It’s time to admit it: I was wrong about Joe Biden. I voted for him, but I wasn’t happy about it. I thought he was the worst candidate the Democrats could have picked to beat Donald Trump. He was too moderate. He had a terrible history of working with segregationists, and even promoting school segregation. He supported the Iraq War, and authored the notorious 1994 Crime Bill. He was accused of sexual assault. He was a symbol of everything that could possibly be wrong with the neoliberal establishment.
But I was wrong because, well, Joe Biden won. And I’m not quite so sure if another more progressive candidate would have done better than Donald Trump — after all, it’s impossible to determine alternate realities. But the progressive association with socialism, fair or unfair, undoubtedly hurt Democrats with the Latino vote in Florida and Texas, most notably in Miami Dade County, where Trump won the most margins a Republican presidential candidate had won since George Bush in 2004, a district Trump lost by double-digits four years ago. Democrats notably underperformed in Congress as well, failing to win the Senate despite being considered favorites, and losing seats in the House.
It goes pretty understated in the media that the loss of seats in the House almost led to Democrats losing the House. The election led to Democrats losing 10 seats and currently holding 222 House seats. There are 218 seats required for a majority, which means Democrats barely hold the majority by four seats right now, which is a substantial down-ballot defeat.
Why?
As a liberal who was fervently against Biden and voted for Bernie, I have to admit that I was wrong. I believe in substantive police and prison reform, universal health care, massively increased funding for education and anything that provides a greater social safety net. The problem with the left is not ideology. Many people would actually prefer more economically liberal policies. Instead, it is a messaging problem that reeks of the worst sin of all religious sins: self-righteousness.
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I recently read a piece by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic about how big-city dominance is growing increasingly problematic for Democrats winning in the Electoral College and the Senate. Thompson coins the term “Instagram socialism,” for highly liberal people on the coasts, who are highly educated urbanites who spend like capitalists and post like Marxists. And the conventions of social media and online communication mean the most radical, viral, and emotional content gets distributed and wins out.
For the Democratic Party, according to Thompson, Instagram socialism is not a good thing. Popular ideas start to become branded in heavily unpopular ways. He uses examples of major police reform being branded as “Abolish the Police,” universal health care being branded as socialism, and openness towards immigrants being branded as open borders. I recently talked to my friend about police reform and “defund the police,” and we both agreed that it wasn’t a good marketing strategy. We both agree with the premise of many defund activists, to devote more resources to mental health services and alternative interventions to lighten society’s overreliance on an institution that too often perpetuates white supremacy and systemic racism.
But the slogan itself is a disaster. Defund the police sounds like defunding the police. Danny Barefoot at The Guardian, who runs a Democratic political consulting group, interviewed a focus group of voters who switched last minute from being on the fence to voting for Trump. 70% of those voters held a negative view of Donald Trump, and at some point supported Joe Biden. But they voted for Trump anyway.
Among the focus group, 80% of those voters agreed racism existed in the criminal justice system and 60% had a favorable view of Black Lives Matter. However, only one of the participants agreed that we should “defund the police.” Barefoot’s consulting group tried to explain the policies behind the slogan, but one woman interrupted the group and said “that is not what defund the police means, I’m sorry. It means they want to defund the police.”
Another woman said: “Don’t try and tell me words don’t mean what they say.” 50% of that group said they thought Biden was sympathetic to the slogan, and while Biden rejected the framing of defund the police, Barefoot notes “it is clear the calls from some on the left were louder than those denials.” What is even more ironic is that 70% of participants supported a proposal to reduce police funding and allocate it to social services and other agencies to reduce police presence in community conflict.
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The problem with the slogan is clear: not everyone appreciates the verbal gymnastics you have to navigate to understand the policies behind defund the police.
Democrats dominated big cities in the 2020 Election, with Biden winning all of the 20 largest cities. He also won the coast by very large margins.
And while winning cities is undoubtedly a good thing, Thompson notes it’s a nightmare for winning national elections, particularly for winning the Senate. The Senate disproportionately empowers white rural communities that tend to vote Republican, and in Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. That’s 22 seats that essentially automatically go Republican. Without the Senate, Democrats are in trouble passing the legislation they want. And Thompson calls big city dominance a nightmare for winning national elections.
What’s hurting the left is an overwhelming reliance on self-righteousness. The Obamas and Bidens of the world are significantly more politically savvy than I thought they were. If you told me I would speak of Biden in a begrudging tone of respect six months ago, I would have said you lost your mind.
David Shor interviewed with Politico looking at the data behind the 2020 Election. Ironically, the only demographic that swung Democrat was white men, particularly college-educated ones. Compared to Hillary’s 2016 performance, Biden made an 11 percent gain among college-educated white men and a 6 percent gain among white, non-college-educated men. Donald Trump made gains among Black men and women, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and white women.
“For Biden, wins in battleground states came thanks to growing support in affluent suburbs around Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit where he expanded margins in a new Democratic stronghold: white voters who graduated college,” Joey Garrison and Rebecca Morin said in USA Today.
Shor says that an “educational polarization” is much larger than what it was in 2016. The Democratic gains in white people with college degrees were great for winning the Presidency, it’s a nightmare for down-ballot races with rural, white, non-college-educated voters holding more and a disproportionate weight over the Senate. You also don’t have to talk to a liberal for a very long time to hear about the unfairness of the electoral college and Democrats winning the popular vote. You might hear that only Democrats have lost the popular vote, yet lost in the electoral college.
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But that fact is misleading — especially since the Democratic Party used to be the party of slavery. Andrew Jackson winning the popular vote in 1824 but losing the electoral vote in the House of Representatives was undoubtedly a progressive victory, as Jackson is a president with one of the worst track records on slavery and Native Americans.
When Democrat Samuel Tilden defeated Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote by more than 200,000 votes, but lost in the Electoral College, the Democrats came to a compromise — they would pull federal troops in the South and end Reconstruction, but the more progressive Republicans would hold the executive branch. While that sounds like a terrible compromise, think about what might have happened had Tilden won or had Jackson won. It’s tough to think about hypotheticals, but would the country have been a better place if Democrats won in the 19th century?
If you get rid of the Electoral College, it requires a constitutional amendment. It requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate, and a two-thirds vote in the House. It requires three-fourths vote of the states. If Trump won 26 out of 50 states, there is no chance Republicans will be on board to overturn an electoral system that favors them any time in the near future. And changing the Electoral College to a popular vote is like changing the sport you’re playing — why would any candidate campaign in rural Ohio or Michigan if the popular vote was all that mattered? If a political candidate wanted to be strategic with their time, why wouldn’t they campaign in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco all the time? According to Jacob Levy, a professor at McGill University:
Of course, deceptive branding isn’t the answer either. As the Democratic Party grapples with its identity, the dreaded word of compromise is reality — and ideological purity is the dream. I would love and major police reform, universal health care, and not separating children and their parents at the borders too. But are we worried about people agreeing with our slogans, or are we worried about actually strategically passing that legislation?
And the problem now is self-righteousness because it’s clear that the gap isn’t as racial as it used to be. It’s educational — liberals are simply not connecting as they used to with non-college-educated voters. The media might not have a liberal bias explicitly, but an education bias is shown to tilt liberal.
The condescension has gone too far and belittling not only the white working class but the working class of all races. That is shown by the shifting tide of the 2020 election across all demographics. If the Democratic Party still wants to hold onto the claim of being the “party of the people,” then shifting towards being the party of the educated is antithetical to that dream. The answer we should seek, then is not to push center or push left, but do a deep examination of the way we brand and the way we speak. Automatically dismissing and disparaging anyone who disagrees with us makes us feel good about ourselves in our echo chambers, but it’s not winning more voters where it matters. I know a lot of people who agree with me in my city, but those aren’t the opinions that are winning votes where it matters.
In the words of Lisa Lerer at the New York Times:
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As a teacher, in my classroom, most days I give a brief overview of current events through CNN 10 Minute News. I’m teaching 9th-grade special education students. On one day, the presenter discussed defund the police and the push from activists and legislators across the country. I tried to present defund the police in the most objective way possible, so my students could form their own opinions. And one of my students said:
And it really got me thinking. I tried to explain to him what defund the police really meant, but he told me that’s not what it sounded like. And that’s where we stopped talking. It’s not my job to impose my political views on my students.
But I teach in Baltimore, a city that has just crossed 300 murders this year, that has just seen five consecutive years of over 300 murders. Baltimore has a higher murder rate per capita than El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. I teach at a school that has seen two former students get murdered, and I sat in a meeting where I watched my co-workers and administrators sob, and I saw e-mails of student funerals we were encouraged to attend in the middle of the pandemic. While I didn’t have the same emotional reaction because I’m new to the school, the news reports of people getting killed are growing younger and younger, with more teenagers killed. Two months ago, one of my old students was charged with first-degree murder.
I used to think it was insensitive to oppose defund the police. Again, maybe the substance behind the slogan might help build a greater social safety net for our most vulnerable citizens, but the slogan puts reducing funding first (an austerity measure that rings very conservative) and more funding to education, social workers, and social services second. I support any initiative that gives more funding to underfunded schools, as a teacher in an underfunded school district. But not for a political gain where it only serves for progressives to feel good about themselves and not truly put education and a better society first.
As a member of the woke intelligentsia, who wants to see police brutality eradicated as much as anyone, I wanted to support it. I don’t want to see police departments militarized either. Now, I just see the slogan as out of touch. And I’m just going to say that if 300 or more white people got killed in a city every year, the whole world would be watching and there would be national headlines every day. But since it’s happening in a majority Black city like Baltimore, it seems like no one cares, besides Republicans who want to seize the “Black on Black violence” narrative. And this is not a Baltimore exclusive problem — major American cities are dealing with a surge in murders.
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At the end of the day, South Carolina is not California. Georgia is not New York. West Virginia is not either of those states. What works in one state might not work in another. And if Democrats want to actually pass the policies they want, the self-righteousness and ideological purity tests have to stop.
President Obama came under significant fire for criticizing defund the police as a snappy slogan.
But Obama is right — snappy, inflammatory slogans don’t win voters. Policy does. Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic has noted that the “language game” that we progressives are trying to play doesn’t help anyone but ourselves — it’s only to make ourselves feel good. Now, violent crime is soaring all across our cities, mainly in our poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods.
I, for one, don’t want to see any more news of students getting murdered. I don’t want to see our politics sugarcoat a reality of gun violence no child should have to through. And I don’t want society to see the pendulum swing that led to the miscarriage of justice in the Central Park Five — because if violent crime keeps increasing, who knows how public opinion will swing?
The answer isn’t snappy slogans or self-righteous dismissal. It’s the policy that makes a substantive change.
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This post was previously published on The Apeiron Blog.
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