Right-wing media is going to keep working to drive splits on the left. Sadly, in 2016, they were able to paint Hillary Clinton as an insider and Donald Trump as a “populist” by focusing solely on the amount of experience one had as a politician and the other didn’t.
Breitbart and others have already run attacks on Kamala Harris that try to paint her as an insider by linking her to Hillary and Democratic donors.
These attacks take advantage of a couple of beliefs that liberals who come from the academic world often have. These beliefs are:
- That politicians create change
- That running someone with the best policy ideas is how to win elections
Basically, we often want our politicians to be leading-edge activists. Here is a friend of mine stating this in different words:
We know the right will keep working to drive this wedge. According to the attacks, if your politicians don’t do exactly what you want, you should not vote.
Since this was successful in 2016, we’re going to see more and more of these attacks. Here are a few thoughts on how these attacks work—and how to defeat them.
The Enlightenment narrative and politics
Most liberals that I know believe in what I’ll call the Enlightenment narrative. This is the narrative about science. In Enlightenment thinking, the best ideas win through a process of peer review.
Logic and science are king.
Quite literally, actually. Many of the hierarchies in the academic world are based on who has the most certifications or who has the most publications. We value knowledge. In our view, all thought is rational.
Here’s George Lakoff on the Enlightenment narrative:
If you’re a Democrat and you go to college and are interested in politics, you’re going to study political science and some law, public policy, economics. And in those fields, there is no cognitive science study by the faculty or anybody else. They learn what is called “Enlightenment reason”–that is, Descartes 1650: all thought is supposed to be conscious,when it’s 98 percent unconscious; it’s literal, so there’s no metaphor, therefore, in rational thought, which is ludicrous; that there is no such thing as framing; that statements fit the world or they don’t; that language is neutral, it fits the world, and so on. They learn that you want to use the most popular language. That what makes us people is we’re all rational animals, and therefore we have the same reason, because we’re all human beings. So it follows from that: If you tell people the facts, that will lead them to the right conclusion.
Not only do we believe that reason is the most important thing when it comes to politics, but we also tend to have certain beliefs about politics and politicians.
We believe that our politicians should be activists who are fighting for what are the best, most logical policies. All we have to do is take a survey of what policies people want and then politicians should just run on the ones that poll the highest.
What this neglects is that all politics are moral. You can think of morality like a second tectonic plate beneath the surface, one that really drives who people vote for. If a politician doesn’t match their morality, their values, it doesn’t matter what policies someone says they support.
This is why the right talks so much about values. They want certain values to be dominant and their values stem from a strict father morality. They value the strong, the rich, the dominant, the individual. They value authority and order.
They are able to elect terrible politicians because, over the course of 40 years, corporate special interests have spent massive amounts of money on propaganda to shift America’s values. This is why there are thousands of pundits on the air demonizing the public sector and spouting their views about how selfishness and the individual is all that matters.
If this analysis is correct, what does it mean?
It means a number of things that run counter to our Enlightenment views about politics.
It means that politicians aren’t Enlightenment leaders. They don’t tend to push the boundaries of social progress. Politicians do one thing and one thing only: they get elected in the current environment of social values.
It means that if we want change, we need to speak to and move peoples’ values. This is what activists tend to do. The more we stand up and talk about our own values of fairness, caring, and democracy, the more we lead and the more we work to shift the moral landscape.
The way change happens looks like this:
Social change -> Political change -> Policy change
It also means that we should be thinking about ways to do this through the media (if we really want to reach a lot of people).
All of this needs to happen in order to elect politicians with liberal values. Conservatives are now able to elect terrible Ayn Randian candidates because they’ve shifted America’s values.
We need both activists and people who can get elected
The latest propaganda wants us to make a false choice. It says we should hate politicians. It says we shouldn’t support politicians unless they believe everything we believe. It says our politicians should be like our best activists.
A better way to think about this is that we need both activists and politicians who can get elected.
Activists work to shift our values. They speak to what’s most important and they often act as moral beacons. Conservatives put their best activists on the air and in the media. They send them to media schools where they learn how to talk to the public. And they develop short soundbites to represent and push what they believe to center stage.
We need liberal activists.
At the same time, however, we need politicians who can get elected. No one ever got elected because people didn’t support them.
The idea that all our politicians should be bleeding edge liberal activists is a terrible one. Bernie Sanders can win in Vermont and Elizabeth Warren can win in Massachusetts but there are many areas of the country where neither of them would stand a chance.
Since the attacks worked the last time, they’re going to happen again. We’re already seeing them against Kamala Harris.
If and when we call for unity, this always sounds like “I want you to agree with me.” It’s not very effective.
A much better way to win people over is to talk to them about how we need both our activists and our politicians. Yes, we need folks like Elizabeth Warren who are able to push the envelope on social values.
But we also need people who can win elections.
David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy (also available as an ebook).