Democrats, Pronouns, And Nostaligia
On The Pressing Matter Of Commentariats
At the end of last week, we got another bromide in the never-ending war of takes on whether or not Democrats caring about Trans rights is costing the party or not, this time from Fareed Zakaria. It’s the same shit every time we get this form of argument – “Democrats need to be the party of doing things, not pronouns” – and now it’s launched another battle of everyone talking past each other.
Let’s talk through some of the things that we know, at this point: It is factually accurate to say that the voters who Democrats have lost in the last decade are likely to have views on Trans rights that could be described either as transphobic, or at the very least retrograde. It is also accurate to say that the voters they’ve won are likely to have at least reasonably pro-Trans rights views – they might not support Trans women playing in sport with cisgender women (which we’ll get back to), but they’re at least inclined to support the community.
That’s basically all we can or should feel very confident in writing, but instead of focusing on that, the broader war ends up extrapolating two very different positions from that – that Trans rights and pronouns “cost” Democrats Obama-Trump votes, and that Trans rights has had no effect because it’s such a low salience issue, and anyways, it’s a majority supported position, so therefore it’s not an electoral loser. And the problem with this is, they’re just talking past each other in sequence.
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Have Democrats lost any large number of votes specifically because of Trans rights issues? Probably not. I have yet to see any empirical evidence that this is an issue with a high enough salience – specifically amongst 2012 or 2008 Obama voters – to have moved people to the GOP.
Has the general perception that Democrats are more focused on “other people” – women, gay people, trans people, immigrants, the incarcerated, to give a (mostly exhaustive) list – cost them meaningful amounts of Obama-Trump votes? 1000%, and this is the distinction that so many miss.
It’s very rare that any specific policy issue ever moves a large number of votes, unless it’s a specific industry issue (say, military contracts given or taken away). Yes, the Civil Rights Act did in the South in the US, but even then, it’s not like Jimmy Carter didn’t win the Presidency in ’76 almost entirely on southern strength. That was also a much different situation than the one currently faced – the Civil Rights movement the defining battle of that decade, whereas no cis person except those close to a Trans person cares about this issue with anything like the fervour of white segregationists.
But to say that it has no impact is also a denial of the fact that Democratic losses in the last decade have been concentrated with people who think that the Democratic Party is too focused on dumb irrelevances, instead of the issues that preoccupy them. Is it all social policy? No, it’s a lot energy and climate policy as well, as older workers in industries that aren’t as viable in a new, green economy end up fighting to keep what they have, but it’s also a lot of people whose views on these sorts of social issues are at odds with the new Democratic consensus.
It's a statement of the bloody obvious that the Democratic Party losing voters with culturally conservative views at the same time that they moved to a pro-gay marriage, pro-expanded abortion access, pro-Trans rights platform that also talks a lot about police brutality and being anti-racist wasn’t an accident. It’s not an accident that Democratic support amongst pro-choice voters is up and support with pro-life voters is down. Joe Biden won by basically the same amount as Obama did the second time, and he outperformed his old boss by 34% in (rich, socially liberal) Southlake, TX and underperformed by 31% in (rural, culturally conservative) Ross County, Ohio. None of this was an act of God, it was the obvious outcome of Democratic strategy.
“But what about Pat McCrory losing in 2016?” I hear you ask, when the GOP lost the Governorship in North Carolina over the bathroom bill. Except, what happened there was simple – everywhere else that year, downballot Republicans underran Trump in the Trumpier eras of the state as swing voters voted for Trump and a slate of Democrats, and then outran Trump in the left-trending suburbs. What McCrory did was lose ground in the Trumpier areas and then either run even with, or underrun, Trump in the left-trending areas, because the Trans right stuff paid him no comparative benefit in the rurals but cost him dearly in the suburbs and cities. But even then, Roy Cooper still did much worse than most Democrats did in rural North Carolina before him – he just did much better than them in the cities, too.
If the GOP go too far and the opening is left for Democrats to attack anti-Trans bills not on principle, but on competence grounds – because the Democratic message in North Carolina wasn’t a moral play, it was that McCrory was fucking the state’s economy and businesses over with it – then it can be a winning issue for Democrats. The problem is, right now, Trans rights are not as popular as gay rights, and so the ability to use them as a wedge with Republicans doesn’t exist.
The funny thing about all of this is that Democrats passing the Respect For Marriage Act last night in the House is that that bill is also a distraction from the business of “doing things”, and one that will further entrench Democratic disfavour with a section of Obama-Trump voters, and yet the commentariat is cheering the political wisdom of passing that. The reason they are is that they correctly see that this is going to force Republicans to take a stand, and will allow Democrats to peel off a lot of Romney-Trump voters who are very shaky about Trump, and keep their gains with Romney-Biden voters.
When it comes to gay rights, the focus isn’t just on the losses, but also on the future gains that come from the socially liberal coalition coming home to the Democratic Party in greater numbers. For some reason, that same logic doesn’t exist with Trans rights, where the fixation of the commentariat is to focus on what votes we’re losing, and pretending that it is somehow on Trans Americans that those losses have occurred. Throwing the Trans community under the bus while maintaining the socially liberal consensus would get the Democratic Party nothing except a lot of vitriol from their left flank.
This desire to blame Trans rights for this obvious decline is about the fact that while the vast majority of the New York and DC commentariat know and like quite a lot of gay people, there isn’t the same predominance of Trans people in elite circles. Throwing Trans people under the bus is the go to because some Democrats want a silver bullet to smashing electoral success, and deluding themselves that this is it is easier than having a real conversation about the nature of their coalition and the choice they’ve made. And in so arguing, they’re not only needlessly throwing a group who needs our support and our love under the bus, they’re doing it for no benefit whatsoever.