Democrats Have an Extremely Obvious Advantage Over Republicans

The Heritage Foundation, an established conservative think tank that has committed more than $500,000 in support of Republican candidates so far in the 2024 cycle, is staunchly against recreational sex. In a 2023 post made by the organization’s Twitter account—which is, of course, emblazoned with a gold checkmark, indicating its status as a “verified organization”—Heritage encourages its fellow partisans to “restore sex to its true purpose,” ending an age of mutual pleasure if its impetus is more carnal than procreative. This is a wild take, and in a saner age it would set you adrift in the political Arctic. But since 2016, the untoward freaks and weirdos of society have concentrated footholds of genuine electoral influence. Case in point: Two weeks ago, Christopher Rufo, a far-right activist best known for his elevation of the critical race theory debacle, affirmed Heritage’s position. He, too, believes in a post-sex world.

“Recreational sex is a large part of the reason we have so many single-mother households, which drives poverty, crime, and dysfunction,” he wrote in a tweet that garnered 1.8 million views. “The point of sex is to create children—this is natural, normal, and good.”

Rufo is not a fringe actor. He was a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, and his keening anxiety about critical race theory singularly influenced Donald Trump to limit diversity training in some Washington bureaus near the end of his term and recently kicked off a “plagiarism” panic that led to the firing of Harvard President Claudine Gay. Given the former president’s prestigious record of philandering, it seems unlikely that Trump shares Rufo’s belief that orgasm must only ever be achieved in Christian solemnity. But there is no doubt that men like him are worryingly close to the levers of power. Rufo facsimiles are popping up everywhere you look: Late last year, the New Yorker reported that the powerful anti-LGTBQ+ legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom has won 15 Supreme Court cases, with the ultimate pursuit of banning the birth control pill nationwide. Simultaneously, Oklahoma Republicans have introduced laws bent on making the consumption of pornography a felony, while also outlawing “sexting,” a term so loosely defined and impossible to adjudicate that it makes me absolutely certain that those castrated state legislators have never engaged with the practice itself. Meanwhile, on YouTube, former alt-right luminaries—you know, the men who once considered themselves to be something like the edgy punk rock of conservatism—are now claiming that OnlyFans, a digital storefront structured around independent sex work, will lead to the crumbling of Western civilization.

This, my friends, is an opportunity. The Republicans have a number of advantages heading into November: They have successfully catalyzed the border issue with white nationalist vigor, and Trump has done his damnedest to hoodwink seemingly half the country to believe that the ballot counters in Georgia were compromised by the deep state. But if you are looking for an acute vulnerability in the ossifying MAGA field, start with the fact that Republicans have grown increasingly retrograde and cosmically weird about human intimacy. It’s not just abortion they hate. It’s sex too. The 2024 Republican platform is coming into view: If they had their way, nobody would be fucking. (And I’m sorry: Several million years of evolution confirms that this will never be a popular position.) Biden needs at least one big-tent issue that can marginalize the ghouls on the extreme fringes, and at last, one has fallen into his lap. If Democrats want to win, they must become the party that loudly proclaims one simple truth: Sex is good, and furthermore, everyone should be doing it.

Like any candidate up for reelection, Biden must confront the social upheaval of his first term. He has done himself no favors with his support of Netanyahu’s sociopathic regime, and he was the top dog during an era in which LGBTQ+ rights have plummeted in so many states and Roe v. Wade evaporated before our very eyes. Thus far, to broaden his coalition and convince the American people that he deserves four more years, the president has structured the bulk of his stump around the idea that a vote for Trump is a vote for the terminus of American democracy. That’s obviously a worthy cause, but if you’re going by the polls alone, it’s clear that that message isn’t resonating in the way it needs to be.

So, I ask you to imagine the alternative. What if Biden took the stage at this year’s DNC with exactly one message in hand: The Democrats will protect your right to contraception, to pornography, to sexting someone you just met on Tinder, and to fuck whomever you want (consensually), for any conceivable reason—aimless boredom, debilitating horniness, post-breakup mania, and, yes, the desire to have a child? What if he made it clear that those rights are under assault by some of the most out-of-touch zealots in the country, and in November, we all have an opportunity to make them feel utterly diminished? What if he reiterated, over and over again, that weirdos like Chris Rufo are a core part of Trump’s constituency, and as president, he’d need to cater to their grotesque psychosexual asceticism? Who knows if it would guarantee Biden a spot in the White House, but he’d certainly be speaking to a basic need shared by millions of Americans. After all, municipal limits on consenting adult sexual behavior are, in a word, evil. We need to be reminded of that far more than we currently are.

In Biden’s defense, he has entertained some of those talking points. The resuscitation of Roe v. Wade, and the fears of a national abortion ban, is one of his most popular causes, and that alone is an issue tied up with a generational history of sexual freedom. But Biden’s personal philosophy about abortion is often devastatingly out of touch—evidence of long-gestating Catholic hesitancy—and as a voter, he has exhibited deflating hedges on the issue. However, if you’re analyzing Biden by some of his off-the-record comments, it’s clear that he, too, is a proponent of a passionate sexual culture. When COVID ushered the world into lockdown, Biden lamented the impact the pandemic would have on young people’s ability to “make love.” (Perhaps without realizing it, he was echoing a wealth of scholarship about the loneliness epidemic, rooted in a decline of person-to-person intimacy among young people.) More recently, a book published about the lineage of first ladies quoted Biden’s belief that a long-lasting marriage requires good sex, an old cliché that has become increasingly radical in today’s cloistered environment.

Whether he realizes it or not, Biden has his finger on the pulse. Ninety-four percent of Democrats support legislation guaranteeing a right to contraception, compared to a whopping 68 percent of Republicans. To be 81 years old is to be alienated from so many vectors of popular culture, but on this issue—and perhaps this issue alone—the president is one of us.

So please, Joe Biden, shout your truth from the mountaintops. Unanimity is hard to come by in this world, but if nothing else, surely we can agree that all types of consensual, adult sex are fun and normal. Let us come together. Literally.