Since the 2016 election, New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall has analyzed the constituency of both our major parties in deeply insightful ways, and has become one of my go-to’s for trying to understand the origins and scope of our American political crisis. His writing on the GOP has been superb, but his thoughts on the Democratic Party in particular have delved into territory that progressives ignore at their peril. I’m hoping to revisit some of his arguments in full soon, but for the time being I want to talk a little about a column from early December.
Titled “Liberals Need to Take Their Fingers Out of Their Ears,” Edsall's piece engages with the thoughts of a pair of sociologists who argue that liberals and liberalism more broadly have played an important role in energizing the powerful right-wing movement of which Trump is the current apotheosis. As with many of his columns, Edsall brings in points of view with which I don’t necessarily agree, but which are deeply thought-provoking.
First, Karen Stenner argues that a liberal democracy such as that generally supported by the left can end up creating conditions that undermine it, by advocating values that threaten and provoke resistance from those with a far different mindset. She also asserts that these same values essentially involve a sort of unilateral disarmament on the part of the left — for instance, by insisting on the absolute value of free speech, it allows into the public sphere hateful or racist speech inimical to liberal values of tolerance. In a similar vein, but to my reckoning more grounded in the actuality of American politics and economics, Eric Schnurer tells Edsall that a combination of economic, demographic, and cultural changes make typical Trump voters feel that they are being left behind by the country, while at the same time these very changes are embraced as progress by their typical “blue state” counterparts. Finally, Edsall checks in with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who throws into the mix the idea that liberals have unhelpfully backed down from making a stronger public case that liberal government works — that we’re better off with environmental laws that give us clean air, that the welfare states lifts people out of poverty, that globalization has had some benefits for Americans. Synching up somewhat with Stenner’s framework, Pinker argues that there will always be a clash between “enlightenment values” and “innate tribalism,” but that modernity will ultimately prevail.
For me at least, the dialogue that Edsall facilitates here is heady, exciting stuff. It hits various sweet spots — inquiring into the nature of Trump voters’ grievances, exploring unexamined assumptions of Democratic and progressive voters, and suggesting that the way forward requires mass empathy for those millions of our fellow Americans who have embraced, to varying degrees, an un-American authoritarian in the White House. Backlash is an enormous part of Donald Trump’s rise to power — backlash against a black man in the White House, backlash against the cultural changes that are disorienting and weakening people’s sense of status in the world, and backlash against an economic system that seems not to serve most people any longer.
Yet all these backlashes are not created equal. The racism-infused reaction to the demographic and political rise of minorities is a sorry judgment on the state of much of white America’s claims to basic decency, and the conflict it embodies is not one from which liberals can retreat a single iota and still consider themselves liberal. Likewise, the backlash created by cultural developments such as gay marriage and the continuing empowerment of women in the workplace and society requires unyielding push-back. But the final leg of this destabilizing triad — our deindustrializing, globalizing, inequality-revving economy — is in my judgment the lynchpin and accelerant of these other two great clashes. This recent piece from Edsall, as with several over the past year, is so exciting to me because, in a nutshell, it suggests a dangerous complicity by otherwise liberal-minded people in an economic dynamic that is deeply damaging to people who, generally speaking, come from less urban areas, and who generally have a lower educational background. This dynamic is summarized well by Schnurer:
I don’t think there’s much argument that the modern economy is killing off small towns, US-based manufacturing, the interior of the US generally, etc. There is, or could be, an argument as to whether that’s just the necessary functioning of larger economic forces, or whether there are political choices that have produced, or at least aided and abetted, those outcomes. In any event, while most of us in Blue World see these changes as beneficent, they have had devastating effects on the economies of “red” communities.
[. . .]
The political, economic, and cultural triumph nationwide of a set of principles and realities essentially alien to large numbers of Americans is viewed as (a) being imposed upon them, and (b) overturning much of what they take for granted in their lives — and I don’t think they’re wrong about that. I think they’ve risen in angry revolt, and now intend to give back to the “elite” in the same terms that they’ve been given to. I don’t think this is good — in fact, I think it’s a very dangerous situation — but I think we need to understand it in order to responsibly address it.
I keep arguing that economic malaise has been key to creating conditions for cultural and racial resentment to boil over into a movement that presents an existential challenge to our democracy, but I want to be clear that the way people experience threats to their well being is not so neatly divided into the categories I’ve been discussing. The disturbance that millions of people are living through is felt so powerfully in part because it feels like it threatens them across a broad spectrum of their lives. If you’re a factory worker who’s lost a job, this undermines more than just your economic livelihood — for instance, it threatens more abstract but deeply important things like the culture you thought you were part of, and the way you view illegal immigrants who Fox News keeps telling you are the reason you lost your job.
While Edsall’s article raises the broad question of whether liberalism has in part created the forces that now threaten our political system, the question of whether liberalism has endorsed, tacitly or not, an economic regime that largely benefits them while doing great harm to great swathes of the population seems to me the most critical piece of our political puzzle. This is not only because I think economic unease is the great accelerant to cultural and racial resentment, but because it’s the one enormous part of our lives that we can actually exert real collective control over. So it becomes more than a little disturbing when you stop to consider whether too many progressives have either embraced, or failed to gauge the true harm of, a modern capitalism that has eviscerated entire regions of the country.
If you accept, at least for argument’s sake, that many Trump voters associate progressives and progressivism with a destructive free market capitalism, then the combination of cultural revanchism and economic protectionism that the president espouses begins to feel more understandable as a position that Trump supporters might see as a direct rejection of liberalism. If liberals have indeed placed themselves, implicitly or explicitly, on the side of an economic system that in serious ways contradicts or undermines values they hold dear, then this could help to explain some of the muddled state we have gotten ourselves into. The question of whether the economic benefits that have accrued to many Democrats over the past decades — particularly those at the higher end of the income scale — is slowing the party as a whole from acknowledging and addressing the real structural problems in our economy seems like a question worth pursuing. Better to bring the party's contradictions into the light of day than to let them fester unexamined.
