Photo by Element5 Digital
As you know by now, Democrats weren’t wiped out as everybody expected during the midterm elections, and I think that’s good news: If election deniers had captured a bunch of governorships and secretaries of state offices, I think that would’ve been about it for American democracy. I relearned a personal lesson this week: Don’t give into despair. Tuesday was — most of the day anyway — a day of deep dread for me. It’s not that I think Democrats are always that great. And it’s not that I think American democracy is perfect. But the alternatives on hand seem to be way worse.
And by Wednesday morning, I had more hope that we’ll be able to survive those alternatives.
Still, the final battle over Trumpism isn’t won, and honestly: The battle for democracy is never finished. It’s something we have to tend to perpetually. And that’s exhausting sometimes. It would be more fun to go binge-watch Netflix or something.
With that in mind, though, I want to take note of a couple of postmortems in the New York Times, both from conservatives — albeit conservatives of very different stripes.
The first is from David Brooks, who says the Trumpist fever is breaking — but leaves us with a stark note:
There are two large truths I’ll leave you with. The first is that both parties are fundamentally weak. The Democrats are weak because they have become the party of the educated elite.1 The Republicans are weak because of Trump. The Republican weakness is easier to expunge. If Republicans get rid of Trump, they could become the dominant party in America. If they don’t, they will decline.
The second is from Sohrab Ahmari, who suggests that Republicans failed because they didn’t do more to address the weakness that Brooks identifies:
Correctly perceiving working- and middle-class discontent with corporate power and economic insecurity, Republicans in 2022 tried to channel it into cultural grievances, ginning up outrage over “woke” sensitivity trainings in the workplace, for instance. A much more effective way to check corporate power would actually be to empower workers — which is what unions do best. Instead, the right continued to pursue its old program of undermining the New Deal.
Fake G.O.P. populism challenged “woke capital” — companies that it believed had become overly politically correct — but didn’t dare touch the power of corporate America to coerce workers and consumers, or the power of private equity and hedge funds to hollow out the real economy, which employs workers for useful products and services — or used to, anyway. The Republican Party remained as hostile as ever to collective bargaining as a new wave of labor militancy swept the private economy.
A couple of notes here:
* Ahmari is an interesting and potentially dangerous figure — one of those “post-liberal” National Conservatives who don’t have much use for American society as they find it and fantasize about a church-led order that would ban drag queens and remind religious minorities to stay in their place. But his trying to package working class cultural issues with working class economic issues could be a powerhouse political match, if anybody ever took him up on it. It’s kind of scary to think about.
* That said, it’s difficult to see from this vantage point, that the Republican Party will ever give itself over to that kind of authentic populism. While the grassroots can break through and take the wheel often enough — that’s how we got the overturning of Roe v. Wade — the structure of the party is still oriented very much toward tax cuts, deregulation and anti-unionism.
Maybe that will change, and maybe sooner than I think, but the best way to hasten that change is probably if Democrats — as Brooks notes — continue their path to being mostly the party of educated elites.
I don’t know how much the loss of the working class is due to decades of messaging from Republicans about pointy headed intellectuals not being on your side, and how much of it is just that the recipients of that messaging really are more culturally conservative than the Democratic Party at large. And that’s uncomfortable because A) there are more working class folks than college educated folks, so the Dem base is bound to lose more often than not, and B) reaching out to those working class folks might involve some not-wonderful tradeoffs.
In the early Trump years, the battle was framed as a choice between embracing “identity politics” versus the “white working class.” It seems increasingly clear that the working class attracted to Republican politics isn’t defined just by its whiteness.
Over the past few years, Hispanics have begun abandoning the Democratic Party, defying generations of political patterns and causing varying degrees of panic on the left. In the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, they won the Hispanic vote by 40 points nationally. In 2020, Democrats still carried the vote by an estimated 33 points against Trump himself, though the party’s margin against GOP candidates nationwide shrank to 27 points…
Democrats like Teixeira believe that the party has become culturally detached from Hispanic voters, moving too far left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights. Democrats like Odio say the real problem is a “class disconnect” in which Democrats are catering to the cultural concerns of economically secure whites at the expense of the pocketbook priorities of working-class Hispanics.
I don’t quite know what to do with this yet. The implication is that somebody’s struggle for justice or freedom is going to have to be sacrificed for Dems to claw back some of those voters. I don’t like that. But I don’t think being the party of the educated elite is sustainable, either. Math, after all.
Maybe I just can’t enjoy a good thing. Who knows? Maybe the anti-anti-abortion coalition that Dems put together this week will continue to carry the day. Maybe this is the blueprint going forward. I have more hope than I did on Tuesday. But the qualms are lurking just underneath the relief.
What else I’ve written
I wrote about Laura Kelly’s Kansas win this week, and discovered something that confounds the “red state” stereotypes we live with here: “Kansas Republicans have won an outright majority of votes for the state’s top office just three times in the last 30 years. One of those was conservative Sam Brownback’s first run in 2010 — he squeaked by with just 49.8% of the vote for reelection four years later. The other two times were accomplished in the 1990s by Bill Graves, a moderate who had to fight off challenges from his right flank. And we know that because over those same three decades, Kansans have not-infrequently chosen to send Democratic women to Cedar Crest — Joan Finney, then Kathleen Sebelius twice, and now Laura Kelly twice.”
Finally, some business…
I’ve avoided giving myself a set schedule for this Substack until now, but I think I’d like the discipline. So, for the time being: Expect to see newsletters on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.