Dan Pfeiffer shares my concern that Democrats — possessing neither message nor discipline — will not have what it takes to save our democracy. A “big tent” is fine. But sometimes you need a single, easily conveyed message that encapsulates what you stand for. Obama’s was one word: Hope.
Pfeiffer asks if Democrats can be successful running on saving democracy.
Yes, “Republicans are a danger to democracy and election integrity.” And yes, “their anti-democratic authoritarianism is the greatest danger they pose in the short term.” But will voters vote based on that? If Democrats can package it right?
A CNN poll suggests that 56 percent of Americans perceive democracy under attack. A critical Democratic voting bloc sees more threat:
A recent poll of 18 to 29-year-olds conducted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics suggests that a democracy-focused message might be effective. According to the poll, only seven percent of 18 to 29-year-olds describe the U.S. as a healthy democracy, while a majority describe it as either in trouble or failed. 35 percent of respondents believe there will be a civil war in their lifetime and 25 percent believe they will see a state secede from the union.
So, says Pfeiffer, there is a market for the message. But, says Pfeiffer, “This is where Democrats run into trouble.” A message, any message, unsupported by actions is likely to fail:
If democracy is really in grave danger why aren’t Democrats doing anything about it? Why aren’t more Democrats – including President Biden– more vocal about raising the alarm? Now, there may be nothing that can be done about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s willingness to sacrifice your right to vote in order to protect Mitch McConnell’s power. No amount of arm-twisting or speech-making may be enough to change their recalcitrant minds. Efforts are still underway to pass Voting Rights and I expect President Biden to become more vocal about these issues once the endless effort to pass his economic plan is behind him. The failure to take action would be a huge problem on every dimension, but I think there are two things Democrats could do to make the message about democracy more credible even absent Senate action on voting rights legislation.
First, they could get caught trying. That doesn’t mean one vote or a bunch of procedural BS. Democrats must engage in a party-wide effort, from the president on down, to make the case for democracy reform and raise alarms about Republican intentions to subvert democracy. It means real pressure on Manchin and Sinema and a very public push to eliminate the filibuster. Democrats cannot make the case that they will protect democracy if they haven’t clearly fought like hell to do so.
We must also clearly and specifically call out the Republicans. Because if Democrats don’t, we can be damn sure the media won’t do it for us. You lose 100 percent of the arguments you don’t make and not enough Democrats are making the argument that Republicans are a danger to democracy.
Second, we should spend more time talking about preventing election subversion and pushing efforts to reform the process at all levels to prevent politicians from stealing elections. This must include votes on specific pieces of legislation that make it more difficult for Congress to reject certified state election results. Let’s put the Republicans on record as being willing to overturn the will of the voters
Seriously, get caught trying. But can Democrats get caught trying and turn it into a message as easily grokked and as repeatable as “Crooked Hillary”? Without that, it will never catch fire. Democratic audiences were all over the place messaging against Trump in 2016, Pfeiffer notes, using words like “racist,” “misogynist,” “liar,” “dumb,” “crook,” “Russian patsy,” and so forth. Trump sucks at most everything except marketing and branding. Democrats couldn’t agree on calling a dog a dog.
A few days ago, I mentioned I was working through Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century by Daniel Oppenheimer. Among his tales of left-wing apostacy, Ronald Reagan’s conversion to conservatism is an outlier.
From the Washington Post’s 2016 review:
The mainstream liberalism of his younger days was a modest inheritance from his father, one he quickly spent. “Not for Reagan a descent into utopian delusion, followed by a long dark night of the soul, culminating in a baptismal emergence into the light of God, truth, and conservatism,” Oppenheimer admits. “In Reagan’s conversion story there was no conversion at all.” An outlier in this tale, Reagan gradually takes up conservatism and remakes his belief system, informed by Hollywood labor disputes and pro-market promotional work for General Electric during the 1950s and 1960s.
In Oppenheimer’s telling, Reagan’s path, easier and less self-aware, is mirrored by the country he would lead. “For Reagan, and for tens of millions of Americans who would travel with him to the Right, political transformation wasn’t marked by catharsis and epiphany,” he writes. “It rarely even revealed itself as a transformation. It was life, lived year to year, decade to decade,” with a deceptive sense of permanence “that gave more comfort and was less anxious to bear than a story of discontinuity and change would have been.”
What “The Great Communicator” offered voters was political conversion on the cheap, a way for southern Democrats, especially, to become Republicans without having to reject their former selves or basic values. Those were always sound, Reagan reassured. Reagan lived forever with one foot in reality and the other in fantasy, making it possible for him to imagine the Democratic Party had changed but he hadn’t. He sold that to the entire South.
Oppenheimer’s analysis is odd, given how many Reagan supporters were evangelicals for whom eternity in heaven or hell turns on lurid tales of dark nights of the soul where Jesus intervenes in the nick of time. They are “saved” in dramatic stories they love to retell again and again. That may be because while everyone imagines themselves as heroes in their own story, when it comes right down to it, they’d rather not have to exert themselves. How very American. Reagan played to that.
Reagan the story-teller grasped intuitively that people don’t make hard political choices if they aren’t given stories that locate those decisions in their own lives. He told Americans subtly that they were always Republicans, they just didn’t know it. (Of course, by the late 1960s, southern Democrats had other incentives to leave.)
But would that work in the other direction with democracy now on the line? Could Democrats (who don’t believe in marketing) drop their five-point plans and sing as a chorus a siren song of democracy that woos voters to them instead of condemning them?
The problem with many progressives is they want to see conservatives respond to an altar call, to fall to their knees and confess their political and personal sins, admit their error, their white privilege, what-have-you, and come to the light.
“We love being right” too much, says progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio [timestamp 3:09]. “We definitely need everyone to understand that this is true. It’s true!” she mocks.
“I actually don’t care. If I can get you to do the thing I need you to do and you still think climate change is fake,” then that’s your personal problem. “We need to stop choosing to be right and start choosing to be happy. By which I mean win.”
We are in an age of competing stories, Shenker-Osorio says. And Democrats’ incoherent story is losing. Can we learn that lesson in time?
Remember, Reagan used to sell soap.