I keep thinking about Democrats vs. Republicans and why some things that seem so obvious to me are just as obviously not widely accepted among my fellow liberals. We all agree that Trump is a racist, a buffoon, a narcissist, and a vindictive prick, but too many of us spend all our time being performatively outraged about this so that we can avoid dealing with the real flashing red siren Trump represents: namely that lots of people vote for him anyway. Let's say that again: despite the fact that even a lot of his supporters understand just how appalling Trump is, they'd still rather vote for him than for a Democrat.
Why? I was brought up to believe in evolution, quantum mechanics, and the median voter theorem. However, the usual interpretation of the MVT is that a winning candidate is the one closest to the median voter. This implicitly assumes that the comparison is a positive one: the winning candidate is the one who has the most in common with the median voter.
I've always thought it's the other way around: we vote more against the party (or candidate) we hate rather than for the party we like. The median voter theorem still holds, but my version tells us that the losing candidate is the one who's closest to what the median voter hates. This is a little different from the usual MVT since what we like and what we hate aren't necessarily mirror images.
Are you with me so far? The upshot of this is that for a Democratic candidate to win, he or she needs to convince voters to hate Republicans more than their opponent convinces them to hate Democrats. In a nutshell, negative advertising works. The dark side is more powerful than you know.
So if Trump is as bad as we think—and he is—liberals should be aghast that a fair number of centrists hate us even more than they hate Trump. How can this be? It's unsurprising that Trump has a base, since both parties have a base that hates the other side with a passion. But in that middle ground, what is it about liberals that scares so many relatively moderate folks into voting against us even if it means voting for Trump or one of his spear carriers? And how have Republicans been so successful in demonizing us? Is it solely messaging? Certainly Fox News has a lot of influence. Or is it also related to our actual policy positions on emotionally-laden topics like immigration, guns, wokeness, and so forth?
God knows I've made it clear that I think Fox News is responsible for a lot of this. But all of it? That strikes me as unlikely, and it hardly matters anyway since Fox News isn't going anywhere. Like it or not, the plain reality is that lots of non-insane people find us really scary. On the mirror side, the kinds of scariness we throw at the Trumpies just isn't hitting the mark. Centrists already know Trump is a racist, a buffoon, a narcissist, and a vindictive prick. They already know this, but they've decided that even though he's a son of a bitch, at least he's their son of a bitch. They know no such thing about liberals.
Life should be good for liberals right now. The Republican Party has gone insane and is led by a guy who makes Ted Cruz look like George Washington. We should be kicking their asses all over the place. But we're not. We've tossed away the chance of a lifetime.
Figuring out what our problem is requires lots of dispassionate, clear-eyed thinking in response to a simple question: What is it about us that scares so many people? I sure wish that weren't in such short supply.
A lot of voters don't follow the news or politics very much, don't really have a clue what the party platforms are, and struggle to see how major policy issues connect to each other (like poverty and crime, or increasing income inequality and their own stagnant paycheck).
They know that they work hard. They can point to plenty of others they consider lazy. They know that they are a good person, and plenty of others are bad (or at least freely choose to make bad/criminal choices). It all functions on a very personal, individual level. This meshes well with their gut feelings about Republicans. And, certainly, both Fox News and the mainstream media do a lot to maintain those gut feelings. That is why Youngkin can talk about parents knowing what's best for their children, and have tons of voters just eat that crap up.
On the other hand, Democrats are constantly offering programs that can feel depressingly condescending in the abstract. Obamacare is great, and once people have access, they love it. But it is also very depressing to accept that you will never be able to "work hard enough" to get a job that pays for your health insurance. Your parents had that! Why not you!? Can't you just vote to get the past back?
They may think the rich should pay more, but it's not a big motivator for them. They don't really see how the rich getting richer makes themselves worse off. They are also bad at math and know little about tax policy, so they can easily fear any tax hike. Has there ever been a proposed tax increase that didn't reveal that many Americans have no idea how a progressive tax system works?
Wokeness and crime are also big issues. Most people don't want to be publicly chastised, and the speed at which acceptable discourse changes can make conversation a frightening minefield. These are also a group of people who don't really draw a distinction between politicians and randos online (in part because they couldn't name more than a handful of politicians on a good day). So a crazy statement by a random leftist does seem equivalent to a crazy statement of a GOP Senator. It's not fair, but it is what it is.
Meanwhile, people are justifiably afraid of being the victims of violent crime. The solutions offered by Democrats take a long time to work, will not be successful against some types of criminals (some organized crime, many psychopaths, etc. ), and don't offer a sense of fairness/justice to victims in the moment. The massive increases in gun sales in recent years show just how powerful a motivator fear of crime is.
On top of all of that, lots of people just love someone who is willing to be the jerk they are too afraid to be. Bullies always have friends. Every elementary schooler knows this. Democrats always seem so measured in what they say, it makes it seem like they never actually say what they believe. For people who know little about politics and policy, a feeling that Trump is being "honest" is all they have got. It doesn't even matter that he is being honest about being awful, or even that he's lying most of the time. They know he is honest about his quest for power and money, and willingness to do anything to get it. That is an elemental honesty they admire. Being "too good" is a bit of a turnoff, which is always going to hamper Democrats. Major Democratic politicians by definition are powerful people, but the Democratic platform is always about spreading the wealth and power to others. Can you really trust someone who is willing to do that? They must have an ulterior motive, right?
I don't know who you are but damn if I wouldn't hire you to be my political consultant. Damn good analysis here and all true.
Re: But it is also very depressing to accept that you will never be able to "work hard enough" to get a job that pays for your health insurance.
The majority of working people do have insurance through their employer. The exchanges have mainly been used by the self-employed, and Medicaid by the unemployed or low wage workers.
God knows this is spitting in the wind, but for the very few readers who actually want an answer to the question "What is it about us that scares so many people?" a good resource is _The New Right_ by Michael Malice.
The author is a self-declared anarchist (meaning he has no great love for either the mainstream Left or Right) and he has no particular agenda beyond curiosity and interest. The book feels like a collection of magazine articles; a sequence of essentially independent chapters each covering different aspects of "the new right". This sort of structurelessness is part of the value of the book; rather than trying to prove some thesis or other, he simply writes ten pages about the history of Pepe The Frog, then some pages on Nigel Farrage, then some pages on Murray Rothbard. You get a good insight into the sheer diversity of those placed (by choice, or by their opponents) in the New Right, what motivates them, where they disagree, and so on.
The name is, I think, a deliberate shout-out to the New Left of the 60s, with the point being, essentially, that to consider the New Left of the 60s as the same sort of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist stuff of the previous 100 years was to utterly miss the point; the New Left morphed into something that had only the most abstract commonalities with what was considered the Left in the 20s through 50s; and in the same way, to obsess and insist that the New Right is the exact same thing as what was considered to the Right in the 60s (Goldwater, Nixon) or 80s (Reagan) or even 2000s (Bush) is to utterly miss the boat as to what motivates these people and as to where these movements will morph.
Sure, not the exact same thing, but common threads that have run through the right from Goldwater to the present: fomenting mistrust of government morphed into encouraging mistrust of science, then medicine, and pretty much any learning; dog-whistling white grievance and supremacist inclinations evolved into openly espousing them; direct suppression of African-American votes has become, well, less direct suppression.*
*It’s irrelevant that Southern conservatives switched parties during this process, we’re discussing the Right, wherever they are found.
It's like back in 1930's Germany. If only the other side had asked themselves "what is it about us that scares so many Hitler voters?"
Oooooor maybe Hitler voters were just nuts and this is gaslighting. 😛
None of this matters until we solve the Manchin problem. If we don't Trump will be in office again in 2025. We have maybe til this Fall to save the Biden presidency from being a short one.
I've read a number of articles involving "focus groups" with the mythical independent, median, persuadable voter -- the kind that switched from Obama to Trump and then back to Biden -- and a couple things stood out.
First, the median voter is low information. They don't really know anything about policy, or what the government is actually doing. Thus, they vote on the basis of identity. Which candidates do they identify with on an emotional level? Which candidates do they think will stand up for people like them? The actual policies are irrelevant.
The Democrats have become the party of minorities and the college-educated. The trouble is, only 30% of Americans have a college education, and those that don't have a huge chip on their shoulder because they feel like the rest of society no longer respects them.
So whenever Democrats talk about forgiving student loans, or making college universally accessible, the message that actually comes across is "these people only care about yuppies and eggheads; they're not going to stand up for folks like me."
For the longest time, I couldn't figure out why voters thought that Trump, a billionaire with a long history enriching himself by ripping other people off, could possibly be a champion of the "little guy" or the "working class". Liberals think "working class" is defined by income, but it's not -- it's defined by education. Socially, an English professor at a community college making $50k a year is "upper class", while a plumber making $80k a year is "working class." Trump made class warfare the center of his persona. Just the way he talks sends English professors nationwide into collective apoplexy. Thus, he must be the champion of the working class, right?
Ditto for minorities. When Democrats talk about black rights, defunding the police, systemic racism, the gender pay gap, DREAMers, voting rights, and so on, they are sending a message. The message, for working class *white* Americans, is "we don't care about people like you." Even black and hispanic Americans aren't convinced, if they identify more as "working class" than black or Hispanic. And Asians are *definitely* not convinced.
Again, this is not about policy. Large majorities of Americans support citizenship for DREAMers. They just don't care about policy in general, and they especially don't care about policies that don't benefit them.
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that fear mongering is a winning strategy for Democrats. The very real danger of Republican rule -- namely that we might slide into illiberal neo-fascism, like Hungary -- is far too abstract a message to resonate with most voters. It will simply get lumped in with with all of the other long-term dangers that the "alarmist" intelligentsia obsess over, just like climate change.
If Democrats want to win, they need to emphasize that Republicans are the party of fat cats on Wall Street. They need to say that Republicans want to take health care from ordinary Americans, so they can give tax breaks to the very rich. They need to play the economic class warfare card (as opposed to social class), and emphasize that helping poor blacks get jobs in urban areas will also help poor whites get jobs in rural areas. IMO, Bernie Sanders was far too socialist for the median voter to stomach, but he did know how to control the message in that respect; he successfully positioned himself as the left-wing defender of the working class.
If Democrats persist in being the party of the philosopher kings, then they will continue to lose.
IRL there's nothing scary about us -- ha, we're the opposite, sadly. But decades of demonization that started with Newt Gingrich, aided and abetted by Fox News, and there you go.
Democrats are the party of pronouns in the bio, "trans women are women!" and schools changing your kid's name, pronouns and which bathroom/changing room they use without notifying the parents.
I've been a Democrat since 1980, but they are losing me.
I'm late to all of this, but here's my take:
It isn't that people hate liberals. it's that they're afraid of conservatives. If you have to hate somebody, it's safer to hate the people who eschew guns and violence and always try to see the other person's point of view. While they're waffling about you can shiv them. In a zero-sum world red in tooth and claw, you want to be on the side with teeth and claws. People are scared. They seek safety. So they side with the bullies, which is to say the conservatives.