Since Tuesday’s Senate election in Alabama, when the mild centrist Doug Jones defeated the menacing racist Roy Moore, social media has been spinning two tunes. Politicians tweeted Lynyrd Skyrnyrd’s Sweet Home, Alabama. Historians tweeted the 1934 classic Stars Fell on Alabama.

My mind’s been drifting to The Alabama Song. Not the obvious reference from The Doors/Bowie version – “Oh, show us the way to the next little girl” – but two other lines that recur throughout the song: “We now must say goodbye … I tell you we must die.”

It’s a lyric for the left, which can’t seem to let go of its sense of defeat, even when the right loses.

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1. This is what defeat looks like

Alabama’s a red state, as red as they come. The last time it elected a Democratic senator – a quarter-century ago – he was a Republican. Three years ago, Donald Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, won re-election to the Senate with 98% of the vote: no Democrat had dared challenge him.

When Democrats started wondering if Moore’s sexual predations might sink him, it seemed a case of either wishful thinking – why would the state that rewarded Donald Trump’s alleged harassment with 63% of its vote care about Moore’s harassment? – or defining deviancy downward. Next to Moore, liberals seemed to suggest, Trump didn’t look so bad, a point Paul Begala actually made even before the news of Moore’s predation broke.

Profile The Roy Moore file Show Hide Born Roy Stewart Moore, 11 February 1947, in Gadsden, Alabama, the oldest of five children of a construction worker and housewife.

Best of times He had a large slab of Vermont granite inscribed with quotes from the Declaration of Independence, the national anthem and the founding fathers installed in the Alabama supreme court. It was topped off with tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Worst of Times In Vietnam, Moore insisted his troops salute him on the battlefield. He was named “Captain America” and later recalled sleeping on sandbags to avoid a grenade tossed under his cot in retribution. What he says “I think it [America] was great at the time when families were united. Even though we had slavery, they cared for one another.” What others say After refusing to acknowledge same-sex marriage legislation, Human Rights Campaign said: “It is clear that Roy Moore not only believes he is above the law, he believes he is above judicial ethics...”

Photograph: Brynn Anderson/AP

But now that Moore has done what virtually no one thought he could do, liberals have turned around to say his loss is not that significant. What really matters, says Ezra Klein, is the fact that Moore almost won, that he got 48% of the vote and 91% of the Republican vote.

Moore is proof that there is no depravity so unforgivable, no behavior so immoral, that it assures a candidate will lose his party’s voters … even though we are not the country that elected Roy Moore, we are the country that almost elected him, and that is still worth reckoning with.

Others focus on the fact that a majority of white voters still voted for Moore, despite his being an unabashed white supremacist and sexual harasser and accused assaulter of underage women.

After every defeat of the right, after every poll shows dangerously low approval ratings for Trump or the Republican, I hear the same response from the left, especially on social media: what about the minority of voters who still support the right? How can they do it? What is wrong with them?

Even though Tuesday’s election showed signs of a fairly large switch in the white vote of Alabama, from red to blue, even though 24% of the American people approved of Richard Nixon the day he resigned – eight points lower, incidentally, than Trump’s current approval rating – the left can’t let go of the voters who remain committed to Trumpism. Even when the candidates of those voters lose major statewide elections twice in a row. In southern states.

But the left doesn’t need to convince every last Republican of the error of their ways. It doesn’t need to put all Republican voters in the public square, forcing them to recant their beliefs. It doesn’t need Christian suasion, encouraging rightwingers to apologize and confess their sins.

In an electoral democracy, the way to break your opponents – especially opponents like these – is to demoralize them, to make them feel they are a small and isolated minority, that their cause is a loser.

On election day, the left needs to convince the right – not through voter suppression or intimidation but through rhetoric and speech – that their movement is going nowhere, so they shouldn’t either. That’s exactly what happened in Alabama, where “the biggest reason for the shift” in counties that voted for Trump last November going for Jones this December is that “GOP voters stayed home”, according to MCIMaps.

2. This is what winning looks like

Speaking of voter suppression, several commenters have said to me that overcoming the effects of voter suppression seems to require either an extraordinarily bad candidate, like Roy Moore, or an extraordinarily charismatic candidate, like Barack Obama. I’d rephrase that to say that it requires extraordinary efforts of all sorts and sizes by all sorts of people.

But that’s not just true of elections and voter suppression. It’s also true of getting social security (and keeping it), passing the Wagner Act, getting the vote, organizing a union, going on strike, and passing the Equal Rights Amendment – which didn’t pass. That’s true of any smidgen of justice, any advance, no matter how small, that you’ll ever get in this godforsaken country, with all its cockamamie veto points and separated, federated, other-kinds-of-ated institutions.

That’s true of all democracy – there’s a reason, the political theorist Sheldon Wolin intimated, that in all those ancient theories of regime cycles, democracy always comes last – but it’s especially true of democracy in America.

The most ordinary, minimal democracy requires the most extraordinary, heroic acts of individual men and women, of anonymous collectives and faceless social movements – years and decades of grueling work, of hair turned gray and stomachs turned sour. That’s the American story: always has been, always will be. The French took the Bastille in four hours; it took American workers 100 years to get a weekend.

3. The Democrats just got served

As many outlets have reported, black voters played a large role in defeating Moore, though as Matt Bruenig points out, there was also a large and under-reported switch in the white vote, which, in keeping with the lack of enthusiasm in the Republican base, may have contributed as much if not more to the surprise of Tuesday’s results.



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Regardless of the relative weight of these factors, this, from Eddie Glaude, is indisputably true:

Finally, black voters in Alabama saw their power and exercised it. In doing so, they served notice to the Democratic party. Democrats cannot win without black voters and they must not take our votes for granted. The days of symbolic talk and empty gestures are over. Deliver or pay the price. The national leadership of the Democratic party must understand this or risk continued defeat.

What black voters, particularly black women, have gotten instead is a lot of thank-yous. From liberals and Democrats, on Twitter and Facebook: thank you, black people, for saving “us” or America or democracy from “ourselves”.

It’s a weird move, with weird overtones. Rather than treating black people as political agents in their own right, acting in their own interest, rather than viewing black people as part of an inclusive movement of the left, the thank-you-note writers treat African Americans as if they were the indispensable helpmates of an addled white upper-middle class, a class that’s too harried, busy, or distracted to deal with the hassle of everyday life, the drudgery of daily upkeep, the housekeeping of democracy.

What Glaude rightly is calling for is not a thank-you note – or donations to black organizations, which replicate the same structure of white noblesse oblige – but a political program, for the entire left, that’s commensurate with the black vote, a program that confronts the deep divide of race and class that mars this country.

Not just the extreme poverty of Alabama, which predates the rise of Trump and Moore and will continue with Doug Jones, but the racial wealth gap, the crushing debt, the homeownership crisis, the over-policing and imprisonment that have been so relentlessly documented over the years.

As Glaude suggests, the Democrats haven’t been too forthcoming on that front. Indeed, their last presidential candidate breezily dismissed the centrality of the economic concerns to African Americans with the claim: “Not everything’s about an economic theory, right?”

4. We now must say goodbye

Keep an eye out in the coming days and months for announcements from Republican members of Congress that they aren’t going to seek re-election in 2018. The number of such announcements was already high, relative to Democrats, back in November: 27 to 7, according to the New York Times. I expect we’ll see a lot more in the new year.

