The Democrats’ Culture Denialism

They just don’t get it.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is now a contributing writer.

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In the wake of the Democrats’ drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you’d assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.

Questions like: Is America really a “white supremacist” society? What does “structural racism” even mean and does it explain all the socioeconomic problems of nonwhites? Is anyone who raises questions about immigration levels a racist? Are personal pronouns necessary and something that should be popularized if not demanded? Are transwomen exactly the same as biological women and are those who question such a claim simply “haters” who should be expunged from polite society?

For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it’s a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.

Well, if the two months since the election is anything to go by, you’d be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front.

Why? Because fundamentally today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues real issues. They are typically viewed as politically motivated distractions or as expressions of something else entirely (i.e., racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, etc.) They are not treated as issues that need to be dealt with on their own terms.

The current Democratic discourse is rife with examples. Here’s Massachusetts Democratic Representative Jim McGovern as tweeted out by progressive group CAP Action:

Get it? No one would normally object to Democratic policies around trans issues or immigration issues. Backlash against them is just ginned up by Republicans for nefarious political purposes. The real issue is the depredations of big corporations. The clear implication is that Democrats don’t need to change their positions on either trans and immigration issues but instead should point out to befuddled voters that these are non-issues and that their real enemy is corporate America (hissss!).

Similarly, the new Chair of the powerful Congressional Progressive Caucus, Greg Casar, had this to say in an interview with NBC News:

[Casar] rejected the view that Democrats need to turn against immigrants or transgender people after Trump campaigned heavily on those issues in his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. Instead, Casar said Democrats should change course by redirecting such attacks and accusing the GOP of fueling culture wars to distract voters from their agenda of helping the rich get richer.

“The progressive movement needs to change. We need to re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up,” Casar said. “So when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did — with Republican help. We need to connect the dots for people that the Republican Party obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”

Conspicuously missing: any hint Democrats might need to actually change their position on any “culture war” issue. Instead, the strategy is to change the subject immediately to mustache-twirling corporate villains.

A close cousin of changing the subject from cultural issues is simply ignoring them. Instead of changing any positions on these issues, the idea here is…just talk a lot about other stuff. Bernie Sanders thinks Democrats should talk more about the “billionaire class.” Ro Khanna proposes a “New Economic Deal” that would emphasize high-paying jobs for the middle class. Chris Murphy thinks the key to a Democratic revival is advocating the breakup of corporate power. Other Democrats suggest a relentless focus on “kitchen-table” issues (ah, what would Democrats do without that fabled kitchen table….). The general idea is that talking more about economic issues, typically in a populist vein, will win back the working class and obviate the need to change anything else.

Or perhaps the real problem is that Democrats haven’t communicated their wonderful positions adeptly and thoroughly enough. This seems to be a real favorite of the candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The two leading candidates are probably Ken Martin, head of Minnesota’s Democratic (well, Democratic-Farmer-Labor) Party and Ben Wikler, head of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party. Martin has a 10-point plan that calls for a “massive narrative and branding project.” He also wants a 50-state and year-round organizing strategy, more effective spending, more open primaries and better youth mobilization. He avers that Democrats need to “show up in nontraditional and uncomfortable media spaces on a regular basis, increase outreach to local messengers and trusted validators, and create our own platforms for authentic engagement.”

Wikler, for his part, believes Democrats must “become the narrator” of their own brand. He says Democrats should be “adapting the language that we use…supporting and deploying trusted communicators…figuring out where we communicate.” He particularly stresses the need to reach voters who don’t pay much attention to politics, a failing he seems to blame for the Democrats’ election loss.

Many of these ideas seem reasonable but, cutting through the verbiage, there is absolutely nothing here about Democrats’ need to address cultural vulnerabilities. It’s as if they didn’t exist. The clear implication is that Democrats, provided they communicate better and more widely, have no need to change a thing in these areas.

Then there is the dead-ender position. Cultural issues have no independent life or policy significance of their own but are simply re-expressions of the underlying racism, etc of Republicans and the voters who support them. Therefore, Democrats should run head-on at these retrograde views instead of compromising in any way on these issues. This appears to be the view of Jaime Harrison, the DNC chair whom Martin and Wikler aspire to replace.

As the AP reported, Harrison has strenuously resisted the idea Democrats should abandon “identity politics”, saying such politics is how “people of color” see Democrats fighting for them. Invoking his status as a black man, he remarked:

That is my identity…it is not politics. It is my life. And the people that I need in the party, that I need to stand up for me, have to recognize that. You cannot run away from that.

When his tenure as DNC chair ends on February 1, he promises to air more grievances; the “muzzle comes off” and he’ll be “naming names” (can’t wait!). Some DNC members echoed his stance arguing Democrats should lean into, rather than back away, from wokeness.

Finally, there are quite a few Democrats who believe the party was helpless against anti-incumbency, the COVID hangover, inflation and a generally bad political environment. Amusingly, this includes the various high-paid operatives and consultants who ran Harris’s losing campaign (what were they being paid for then?). By that logic, cultural liabilities could not possibly have had anything to do with the outcome.

This is all pretty remarkable, given that in this election the top reason among swing voters not to vote for Harris was the perception that she was focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than on helping the middle class (Blueprint research group polling). This of course was the theme of the campaign’s most effective ad (Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you).

In other polling, overwhelming majorities (67 to 77 percent) of swing voters who chose Trump thought these phrases about the Democrats were accurate: not tough enough on the border crisis; support immigrants more than American citizens; want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants; want to promote transgender ideology; don’t care about securing the border; have extreme ideas about immigration; aren’t doing enough to address crime; and are too focused on identity politics.

These same voters believed Harris supported the following policies: using taxpayer dollars to pay for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83 percent); allowing children under 18 to transition genders without informing their parents (77 percent); decriminalizing border crossings (77 percent); allowing abortion up until the day of birth (76 percent); allowing illegal immigrants convicted of crimes to stay in America (75 percent); defunding the police (72 percent); and giving black Americans reparations for slavery (67 percent).

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In light of these findings, how it even possible that so many Democrats stubbornly refuse to admit cultural issues are a good chunk of what is dragging down the Democratic brand with ordinary voters, especially working-class voters? How can they persist in their blinkered culture denialism? We’re definitely getting into “who are you going to believe—me or your lying eyes?” territory.

Obviously, part of it is fear of “the Groups”—the advocacy groups who push the positions above—and their many allies across social and mainstream media, foundations, academia, think tanks and within the Democratic party infrastructure itself. Those who might wish to point out the obvious—that Democrats’ association with cultural leftism is a huge problem for the party—are not unreasonably afraid that they will face an onslaught of criticism from the Groups and their allies. Look what happened to Massachusetts Democratic representative Seth Moulton recently when he suggested that biological boys should not be playing girls’ sports, no matter what their “gender identity” is. He was attacked viciously by progressives all over the map; his resignation for “Nazi” remarks was demanded by Salem, MA (his home town) Democratic party officials (witch trial anybody?). Moulton refused to back down but the signal to others was clear: stay away from these issues or you will pay the costs.

So fear is clearly a factor in culture denialism. And voters have picked up on this—they have a sense that the inmates are running the asylum. In a very interesting finding from a Progressive Policy Institute post-election survey of working-class (non-college voters), these voters did not believe Harris could stand up to the more extreme members of her party but by a whopping 41 points they believed Trump could stand up to his own party’s extremists.

However I think the problem goes deeper than the fear, real as that may be. The idea has penetrated deeply into the Democrats’ DNA that these issues are not real issues. They are artefacts of the Republican attack machine, preying on bigoted impulses, rather than real concerns of voters. Real issues concern tangible things like the economy, health care, government programs and the like. How else to explain the remarkable quiescence throughout the party as it moved sharply and consistently left for a decade across all cultural/values issues from crime and immigration to race and gender? These issues were treated as a costless playground for social justice commitments.

But of course they were very real issues reflecting very real concerns. Voters overwhelmingly believe illegal immigration is wrong and should be deterred not indulged. They believe crimes should be punished, public safety is sacrosanct and that police and policing are vital necessities. They believe, with Martin Luther King, that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and therefore oppose discrimination on the basis of race no matter who benefits from that discrimination. They believe biological sex is real, that spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved, and that medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available simply on the basis of declared gender identity, especially for children.

These issues reflect deeply held beliefs and values and are vitally important to ordinary voters, especially working-class voters, not diversions from real issues foisted upon them by crafty Republicans. So far, even the screamingly obvious implications of this last election have not been enough to shock many, if not most, Democrats out of their culture denialist torpor. We shall see if this denialism survives the next few years of the Trump administration and the necessity Democrats clearly face to broaden their coalition among the very voters for whom cultural issues are intensely real and the Democratic brand intensely alienating.