The ever valuable Matt Yglesias lists out some useful thoughts in approaching the election portmortem, including the reminder that elections are too complicated to be boiled down to one cause. But I particularly like his first three points:
1. Shouldn’t at least part of coping with the “moral values” problem involve some effort to do a better job of convincing people that more liberal positions than the ones they currently have are actually the correct ones?
2. More broadly, you’ve got to have a strategy for convincing people that at least some of your currently-unpopular ideas are ideas that they should like, not just a strategy for trying to figure out which ideas will be popular.
3. (1) and (2) above are less the task of campaigns than they are something other people need to be doing out in society when a campaign isn’t happening.
He’s right in the diagnosis: liberals and particularly lefties cling to elections as the time to make their statement, but the persuasion absolutely has to come first. The problem is that structural constraints work against us doing just that. On one hand, there’s a sharp geographic separation of liberals from the rest of the population. It’s less North-South than urban-rural, with Northern suburbs leaning Blue, and Southern/Western suburbs leaning Red. I don’t know empirically if polarization along those lines is really any worse than before, but anecdotally it sure feels like it, and in any case Massachusetts liberals are likely to have little lived interaction with Clark County, OH or anywhere in Oklahoma.
Which brings us to the other structural hurdle: the media. Republicans have done an excellent job in fostering an alternate, partisan news media, but, paradoxically, if Democrats try the same thing, they’ll find themselves even more removed from avenues of persuasion. Meanwhile, certain venues of the mainstream media itself has become marginalized outside Blue-state and elite circles, so the likelihood of reaching voters through mediated interaction any more than we already have seems unlikely.
The reason these hurdles are in the way of liberals but not movement conservatives (who, too, are a minority of our country) is that the election was the expression of a status war overlaid on top of the culture war. Of course, competing economic self-interest hasn’t disappeared, but on so many levels it’s become sublimated into a conflict between those with competing status claims. Blue States (and Red State urban areas) are the home of the cultural elites and, just as importantly, a large population of those with stakes in the status game. High school teachers, struggling artists, anarchist college kids, and petit bourgeois gay men and lesbians (to take a few examples) are hardly the highest prestige holders, but they are invested in life choices that emphasize cultural capital to compensate for lack of economic capital. Red States (and Blue State exurban areas) harbor resentment against the coastal and urban cultural elites and their allies. Even business elites with considerable local prestige sense their devaluation on the national prestige market; geography doubles as a vector of class differentiation. Thus, for much of the population, liberalism has become identified with the coastal and the sociologically foreign. And voters who aren’t movement conservatives or the Christian right will tend to side with the Republicans as a way of expressing resentment against a class system they’re powerless to affect any other way.*
Pursuing this idea can flip the culture war on its head. Take for instance the polling data on “values” and the subsequent claims that the Democrats need to get religion. Well, maybe. But will their religion be the right one? What if an Episcopal or Unitarian or Reform Jewish politician starts talking about her or his religion? Might that not seem similarly foreign to the Red Stater? And how do we know that the explicit reasons people give for voting don’t have underlying sociological ones? It should be remembered that while homophobia has ties to religious doctrine, it too is also a cultural phenomenon. Even if religion isn’t reducible to an epiphenomon of class conflict, its political expression may well be.
If I’m right, then the challenge facing liberals is quite difficult because so proscribed outside of individual decisions of campaigns and campaigners, politicians and policy wonks, bloggers and op-ed writers. In sum, the Democrats will steadily face ad hominem rejection from those who discount the message because of the messenger. And I don’t see an “until” qualification to that.
* This may sound much like Thomas Frank’s argument in What The Matter With Kansas?, only I don’t think any cultural duping is going on. Or rather, explicit attempts by the GOP to dupe ordinary voters to vote against their economic self-interest don’t take away from the fact that the sociological basis of this class resentment occurs somewhat automatically and is in fact one logical consequence of an entrenched prestige market.
UPDATE: Kevin Drum has a good post on Red State resentment. He focuses on resentment of explicit actions and attitudes expressed by Blue Staters - and indeed that will need changing (easier said than done). But I think he overlooks the possibility that status resentment can fester regardless of the specific choices of politicians and political supporters.
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