In 2022, this magazine warned that the latest “cool” Democrat was showing worrying signs of being unprincipled and disappointing. Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman, who had once positioned himself as a Bernie Sanders style progressive, was running a campaign that heavily featured zingy social media content. Fetterman relentlessly trolled his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, for being a carpetbagger without roots in the state. The rude, crude social media strategy attracted a lot of attention, with the New York Times commenting that Fetterman had a “towel-snapping virtual campaign of sassy online memes,” and the Daily Beast asking “Could John Fetterman shitpost his way to the Senate?”

It turned out that the answer was “yes.” But what I’d written during the campaign was that memes are no substitute for clear, authentic progressive agenda, and Fetterman was beginning to seem like he cared more about humiliating Dr. Oz than about bringing people good healthcare or ending poverty. Fetterman distanced himself from the word “progressive,” and was troublingly sympathetic to Israel’s aparrheid state. So much of the messaging was just jibes about Oz’s residency, and I argued at the time that “it is a very serious problem that Democrats do not have a clear message on things that matter to people.” Since Fetterman won, he has outdone even some Republicans in his championing of Israel, even as the Israeli state has begun perpetrating an outright genocide against Palestinians. He has been viciously critical of leftists, mocking environmentalists and being steadfastly committed to supporting every war crime committed by Israel. 

So I’ve been getting a bit of déjà vu seeing headlines like “Gavin Newsom’s Latest Role: Social Media Troll” and “How Gavin Newsom trolled his way to the top of social media.” Newsom’s record as California governor has been maddening for progressives. As my colleague Stephen Prager writes, Newsom “has held back legislation that would have addressed the housing crisis, improved healthcare coverage, and expanded the rights of labor unions.” And he’s shown a concerning willingness to embrace the MAGA right and cast trans people aside when he perceives it to be politically advantageous. I don’t trust Newsom one bit. I think he’ll say whatever he needs to say to get elected, and that when he (most likely) runs in 2028, we’ll see the same pattern we saw from fellow political ladder-climber Pete Buttigieg in 2020: he’ll make noises that suggest he’s pro-Medicare For All and free college if he thinks those things will help him win a primary, but he will show no actual interest in fighting for those things and will backtrack if he feels he needs to “run to the center” in a general election.

But Newsom is (or has hired someone to be) sassy on social media, which has lately been making him a hero to many Democrats. Newsom’s @GovPressOffice Twitter account has eschewed the traditional decorum of official government social media and embraced full-on parodies of Donald Trump’s infamous all-caps style, posting insults, AI-generated weirdness, and Trumpian grammatical quirks like the inappropriate use of quotation marks. A flavor of the bit: 

Of course, these sound nothing like they came from Gavin Newsom, a man so buttoned-up and boring that he himself looks like what you’d get if you asked an AI image generator for a picture of “a slick politician.” But he’s certainly onto something here, because he’s successfully driving MAGA people bananas with this, and also getting a lot of Democrats to cheer him on. 

The Democrats’ official Twitter account has embraced this style of posting, too, changing Trump’s “America First” to “Putin First,” calling the Cybertruck an “ugly ass truck” (which it is), making a crack about Pete Hegseth’s relationship with alcohol, and most recently wading into the controversy over Cracker Barrel’s minimalist rebrand (which the right is bizarrely trying to spin as “woke,” even though every corporation does one of these stupid redesigns sooner or later).

On the one hand, of course, it’s nice to see Democrats with some actual fight in them. One of the most demoralizing things about the party in recent years has been watching it roll over and play dead, or publicly explain why it simply can’t fight Trump (“What leverage do we have?” Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries whined helplessly a few months back.) To those appalled (as I am) by Trump’s savage authoritarian assault on immigrants, the environment, workers, trans people, and democracy, it feels good to see Trump given a “taste of his own medicine.”

And yet: I’m getting that Fetterman feeling all over again. They’re fighting, but what are they fighting for? The core problem with the Democratic Party has not been its “messaging” (i.e., the way it communicates what it’s about) but its lack of a clear, substantive agenda that will make it popular with working people (i.e., what it’s actually about in the first place). Too many Democrats of the McKinseyite Buttigieg type look at the popularity of Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani and think “Aha, what we need is to look more like normal people.” No, what you need is to have plans for how to actually help normal people! 

You can look, for instance, at Zohran Mamdani’s successful video and social media strategy, and think that Democrats need more relatable “man on the street” videos. That was certainly the lesson that Mamdani’s opponents Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo took, and they’ve been frantically pumping out contrived videos of themselves looking Highly Relatable. Adams “filmed himself doing pull-ups from a pedestrian crossing sign, and, more recently, invited New Yorkers on an ‘MTV Cribs’-style tour of his home at Gracie Mansion” while Cuomo “has posted videos of himself jump-starting a car and opining on how to pronounce ‘Kosciuszko Bridge’ using snappy music, a cinematic filter and a new clip-on microphone.” 

But, sorry: the Mamdani magic does not arise from the fact that he does cool things like host scavenger hunts and give campaign volunteers charming punch cards, nor from his willingness to deploy biting zingers (like Mamdani’s recent clip-worthy moment where he said Cuomo is still running after losing the primary because “Andrew Cuomo is someone who doesn't understand that no means no.”) No, Mamdani, like Bernie Sanders, caught fire mostly because he is relentlessly on message about affordability. Like Bernie with Medicare For All and tuition-free college, Mamdani has a simple agenda that everyone can recite (freeze the rent, free buses, free childcare, city-owned grocery stores), and people like it because they see the direct connection between what Mamdani would do and their own economic circumstances. He has shown he has a plan to help them with the exact thing they actually want their politicians to help with—namely the fact that they’re struggling to afford to stay in their city. If Mamdani didn’t have that, the scavenger hunts and jokes would seem cheesy and unserious. But Mamdani has shown through his policy agenda that he’s more substantively committed to the issues than his opponents, so he can add the fun stuff as a kind of “icing on the cake.”

Without the substance, though, the sassiness is worthless. And it’s just another sad, grotesque, maddening substitute for an actual Democratic agenda. In fact, in the age of genocide, it becomes downright sickening. Gavin Newsom may be successfully getting under Trump’s skin on Twitter, but he’s not using his all-caps posts to condemn the Gaza genocide, and he in fact signed legislation targeted at the protesters trying to stop the genocide. That’s warped, twisted, indefensible, and nobody like this should be considered a hero of resistance. What we must do when we see politicians being snarky on social media is ask ourselves what the substance is beneath the snark. Is there a real, principled progressive agenda there? Like Bernie Sanders, are they relentlessly focused on making a better world? Or is this a cheap, calculated effort to seem cool, a gloss atop a soulless corporate politics? 

After all, the Democrats and Newsom are following in the footsteps of many corporate brand accounts (Wendy’s, Steak-umm, etc.), who have in recent years adopted distinctive personalities online in an effort to seem fun and hip. The corporations themselves haven’t changed, but it’s another manifestation of the “conquest of cool,” the process by which coolness is co-opted for profit by bad-faith actors trying to capitalize on trends. Democratic politicians, like corporations, are going to give the kids whatever they think the kids want, while actually pursuing their own naked self-interest. So we should be fairly cynical when we see a Newsom or an Andrew Cuomo suddenly doing “funny” posts. These people have shown no evidence that they want to make your life better. They just want you to like them, and they’ve hired strategists who have told them how to optimize their posting strategies. But are the Democrats really going to offer us something meaningful? Or are memes what we get instead of a real plan for fixing the country?