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After losing to Carlos Alcaraz in the U.S. Open final, Jannik Sinner had an insight. He lost because he was too “predictable.” There he was, issuing gunfire serve after gunfire serve, slugging perfectly crafted baseline cannonballs, the strokes that had made him the highest-ranked men’s player on earth (until the match on Sunday). And what was Alcaraz doing? Hitting with no less force and craft, but also — and more importantly, in Sinner’s telling — mixing it up. Alcaraz was unpredictable. He hit drop shots, forcing Sinner to lurch forward; he came up to the net himself and volleyed and half-volleyed at angles that warrant criminal investigation; sometimes, when he was barely going to get to a ball, he attempted the hardest possible version of a return stroke (say, switching the trajectory of the ball) instead of simply lobbing it back to buy time. He wasn’t one kind of player but many. He refused to let the rigor of his training make him a bore.
The difference between Sinner and the Democratic Party is that he knows he has this problem. As soon as I saw him voice that extremely self-aware analysis at the post-game press conference, it struck me as a tidy and apt summary of why Democrats have, in the main, been so inadequate to this moment.
Up against a historically unpopular and endlessly self-sabotaging and not all that bright demagogue attempting an authoritarian takeover, Democrats default to being predictable. They hit back solid baseline groundstrokes at their utterly boring press conferences. They give unmemorable speeches in which you hear the lawyerly formulation “as it relates to” far more often than any line you might remember. They tend to avoid stunts and attention-seeking, as if they were landed aristocrats. They give you elaborate explanations for why things like shutting down the government may feel good, but don’t make sense. They declare that everything is very, very bad, and then behave as though things are, in fact, manageable, thus ensuring that no one believes their warnings. When, in Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, they finally have a candidate running somewhere who actually excites people, they do what addicts of predictability are wont to do: they freak out and refuse to support him, in keeping with their upside-down political logic: If a leader causes people to feel something, like, actually feel something, that leader must be stopped.
There are exceptions. Gavin Newsom is one. He Alcarazes. He mixes it up. He does slightly facile things, along with very serious things, to make you look. He engages in dumb meme wars, which are the most important kind of meme wars if you understand what memes are. He tries shit. He seems to have become less afraid of looking silly than losing the country.
But the feels that Newsom gives, or that Mamdani gives, or that, on occasion, J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, has given, or that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been giving for some years now, are so rare. Because the culture of the Democratic Party, the invisible infrastructure of what is rewarded and incentivized and trained for and shamed, favors the safe, the predictable, the done thing. There is more fear of looking stupid than of fascism. The corporate culture of “no surprises,” of meetings held to apprise important executives of what will happen at future meetings, has bled into political life, just as corporate money has taken over political parties.
These are people I know, people I interview, people I’m friends with, people I admire. I am writing this both from knowledge and from love. But these are people whose lodestar is not messing up, not making a mistake, not misspeaking, not being disliked, not hurting feelings.
It is killing us. Get wild. Get weird. Hit a drop shot. Sit in at the Capitol. Serve and volley. Shut down the government and see what happens. Hit a slice. Make a speech for the ages.
The country will not be saved by politicians who behave as though they are auditioning for senior partnerships in publicity-shy law firms. Stop playing like Sinner and play like a sinner.
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"There is more fear of looking stupid than of fascism".
This. This. A thousand times this.
Great analysis and love the Alcaraz comparison. You can’t say we’re facing an existential threat to democracy and then respond with business as usual tactics.