Listening to and puzzling over comments from Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC, I realized that she was struggling to comprehend the OTHER epochal transformation of American politics that she was witnessing. A woman as President? A break with millennia of patriarchal discrimination that has all of us rejoicing. But set that aside a moment. What Wallace was trying to grasp was a political sea change from 6 decades of ideological alignment. She got it half right, … and half really wrong.
I was fascinated early in the evening to hear her say, overtly, that the previous 3 days of the convention had opened ears of conservatives and Republicans who were turned off by Trump and wondering if perhaps they could find a reason to be With Her.
Now, we all know what she was referring to. Much has been said in many quarters about the aggressive play that the DNC has made in the convention to reclaim cultural ground that Trump has abandoned on behalf of a reeling GOP: patriotism, optimism, small town values, etc. Trump offered the Democratic Party a strategically suicidal opportunity for Democrats to affirm American values that the GOP had used since the Viet Nam War to beat them with. We’ve all seen the rueful expressions of dismay from ReThuglicans who watched sourly while Hillary and the DNC pounced on ideological turf the GOP had long understood to be their birthright. To use a football metaphor, the Democratic Party has moved the cultural football from, say, its own 35 to the GOP 35 and field goal range.
OK. This is what Wallace was referring to and the context for her perspective in listening to Hillary’s speech. After the speech, she announced that Hillary had “squandered” the opportunity to reach out to her tribe. “There was nothing in that speech for Republicans,” she opined.
I was startled by this aggressive response, but also intrigued. What was Wallace thinking? Was she onto something or missing something? As I thought it through, I figured she really was missing the point. (Note: other commentators—notably Steve Schmidt and a reluctant Michael Steele—disagreed and recognized the effectiveness of the speech, especially on cultural grounds.)
Specifically, Wallace’s complaint was about policy proposals. The speech and the party platform it reflects is, clearly, unabashedly progressive. I gather that Wallace looked for and resented the absence of reassurances from Hillary that a Clinton Administration would avoid an aggressive progressive agenda and emulate the DLC agenda of her husband’s era.
Now, let me clear here. Wallace’s point was not about what Hillary might actually do. That’s a different question, one I am not going to discuss here. I may or may not write about that in some other post. Wallace’s point was about the tactics of Hillary’s speech as a pitch to take advantage of the remarkable opening she has to make inroads into the GOP base in this election. MY point will be about how Nicolle is missing the sea change in POLICY interests that Hillary was brilliantly addressing.
Wallace was willing, as many conservative commentators are in the Summer of Trump, to concede the cultural ground lost to Trump’s distasteful demagoguery. But I honestly believe that they are not willing to confront the untethering of their base from long-time GOP policy dogma.
As we have long understood, the GOP powers that be have never given a flying fart about the cultural dogmas that allowed them to manipulate and exploit the rubes, the voters who did not share their policy interests. Abortion, religion, homophobia … none of these issues matter to the agents of Wall Street who steer the ship. They don’t care about patriotism, either, or the military, or the work ethic, or small town values, or any of it. It costs them nothing to cede that ground to the Dems apart from the tactical challenge of finding other ways to dupe and control voters.
Policy matters, though, they are another story. And, of course, for the GOP powers (and most of the DNC powers) they are all about the financial interests of the wealthy: low taxes, privatization, challenges to Social Security, de-regulation, etc., etc. Since Ronald Reagan, GOP political dogma has been about these policy principles.
And, of course, half a century of propaganda resulted in millions of GOP voters internalizing the language of neo-liberalism and parroting back those values as the currency of political participation. Everyone has concluded for decades that crony capitalist dogmas were bred deeply into the arteries, bones and nervous systems of GOP voters.
But, see, this was never a valid conclusion. On some levels, we knew this as well. For many years, we have been agonizing over the fact that, when given a chance to respond to policy proposals stripped of propaganda language, Americans by a wide margin actually want a progressive agenda. Few Republicans object to the ACA as such; they object to the word “Obamacare,” which they have been conditioned to fear and loathe.
We know this. But Wallace and the GOP Kommisariat/Kommentariat DO NOT know it. They have operated for decades under the false assumption that what motivated GOP VOTERS were the same values that motivated them. And it was this false assumption that made them vulnerable to Trump.
Trump, after all, is addressing voter frustration and anger. His support comes from racists and nativists, yes, and from voters who have watched the GOP fail to fulfill promises regarding abortion, homophobia, and immigration. Everybody gets that. What people forget is that the vitriol of those classic reactionary attitudes is driven by economic frustration. Trump supporters want to blame vulnerable scapegoats for their plight, but they ALSO want relief.
And Trump, who will say anything with no regard for either dogma or his own actual intentions, sensed that the GOP base is NOT in actual fact committed to neo-liberal dogma. His oratory has freely challenged and dismissed ReThuglican policy dogmas, and his supporters have slurped it all up with spoons. Many of them have become virtually incapable of responding to specifics at all: their guy can say yes at 10:00 and no at 11:00 and they’ll support both with equal enthusiasm. But, given a chance to imagine progressive policies—e.g. trade protections for American laborers—actually find themselves supporting policy proposals that really ARE in their interests.
What Trump has done is, I think, transformative for American politics. He has untethered working class GOP voters from GOP financial dogmas. He has proven to the political establishment, to observers, and to GOP voters themselves, that they actually ARE NOT convicted by neo-liberal values and assumptions. This is what observers were noticing about the confluence of Bernie and Trump voters—a hunger for progressive remedies to economic distress. Of course, the congruence is extremely limited. I am a Bernie guy and I loathe and (almost) fear Trump more than any politician in my lifetime. There is a huge difference between the values of Bernie voters and Trumpism. I cannot imagine a single Bernie voter actually turning to Trump, and very few, in my judgment, will be foolish enough to fail to support Hillary. But the POINT is that neo-liberal Thug dogmas which have dominated the GOP, all too much of the Democratic Party, and the chattering media class for decades have been untethered and have triggered intense anger and opposition in both party bases.
Wallace simply fails to recognize the implications of all of this. Listening to Hillary, she was looking for 90’s style, DLC triangulation, a political strategy based on assumptions about dogmas that could not be safely challenged by voters. But this is 2016, not 1996. And Wallace’s assumptions about what might appeal to Republicans giving Hillary a listen are way out of date.
Think about Hillary’s speech in terms of rhetorical targets. She has locked up her base (she really has) and the votes of minorities. Whom can she add to her column?
Well, she can target key elements of the white electorate: the educated, working women, and the sub-set of blue collar workers not willing to be caught up in raging nativism and racism. These are precisely the groups the convention targeted.
And, in terms of policy, all three groups are actually open to progressive policies much more than Wallace is willing to admit. Further steps in health care. Affordable college. Investment in jobs and green technologies that generate jobs. Etc. These are the sorts of principles that decades of propaganda have conditioned GOP voters to resist at least in terms of labels. But Trump has cut the cord on these ideas and given these voters permission to consider the idea of using government to improve the economy and address climate change.
I found one moment in Hillary’s speech worthy of a lot of reflection. She looked dead into the camera and took on the gun lobby. That is a profound challenge to GOP dogma and the myth of mainstream convictions that the media have long supported. This has GOT to be one of the moments that had Wallace shaking her head and thinking, “Hillary is squandering this chance to appeal to voters.”
But in the heart of her acceptance speech, Hillary looked dead into the camera and and took on the gun lobby. Does anyone think for one instant that the Clinton campaign, which did everything else so brilliantly for 4 nights, would do this without a ton of research behind it telling them that it is a political winner in 2016? I don’t. I figure this is perhaps the most remarkable example of how profoundly the ideological landscape has changed this summer in terms of policy possibilities. Sure, the gun nuts will freak out, but every poll I’ve seen holds that a large majority of the electorate, necessarily including many Republicans, want common sense gun law reform. Hillary WAS OFFERING A PROPOSAL TO BE ATTRACTIVE to the portion of the GOP base Wallace was talking about. The working women, the educated voters (who are already polling well for Hillary), the reasonable white, working men who want change in their world and are capable of doubting they’ll get it from a raging, narcissist con man like Trump.
Wallace was willing to recognize the tactical shrewdness of 85% of the DNC convention. What she couldn’t find a way to see was that Hillary and the same people who planned all of that INTENTIONALLY decided to make strong progressive appeals in her speech because they believe that it will work with their target audience: independents and reasonable Republicans. It’s ALL part of the same plan.
Now, maybe Wallace is right. Maybe the progressive policy appeals won’t work. But if she is going to be honest, she must admit that A) low information GOP voters have never really understood or bought into neo-liberal policy dogmas even while repeating the mysterious phrases, B) Trump has untethered GOP voters from those dogmas, and C) it makes tactical sense, before the fact, for Democrats to make a play at exploiting the policy opportunity Trump has opened up for them.
I said I won’t write here about what I imagine a Hillary Clinton Administration to be like. And I won’t other than to say that I foresee some really desirable things, some major concerns, and an Administration vastly better than anything the GOP, let alone Trump, can offer.
What I will say is that, after this summer, the political landscape in America has changed. Between the 2 of them, Bernie and Trump have transformed the electorate in good and bad ways. As a Progressive, I am heartened and encouraged by what I saw at that convention.
Everyone knows about the cultural ground reclaimed by the Democratic Party. What thrills me to see is not just the fact that we possess the cultural high ground of the center, but that we are REDEFINING IT! Tim Kaine’s discussion of small town values was NOT the Mayberry myth of erased peoples, but a multicultural vision of immigrants and mainstreamers sharing core values of hard work, humility, and community. Hillary’s core theme of togetherness is a major assault on not-so-conservative individualism. And these values laid the conceptual foundation for a re-framing of progressive policies that has the chance to fundamentally re-write the conceptual mindset of the American electorate in ways that I and many of you have been yearning for since Ronald Reagan sent us into madness.
It seemed to me that Wallace was wanting to be able to be “With Her” as a rejection of Trumpism. But what Wallace can’t let herself see is the totality of the vision being offered by our Party. We are reclaiming optimism, patriotism, and old fashioned family values and using them as an ideological foundation for the progressive policies we need to change our world, hopefully in time to save the planet. Wallace can’t buy into all of that, and probably most Republicans will resist along with her.
But I would predict that a lot of independents and a surprising number of Republicans, cut off by Trump’s madness from their ideological links to neo-liberal dogmas, will find in that vision much for them.
I know I did. Look, I have long criticized the Democratic Party and I am not foolish enough to believe that this week’s soaring rhetoric will usher in a Utopian future.
I do, however, see in this summer a new set of political possibilities made possible by Donald Trump’s destructive madness and by the combined brilliance of Bernie Sanders and our candidate for President, Hillary Clinton. Let’s help her win by a landslide that makes President Obama’s look thin!