We Just Have To Give Up On (Some) People

For The Good Of The Many

People Like This Would Give Up Their Life For Trump

Giving up on things goes against the very core of the liberal world view. After all, liberalism is the ideology of fighting for the oppressed against unimaginable odds. It is why the left is on the side of workers rights, minority rights and women’s rights, among so many others.

So when someone like me argues that we should give up on something, it hits the ear wrong. We can’t give up. We have to fight, fight, fight until our last breath, right?

That’s generally true, but when it comes to the obsession with converting diehard Trump supporters and otherwise committed conservatives, we are long past the point of where this notion should have been abandoned.

As a caveat, I am not arguing that the Democratic Party should cease trying to appeal to “soft” Republican voters, people who aren’t watching 100 hours of Fox News every week and decorating their homes with velvet paintings of a muscular fantasy Donald Trump. If there are fair-minded people out there who voted for Trump and are open to voting for President Biden or another Democrat, it would be foolhardy to ignore them.

But the obsession with winning back the prototypical “Reagan Democrat” style voter has got to stop. Walter Mondale lost in a landslide in 1984 and the shock of that moment has perverted at least two generations of voter outreach from the Democratic Party. Much of the population who voted for Reagan has died off, and those people who remain in the camp of fiscal or social conservative (or both) are far more Republican now than they were 40 years ago. They’re gone.

Even more dire is that some of the rhetoric used to appeal to these voters ends up turning off the voters Democrats need to attain majorities and pass progressive legislation.

Democratic leaders like Presidents Biden, Obama, and Clinton love talking about cutting the deficit and addressing federal spending like it is a family budget. This is directly from the playbook that says supposedly center-right voters want to hear “fiscal conservatism” mixed with center-left social policy.

But no voters truly care about the deficit, not in a way that seriously matters, but harping on about fiscal restraint dampens the enthusiasm among liberal voters and people to their left, who want to hear about government working to fix problems, not haggling over spending.

For the time being, especially when the Republicans are fielding an odious figure like the corrupt Donald Trump, these divisions can be papered over. But as we have seen in the recent past, it isn’t going to last and not tending to these issues are the perfect opening that assist the election of figures like Trump and George W. Bush before him.

The solution is to give up. Give up on these voters, who are mostly a mirage. Give up on them. Stop doing counterproductive things like inviting the anti-choice former governor of Ohio, John Kasich, to speak in a prime slot at the Democratic convention out of some misguided notion his appearance could shake some votes loose. Biden lost in Ohio by nearly the same margin as Sec. Hillary Clinton. It didn’t work.

It’s a tough mindset. Some of these voters are close family. If you love your father or grandmother it seems wrong somehow to throw your hands up and assume the situation isn’t going to improve.

But it won’t. Conservative politics, particularly the branch oriented around Trump, is a cult. People rarely leave cults of their own volition. Either the cult leader dies or something really traumatic occurs. Cases in which someone wakes up one day and comes to the realization that they’ve been living a lie for years and years are rare. Don’t bank on it.

This isn’t a license for liberals to go wild, to turn the ideological movement and the affiliated Democratic Party into some strange parody of itself. Liberalism should take a lesson from what Fox News has done to the Republican Party, transforming it into a universe of truly weird people who are far out of touch with the issues that concern normal Americans.

But this is where the advantage of modern liberalism kicks in: The agenda is actually popular. It can always be more progressive and move to the left, but fundamentally the key things that liberals stand for are popular. People want an active government that polices business and provides a generous social safety net. They ultimately don’t care about belt tightening and they certainly do not like bigoted social policies and agendas.

There needs to be massive messaging work done around key progressive goals and ideas, thanks to the broken mainstream media and the propaganda of the right combined with the inability of the left to sell things, but it isn’t a lost cause by any means.

It also will cost less time and money to keep core liberal voters engaged while attracting people who can be nudged to vote, versus the waste of resources to turn those who are in the cult.

This will require a tough mental break. It doesn’t feel good. But this particular lost cause, unlike so many of the other tough but necessary fights, cannot be won. We have to give up on these people so resources can be freed up to get more rational-minded voters to the polls.

Ironically, the successful execution of this strategy will make life materially better for the voters who hate everything liberalism stands for. Oh well.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977/Bluesky @owillis

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