Hopium and Copium won’t cut it.
You brought a spoon to a knife fight and paid the price of your naivete.
So, once again. Do you want your country back? Or have your descendants lost democracy, and the last great hope of Earth, permanently?
If you do want it back, here’s what we need.
Technology
Republicans were so far ahead in technology they didn’t even campaign.
As I wrote a few days after the disaster, Democrats ran a campaign based in the cloud. Republicans ran one based on AI. We are a decade behind.
If you want a hope of being competitive, you must have an equivalent technology platform.
By AI, I don’t mean some magic of pictures with 6 fingers, built with Nvidia chips, although being able to twist facts to fit your narrative will always be important. I am talking about connecting the databases that give you a political and social dossier on every American voter, combined with the ability to reach any subset at any time.
That’s what Palantir built. There are unstructured databases of voters, census data, demographic and psychographic data available in the market, about what people click on and what they like. Collect it, integrate it, build the system. You’ll then know what might happen if everyone registered, and if everyone voted.
Proceed from there to the kind of semantic database necessary for AI to run at the lowest cost today and you might get a step ahead.
This will require a big partner. America has several tech companies run by Indian immigrants who are surely on our side. Quiet words in dark places. Democrats need to find their own Peter Thiel.
Once the stack is up and running, you can touch any American in many ways, and you’ll be alert to their changing preferences. E-mail, text, video, WhatsApp. Then you start slicing-and-dicing, identifying what activates who and how and when. You test every message, and only point it to the group it works on.
This gets you halfway there.
Media
Oliver Willis has been saying this for decades. Democrats need a media ecosystem comparable to what Republicans built.
Trouble is that Republicans have been working on it for 50 years, since Richard Nixon resigned. They have systematically created alt-right versions of every American institution, not just Fox News but the Heritage Foundation for policy, the Federalist Society for law, and a host of others.
People who live in their bubble can’t be reached in a normal way, by any ideas outside that bubble. But this has given Republicans technology debt. They have fixed cost media assets the Internet can bypass. Bypass them.
The bubble can also be pierced by events. Republicans are certain to spend the next few years creating bad events. They mean what they say, and every policy they propose lacks majority support. They have won because a collection of enough minority positions, fiercely held, can equal a majority. Also, they know what they’re doing.
We need to learn how to do what they are doing, just better.
I disagree with Oliver about buying newspapers or TV stations. Old media is dead, and frankly it’s too visible given what must happen now. We’re engaged in subversion of the existing order, against a movement that means to impose a Fascist, Christianist, dictatorship on everyone.
Everything we need to do in terms of the media can be done online, and at a fraction of old media’s cost. The new liberal media network should be based on this fact.
Attitude
This brings up the third essential.
The biggest mistake Tim Walz made was treating J.D. Vance seriously. You’re not “the honorable member” and you’re not “my learned friend.” You’re an enemy of this nation’s ideals. We need to react to every outrage like liberals of the 1850s did to the caning of Charles Sumner.
A lot of Sumners are going to be caned in the next two years. Recognize that we’re going to lose a lot of battles. Republicans will succeed in banning abortion, even birth control. They will seize the education system and steal everything that isn’t nailed down. They will even try to ban our media and organizing. Be grateful that the Internet is global, and that it can replicate everything Republicans destroy.
We’re not America in 1940, we’re England. We’re in a war, and we’re losing. The bombs are raining down. We need Churchill, not Chamberlain. We need Roosevelt, not Lindbergh. They scream “fight, fight, fight.” Get ready to fight harder.
But to have a chance, we must have the tools to fight with. The AI Cloud must become our arsenal of democracy.
