One December afternoon in the 90s I wandered into the local Good Will store and was looking through the men’s shirts when another shopper tried to hand me a $5 bill. “I like to give to people shopping in these kinds of stores during the holiday season,” she said. I declined to accept, even though—grad student that I was—I could have used an extra five. 

I was reminded of this moment the other day while reading “Does the Working Class Vote Against Its Interests?” by John Vassallo in The Liberal Patriot.  Vassallo advises Democrats to stop asking what’s wrong with working class Americans who don’t support their candidates and instead ask why their policy menu is not more appealing to these voters.

The enrollment surge in means-tested programs such as SNAP since the Great Recession is not necessarily an unqualified testament to government’s ability to help the less fortunate,” he writes. “Rather than a tribute to Democrats’ good intentions and the effectiveness of the safety net, this trend could be seen as an indictment of America’s labor market policy and the deprivation that offshoring, anemic growth, lousy jobs, and chronic underemployment have created. Moreover, the explosion in food bank usage, crowd-funding to pay for medical procedures, and other forms of charity and nongovernment aid underscore the frequent inadequacy of these programs.

Working class people want the dignity of meaningful work and a living wage, not handouts. Vassallo calls for a return to the pre-1970 progressivism that “focused on promoting inclusive development while deterring economic predation and unfair business practices” rather than just managing poverty with “patchwork transfers.” 

Without old Democratic policies like the Wagner Act and the GI Bill my parents wouldn’t have been able to buy their first home and spawn my four older siblings—all while in their 20s. Dad made a living wage as a unionized low skilled laborer in a meat packing plant—back when meatpacking was unionized. 

(Side note: meat companies busted labor unions in the 60s by hiring illegal immigrants and Democratic administrations did nothing to enforce laws against hiring them; the party is currently divided about whether to penalized employers for hiring undocumented migrants) 

Such programs were based on Democrats’ “abiding belief in the importance, and feasibility, of continued enablement through decent jobs, schools, housing, and affordable family recreation.” 

But, Vassallo suggests, Democrats no longer offer a working class path to the American Dream. Vassallo leaves out one path the Party does advocate: go to college. In fact, I was the first among the siblings to get a bachelor’s degree thanks to the generous state-subsidy of higher education that’s been slowly eroded since then.  

But their policies have tended to increase student debt rather than make college more accessible to working class kids—Joe Biden’s bestowal of loan forgiveness to one cohort of debtors notwithstanding. And anyway, at a time when AI is poised to eliminate lots of white collar jobs, expanding the number of college grads competing for them doesn’t seem likely to solve the employment problem, when about 34 percent of America's college graduates work in professions that don't require a college degree. 

Michael Sandel’s excellent book, Tyranny of Merit identifies the origin of the liberal obsession with college degrees.  Beginning sometime in the 1960s, education leaders, led by the president of Harvard, began to think of public grade schools not as places to prepare students for citizenship, but as sorting machines to determine which students would go to which colleges—or no college at all. College admissions became the venue for determining merit and deservingness. Sandel shows us the many ill effects of this idea as it has somehow gotten general acceptance in the culture, but the effect most relevant to our purpose: it fosters hubris among the successful and humiliation among those who don't manage to get their Bachelor’s degree. “A system that celebrates and rewards ‘the best geniuses’ is prone to denigrate the rest, implicitly or explicitly, as ‘rubbish’” (161). 

Sandel talks about his book here.

Put Sandel beside Vassello’s article and it might look to some like it’s either college or welfare in the Democratic American-Dream playbook. Bill Clinton seems to be the chief architect of this approach. He embraced trade policies that led to the "China Shock" (the precipitous loss of US manufacturing jobs in the 2000s) and told American workers: “what you earn depends on what you can learn. There’s a direct relationship between high skills and high wages and therefore we have to educate our people better to compete.”  

For her book, Coming Up Short Jennifer Silva interviewed 100 working class adults who didn’t learn enough in school to compete successfully in the job market. She found that:

At its core, this emerging working-class adult self is characterized by low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health (10).

If the Democrats have done little to save unions and preserve programs like the GI bill, the Republicans have actively opposed those things. So why would an increasing number of working class people vote for Trump? Isn’t the Democratic party the lesser of two evils?  

Another piece on Substack, by Yasha Mounk, a political scientist who studies the global rise of populism, has a theory. Trump, he argues “has forged a brand of populism that has wide appeal and makes big promises about the future”: aspirational populism. Where Democrats are asking why working class people vote against their interests, billionaire Trump has somehow managed to address the sentiments of the white “losers of globalization” by raising tariffs and expelling immigrants, while pulling in an increasing number of non-white working class voters. He writes that anti-globalization

was and likely remains Trump’s appeal for one part of his electorate. But another part of his base—just as important—has a very different view of America. Hailing from groups that had once been banished to the fringes of American society or have immigrated more recently, they don’t want to return to a supposedly golden past. On the contrary, they are optimistic about the future and embrace entrepreneurial values precisely because they feel that their hard work is starting to pay off. They don’t picture themselves as standing in a long, static line [a reference to Arlie Hoschild’s book, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right] to enter a destination they covet; rightly or wrongly, they believe that the doors to it would be wide open if gatekeepers—from journalists to Democrats to elites self-servingly insisting on outdated norms [and, I might add, college admissions offices]—hadn’t cruelly decided to bar their way.

That the system is “rigged” by gatekeepers has been a theme of both of the great contemporary American populists—Trump and Bernie Sanders. The nature of that rigging is vividly illustrated in Mathew Stewart’s 2018 article in The Atlantic, “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy.”  

It’s no revelation to say that social mobility in the land of opportunity has decline drastically since the middle of the last century, and now lags behind most of Western European. I imagine that when Trump talks about making America great again, his rising number of non-white voters do not hear “bring back Jim Crow” as his liberal critics charge him with dog whistling; they’re thinking that he just might succeed in restoring opportunity to Americans even ones who don't attend a four-year college.

Effervescent Christmas

This ad appeared in the Boston Globe during the Christmas shopping season of 1919. Note the enticement to become consumers rather than producers of music.

The assembly hall at Phillips Exeter Academy is usually the site of serious, sometimes grim, subjects: global warming, war, poverty, the Supreme Court.

Last Friday, one of our music teachers, Eric Sinclair, got up on stage and sang Christmas carols.

This assembly used to be an annual event, but it hadn’t happened for long enough that the current students had never experienced it. I never heard an explanation for why it was stopped, but I’ve assumed that, in the spirit of diversity and inclusion, we had decided that the “harm” it might do to people who don’t celebrate Christmas was more important than the “collective effervescence” it inspires among those who know the words to the songs.

Was this experience of joining together with others in song more common before Netflix and doom scrolling? Before we traded in our pianos for record-players? Before we all had our own Spotify playlists and air-buds? Did we know the words to more of the same songs and sit around the fire or the piano and sing together?

Christmas and Christmas songs seem to be one of the few things that still permeate our national culture down through the generations. After the assembly, Eric said he wasn’t sure this youngest generation would know the words. They did.

They belted out “Deck the Halls,” and “”Jingle Bells,” and when Eric sang “had a very shiny nose,” they even knew to shout back: “like a light bulb!”

Adam Grant guessed that the numbers of depressed Americans quadruped during COVID quarantine because we were being denied “a special kind of joy.”

“Peak happiness,” he said, “lies mostly in collective activity.”

Grant’s NYT op-ed is where I learned the term collective effervescence. “We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence,” he wrote.

According to my AI friend, Gemini, the term was coined by Emile Durkheim in 1912 and describes the feeling of energy and harmony that people experience when they come together in a group with a shared purpose. It is a joie de vivre that manifests when we share moments with others, such as being in a stadium that erupts in simultaneous applause when a musician returns for an encore performance.

Grant described the feeling more broadly to include “creating together and solving problems together.” He chided Americans for thinking that the pursuit of happiness is a solitary endeavor and called for a “Declaration of Interdependence.”

Unfortunately, the end of pandemic lock-downs didn’t end what the surgeon general calls our loneliness epidemic. And there’s no end in sight.

It seems like every new invention and every social trend has the effect of pushing us away from each other. My parents’ first home was just around the corner from both of my grandparents. Then we moved to the suburbs. By the end of the day on Christmas, nine people will have spent a combined 60 hours driving to our holiday celebrations over the last few days in search of an effervescent Christmas.

I hope we were wrong about the harm these songs might cause.  I can't recall a single religious theme in the lyrics Eric sang. They were all about decking the halls and dashing through snow.  And one song at the end had an inclusive message, about German and British soldiers playing soccer during a Christmas truce in 1914.  The assembly ended with these words: On each end of the rifle we're the same.

Should Democrats change their approach to identity politics?

In the immediate aftermath of the election, the Times quoted Bernie Sanders explaining the results:

“It’s not just Kamala,” he said. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class. This trend of workers leaving the Democratic Party started with whites, and it has accelerated to Latinos and Blacks.”

Sanders’ always campaigned on economic populism, but he had felt it necessary go along with identitarian appeals in response to relentless woke criticisms during his presidential campaigns.

I reviewed the identitarian attack on Sanders here.

This was the first time Sanders criticized the woke left as far as I know.

Maybe others would follow. After all, in the past three elections, Dems have lost voters in just about every group their identity appeals tried to win over.

But in all the comments by Sanders since that time—and I’ve seen a lot of them—he has not repeated that critique, but continued to double down on economic populism.

That may be because the woke police are still on the beat over here on the left side of American politics. Seth Moulton is now likely to face a primary challenge for saying something that 69% of Americans agree with about trans athletes.

It won’t be enough for Democratic politicians to quietly back away from the most fringe woke positions they’ve embraced—either implicitly or explicitly. Harris tried that and it didn’t work. Undecided voters who watched the Trump ad showing her endorsing gender reassignment surgery for imprisoned unauthorized immigrants shifted from D to R by 2.7%. 

As someone who has lived through the hothouse years in one of the venues where woke fever took hold, I understand voters’ suspicions of the subtle signs that the woke left is not in charge anymore. There needs to be a recognition that the cancellations, firings, scoldings, shamings, struggle sessions, and other means of ideological coercion were wrong and that the leaders of the institutions that promoted them are either no longer in charge or acknowledge their mistakes. Until that happens and the party has its Sister Souljah moment, no one will believe they are safe to speak their minds. Or vote Democratic.

---

Notes

These are problems and questions I’ve been grappling with all fall. I asked if we have passed “peak woke,” in this post.

Today’s post was inspired by Ruy Teixeira’s blog post, "Economic Populism: Opiate of the Democrats."

An excerpt:

In a widely-noted finding from a post-election survey by the Blueprint strategy group, the third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” And among swing voters, this concern about cultural focus was the most powerful reason….

Other than that NYT quote, Sanders has refrained from the critique of identity politics and doubled down on his theme of economic populism. That, Teixeira, argues reflects magical thinking:

Changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work [on it’s own, I would add]—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done. 

None of this means abandoning trans people.  Moulton responded to criticism by noting that, although he doesn't want his daughter to play sports with biological men, he will continue to vote to protect trans rights, as he has done in the past.  When asked by a listener why trans people should work to elect Democrats who don't support every "edge case" of the trans-activists agenda, Podcaster Ezra Klein said this: 

What matters first is not everything the politician says but the power they have.... 

The questions they should be asking, I think, need to be more fully political — that the question is gaining power for the coalition that will listen to and work with you, not finding a coalition that says everything that you want them to say. Because the nature, the purpose, of the political coalition is to win political power, not to signal agreement.

 

Dems' next move: Oppose or #resist?

 

A bipartisan opening?

In the aftermath of the election, Democrats need to decide whether their relationship to Trump 2.0 is resistance (again) or the normal opposition of a minority party.

Resistance failed last time

It's not clear what #resistance 1.0 accomplished. Indictments in the past year and even 34 felony convictions didn’t hurt Trump in the polls and may have helped him. His standing with primary voters rose six points in the week after the first indictment, in the hush money case. And it bolstered his fundraising.

The court cases were the last chapter of the first resistance movement. The first chapter began during the 2016 campaign but the movement really got going after the election that year. #Resisters flooded social media and street protests erupted all over, culminating in the “pussy hat” march in DC. Pundits and journalists pledged not to “normalize” Trump, and introduced more “moral clarity” into their headlines, using the words “lie” and “racist” to characterize Trump’s pronouncements, instead of trusting readers to make those judgments. According to the Times, the #resistance was being “televised, podcasted, hashtagged, Snapped, Facebooked, Twittered and Periscoped.”

The “breakout hit” of the genre was “Pod Save America,” started by former Obama staffers, including the one who wrote the president’s speech at the White House Correspondence dinner that inspired Trump to run for president. That tells us something about why the #resistance failed.

The street protesters said they were marching against Trump, but you might excuse his 63 million supporters for thinking they were marching against their votes—or against American Democracy. According to Wikipedia,

Numerous petitions were started to prevent Trump from taking office, including a Change.org petition started by Elijah Berg of North Carolina requesting that faithless electors in states that Trump won vote for Clinton instead, which surpassed three million signatures.

Calls for impeachment began even before The Donald took office, and two Democrats filed formal articles of impeachment just six months after the inauguration.

And, according to an article in the Washington Post on inauguration day, 2017, the drive to impeach coincided with efforts by “Democrats and liberal activists” to “stymie Trump's agenda.” Let’s not talk about the pee tape.

Perhaps all the dire predictions and early talk of impeachment led to a boy-who-cries-wolf phenomenon when Trump actually did impeachable things during his presidency. At any rate, whatever the legal or ethical merits of all the protests, impeachments and indictments, their political impact was negative. Trump’s vote totals only increased every time he ran:

2016: 62,984,828

2020: 74,223,975

2024: 77,302,580

It’s not likely that there will be one unified approach to Trump 2.0 given the diversity of the Democrats’ coalition and the prominent role of the “shadow party” and random left-crazies, like the people calling in bomb threats and swatting cabinet nominees last week.

What would opposition look like?

Conor Friedersdorf makes the case for Democrats acting like a normal opposition party:

Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery. Don’t hesitate to criticize him when he does something bad, but avoid overstatements. They are self-discrediting. And know that new House elections are just two years away. Focus on offering a better alternative to voters, not ousting the person they chose. Meanwhile, oppose Trump’s bad ideas by drawing on the normal tools Americans use to constrain all presidents. Our constitutional and civic checks on executive power are formidable, frustrating every administration. So be the John Boehner to his Obama. Even if ill intent exists in Trump’s inscrutable mind, his coalition does not wish to end democracy. Some will turn on the president when he merely has trouble fulfilling basic promises.

Step one: cognitive empathy

One object of the opposition is to win the next election. Democrats won’t make a comeback if they don’t make a better effort to oppose Trump while winning back some of his voters. The first step is to try to understand them. (The fancy term for that is "cognitive empathy," which I've argued frequently on this blog is an essential capacity of democratic citizenship.)

I was not optimistic this will happen after I watched John Stewart interview professor Heather Cox Richardson, an Exeter alum whose Substack blog has well over a million subscribers, takes in more than $5 million annually and is deeply admired by my Democratic friends (one of them sent me the YouTube link). While Stewart kept bringing up the failures of the Democrats—their capitulation to Reagonomics and de-industrialization, Harris’s “hugging” of Dick Cheney and defense of the rigged system—Richardson kept putting the blame back onto the voters.

How do you explain the shift of so many Hispanics, Blacks and women to Trump? Stewart asked. Cox replied with an allegory involving 10 people in a room: “They are hearing stories that say you must turn against those two people at the bottom or we’re going to turn against you.” Trump voters, she said “carry confederate flags and carry Nazi flags” and include “white women who will die from lack of medical care” because of how they voted.

This condescending notion of false consciousness—of uneducated peasants perpetually acting against their self-interest out of gullibility, ignorance and wickedness—is a favorite hobby horse of the super smart denizens of the academic left and is really annoying to anyone who is the object of the analysis.

Unfortunately, it sometimes also slips out of the mouths of Democratic politicians, as when Hillary Clinton put Trump voters in a basket of deplorables and most recently when Obama said sexism was preventing Black men voting for Harris.

People who want the Democrats to do better in the next election should stop assessing the morality, or IQ, or rationality of the 77 million Trump voters, and focus on what the party can do to win them over in the next election.

Maybe Democrats could win back some working class voters if they said something like this about the election results (whether or not it’s true):

The American people understand that our economic and political systems are rigged. They know that the very rich get much richer while almost everyone else becomes poorer. They know that we are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. The Democrats ran a campaign protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges. Trump and the Republicans campaigned on change and on smashing the existing order. Not surprisingly, the Republicans won. (Sanders email, 11-23) 

That’s Bernie Sanders. If, as he’s been saying for some time now, the system has been “rigged” against your interests for 40 years, maybe a vote for Trump isn’t completely irrational.

Maybe the system has been rigged after all!

(For a counterpoint to the Stewart/Richardson discussion, here’s another Exeter alumn with a different view)

Should Democrats Compromise?

Resistance implies that any compromise with the “fascists” in power is capitulation to evil.

But despite being in the minority, the opposition party is also part of the government and has an obligation to govern in the public interest. So, in addition to working on winning more votes in the next election and just trying to stymie Trump’s agenda (and the wishes of 76 million voters), they should be looking for opportunities to cooperate with the party in power whenever it could improve the lives of Americans or advance the national interest.

In the first Trump term Bernie opposed the USMCA (Trump's NAFTA renegotiation) but more House Democrats voted for it than Republicans and it did make some small changes likely to benefit American and Mexican workers and American dairy farmers. 

Other bipartisan legislation back then included reforms to the criminal justice system, addressing the opioid crisis, funding vocational training, reforming the Veterans administration, and granting aid to farmers.

(See “President Donald J. Trump Has Shown that Extraordinary Bipartisan Achievements Are Possible” at the UC Santa Barbara American Presidency Project.)

Trump may or may not have been sincere when he said: "When Republicans and Democrats talk, debate, and seek common ground, we can achieve breakthroughs that move our country forward and deliver for our citizens." But the fact that he said it shows he wants to be seen as open to bipartisan compromise.

Democrats must exit the campaigning mode and find issues where they can force him to honor this pledge. Trump’s party has a slim majority in the House and lacks a filibuster-proof Senate majority so Democrats will have some leverage between now and the midterms.

One promising area is labor. Trump selected a labor secretary backed the PRO Act, which would make union organizing easier, but half of Republicans oppose her. Democratic Senators will likely play a key role in her confirmation, but should also push the administration to follow her appointment through with concrete pro-labor policies. Democrats might also look for an area of compromise in Trump's appointment of a critic of the pharmaceutical industry to head HHS. 

On Sunday, Sanders tweeted his support for Elon Musk’s plan to cut defense spending and Musk responded: “cool.” Another possible area of compromise? 

Roadblocks

I see two characteristics of the Democratic coalition that will make it hard for the party to effectively perform a normal opposition.

First, the party has come to be dominated by educated elites who are just so culturally different than the working class voters who have been trending rightward, that cognitive empathy may just be impossible.

Second, the liberal values of Democrats often come in conflict with any populist impulses they may have and pose a difficult dilemma. A passage from Alan Wolfe’s Future of Liberalism identifies this problem:

There are and always will be issues in which liberalism's commitments to openness, proper procedure, or fairness will come into conflict with democracy's insistence not only on fulfilling the will of the majority but on doing so as rapidly as possible…. For all their commitment to equality, liberals do believe that the political views people sometimes hold are not, if they had more knowledge and were open to more deliberation, the political views they should hold.

Wolfe uses the Supreme Court’s Brown school desegregation decision as an example of liberal values properly trumping majority opinion. But he also praised the Court’s deference to majority sentiments in the South with their “all deliberate speed” ruling and the slow pace of desegregation in practice. The Court

opted to give those people, and the political institutions that represented their views, sufficient time to grow into the position they ought to have rather than the one they did have. Ten years later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, giving the decision in Brown ex post facto democratic legitimacy. The lesson was clear: liberals could and should break with public sentiment in order to ensure that what was popular and what was right could become the same thing.

This comment echoes the great historian of Populism, Lawrence Goodwyn, who coined the term "ideological patience."  

Some parts of the Democratic coalition have been promoting views that may or may not be the views that Americans “ought to have,” notably in the past election promoting transgender rights.

Polling has shown that an ad ridiculing Harris’ support for funding of gender re-assignment surgery for prisoners played a key role in moving undecided voters to Trump. As Jonathan Chait has argued, Democrats can live up to liberal principles by defending the dignity and legal rights of transgender people without going along with every demand of the most radical gender activists, especially those involving minors.

This is a delicate line to walk, however, and I’m afraid the over-educated people who dominate the party and it's many factions (the "shadow party), can come together along that line and have ideological patience for their fellow citizens.

Who's weirder?

Caledonian-Record, Nov. 18, 2024, p. 1.

In all the hand-wringing over the results of the recent election, I haven’t seen any comments yet on the voter’s answer to this all-important question posed by the campaign:

which Americans are the weird ones?

By pinning that label on the opposing party, Tim Walz got himself nominated for VP. Unfortunately for the Democrats, a majority of voters don’t seem to have agreed with him.

The weird question has also been the subtext of a debate raging this month in the letters-to-the-editor section of the local newspaper about a drag story hour planned for a library in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, just over the river from here.

Opponents of the event saw it as part of a broader conspiracy to undermine gender norms, the nuclear family, and Western civilization itself—to “break taboos” and “implant a measure of confusion in children,” according to one letter-writer.

On the other side, a defender of the event said protests against drag queens are a threat “to the core values and the very bedrock of our nation.”

According to reports of the event at the Atheneum last Saturday, opponents of drag stories were decisively outnumbered by supporters, but Vermont is a deep blue (deeply weird?) state that went 64% for Harris and Walz.

In the excitement this summer after the Democrats’ seeming resurrection, I thought Walz’s weird comment would help the Democrats. Upon reflection, though, it seems odd that the liberal party would position themselves in opposition to weirdness. As the pro-drag writer said, the “bedrock” principle at stake in supporting the Athenaeum event was “the freedom to be an individual.” Isn’t that the whole point of liberalism, after all?

Gender non-conformity is just one more offshoot of the liberal uber-project of tolerance of difference and the right to think and behave outside social norms—to be “very strange” or “bizarre” if you want to go by Webster’s take on weird.

Maybe a better way of understanding the nation’s answer to Tim Walz’s question is to consider a different definition. In 2010, a group of researchers led by Joseph Henrich, discovered that most of the findings of social science didn’t apply to the majority of humans on Earth. It turns out that the undergraduates psychologists and sociologists mostly used for their experiments are not typical people.

Henrich wasn’t making a value judgement, but just noting they are outside the norm and their values and behaviors can’t be used as examples of “human nature.” He coined the acronym WEIRD—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. To some degree everyone in Europe and North America, is WEIRD compared to folks in less developed countries, but there’s a continuum—more education and urban living makes you WEIRDer.

WEIRDer people tend to be more individualistic, analytical, cosmopolitan, progressive, secular, and left brain oriented. Less WEIRD folks are more communal, holistic, rooted, traditional, religious, and better at right-brain thinking.

(I wrote about Henrich's 2020 book, "The WEIRDest People in the World.")

It’s tempting to think that with all that education, WEIRD people are smarter, but judging by the reactions to the election, one gap in their intelligence is the ability to understand the non-WEIRD.

If Democrats want to make a comeback, though, it’s crucial that they develop this right-brain capacity.

Democrats did really well with the eggheads who have advanced degrees—about 60 percent of the doctors, lawyers and college professors who make up the professional-managerial class who make up only 19% of the electorate. But they lost decisively among the majority of voters without a four-year college degree.

The future of the Democratic party will rest on their ability to win back some of those voters, the people who don't take their kids to drag queen story hours. But can they do it without abandoning the liberal value of tolerance and losing both their weird and WEIRD voters?

And in the longer run, what can educators like me, who teach some of the WEIRDest people on the planet, do to fill the empathy gap in their intelligence, which I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog is perhaps the most important element of good citizenship.

Whose idea was it, anyway?

 

Or, You can't just blame "progressives."

One cause of the Democrat's recent election disaster may have been what political Svengali, Ruy Teixeira identifies as one of four “terrible progressive ideas”:  

Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder.

The results of the idea are illustrated vividly in Jamie Thompson's “Catching the Carjackers” in the November Atlantic.

Carjacking is one of several crimes that increased significantly from 2019 to 2023—by a factor of six, from 152 to 958 in DC. In her reporting for the article, Thompson rode with police in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit of Prince George’s County, a suburb of Washington DC.

Law enforcement officials she spoke with blamed the policing, prosecution and sentencing reforms of the past decade, along with anti-cop sentiments reflected in cries of “abolish the police.”

A frustrated officer pointed to a “coddling mindset” of the courts, citing

dozens of cases in which teens were arrested for armed carjacking, pleaded to this or to lesser charges, and were released on probation. Kids found to be involved in carjackings rarely seemed to get any significant time in juvenile detention. He compiled a list of what he called the “top offenders”—teens on probation for carjacking who went on to be charged with additional carjackings.

Cars have been hijacked near the Capitol and Supreme Court buildings. Victims include a Congressman and an FBI agent. Thompson quotes motorists who are afraid to stop for gas, a school administrator complaining about carjackers showing up in school a day after their arrest, and cops who have no incentive to do their job. Thompson writes:

The carjacking crisis came at a time when police departments were already struggling to hire officers. The Prince George’s County Police Department, budgeted for 1,786 sworn officers, has about 350 open positions, leaving the force the smallest it’s been in a dozen years. (In 2012, according to Aziz, nearly 8,000 people applied to be police officers in the county; in 2022, only about 800 did, most of them unqualified.) D.C. has lost nearly 500 sworn officers since 2020, leaving the force at a half-century low of 3,285. Many officers who remained were hesitant to do proactive police work, preferring simply to respond to 911 calls. “The general feeling was If you’re not going to fund me, acknowledge me, or appreciate me, I’m going into self-preservation mode," [county police Major Sunny] Mrotek told me. To Mrotek and his colleagues, the relationship between the retreat from aggressive policing and the explosion of violent crime seemed obvious.

The article reads like a confirmation of every critique you might have encountered on Fox News of the progressive policing reforms of the past decade.

If it was inevitable that denigrating police and releasing criminals from detention would lead to an increase in crime, it was also inevitable that a rising crime rate would hurt Democrats and help the party of “Law and Order,” as it did in 1968 and some other elections since then. But in 2020, even mentioning what happened in 1968 could get you in trouble on the left. David Shor (a self-described socialist) lost his job in a Democratic think tank for tweeting—during the sometimes-violent George Floyd protests—that social disorder in 1968 helped Nixon win the presidency on a law-and-order platform.

We should have listened, because when it becomes unsafe to stop for gas, policies that restore safety in the short term are going to displace all others, including every other progressive or Democratic priority.

In much of the post-election discussion of why Kamala Harris lost the election, the reforms that led to the rise in crime—as well as all the other policy ideas that voters seem to have been rejecting—are being laid at the feet of the “progressive” wing of the party by analysts like Teixeira.

Democrats need to reject progressivism and move toward the moderate center, the punditry is saying. They need to give the reins of the party back to the Democratic Leadership Council types (that is, Bill Clinton), who so successfully resuscitated the party’s fortunes in the1990s. I’ve been arguing all fall that this progressive-moderate distinction misses the point. The party needs to be more discerning as it changes its course and pick and choose between progressive and moderate approaches to different policies.

We need different terminology.

The key divide in the party is not between “progressives and moderates,” but between the class-focused and identitarians. Or, if you prefer, between normies and the awokened. How about the intersectional left and the universalist left? Or populists vs technocrats?

Or, as substacker John Halpin would have it, Bernie Sanders of 2016 (“who ran a sharply focused class-based campaign in 2016 against the Democratic establishment and Trump”) vs. Bernie Sanders of 2020 (“an intersectional cornucopia of ‘economic, racial, social, and environmental justice for all.’”)

In a previous post, I described the relentless hounding that led Sanders to make that switch, and it illustrates the dynamics that will make it hard for the party to resist pandering to identity-based appeals in the future. One of those dynamics was the power of the Black vote in key Democratic primaries, which overwhelmingly went to Clinton in 2016. But it turns out that Bernie’s adoption of an “intersectional cornucopia” did nothing to attract more Black voters in 2020 primaries. It turns out that Blacks are the most conservative element in the Democratic coalition.

It’s true that some of the most enthusiastic promoters of law enforcement reforms were people who call themselves “progressive.”

But in the 2010s, progressives, liberals, and lots of people all over the spectrum were increasingly—and rightly—becoming alarmed about the impact of the criminal justice system on Blacks, particularly black men.

Michelle Alexander’s exposé of the mass incarceration of Black men in 2010 (The New Jim Crow), followed by a train of high-profile police shootings from Michael Brown to George Floyd, led to a broad consensus that extended beyond “progressives” in favor of policing and sentencing reform and eventually led to the bipartisan “First Step Act,” which President Trump signed in December of 2018 and bragged about, at least for a while.

Some advocates, however, undermined this emerging consensus by taking reform ideas to extremes with the slogans “abolish the police,” and “defund the police.” Mainstream Democratic politicians, not wanting to alienate the reformers, expressed support for the sentiments behind the slogan. Kamala Harris’s comments, dredged up by CNN shortly after President Biden handed her the Democratic nomination in July, were typical:

“This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” Harris said on a New York-based radio program, “Ebro in the Morning” on June 9, 2020, adding that US cities were “militarizing police” but “defunding public schools”…. In an interview a day earlier, Harris also lauded Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti for his decision to slash $150 million from the police budget and move it into social services. 

From the beginning of his 2016 campaign, Sanders talked about spending more on schools than on prisons, but he de-emphasized race in the policies he advocated to address the mass incarceration and police shooting of black men.

He rejected both “abolish” and “defund,” and suggested spending more money to improve policing. “There’s no city in the world that does not have police departments,” he told a New Yorker interviewer.

I think we want to redefine what police departments do, give them the support they need to make their jobs better defined. So I do believe that we need well-trained, well-educated, and well-paid professionals in police departments. Anyone who thinks that we should abolish all police departments in America, I don’t agree.

These aren’t the sentiments that devastated the morale of DC police. 

Soon after Sanders entered the 2015 race, a Vox piece explained Sanders’ class-first approach to the problems of African Americans.

His response to events like the unrest in Ferguson in 2014, or in Baltimore this spring — which to other progressives were a reminder of structural racism in the criminal justice system — was to focus on local youth unemployment rates, and call for more young black Americans to get jobs. To Sanders, that’s the ultimate solution to the underlying problem. To progressives who think addressing racism is an end in itself, that’s a separate issue from getting police to stop killing young black Americans.

(2020-Sanders’ laundry list of criminal justice reforms.)

Sanders was criticized by race-first advocates of criminal justice reform for this approach and in general derided as clueless about how to speak to Black voters.

But the Atlantic car-jacking story seems to suggest that 2016-Sanders was right, and the problem of crime in DC stems more from material deprivation than racism in the police force.

After apprehending a 12-year-old carjacker, officer Sara Cavanagh, searched his home—a two-room apartment housing 10 people, riddled with cockroaches. She found rotting take-out food under a bed but nothing in the refrigerator. Police records revealed that the boy had been physically abused at the age of 6. During his arrest, Cavanagh discovered he had been victim of a shooting and still had a bullet in his back.

Thompson reported that about half of the juveniles arrested by the carjacking unit have had previous interactions with the cops as victims.

“I really didn’t want to like this kid—he’d just carjacked an old lady,” said Cavanagh, who is white. “But I felt sorry for him.”

But what is to be done? Conservatives might blame the breakdown of family life caused by civilizational decay for the conditions in that boy’s home. Liberals and progressives would blame structural forces. Bernie pointed to economic structures. “Structural racism” became the favored explanation across the left in 2020.

Ta-Nehisi Coates organized his influential best-seller about the central importance of race in American life, Between the World and Me, around the police shooting of his friend even though the offending cop was Black.

Defining the problem as racial leads to the search for racists, which inevitably led to framing the police as the villains in the story. Derek Chauvin seemed to confirm this narrative. Hence, “abolish the police.”

But agents of DC law enforcement in Thompson’s story don’t seem like nasty racists.

Like Cavanagh, those quoted in the story have sympathy for perpetrators who have been the victims of brutalizing conditions. But they have more sympathy for the mostly Black victims of their crimes.

“It’s really important to hold two ideas in your brain at the same time,” the first assistant attorney general in DC told Thompson, “Carjacking is a terrible crime that has terrible effects on victims—and these are children who don’t have the same decision-making abilities as adults. A child who commits a crime like this has already been failed in so many ways.”

The notion that this failure involves systemic racism led to reforms that may have eased white guilt—but it they also led to more carjackings.

DC Attorney General Brian Schwab called for “a ‘both and” approach’: Violent offenders must face aggressive prosecution—and communities must address root causes of crime. Rather than careening wildely from one extreme (defund the police) to the other (lock ‘em up).” 

Viewing the root causes as material rather than racial might lead to better reforms. 

Some of the commentary after the election suggest a recognition that the party needs to shift to an economic populist message while de-emphasizing identity issues. Left-leaning Democratic pundits ranging from Ezra Klein to David Brooks suggested the party went wrong in not following the lead of 2016-Sanders.

But the tendency to use the simplistic progressive-moderate binary continues, and it unnecessarily muddles the brains of both the progressive and the moderate left, preventing the adjustments necessary to piece together a winning coalition. It's not just "moving to the center."

And if the Democratic Party can’t do it, there are those in the Republican coalition who think they can. Meet Patrick Ruffini—the Republican Pollster who has laid out a plan for the Republican Party to assemble a populist, working class coalition that will lead to an unbeatable majority. The natural home of the majority of Americans without a college degree, he argues in his book The Party of the People, is now the Republican, not the Democratic Party. His book is an effort to show them the way to permanently capture those voters.

What now, Democrats?

 

An incomplete survey of opinion in the hours and days after the election about why the Democrats lost and how they should change course.  

The last time Trump won, Democrats responded in two ways: introspection and #resistance. Introspection quickly took a back seat to resistance, beginning with the massive “pussy hat” march on Washington. Resistance seems to have done nothing for the party’s ability to win elections, so I’m hoping this time my party will take introspection a bit more seriously and it might lead to some changes and future electoral victories.

 David Brooks' Wednesday column in the New York Times, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?”  provides a 40-year history of Reagan-inspired neoliberalism that led to the decline of the working class and has culminated in the “Trump Era.”  He argues that it makes perfect sense that decent people would want to overturn that regime, even if it means voting for a “monstrous narcissist.” The column agrees with much of what I’ve been saying and writing about, mostly on this blog, since 2016 and as recently as Sunday.

Somewhat shockingly both Brooks and Ezra Klein joined Jacobin and others in seeing a missed opportunity in Democrats’ rejection of Bernie Sanders-style populism. Brooks:

My initial thought is that I have to re-examine my own priors. I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.

The success of so many pro-worker referendums in Trump voting states on Tuesday— raising minimum wages, requiring paid sick leave, banning anti-union practices—suggests there may be something to this view.

The opposing view among left-leaning pundits, like Ta-Nehisi Coates after 2016 and Carlos Lozada on Wednesday attribute Trump’s win to an evil American electorate.

Atlantic writer Tom Nichols articulated this view Wednesday when he dismissed all the rational possible reasons for casting a Trump vote, including “economic anxiety.” Policy, he says, didn’t matter. Voters hostile to democracy, impervious to facts and reason, and driven by “racial grievances” liked Trump’s anger and “promises of social revenge” and are looking forward to the continuation of a “nonstop reality show of rage and resentment.” He continued:

Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.

The problem with this view is that it suggests there’s no point in even trying to win the next election through the normal means of democratic politics. It reflects a certain type of anti-politics, which I consider to be at the root of our public dysfunction.

In short, Nichols would deposit 73 million of our fellow citizens into Hillary Clinton's basket of irredeemable deplorables.

Politics is not the place to make moral judgements of the voters. Leave that to St. Peter. Politics is simpler—it’s about getting more of them to vote with you—and your moral judgements will only get in the way of that.

In a Wall Street Journal column, a former Democratic voter, Ann Bauer, said her Republican vote was less for Trump than against woke “shaming rituals” and “the hectoring superiority,” of “the people who told us we were too stupid to understand, or too racist, too sexist, too self-hating, too similar to Nazis.”

The hectoring shamers probably didn’t realize they were advancing Trump’s political fortunes, but they were. Danielle Allen’s theory of citizenship says that daily interactions among citizens of different classes and races and political inclinations have an important impact on politics in establishing trust within the electorate. Shaming surely feeds polarization. Read about her theory of “political friendship” here.

(Also, my Defense of MAGA voters)

Predictably, the Wall Street Journal argues that the Democrats lost because they are too far left—both on cultural and economic issues—and too aggressive about it. A board editorial decried “Bidenomics,” “lawfare,” “cultural imperialism,” “regulatory coercion,” and talk of killing the filibuster (As someone with family members on Obamacare, I’m very happy for the filibuster right now). The call for moderation was echoed—also predictably—by Matt Bennett over at the Clinton-Democrat centrist think tank, Third Way.

Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel put her finger on a different Democratic weakness.  The liberal media bubble, she said, pushed a “narrative of fantasy” through the 2024 election season, reporting uncritically on Biden administration denials of the president’s cognitive decline and shielding the party from an accurate view of the “mood and worries of the country.” This view reflects what Ruy Teixiera and John Judis identify in their book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? as two things that drag down the party: the Fox News fallacy and the Shadow party. 

(The WSJ presented Democrat Teixeira's election reaction in this profile. He seems to echo the pro-Bernie sentiment seen elsewhere, calling him the "last of the classic Democrats whose main center and focus was the working class" and criticizing Clinton for running "to his left on cultural issues.")

The socialist magazine Jacobin agreed that the focus on identity politics, e.g. “white dudes for Harris,” hurt Democrats, who have become a party of, by and for elites. They helped raise a whopping $1 billion for her campaign, but also “marked Harris as the property of an educated professional class . . . largely uninterested in material questions,” Matt Karp writes. 

Daniel Finn noted the outsized influence of Mark Cuban and other billionaire donors on the campaign. They got Harris to water down her plan to crack down on price gouging (leaving her with no other way to address inflation), promise to less zealously enforce anti-trust laws, and reject Biden’s plan to raise the capital gains tax. 

Branko Marcetic noted that Harris was offering a $25,000 give-away to people in the position to buy a home, but had nothing to say about rising evictions and homelessness, the record number of cost-burdened renters, stagnation of median income below the 2019 level, and rising inequality and poverty—especially among children.

A type of explanation that absolves Harris and the Democrats might be called structural determinism. Conditions were ripe for a Republican victory and impossible to defy. In “How Donald Trump Won Everywhere,” Derick Thompson argues that Nov. 5 was America’s “second pandemic election.” The pandemic was a traumatic event that inevitably led to the defeat of the incumbent party in 2020. This outcome was a response to the trauma of the COVID economic aftershock—the inflation caused by supply-chain disruptions and increases in government spending during the pandemic. 

“The global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year... There is no escaping the circumstances that Harris herself could never outrun. She is the vice president of a profoundly unpopular president, whose approval was laid low by the same factors—such as inflation and anti-incumbency bias—that have waylaid ruling parties everywhere.”

The Democratic Party operatives on “Pod Save America” used a similar argument to say that Harris actually did a good job of persuading voters to support her, noting that more blue voters moved to Trump in non-swing states where Harris didn’t campaign than in battle-ground state where she did.

If Thomson can be referred to as a structural determinist, Nichols might be considered a moralist, and Coates a defender of identity politics. The Wall Street Journal provides a conservative interpretation, but so too do the Democrats at Third Way.

The class-first interpretation at Jacobin and elsewhere is usually linked to an anti-identity politics view. 

After the election, Mr. class first himself, Bernie Sanders, who had worked out a fragile accommodation with identitarians (despite their attacks on him in 2016), seemed to make a clean break with them on Wednesday for the first time (as far as I know), according to a comment to the New York Times: 

“It’s not just Kamala,” he said. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class. This trend of workers leaving the Democratic Party started with whites, and it has accelerated to Latinos and Blacks.”

In Sunday’s “Woke—Who’s to Blame” post, I argued that Democrats tend to win at class politics and lose culture war politics, and backed that up with some historical background. I cut out a paragraph or on how the Republicans are more effective at waging culture war. Here it is now:

When it comes to waging culture war, the Republicans—predictably—have brought a gun to the Democrats’ knife fight. Where left wing cancellations involve private actions—social ostracism or firings—right wingers are wielding the power of the state to push their cultural agenda and punish culture heretics. In Texas, for example, Republicans have passed laws that encourage citizens to report neighbors, parents, librarians, and teachers, who promote or assist transgender therapy, abortion, or critical race theory. One law even offered a $10,000 bounty to anyone who sues a fellow-citizen who “aids or abets” abortion. Conservatives have been the masters of cancellation and censorship throughout American history. In the 19th century South, pro-slavery conservatives exiled opponents of slavery like the Grimke sisters and banned abolitionist literature from the mails. And they updated those practices for the 20th century during the Red Scare of the 40s and 50s. [Texas information based on reporting in the November Atlantic]

In “Whither Woke?” I entered the debate among some progressives about whether we have reached and passed “peak woke” and if the left was abandoning identity politics. The New York Times ran a piece on this question after my post, so in “Scoop!” I connected claims in their article to some of the pieces I’ve been working on this fall on the subject.

All of the above interpretations—including mine—tend to reflect assumptions the authors held before the election took place. It will take some weeks before the best exit polling data is released. Keep your eye out for that, at Catalist and Pew.