Do Progressives "Believe" the Realignment? It's a Moo Point.

Like a cow's opinion, you know, it just doesn't matter. It's moo.

I was recently speaking with a law student who raised a frustration common amongst advocates for the New Right. “I can point to all the comments and proposals I want from JD Vance and Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley,” she said of her conversations with more progressive friends, “but they just say they don’t believe those guys mean it.” My advice to her was simple: “Just tell them,” I advised, “that you couldn’t care less.”

Or to quote Joey Tribbiani, it’s a moo point: “Like a cow's opinion, you know, it just doesn't matter. It's moo.”

It’s a peculiar phenomenon, after all, that progressives deem themselves the authoritative arbiters of who actually cares about, speaks for, or can best represent the average American. They’re not exactly disinterested parties, nor have they ever shown any inclination to think seriously or introspectively about their opponents’ strengths or their own shortcomings. To the contrary, typical assessments resemble Thomas Frank’s infamous What’s the Matter with Kansas?, working from the premise that any working man not already in the Democratic Party column must be suffering from either false consciousness or outright exploitation.

I have a hard time thinking of anything less surprising than a progressive law student declaring he doesn’t believe conservatives care about workers, and an even harder time thinking of anything the conservatives could do that would change his mind. In all likelihood, it would take supporting the PRO Act’s goodie bag of Big Labor priorities, and also the Green New Deal (everyone knows climate change harms workers!), and a pathway to citizenship for every illegal immigrant in the country (they are “workers” too!), and of course student-debt forgiveness (workers have student debt, almost as much as progressive law students, a happy alignment of interests). In other words, don’t expect to satisfy a progressive with anything short of becoming a progressive.

My appearance last week on Jon Stewart’s podcast, The Weekly Show, followed this same recipe, with a healthy scoop of “What about Trump?” poured on top. For the most part, I found it a pleasant and engaging conversation about the return of conservative economics (give it a listen!), but it was amazing the number of times he returned to his belief that this can’t be happening because that’s not what Trump says.

His producers previewed the episode online as: “How is a candidate who hates paying overtime and applauds mass cuts pro-worker? Jon gets into Trump’s contradictions and how his inconsistencies have impacted the Republican Party.” Then they titled the episode, “Jon Stewart Dives into MAGA's Contradictory Politics.” I guess they know their audience. For what it’s worth, I thought this exchange summed up the quality of that argument pretty well (rough transcript):

OC: But again, you're still going back over, and over again. I agree that Donald Trump is the head of the party today. I think the question is “what is post-Trump conservatism going to look like?” If you look beyond Donald Trump, and you ask, "okay, who is the generation of leaders who's going to come after him?" One interesting thing about it is, it's not a bunch of mini Trumps. I mean, there are mini Trumps out there, but they haven't been especially successful.

JS: I mean, if I look at Congress today, there's not one person in there on the Republican side that I can see that has a viable path to, in any way, criticizing Donald Trump, or coming out in a variety of ways.

OC: Of course, which goes exactly for the number of people who were willing to say how Joe Biden looked until he actually announced he was dropping out.

JS: That's a good point. Touché.

Not for nothing, other than one silly aside, Trump was not mentioned again in the conversation.

Fortunately, most Americans are not progressives, and it is they who must be persuaded. That’s happening, and it’s opening a remarkable rift between those on the Left capable of noticing, and those who are not. Most Democratic Party leaders are in the latter camp, and have long specialized in obtuse and self-defeating professions of ignorance about “bitter clingers” and “deplorables.” But faced with an increasingly significant and undeniable exodus of non-white voters—young black and Hispanic men, especially—from the Kamala Harris camp, former President Barack Obama outdid himself last week, declaring such support for Trump “not acceptable.”

After noting that he was not seeing the “same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Obama continued:

It makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.

Women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time . . . when we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting. And now, you’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.

Rarely will you find such ham-fisted entitlement and condescension integrated so seamlessly into a campaign speech. Notice first the benchmark: whatever level of “energy and turnout” young black men displayed for Obama, they are expected to show for any… well, what? Any Democrat? Any black candidate? It’s not exactly clear. Regardless, the most excited you’ve ever been for Obama, that’s how excited you must be for whatever Obama cares about. And if you’re not? Apparently the problem must be that you think “being a man” requires “putting women down.”

This is truly insane stuff, and political malpractice. As if delivering a punchline to a pathetic joke, the Harris campaign followed up just a few days later with its “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” of which one of the five items concerned protecting cryptocurrency investments and a second promised to legalize weed. The biggest issue here, suffice to say, is not Harris’s gender. And no matter how sure Obama is that any right-thinking young black man would be on his side, that confidence turns out to be worth exactly nothing—indeed, it counterproductively obstructs efforts at reform on his side and instead engenders off-putting outbursts.

I’ve written a lot lately about these same dynamics in the context of the labor movement, where unions have been clinging for years to the false premise that what’s good for them is good for workers and therefore what they choose as their own agenda is by definition the pro-worker one. That conceit has become unsustainable in the face of evidence like the Teamsters’ acknowledgement that their own members supported Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by roughly 60% to 35%. But unions are responding by declaring the views of their members irrelevant; instead, their leaders supposedly have both the right and obligation to impose their progressive political preferences on the membership, rather than listen to and strive to represent it effectively.

They can do that if they want, but it works about as well as Obama’s plan. In a much-discussed essay at Vox, labor reporter Eric Levitz notes that Harris is heading for a worse performance with union members than Clinton’s in 2016; Biden himself was at just 50% in February. “All this,” deadpans Levitz, “raises the possibility that organized labor’s capacity to prevent working-class voters from drifting out of the Democratic tent is more limited than progressives had hoped.” That’s only half right, and requires a qualifier at the end: …more limited than progressives had hoped, unless progressives reorient their agenda toward working-class values and interests.

For a good counterexample of progressives taking their own challenges (and working-class interests and agency) seriously, it’s worth taking the time to read this new essay from the Carnegie Endowment’s Rachel Kleinfeld and Brendan Hartnett in Democracy Journal, “The Parties Reimagined.” To be clear, they’ve got all manner of bubbled progressive assertions with which I would disagree. But for purposes of this discussion, focus on how they describe hypothetical left- and right-of-center parties that could emerge from America’s ongoing political realignment, each of which would have the potential to command a durable governing majority.

Their conservative version looks like this:

Republicans could fuse more than a third of Black and Hispanic men under 35 (who together compose about 6 percent of the voting population) to their current base of working-class whites, particularly men and older white voters of both genders. This would give Republicans a coalition large enough to win the popular and electoral votes outright—if they embraced a platform that:

• called for more restrictive immigration policies—but in a less race-baiting manner;

• promoted traditional family and gender roles but allowed for limited abortion;

• supported law and order, but with messaging that did not stigmatize Black Americans and instead appealed to the desire for security among both Black and white voters;

• opposed welfare spending, with an explicit appeal to the working class rather than the non-working poor;

• promoted manufacturing;

• eschewed white nationalism and other polarizing rhetoric and symbolism that currently make many younger Hispanic and Black men feel the party is too far right

Their progressive version looks like this:

It would maintain the demographics that Democrats currently excel in: college-educated whites and Hispanics, older and educated minorities, young women, and Americans who are professionals with means, but not at the nosebleed top. It would also increase support from cohorts of voters who already lean Democratic, but would lean further with some platform tweaks—such as young voters of both genders. This platform would include supporting:

• Abortion—but only up to 20 weeks, with exceptions for medical and other necessities;

• Legal immigration and granting status to tax-paying undocumented migrants who are already in the country and have no criminal record—but also strong border security measures. It would reduce support for undocumented immigration to alter the common belief that Democrats favor the free flow of immigrants into the country with little border control—a view with which most voters disagree.

• Spending on education, health care, and to a lesser extent on transit, making the case for public goods and infrastructure that help all Americans;

• Realistic action on the climate, such as supporting the development of renewable energies, investing in and encouraging the use of electric vehicles, and establishing financial penalties for top corporate polluters;

• Popular gun control measures, such as banning assault rifles;

• Policies that protect transgender rights, while reducing the salience of this issue by significantly dialing back rhetoric on and attention to it. (Nearly two in three Americans favor protecting trans people from discrimination, but such policies enjoy less support from Black Democrats than from the rest of the party, and they are far from the top of most voters’ agendas.)

• It would reduce the focus on identity synthesis issues that make some voters feel the current party is too far left and are driving some—particularly young minorities—toward the right.

For readers of Understanding America, one of these descriptions should sound extremely familiar. The other, I must confess, I do not recognize at all as having a meaningful constituency or organizing force behind it. If progressives don’t want to believe we are working toward the first, if as a result they spend their time shaming the exodus from their coalition rather than understanding and responding to it, we should be delighted.

Whether they themselves agree that it is happening, or why, is rather beside the point.