THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

by Brian Beutler

① Republican culture-war provocations are already cross-pressuring voters who like Joe Biden and the American Rescue Plan

② Those provocations will be central to their total war against democracy reform

③ The right response is to treat democracy reform not as a normal policy fight, but a make-or-break culture-war battle against Trumpism

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FRAUGHT POTATO

Let’s talk about the democracy-reform poll we just conducted with Change Research. I know there are bigger outstanding questions about the fate of democracy reform in Congress and the prospects for filibuster abolition, but it’s all related, and in any case we went over that stuff last week. 

The good news isn’t particularly surprising. Democracy reform is popular, even in a closely divided, polarized state like Arizona, and it’s particularly popular when characterized—as it should be!—in nonpartisan terms as a means of protecting American voters and popular sovereignty. 

There’s some bad news in there, too, about how Republican framing of the For the People Act (which is, of course, nakedly partisan) makes the initiative less popular, and how little voters in Arizona know about the GOP’s voter-suppression efforts in their own state. But, silly as it sounds, the most unsettling result in my mind was this one:

The Republican Cancel Culture strategy is breaking through in Arizona. 82 percent of voters have heard about the Fox News-generated controversy over Dr. Seuss and 67 percent have heard about the controversy over Mr. Potato Head—more than have heard about the For the People Act or the Arizona GOP’s voter-suppression bills.

Arizona voters are concerned about what’s happening to Dr. Seuss. 48 percent say that the controversy is a perfect example of liberal cancel culture run amok, while only 42 percent say it’s a fake controversy invented by conservatives to distract from Biden’s American Rescue Plan.

When the American Rescue Plan passed, the general consensus—and not just among liberals—was that Republicans had disengaged from the process to whine and lie about Dr. Suess and Mr. Potato Head because the bill was so popular, and their lockstep opposition left them nothing but culture-war straws to grasp at.

I argued at the time, and still believe, that this view misconstrued politics as if it were circumscribed by policy fights within and among the branches, rather than what it is: a multifront war where tribal rallying signals and cultural rhetoric matter just as much as policy and governance. And this is what I had in mind: The rescue plan is good, Biden is popular, it isn’t that policy doesn’t matter at all—but Republicans have already successfully cross-pressured supporters of both Biden and the rescue plan on the basis of total nonsense. It’s a mistake to wish away these kind of fights as if they’re immaterial to election outcomes, or to imagine they won't subsume coming fights over democracy reform and everything else. 

① CLOTURE V. CULTURE

It’s worth projecting ahead from here, to think about what a 2022 campaign would look like on the terms prevailing at the moment. In an optimistic scenario, Biden and Democrats will run as the authors of post-COVID prosperity, amid a new roaring ‘20s, replete with White Claw speakeasies, against Republicans arguing that Democrats inherited a boom but wrecked democracy to impose ideological conformity on a reluctant public via cancel culture (and elitist hard seltzer).

Once upon a time I would’ve been pretty sanguine about a formula that says leaders who govern well and don’t fuck up the economy can rest pretty easy and not sweat the bullshit. But if the events of the past several years haven’t at least scrambled your intuitions about that, I envy your serenity.

The irony is that many of the same liberals who admonish Dems to ignore GOP-style culture-war distractions, and train their focus on popular economic appeals, unwittingly embody the fact that culture-war stuff is more potent than they imply. For instance: Nearly all of the leading popularists are also openly contemptuous allyship culture (particularly, promiscuous use of the boycott method) in progressive spaces. That isn't meant as a knock; I actually tend to agree with them that certain aspects of that culture are censorious, easily caricatured, and (this is key) politically counterproductive. But that’s just another way of saying that cultural forces are extremely powerful. Powerful enough to elicit reactionary tendencies even in those who understand how dangerous the Republican Party is.

The upshot, then, can’t be to hope that with good enough governing they can sublimate cultural battles into substantive ones. It should be to engage the culture war on winning grounds, including ones that overlap with good policy.

② REFORMANCE ANXIETY

This is all relevant to the voting-rights context, because Democrats will have to adhere to a strategy drawn chiefly from one of these two political worldviews. They can treat democracy reform as as they might treat a kitchen-table issue, scouring polls to isolate popular components, sacrificing aspects of the reform agenda that lend themselves most easily to Republican culture-war incitement. Or they can embrace the fact that democracy reform is inextricable from culture war, and fight it to win. Grab the Potato Head by the gender-neutral horns, so to speak.

Right now they’re doing a bit of both. 

The bad news is there’s a subset of Senate Democrats (led by Joe Manchin, natch) wasting time pretending as though Republicans (who oppose democracy reform unanimously) might vote for a trimmed down version of S. 1.

The good news is I don’t think any of these machinations is incompatible with the picture I drew last week. Manchin and Dems can use the threat of filibuster reform to pressure Republicans to get on board with a kind of voting-rights detente, then pass a more robust set of reforms if (when) Republicans refuse to play ball. (Assuming no one in the Dem caucus falls gravely ill or dies or what have you.)

The better news is that Democrats’ main-stage message is much more confident than the jockeying-for-position we see peeking out from behind the scenes. Barack Obama’s description of the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic” has taken hold both among Democrats and within the broader culture. Democratic leaders say failure to pass democracy reform is not an option. Here’s how Joe Biden described it at his first White House press conference Thursday 

What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick. Deciding in some states that you cannot bring water to people standing in line waiting to vote, deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work, deciding that there will be no absentee ballots under the most rigid circumstances…. The Republican voters I know find this despicable, Republican voters, the folks outside this White House. I’m not talking about the elected officials. I’m talking about voters. Voters. And so I’m convinced that we’ll be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing. 

That’s pretty good! 

③ DON BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

To truly take up the culture-war side of the fight, though, I think it’d be hard to do better than making it about Donald Trump—not in the counterproductive, partisan sense of talking about what S.1 would mean for the next election, but as something necessitated by the horrible damage he did to democracy. We see some of this in the jousting over state-level voter-suppression bills, which Republicans justify with The Big Lie™. But simply explaining the bill as necessary to fix what Trump broke and exploited about America democracy would be 1) largely true, 2) simple, and 3) an advantageous way to win both the legislative fight and the broader culture war. Trump IS a culture-war flashpoint as much as anything else in America. He’s also a losing combatant in it, logging in at just a couple ticks above Xi Jinping in the favorability rankings. A veritable “sucker” of the culture war trenches.

I know the Dr. Suess stuff is based on rank dishonesty and in a better world, Republicans would pay a penalty for operating so nakedly in bad faith, rather than reap benefits from it. But it's truly Not Great that 82 percent of Arizonans have heard of the Suess thing and that a plurality of them think it has something to do with the America liberals want to create.

Know who polls just as badly in Arizona as “cancel culture,” though? Donald Trump. 

Finding ways to frame democracy reform in popular terms is fine—good even!—but it’s also susceptible to the tribal attacks Republicans are already leveling at reform from all directions: Democrats want to rig the game to gain more power so they can cancel everything we love about America. Those attacks need an answer. Hoping progressives across the country stop doing easily caricatured things, or scripting a bunch of Sister Souljah moments to distinguish Democrats from the San Francisco school board or Suess enterprises will not cut it. But there's also no reason to be defensive. Make people understand that it’s about Trump; that we need reform because of Trump and Republicans oppose it because of Trump. It isn’t possible to avoid this war, so once you’re in it, you might as well fight the whole thing.

I’m excited to watch this documentary based on James Fallows’s book Our Towns about the dichotomy between our polarized, soul-deadened national outlook, and the spirit of optimism and cooperation that prevails in so many quieter precincts in America. And not just because he uses our mutual hometown of Redlands, CA, as a case in point. 

Biden’s $3 trillion Build Back Better plan is shaping up to be pretty good and an interesting basis for a discussion of the legacy question. You can listen to me and Extremely Smart Person Mike Konczal discuss all of that here.