By Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Sunday, February 16, 2025
A recent poll by the New York Times and Ipsos found that many
Americans do not feel that the Democrats share their values. According to a
Quinnipiac University poll, only 31 percent of Americans have a favorable view of
the Democratic Party, and more than half of respondents have an unfavorable
view of it. Yet in Democratic election postmortems, liberal media and political
leaders’ reactions have ranged from characteristic shrillness to self-loathing,
blame games, and party infighting. What we have yet to see is Democratic
leaders truly trying to understand the American people and why they have
recoiled from the party. This excessive self-regard gone unchecked could cause
much more than an election loss and become an existential threat to the party.
As a part of the research for my book The Overlooked Americans, I spent over five years
talking to people who live in rural America, a voting bloc that overwhelming
voted for Donald Trump in 2024. In my interviews, which ranged across favorite
holidays, religion, and parenting, a number of my respondents expressed a
wariness towards an unforgiving form of political correctness (a.k.a.
“wokeness”) that judges people for accidentally using the wrong pronoun or not
being entirely on board with the Democratic social agenda. These folks were not
dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters, nor were they ultraconservative. But many of
them expressed a frustration with the progressive politics that have subsumed
the Democratic Party. This estrangement of rural Americans, which has been in
the works for years, has now borne out in our national, state, and local
elections.
In the aftermath of 2024, Democrats need to stop paying
so much attention to themselves and pay far more attention to the American
people and the issues they really care about. The potentially unsurmountable
roadblock for Democrats is accepting not only that liberal values are not
“everyone’s values” but that others’ values can be just as legitimate. Through
the course of the campaign, liberal elites evolved merely from harshly judging
to barely tolerating with bafflement the idea that rural Americans hold dear
values different from theirs. The next and only step for Democrats, if they
wish to succeed, is to embrace the fact that rural values — which, as it turns
out, are pretty reflective of most of the country — are no less important.
I recall one autumn afternoon, when I gave a talk on my
book at the University of Southern California, where I work. The students in
attendance were part of the Academy for Polymathic Study, a group of some of the
brightest and most intellectually engaged students on campus. At the end of the
event, one student came up to me and politely remarked, “You say we need to
convince people of vaccines and climate change and marriage equality through
tolerance and not by looking down on them, but did it cross your mind that
maybe you shouldn’t be trying to convince anyone of your values at all?” The
student’s remarks stuck with me as I watched the Democratic Party implode. I am
a lifelong Democrat who has worked as Mayor David Dinkins’s teaching assistant
while at Columbia University. I was a fellow at Hillary Clinton’s Senate office
and had volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. This student’s
clear-eyed observations were nowhere in Democratic Party discourse.
When we discuss liberals’ inability to understand that
rural Americas simply have different values (and are not inherently against
liberal values), I often return to Obama’s “guns and religion” phrase and
Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” — essentially repeated by Biden in his comment
that Trump voters are “garbage.” These remarks confirm what rural Americans
have long suspected the liberal establishment thinks of them. Or, as a few
rural folks said to me when I asked them what they thought coastal America thought
of them, “They think we’re just a bunch of hillbillies.” The problem is that
liberal elites can’t seem to comprehend that there may be other values in the
ether, and those values can be equally justifiable and valid.
For example, liberal elites (at least overtly) prize
intellectualism and secular values — be it science and data or philosophical
concepts like equity and justice. They judge fellow Americans who may question,
based on their religious beliefs, such practices as abortion or vaccination.
This worldview came in sharp relief as I interviewed rural Americans, almost
all of whom, without prompting, discussed their relationship with God. I
realized that I knew whether my urban friends were Jewish, Muslim, or Catholic,
but I didn’t know their actual beliefs in detail, or if they even believed in God.
I have had conversations with friends in Los Angeles, for example, who cannot
grasp that someone might value their religion over science (which is not to
say, of course, that religious people refuse all vaccinations).
Liberals are so anti-gun (I include myself in this group) that they can
lose sight of the fact that rural folks may want a gun simply for hunting or
for self-protection. I grew up in a Pennsylvania town where, starting when I
was in high school, the school district gave us the day after Thanksgiving off,
for hunting. This past October, on a trip to visit my parents, my family drove
I-80 to my hometown, Danville, Pa., and we must have driven past ten dead deer
that had raced across the highway at dusk. Deer in Pennsylvania have no natural
predators, so hunters arguably do a service by helping regulate the deer
population. Many hunters also eat the meat, cure the venison, and use the pelt.
These folks’ desire for a gun is reasonable. As is their desire for a gun for
self-protection. They might never use it, but, like an alarm system, a gun
makes them feel safe. The liberal trope, however, lumps gun owners in rural
America with, say, machine-gun zealots who might shoot up a school.
Some liberals sneer at rural Americans also for lacking higher education. In part, this is a devaluation of the trades, crafts, and vocational work that
power many rural economies. This view also fails to appreciate that many rural
Americans don’t have the financial means to afford a university education and
don’t have parents who went to college, and their high schools might not
possess the “college knowledge” needed to get students into the top
schools.
Fundamentally, however, rural Americans, like many across the country, are tired of being told they
should care about wider social justice issues above and beyond their own
families’ needs. As one woman I interviewed explained to me, big government
policies and increased taxes will make her life harder. She shouldn’t be met
with incredulity when she says she cares more about economic issues such as her
grocery bills and her mortgage, or her family or her church, than LGBTQ issues.
This woman, incidentally, happens to have a transgender niece and has nothing
against her or anyone else who is transgender. This issue is just further down
her list. The woman said she was just so sick of Hollywood moralizing about
what she should care about. A farmer from Iowa told me he didn’t feel strongly
about marriage equality either way. He explained he felt that everyone had a
right to a civil marriage but that this was not his issue to fight: “I think
everyone should be free to be who they are and who they want to be,” he
explained. “But some of these things get so stigmatized. . . . You should be
free to be who you are, but don’t stuff it down other people’s throat.”
For the Democratic Party even to begin to move forward,
it needs to stop focusing on itself and start focusing on the Americans it
claims to serve. The Democrats might be surprised to find a lot of open-minded,
tolerant people who understand and even share some of their values — but also
have values of their own that deserve dignity and respect.
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