Human beings interpret the world through stories. There are main characters, and they battle their foes throughout a journey that has a beginning, middle, and end. Obviously this rarely maps cleanly onto reality, but you can learn a lot about the way that people set their priorities and values by who they frame as the main characters, who they frame as the enemies, and how they describe the journey of those they talk about.

This brings me to a trend that I have noticed in a lot of Democratic spaces that I am in, especially in Delaware, where many people find themselves more willing to defend the motives and interests of elected officials than the people that those officials are representing. Most of the time, this looks like chastising people who are advocating for things that are directly needed in their lives by returning to a few key phrases: it’s more complicated than that, they’re really trying, there’s a lot of conflicting priorities. When they’re boiled down, many of these phrases serve as defenses of the inaction or resistance of people in power.

I don’t think that most people who use these phrases and defenses are operating in bad faith. Rather, I think they serve downstream from a culture around how we engage with power on the broad left of center, especially in a small state like Delaware where everyone knows each other. It’s a culture that places the burden of responsibility most heavily on those who have the least power, and lets the most powerful people serve as our protagonists without the accountability that is required for quality leadership.

The Power of Friendship

I have around a dozen elected officials on my Facebook friend list. If you have spent more than a year or two in Delaware politics, there’s a good chance that your friend list looks somewhat similar. There’s only so many people who are involved with politics in the state, which means that we’re constantly rubbing shoulders with people who are in power, even if we don’t necessarily have a lot of power ourselves. In Delaware, we are fairly lucky in that most of those people are generally on the left, at least at a surface level. It’s very rare that I have to get into an argument with a Democratic elected official about why LGBTQ+ rights are important, why a minimum wage should exist, or why police violence is a problem.

This closeness is reinforced constantly. We run into them at the grocery store, we see them in the comments of Facebook pages, our kids go to school with their kids. As a result, it is very easy to form a parasocial relationship, or even an actual relationship, with the people who are responsible for running our government. We want to see them succeed, we want them to be happy, and we want them to not hate their jobs. In the context of how the government works, these are our main characters.

When our leaders become our protagonists, the enemies of our story are the people who attack those leaders. In many cases, those attackers are coming from the right: the various religious fanatics, gun nuts, and internet fascists. But many Democratic leaders also face attacks from the “left,” in ways that we might not interpret as fair.

Most people have an inherent distrust of power, and for a lot of people it’s well-earned. If you’ve been trapped in low-wage jobs, if your humanity was questioned just because of who you are, or if you’ve had to rely on subsidized housing or welfare, your experience with powerful decision-makers is one of indignity and conflict. As a result, a lot of people who go through that will use any opportunity to attack decision-makers, regardless of context. 

All of us are guilty of this to some degree. I have never been one to give much grace to legislators who are fighting to strip rights away from those I know and love, and I think that most Democrats would feel the same way. The level of our sympathy on the other side just depends on the person. Some defend all Democrats, some defend Democratic leadership specifically, some defend the people they know personally, and some defend just those on the left or right. As legislators work to get through each session unscathed, they all face attacks from left and right, which means we then find ourselves reflexively defending those protagonists in our own personal circle of sympathy from the attacks that we see as unfair.

Democracy Among Friends

Since the 2024 election, there have been a flurry of think pieces about what the Democrats have done wrong and how they can win back power. They point to the very real trends of working people leaving the Democratic Party as a sign that there’s something wrong with how the party interacts with people. Often, they then accuse the Democrats of being too scolding, too pure, and too sanctimonious.

If you have read one of those articles before, you’ve probably laughed at how out of touch it seemed in the face of the problems represented by Trump and the Republican Party’s increasing authoritarianism. And if you had that reaction, you’ll understand the feeling that many people have when they are told they are being too mean to elected officials that you like. For many activists, the issues of housing insecurity, police violence, and environmental degradation are deep issues that are actively harming them and people in their families and communities. Just as it is ridiculous to ask Democrats to just calm down about fascism, it is ridiculous to ask working people and affected communities to tone down their criticism when it comes to material issues.

When a bill gets pushed back a year, held up in committee, or watered down to help fewer people, these are real things that have huge effects on people’s lives. While there’s certainly plenty of cases of advocates getting on their high horse about communities that they’re not even a part of, there’s at least as many cases where it’s every day people speaking for themselves. And when we’re talking about the stakes of legislators facing long hours and public backlash, compared to the stakes of their constituents losing housing, health care, or legal protections, the power imbalance becomes very clear.

One of the first conversations I have when recruiting a candidate is making sure that they know that serving in office is a responsibility. The average state representative in Delaware represents around 20,000 constituents. While they are not responsible for every aspect of each of those people’s lives, they do have a responsibility for how their votes affect those people. This power only increases the higher you move up. Staying in the state legislature, committee chairs have more power than committee members, and members of leadership have more power than average legislators. Then of course as you move to the state senate, executive branch, and federal offices that power only increases more.

This can be a difficult thing to balance in our heads. Beyond any personal considerations, many elected officials are marginalized in other ways. In Delaware, we have our first ever Black woman speaker, who deals with horrible racism and misogyny but also has the power to inflict real damage to those who she dislikes, including other Black women.

I am not writing this to say that everyone needs to be mean to elected officials and completely uncritical of those who criticize them. When we are doing real organizing together, we have a responsibility to be strategic and approach elected officials and decision-makers in the way that will make us most effective. But when we are going out into the world, sharing our thoughts on social media, and interacting with people we’ve never met, that is not the same thing as a strategy session among a trusted team. The way that we engage with people really matters.

What I would ask from my people, the liberal and progressive activists who make this work a large part of our lives, is to consider power dynamics before you chastise the people you see out there in the world. Before you take the time to attack someone who’s popping off on Facebook and share that latest New York Times article, try to remember who you’re really advocating for. Is it the powerful people who represent us, or the people they’re supposed to represent?

Sometimes that is going to mean being critical of other Democrats, even ones that we like. But if we want to build a broader base, that is what is going to take sometimes. I believe that every day people have an important role to play in our democracy, and if you agree, then we all have a responsibility to make their participation possible.