“Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do,” Kevin Drum wrote recently. Damon Linker argues this is true because “Democrats have moved further and faster to the left than Republicans have moved to the right.” But is that right?
Thomas Edsall consulted Jacob Hacker at Yale who writes:
It strains credulity to argue that Democrats have been pushing culture-war issues more than Republicans. It’s mostly Republican elites who have accentuated these issues to attract more and more working-class white voters even as they pursue a plutocratic economic agenda that’s unpopular among those voters. Certainly, Biden has not focused much on cultural issues since entering office — his key agenda items are all bread-and-butter economic policies. Meanwhile, we have Republicans making critical race theory and transgender sports into big political issues (neither of which, so far as I can tell, hardly mattered to voters at all before they were elevated by right-wing media and the G.O.P.).
Democrats have shifted left with the rest of the culture while conservatives have not. It’s no wonder conservatives feel left behind.
Edsall writes:
The Democratic shift to the left reflects in large part a parallel shift in the general public. The median voter has become more liberal and the result is that in 2017, Democratic voters were modestly closer to the median voter than Republican voters (by one point on a 20-point scale).
I asked Brian Schaffner, a principal investigator at the Cooperative Election Study and a political scientist at Tufts, about the Drum and Linker columns. Schaffner made an argument similar to Kiley’s:
The overall median among the population of Americans has moved leftward from 1994 to 2017. Even if Republicans have shifted less than Democrats, compared to their views in 1994, this hardly makes them less extreme in the current moment. To put a finer point on it, imagine an individual who supported school segregation in 1965 and who still held that same view 50 years later. Clearly it is the lack of a shift in views over five decades that would have made that individual extreme in the year 2015.
Schaffner observes that the data
shows a very clear shift among Democrats, while Republicans hardly move at all. But independents are also moving in the same direction as Democrats on these issues. Sure, Republicans aren’t shifting their views, but their unwillingness to update their assessments of racism in America is essentially leaving them behind as the rest of America’s attitudes are evolving.
There is much more at the link. Bottom line: Republicans are going to fight 2022 as a culture war contest and attempt to “gin up enough controversy over the so-called woke agenda” whether or not they can pin the blame on Democrats. Linker believes that benefits Democrats deliver for voters will quench the flames of the culture war, causing it to backfire.
But, says Edsall (and I think he is correct):
If right-wing manipulation of cultural and racial issues does end up backfiring, that will defy the long history of the Republican Party’s successful deployment of divisive wedge issues — from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Newt Gingrich to George W. Bush to Donald Trump. Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated that the half-life of these radioactive topics is longer than expected, and Democrats, if they want to protect their fragile majority, must be doubly careful not to hand their adversaries ever more powerful weapons.
Or instead of treading lightly like cringes, Democrats might instead lean into the culture war being waged by the right as proof conservatives are losing it and know it. Americans want to support winners. Democrats need to start acting like they are.