I think it matters to a lot of people
This exchange confounds me. Why would a popular Democratic politician fail to understand the obvious synecdoche/metaphor of Trump demolishing a historic wing of the White House to raise a huge, gaudy tribute to his monarchical pretensions while the government is shuttered and there is massive distress across the country?
I know for a fact that regular people know about this and they care about it. Seven million of them came out to express that last weekend. And yet we get this robotic response from the likes of Gretchen Whitmer:
I just wonder, from your vantage point as a governor of a state, what are you making of that split screen?” Psaki asked.
“Well, as I have talked to people, I’m telling you right now, no one is worried about building a ballroom in Washington, D.C.,” Whitmer replied. “What they want is to make sure that they can feed their kids next week. And the longer the shutdown goes, the more precarious it gets for people.”
The governor said most Americans are “never going to step foot in a ballroom over the course of their lifetime.”
“But what they do every single day is try to feed their kids, make sure that they get a job to show up to, make sure that they don’t hit a pothole on their drive to work and they have to take money out of their rent or their child care to pay to fix their damn car,” she continued. “That’s why we got to stay focused on the issues that matter to people.”
People are worried about the destruction of the White House which symbolizes the destruction of our country, including the economy. Doesn’t she understand that??
Brian Beutler addresses this phenomenon in his newsletter today and it’s really great. He talks about the art of persuasion. (I urge you to read the whole thing.)
How often over the past, say, five years have you found yourself confused to see something small, local, fringe, minor in the scheme of thing become a dominant issue in political discourse?
How do people in Georgia come to care about whether San Franciscans honor Founding Fathers with school names and statues? Why do voters who’ve never met or interacted with a transgender person decide they’ve learned everything they need to know about a politician based on whether they respect (or how they talk about) other peoples’ gender identities? By what process do people who watch Fox News or hang out on Twitter or consumer wellness content transform from normies into zealots?
Strident views can arise seemingly out of nowhere the same way trends do. People of influence drop them intentionally into the cultural slipstream then fan and fan and fan them until they’re ubiquitous enough to make us incorporate them, one way or another, into our identities.
This is something Republicans in particular understand about opinion formation, and, thus, persuasion. Democrats by and large do not.
Everyone I’ve asked, from all walks of life, had a visceral reaction to this week’s images of physical wreckage at the White House. Nearly all of them understood intuitively that if Joe Biden or Barack Obama had spent bribe money to bulldoze the East Wing, their presidencies would have ended. They knew enough about politics, in other words, to intuit this difference between how Republicans and Democrats react to shocking developments.
I suspect most elected Democrats had the same visceral reaction you and I did to those images. But they largely suppressed their indignation. They did not treat it as an emergency (i.e. a political opportunity) and reverted instead to their own, socially-constructed, default opinion that Regular People™️ would not care.
It is self evident to them that their feelings about what’s happening in the world, their instincts about what constitutes important news, are unreliable barometers of public sentiment. The fact that they’re upset about something doesn’t imply the voters they need to persuade will care. To the contrary, as out of touch elites, it’s likely that our fixations are of no interest to Joe Sixpack. They can not imagine that Joe Sixpack has few fixed views and is mostly just glancing around for cues about what’s important and what to think about it. They don’t reason that if people in Georgia can be made to care about school names in San Francisco, those same voters can be made to care about the White House reduced to rubble.
This gets to a phenomenon that seems confusing to those of us who know that democratic policies are far more likely to address the economic woes of the average Joe while the Republicans make everything worse. I think a lot of people are simply confused that Democrats often sound like they think Americans are selfish, myopic people who care about nothing but money. I know it annoys me anyway. People are more complicated than that and can hold several ideas in their heads at the same time, especially if leaders offer them different ways of thinking about things.
As Beutler writes:
I’m not saying Democrats should ignore laboratory findings about what matters to voters, or what voters want to hear. I want these stickers affixed to everything Donald Trump has made more unaffordable. I want people who lose their health insurance because of Trump on the news and in 30 second ads. I want people to think of him as Mary Antoinette or a modern-day robber baron. I want it to become socially awkward, a sign of supplication, to make excuses for the economic havoc he’s wreaked. It should be a sign of loserdom and weakness to blame Trump’s failures on Joe Biden or mysterious saboteurs or even the business cycle.
But none of this has to come at the expense of pouncing when he makes a mistake that has nothing to do with wallets and bank accounts—when he fantasizes openly about dumping shit on citizens exercising first amendment rights, or orders his defense attorneys, who now run the Justice Department, to pay him a quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer money.
Or when he demolishes a priceless historical artifact to build a gilded monument to himself.
It’s foolish to be dismissive of people who care about what Trump is doing to the country and that’s how Whitmer sounds to my ears. She could have incorporated all those thoughts Beutler names together because they are all of a piece. His destruction of the economy, our democracy, our history, our place in the world — all of it.
Take advantage of those things that have great symbolic value and put the Republicans on the defensive. They know Trump’s acting like a spoiled prince, doing what he wants without any sense of the optics or the timing anymore. Democrats should pounce on all of it — and repeat the charges over and over again. Make it a matter of conventional wisdom that he is a demented old tyrant and those people who are disengaged or just on the sidelines not knowing what to think will drift in the Democrats’ direction.