Realignments And The Two Americas

Can Democrats Win Back Cultural Conservatives?

The thing that writing fiction has shown me this year, as I’ve written the comical amount of it I have this year that’s so far unpublished, is that you need to spend a lot of time making sure you understand your characters not just as plot devices, but at a more intimate level. If you can't explain your characters’ preferences around music, TV, movies, what sports they watch, what books they read, whatever that is for the story you’re telling, you haven’t done a good enough job. Fiction writing is a process of world building, and to build a world that’s compelling you have to really dig into who your characters are and what makes them tick - otherwise, you get one-dimensional plot instruments.

If you view your characters as plot devices, you end up writing what might be very compelling plot, but you don’t care, because the characters are so uninteresting that you don’t understand them. The best works of fiction all are enhanced by depth of character - think about how we associate the works of Tarantino with the songs used as motifs throughout his works, or the way My Cousin Vinny is elevated from a forgettable comedy to a classic by the recurring gags, from the inability to sleep to Joe Pesci’s character’s suits and the contempt the Judge has for him. That movie is elevated because it understands the world it is in, and without that understanding, it would be an incoherent mess.

The same thing applies to most political analysis these days, somehow.

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I think people have got this wrong about me, so let’s just get something on the record - if the Democratic Party could win additional Senate seats by running conservative Democrats in those seats, they absolutely should do so.

My objection to the path that many advocate, which is a pivot back to Democrats doing better with working class, culturally conservative voters isn’t a personal preference, but a belief it would be a strategic mistake. If we could nominate ardent homophobes and win Senate seats in Missouri or Tennessee or South Carolina that way, sign me the fuck up. I’d love it, because I’m an electoral realist, and the one vote that would justify that strategy is the one to make Chuck Schumer majority leader. Once they’ve done that, they can vote against us as often as they like, because being in the majority is so much fucking better than being in the minority.

My objection is solely that trying to turn the clock back won’t work, and I tend to be opposed to useless acts. Social liberalism got us the Senate majority we have now, because without it, we have 0 seats out of Arizona and Georgia, and we currently have *checks notes* all four of them. I mean, they can’t be that important, it’s not like we have a 50/50 Senate or something, right? Oh. Wait.

The thing that makes me so fucking mad about the argument that there is this sunlit uplands just waiting for the Democratic Party if they just make cosmetic and substantively meaningless changes in direction - basically, tilting towards cultural conservatism in meaningless ways while still being a broadly socially liberal party - is that if it was that fucking easy, wouldn’t someone else have figured it out by now? If all we had to do to win back lost working class voters was to say bland platitudes about how wokeness is bad or how the San Francisco school board renaming all the schools was bad is all it took, wouldn’t we have done it already?

The problem with this analysis is it’s a bunch of educated, wealthy whites who don’t get the voters they’re talking about, because the world they live in is alien to the one the coastal elites who have blue checkmarks and live in the Acela corridor live in - and discussions about what could play well in Youngstown is entirely divorced from the reality of the voters who live there. If you’re working on a caricature of who these people are and what matters to them, you’ll end up fucking up the analysis, in the same way that I fucked up a lot of my 2020 analysis because my biases got in the way. I thought Biden could do Obama-2012 levels in the rurals and extend Hillary’s margins in the suburbs, and boy oh boy was that wrong, because I didn’t realize why the rurals had turned against us.

To understand US elections these days is to understand that Southlake and south Texas will not trend the same way, and that you are trading votes between them. A Southlake strategy will necessitate losing south Texas, and a south Texas strategy will necessitate losing the gains in Southlake. You want to do better in north Fulton and Forsyth? Say goodbye to any chance of improving much in Mahoning. The thing about these places - the educated, wealthy suburbs full of social liberals that are embracing the Democratic Party, and the rural and regional towns and cities that are running from us, is that these two groups of places want very different Americas. One wants an America where I am welcome, where I am free to be myself, where I can give my partner the soft affection of a kiss in public without fear, and the other wants an America where people like me don’t exist in their lines of sight, where homosexuality is a thing that happens in other places, and other people have to deal with it.

One part of America reacts to someone coming out with love and happiness, and the other reacts with dread. One part views it as a thing to embrace and celebrate, and the other views it as a thing to be managed, a flaw to be loved in spite of. You think I’m just some city slicker projecting my biases? My uncle, who has spent the majority of his life in Alberta, doesn’t know I’m gay, because he’s a homophobic asshole who would take the news horribly. I have to hide it whenever I have the displeasure of seeing him, and it is hell - but it is also a useful insight to how these people think. Cultural conservatism isn’t an abstract concept to me - I’ve lived it. And I know there’s no coming back for the Democratic Party because of it.

I would love the Democratic Party to be able to attract culturally conservative voters to our party in 2022, but it won’t happen, because the America cultural conservatives want is fundamentally different than the one social liberals want. The voters coming to us in Forsyth and Southlake want a fundamentally different world than the voters running right in Youngstown and south Texas. Pretending otherwise is malpractice.