Imagine if Christians took a year off from the culture wars … No, you can’t escape the culture wars, even if you wanted to.
—Daniel Darling, V.P.
Southern Baptist Communications
Better wages, more good jobs, less inequality — we all agree that’s the ticket. But are those the keys to winning? Sanders says yes. But in Chapter 2 we saw that Sean McElwee, the Berniecrat pollster and the favorite radical intellectual of websites like Vox and Slate, didn’t seem to be buying it.
He said that “Sanders … convinced a lot of progressive leaders that his white working-class voters were supporting a progressive agenda.” That means progressives bought his economic analysis and tried to use it to win in 2018. But that had them “knocking on doors in [for example] rural Wisconsin,” and that hadn’t worked. According to McElwee, the radicals failed because they bought the economic diagnosis.
It also didn’t seem to work for Sanders in 2020. This might not matter, except that the economic-insecurity explanation of Trump’s base seems to have caught on with the entire Democratic Party (although only the radicals adhere to it slavishly). What if that’s completely wrong?
I’m certainly not suggesting that good jobs etc. are a bad idea or not important to Trump’s base. I’m just asking, what if Trump’s base either dislikes or does not care about radical economic policies, and does care about a completely different set of issues that we’re ignoring? If that’s why the radicals went nowhere in the 2018 election and 2020 primaries, then perhaps the Democratic Party is missing something big and needs to rethink its 2020 election strategy.
Most political scientists, as well as most of Trump’s base, think we’re missing the culture war — and they think that’s the biggest part of today’s politics. So before the Democrats adopt any more radical economic rhetoric, it’s worth comparing these two theories. This would not mean giving up our goals and aspirations. It would just mean smarter campaigning.
Testing Sanders in Denmark
Sanders’ radical-left theory claims that our social and political problems are rooted in economic inequality. Solve that problem and you’ll win over many working-class Whites and heal our social divisions. Trumpism will be vanquished.
He claims Denmark proves his case. It’s his favorite example. As many of us have known for decades, Denmark does a remarkably good job of reducing economic inequality, and it provides about the best safety net anywhere. I went there in 1974 and took their social-services tour because we all knew its reputation. I was enormously impressed. There’s no doubt in my mind that the U.S. should, in its own way, follow Denmark’s example.
But does that mean such economic policies, if implemented here, would win the culture war and win over the White working class? Does it even do that in Denmark? Sweden is Sanders’ second-favorite example. What’s happening to their politics?
Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard University who studies international populist movements, points to the surprisingly Trump-like populist movements in both Sweden and Denmark.
The right-wing Danish People’s Party, formed in 1995, sounds a lot like Trump, and it had the second-largest representation in Parliament in 2015. The Party’s stated goals are to protect the Monarchy and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark; to enforce a strict rule of law; and to limit immigration to prevent Denmark from becoming a multicultural society. This is almost identical to Trumpism.
Sanders’ socialist theory does not work in Denmark. So what’s going on? Norris summarizes the effect saying,
A lot of data suggests that countries with more robust welfare states tend to have stronger far-right movements. Providing white voters with higher levels of economic security does not tamp down their anxieties about race and immigration.
She conjectures that when people have economic security, their focus shifts to more polarizing cultural issues.
Testing Sanders’ American Example
Sanders tells us that after 1973, many good manufacturing jobs went away, wage growth slowed dramatically, and income inequality rose. He’s right. That’s why, according to Sanders, the White working-class left the Democratic Party. Hang on. Where did that come from?
The huge wave of the White working class that left the Democratic Party did so before 1973. The sour economy after 1973 had nothing to do with it.
Sanders is right that before 1973 the White working class was doing great. There were lots of good manufacturing jobs, rapid wage increases, low economic inequality, and LBJ had dramatically improved the social safety net with Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps. So what caused Trump’s White working-class base to leave the Democrats?
The short answer is the culture war. Not economic insecurity. And that war was started by the radical left. I was part of that, and everybody saw it happening. The counterculture made news for years. White kids started smoking dope and then dropping acid; guys grew their hair long. There was the Summer of Love in San Francisco and then almost half a million hippies flocked to Woodstock.
Political radicalism was even more culturally upsetting to the White working class. Often this is excused by citing the radicalism of the civil rights movement, but this is wrong for two reasons — that movement was not radical in the usual sense, and it did not upset and polarize the country. It was radical in that it advocated a dramatic and fundamental social change — the end of Jim Crow laws. But so did liberals. However, it rejected the dark side of radicalism that separates radicalism from liberalism, and it appealed to traditional American values.
That movement did not significantly polarize the country as is confirmed by the fact that four months after LBJ passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he was re-elected in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history.
Then came the true radicalism of the 1960s, beginning with Stokely Carmichael, who attacked Martin Luther King Jr. for being moderate or worse and launched the Black Power movement. The Black Panthers engaged the police in shootouts. After 1968, the antiwar movement went radical and backed the Weathermen (aka the Weather Underground), who declared war on America and launched their bombing campaign.
The White working class also played a role. In the Hard Hat Riot in New York City, about 200 construction workers were mobilized by the New York State AFL-CIO to attack some 1,000 college and high school students who were protesting the Vietnam War. And there was plenty of racism on display. But remember, this was all part of the culture war.
At the end of the eight-year period of 1964−1972, George McGovern, the radicals’ candidate, lost in a landslide that was the reverse of LBJ’s. And as I’ve mentioned, about 20 million voters left the party during those eight years. That was the White middle class and working class doing the walking. They amounted to 40% of the Democratic Party — lost due to the culture war.
Sanders’ economic theory says that between 1964 and 1972, the White working class, which was doing great economically, should have been swinging left, toward McGovern. But 20 million headed the other way.
Culture-war theory says that between ‘64 and ‘72, the White working class, which was then deeply offended by left radicalism, should have been swinging right, away from McGovern. And it was.
Even though Sanders knows this economic data, he is so blinded by his socialist analysis, which maintains that economics explains all politics, that he can’t see the obvious. His theory predicts that restoring good jobs, rising wages and high tax rates on the rich, like we had before 1973 would bring back the white working class. Yet, when we had all that, that was when the largest slice of the working class left the Democratic party. When radicals give you advice about elections, it’s quite likely to be backwards. Chapter 18 partly explains why this is.
Check it with Nixon. George Wallace and Richard Nixon are the experts on the culture war. They led those 20 million Whites out of the Democratic Party.
Just listen to their slogans. Wallace: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Nixon: “Stand Up for America,” “Law and Order.” McGovern was ridiculed as the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion.” This was an attack on the hippie counterculture, the draft dodgers in Canada and the women’s movement. Nixon implicitly blamed the largely-Black urban riots on the Black Power movement. None of which has to do with Sanders’ economic arguments. Those are all culture-war issues. Wallace and Nixon knew exactly what they were doing. They knew that culture-war issues were more powerful than a booming, low-inequality economy. Radicals don’t get it.
That Was Then; Is It Different Now?
By November 2016, the unemployment rate was down to 3% in North Dakota and 2.9% in South Dakota. For decades, neither state has had a shortage of good, hard-hat oil and gas jobs. Yet what happened? Trump won by 36% in North Dakota and by 30% in South Dakota.
This is just what we saw in the late 1960s. Although economic conditions were good for winning back Trump’s base — according to the socialist theory — Trump still won overwhelmingly. Once again, the culture war trumped economics.
Meanwhile, Blacks, with roughly 10% unemployment (compared to the national average of under 5%) voted heavily for Clinton (76%). So exactly where Sanders’ theory would predict a group should abandon the Democrats, they overwhelmingly voted for them. Culture-war concerns were the reason.
In all these cases, Sanders’ theory points to the opposite of what happened. The culture-war view gives the obvious and correct answer.
A Sociologist Gets to Know Trump’s Base
But Trump’s base also wants more jobs and better pay. Doesn’t that prove there’s some truth to the economic theory? Actually, no. The problem is that while they do want good jobs, they don’t want to get them through “socialist” policies. To check this out, I turned to a sociologist who got to know Trump’s base.
Arlie Hochschild, the author of Strangers in Their Own Land, is a sociology professor at U.C. Berkeley and a Bernie Sanders supporter. She spent five years interviewing Tea Party and Trump supporters in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she concluded that Trump supporters were mainly upset with “people of color, women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers,” and with environmental causes. They viewed all of these as, in effect, “cutting in line” in front of them.
When I asked her at a book talk about how they would feel about taxing the rich to fund a huge infrastructure program to provide jobs, she regretfully answered that they would oppose it. In other words, their primary concerns were all cultural. To the extent that they are concerned about jobs, they blame their problems on discrimination against them by progressive programs, and they don’t want the government creating the jobs.
They far prefer Trump’s approach to adding more jobs: build a wall and wage trade wars with China and Mexico. To cap it all off, Trump’s base sees Democratic regulations and the taxing of business as job killers.
Like it or not, the Democrats, and especially the radical left, need to understand the politics they are dealing with. That doesn’t mean changing our goals, but it does mean not being needlessly offensive. And it also means listening to the other side. They may have some legitimate points. For example, as Sanders used to point out, some of them may be losing jobs to immigrants, documented or undocumented.
Ripped Apart
