Can Democrats Make Policy Matter Again?
A policy agenda is only as meaningful as the vision of society Democrats are willing to defend for their voters.
Last Monday, Democrats unveiled a new policy agenda ahead of the 2018 midterm elections called “A Better Deal”. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer explained in an op-ed post in the New York Times that the agenda would “show that we’re on the side of the working people” by supporting increased wages, fewer everyday expenses, and new skills training for all workers.
The narrow economic focus of the agenda shows the extent to which Democrats have heeded criticisms of Hillary Clinton for her purportedly weak economic messaging during last year’s presidential race; and, from the Sanders-aligned left, criticisms of the party’s reluctance to adopt bolder policy positions on the minimum wage, health care, and other ‘kitchen table’ issues.
If the latest Post-ABC polling is any indication, having a clear economic agenda will prove to be a welcomed change among voters. When asked whether the Democratic Party “stands for something” or is “just against Trump”, 52 percent of respondents chose “just against Trump”, while only 32 percent said they felt the Democratic Party had an agenda of their own.
While some Democrats have challenged the assumption that opposing Trump and promoting a policy agenda must be a binary choice for the party, the agenda question continues to loom over them, as do deeper questions about where the party’s agenda should lean on the ideological spectrum and who should be its primary target.
Since the election, a number of observers have argued that Democrats should go all in on a left-populist economic agenda akin to social democracy. In this view, the future of the party does not lie in the success of a ‘Panera strategy’, or building coalitions with college-educated moderate Republicans. Rather, the future lies in mobilizing the progressive voters who stayed home or defected to third parties in last year’s election.
But a competing argument insists that Democrats must get back to what has been a winning strategy for them since the early 1990s — pivoting to the center. According to this view, as the Midwest grows whiter, Democrats cannot afford to alienate working class whites with the far-left causes that have come to dominate their agenda in recent years. Like Bill Clinton, they must take a more balanced position on entitlements, immigration, and wedge issues such as abortion.
A nexus between these two proposals hails from Silicon Valley, and recommends that Democrats adopt a pro-business populist platform. In this view, progressive economic ideas such as the universal basic income and free college degrees don’t have to be in conflict with market interests. On the contrary, these policies would ease reliance on entitlement programs and ensure that more people have the right skills to compete in a STEM economy.
While these proposals for a new Democratic policy agenda differ on many points, in my view they all share a similar blind spot: nothing they propose for Democrats reflects ideas or strategies that Republicans have deployed in order to win elections in recent years. In other words, if better economic messaging is the key to winning back working class white voters, these proposals don’t explain why Republicans continue winning these voters while advocating for explicitly anti-worker policies. In some ways, the proposals treat voting Republican as the default choice for these voters, with little interrogation of the alternative appeals Republicans make to them to get their votes.
To that end, I find the narrow focus on policy to have limited explanatory value for Democrats’ electoral losses, let alone Donald Trump’s rise to power or the appeal of the Ryan / McConnell agenda to his working class supporters. Instead, I think Democrats in recent years have failed to contend with (in part because they have also endeavored to activate) white racial resentment as an electoral force in American politics, one that has created a protest identity in opposition to a society that is becoming less white and less Christian. Democrats have also failed to counter the Republican Party’s manipulation of white racial resentment with a clear alternative vision of the kind of society they want.
A week after the November 8 presidential election, Brookings scholar Shadi Hamid described Trump’s shocking win in Foreign Policy magazine as the reorienting of American politics away from “center-left managerial technocracy” toward the “flailing search for a politics of meaning” that contemporary liberalism has failed to accommodate:
The essence of politics then isn’t just, or even primarily, about improving citizens’ quality of life — it’s about directing their energies toward moral, philosophical, or ideological ends. When the state entrusts itself with a cause — whether based around religion or ethnic identity — citizens are no longer individuals pursuing their own conception of the good life; they are part of a larger brotherhood, entrusted with a mission to reshape society.
Trumpism, in other words, offered more than a collection of ideas for how to make society a better place to live. At his campaign rallies, which Hamid compared to “faith-based festivals”, Trump painted a picture of the kind of society people wanted to live in — and were eager to fight for. His attacks on media elites and minorities made political life contentious again, in an age where the leaders of most western democracies had put a premium on political consensus.
To be sure, I think Democrats understand that their voters want to be inspired when they go to the polls. But Schumer’s op-ed post shows how Democratic leaders think about voter enthusiasm, and it’s through the same technocratic lens that they view governance. It’s about the number of buzzwords that can fit into a new slogan or the right balance between attacking the status quo and avoiding any potentially binding ideological pitch to voters. Simply put, society’s institutions no longer provide the purpose and belonging they once did to many people, and elite-driven center-left Democratic ameliorism doesn’t really offer those things either. The Trump campaign, by putting violent images of a free white Christian society besieged by illegal immigrants and illiberal Islamists in the minds of voters, offered more than a slogan for white people to hitch their hopes; it became their crusade. As Peter Beinart explains in his review of President Trump’s controversial speech in Poland on July 6:
The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech — perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime — was his claim that ‘The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.’
Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The ‘south’ and ‘east’ only threaten the West’s ‘survival’ if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s ‘survival’ if by ‘West’ you mean white, Christian hegemony…
[W]hen Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He’s not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He’s speaking as the head of a tribe.
Although establishment Republicans have not (with some notable exceptions) adopted Trump’s white nationalist dog whistle politics as their own, one would be mistaken to assume that Trumpism is incompatible with the Ryan / McConnell agenda. Trump’s rants against immigrants and global trade deals provide cover for Republican lawmakers to continue doling out tax breaks for the super-rich that claim to ‘buy American, hire American’. In general, oligarchs who share in working class whites’ resentment of minorities and the political elites who appeal to them tend to be insulated from populist rage.
Despite having an unpopular economic agenda, Republicans continue to win majorities at all levels of government. They do so not because they make major policy shifts to the left or right, but because they appeal to the most basic human desires — for belonging and for purpose. They have, as one Democratic adviser put it, “built a massive messaging infrastructure designed to distort reality” — namely by feeding their voters a constant narrative of their own victimization as white, Christian people. In doing so, Republicans have found new ways to challenge multiculturalism as a social good, replacing it with the imperative to fight for ‘western’ civilization’s survival.
Democrats must articulate and defend their vision of a multiracial social democracy. Pulling back on either racial or economic messaging will only embolden the far right, and signal a true lack of conviction — of purpose — in what the party claims to stand for. As Hillary Clinton’s supporters learned in last year’s stunning electoral defeat, it doesn’t matter how many good ideas a candidate has or how progressive her party’s platform becomes if people cannot envision a more just world with her at the helm.
