There are many explanations for the pathetic loss of the Democrats to Trump, but one recurring theme is that the Dems failed to recognize that the institutionalists were grossly out of touch with the voters.
The institutionalists and the most highly bureaucratized institutions with distinct lines of management, oversight, and regulations were the easy targets for Trump’s attacks. Trump recognized their weaknesses as ineffective, unpopular, or too ossified by tired, weak management and their historical burdens to act “properly.”
Federal regulators based in Washington, D.C., especially the Justice Department, SEC, and all the other departments holding Cabinet-level positions, were at the top of this list.
Trump also exposed the meek, timid leaders at the top of these departments and capitalized on their inert responses, which were never immediate and ponderous. For a man who benefits from delays, obfuscation, and evasion, Trump exploited this institutional morbidity to the extreme for his benefit.
The problem is that federal agencies are propelled and burdened by their histories. One academic paper said institutionalized policies and programs “function as powerful myths, and many organizations adopt them ceremonially.” Highly rigid organizations, such as the Justice Department, have foundations based on a rational, legal framework to secure their social authority. They work on established law and precedent. Trump, as both candidate, then president, and a convicted felon, presented a unique defendant whose overwhelming crowd manipulation overwhelmed the institutionalists at the Justice Department and the White House.
This wave of illegality and political thug behavior was outside the response talents of Biden, Garland, and their teams. In a study of bureaucratic elites, sociologist Gary Spencer writes that sociology “not only seeks to understand social relationships caught in a specific time and place but also to identify more general principles of human applicability that have applications across a wide range of social realities.”
The Democrats failed to recognize the intensity of the MAGA movement and its focus on reform and revenge in 2024. These emotions were centered on specific bureaucracies that relied on rule compliance and the expertise of these public bureaucracies and the elites who run them.
As veteran and experienced politicians and lawyers, these Democratic elites, such as the Attorney General, Vice President, President, leaders of the Democratic Party, and their inner circles, have all been socialized through their respective systems. In the process, they developed “the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors necessary to become bureaucrats or, to put it differently, to play the role of bureaucrats,” as well as the “authority of expertise” needed to assume leadership and top management positions.
However, their collective socialization needed to have connected them to half of American voters. Something went wrong beyond the often-cited failed polling, messaging, poor candidate selection, gender prejudice, Biden’s feebleness, poor popularity ratings, and campaign problems.
There was also the problem of the bureaucracies that managed Trump’s election and prosecution becoming institutionalized. This made them rigid and inflexible in adapting to the changes Trump posed to the law and its prosecution of his offenses. As the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, the Justice Department cannot develop the innovative legal prosecution Trump demanded, nor was Garland the man to oversee that effort even if it became an institutional goal.
Those were all important, but can those problems be linked to the ossified institutionalization of the Executive branch, Democratic Party executives, and the Justice Departments?
Biden, Garland, Harris, and Senator and some unnamed managers in the DNC fell victim to the false pride of their offices. The best example is why Garland waited almost three years to appoint a Special Prosecutor to bring charges against Trump for the post-election insurrection.
Garland’s biographers and historians will provide an answer in a few years, but today, it looks like Garland could not place himself into the new legal world Trump created. Trump is the sociopath who flaunted the law. As a traditionalist, Garland was initially paralyzed as he searched legal precedent for a criminal presidential candidate that operated outside of Constitutional or state laws. Garland was the wrong choice for AG, just as Kamala Harris was the wrong choice for being the 2024 candidate or even for being chosen as Biden’s VP in 2020.
The DNC owes Democratic voters a quick answer as to why it spent $1.5 billion and has nothing to show for it, even as it continues to ask for money to pay off outstanding bills. The Democrats promised transparency but have not delivered any answers about their defeat. Telling Democratic voters to reorganize and “stay strong” is a weak call to action for a DNC leadership that did not follow its advice.
