The great capitulation

Over the past fifteen years, few figures have been as reliable a barometer of elite consensus as Mark Zuckerberg.

In 2010, the CEO of the company then called Facebook announced he was donating $100M to the struggling Newark school system, most of which flowed to the charter schools that were then experiencing the enthusiastic support of the Obama administration and Democratic mayors throughout the country. In 2013, Zuckerberg aligned himself with Democrats’ efforts to reform the country’s immigration system. In 2015, he planted his company’s flag behind same-sex marriage legalization. Following Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, he acquiesced to calls from the left to impose new policies around “fake news” and misinformation. He publicly opposed the administration’s 2017 ban on transgender people in the military and announced tens of millions in donations to racial justice initiatives following George Floyd’s killing in 2020. After the violence of January 6th seemed to end Trump’s political career, Zuckerberg “indefinitely” suspended him from Instagram and Facebook (before allowing his return shortly after his reelection bid announcement).

So it carried special significance when the Meta CEO announced on Tuesday that his company was ending a number of policies around fact-checking and content moderation on its platforms. Zuckerberg’s statement was laced with obvious appeals to the right, decrying “the legacy media,” calling the 2024 election a “cultural tipping point,” and announcing he was moving the company’s content moderation team from California to Texas.

For Meta’s partners in the fact-checking program, the announcement was a blow. “This is really challenging,” said Katie Sanders, Editor-in-Chief of Politifact. “We are really proud of the program.” Sanders argues public criticism often ignored the organization’s work outside of politics, like combatting fraud schemes and scam efforts. “To see it kind of summed up as censorious, or biased is not our truth,” she added.

Sanders said the group was given virtually no heads-up about the decision. But it heard an unmistakable message. “This was a move that had the incoming administration and Republican-controlled Congress in mind,” Sanders said. “It does feel like the tides have changed, and pretty dramatically.”

Meta’s announcement came during a week full of indications of changing tides. Over the weekend, Politico reported that congressional Democrats largely plan to attend Trump’s inauguration, in contrast to 2017, when dozens boycotted. On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who came to personify the brand of technocratic liberalism that found viral currency in the late 2010s and early 2020s, announced his resignation — likely clearing the way for a populist conservative to ascend to power next door to the U.S.

On Tuesday, the House passed the Laken Riley Act, a Republican-led bill aimed at making it easier to detain illegal immigrants accused of crimes and the kind of measure congressional Democrats had previously held firm against during Trump’s first term. Forty-eight House Democrats voted for the bill, and enough Senate Democrats have announced their support to make overall passage likely.

Also on Tuesday, Sweetgreen, the nation’s largest salad chain, announced it was launching a “seed oil-free menu,” a not-so-subtle appeal to “Make America Healthy Again” conservatives among whom the ingredients are considered toxic. Thursday brought former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral, the kind of D.C. establishment affair from which Trump was largely exiled over the past eight years. And yet, there was the president-elect, smiling and laughing among the other presidents, vice presidents, and spouses, a group into which he was never truly welcomed after 2016.

It all adds up to a clear fact eleven days before Inauguration Day: The core pillars upon which Democrats built the “resistance” to Trump’s first term — the new administration’s perceived illegitimacy, near-lockstep Democratic opposition to his agenda in Congress, a favorable social media landscape, an implicit alliance with big tech and corporate America — have crumbled. It remains unclear what will take their place, a fact that is not lost on the party’s rank-and-file.

In November, Pew Research Center found that Democratic voters are more pessimistic about the direction of their party than voters of either party have been since 2016 (including Democrats after 2016 and Republicans after the distinctly larger defeats of 2018 and 2020). The survey also found Republicans commanding a seven-point advantage on the question of which party represents “people like them” — the first time the GOP has led on the question since Trump’s first election. To Hannah Hartig, a Senior Researcher at Pew, the results speak to a broader “buoying effect that you're seeing in the glow of the election win on the Republican side.”

The pessimism among Democratic voters stands in contrast to some in the party’s political class. “Democrats are better positioned than ever before to meet this moment, to retake power in the upcoming cycle,” said Tomás Kloosterman, National Political Director at SwingLeft, a liberal group that has heavily focused on local races and grassroots engagement. The organization, which was part of a bumper crop of new groups to emerge on the left after Trump’s first victory, has a genuine case to make.

Heading into Trump’s second term, Democrats are in a noticeably better position down ballot than they were in 2017. Republicans now hold a 57-39 advantage in the country’s state legislative chambers, and hold a 55%-44% edge in overall seats; in January 2017, those margins stood at 68-31 and 57%-42%, according to data from Ballotpedia. At the time, the GOP also held a historic 33-16 advantage in the nation’s governors’ mansions; today, they are split 27-23. Most significantly, Republicans’ edge in the U.S. House is far smaller, narrowing from 241-194 in January 2017 to 219-215 today. And in a development with real implications for the 2028 election, the pro-Republican “bias” in the electoral college all but disappeared in November.

For many in the party, the numbers are little consolation, especially after a cycle in which the national popular vote swung six points to the right and was won by Republicans for the first time in two decades. But they point to the complexity of the political moment. In recent years, some theorists have argued that a defining feature of modern political conflict is an overrepresentation of the left, via universities, Hollywood, and coastal hegemony, in American culture, and an overrepresentation of the right, via the Senate and electoral college’s pro-Republican bias, in American government. After November, American society seems to be in the middle of quiet reshuffling, with each side losing ground in its bastion compared to eight years ago. Whatever the achievements of his second term, that may be Trump’s biggest victory of all.        

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