When Donald Trump began beating the drums of war against Iran, U.S. Senators Tim Kaine and Bernie Sanders were vocal about the need for him to gain congressional approval for any declaration of war. Anything short of that, given the present circumstances, would be illegal.
But party leaders – Chuck Schumer in the Senate, Hakeem Jeffries in the House – did virtually nothing. The week’s news went by mostly in the absence of Democratic leadership. Headlines saw the president’s war-mongering and then on Saturday, the bombs fell on Iran.
How did this happen?
It’s about Schumer’s and Jeffries’ view of politics, Will Stancil told me. “Iran shows what the mindset is really about - all the pretexts about distractions really break down when the thing under discussion is what could easily become a generation-defining war, bigger than Iraq.
“But Democrats can't seem to shake themselves out of their policy-wonk stupor here either,” he said. “And it shows how what really underlies the ‘distraction’ rhetoric is a desire to focus on issues where the stakes are low and conflict is muted. It's an avoidance mechanism.”
In other words, Democratic leaders don’t want to fight, not openly, because open combat is risky, which is something to avoid. Ironically, that’s what’s preventing the Democrats from earning public trust.
As of now, party leaders tend to believe that the Democrats can win back trust by compromising, by moving to the middle. But if they won’t fight for the authority of Congress, which is the only authority they have, why would anyone trust the Democratic Party to fight for them?
Stancil researches civil rights and urban policy, but he’s probably best known for being one of the most thought-provoking thorns in the side of the Democratic Party. In this lengthy interview, Will and I talk about what I called “the distraction debate,” interpretation of progressive history and the real meaning of the liberal elite bubble.
Let's start with what I'll call the "distraction debate." Some liberals believe things like sending 500 Marines to California is a distraction from what they think are serious issues, like the Republican budget bill that threatens to strip out Medicaid and do other harmful things. This debate seems to be endless. Where do you stand on it?
Liberals have trained themselves to see the world through this very particular end-of-history lens, where the "stuff that matters" is inevitably wonky policy questions, the day-to-day of taxes and government, who gets subsidies, what healthcare policy looks like.
The stuff that feels bigger and traditionally historical - scandal, social movements, violence, power and authoritarianism - that's all assumed to be silly TV drama. That stuff belongs to history, and history is over!
But it's ridiculous. History isn't over, the future will contain events as dramatic and horrible as the events of the past, and this stuff is what it looks like: an assault on the foundations of our government, with all the terrifying and weighty implications that it seems to have.
I would suggest that liberals have a reading of history in which certain things are inevitable, like justice for all. It whitewashes the fact that people made moral choices and that moral choices have consequences. I supposed we could blame Obama for some of that.
I don't know if they think these things are inevitable, but they certainly think these fights are over. I'm not sure I'd blame Obama, but I think people are used to living in a relatively stable era and have come to believe that stability is normal.
You see it in news coverage, where any kind of dramatic pronouncement is treated as hysterical or hyperbolic. It's a little better now, but for most of Trump's first term, the consensus was that he was functionally a normal Republican with an uncouth demeanor. This was, in my view, insane – you could tell the guy was corrupt and unbalanced in an unprecedented way, openly supportive of authoritarianism. But in the view of a lot of liberals, it was just a gloss on an underlying normality.
When Joe Biden won, people scoffed at the idea that Trump might try to stay in power, even though you had to examine the guy for 10 seconds to realize he was capable of doing something dramatic. If you thought about why it seemed ridiculous, it was because they implicitly assumed that there are just some sort of guardrails on modern affairs – that we stay in the Normal Zone because the Danger Zone was something that happens in other countries and in history, not to us.
I agree that this is partly because people have come to see the state of affairs they grew up in as the consequence of some kind of historical guiding force, rather than hard choices people had to make. Someone built that stable world and we can definitely unmake it! But no one wants to take responsibility.
Liberalism is guided and informed and perhaps controlled by people who live on the coasts. In my experience, these liberals really do not understand what animates the rest of the country, by which I mean racism and other forms of bigotry. It's so bad, they look for any reason why white people support Trump and they end up believing it's about money or "economic anxiety." How do we solve this?
The dynamics of the coastal bubbles are bizarre. Elite coastal liberals (and really, mostly New York City and Washington, DC, liberals) understand very well that they are in a bubble. But they misunderstand the nature of it. They assume what makes them different is that they're interested in politics, that they have ideology, that they are capable of being liberal. They assume people in "real America" are these unthinking yokels, motivated by their pocketbooks, functionally incapable of ideological belief, and especially incapable of liberalism.
This belief is not only incorrect but the precise nature of the bubble. Elite coastal liberals think they're different from the rest of the country when they're not. The middle states have plenty of people who care about politics, who are capable of following politics. Even the most dimwitted maga goon is driven by belief and ideology. People in flyover states aren't animals. They aren't stomachs with legs. They have beliefs and social environments, an array of forces acting on them, and their core motivations aren't different from the coasts. It's just that the social and information environments are very different.
Understanding this also opens up the understanding that MAGA is absolutely driven by racism and bigotry. These people are propelled by ideas they're receiving and those ideas are bad. It's a little paradoxical to say, but respecting that red state voters are normal people often means being willing to disrespect the actual ideas they hold.
One of the problems, I think, is the tendency of liberals to accept as true the endless bad faith of right-wingers. Trump and the rest rail against open borders, for instance, and liberals have no response, except to concede that the immigration system "is broken."
I think liberals have misconceived how politics works on a pretty fundamental level. They see politics as debate club: there are two sides, making the case, and there's an audience, or judge, trying to decide who made the better case. That's not actually how social environments are structured.
Politics is a lot closer to the schoolyard. People clump around the people they think are the coolest. They support things those people say. Who is right and who is wrong is mediated through popularity, not accuracy. If Trump says something about open borders, a lot of people will defend him, because they're on his team. Democrats, by constantly dodging and dissembling in an attempt to win the logical debate, basically undermine their own presence in the schoolyard.
Part of winning this popularity contest is being willing to talk about the other people! If Trump’s a moron, call him a moron. If he's lying or you think he's acting in bad faith, say so. Liberals are worried they'll get stuck in some kind of argument - "Well, we can't prove he's lying. Then what? We'll look bad!" But that's not how schoolyards work. If it feels right to a lot of people, if you say it confidently, if you're generally seen as a important voice, a lot of people will go along with it.
And unfortunately, I think social media and polarization has made these dynamics worse - which advantages people like Trump, who understand them, at the expense of liberals. Maybe in a country where most voters see the parties as slight variations of each other, and political discussion is mediated through a handful of authoritative sources, the debate-club analogy works. But it doesn't work in a country where people are getting validating narratives fed to them from diffuse media and are mostly strongly in one camp or the other.