I urge anyone who has strong opinions about what the Dems should do to read Asymmetric Politics.
I hate to put my thesis first, but here I will. I’m seeing a lot of centrists arguing that the DNC should support centrist candidates, and self-identified leftists saying it should be leftists. And there are people who are saying that the DNC should have a coherent message, or various other narratives that assume the DNC is at the wheel. The DNC cannot guarantee that opponents of authoritarianism can win the midterms by only putting forward candidates with one ideology and one policy agenda. What will work is cracking holes in the dyke of support for Trump, and that means NOT sharing posts from irresponsible anti-Trump sites. Sharing information that it’s easy for Trump supporters to dismiss as false or misleading confirms their support for him, and their sense of a binary of unbiased and objective people (Trump supporters) and biased liars (his critics and opponents).
Here’s the longer version. Whenever there is a really complicated and nasty political situation, there is a tendency for some people to assert that it’s actually really straightforward, and there is a simple solution. That response is emotionally satisfying, since it’s what people really, really want to hear when things are getting twitchy, but, as a scholar of train wrecks, I can say it’s never true.[1]
There is always a tendency for people to think about policy questions from our own perspective. We unintentionally assume that what we want is what everyone wants (or should want). I always think of this as the Rousseau problem. Rousseau assumed some univocal identity of “the people” who had all the same needs and interests.
Drifting around the digitally-connected world, I’ve learned that there’s an interesting variation on the notion that all real people really have the same needs and interests, and it’s one that troubles anti-authoritarians particularly: the tendency to assume that everyone reasons as we do. There is a tendency among people who oppose Trump to assume that the Dems could win if they just used different rhetoric and/or had a different policy agenda. And it’s always the rhetoric or policy agenda that person endorses. So, it’s an argument that, were the people making decisions in the DNC to behave more like the GOP (one policy agenda, one rhetoric) and find the right policy agenda and rhetoric, then the Dems could win. That isn’t how Dems and potential Dems approach politics.
GOP voters will vote for a dead person rather than a Dem. People likely to vote Dem don’t have that kind of party loyalty. (Which, I think, is good on the whole, but it’s a problem when we’re no longer in a pluralist system.) Dem and potential voters are about policies. So, all that the GOP has to do to win is to persuade potential Dem voters not to vote Dem. That’s how the math works. So, what does that mean about what voters who will not vote GOP, but are unhappy about Dem policies and candidates, should do? And I should say that I really hate the DNC. For all the reasons.
But here’s where I’ve landed.
The current GOP, which is not conservative, has a base that is about ideology and ingroup loyalty (as the conservative Haidt long ago showed). It is reactionary (a topic on which Mark Lilla has written beautifully). And the ideology is strategically vague, but functionally mostly negative (as Paul Johnson has shown): supporting the GOP means [slogans not reasonably attached to GOP policies] and actions that are simply about feeling victimized by the hobgoblin of “libruls.” That approach to politics works because self-identified “conservatives” commitment to loyalty means that they are loyal to their sources of information.
People likely to vote Dem are not motivated by ideology. They (we) care about policies. It’s a coalition. I have to say Asymmetric Politics surprised me—I thought the GOP was a coalition, in that it has people who actually wildly disagree with each other on all sorts of policies, yet they work together. That seemed like a coalition. But a coalition is a group of people with disparate interests who agree to work together.
What I’ve come to believe from drifting into pro-GOP sites and conversations is that supporters of the GOP don’t know they disagree—they just agree on hating on the hobgoblin. Fox is not as extreme as some pro-GOP media sites, and that’s the only one I intermittently check, and they never mention anything that might undermine support for Trump—ranging from his falling asleep, rambling incoherently, openly lying, how many of his policies are oriented toward his family’s pockets, or the irresponsibility and internal incoherence of his policies.
Here’s my point: What matters most about people who currently support the GOP is that their sense of loyalty means that they have no clue what the GOP is actually currently doing.
Showing that progressives won in very pro-Dem areas is not evidence that that particular agenda and rhetoric will work in other areas (although I really, really wish it did.) That advice falsely assumes that Dems are like the GOP—that there is one ideology and one set of policies will work for all potential Dems. There isn’t. There shouldn’t be. That would make the Dems just a mirror image of the GOP; that is, anti-democratic and anti-pluralist.
[1] The book I’ve never written is about toxic self-help rhetoric, and how toxic self-help rhetoric promises “this one weird trick” or “you just have to”. (The adjective is restrictive.) Not all self-help rhetoric is toxic. I’ve got a site that has a lot of advice about scholarly writing—in other words, self-help rhetoric. And it cites a lot of advice and sources that are self-help rhetoric.)