The Activist Trap

Why Democrats Keep Falling Into It

Democrats have had more than their share of opportunities in the Trump Era.

And yet, time and again, we continue to find them losing on winnable issues where the wind is at their backs. Why? It’s the most frustrating thing I’ve ever seen in politics througout my life and career. Worse yet, they almost always end up in a worse place than before, and people resent them more than they should as a result. It’s how Democrats create Sanctuary Cities across America, continue to fight for Transgender Athletes and why most liberal activists demonstrate over unpopular issues. Why does this keep happening over and over?

It’s something I call the “Activist Trap” and Democrats fall into it way too easily. To be sure, this is not just exclusive to Democrats; Republicans and right wing activists can fall into this trap from time to time also. The differences appear to be though in frequency (the left falls into it far more often) and in degree (Dems continue fighting as is their M.O. while right wing activists tend to wither away or go quiet like a shrinking violet).

So what is the trap? Let Me Explain.

How Major Issues Arise

Most issues are just out there getting their due course as part of the status quo part of politics. Medicare, Social Security, Education, all of it. They get debated, they get discussed and the general public’s opinions on these issues are typically static or sway a little here and there with the winds. What I am saying is there’s not much movement and people’s positions on these tend to get baked in.

Then an event happens. It could just be election season and a primary focus on the issue. It can be something catastrophic or something that catches the public’s gaze. Whatever it is, there is a reinvigorated attitude towards doing SOMETHING about this issue. It is also not just focused on by the political extremes, it’s genuinely absorbed by the zeitgeist and the American cutural psyche. It causes us to re-evaluate our very values as a society. As a good example of this, I am going to use the George Floyd murder to demonstrate how this plays out; I’ll come back to it during this article. Also, in the charts (at the top of the page and throughout) I will use the “left wing” as examples of falling into the trap, though it could just as easily be applied in the other direction.

When the Floyd arrest and murder by police officer Derek Chauvin happened, captured on video by a high schooler with a camera nearby, it immediately went viral. Most everyone, white, black, asian, hispanic, young, old, EVERYONE, said this was a horrible injustice, that this happens far too often and that something needed to be done to fix the racial injustices in this country. There was a MASSIVE amount of political energy as a result to do something about this, coast to coast.

What to Do? The Policy Considerations That Give Rise to the Trap

As with any event like this, the immediate quesion that arises are what policies should be reconsidered and how? Do they need to be massive reforms or tweaks here and there? Should those changes be narrowly scoped to the focused issue or should they be broad and far reaching across various issues? Should you use the opportunity to reassess policies more tangentially related? How would these policies, if previously enacted, had impacted the event that sparked this reconsideration? These are all legitimate policy considerations.

However, to the activists (and for larger issues, the broader public demanding action), only widescale reforms with major changes will suffice. They want something grand done and they want it immediately. This is because 1) there is a perception the changes have to match the intensity and the energy of the politics of the moment and 2) anything else less than that seems like technical changes and bureacratic inertia to do nothing. This is a dangerous time for the issue, because what had started as a good and worthy cause can easily be corrupted, diverted, demogogued and astroturfed by people without the best interests to the cause at heart. It is very easy to take this level of energy and make it more extreme or radical in tactic and purpose.

And to be sure, with George Floyd, the level of energy was intense.¹ In the immediate aftermath, 19 of the top 20 books on the New York Times Bestseller list were associated with race. Demonstrations occured in most every major city (and even many smaller cities) across the country. In Minneapolis², the site of the Floyd murder, several protests devolved to riots including the burning down of a police station near the murder.³ There was most definitely an impetus to do something. Among the issues discussed:

• Widescale police and criminal reform, including often firing⁴ and hiring new Police Commissioners and upper management within various police forces.

• Decriminalization of minor offenses, such as legalization of marijuana, which disproportionately impacts African-Americans and results in longer sentences with recitivism.

• “Defunding” police; police stations across the country had received at a discount surplus military equipment for SWAT and riot control following the scaling down of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Many likened it to a military police presence.

• Greater focus on inclusion and diversity programming.

• Greater focus on rectifying unequal outcomes in hiring, wages and other socio-economic factors. (equity programs).

None of these are illegitimate for genuine policy discussions with serious advantages and disadvantages to be measured and considered. Unfortunately, because of the energy of the moment, most were not discussed at depth, and few politicians got in the way of enacting pretty much anything at the time that was being promoted. Little thought was given to actually debating the policies as policy, and were instead largely rubber stamped in many cases. Activist Absolutism, and the energy that feeds into that level of self-righteousness, creates a mob mentality that few want to get in the way of.

The energy was so strong that in the perception of the most hardcore activists, to give pause and reflect on the conseqences and considerations of any given policy could have easily been interpretted as condoning racism to persist, and was portrayed that way.

The Switcheroo— How the Opposition Sets the Trap

Now, if you are generally on the other side of an issue, and feel hurricane like winds in your face, with the Vox Populi clearly not in your favor at the time, how do you adjust? Simple, you take all that energy and get it to work in your favor instead, by getting it to focus on more of the unpopular and questionable aspects of the issue. It’s a simple “political juijitsu.” They don’t need to fully support or promote an idea in the public forum, they only need to get the ideas out there and let the mob run with them.

In the case of the George Floyd they did this by putting the focus on underlying principles and philosophies that did not necessarily have mainstream acceptance. Most Americans sincerely believe in racial equality and MLK’s axiom to judge not on the color of one’s skin but the content of their character. They believe strongly in merit and how people who try and work hard, regardless of race, should be rewarded. They believe racial injustice had gone on for too long and needed to be addressed; these were questions opposition was not going to win on. What the energy behind the movement exposed was that, because of the rash policy proposals and deep policy changes in some cases, some of the beliefs and ideas being promoted along with the moment could be seen as contradicting those more universal beliefs:

• Republicans were quick to elevate “Critical Race Theory” into the center stage. The philosophy, which is more of a thought exercise really, means to take the perspective of race into most decisions and outcomes and assess their impacts accordingly. It has the disadvantage of assuming race is involved in decisions where it was never considered at all.

• Many more liberal activists started calling for reparations, with the most ardent calling for reparations going back to 1619. Republicans had no problem elevating that issue.

• Ibram X. Kendi, a vocal African-American author of the book “How to be an AntiRacist”⁵ was elevated and his book demonstrated to be nothing but another form of racism taken from the a minority perspective. ⁶

• In regard to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, focus was pointed at how non-merit based they were, and how many were passed over for promotion or jobs in favor of lesser qualified individuals.

• “Defund the police” was reinterpreted to be “Stop paying police or giving them the tools they need to stop crime.” As crime rose, this became a stronger argument.

• Decriminalization of minor offenses was quickly seen as a mistake as more mass shoplifting events occurred, often on small item products such as deodorant and toothpaste. When retailers started locking up these items, people seriously questioned WTF?

The Trap. And Why Democrats Keep Falling Into It.

The Activist Trap is simple, and can be defined as this: Get the supporters of an issue with energy at its back into a position where they are playing defense on a tangential issue with much less support. I see this time and time again, and they fall into it EVERY time. They do it, because they are reflexively inclined to go that direction, and that absolutism that activists adhere to allows for no room for compromise or reconsideration. They’ll defend it right up until these definitively lose elections because of it.

• I saw it when cities across the country started declaring themselves “Sanctuary Cities,” even though most Americans really have no idea what that really means. In their minds, either you’re against Illegal Immigration or defending it. As this VOX video explains, “Sanctuary Cities” is far more administrative and particular than that.

  The idea of a “sanctuary city” began on FOX news as a label given to cities that would not detain illegal aliens after a criminal charge on request from ICE. Immigration wasn’t paying to keep them, and city budgets didn’t have the money so they often just released them. Instead of taking the reasonable position of paying local governments funds to keep them until ICE could pick them up, more liberal cities with immigrant communities instead took the odd position of taking pride in being a “sanctuary city.” To the general public, this makes big cities mayors (almost always Democratic) look to be on the side of Illegal Immigration.

• I saw it in Fox’s promotion of “Antifa” as emblematic of growing left wing militantism. Antifa was thrown around on Fox to take heat and pressure from Right Wing Militant groups like the Proud Boys and Bugaloo Bros. to show it wasn’t just a right wing problem. Progressive Left wing groups took the bait and started branding themselves “Anti-Fascists” and justifying the groups by saying “It just means “anti-Fascist” who wouldn’t be for that?”⁷

• I see it regularly on the transgender issue. Most transgender people don’t want the attention, they just want to integrate and get into their lives yet Democratic activists keep making them the centerpiece of issues. Republicans bring up Transgender athletes, a biologically unfair advantage most anyone can grasp⁸, and yet Democrats try and defend this. Republicans bring up how Democrats support puberty blockers for minors who usually don’t even understand sexual identity yet and Democratic Activists defend it.

  • As if to underscore the issue, this came up only last week: “Senate Democrats block GOP-led bill to ban transgender athletes from women's sports.”

  • Here they could have just gone along with it, diffused an issue that was problematic to them and only impacts maybe a half dozen actual athletes. Instead, they put up the barracades and plan on fighting a losing battle, where nearly 80% of American adults agree with the Republican position on this.

• I see it in the way Al Green and Democrats just HAD to protest at the State of the Union, and how Democratic representatives oddly demonstrate on the floor of the House after his censure singing “We Shall Overcome” in defending a clear breach of decorum and a rightful admonishment of it.

In fact, I see it far too often in how many Democratic representatives, pundits, consultants and activists justify and respond to most issues. They are in such a rush to defend the broad, general idea or position of something, that they get bogged down in defending less popular details about them instead of making reasonable exceptions of them.

In the case of George Floyd and our nation’s racial reckoning, it meant they got completely bogged down in defending CRT, in making excuses for DEI, on defending “defunding police”⁹ and on a host of other indefensible positions that they lost sight of the original goal, the disparities and mistreatments within our criminal justice system and our police forces. There were easy positions to take on this too:

• More people of various racial and ethnic identities joining the police force.

• Better interactions between local police forces and whom they protect and serve.

• Serious penalties for detrimental conduct by cops.

• Greater use of police body cameras (this one actually WAS done! Yeah!) and other forms of transparent accountability.

• Less of a focus on grabbing a firearm to resolve conflict; alternative dispute resolutions

• Better accountability generally in the police force.

• Greater fairness in sentencing for offenses.

• More funding for schools and scholarships in primarily minority neighborhoods which helps keep kids busy and out of the path in going to jail.

Instead what you got was Democrats defending CRT in classrooms and Ibram X. Kendi’s Children’s Book. It’s exceptionally EASY to beat Democrats when they are doing that. As the issue wanes in popularity they tend to lash out at the rest of America, calling them racists, or sexists, or homophobes or condoning whatever issue under the sun, which only compounds their unpopularity and makes everyone resentful towards them. What ultimately happens is that instead of supporting the issues where most of America agreed with them, activists defend positions that were outside of that scope and lost the support of the masses. And it’s how they lost in 2024.

The most obvious person in laying these traps is Donald Trump himself. Whenever he is confronted with a topic he doesn’t want to cover he says something along the lines of “Well, I don’t know about that I heard about “x” over there, yadda yadda yadda.” He doesn’t get into details about it, just drops the seed and watches the news media dive into investigating the claim.

And this is where the trap takes a life of it’s own. So much attention is given to the claim, to the fact checking, to the mistruth, to the reporting of it all, people forget the issue that was brought up to Trump when he was confronted in the first place. It’s a minor deflection by a charlatan of a politician, and the media falls for it every time. Democrats pile on and amplify it. Activists lament the end of our civilization because of it. Stop playing into his game. Stop walking into this very obvious trap.

The way you stay sane, focused, on point and ready is by not taking the bait.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

In the immortal words of that great intergalactic military genius, Admiral Ackbar, just don’t do it because…

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. I am currently in my 50s. In my life I have seen very few issues grasp the public quite like the George Floyd murder did. I could probably count on two hands the number of times that an issue was that consuming to the general public, that fast with that level of intensity.

2. I currently reside in a suburb of Minneapolis and was here through all of it.

3. Interesting side note on this: FOX News and right wing outlets repeatedly reported this as left wing protests getting out of control. In this case, the fire was started by a white person known for being a right wing provacateur. Among the conspirators was a member of the right wing “Boogaloo Bois” group.

4. Whenever big events like this happen, people immediately demand resignations or firings, regardless of the culpability of the person targeted. Generally, the bigger the issue, the higher in the pyramid someone needs to be fired. People above them are also always forthcoming to do so too, out of fear the anger goes higher on them. The poltically incorrect term for this in politics is “scalp-hunting” and quite often it leads to far too many really good, qualified, loyal public servants paying for someone else’s mistakes.

5. I have to give credit to the sheer audacity of the title. By naming it that, to be critical of it made it very easy to level the claim that “Oh, you’re just supporting racism.” The fact is, Kendi defined “anti-racism” with such a bunch of gibberish circular logic that to support racial equality could very well fall short of his idea of “anti-racism,” and get one labeled a racist simply for pointing it out.

6. For great analysis of Kendi and his books, I highly recommend reading John McWhorter and his book “Woke Racism.”

7. Answer: A lot of people when they consider what Antifa actually does,

8. A current poll showed Americans don’t think transgender women should be in women sports by a rate of 80% to 20%. Try getting America to agree on anything else with that large a margin.

9. One of the greatest racial disparities of this whole thing was that “defund the police” was actually promoted by more white progressive activists than it was African-Americans in large cities. The reason was that a higher percentage of African Americans tended to live in poorer, higher crime neighborhoods that needed MORE policing and they understood it. White progressives on the other hand came from outside of those areas and saw police in riot gear in those areas as a reason for the cause of socioeconomic issues.