What Do Democrats Really Mean When they Say that Social Issues aren’t Economic Issues?
A recent article by Madeleine Sweet and a recent tweet series by Ta-Nehisi Coates got me thinking about the strange belief that there’s a divide between social and economic issues, and what that belief says about American Liberalism and the Democratic party.
Sweet’s article doesn’t merely say that social and economic issues are often the same thing. She goes further to demonstrate that many of the issues labeled by liberals as “economic” are, if anything, more social in nature, and vice versa.
In the past, I had been suspicious of the liberal framing, but basically accepted the idea that some ideas are more social and some are more economic, and that they need to be addressed separately. Upon reading Sweet’s article, it became clearer just how little the framing holds up when measured against reality.
My first thought, after reading Sweet’s article, was that “social vs. economic” is just a sloppy framing that liberals developed because they thought it sounded good, but without thinking it through.
But it later occurred to me that it’s probably not just sloppy framing, because there’s a pattern to it: When they want you to dismiss an issue, they frame it as an economic one, and when they want you to care about an issue, they frame it as a social one. And the same issues actually get reframed willy-nilly based on what the democrats want people to be upset about at any given time, and what they want people to forget about at others.
As both Sweet and Coates say, the Clinton campaign rested heavily on the primacy of “social” issues, with a high emphasis on the particular “social issue” of reproductive rights. But If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, reproductive rights could have just as easily been discarded. Here’s how the post-election “social vs economic” pivot would have gone down regarding reproductive rights.
In eight years of a Hillary Clinton presidency, some restrictions have been lifted on abortion, but it is just as difficult to get an abortion as it was in 2016. This failure is masked by the fact that women are traveling to Canada and Mexico to get abortions, or buying misoprostol on the black market, and by inspiring speeches by Hillary that make you feel as if a true victory has been achieved (unless you actually have to get an abortion). Still, people who voted for Hillary because they thought they’d have better access to an abortion with her as president are disillusioned. For 2024, they want a democrat who can truly give them what they want.
In 2024, the democrats want to run a centrist Clinton-style candidate — let’s say it’s Cory Booker. But a more progressive candidate — let’s say it’s Keith Ellison — runs against him. Keith Ellison speaks to these women who can’t afford abortions, and runs on a campaign to repeal the Hyde Amendment, making federal funding available to abortion clinics, and guarantee affordable abortions for all women.
The democrats don’t want Ellison. So they accuse Ellison of emphasizing “economic” issues. They’ll say, “Why all this talk about women being able to afford things? Will free abortions end sexism? No. But this dudebro thinks it will.” The Social issue of 2016 is now demoted to an Economic Issue in 2024.
This happens in cycles. In the Booker 2024 campaign, the financial regulations that in 2016 were dismissed as “economic issues” will once again become recast as “social” issues, because the democrats will desperately need the votes from people who have been angry at financial institutions since 2008. They’ll campaign on it. Finance will be promoted to Social Issue, and affordable abortions will be relegated to Economic Issue.
The “social issue” label seems to indicate that an issue is higher on the scale of importance, but it also indicates how little the democrats will actually do about it. If the Democrats sincerely wanted to increase women’s access to healthcare, they wouldn’t need to frame it as some expansive Social issue. They would just come out and say “You should be able to have an abortion if you want, and we’ll do all we can to make sure that you can get one legally and can actually afford it.”
Framing women’s reproductive health as a “social issue” makes them look more important, while making the actual goal appear more abstract and less attainable. Framing the fight for women’s reproductive health as a battle in the War on Women as opposed to, say, framing it as the Fight for Affordable Abortion, makes Democrats look like heirs to a hermetic tradition, rather than people we are electing because we want them to do specific things for us.
But most Democrats don’t actually intend to fight for what voters want, because that would involve taking risks: if they promise, and genuinely try, to make abortion affordable and accessible, and it doesn’t happen, voters might turn on them. And if abortion does become safe, legal and accessible, as opposed to merely safe, legal and rare, some of the Democrats’ more conservative sponsors might turn on them. So it is easier to frame it as an immaterial “social” issue, and it’s easier to frame things as expansive cold wars than as fights. (Consider the national Fight for Fifteen movement, and ask yourself if you can imagine Democrats ever using a word as unambiguous as “fight,” or a goal as concrete as a fifteen dollar minimum wage in one of their slogans.)
The term “social” actually tells you a whole lot on its own. People who use that odd label don’t see these issues as political problems, the responsibility of people with power. They see them as issues for the masses to fight about, while the elites occasionally drop in to debate them with detachment and expertise.
This is more obvious in the entertainment industry than it is in politicians. Many writers see themselves as elite commentators on eternal social issues that never truly change. They do not see themselves as journalists introducing a diverse readership to new stories, feelings and ideas and their work reflects this.
When they see people who are trying to genuinely fix the political problems that provide material for the content they write, it makes them uncomfortable. It suggests a world that doesn’t compute with their own — a world in which publishers and readers might lose interest as social movements take on social problems in material, concrete ways.
So these writers hit back with the myth that, if a social problem can be fixed with a real, actionable solution, it is not a social problem but a dull, irrelevant “economic issue.”
Democrats invoked the “social issue” for all of 2016, but if they actually believed that politicians can fix social problems, they’d be socialists. And if they actually believed that the government can’t fix social problems, they’d be libertarians. But Democrats take some of the things people dislike like about socialism, add some of the things people dislike like about libertarianism, and combine them into a hybrid so baffling that many Americans wonder why anyone would ever vote for it.
The logical conclusion of American Liberalism is to see politicians as the management consultants of societies. In the corporate world, management consultants don’t promise to do the jobs of presidents. But in the political world, Liberal management consultants get themselves elected by promising to lead. Then, once in office, they facilitate social progress just enough to show deliverables and rack up billable hours.
If leadership were the same as management consulting, corporations wouldn’t hire consultants. Democrats often don’t get that. Voters don’t want consultants. They want leaders. If a consultant stops into an office three times a week to say “Remember: social issues, not economic issues!” and then leaves, employees will probably avoid those meetings, unless there’s free food. The consultants that the Democrats keep running are a bit like that, but they don’t even offer free food anymore.
