Give The People What They Want
Democracy is about more than procedural norms and traditions ... it's also about reflecting the will of the people.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were sent this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
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Back in the old days of blogging, it was fairly routine for a blogger to take a piece they read on the Internets and then write a several hundred-word post, tearing it to shreds. That’s not something I often do here at Truth and Consequences … but I will make an exception today.
Centrist pundit Josh Barro has a new piece up taking Democrats to task for failing to trim their policy sails to win over Republican voters who are worried about the party’s authoritarian turn. According to Barro, this disconnect shows that Democrats are not really serious about democracy.
When Democrats talk about “democracy,” they’re talking about the importance of institutions that ensure the voters get a say among multiple choices and the one they most prefer gets to rule. But they are also saying voters do not get to do that in this election. The message is that there is only one party contesting this election that is committed to democracy — the Democrats — and therefore only one real choice available. If voters reject Democrats’ agenda or their record on issues including inflation, crime, and immigration (or abortion, for that matter), they have no recourse at the ballot box — they simply must vote for Democrats anyway, at least until such time as the Republican Party is run by the likes of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
This amounts to telling voters that they have already lost their democracy …
… We have seen in recent years how no-choice politics works out. If your message to voters is that they have no choice but you, you had better make yourself a palatable choice — otherwise, they are liable to defy you and choose what you claimed was unthinkable. But Democrats have not governed like they had better win the widest swathe of voters possible, as they would if they really believed our democracy is at grave risk if the other side wins.
There are a few obvious problems here. First, there’s the underlying assumption that it is the responsibility of Democrats to fix the Republican Party. If Republicans want to cast votes for election deniers because ultimately they agree with them more on issues like inflation and abortion, that’s their choice — and in a two-party system, thems the breaks. But Democrats can only go so far in convincing them they are making the wrong choice. The agency on this one lies with Republicans.
Second, Democrats have fought on a political terrain (for well over a century) in which all sides generally agreed on the fundamental aspects of American democracy. That’s no longer true today. For example, never before have we had a political party that refuses to accept electoral defeat. It is hardly realistic to expect Democrats to shift their entire approach to campaigning and governing — and to put all their eggs in the democracy basket — because Republicans are becoming a fundamentally anti-democratic party.
Third, color me skeptical that Democrats slightly moderating their policies will get GOP or even independent voters to say, “ok, I’ll vote for a Democrat.” Either you think protecting democracy and not supporting an un-democratic party is important — or you don’t.
Fourth (and now I’m starting to get really annoyed) — there is no reason to believe that Barro’s political strategy would work. Here’s a question: name the political party that, after taking control of the White House, trimmed its policy sails and, as a result, won seats in the subsequent midterm election?
Trick question: you can’t. It’s never happened. Since the 1930s, the incumbent party has traditionally lost, on average, 28 House seats and four Senate seats. There is one major exception. In 2002, Republicans picked up seats. This outcome was largely a by-product of 9/11. But did the GOP make a concerted effort to win over Democratic voters concerned about the hard right turn of the Bush Administration and its increasingly martial rhetoric regarding the war on terrorism? Ha! Not in the slightest.
The closest proximation to a party doing what Barro suggests came in 1993 and 1994 when Democrats shelved a good part of the policy agenda that Bill Clinton had run on in 1992 to focus on deficit reduction. How did that work out? Democrats lost 54 House seats, 8 Senate, and 10 governorship and relinquished control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.
In a highly polarized political environment (like the one we live in today) there is no reason to believe that a slightly more moderate Democratic policy agenda would win over Republican voters. If anything, the more likely political outcome of such a choice would be to demotivate Democratic voters — which, again, in a polarized political world where mobilization of core constituencies is often more important than persuasion, seems like a dubious strategy.
And what does Barro think that more moderate policy agenda should look like:
Joe Biden knew that world events beyond his control could spike gasoline prices, yet his fear that voters might punish him for this did not give him pause when he pursued an agenda from day one that discouraged North American production of oil and gas, including pausing drilling leases and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline. He was blasé about the risk that the American Rescue Plan would overstimulate the economy and spur inflation, ignoring the warnings of mainstream Democratic economists like Larry Summers. He spent much of 2021 trying to get Congress to approve a multi-trillion dollar package of new social spending that would have been even more inflationary. He approved an extra-legal cancellation of hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt in a manner never contemplated by Congress (so much for democracy!). His party has coalesced around increasingly rigidly progressive positions and rhetoric on issues including abortion, sex and gender, and immigration, and Biden himself moved in a more extreme direction on abortion by rejecting the Hyde Amendment, which he had long supported — hardly an effort to broaden the coalition.
Let's put aside the fact that the Biden Administration allowing more domestic energy production would likely not have had a demonstrable effect on gas prices. (I'm not even going to get into the notion that Biden should have seen the Russian invasion of Ukraine coming and prepared accordingly).
But Democrats have spent the last several election cycles running on a political and policy agenda of addressing climate change. They've talked incessantly about stopping new oil drilling and shutting down the Keystone pipeline. So what message does it send to their supporters if they blithely cast aside that long-held position?
At this point, you might be asking why I've spent several hundred words laying waste to a weak, underdeveloped argument like this one.
The first reason is that it gets to a point I've raised before about the "Pundit Fallacy." This is when a political observer casts an argument about a political party's flawed political strategy based on their personal biases. Barro is a Republican or, at the very least, Republican-friendly. Surely he'd like to see the Biden Administration pursue a GOP-friendly policy agenda. And while it might appeal to voters like him, he's failing (as pundits often do) to consider the larger effect of such a move on voters who are not like him. If you think Democratic voters are merely robots who will vote for anyone with a "D" next to their name, no matter what they do in office, then his argument makes sense. If you think about the tricky job of navigating a broad coalition of tens of millions of registered Democratic voters, you might have more humility in suggesting what political strategies Democratic politicians should embrace. In the days and weeks after the midterm elections, you're going to be bombarded with a shit-ton of post-mortems on why Democrats didn't do better (assuming they lose the House and/or Senate). When you read them, consider the author's biases and assess accordingly.
Second, it's essential to remember — and sometimes it often gets forgotten in our obsessive focus on political strategy — that democracy isn't just about procedural norms. It's also fundamentally about responsiveness to voters. If a political party runs on a political agenda with a particular set of policy goals, they need to make every effort — once they achieve power — to implement them. Not only is there clear political logic to acting that way, but it's also crucial from a small "d" democratic perspective. Voters need to be confident that their vote means something and produces the policy outcomes they prefer. You can't argue, as Barro does, that Democrats should take safeguarding democracy more seriously by ignoring the deal they made with voters to win congressional majorities and the White House in 2018 and 2020. It's an even worse argument when you consider that there is literally not a single historical precedent for Barro's strategy.
Doing things they've promised to do is even more important for Democrats because it is a party of "doing things" (the GOP is the party of stopping things). If the price of Democrats passing a significant chunk of their policy agenda is losing control of Congress two years later, then so be it. But what exactly is the point of electing Democrats if they are not going to make every effort to enact their ambitious policy agenda? (To his credit, Barro does acknowledge this point by noting that it was worth losing the 2010 election if it meant passing Obamacare).
And look, I get it. I should probably be the last person to accuse anyone of thinking too much about the inside baseball of politics. It's half of what I do in this newsletter, but it's also important to remember that the success of any democracy relies on the extent to which it reflects the will of voters. And beyond that, no political party, particularly one in a two-party system like the United States has, can satisfy every constituency. In an ideal world, Democrats would focus all their energy on upholding democracy because, after all, it's pretty dam important. But so, too, is fighting climate change? So too, is reducing child poverty? So too, is ensuring that Americans can afford health insurance? I could go on, but you get the idea.
Political parties in America are bizarre amalgamations, and it's legitimately impossible to focus on one issue at the expense of all others. To suggest, as Barro does, that if Democrats truly thought upholding democracy was important, they "would have governed differently" and that since they didn't, "they are not actually serious about the arguments they're making now" belies a fundamental misunderstanding about how party politics in America work — and more importantly, how democracies work.
What’s Going On
Things ain’t looking good for congressional Democrats … though it seems John Fetterman remains narrowly ahead.
I wrote a bit more in depthly about Paul Pelosi and the depravity of the GOP response to his assault.
Really good takedown of that recent Intercept piece on the Biden Admiinistraiton supposedly clamping down on misinformation online.
Read John Ikenberry on why American power endures.
Musical Interlude
This is an excellent article.
Here's an explanation for Barro's weak arguments: he knows Republicans won't pay him any attention, and he can't bear the thought of giving up his public podium. Any old argument that generates a thousand or so words will do!