Deal with it.
Okay, that may be premature.
I wrote a couple of years ago about the internecine fights between the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic Party. You have the upstarts dissatisfied with the status quo, and then there are the establishment Democrats who fear democracy breaking out inside the Democratic Party, for whom talent takes a back seat to tenure and fundraising. Progressives and lefty independents tend to prefer playing the outsider antagonists raging against the machine.
An old friend who’s spent his life as a loner once said if he ever found himself on the inside of a social group, he’d have to create a new outside for himself just to feel normal. So what do progressives do when eventually they find they are the mainstream?
Eric Boehlert’s PressRun dispatch this morning raised that question indirectly in noting how the media narrative of a country divided against itself is nonsense. A sort of “Both Sides Now with Chuck Todd.” The topic was Covid, masks and vaccines. Todd naturally framed the question in Republican vs. Democrat terms:
Except that premise is false and it reflects a misguided brand of Both Sides journalism. Instead of the country being “divided” over Covid, including whether to get vaccinated and wear masks, 75 percent of eligible Americans have received at least one shot, and 70 percent support mask mandates in schools. Just “17 percent of adults say they probably or definitely will not get vaccinated,” according to a recent ABC-Washington Post survey.
Meanwhile, a strong majority of Americans support requiring proof of vaccination to travel by airplane, according to Gallup. (39 percent oppose.) And the percentage of parents who plan on vaccinating their kids has climbed to nearly 70 percent.
If there’s an actual Covid divide, it’s among conservatives themselves — 45 percent of Republicans support a universal vaccine mandate. Roughly the same percentage oppose.
The media’s lazy framing of a “divide” is nonsense, Boehlert writes (emphasis mine):
Instead of portraying the dangerous zealots accurately, the media downplay the threat by presenting anti-vaccine and anti-mask fanatics as being the mirror opposite of Democrats and progressives who embrace science and common sense. If there’s a “divide,” that means there are two equal, opposing forces, right? The press much prefers to tell the tale of Both Sides facing off over Covid, instead of detailing a deranged and radical minority waging war on mainstream America.
Think of that, progressives. You are mainstream America. Even if the Democratic establishment has not fully accepted it. How much of your self-image is built upon being outsiders? How will you adapt? Or will you have to construct a new outside just to keep feeling angry, marginalized, and normal?
Boehlert continues:
In reality though, there are three self-identifying political parties in America — Democratic, Republican and Independent, with Independents siding with Democrats on key issues. Independents though, tend to get erased by the media, so journalists can hyperventilate about American being “divided,” pretending we’re a 50-50 nation.
We are not. The recent ABC-Washington Post poll found that, “9 in 10 Democrats and more than 6 in 10 independents support school mask requirements, while nearly 6 in 10 Republicans oppose them.” There’s no way those results suggest a large “divide” on the issue — it’s basically two-against-one.
Not only are there three major parties, but the number of voters who identify as Republican has been steadily shrinking for years. The ABC-Washington Post poll, in order to get what it considered to be an accurate reflection of the U.S. electorate, conducted its survey where the makeup of respondents was 30 percent Democratic, 24 percent Republican, and 36 percent Independent.
Even those percentages are misleading. Independents are no more homogenous than Democrats or Republicans. Suggesting Independents as a whole side with Democrats on key issues is inaccurate. It depends on where they live.
In my very blue county, it depends on in which precinct they live. Although Independents (UNAffiliated in NC) “break” Democrat in their voting almost countywide, the farther out in the county you go, the redder things get and the more the percentage shrinks. In a red NC county where I ran calculations recently (60-40 for Trump in 2020), Independents break Republican in almost every precinct.
As for progressives, be they registered Democrats or Independents, it is past time to reassess how they will view themselves when they are the establishment. “[B]eat drum hard we are winning,” Anat Shenker-Osorio reminded us ahead of the 2020 election.
Stuart Stevens wrote, “Now is when you turn a victory into a rout. We are all tired, but the other side isn’t just tired. They are frightened and confused. As they should be. Because they are losing the fight for the soul of this country. And they know it.”
Seeing oneself as the perpetual outsider is self-defeating. The whole point of progressive politics is gaining power to wield it for the public good. Hard to do when doing so makes you your own enemy.