Quote:
Originally Posted by Phone Booth
Actual messaging directed at black voters would also not hurt. Right now what I'm seeing a lot of is messaging directed at white liberals pretending to be concerned about blacks. And what many blacks are cynical about is precisely the kinds of stuff that I'm calling out. Because of much of the left's concern for social justice has to do with appearance rather than genuine conviction, they are not actually able to deliver. Also, they are not stupid - they know the same white liberals who look down on the white working class also look down on them. Cut out this crap, underpromise and overdeliver.
If you want to engage the black voters, as opposed to a few confused urban activists, you need to understand the role of faith in their communities, adopt religious metaphors, understand the language and the concerns of the working class, learn to empathize with the downtrodden. Pretty much the same thing you need to do with the white working class that liberals are not doing.
This is veering into a mish-mash of the same sort of signaling you're decrying, and still not at all responsive to the points others have made that and are backed up empirically,
that the intersection between campaign themes and promises and governance are actually pretty large. .
So: in one paragraph we go from "left's concern for social justice has to do with appearance rather than genuine conviction" and then you go on to ratify a strategy where Democrats posture working class virtue signaling ("you need to understand the role of faith in their communities, adopt religious metaphors, understand the language and the concerns of the working class, learn to empathize with the downtrodden.")
I'll repeat yet again but this seems like just well-articulated but ultimately trite wisdom: Democrats need to hire better actors and faces and pivot their messaging to be more explicitly in-line with working class interests. Fine, whatever, do that. But then you don't get the whole "oh look how cynically working class blacks view the Democrats, just like the working class whites view Democrats, it's all a bunch of empty messaging right now!"
I agree on the merits that Democrats are maybe far too wedded to modern cosmopolitan norm signaling and you can flip it around and be more genuine populists. That will help with working class whites, blacks, Latinos, and others -- agreed. But let's face it, any dime store pundit is saying that thing, neither you or are I are adding much here to nod along with it.
I'll just caution yet again -- points you have yet to really address and instead repeated some ultimately banal pop-psych stuff we all intuitively understand (e.g., Democrats lost working class whites and didn't inspire blacks because of too much identity politics and not enough messaging working class people understand; e.g., they sound too much like America's professors, they don't sound enough like America's pastors.)
The cautions:
1) this strategy has been tried and the Republicans were pretty good at recognizing and undercutting the Democrats ("Billy Bob Clinton loves plowing white trash, but also, they're poseurs, elite Yaliens!") and moving the Overtone Window further and further into the right-wing populist sphere such that Democrats could never satisfy a lot of white working and middle class types because the GOP always had a more sincere option that held closer to white identity politics than Democrats ever could be.
That is to say: Democrats tried this, it did not lead to a durable winning coalition, and the GOP had answers for it.
2) Democrats had a very hard time during this period separating the campaign from governance. Valenzuela has made this point, and I've made this point. You've just hand-waved it away and then pivoted back to referencing some 4 year old posts on affirmative action but still, that Dick Morris and Mark Penn and Doug Schoen were political message makers during the 1990s, advocated more or less what you are ("white working class sees you as weak! Get tough on crime! Mandatory sentencing!") and that Democrats like Clinton and Biden not only followed but led here, and they've now had to walk into black communities for the last ten years and apologize profusely for it -- that's a pretty strong refutation of your point that Democrats can simply flip the switch and just become the World's Best Bait-n-Switch Artists.
It's fine if you want to argue it honestly and say, well, look, Clinton-era Third Way strategies are better than Trump, but that means you will have to walk back the identity politics in both message and policy. Just at least be honest with people it's not some magical solution and that the political class is just as unprincipled as voters and if they see defeat on the horizon (1994) will pivot hard to acting on white working/middle class grievance instead of just pandering to it and there's a whole generation of black guys rotting in prisons due to non-violent drug offenses because of it. I know you'll be here with some 4 year old posts with ham-handed pop-psych about how that's not important and not even policy and doesn't even matter and no liberal actually worked hard enough to avoid that, shame on them.
But the actual realistic, predictable outcomes is that if you aggrandize working class and middle class virtue signaling there's no reason politicians won't see fit to act on them, and to the extent those virtues are wrapped around dealing with black protestors authoritatively and deporting migrants and stuff, you're basically playing with fire some behind the scenes Bait-n-Switch political actors can withstand the understandable political self-preservation pressures that go with appealing to the working classes bad impulses.