agenda. Let’s say, by some miracle, the Dems do take both seats. That would make the Senate 50-50 and turn Vice President Kamala Harris into the tie-breaker. 

OK, what happens if you then pluck Warren from the Senate and plop her at Treasury?  As Massachusetts law now stands, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, would appoint her replacement.

Now, Baker’s a good guy…but he is not appointing some progressive darling to the seat. He’s going to name a Republican. Presto, chango, Mitch is back in charge – at least until a special election. Can you imagine a better way to frustrate Biden’s hundred-days agenda – and any chance of Senate confirmation of other progressive nominees – than that?

See what I mean? How can you take seriously the thundering of political naifs who can’t even see around the first corner?

Now, to policy. Again, to be clear, I think progressives get a lot right in their diagnosis of how corporate greed and systemic racism have fouled our American landscape – and in their urgency about starting to dismantle those systems. It’s their stance on how to go about that work – and how to bring the rest of America  along – where I find them to be so maddeningly “bubbled.”

“Defund the police.” At this point, only ostriches and racists dispute that American policing and justice are deeply stained by embedded racism which can’t be winked at one second longer. A righteous, multiracial, multigenerational wave of Americans took to the streets to declare that truth after George Floyd’s murder.

Then this dumb slogan – and the associated defense of people looting the CVS and the sneaker store – frittered away the coalition.

As with “Medicare for All,” the people who coined the phrase want all Democrats who see the problem to salute their absolutist slogan for the cure. So you end up hearing a lot of tortuous explanations from people who find the slogan problematic but want to be on the right side of history: “It doesn’t really mean defund per se. It’s about shifting funds. It’s about reforming the police. Or reimagining. Or revamping. Or …. or … or …”

If it takes you six tries to explain what your slogan means – and the final try is a fair distance from the plain meaning of the words – then that’s a problem. A shrewd polemicist such as the Orange One will be happy to pounce upon it.

The problem is even bigger, though. The activists who came up with “defund the police” actually, really, truly mean what the three words say. They want to dismantle police departments and shift the money to community groups.  I interviewed two Black Lives Matter activists in Philadelphia for a public event; they were crystal clear this is what they mean.

One of them was eloquent and moving in describing how racist police systems have wounded his community, but when I asked how he would go about building a community-based safety service, he struggled mightily. The other activist, who was more the kind of sloganeer I’m complaining about here, airily dismissed my question: “It’s not our job to come up with detailed solutions.”

Uh, excuse me, it surely is: When you are demanding to shut down a community institution, however flawed, and to claim the billions it now spends for your agenda, you very much do have to provide persuasive specifics.

Again, naivete married to arrogance.

This speaks to another common failing of the woke progressives: Nestled in their bubble, they assume they form a far larger contingent, speaking for far more people, than they really do. In a Gallup poll last summer, 61 percent of Black Americans said they’d like police to spend the same amount of time in their community, while 20 percent answered they’d like to see more police. Just 19 percent aligned with “defund the police.” That breakdown mirrored results among white Americans.

“Medicare for All” also suffers from the syndrome of an absolutist slogan breeding a fatal fuzziness, as was on vivid display in the Democratic primaries. When I heard people singing hymns to Medicare for All, I wondered how many in the chorus were under the delusion that Medicare is free to the consumer. As someone newly switched to Medicare from my now-retired wife’s excellent workplace coverage, I can testify that Medicare, while just fine, actually costs us more for slightly lesser service, while being more complex to navigate.

When reminded that their single-payer, Medicare for All rhetoric might seem threatening to the chunk of Americans who, like us, were well-served by the status quo, enthusiasts’ answer, to the degree they offer one, seems to be: Hey, they’re rich and privileged, so who cares what they think?

Just every member of Congress, that’s who, because such people vote. That’s why you saw gyrations from Democratic candidates like Harris, once their constituents began to discern that Medicare for All didn’t sound like all that great a deal for them.

And a plan that cannot pass an evenly divided Congress is really no plan at all. 

By all means, progressives should advocate bold ideas to address our embedded problems at the needed scale, because that can expand the window of the politically possible. But there comes a time when those words ideologues hate – compromise and deal-making – become the difference between providing people in need with something instead of nothing. That’s when those much-derided activities become the height of reformist virtue. It’s a lesson I’m still waiting for many in my party to learn.

I’ve dwelled on policy here, but that isn’t all that’s going on in the left’s silly quarrel with Biden, a man whose quiet decency and steady strategic wisdom just saved us. Biden seeks healing and bridge-building. The left would prefer triumph and transformation, having millions of Americans submit to being schooled by the woke on the myriad errors of their ways, from evangelicalism to patriotism to sexism to racism, the whole panoply of -isms.

That’s a re-education that those millions just briskly rejected, via a middle finger named Trump.

I’ve no doubt some of those Trump voters would benefit from being awakened to the ways that corporate propaganda and racist dog whistles have misled and betrayed them. Just as I have no doubt that some progressives might do well to learn more about the genuine pain in the heartland, the value that many Americans place on things like self-reliance and responsibility – and how off-putting it can be to endure lectures from the self-righteous.

Multiple sides of America’s polarization need to be educated, not just one.

More listening, more learning, less arrogance.  I’m begging. Please.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.