A Crisis Of Confidence Solved

Republicans understand in their marrow that confidence is contagious. 

It’s why, even after a slim electoral win, they strut before the cameras and say fuck you, we won, it’s all over for you, our victory is permanent. Republicans look you right in the eye and say you’re finished here: We have the mandate not just of the American people in all their wisdom and careful consideration, but of God himself, for God wants lower interest rates and ethnic cleansing and a bull market and the end of pronouns in email signatures, and what God wants, God gets. 

Confidence projected correctly tells people what to think, how to perceive you and how to perceive events. Anything said with sufficient confidence, I think, can be made real. Whether it’s innate or taught in Republican boarding school, the American right wing’s expertise lies (mostly) in projecting confidence that they have won, even when they’ve lost. 

The collective trauma of the past decade of democratic backsliding and reality disintegration has left liberals utterly without confidence, even when they win. The horrors of the Trump era – the policies, the aesthetics, the idiocy, the unquestioned equating of good and bad things – have conditioned folks who oppose fascism to doom no matter the circumstances. We doom ahead of an election, we doom harder after we’ve lost, and we find a reason to doom after we’ve won what can only be described as sweeping, overwhelming victories. 

It’s quite the talent, being unable or unwilling to project confidence in the afterglow of a win. The trauma takes over: Something bad must be on its way. The We Can’t Have Nice Things meme has penetrated the liberal soul. 

The Doomers Are Inheriting The Earth

Fascists want nothing more than for you to believe the shadows on the wall are real, that you’ve lost.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

I want to (maybe) be the first one to telll you you’re allowed to be happy today and this week, and hell, maybe next week. The weak knees and of the American left have driven me mad – the pants-pissing, the hedging, the refusal to take credit for shit people like. Our shoulders are eternally slumped.

Tuesday’s election results were not met with confidence and joy, but with agonizing about What Comes Next. Doomers who have said for nine months that the regime will end all elections in the US – even as elections went on as scheduled – were weirdly silent in the wake of Tuesday’s results. Their predictions of ICE agents and American soldiers shutting down polling places in opposition strongholds didn’t come to pass. None of their worst nightmares came true, so they transferred those nightmares to 2026; it's easy to do if you try. Surely opposition voters will be met with military force by then. And if not, well, 2028 is right around the corner. By 2030, elections will definitely be over. Maybe 2032. We’ll see. Tuesday was a tough day for the doomers.

Stop your fucking dooming. You’re telling the regime and its allies what they can get away with when you broadcast this impenetrable sense of doom. You're telling them how to treat you, to not take you seriously.

Tuesday’s off-year elections were not a mild rebuke of the Trump regime; they were a fierce, almost unhinged rejection of the regime’s policies and antics and anti-constitutionalism. Tuesday’s results were normies busting down the doors to their polling places and saying I will vote for anyone – anyone – who pledges to fight this shit to the end. Tuesday’s results were so-called swing voters having touched the stove in 2024 and saying fuck, that hurt, and looking for an ice bucket in which to plunge their scabby little hand. Tuesday’s results were incontrovertible proof that the 2024 Trump coalition was indeed an electoral mirage, not the durable political force Republicans have touted it as. 

Tuesday showed there is no Trump coalition. There never was. It’s all been a skilled politician coasting by on hate and vibes and lots of money, a guy who seems funny and wild online, an attention sucker, a dopamine machine. Latinos who backed Trump in 2024 jumped ship. Zoomer dudes – after trending fash in recent election cycles – reversed course. The low-propensity types – people for whom vibes dominate – either did not vote or backed Democrats on Tuesday. 

None of this was unpredictable. The Wisconsin Supreme Court election back in April foretold a wave election in 2025 (and possibly beyond). Not even Elon Musk’s billions and the backing of his fascist propaganda machine formerly known as Twitter could prevent a landslide victory for the Democratic candidate. We witnessed remarkable shifts toward Democrats in that Wisconsin race – shifts that seemed to be of little interest to mainstream media outlets. The stove had been touched five months earlier and voters wanted relief. 

Be happy. Be confident. Push back your shoulders a little bit. Smile, if you dare. Tuesday did not only deliver crushing wins for the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey. Virginia Democrats held on to their legislative majorities and New Jersey Dems now have a supermajority. The liberal justices on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court easily retained their seats. Bucks County, Pennsylvania elected its first-ever Democratic district attorney. Mississippi’s longtime Republican legislative supermajority was shattered. There were shock results in Georgia races where Republicans have long held power. Everywhere you looked, good things were happening. The pendulum is indeed swinging.

We don’t have to imagine how Republicans would behave if they had secured similarly striking victories. Millennials surely remember the aftermath of the 2010 midterms, when Republicans swept to power everywhere, including in Democratic strongholds. Every Republican within shouting distance of a TV camera told Americans that they had claimed a final, resounding victory over the forces of progressivism that had peaked in 2008. Republicans hustled to lock themselves into power in purple regions and never looked back. Their confidence in themselves and their cause – the undoing of the 20th Century – was unshakeable. I both hated it and admired it.

Woke Is Now Dark. Good.

Look to this week's post-election media coverage, both mainstream and otherwise, for a glaring example of how confidence is projected, or in the case of most Democrats, not projected. The New York Times, 48 hours after Zohran Mamdani became the first New York City mayoral candidate since 1969 to get a million votes, clutched its pearls over Mamdani’s “tone shift” following his resounding win over Andrew Cuomo, who has functionally been a Republican for forty years. Mamdani, per the Gray Lady, had “shed his conciliatory tone” following his domination of the mayoral race. In no universe would that ever have been written about a Republican candidate on any level of government. A victorious Republican would never be expected to embrace conciliation.

Mamdani, after blowing out Cuomo and ending his family’s wretched political dynasty, sounded a lot like a goddamn Republican: I won, I have a mandate, I will follow through with the policies I relentless pitched over the past year, and I’m not going to take no for an answer. 

Vibes Aren’t Everything. They Are the Only Thing.

To survive in this political environment, Democrats must stop thinking and start feeling.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

“I refuse to apologize for any of this,” Mamdani said about his unabashedly left-wing economic stances and his Muslim faith. “I’m looking to be clear about the mandate that we won over the course of this election, and it is a mandate to deliver on the agenda that we ran on.”

Shorter Mamdani: I won, fuck you. 

Fascists respond to this brazen confidence. Some of the filthy rich guys who vehemently opposed Mamdani's campaign immediately bent the knee and asked how they could work with the city's next mayor. Even Trump conceded that he might work with Mamdani. These guys respond to confidence. They respond to authoritativeness and even belligerence. They crave nothing more than appeasement, as Mamdani said in a victory speech that made me tear up over my first cup of coffee Wednesday morning.

The conditioning of the American left to never feel good about itself and to always – no matter what – engage in the most intense kind of doomerism could be seen in CNN pundit Van Jones’ response to Mamdani’s victory speech. The victor had projected unshakable confidence that he could carry the energy of his upstart campaign into governing, and Jones winced at this show of force. Mamdani said I won and my opponents lost and they have to learn to live with that and Jones – who, like Cuomo, is functionally a Republican – recoiled. 

"I think he missed a chance tonight to open up and bring more people into the tent," Jones told a CNN election night panel. "I think his tone was sharp. I think he was using the microphone in a way that he was almost yelling. And that's not the Mamdani that we've seen on TikTok and the great interviews and stuff like that, so I felt like there was a little bit of a character switch here where the warm, open, embracing guy that's close to working people was not on stage tonight, and there was some other voice on stage."

Jones and other centrist pundits and columnists and podcasters who only wish to magically return to pre-Trump politics are not capable of understanding the Dark Woke vibes that made themselves known on Tuesday. They need a return to somewhat normal politics if their shtick is going to hold up in the long run. What they refuse to acknowledge is that there remains no appetite whatsoever among Democratic voters for conciliation and bipartisanship. We tried that. It didn’t work. Now is the time for unbreakable political will and confidence and a nationwide back burn to save representative democracy in the United States. 

Look to Virginia Senate President Louise Lucas for a model of confidence and a reflection of what so-called Dark Woke politics might look like in practice. Lucas, clearly a born Poster, has logged on a few times since Tuesday’s results to tell her Republican opponents and critics to locate the nearest pile of shit and scarf it down. 

Lucas committed to gerrymandering Virginia's house districts to counter Republican gerrymanders, and told a shameless Maryland Democratic lawmaker to shut his damn mouth about Tuesday's wins until he's committed to purging Maryland's lone Republican House member via gerrymander.

Lucas saw Tuesday's results and chose to be confident in what her party can do with (almost) unchecked power in Virginia. Her confidence – and Mamdani's confidence – is contagious. It makes people believe, it converts to doomer into something less doomy. She did not reach out to her opponents and ask to hold hands. Lucas said your time is up, we're in charge, have fun wielding no power. Shorter Lucas: We won, fuck you.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.