Democrats, so the critical refrain goes, do not know the real America. High in their shining towers of ivy and ivory, they preen over social minutiae while regular people are too busy worrying about getting food on the table, affording medication, or securing their other so-called bread-and-butter issues.
And yet, the core of Democratic policy is undeniably more pro-poor, more focused on the bread-and-butter concerns of working-class Americans than the GOP’s. Even as a handful of high-profile progressives sometimes veer into abstract hot-button issues like the debate over cancel culture, Democrats have largely run on a platform centering day-to-day economic issues.
This focus sharpens in the relief of a Republican Party that has embraced conspiracy and cult of personality over values or substance.
Take healthcare. President Joe Biden campaigned on expansion of the Affordable Care Act funded by modest increases in taxes on the wealthy. Each of those policies moderate the Democrats’ left flank and, not incidentally, show broad public support.
Meanwhile, more than a decade after the ACA’s passage, Republican healthcare policy begins and ends with a mantra to “repeal and replace” still missing its second “R.”
In 2020, for the first time in over a century, the Republican Party declined to even introduce a new policy platform; former president Donald Trump was their policy incarnate. If they know the real America any more than Democrats do, Republicans have not made policy that proves it.
Now more than ever, the Democrats are the party of bread and butter, of a more generous welfare state, more affordable higher education, lower-cost healthcare — the stuff that reaches for the heart of the ailing American Dream.
Only one issue: American voters don’t believe it.
Look to the average non-college-educated White voter: the kind of blue-collar, small-town person abandoned by globalism, whose calloused hands can no longer provide for their family the way their grandfather’s once could, who struggles to afford treatment for the aches of decades spent overworked and underpaid. They stand to benefit greatly from improved access to healthcare. Their children stand to benefit greatly from an education that can finally give them the hope of opportunity. Democrats need them to succeed in an electoral system that structurally advantages minoritarian Republican rule.
They also break for the GOP by 24 percentage points.
Democrats’ support among the non-White working class has shown instability too. In 2020, Trump outperformed his 2016 numbers in 78 of 100 majority-Hispanic counties, most of which are working-class.
Democrats have an image problem among working-class voters. It threatens the party’s national viability, coalescing even though Democrats continue to focus on traditional bread-and-butter issues. Even as progressives push more generously pro-poor policy, the disconnect remains — heaping on more of the same bread and butter does not bring new voters to the table.
If Democrats envision a coalition that reaches beyond their usual, stale domain, that crosses the arbitrary lines fracturing American society and revitalizes a politics centering the everyday worries of all working-class Americans, they must reimagine what bread-and-butter politics and, by extension, political parties themselves can be.
The answer, rather unexpectedly, may be found in the Great Texas Freeze of this year.
Though anomalous in its particulars, at its outset, the freeze conformed to the archetype of the American natural disaster. Tragedy strikes, seemingly out of nowhere. News coverage flares. Politicians follow. Promises are made. Photo-ops are maximized. Soon, the nation loses interest.
Often, these promises are kept, at least halfway — the visibility of the American tragedy demands that. But in the dramatics of it all there lingers a palpable sense of the artificial, that if the camera lights flickered off sooner or never came on at all, there would be little help coming.
At the freeze’s outset, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, typified the worst of this empty circustry. As millions lost power, Cruz attempted a family trip to Cancun, and Abbott asserted, absurdly, that frozen wind turbines were responsible for a power grid gutted by years of mismanagement.
Then, the Great Texas Freeze broke from the archetype. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., went to Texas.
From a strictly representative perspective, Ocasio-Cortez’s trip to join the relief effort made little sense. If a representative is to be understood as, well, representative, then a New York Democrat has no real reason to help with a Texan disaster.
But politics in this new era of distrust cannot rest complacently at the bounds of normalcy; in flying to Texas, raising millions of dollars, and working at the Houston Food Bank, Ocasio-Cortez modeled an approach to politics that goes beyond the transactional promises of a traditional bread-and-butter strategy.
Ocasio-Cortez did not raise money for Texans of a particular partisan affiliation, nor, presumably, did she volunteer to lay the groundwork for a carpetbagging Texas state office run.
As Ocasio-Cortez put it to reporters, “When disaster strikes, this is not just an issue for Texans … our whole country needs to come and rally together behind the needs of Texans.”
Sure, there were the photo-ops and soundbites that follow any high-profile politician. But the fact remains that Ocasio-Cortez’s trip defied — or at least revised — the norm, delivering tangible support where many politicians only make promises.
In Ocasio-Cortez’s trip to Texas lies the rough outlines of what could be a revelatory new dimension for the troubled Democratic messaging machine: an on-the-ground, voluntarist arm that offers everyday aid as a way of building good faith and, in turn, making policy promises credible.
This more expansive approach to bread-and-butter politics acknowledges growing distrust of political parties and seeks to establish that politicians are acting out of genuine care and compassion. By helping with the quotidien struggles of the real America — natural disasters, welfare forms, tax papers, financial aid — as a non-profit organization might, Democrats can demonstrate in a nonpartisan, depolarized forum that they want to serve working-class people.
Rather than knocking on doors and echoing campaign-trail rhetoric, volunteers might, for example, staff a traveling paperwork fair offering assistance with the byzantine bureaucracy of welfare or tax forms. For broad-based attendance, Democrats would brand such outreach only matter-of-factly, eschewing the flashy trappings of an ordinary political event.
Fanfare riles the base, but it cannot persuade the unpersuaded. A revived politics of persuasion must be depolarized, understated enough that it makes visible only the pragmatic, self-interested appeal of traditional bread-and-butter policy.
As the failures of the past few years attest, in a time where even the commonality of basic truths is in question, a politics crafted of promises and narratives subjugates itself to each voter’s flawed evaluation of belief or disbelief. A politics crafted of unconditional action, however, seeks to be undeniable; an ordinary helping hand can rehumanize politics and serve as the locus for bridging the yawning American partisan divide.
Democrats know the real America. Their policy shows that they care about it. But, in leaning on a politics of promises, they have lost its love. If Democrats desire to build a coalition that reaches across the great, fractured American expanse, that finds power in union and not the strategic use of division, then it is time they revolutionize what a political party can be. It is time for a new bread-and-butter politics.
Image by vwz.photography is licensed under the Unsplash License.
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A New Bread-and-Butter Politics - Harvard Political Review
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