The Democrats’ Biggest Kink is Losing

At this point, watching Democratic leaders lose feels like a doom loop. On November 12, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history came to an end. For most of the shutdown, the Democratic Party united around clear demands. Foremost was a refusal to let Republicans gut health care subsidies that currently allow millions of poor and working Americans to access vital medical services. Then, on November 15, eight senators broke away and voted to pass a short-term funding plan until January 2026 — without winning a single major concession. 

The aftermath of the Democrats’ vote is clear. The party of #Resistance has left countless Americans out to dry with nothing more than a wink from Republicans about the status of healthcare (Republicans are already hard at work trying to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and make it harder to access SNAP benefits). 

Why do so many of the Democrats’ historic losses seem self-inflicted?

The vote was widely panned as a betrayal of Americans and a bungled opportunity to gain political leverage. Against the odds, Democrats were winning the battle for public approval and had just swept the November elections. After holding the line for over six weeks, why did the Democrats choose to lose? It begs another question: why do so many of the Democrats’ historic losses seem self-inflicted?

Sure, there are political and historical answers to these questions, but a less familiar figure can help us begin to analyze the Democrat’s’ overwhelming drive to surrender. No, it’s not Karl Marx. It’s Sigmund Freud. 

In psychoanalysis, the term for the tendency to self-inflict loss and destruction is “masochism.” For Freudians, masochism is a dynamic by which we unconsciously grasp at power by giving it up. In masochism, we re-submit to an early traumatic pain that overpowered us, trying to take control of that trauma and master it. Surrendering to pain — something we ordinarily avoid — becomes an unconscious source of mastery and satisfaction. 

For individuals, masochism looks like striving for goodness through suffering, happily surrendering to powerful external forces like a boss or a tyrant, or trying to control one’s life by enacting scenarios of powerlessness. Masochism is not a normative category in psychoanalysis — it can be “used” in many ways. It can cause unbearable psychic suffering and result in self-harm; it can also be an ingenious way to enjoy sex by being playful with power. 

When masochism becomes a style of politics, however, it surrenders the very thing that is needed for effective governance: power. When power is given up, the internal failures of a political party are masked by a narrative of its opponents being invincible. Having abdicated its power to an opponent that seems invincible, a masochistic political party is emptied of political will — a “beautiful soul” that experiences its feebleness as a sign of virtue.

Why beat the authoritarians when you can enshrine your party as the eternal resistance to authoritarianism?

When it comes to the Democrats, their biggest kink is losing. It would give Freud a field day: not only do they indulge in the enjoyments of powerlessness, they understand themselves as powerful precisely at the moment they are giving up power. Over the last few decades, even when Democrats have held formal power through majorities or had procedural leverage, they have habitually refused to use that power to block Republican policy goals. Even as they careen toward becoming a permanent minority party, they wring their hands about escalation, legitimacy, and institutional stability. Why beat the authoritarians when you can enshrine your party as the eternal resistance to authoritarianism?

It’s not hard to see how this masochistic personality suffuses the Democratic Party, in both its structure and everyday rhetoric. “What leverage do we have?” opined Senate minority leader Hakeem Jeffries in February. “[Republicans] control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government.” As Adam Johnson has observed, this kind of rhetoric allows the Democrats to feign helplessness. Because of their supposed underdog status, Democrats begin with concessions and “start every political fight with lowered expectations, thus moving our politics rightward.” Rather than embodying ideological strength and skillful statecraft, the Democrats are “an elaborate regime of excuse-making,” Johnson writes, who insist “upon alleged lack of agency.” 

Centrist and establishment members of the party also pour a huge amount of effort into fending off insurgent left-wing legislators who might actually rally voters with class-centered messaging and policy. This means that Democrats must rely on the more arcane and anti-democratic aspects of American governance. The Democrats spend their energy, as Adam Kotsko has argued, “disciplining and containing the party’s left flank.” In doing so, they come to view the “idiosyncrasies of the federal system — and the advantages they give the Republicans — as potent tools for achieving those ends.” 

The leftist critique of the Democratic Party has always been that it will not — because it cannot — effectively wield power on behalf of the working class. 

The insights gained in a psychoanalytic session often have a darkly comic character. The same could be said for this analysis of the Democrats, whose masochistic tendencies have put them in a farcical position. Republican power — even its most brutal incarnation — is now an existentially necessary ploy for Democrats to reproduce themselves. Posing as tragic bystanders to a political momentum totally outside their control, Democrats create the conditions for their powerlessness. Meanwhile, the only far-flung hope for defeating Republicans in the legislature — left-wing members of the party — are systematically excluded and derided by establishment Democrats.

For leftists, it’s all too familiar to watch the Democrats kneecap themselves again at a crucial political moment. This is, after all, why we aren’t Democrats. The leftist critique of the Democratic Party has always been that it will not — because it cannot — effectively wield power on behalf of the working class. 

As gratifying as it may be for leftists to toll the bell of Democratic failure, there are lessons here for the left about the temptations of defeatism. If the Democrats are a party of determined losers, leftists are what Sam Adler-Bell has called “beautiful losers.” For centuries, the left has had “an intimate relationship with defeat. Defeat is our mother: our sustainer and our burden.” Failures of revolution do not, however, doom the left to despair or accommodate it to the forces of reaction. Rather, these failures become the fertile ground for new forms of solidarity, converting mourning and loss into militant power.

At least, ideally. There is a countervailing temptation for the left to enjoy the comforts of powerlessness, adopting the masochistic idea that defeat and the lack of power are inflicted from outside, rather than from within. “Conditioned by history to expect defeat — to see it as inevitable, the product of malevolent forces beyond our control — we welcome its arrival with something like relief,” writes Adler-Bell. “Lurking behind our dour pessimism is, at times, a desire to evade accountability for our own mistakes.” 

Masochism might spice things up in the bedroom, but it has no place in politics, especially for those serious about fighting for a truly equal society.

In times of progress and victory, leftists have engaged in healthy self-criticism and coalition-building. But in times of loss and defeat, the left easily turns on itself, shrinking its coalitions, doubling down on purity tests, and expelling those who are deemed insufficiently loyal. Instead of accountability and self-scrutiny, we are driven to seek absolution — another morbid symptom of masochism. This reflex turns leftists away from hard questions about how to rebuild power — the kind that can overcome the very conditions that caused our defeat.

Masochism might spice things up in the bedroom, but it has no place in politics, especially for those serious about fighting for a truly equal society. It can only be a disabling posture. Instead, the left must endure the “ordinary unhappiness” of defeat, absorbing all its lessons, without abandoning each other along the way.