What makes a political movement?

Thursday's "debate" between incumbent Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, and Republican challenger Mike Collins was a blowout for Ossoff. It was not close.

Collins himself was responsible for much of that. The House Republican has made a name for himself as a right-wing pro-seditionist pro-Trump crank, and has been under particular scrutiny this campaign cycle for staffing his campaign with an unusual number of open white supremacists. (For the record, the "usual" number of open white supremacists to be found on pre-2024 U.S. Senate campaigns is generally zero.)

But "right-wing pro-sedition pro-Trump crank surrounded by white supremacists" now describes nearly all House Republican incumbents, and it never seems to do any of the rest of them much harm. The real difference on Thursday was Ossoff's unwillingness to pretend that the Trumpian lickspittle on stage with him was anything but a crank. And it was, if you are a fan of people getting to say things to important people's faces that you wish you could say yourself, a damn good time.

Ossoff made Republican toadying to Trump a major theme, effectively pantsing Collins for the whole state to see:

He made Collins' lack of character a theme of the evening:

He tied Collins' embrace of white supremacist allies to history.

Notes Will Stancil, about that clip:

One thing that Ossoff does - thank god - is COMPLETELY abandon the weird liberal wisdom that you should never say your opponent’s name.

He says “Mike Collins” about 30 times in this clip, not “my opponent” or some such, and the directness make his attacks exponentially more brutal.

So. Many. Times. Anti-Trump, anti-fascist Americans have begged for performances like this so many times, even as cornerstones of the Democratic Party continue on with the insufferable game of pretending that the Republican lawmakers endorsing and facilitating rank criminality in the White House are merely distinguished "peers."

No, people like that are called accomplices. They are called co-conspirators. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference what the nameplate on their office door says.

Ossoff is not the only Democratic elected official to treat Trump's bootlickers with public contempt, but he is in the distinct minority. It is not something that Democratic Party leaders know how to do; structurally, even, the onset of fascism has been rapid enough and the Capitol fossilized enough that many of the incumbents with the most institutional power do not know how to respond to an opposition party that believes laws themselves are optional and that resistance to their ideology ought to be criminal.

It's a different skill set. And it's specifically not one that American elites have ever had to learn. Civil rights leaders had to learn it. Oppressed and marginalized groups have always had to learn it. Now, though, lawmakers whose prime qualifications for their roles have been their proximity to longstanding political dynasties are struggling to parse out what might happen when the President of the United States suddenly pipes up on television with another demand for your imprisonment.

I mean, it's hardly a surprise that a group of octogenarian glad-handers are finding it difficult to adjust to the nation's new environ. If it's not a problem that can be solved by trading one tax favor for another, they're going to be stumped.

What the Ossoff approach to campaigning shows, however, is an understanding both of the moment and of the broader truth that a successful political movement hinges on creating emotional support, not merely policy support.

Voting is a chore. It is hard. It is next to impossible to immerse yourself enough in the details of every race and referendum to the point where you know even vaguely what you're voting for, and most people neither have the time nor skills to do it. Even dragging yourself into a voting booth come election day is hard: Even diligent voters tend to think of it as a tedious civic duty rather than anything that will shape their particular worlds.

Voting is like jury duty, but you don't even get gas money. There aren't many people who get a thrill from filling in the little ovals, especially if they've done it ten or twenty years and can't point to anything in particular they've gained from it.

So how do you drag people who don't usually vote into voting booths? You give them a stake, for God's sake. You turn the ballot from a dull civic duty into an act of defiance.

Supporting incumbent Sen. John Ossoff because you believe he best represents your opinions on energy or immigration or tax policy: That's a civic duty. An obligation. A responsibility.

Supporting a man who stood up on a stage and told one of Trump's feckless toadies all the things you've wished you could say to that toady yourself? That is euphoric. That is how you make filling in a little oval something satisfying. Any voter angry about the status quo who heads into a booth to vote for Jon Ossoff will likely do so thinking about one of these particular clips, and they will smile as they color in that oval or press that touchscreen button. Instead of a civic duty, it's become an act of defiance—a way to associate yourself with the person speaking truth to power, a way to share in that moment.

That's what the Obama coalition was. It was people showing up for the at long last candidate, people wanting to take part in a cultural moment that was too long coming.

And it's what the Trump coalition has been as well. In a nation of relentlessly enforced candidate positivity, with surrogates slinging the mud while leaders were expected to remain above the fray, Trump came in as an oozing, vulgar bag of bile with hatred in his heart for everyone and immeasurable bitterness about the president named Barack and the post-civil rights America in general. And Trump built a coalition of Americans who have generally treated voting with contempt, and who consider government itself to be an evil, and he turned himself into an avatar for all that spite and all those grudges and sent people into the voting booths who didn't give a particular shit about any of the issues, so long as they could stick it to the people who might.

That is what a political "movement" is. A "movement" is when voters who cannot or will not muster up regular voting records show up to vote not out of civic responsibility, but because the act will bring them personal satisfaction.

The worst disaster to befall the Democratic Party is the now-entrenched conviction that emotion ought to be left out of campaigning. I cannot fully describe how it came to be: It seems to be a pasteurization of the Clinton-era theory of eternal optimism. You are supposed to give grand hand-wavey visions of a generally positive future, because that's what voters want to hear from you.

But, say the experts, you are not supposed to delve too deeply into specifics because people will get bored very quickly. They want to feel like things will get better; they do not want to know how you will make things better because (1) knowing details about things makes you a nerd and/or dork and (2) the moment you start listing off specifics you're opening yourself up to challenges from people who don't like those specific ideas.

Oh—and you're also not supposed to attack your opponent directly, you're supposed to leave that to surrogates, because people don't want to see leaders being mean. They don't want their leaders to have a mean streak, because if you attack your opponent for, for example, proposing something abhorrently evil, you're also implicitly attacking all the voters who maybe like that evil thing, and so now you've lost the entire people-who-like-evil constituency.

Oh—but people like to see surrogates attacking people directly. Because actually, voters love it when leaders are mean, and they support every other politician being mean except for you.

Got that? You need to project a general wafting feeling of positivity, give as few details as possible, treat even the most misinformed, most fraudulent, or most evil ideas with dignity, and never give anyone a reason to hate you. You must always rise above it all; if your opponent says you belong in jail or should be renditioned to a foreign country because you voted against a bill to cut food stamps, you should give a little chuckle and say that while you respect your esteemed opponent's point of view on that what you really want to talk about is the housing policy that for now you will refrain from elaborating on.

Bizarrely, these strategies have not sent regular Americans flocking to the polls. I say "bizarrely" because the strategy is specifically aimed at convincing voters who know next to nothing about your, your opponent, the issues involved or the history of any of it, but after three decades it still hasn't managed to coax those people into voting booths.

What has provoked turnout spikes? Movement politics. Coalitions of the moment. Public fury over specific economic miseries or abstract economic miseries.

Gas prices.

And it's been a given for decades now that the party that won the presidency in one election cycle is likely to get pummeled in the House and Senate, because for all the talk of positivity the record is pretty clear that it's resentment, not positivity, that really drives Americans to the polls.

We keep hearing that disillusionment with Republicans this time around is likely to depress Republican turnout—or, even more specifically, turnout of low-information high-bile Americans of the sort that thought voting for Donald Trump was a good idea—but that that same disillusionment may not translate into many Americans actually switching parties. That is ... probably true, for Democrats running on the platform of abstract positivity designed for the politics of ten or twenty years past.

But there is no reason Democrats can't offer up their own version of a movement, one that takes all of the seething resentment Americans now have for manipulative oligarchs, escalating corporate abuse, and a Republicanism that now seems solely devoted to facilitating corruption and white nationalist violence. Mamdani turned government competency into a national issue simply by arguing that government should be expected to be competent. Talerico has elevated himself as a moral figure while condemning the faux-morality animating modern conservatism. Ossoff's bold message is that being a white supremacy-coddling Trump bootlicker is Bad, actually, and that it's all right to treat such people with the disgust that we used to have for them.

That sounds like the making of a new movement to me. Wrap it, brand it, and ship it.