Charts To A Gun Fight

How the Fighting Democrats of 2007 became the timid, focus-grouped party of today.

(Photo by Eugene Mymrin)

I’ll reserve comment, at least briefly, on the grisly news in Israel and Gaza, both because the fog-of-war effect leaves little to responsibly say that isn’t also rote, and because my relevant expertise will draw me toward the partisan-domestic implications of a human calamity half way around the world, and I don’t feel like going there just yet.

As I mentioned in my welcome note, I think American liberals and their leaders in the Democratic Party have lost or abandoned the confidence and combative energy they’d developed by the end of George W. Bush’s second term. 

More precisely, I’d say a combination of factors—unpredictable events and changing contexts—contributed to the erosion of that kind of fighting spirit, which has been replaced by a spirit of timidity. 

When Barack Obama launched his first presidential campaign in 2007, Democrats had been locked out of power for over six years. For most of that time, the public just wanted Republicans rather than Democrats to run the country, but by the final stretch, the incumbent GOP had squandered its post-9/11 good will. Democrats had reason to be hungry; the public had an appetite for accountability; the stars aligned for Democrats to act like the rightful majority party in exile. 

Today, things look much different. Democrats have power, and have done pretty well in three consecutive elections; they are trying to keep it, not win it back. They are also chastened by the challenges of the Obama presidency, the backlash to it, and the semipermanent trauma of 2016. It didn’t take long after they won a formidable governing trifecta in 2008 for doubt to creep in. They badly (and mystifyingly!) underestimated the nihilism and extremism of the congressional GOP. They were blindsided by the backlash to Obama’s agenda, some of which was organic, much of which was cynically fomented, all of which gathered easily and intensely against the backdrop of the Great Recession. 

Then Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton and convinced many shellshocked liberals that their pre-Obama confidence, already on the wane, had been misplaced from the outset. That Americans (or American swing voters, at least) may have been done with Bush, but they weren’t therefore ready to sign up for the whole liberal catechism (pluralism, tolerance, big-city melting-pot sensibilities). Many of them wanted ethnic solidarity; they wanted a chauvinistic form of government preferences and a storyline that laid their hardships at the feet of outsiders; they wanted their caste to rule. 

A “don’t poke the bear” mentality has thus come to dominate center-left politics, and it often manifests as reactive scolding of progressive activists, their bolder policy goals, their intersectional politics, their pointy-headed idioms. Anything that might upset the Volk, or that scans as an argument for banishing Trump voters from the big tent, should be muffled. If it might make Democrats seem moderate, it’s worth doing, irrespective of whether it concedes too much to the right, or reinforces harmful stereotypes about the left.

I want to stipulate to all that, and concede that it adds up to a reasonable basis for caution. But I also believe it has metastasized into something paralyzing, something that exudes weakness. It has grown from simple lessons about discretion like “don’t call large numbers of voters ‘deplorable’ even if you think it’s true” (or, as Obama once put it in a different context, “don’t do stupid shit”) into a much more all-encompassing philosophy that discourages any risk taking, from reacting to events authentically to suppressing any hints that liberals think their values are good and should have mass appeal. If caution is warranted, it should extend all the way to personal affect—after all, the line between confidence and cockiness is blurry, and we should never take anything for granted. Aren’t sure where the country will come down on issues like trans health care and book bans? Better to just sit those fights out. The platonic Democrat is Conor Lamb, and the party should be wary of its John Fettermans. 

The Fetterman/Lamb primary embodied the phenomenon I’m trying to describe really well; Democratic groups went all in for a buttoned-up, overly disciplined party man, Democratic voters loved the punchier, less scripted guy, and he went on to flip a Pennsylvania Senate seat under harrowing conditions. But I don’t think the bumpy ride between 2008 and today can fully explain how the party reached that point. There was another contributing factor, or catalyst, which I fear we give short shrift, because it’s rooted in some of the very best things about liberalism—dispassionate analysis, empiricism, and reason.

Shortly after I got my start in journalism, Democrats began throw around the word “science” as both a dog whistle to their base voters and a values-based appeal to the public at large. They could say “we believe in science” knowing some people would hear “Republicans are medieval, religious fundamentalists who are so corrupted by fossil-fuel interests that they deny climate change” and others would hear “Republican arrogance and contempt for expertise, which got us into Iraq and wrecked the economy, has no limiting principle.” It was an effective rhetorical trick, and a perfect match for the late Bush years. It still resonates over a decade later, when the leader of the GOP is famous for saying “climate change is a hoax.”

But along the way somewhere it stopped being just a useful cudgel and came to dominate how Democrats and liberal elites think about everything, including politics. It’s all science, and we trust science. But, 1) no it’s not; and 2) it’s hard to be a spontaneous, confident politician if you believe there’s a real science to campaigning and you should never toss anything outside the formula into the mix.

The advent of poll aggregating, and the forecasting successes of Nate Silver, were benign precursors to something more insidious. On its own, poll aggregating amounted to a huge improvement over an earlier world of sweeping media narratives stitched together with yard signs, crowd sizes, and one-off surveys, whether or not they were outliers. The obsession with polling that followed the 538 boom has not been particularly healthy. It’s made polls and media about polls endogenous to politics, such that polls are often the entire basis for media narratives, and those same media narratives become drivers of subsequent poll findings. Republicans have thus taken to flooding aggregators with junk polls in uncompetitive races, in the hope of manipulating media narratives about national elections. Polling can now fulfill its own prophecies. 

But it’s also fed a sense within the Democratic Party that data science, as applied to politics, is very precise and can more or less tell candidates and campaigns what to do and how to talk. That Democrats should do and say nothing of consequence until it has been surveyed and run by focus groups.

This is a logical error that I think has to be corrected before Democrats can escape the uncanny valley full of Conor Lambs and emerge as a party of likable humans with good judgment, values, and instinct. 

But until very recently at least it was the reigning theory of Democratic Party politics. The 2022 midterms may have caused some rethinking—the themes strategists urged Democrats to avoid in that election turned out to be their most potent—but for a few years until then, the ascendant view in liberal circles held that politics was akin to a solved game, which could be won, or at least contested optimally, by trying to ascertain which policy issues and slogans gave survey-takers happy feelings, and then marching candidates out to drone on about them. (Talk about being tough on crime and fighting inflation, not about democracy and abortion.)

For years after the Affordable Care Act became law, Democrats didn’t want to talk about health care too much, because the public had soured on the issue, but then Donald Trump tried to repeal it, the law became popular, and swing-district Democrats started talking about health care a lot. One way to interpret this history is to conclude following the polls didn’t help Democrats much in 2014 and 2016, then did in 2018 when the issue was back on their side. But another is to ask how much health care mattered in any of those races. I honestly think none of them was principally about health-care policy. I’d argue Democrats made a big mistake by attributing their landslide victory in 2018 to effective health-care messaging, rather than to a nationwide antibody response to the horrible toxin of Donald Trump.

I want to walk a fine line here, because I don’t mean to suggest liberals are wrong to “trust science” or consult polling data or support improvements to the health-care policy status quo—I merely want them to consider the political limits of those methods. By the same token, I don’t think liberals should assume quantitative methods have no value or that data scientists are all swindlers—they should just be humble when applying their findings. There’s an important difference between “trusting science”—that is, say, believing your pollster when he says “your position on X is unpopular ”—and treating fundamentally human vocations like politics as problems science can settle—that is, following his advice when he says “ergo, if you say ‘not X,’ other humans will trust and like you more.” 

He can’t possibly know! Maybe the optimal choice is to talk about X less; maybe it’s to change how you talk about it; maybe it’s to abandon the position altogether; or maybe it’s to damn the torpedos and stand on principle—science can’t determine which course of action voters will respond best to, because the answer is entirely circumstantial.

When you convince yourself that chaotic, people-driven enterprises are perfectible, it opens the door to ideas that might seem liberal but are actually loopy and vulnerable to exploitation. In the realm of altruism, the idea that people should donate money wisely so that it does the most good (instead of, say, padding Harvard’s 11-figure endowment) briefly morphed into the idea that there’s a mathematically optimal way to donate, and even that there’s an optimal way to live life in the service of charitable deeds. “Try to find work you love, and give some back”—a good ethic for a healthy society—yielded philosophically to “earn to give”—the idea that it’s better to find ways to become rich so you’ll have more charitable dollars to lavish on the most effective charities. But (you may have caught on by now) it was a short hop from this dubious precept to the straight up fraud perpetrated by effective-altruism evangelist Sam Bankman-Fried. 

It’s no surprise to me that some of liberalism's most influential data-science practitioners and boosters found themselves tangled in his web of deceit. Their thinking about politics paralleled SBF’s ideas about charitable giving in unfortunate ways. It misconstrued politics (try to win people over) as something like antipolitics (just do what the computer says) in much the same way that E.A. misconstrued the idea of charity (be thoughtful and generous whenever possible) as something much more bloodless, utilitarian, and ultimately corrupt. 

And the potential for mischief is just as large, and potentially far more consequential, in the political realm: If elected officials believe optimal politics is merely an extension of data, then getting them to do whatever you want becomes a simple matter of feeding them surveys and memos that tell them those things are politically optimal. (A big soon-to-be-released study reportedly concludes there’s no persistent pattern in real-world political advertising to suggest one kind of message is better than any others, and I can’t wait to read it.)

Unless our legislators suddenly all become highly numerate (not gonna happen) they’ll keep following data (“data”) down mistaken paths—including the path that tells them to fight Donald Trump by chanting “fund the police!” then pivoting to insulin prices, while refusing to say his name out loud.