What to do with sincere but unpopular beliefs?

The division of labor in political change

Two quick reminders before we get to today’s article. First, we now have Slow Boring quarter zips for sale. And second, we’re having a DC happy hour tomorrow, February 6, at 6pm (details here) cohosted by Emily in Your Phone — please join us if you’re in the area!

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My basic electoral advice for Democrats is so banal as to, at times, hardly seem worth writing down: They should get on the popular side of political issues rather than the unpopular side and try to raise the salience of their most-popular stances rather than their least-popular ones.

This was conventional wisdom in the very recent past, but it’s become controversial.

Consider gay marriage in 2008. This was a roughly 60-40 issue at the time, so Barack Obama wasn’t for it. And it wasn’t just him. All kinds of mainstream Democrats in boring safe blue seats were against it. The caucus leaders in the House and the Senate were against it. And while, of course, many liberals (myself included) thought they were wrong about this (40 percent of the population is a lot of people), nobody was angry or confused about what was going on. Everyone understood that you don’t take the 40 percent side of a 60-40 position if you want to participate in electoral politics. There were no angry anonymous staffer letters about it.

You also didn’t have today’s level of empiricism about the issue. Did Dick Durbin have to be against marriage equality to win re-election in Illinois in 2008? Obviously not. But he didn’t come out in favor until 2013 when it had become more popular. Everybody understood that, generally speaking, a political party’s mainstream leaders should avoid espousing unpopular causes. You didn’t need to prove in a laboratory experiment that it was really hurting you with swing voters; you just didn’t do it. It’s a striking contrast to the way politics is practiced today, where a view like, “Democrats shouldn’t take the losing side of a 70-30 issue about who plays on which sports team” is a controversial statement litigated in long essays and panel discussions. Among donors and operatives, it’s considered more plausible to try to win a Senate majority by running Dan Osborn-like independent candidates in states where the party brand is toxic than to try to de-toxify the brand by adopting popular positions on cultural issues.

A sticking point in this conversation, of course, is that when you have a 60-40 issue or a 70-30 issue or even an 80-20 issue, you still have lots of people with sincere beliefs (and often very strong feelings) on the unpopular side. And they don’t want to just give up, which is understandable — the outcomes of these policy debates have a real impact on people’s lives. So I think we need to revive some kind of sense that there are ways of making political progress toward progressive goals that don’t involve trying to bully politicians into adopting suicidal stances on the issues.

The division of labor

The fundamental breakdown we’ve experienced, it seems to me, is a kind of context collapse, a breakdown of the idea that different people have different jobs.

Something that I believe strongly, that I do not think the electorate particularly agrees with, is that we should provide universal cash benefits for parents of young kids.

My view of what I do in life is “persuasive writing aimed at relatively elite audiences.” So my main theory of how I can contribute to this cause is that I can try to convince progressive-minded elites that this is a better idea than competing ideas about how to spend large sums of money on helping families and try to convince conservative-minded elites that their worries about this policy are misguided. I like to talk about evidence that the negative shock to labor supply that conservatives are worried about is very small. Offsetting this, we have meaningful improvements to child well-being and some evidence of long-term benefits, including on things conservatives care about, like crime. There’s also reason to believe a more generous CTC would increase fertility, which I’d think would appeal to conservatives.

Will my strategy on this work? I don’t know. Change is hard, but it’s the best idea I have for how a political columnist can help. And we’ve gotten far with elite persuasion on the YIMBY cause, so I really do think it can work.¹

Something that I do not think I can do effectively (but would love to if I could) is mass persuasion. My guess is that mass persuasion mostly happens through pop culture rather than political columns. If you look at an old movie like “Paris Blues” (1961), which stars Paul Newman and features Duke Ellington playing jazz, Hollywood liberals are going to great lengths to get white audiences to watch Sidney Poitier talking about escaping the routine racism of American life.

Going further back in time, I’ve been reading George Eliot novels, and part of what she’s doing is trying to show readers that the sharp limits placed on 19th century women’s education are bad and also that the class norms of 19th century England are arbitrary.

There are also more journalistic forms of mass persuasion, which document things that people don’t know about or bring to light information that was previously hidden. These things can feed into each other. Factual reporting can inspire works of fiction, and elite persuasion almost certainly helps explain why movies like “Paris Blues” get made at all. And then there’s feedback in the other direction — I can’t think of much recent mass culture dedicated to trying to increase sympathy for the struggles of low-income parents.

There’s also a really important role for experts and technocrats in trying to devise workable ideas. Progressives did incredible work in the 2010s raising consciousness about problems with American policing. But they really skimped on the part where you need workable solutions to the problem. A lot of policy questions have much more technical content than marriage equality or segregation. I thought “Don’t Look Up” was a really good movie about existential risk. But Adam McKay is a really bad advocate on climate change because he misunderstands the actual dimensions of the problem, which is not genuinely existential and involves hard international coordination problems and the need for new technology.

The larger point, though, is that the stuff that helps shape long-run opinion typically leads electoral politics rather than the reverse.

Kinds of politicians

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, I think, a very skilled politician and an appealing communicator. She also has a pragmatic streak when it counts, which is good.

But despite her fundraising prowess and communications savvy, she’s an electoral underperformer relative to a generic Democrat in a district as blue as hers. It’s a very safe seat, so there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having an underperformer in it. I often think that moderate Democrats expend too much time and emotional energy complaining about members of the Squad, when it’s not The Squad’s fault that Bob Casey lost his race. You could blame Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Chuck Schumer for creating political problems for Bob Casey. Or you could blame Bob Casey for not demonstrating enough independent-mindedness. But it’s not AOC’s fault or Rashida Tlaib’s. Giving voice to sincere but unpopular stances and underperforming from within a safe district is a perfectly valid way to live your political life.

What I think is not valid, though, is staffers for Squad members publicly opining that Democrats would do better nationally if they all acted like AOC. That’s just not true. It is true that AOC ran ahead of Harris last November, but all incumbent House Democrats in heavily Hispanic districts ran ahead of Harris. She still did worse than you’d expect given incumbency and district characteristics, though, because she’s so left-wing.

In a healthy political culture, her staff would be willing to admit that she’s an electoral underperformer, and also frontline Dems would stop giving her a hard time about it. It’s a safe seat and she’s trying to be a visionary — let her do it!

But what anyone running for a frontline seat should try to do is win the election. That means being moderate, like Jared Golden or Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Henry Cuellar or Abigail Spanberger. Frankly, I generally think that frontline Democrats should be doing more to moderate their image. Ruben Gallego got a ton of mileage out of just coming out swinging against the word “Latinx,” which was both highly salient and had almost no substantive stakes. There are lots and lots of opportunities for members to demonstrate some loud and proud heterodoxy while still being solid progressive allies.

But I do think there has been a harmful shift among many mainstream Democrats — the people who are in positions similar to that of Dick Durbin in 2008. These are the members who ultimately shape the image of the party. They can get away with taking unpopular positions if they want to — Kirsten Gillibrand and Brian Schatz aren’t going to lose their seats if they come out in favor of a fracking ban or cryptocurrency crackdown — but if all of the members in those seats take increasingly left-wing positions, that comes to define the party, because ultimately Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are accountable to those mainstream members. The biggest change that we need to see is a change in attitude among mainstream members from “What can I get away with being for in my district?” to “What’s a good national message for the party?”

The job of the staff is to support the members in advancing those goals, not to try to corral them into taking aggressive progressive stands. And the role of party-aligned NGOs should be to amplify the good message, not coerce members into taking riskier stances. Again, to be clear, not every single member needs to do this on every single issue. But if you want to carve out a role for yourself as a visionary, just accept that this involves a degree of self-marginalization.

Ideologically conservative, operationally liberal

If Social Security didn’t exist, conservatives would obviously hate the idea of it. We’d be talking about a gigantic increase in federal spending financed by a broad-based tax increase with the explicit intention of reducing people’s incentive to work. It’s popular, in large part, because it already exists. I don’t totally understand how it is that decidedly conservative people who routinely vote for Republican Party candidates and complain about government spending have reconciled themselves to the apparent contradiction, but they clearly have.

And this is part of a larger phenomenon that everyone seemingly used to be aware of, where the public tends to espouse conservative ideological concepts but then also agrees with lots of specific liberal positions.

This is a fact of life that is unlikely to change, no matter what you or I or anyone else says or does. This means that realistically, the best way of getting to yes with any new idea is to detach it from the realm of progressive values.

Back to the CTC example.

When people were debating this issue in 2021, I know there was an impulse in some quarters to address the labor force participation question by contesting it on a values level — saying maybe it’s not so bad if people drop out of the labor force rather than doing grueling low-wage work. It’s possible that kind of argument will work in the future, if we start seeing AI-induced disemployment. But generally speaking, people believe in the value of work. And it’s best to try to work with them. CTC is an efficient and non-bureaucratic alternative to other efforts to help families with children, like the creation of a giant government-run childcare system. It’s also neutral between working parents and stay-at-home parents, which keys into a values framework about labor force participation that conservatives already embrace. Could you maybe compromise and say the program will have a work requirement but exempt parents of the youngest kids, while offering reassurance that statistical evidence indicates very small impacts anyway? Then we’re really just bargaining over one year or three years or five, but within a values framework that conservatives already accept.

Jan Voelkel, Joseph Mernyk, and Robb Willer published a great paper in 2023 showing that progressive economic ideas are more popular when they’re framed in terms of “values consistent with the ‘binding’ moral foundations—e.g. patriotism, family, and respect for tradition.” This, they find, is much more effective than talking about “the ‘individualizing’ foundations, e.g. equality and social justice.”

That’s a relatively recent paper, but the idea it embodies used to be conventional wisdom. Back when the call to reduce mass incarceration had some momentum behind it, the policy change that did happen came about largely by working with conservatives who were motivated by a desire to reduce spending. This kind of crossing the lines works at an elite level as well as a mass one. PEPFAR, which the Trump administration is now imperiling, happened because George W. Bush and members of his team were sincerely convinced that addressing HIV/AIDS in Africa aligned with their Christian values. You would just never in a million years get an ambitious project like that done on a partisan basis.

The limits of bullying

The complete opposite of these ideas is a strategy that we’ve seen repeatedly over the last decade: showing up in a space that is already ideologically committed to being progressive, and then loudly announcing to everyone in the space that in order to be a good progressive, everyone now needs to do X. That might be something substantive, like abandoning Obama-era education reform and “all of the above” energy policy, or it might be something performative, like land acknowledgments or having everyone put their pronouns in their bio. If you’re really aggressive about this kind of demand, you can get pretty far in intra-progressive fights — or at least you could in the years 2015-2024.

But as a persuasion tactic, it leaves you stuck at a local maximum.

You’re bullying people who are committed to progressive politics into going along with your ideas. But most people are not committed to progressive politics! Maybe land acknowledgments actually are a good idea, but by making them constitutive of progressive politics, you’re ensuring that the majority of the population will see them as cringe and weird. And by making Democrats seem cringe and weird, you’re making it less likely that candidates who support funding Native schools and health care will win elections and be able to deliver actual policy.

1. It certainly makes more sense than encouraging people to be angry at Joe Manchin.