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Gavin Newsom’s Cynical Embrace of the Anti-Trans Agenda
By abandoning trans rights and praising Reagan, Democrats embrace a fangless politics with a track record of electoral failure. The post Gavin Newsom’s Cynical Embrace of the Anti-Trans Agenda appeared first on The Intercept.
California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday debuted his new podcast with a 90-minute chat with Charlie Kirk, the anti-woke culture warrior and Turning Points USA co-founder. Newsom, who is positioning himself as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, used the conversation to throw trans people under the bus.
Newsom told Kirk that he finds the participation of trans women in sports to be “deeply unfair.” “I completely agree with you on that,” he told Kirk, a man who called trans people a “throbbing middle finger to god” and “an abomination.”
Little matter that “fairness” in sports when it comes to the participation of trans athletes is, as the Human Rights Campaign reported, “a non-issue.” The LGBTQ+ advocacy group noted that “many states, athletic organizations, and governing bodies successfully balanced fairness, inclusion, and access to play without any problem.”
But Newsom was not interested in taking seriously the responsibility of his position and huge platform to demystify and rebut far-right fearmongering by elected officials, conservative think tanks, and well-funded trans exclusionary campaigns. Instead, he used the podcast to give this far-right Trumpian agenda more oxygen still.
Newsom showered Kirk with affirmation and only the most meagre of pushbacks; one listener counted that the governor used some variation of the word “appreciate” 52 times in reference to Kirk’s views. Newsom denigrated the use of gender pronouns in introductions, mocked the term “Latinx,” and decried calls to defund the police as “lunacy.” In a particularly disturbing segment, the governor effectively disavowed Democratic support for trans people accessing gender-affirming health care in prisons — a constitutionally protected right under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Newsom described as “brilliant” the popular Trump campaign ads with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” One of the ads featured a clip of former Vice President Kamala Harris, when she was California attorney general, voicing support for adhering to a law ensuring medically necessary gender-affirming care be provided for trans people in prison.
“Issues of people who are incarcerated getting taxpayer-funded gender reassignment … that is a 90/10 issue,” he said, referencing the perceived unpopularity of the issue with voters. The “90/10” number appears to have been pulled from thin air; I can’t find it anywhere.
The performance was emblematic of the current wave of rightward pandering that establishment Democrats have decided to embrace with vigor after the very same strategy helped them lose the 2024 election. Democrats are positioning themselves as moderate Republicans, abandoning minority communities and vulnerable constituents in service of a fangless politics with a miserable track record of electoral failure.
In their appeals to some imagined white, conservative electorate, these Democrats are not focusing on “bread-and-butter” economic issues like housing and the exorbitant cost of living — a route to success that does not require abandoning the rights of minorities. Rather, they are relying on logics of austerity and scarcity that only affirm right-wing talking points. It is an abject showing, and a strategy that has not worked for centrists against the rising far right yet. The effect is to simply push the entire political fulcrum further rightward.
Newsom isn’t alone. Following President Donald Trump’s rally-style address to Congress on Tuesday, Democrats chose Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin to deliver a response. The former CIA analyst, who was endorsed by neoconservative former Rep. Liz Cheney, offered an empty paean to American exceptionalism by evoking former Republican President Ronald Reagan in a glowing light. “Reagan understood that true strength required America to combine our military and economic might with moral clarity,” she said. “As a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War.”
Reagan, of course, ushered in the era of neoliberal fundamentalism that helped cripple the working class; he backed bloody coups to install right-wing governments in Central America — the turmoil from which continues to this day; he also refused to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic for years as whole communities were left to die under his tenure.
The idea that hawkish Atlanticism will win over voters en masse is laughable. According to a recent poll, only a slim majority of Americans, 52 percent, even “personally support” Ukraine. (Meanwhile 64 percent of adults express support for protecting trans people from discrimination). I only raise these statistics because the Democratic establishment hews its agenda to the gods of ‘“public opinion” — until that public opinion conflicts with lobbyists and the donor class. Polls consistently showed that voters are against the U.S. sending arms to Israel; a CBS poll from last June showed 61 percent of all Americans said the U.S. should stop arming Israel, including 77 percent of Democrats. The Biden and Harris campaigns wouldn’t entertain the idea. Medicare for All has been consistently popular with over 60 percent of voters for years, and has nonetheless remained politically untouchable in the eyes of centrist Democrats.
So when Democrats speak of shifting their agenda to reach a wider array of voters, what they mean is appealing more to base resentments that the Republicans have so successfully fostered through extensive astroturfing, fearmongering, and misinformation. Democratic leadership could offer a genuine alternative, alleviating the conditions in which revanchism thrives. They would need to present a truly transformative economic platform, taxing the rich, investing in public infrastructure, and supporting the care economy — which represents far more of the U.S. working class than the tiny percentage of manufacturing jobs that receive so much political lip service.
It was not so long ago that President Joe Biden saw success running on a platform closer to these lines with his Build Back Better agenda, which was fatefully diminished by conservative Democrats in Congress. As we saw in the cutting down of Build Back Better into what became Bidenomics, and as we see in Democrats’ rightward posturing now, the party remains unshakably committed to the ruling class.
Last month the centrist Democrat think tank Third Way hosted an event to present its autopsy of the 2024 election. The group blamed Democrats for failing to prioritize economic concerns — which is fair. But it also suggested there had been too much focus on “identity politics,” and that the “far-left” had been permitted to define the party. The latter points are nonsense. Harris embraced Republican pillars: campaigning on a hardened border, law and order, and support for Israel. The Third Way soothsayers nonetheless advised Democrats to embrace “patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery” and to “get out of elite circles and into real communities” like churches and gun shows, and promote “moderation, individualism, and masculinity.”
To prove conservatives wrong by becoming more conservative is just a gift to conservatism.
The same playbook, and its thinly veiled appeal to whiteness, is nothing new. It’s what Democrats have been doing for years. Regardless of how far to the right Democrats are willing to lurch, Republicans will paint them as unhinged communists trying to turn all children trans. To prove conservatives wrong by becoming more conservative is just a gift to conservatism. Instead, Democrats could step out of the trap and offer a robust, working class-focused popular economic program. But that would require the will to abandon austerity thinking, and break their allegiances to Wall Street, corporate America, and the donor class.
Third Way also proposed that Democrats move “away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate.” This was a telling addition. Because who is left if you move away from small donors? The multimillionaires and billionaires for whom the maintenance of a profoundly unequal status quo is all that matters. Unwilling to jettison big-dollar donors by offering an economic agenda for the working class, Democrats are choosing instead to run a nasty race to the bottom, and treating trans people, immigrants, and other vulnerable minorities as disposable. Even if it were a smart strategy — which it is not — such an approach leaves the entire terrain of politics in a darker, meaner place.
The post Gavin Newsom’s Cynical Embrace of the Anti-Trans Agenda appeared first on The Intercept.
