Don’t You, Forget About This Lesson From 2016

One lesson of the 2016 election seemed to be that voting for someone you don’t believe in because you think they have a better chance of beating Donald Trump is a mistake. But to assume everyone learned from that mistake would also be a mistake. I knew lots of people who believed in the things Bernie Sanders said and liked him better than Hillary Clinton, but voted for Clinton in the primary because they were told over and over by everyone on TV that she had a better shot at beating Trump, and now some of them have the same plan for 2020, already, except of course for the Clinton part, which has not yet been cast.

This voting strategy — you could call it The Values Sacrifice —has its appeal, and it is understandable that people would opt for it when confronted with something they find as scary as they found Donald Trump. The reasoning behind it is something like this: the best way to beat someone on the far right is not with someone on the left, but with someone in the center, because you have to appeal to the people in the middle. Because there are more of them.

Set aside for a second that the strategy so recently failed (maybe it was a fluke, and maybe centrist candidates in 2020 won’t be as unpopular as Clinton), and also set aside the bizarre irony in the idea that voting responsibly requires voting for a person who is closer politically to the one you are trying to defeat. If you just take the strategy at face value, it can appear to make sense. But there are reasons why it actually does not.

First, it assumes that centrists, in general, have the broadest appeal to the electorate. This is true in a limited sense, but false in a wider one. Centrists appeal to a broad base the way beige goes with almost anything, or the way blank walls make apartments more appealing to renters, or the way you can’t really disagree with someone who never says anything meaningful. It’s an appeal that is decidedly uninspiring. Consequently, it is limited to the minority of people who vote no matter what. It does not touch the majority, who will vote only if given a reason.

Second, today’s centrism is different from the centrism of the past. It’s shifted to the right of where it was in the ‘80’s, and far, far right of where it was in the ‘40’s. Public opinion, however, has not shifted with it. So centrist policies — like, say, the ones that exclude a public health care option or the ones that support public subsidies for the fossil fuel industry or the ones that tax the rich at lower rates than the poor — are often not aligned with public opinion. Here are things that extensive polling over decades has shown that most people think: we should have a health care system like they do in Canada and the rest of the industrialized world; we should spend less on the military and wars; the rich should pay more taxes. Here is what centrists think: we should continue doing health care, war, and taxes the way we’ve been doing them, with occasional inconsequential tweaks.

The centrist promise of today is essentially this: “We’ll go back to how things were under Clinton, the Bushes and Obama, where we argue over how tightly to regulate Wall Street but never end Too-Big-To-Fail or reinstate Glass-Steagall; where we argue over how much private health industries can gouge the public but never stop them from doing it; where we do nothing at all to stop corporate assaults on unions; where we do nothing to close corporate tax loopholes; where we do nothing to protect middle class jobs; and of course where no one will ever end the wars or military interventions and free up those billions of dollars for other things.”

This promise is not too appealing. Even if you don’t know what Glass-Steagall is, or you don’t care about unions, or you think the wars are necessary, it’s still clear that the whole thing rests on a premise that more and more people recognize as false: that the government can prioritize the desires of the very rich and at the same time serve everyone else. That is the assumption at the core of centrist ideology. It runs right down the middle of the two parties because serving the rich is one of the few priorities they share. And the assumption is utterly untrue.

The truth is that the preferences of major industry and the interest of the general population are often at odds with each other, because major industry under capitalism demands endless profit growth. That growth comes at the cost of lower wages, fewer worker benefits, more automation, more pollution, more off-shoring of jobs, and on and on. Letting major industry do whatever it wants always eventually hurts the general population. The fantasy that it benefits them is called trickle-down economics, and is today basically a joke. Today, in 2019, it is painfully clear that the world doesn’t work that way, and the reason it’s clear is because we tried it for a few decades and the results are in: 30 million people uninsured, one in four kids living in poverty, 80% of workers living paycheck to paycheck, a tiny minority with more money than God, and all in the richest country in the history of the world.

And everyone knows. Even if they can’t recite those statistics, they know because they live it. They or their friends or family struggle to make ends meet, carry huge debts, have no insurance, can’t find work that pays enough to live decently, can’t afford a thousand dollar emergency, and all the rest that is now so familiar. They’ve lived through all the tax cuts for the rich and seen that the rich do not then invest in more production, don’t hire more workers, don’t increase wages, don’t improve working conditions, don’t do anything that’s supposed to justify the gifts lavished upon them, but instead pay themselves huge bonuses, buy back their company stock to artificially inflate its value, buy government bonds (which the government would not even have to issue if it collected those taxes in the first place), and sit around engaging in other financial wonkery.

The promise of centrism worked when there was a strong middle class who felt like their lives were getting better. It worked when they weren’t so aware of the obscene wealth hoarded at the top. But those days are over. Too many people perceive, accurately, that centrist, big business-dominated policies make their lives worse. They don’t like Donald Trump and yes he is also a billionaire, but they don’t want to go back to the government that gave them the financial crash, the recession, and a stagnant or sinking standard of living. Donald Trump is a disaster, but those things are too, and it’s hard to say which disaster the public thinks is worse. It’s easy to over-estimate how disappointed people are with Trump. Another thing 2016 gave to many on the left was a pristine view of their own bubbles.

Every election is a referendum on the status quo. People vote between a candidate who can be expected to continue the current administration’s policies and one who can be expected to depart from them. (Sometimes the current administration is so unpopular that both candidates claim to be a departure, even when that claim is absurd — John McCain did it because the Iraq War made Bush so unpopular, despite the fact that McCain was always a big war enthusiast himself.) In 2020, the departure from Trump cannot be a proposed return to Obama. As great as many Democrats think that would be, because it was so nice to have a president who spoke intelligently and made some modest moves for the middle class and was also fun enough to dance on Ellen and cool enough to go on Marc Maron and who wasn’t a sleazebag to women, in the end his administration did not really make average, working people’s lives better. Those people — including me and probably you — still had to pay a lot for health care and still took on debt just to meet living expenses and still paid banks usurious interest rates and still got no relief if they were hit by the crash while the people who caused it got richer and still dealt with underfunded public services because the tax revenues to pay for them weren’t there because they were sitting in off-shore tax havens. And that’s the middle class. The poor were drinking poison water. We can blame the Republican congress if we want. It will not help anyone.

Donald Trump does not erase all of history. The fact that he is an extremist does not make being a centrist bold and new. Every Democratic president for forty years has been a centrist, if you measure them against the range of popular politicians over the last two centuries and not just the last two decades. That’s why saying the country needs a centrist makes no sense — you can’t really be in need of something you already have a lot of.

All of this is ignored by The Values Sacrifice voting strategy. It expects that someone whose pitch is, “We’ll get sensible again, like we were before Trump,” will bring out the big numbers. In this country, today, that is a very, very shaky bet.

Of course, there is no really safe bet. But here I propose an alternative voting strategy, one that rests on a different assumption: bringing people out requires giving them a concrete, specific reason to vote. You could call it The Give Me A Reason, Just One, Please God, At Least One And Preferably More Reasons To Vote For You strategy. It is for the most part easy, but it does require being vigilant about what qualifies as a reason and what doesn’t.

A reason is not an empty promise, and it is not the achievement that you are not Donald Trump. It’s a credible promise to better someone’s life in a tangible way. Here are some examples of reasons: “You will be guaranteed health care. Your kids’ schools will have sufficient funding. You can go to college for free. If you want to work but are unable to find a job, the government will hire you to do something the public needs done. These programs will be paid for by taxing the richest corporations and individuals who have more than enough money, and not by taxing you.”

These are also reasons: “You will be kept safe because we will aggressively jail criminals. You will have more jobs because we will keep the number of immigrants who compete for them to a minimum. You will be kept safe because we will bomb and assassinate the terrorists. You will have more jobs because we will not allow corporations to ship them overseas. You will have more jobs because we will spur investment with tax cuts. You will have better roads and infrastructure because we’ll stop wasting money on pointless wars. You will have more jobs because we will tax imports.”

Whatever you think of that second set, which should sound familiar, they are reasons. Most may be weak — there is lots of evidence that aggressively jailing and bombing people does not make anyone safer, and there is little evidence that immigrants cause job scarcity or that tax cuts spur investment — but they at least propose concrete solutions to perceived problems. And that is what a reason must do.

A reason, then, is a concrete policy that is easy to grasp because it is a straightforward solution to a basic problem.

Every reason contains within itself the acknowledgement of an unpleasant truth. The truths acknowledged by the second set of reasons above are these: we feel unsafe; there are not enough jobs; infrastructure is bad and needs to be fixed. The truths acknowledged by the first set are these: we don’t have the health care we need; schools are underfunded; college is too expensive; there are not enough jobs; fixing these problems will be expensive.

Here is another unpleasant truth, repeated constantly in one form or another by Donald Trump in 2016: “The political establishment is corrupt and overwhelmingly serves the rich and powerful at your expense. That’s the reason you don’t have what you deserve. These people are full of shit. They promise you the world, over and over, and give you nothing. They give it all to their rich friends.”

If you don’t think that’s true, you’re not paying attention, and if you think it’s too simplistic, you’re expecting people who don’t have much time or interest in politics to pay closer attention than is reasonable. People may have been wrong to think Donald Trump was going to fix that problem, but they were not wrong to respond favorably to him for acknowledging that truth, especially in the truth-anemic world of politics. The other candidate who consistently acknowledged it became the most popular politician in the country and stayed there for two years, despite the media ignoring him, and it wasn’t because he was as eloquent and charming as Barack Obama.

Acknowledging that kind of truth, which is essential to giving people a reason to vote for you, is very hard for centrist politicians. It’s hard because it exposes the guiding principle to which they are committed — that government can cater to the very rich and also serve everyone else — as false. That is why centrists (and most politicians) rarely give people real reasons to vote for them, but instead give them things that kind of sound like reasons but aren’t: platitudes.

A platitude is a vague and open-ended statement that aligns with universal values, which can be and often is made by any politician anywhere, usually with reference to a “plan” but with no concrete policy proposal. It is an expedient but meaningless endorsement of a democratically popular idea.

This is a platitude: “Every American deserves access to health care, and we have a plan to ensure that everyone gets it.” Every politician says this now because they know the entire electorate thinks everyone deserves health care. Even politicians whose policies make health care impossibly expensive say it. It is a meaningless non-statement.

Here is another platitude: “We want to rebuild the middle class.” You know who wants that? Everyone in America. So every politician says it. Even politicians whose policies kill the middle class say it. It is also a meaningless non-statement.

So here is the pill to swallow, which is actually not bitter but sweet, the Why You Can’t Fight Far Right With Center But Must Fight It With Candidates Who Are Actually Committed To Substantial Policy Change pill:

It is impossible to fight reasons with platitudes. A half-century of platitudes has put the electorate’s bullshit detector in overdrive, and the amount of bullshit it takes to make them stop listening is almost zero. The slightest hint of bullshit and they think, ‘I don’t want this sales pitch, I’m out, I’m done listening until I hear someone who sounds like a fucking straight-talking person and not an android.’ For people in this state, whose platitude-based political diet has left them so starved for substance they can barely stand, a weak reason will beat a strong platitude. If a candidate relies on platitudes instead of reasons, they are asking to lose.

Again, go back and look at Donald Trump’s campaign. He had lots of reasons. They were weak and fell apart under scrutiny, but he won anyway because his opponent hardly had any and ran instead on platitudes.

The border wall is an example of a weak reason. It’s really expensive and would not solve the crime and jobs problems it’s supposed to solve. But it is a concrete policy addressing basic problems that is easy to grasp. The other side responded to the jobs problem with platitudes, and most people don’t even remember what they were. Even if Trump had lost, we’d still remember the border wall, and not just because it’s so outlandish and inflammatory. Sanders lost and nobody forgot Medicare For All.

So it is not enough for a candidate to say that a reason like the border wall is bad, explain why, and then offer a platitude in its place. They must offer other, stronger reasons of their own.

Aside from being policy-specific and graspable, a good reason also needs to be credible. That means the promise it contains must align with the past actions of the person making the promise. Discovering whether that’s the case requires some internet searching and is boring, so most potential voters won’t do it themselves, but they’ll discover it later when the other side brings it up. So anyone not wanting to “waste” their vote on a weak candidate should make sure their candidate is credible.

I do not want to pick on Hillary Clinton, and we can fight about why she lost later, but I think it’s fair to say she suffered because the contradictions between her record and what she promised were so obvious. Everyone knew she took millions of dollars from Wall Street banks, so her promises to rein in their excesses were not credible. She advocated every military intervention including the most disastrous ones, so her promises to run sensible foreign policy were not credible. She was dishonest with the committee investigating her e-mail server, so it was very hard for people to trust her. It was hard for me to trust her, and anyone who wants to believe I am a misogynist because of it is free to do so. That won’t help anyone either.

So, if you think we should have universal health care, vote for a candidate who promises it and whose record makes that promise credible. If you think we shouldn’t spend billions of dollars a year bombing countries most of us can’t even name (there are 9 of them now), vote for someone who credibly promises to cut military spending. If you think the ultra-rich should pay more in taxes than the poor and middle class do, vote for someone who credibly promises to make them pay. If you think the bombing is necessary and tax cuts spur investment and being a billionaire qualifies you to be president, then vote that way. Just don’t steal your vote from yourself by trying to fortune-tell which personality has the best chance of winning.

Because fortune telling is very, very hard to do. It’s unnecessary and counterproductive. You would never choose a doctor that way. You probably wouldn’t choose a hair stylist that way. And its track record lately is pretty bad.

The Einstein quote about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results goes here.

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