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Seth Moulton Completely Ate Dirt
Tuesday night I did something I’ve rarely ever done before and spent half an hour refreshing NBC’s election results to catch the moment the Democratic primary was officially called for the incumbent senator, Ed Markey.
By then, every smart political forecast had Markey beating challenger Seth Moulton, but I wanted to watch it as it happened, to see Seth Moulton eat dirt, officially. Polls closed at 8pm in my home state of Massachusetts, and the race was called just before 8:30, and I was at my computer watching (and posting).
I wrote about the race here about a month ago, about the way age played in a race where a young centrist was challenging an old progressive. I said then, and it’s been borne out by the results, that age in politics doesn’t just mean age. When voters complain about a politician being too old they are only partly expressing a concern that he or she might not be up to the rigors of the job, or a concern that he or she might die in office. They’re also using age as a proxy for being tired, low energy, weak, and conciliatory.
Markey used trans issues for this purpose. He didn’t just say he was a fighter, he showed Mass voters he wouldn’t back away from his support for the trans community because conventional wisdom was blaming Democratic support for trans rights for the failure of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. By refusing to back down Markey trapped Moulton into tongue tied attempts to distance himself from his own anti-trans comments, showing himself to be the exact kind of mealy-mouthed poll-chasing politician people think of when they think of a weak old Democrat.
Markey couldn’t change the fact that he was 80, but he addressed the underlying concerns age was a proxy for, and it allowed him to deliver Seth Moulton a shellacking so conclusive NBC called the race with fewer than 2 percent of ballots counted.
Moulton’s loss should be an embarrassment for everyone who backed him, starting with the Boston Globe who endorsed him in late August saying, “For Markey and his allies to suggest that Moulton is somehow allied with the Trump agenda on trans rights is cartoonishly unfair.”
There’s nothing unfair about saying that Seth Moulton attempted to kick trans people while we were down for his own political advantage. That’s exactly what he did when he told the New York Times he didn’t want his young daughters playing sports with trans girls their own age (although of course he didn’t call them girls). There’s nothing unfair about saying he responded to Trump’s unfair attacks on Kamala Harris as too supportive of trans people by moving closer to Trump’s position.
Trans people have been put through an absolute wringer for the past two years by the administration. Our rights have been set back at least a decade, even in blue states, where we’re relatively more protected. In red states, trans people can’t teach school or drive a car or use the bathroom without fear of discrimination or even violence.
Joining in those attacks, even a little, lends them legitimacy and emboldens the attackers to go further. Seth Moulton’s comments in a very real way signaled to Trump and people in his administration to keep attacking, to keep pushing, that Democrats were weak and disunited, that no one was going to protect trans people. It was an act of moral cowardice that encouraged the administration not only in their extreme attacks on transgender rights but in their extremism in general. It signalled they could get away with anything, and we’ve all seen them do so.
It is too early to know how much of Trump’s damage can be repaired once a Democratic president is elected. I’ve said many times that we cannot expect a snap back to the status quo, that what passed for normality in pre-Trump America is never coming back and wishing for it will only give Republicans more room to continue remaking the country.
However, it is not too early to begin to see a reckoning for those whose cowardice enabled Trumpism to sink its fangs into the exposed neck of our America, and it is exactly the right time to begin imagining a world where something new can be built out of the chaos and destruction of the Trumpian experiment. For the trans community, our strength and our refusal to give up has led to unexpected victories. I hope to see us flourish in a post-Trump period of creativity and renewal. Hang in a little longer. We took some hits, and more are coming, but we’re not out. Not by a long shot.
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