'Democrats who cosplay as substantive' (from BIG by Matt Stoller)

A year ago, I wrote Being Trans & Drawing the Line, about (among other things) the desire to live in a political "simulacrum".

I've also been thinking about Democrats who give up on basic rights for trans people, pretending to see us as human and then suddenly changing their minds. The following seems to me to shed light on that.

Today, Matt Stoller says, "it’s an older generation of Democrats who cosplay as substantive." He is explaining something about the big media merger in the news right now:

The second level is about the Democrats, which is a political party few people really understand. The most important thing to get about the older generation of Democrats is they are fundamentally uninterested in the real world. They have a form of politics, but it is unrelated to governing. It is about validating each other as savvy and polite, while deferring to objective experts. That’s why they love ‘independent’ agencies and asking for studies and vague regulations.

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When California Attorney General Rob Bonta took a stand against this merger, it was stark, a real position on an important question of market and media structure. He was playing in the big leagues, where Wall Street plays. When he reversed himself completely on this merger, he met widespread disbelief from virtually everyone, from opponents of the deal to supporters of it. And that’s not because he caved, but because he had talked so tough and then flipped without any explanation. There were many people musing about whether he had been blackmailed, or bribed, and whether this move was the biggest betrayal anyone had ever seen.

But I don’t think any of those are why he flipped. I think he flipped because he assumed no one would care. And that’s because all of the insiders around him likely told him serious people would let this merger through, and any controversy would blow over in a few days. The entire state Democratic establishment was pressing him to let the merger through, and he doesn’t notice anyone but them.

* * *

Most Democrats do this kind of reversal, and have for many decades.

* * *

Most neoliberal Democrats are like actors playing doctors on TV. Asking a neoliberal Democrat to do something about corporate power or economics is like asking a TV doctor to do surgery. It’s not just that they won’t do it, they are baffled anyone would even consider that their job. A different analogy is the film Galaxy Quest, a sci fi adventure about a group of actors from a Star Trek style show. They are pulled into a battle among aliens, one faction of whom thinks the show is a documentary of a real civilization and has built their society around the fictional series. At a certain point, the lead has to tell the aliens who have worshiped him that he is in fact just an actor.

What Bonta did here is just that.

In other words, it wasn’t the betrayal that was unique, it was that everyone noticed it.

— Monopoly Round-Up: Paramount-WB Isn't Just a Loss, It's a Prelude: The unorthodox development isn’t that politicians caved; it’s that people noticed it. Plus, bond yields go nuts, and Trump and Xi meet to hash out China-U.S. relations. BIG by Matt Stoller, Sept 28, 2026