The.Ink’s Anand Giridharadas said Democrats promised a reckoning and a discussion of what a pro-democracy movement looks like, but instead, a sense of “a smugness and a defensiveness” took over. On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Giridharadas cited the DNC booting Vice Chair David Hogg from his position as an example of smug people in the Democratic party believing “everything we’re doing is perfect.”

MIKA BRZEZINSKI, MSNBC: Anand, your latest piece for The Inc. is entitled The Reckoning That Wasn’t. Tell us what you mean by that. ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, THE.INK: So I think last week, it was six months since the election in November that stunned a lot of people. And it occurred to me that back then in November, there was a lot of talk about reckoning in a lot of different places, progressives, movement spaces, Democratic Party leaders, centrist groups like Third Way, the press, we’re not seeing certain things, how could this happen again in America? There’s a lot of promise, reckoning, reflection, introspection. And six months on, I kind of took a survey of those things. I’ve been in a lot of those rooms over the last six months. And I have to say, this was the reckoning that wasn’t. Reflecting on so many of those conversations in public and in private over the last six months, it struck me that in so many of these worlds, with that promise reckoning, the promise rethinking, what should our party be? What does a pro-democracy movement look like? What should the press function like? There was kind of a smugness and a defensiveness, and I’m, nope, we’re doing everything perfectly. JOE SCARBOROUGH: What are you saying, in the Democratic establishment? A little smugness? GIRIDHARADAS: Well, I think you can go down the list. Full of smugness. So start with the Democratic Party, right? Right. Which should really be at the top of the list of what is a profound rethinking of what it means to have a pro-democracy party when you’re running against that. Someone, you know, frontally going after Medicaid, as we were talking about. And you’ve had no real rethinking. You’ve had, you know, individual leaders reaching out to people saying, what do we do? What do we do? But anybody who’s tried to change anything, David Hogg, others, the DNC picked out, they picked a very lackluster chair. I would say the other, you know, you look at the progressive movement space, where I’ve also spent time, no real reckoning there. You know, you have just a continued sense of everything we’re doing is perfect. Let’s just do, you know, the land acknowledgements and all this academic jargony stuff that no one understands. It alienates people that don’t understand what those things are. No reckoning there. I think you have, you know, leaders, individual Democratic leaders who have just been completely disappointing to most people watching this who have not stood up, not showed spine. People have raised their voices. It’s the thing I hear most from people. You haven’t had one leadership shuffle, you haven’t had one new leader, you haven’t had anybody say, you know what, I’m not adequate to this moment. And you know, this sounds like a very negative analysis, and it is, but I think what I wanted to call people’s attention to is there’s a risk of becoming Trump-like in opposing Trump. There’s a risk in becoming as defensive, as smug, as self-certain, as incurious. Incuriosity was sort of the thing I found the most. And all these people and institutions who said, we have to look at ourselves. No one, as far as I can tell, ended up really looking at themselves. And no one has ended up really saying, we need a completely different kind of party. We need to report the news differently. What does anybody think they need to do differently six months on? I don’t think you stand up for democracy with values of kind of closeness. And I think the value of curiosity, openness is the only way to beat whatever Donald Trump is… SCARBOROUGH: First, you have to know who you are, and the Democrats don’t know who they are. And secondly, you have to know who your opponent is. And again, they’re not running against Donald Trump in 2028. Maybe they’re running against him a little bit in 2026, but they’re not running against him in 2028, right? GIRIDHARADAS: But don’t they need to figure out who they are first? And they have to know what battlefield they’re on. And I think the answer to your question, one of them, is that Donald Trump understands maybe uniquely that politics in this day and age is played on a level of emotion and psychology and attention, as much as it is on policy. And it’s incredible to me how few people understand that on the other side, how few people understand the importance of being a cultural, having a cultural figure, a cultural presence that helps people sort through. Donald Trump, for all of his profound personal and cerebral limitations, is a culture maker and is a player in the culture and is participating in the meaning-making process that voters are engaged in every day. Why did this happen? Why did that happen? Why are eggs expensive? Why are my kids learning this in school? Donald Trump is running almost unopposed in the cultural meaning-making process in this country. And the Democratic Party-and we can talk about other institutions-the Democratic Party, above all, has abdicated any role in participating in the cultural process. Instead, it stands at the end of the pipeline saying, please, $ 5, and please vote, and is ignoring 90 percent of where politics happens, which is where people figure out the world, figure out what they think, make sense of things, and form preferences.

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