A very similar version of this story ran in The Atlantic. Click above to play the video version of the Spiel.
Kamala Harris and the Democrats sold themselves as the party of change, freedom, and not being weird. But many American voters saw them instead as prigs, Stepford wives, morons, smarty-pants, and flaccid would-be hook up partners.
The Democrats didn’t actually embody all of these shortcomings, separately or simultaneously: it’s difficult to be both smart and dumb, seductive and prudish.
So what are the Democrats? WHO are the Democrats? I’ve been thinking this past week and it hit me: the institution that the Democratic Party resembles in the minds of most Americans is the HR Department.
Like the Human Resource Department, the Democrats are a party of norms, procedure, bureaucracy, DEI initiatives, rule-following, language-policing, and compliance. It is in this way that the Democratic party feels not so much as infuriating and threatening but as a kind of annoying bummer. Just like an HR manager might respond when asked for clarity, Kamala Harris frequently spoke in the lexicon of lawerly avoidance.
The Democrats’ banked on the idea that classic mommy-party traits—nurturing, fretting about life’s dangers—would appeal to voters worried about the chaos of Trumpism. Instead, their warnings came across as scolding, while Trump’s wild antics were either embraced by his party as a selling point or dismissed as the harmless byproduct of his showmanship. To his followers, Donald J. Trump, CEO, fits a heroic and masculine frame; to his detractors he is a villain, yet he is always the protagonist.
The cultural space that the HR Department occupies, on the other hand, carries with it no archetype at all. HR is mainly reactive, and often overly cautious, executing the company’s goals with an extraordinarily low tolerance for risk. At best, this function serves as a careful, mild check on excessive behavior, and at worst, a fussy and fear-based obstacle that distorts a company’s culture and prevents people from achieving their mission. Trump famously hates to be told what to do; the HR department exists to do just that.
HR departments also have a reputation for being haters of fun. In 2016, the Democrats knew Trump was seen as the more affable candidate. This wasn’t exactly difficult. Despite her many qualifications, Hillary Clinton had a reputation for being lawyerly, not playful. More recently, a Democratic operative told me the party learned their lesson from Clinton’s run, and consciously sought to brand Kamala’s latest campiagn as joyful. But it’s impossible to convince a skeptic you’re the party of fun, when you’re also the party accused of, and sometimes engaged in, taking beloved things away—gas stoves and cows come to mind —because “it’s good for humanity.”
Michael Scott, Steve Carrell’s character from The Office, once said to Toby Flenderson, the HR-representative on the show “Why are you the way that you are? Honestly, every time I try to do something fun or exciting, you make it not that way. I hate so much about the things that you choose to be.”
Michael Scott may be a buffoon, but Toby Flenderson is a killjoy, which is precisely how many voters see the Democrats. They’ve Flendersoned themselves. There is no heroism in HR, just the hemming in of behavior. The Democrats should want the vote of Michael Scott, and not be satisfied with only the support of rule-following, over-achieving Leslie Knope. (And, no, this isn’t about gender: there are plenty of non-Knope, fun-loving, rule-breaking women in the world.)
Democrats will tell you that they are the way they are because they’re trying to help Americans, that they know what’s best. But this was no more convincing to voters than a corporation’s insistence that the HR department exists to help employees. Absolutely no one believes that, of course. HR departments work for the people who hold the power, and they reinforce the company line, whatever that may be. To quote a headline from the Society for Human Resources “HR Doesn't Exist to Help Employees.” And in the last few days you are hearing echoes of this admission from prominent Democrats left and center-left alike. The party has turned its back on workers.
Because they are not stupid, workers and voters pick up the whiff of the old okey-doke when they are sold policies and procedures they are told are for their own good, but are quite obviously most beneficial to those higher up on the org chart. Just as the savvy worker views an intervention from HR with suspicion, any voter who is paying attention will regard a party known for its past class betrayals with great skepticism.
They’ve Flendersoned themselves.
The average HR professional is more likely to be college educated, younger than the median worker, and wealthier than the average American. She (and usually it’s a she: 73.5 percent of HR professionals are women) is more likely to be Black or Hispanic, which is also true of Democrats. And, HR workers are more likely to be Democrats themselves. According to Federal Election Commission filings, political donors listing their profession as Human Resources made 6,598 donations to Kamala Harris in the last election cycle, and only 821 to the Trump campaign.
By means of disclosure, I’ll admit that I have liked every HR person I’ve dealt with in my personal life. They are likable people. They perform a mandated service, which the non-reptilian part of my brain accepts. Occasionally, HR really does serve as a useful resource, helping employees navigate FLSA, ACA, Title VII, FMLA, ADA, and OSHA, (all except OSHA being Democratic initiatives). HR is an arm of the corporation, and the depletions of life-force I have suffered in HR dealings cannot be blamed on them personally. I say this as someone who left a job at National Public Radio because I just couldn’t handle filling out my Kronos automated time-sheets. I never resented the actual practitioners of HR for being made to implement their mind-numbing training videos, or distributing their jargon-laden rule books, or being the gendarme of liability-avoidance. But I don’t want to live under that regime if I don’t have to.
For what it’s worth, I wanted Kamala Harris to win, and I wanted her to win because I viewed my choice as one between compliance and chaos. But I can relate on some level to those who rejected her. Campaigns are always run aspirationally, but elections are referendums. For so many Americans the stultifying small-bore rules-bound persnicketiness of the Democratic party became a huge turnoff. People don’t want to feel that they are being told what they can or cannot say. They’re sick of a culture of walking on eggshells. The proof is right there in the election results—and what’s a presidential election, really, if not a quadrennial performance review of an entire nation?
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