By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, February 16, 2022
If you thought the public polling was looking grim for Democrats heading
into this year’s midterm elections, it’s got nothing on the private polling and
focus groups that Democrats are conducting among themselves.
Politico’s analysis of a document summarizing the party’s
research is about as bleak as it gets. On cultural issues alone, the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee found that the GOP’s messaging was “alarmingly
potent” because Democrats had become “preachy,” “judgmental,” and “focused on
culture wars.” Issues ranging from a progressive effort to “defund the police”
to maximalist immigration policies summarized as “open borders and amnesty”
repulsed voters to a degree that heralds a political disaster for the
Democratic Party in November.
When voters are asked in Democratic surveys which party
they’d prefer to see in control of Congress, Democrats trail the GOP by 4
points. But when those voters are primed with Republican messaging around these
hot-button cultural issues, the Republican Party’s lead explodes to a
staggering 14-point advantage over Democrats. “It wasn’t all bleak, though,”
Politico notes. When those same voters are confronted with canned Democratic
rebuttals to the GOP’s talking points, the Republican lead in generic ballot
polling recedes to just six points.
That’s cold comfort. In 2010, the Republican Party won the
national popular vote by 6.8 points over Democrats, which netted the party 63
seats in the House, five seats in the Senate, and five governorships. So, if
the election were held today, the range of outcomes is somewhere between a
historic landslide victory for the GOP and an unprecedented electoral brushfire
that would purge the landscape of any Democrats unfortunate enough to find
themselves on the ballot. That’s some bright side.
Politico’s analysis maintains that the party can pull
itself out of this tailspin relatively easily. All its members have to do is
talk more about their policy preferences, which voters generally favor. If only
it was that easy. Democrats have spent the last year waging a culture war not
just rhetorically but in policy, too. Their problem is that they don’t see
cultural combat as cultural combat when they’re engaged in it.
Even before Joe Biden took the oath of office, leftwing
cultural signifiers—“defund police,” “open borders,” and the like—were
understood to be politically toxic. With notable exceptions, it’s hard to find a Democrat with a
national profile pledging his support for “amnesty” or the defunding of law
enforcement. By contrast, Democratic efforts to reengineer society via
legislation or executive fiat are not rare.
Democrats don’t seem to see any signs of cultural combat
in policies that seek to apply a racial litmus test to
the disbursement of taxpayer-provided funding. Nor can they comprehend why
voters would appreciate
a judicial check on a “program intended to address a long history of
racial injustice in farming,” even though that check explicitly violates the
14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Indeed, Joe Biden has sought to embed “racial equity” in “the whole of
government, in all our federal policies and institutions.” That initiative has
involved extricating the Justice Department from its support
for the Asian-American students who alleged that Ivy League colleges were
discriminating against them. It will soon involve reversing Trump-era Title IX guidance that restored
jurisprudential standards on campuses. Such standards had been so relaxed in
the Obama era that colleges routinely violated students’
4th and 6th Amendment rights. The
subordination of equality before the law to social-justice initiatives is
culture warring, whether Democrats admit it or not.
Likewise, Democrats seem unable to recognize that
government efforts to anathematize turns of phrase that were banal and
ubiquitous not long ago is also cultural combat. When the Department of Homeland Security drops “illegal
immigrant” for polysyllabic synonyms (“undocumented noncitizen” or
“undocumented individual”), that’s policy. When DHS retires the word
“assimilation” because it fails to place a premium on a foreign cultural
identity, that’s policy. When the Centers for Disease Control decides expectant
women are now “pregnant people,” that’s policy. It’s also culture warring.
Even Covid has become a cultural issue, in part, because
the continued observance of emergency mitigation measures like masking in
public and maintaining social distancing—even in schools—is increasingly
regional. The regions that are likely to adhere to these protocols are also
reliably Democratic, and vice versa. Republicans have the distinct advantage in
this culture war of advocating the position that is the least burdensome on
those who do not appreciate the burden, whereas the Democratic position
maintains that all must observe these restrictions (even when Democrats themselves do not). That is becoming increasingly
untenable, and Democratic governors are no longer waiting around for the White
House to realize they’re on the wrong side of an enthusiasm disequilibrium.
Covid-mitigation accouterment is becoming an inscrutable feature of the urban scene—one that marks its
wearers as distinctly out of touch.
Maybe the most illustrative example of the Democratic
Party’s blind spot—one that is often reinforced by its unhelpful allies in
media—occurred last April when the Department of Education released a draft
rule providing priority access to taxpayer-funded grants in U.S. history and
civics programs to candidates who “incorporate racially, ethnically,
culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives.” Specifically, candidates
were asked to rely upon faddish works of anti-racist ideological coaching like
the Times’ “1619 Project.” Applicants “must describe” how they
would teach “systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory
policy and practice in American history.”
When Sen. Mitch McConnell merely noticed this,
it was the Republican senator who was accused of leaning “into the culture wars,” and for no grander purpose than to
“throw some red meat to the base.”
Democrats can diagnose the problem alright, but they have
already soothed those symptoms that they’re willing to recognize. The malady
afflicting the party is broader than they’re willing to admit.
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