How Gay Marriage Ruined Democratic Activism

The end of moral triumphalism

A few days ago, leftist Twitter personality Cassie Pritchard had a somewhat viral thread about the need for the political left to stop ostracizing and bullying people and instead focus on persuasion.

I’m always happy to see people repeating the things we talk about here at Infinite Scroll. And yes, this is the same account that was at the center of the ‘no bananas under socialism’ drama last year.¹ Pritchard’s politics are well to the left of my own, but she’s using the same talking points that I’ve been using in interviews and in pieces like Is a Progressive Joe Rogan Impossible?

When I was growing up, my vague perception of politics was that Democrats were the cool party and Republicans were the party of lame, upright scolds.

Somewhere along the way, that changed. Who today is more likely to lecture you for saying something they consider offensive or out of bounds? It’s obviously Democrats - specifically progressive Democrats. Today it’s progressives, not conservatives, who are prone to scolding and nagging. It’s progressives who try to cancel people for using the wrong pronouns or having the wrong opinions or saying the wrong thing about race. Conservatives are now the ideological movement that embraces edgy contrarianism. You may think this is good or you may think it’s bad, but I don’t think it can be denied that this is the state of things.

Pritchard focuses on a similar problem:

I think there are three main claims that Pritchard, myself, and a few others are making:

• Republicans used to be the scolds while Democrats were cool and accepting.

• Something changed, and now Democrats are the scolds while Republicans are more chill about internal disagreements.

• Democrats, especially progressives and the left, have adopted a mode of discourse that assumes all culture wars move left over time - and all you have to do is yell at your opponent until they end up retreating in shame.

I think all three of these things are self-evidently true. But there’s a giant unanswered question - what the hell happened? How did Democrats move from being chill to being uptight nags? I have a pet theory about how this change occurred. It’s the kind of theory that I don’t necessarily believe in a literal sense, but I do think is directionally true. To understand how the Democratic Party lost its way, we have to understand the political fight for gay marriage.

Gay Marriage Ruined The Democratic Party

I can already feel the social media provocateurs taking this out of context,² so let me be clear about what I am not saying. I’m not saying that gay marriage is a bad thing, or that anyone who advocated for it was wrong to do so. I’m very glad gay people can now get married. But I do think that the fight for gay marriage taught left-leaning activists a number of bad habits that haunt them to this day.

Let’s recap the very basic story of the fight for gay marriage.³ For a long time, the gay rights movement didn’t consider gay marriage at all - they were focused on other issues like AIDS advocacy or employment discrimination. It wasn’t until the 2000s that gay marriage became the central issue of LGBT activists. And for quite a while, it was a losing issue. The political right successfully used gay marriage as a cultural wedge to win elections from 2000-2004, when George Bush’s anti-gay marriage stance was a clearly winning issue for him. But seemingly overnight public opinion flipped, and LGBT activists started succeeding.

Public opinion moved remarkably fast. Gay marriage, from 2009 to 2015, went from a -17 issue to a +23 issue. This culminated in the landmark decision Obergefell vs. Hodges, where the Supreme Court made gay marriage the law of the land. It’s now widely accepted that gay marriage advocates were correct and that the outcome was for the greater good.

But I would argue that liberal and progressive activists learned the wrong lessons from that fight, and that it’s haunted the Democratic Party ever since. There are three important things to note about the fight for gay marriage:

• First, it was maximalist. Activists weren’t asking for a partial victory or a negotiated settlement. They weren’t looking for a compromise (there was a brief flirtation with the idea of ‘civil unions’, but that was quickly abandoned and only full equality was acceptable). They wouldn’t take any half-hearted solution. They wanted universal gay marriage, recognized everywhere, and they weren’t stopping until they got it.

• Second, it was costless. There really and truly was no cost to anyone to do the right thing. No straight person ever faced any actual harm or cost from allowing gay marriage to exist (other than some vague sense of personal discomfort). Activists were able to lean into this with slogans about “Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t get one!” They simply wanted to be recognized just like everyone else was, without hurting anyone.

• Third, it was moral. Activists successfully made the argument that LGBT individuals were targets of unfair, unethical, and immoral discrimination. The forces opposing gay marriage were painted (for the most part fairly, in my opinion) as prejudiced and backwards. Gay citizens simply wanted to live normal lives, as the argument went, and a bunch of narrow-minded bigots were standing in the way of decency and progress.

These tactics worked spectacularly for gay marriage. The chart above that shows a 40 point swing in just six years is incredible - I can’t emphasize enough how much this does not happen with any other issue. All these strategies worked. It really was correct that gay marriage was morally correct, that it was costless to society, and that activists shouldn’t stop until they got full equality.

The problem is that Democratic and left-leaning activists have taken those tactics and applied them in cases where they don’t fit for the last decade.

Progressive Democrats are now maximalists—in 2020 we heard over and over that it’s not enough to help some people with college, we must make ALL college free for everyone. And also cancel 100% of all student debt.⁴ It’s not enough to ensure access to medical care through a mix of methods—we must have Medicare For All. Anything else is a cowardly half-measure. You can see this maximalist messaging everywhere in the last decade of Democratic activism, from the Green New Deal to Palestine to Defunding The Police. Too often the only accepted policy is the biggest, most maximal policy, which is often not the best policy.

Left-leaning activists also struggle with cost. Gay marriage legitimately had no real costs, but that’s a rarity. Most policies have real trade-offs and difficult cost/benefit calculations to think about. A program might benefit one region but harm another. A new spending program must be paid for eventually with taxes. But progressives today shy away from having hard discussions about costs or trade-offs. Instead, activists usually deny that tradeoffs exist and live in a fantasy where everything can be easily done, there are no negative consequences, and nobody has to pay for it. But that’s just not true. If you end fossil fuel drilling, gas and energy prices will go up. If you stop prosecuting retail theft, petty crime and disorder will increase. Most policies come with a complex set of gains and losses, benefits and harms, and ignoring that leads to bad policy and politics.

And finally, progressive issues are now messaged as moral imperatives. To listen to many activists from the last decade, the only reason to be against Defunding the Police, Medicare For All or Free Palestine is that you’re an immoral reactionary. There’s often no attempt to argue for one policy over another. Instead, policies are simply asserted as moral necessities. This is politics by axiom—it’s simply true that our position is morally correct, and any attempt to argue for a different policy or to discuss costs or tradeoffs is immoral.

The Death of Triumphalism

I stated upfront that this is an theory I take seriously but not literally. It’s too cute to say that this single factor caused the explosion of woke lecturing… but I do think it’s at least partially responsible. For the last decade, Democrats have learned the wrong lessons from the fight for gay marriage. We’ve all seen progressive groups that treat every issue like a moral issue, where the maximalist stance is the only acceptable answer and there are no tradeoffs or costs to deal with. I’m going to label this style of politics as Triumphalism. It’s the belief that all you have to do is present a pure vision of what you believe is good and moral policy, yell about it really loudly, and then over time people will have no choice to but agree with you. The arc of history is on your side! You will be triumphant in the end - and anyone who doesn’t see that today will be shamed into compliance tomorrow.

Astonishingly, this approach did work for gay marriage. Public opinion really did reverse that fast, and the gains have held for the last decade.

But the problem with this Triumphalist approach is that it fails with almost every other issue. Activists have been yelling about abortion for decades and polls simply haven’t moved that much. Defund the Police was never popular and making it a topic of national discourse only made it less popular. Tradeoffs exist. You can argue for huge stimulus bills and spending packages like the Biden administration did, but you then need to be prepared for the roaring inflation that they helped cause.

Most importantly, regular people simply do not like being lectured. They do not like to be scolded and nagged and told that they’re bad people for not believing the same thing as you do. But post-gay marriage, that became the default strategy of the left. Rather than persuading people, it was far more common to try to shame them into agreeing with you. Or as Pritchard put it:

After the 2024 election, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the Triumphalist approach to politics is dead. Gay marriage is still popular, but the public’s views on trans issues have moved significantly to the right. A surge of illegal immigration under Joe Biden led to a drastic decrease in support for immigration. The political legacy of ‘Defund the Police’ has been a surge in crime and the perception that Democrats can’t govern America’s biggest cities. Despite progressive preaching, the public has become sharply more nationalist and conservative and these issues and many others.

Maximalism is rarely good policy. Tradeoffs and costs are real. And preaching at people is a losing political strategy. Gay marriage was a unique issue that fit these strategies, but it’s not repeatable. Maybe some of you find this upsetting. You might think that you shouldn’t have to communicate empathetically with bigots, or compromise with people who have stupid ideas, or tolerate people whose politics you strongly dislike. I’d agree that it sure would be fun if we never had to do any of those things, and we could win every issue in the purest and least compromising way possible. But that’s not the world we live in. And the Democratic Party is going to have to unlearn a lot of lessons they’ve been taught over the past decade if they want to be politically relevant moving forward.

1. In a remarkable turnaround, Pritchard has become an advocate for YIMBY policy and the politics of persuasion. There’s always hope!

2. To be fair, the title is provocative on purpose. I blame all of you for so reliably falling for clickbait.

3. I’m going to stick here to an American context, since I’m largely also talking about the impact this had on the American political scene.

4. You almost never hear the left-wing of the Democratic Party acknowledge that Joe Biden has forgiven more than 160 billion dollars in student debt, because what they really want is for all student debt of every kind to be forgiven.