Last week, I surveyed Republican efforts to subvert the teaching of U.S. history with white supremacist propaganda aimed at reproducing the bigotry of GOP politicians, who view racist manipulation as key to retaining power in a diversifying America over the coming decades. Rather than being a side issue that Democrats should easily dismiss, these attacks on basic American principles of equality and free thinking in schools pose a threat to American democracy as well as an enormous opening for Democrats to hit back against massive Republican overreach.
We are now beginning to see hard evidence that the GOP hasn’t just chosen an immoral side in this fight, but a highly unpopular one. In a column last week, Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent cites recent polling on the issue:
The poll finds that 83 percent of Americans say books should never be banned for criticizing U.S. history; 85 percent oppose banning them for airing ideas you disagree with; and 87 percent oppose banning them for discussing race or depicting slavery.
What’s more, 76 percent of Americans say schools should be allowed to teach ideas and historical events that “might make some students uncomfortable.” And 68 percent say such teachings make people more understanding of what others went through, while 58 percent believe racism is still a serious problem today.
Finally, 66 percent say public schools either teach too little about the history of Black Americans (42 percent) or teach the right amount (24 percent). Yet 59 percent say we’ve made “a lot of real progress getting rid of racial discrimination” since the 1960s.
Among other things, these numbers give the lie to the idea that Republican politicians represent anything like majority opinion as they seek to sanitize and propagandize the teaching of U.S. history. Just the opposite — they represent a minority, even fringe opinion. These poll results are even more remarkable in light of the fact that Republicans have spent literally the last year attempting to incite public opinion to align with their war on U.S. history, with almost zero Democratic pushback, and still have built nothing close to majority support.
The big take-away for me, though, is how these polls demonstrate what Democrats should have already concluded based on political instinct, morality, and common sense: rather than Democrats being on shaky ground, it is the GOP that has made itself vulnerable by embarking on a racist initiative to rework the very nature of U.S. history education — an initiative that involves not just teaching white supremacist propaganda, but, as Sargent reminds us, also involves the incitement of violence against school officials as part of a broader campaign of intimidation against U.S. public education.
I won’t repeat my in-depth arguments for why Democratic hesitance to engage on this issue has been so wrong-headed, but I do want to delve more into the underlying question of why, exactly, Democrats would have such difficulty doing the morally correct and politically advantageous thing in this and other similar conflicts. Crooked’s Brian Beutler has long been hitting Democrats for their reluctance to engage in what they perceive as mere culture war sideshows, and has extensively documented the self-defeating nature of this disinclination; in a recent newsletter, he revisited some ideas about why this might be the Democrats’ default position. Noting the the double-edged news that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has belatedly registered the power of culture war attacks by Republicans, and is looking at strategies to neutralize those attacks through more effective fact-checking, he writes:
I see Democrats’ late grappling with the potency of GOP culture war tactics as both necessary and terribly myopic. It’s also of a piece with the party leadership’s tendency to recoil from partisan matters in general—to react, rather than take charge, only when forced, and to do so in the most shrunken and narrowcast possible way.
[. . .] The way I’d put it is that the most important division in Dem politics isn’t left vs. center—it’s partisan and procedural boldness vs. timidity.
[. . .] Because they’re scared, Democrats can’t seem to recognize the GOP’s huge and obvious vulnerabilities when they arise, let alone exploit them. Whatever the bone of contention happens to be on any given day, Republicans approach it by trying to disrupt the Democratic OODA loop, and Democrats, almost always playing for defense, let it happen. It’s allowed Republicans to set the terms of national discourse on almost all issues—the economy, the pandemic, education, everything outside the penumbra of January 6—with the federal government under unified Democratic control.
I don’t want to be too reductionist with Beutler’s many nuanced observations over the years, but I want do draw out a common theme I see between the points above and in his previous columns: the Democrats’ apparent lack of conviction and confidence in their own policy positions, let alone in their ability to win fights over more amorphous culture war issues where, far more often than not, right and majority opinion are on their side. This assumption of their own lack of popularity and righteousness, I would submit, is an awfully strange attitude for a political party to take!
Beutler’s references to the Democrats being “scared” as well as timid on partisan and procedural fronts are important parts of the puzzle, reminding us that whatever the deeper reasons for their political decision-making, Democratic leaders bear ultimate responsibility for whether they choose to fight or flee. Here, psychology, as well as basic realities like the advanced age of what some describe as the Democrats’ gerontocratic leadership, may certainly play a part.
The interaction of age and outdated conceptions of politics is something that Thomas Zimmer touches on in a recent exploration of why Democrats so often pull their punches in critiquing their GOP opponents. Zimmer notes that older Democratic leadership figures “came up in a very different political environment, when there was indeed a great deal of bipartisan cooperation in Congress.” To be a bit provocative: their age means they are somewhat stuck in the past, unable to acknowledged the current highly partisan reality. But Zimmer gets closer to the heart of what’s holding many Democrats back when he writes that:
The way some establishment Democrats have acted suggests they feel a kinship with their Republican opponents grounded in a worldview of white elite centrism. Their perspective on the prospect of a white reactionary regime is influenced by the fact that, consciously or not, they understand that their elite status wouldn’t necessarily be affected all that much. The Republican dogma – that the world works best if it’s run by prosperous white folks – has a certain appeal to wealthy white elites, regardless of party.
[. . .] American political discourse is still significantly shaped by the paradigm of white innocence. Economic anxiety, anti-elite backlash, or just liberals being mean – whatever animates white people’s extremism, it must not be racism, and they cannot be blamed for their actions [. . .] The idea of white innocence also clouds Democratic elites’ perspective on Republican elites: Since they cannot possibly be animated by reactionary white nationalism, they must be motivated by more benign forces, fear of the Trumpian base perhaps, or maybe they are being seduced by the dangerous demagogue.
Zimmer’s observations takes on even greater resonance — and persuasiveness — when we consider that the root of so much of our current political conflicts, whether on the level of policy or “culture war,” is a mammoth struggle over whether we will be a white supremacist nation or one that accords all Americans political equality regardless of skin color or race. Certainly this seems to be Zimmer’s understanding in making his observations quoted above, and it allows us to circle back and more fully answer the question we started with: what’s behind Democrats’ reluctance to fight back against Republican white nationalist authoritarianism with the ferocity and single-mindedness needed to win this fight, even when a clear majority of Americans are on their side and not doing so threatens the very survival of both democracy and the Democratic Party?
I think Zimmer’s discussion of what amount to white supremacist blind spots among Democratic leaders does much to explain their maddening reluctance or inability to take the fight to the GOP. At a basic level, Democratic leaders don’t want to admit the centrality of racism to our current politics, and the necessity of aiming for the destruction of white supremacism, because they literally can’t imagine a world without it. Too many have internalized its benefits and feel immune to its worst consequences. It’s simply beyond conception that it might be eliminated or brought completely to heel; their imaginations simply cannot make that leap.
But I think we can go further, and say that not only has this blinded them to the nature of their Republican opposition, this has equally blinded them to the nature of the the American people they purport to serve — not just to the racism of so many white Republicans who will never be wooed into the Democratic fold by kitchen table appeals, but to the burning desire in millions of Americans to do all that’s possible to destroy, degrade, and nullify white supremacism as a force in this country. Instead, for too many Democratic leaders, elevating the pernicious role of white supremacism in public consciousness must only hurt the Democratic Party by forcing white Americans to choose race over principle, which they fear will push millions of white Democratic voters into the GOP camp, or at best, into non-voting neutrality. The Democratic Party is gripped by a primordial, even unconscious fear that the GOP will successfully label the Democrats as the non-white people’s party, and in this way administer a sort of coup de grace to the party’s prospects forevermore. This feeds their reluctance to make the obvious case that the inverse is true, and perniciously so — that the GOP has become not only the white people’s party, it has in fact become the party of white supremacism and its accompanying drive to authoritarian power against the American majority.
In turn, the Democrats’ inability to fully reckon with the white supremacist mindset that is rending our politics and leading the GOP into violent authoritarianism is preventing them from fully engaging against either authoritarianism or its racist roots. Democratic leaders place high importance on a conciliatory, bipartisan approach to politics, when what our country truly needs is a full disclosure and exploration of its actual conflicts and irreconcilable divisions. There cannot ever be peace or compromise with the forces of white supremacism, because white supremacism is not compatible with a full, multi-racial democracy. Yet Democrats leaders continue to behave as if this were not so, wish to deny the logic of the moment, leading to all manner of bizarre behavior like ducking out of fights about banning books and accurate teaching about the history of racism in America. In doing so — by failing to rally the majority that is already on their side, and by demoralizing their base by acting as if basic ideals aren’t worth fighting for, they actually make it more likely that they will lose future elections.