When Bad Politics Happens to Good Policies

This Friday, October 15, at Noon ET, my guests on our Zoom call will be Jafar Farah and Suha Salman Mousa, the general director and executive director of the Mossawa Center, which advocates for the rights of Israel’s Palestinian-Arab citizens. We’ll talk about the violence earlier this year in Israel’s “mixed cities,” about the inclusion of a Palestinian-Arab party in Israel’s current coalition government, and about the role of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the larger Palestinian national struggle. As always, we’ll take your questions. Subscribe and you’ll also get access to all of our previous conversations with guests like Omar Barghouti, Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, and many others.

Last week, the political scientist Ruy Teixeira dug into the data about how Hispanics voted in 2020. If you’re a progressive, it’s pretty alarming. Donald Trump performed 16 points better among Hispanics nationally than he had in 2016. And he gained ground everywhere: From Florida (28 points) to Texas (18 points) to Arizona (10 points) to Georgia (8 points).

To be sure, Trump still only got roughly half the share of the Hispanic vote that Biden did. But to overcome the Republicans’ massive advantage among white voters—not to mention its accelerating efforts to disqualify African American voters—Democrats need to wrack up huge margins with Hispanics. The current margin may not be enough.

Why did Democrats lose ground? Some Hispanics appear to have credited Trump for the strong economy he presided over until COVID hit. That may not signal a longer-term problem. But what does signal a longer-term problem is the hostility of some Hispanics to the progressive push for racial justice. Only about half of Hispanics approve of Black Lives Matter. And while Hispanics do support some reforms aimed at ameliorating police killings, most oppose defunding the police or even reducing the size of police forces. They also overwhelmingly oppose reparations for slavery and, by a margin of twenty points, agree with the statement, “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”  

None of this should be all that surprising. In a country where African Americans (along with Native Americans) have always been the quintessential subjugated class, it shouldn’t be startling that many Hispanics—many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants—embrace the attitudes of white Americans who enjoy the privileges that they desire for themselves. In the 1960s and 1970s, the children and grandchildren of Irish and Italian immigrants left the Democratic Party after it embraced civil rights and the War on Poverty. Amidst today’s new civil rights movement, which includes reparations and the radical reform of American policing, some Hispanics appear to be doing the same.

At this point, I’m supposed to tell you what Democrats should do. And that’s where the problems begin. Because answering that question is a trap.

It’s a trap because the question “what should the Democrats do?” is actually two completely different questions. Question number one is moral: What policies best promote human dignity and human freedom? Question number two is political: What policies best help win elections?

The answer to those questions is often radically different because—especially when it comes to the rights of historically subjugated groups—moral progress often isn’t popular. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has noted, most Americans in 1961 disapproved of freedom rides and sit-ins. In 1963, most of them disapproved of the March on Washington. In 1966, most of them disapproved of Martin Luther King.

It’s hardly unusual, therefore, that most Americans today—Hispanics included—oppose reparations and oppose dramatically shifting government resources from the police into programs that provide economic opportunity. But that opposition says little about the morality of these efforts. Given the profound disadvantage that African Americans face because the United States government for centuries has kept them from accumulating intergenerational wealth, the case for reparations strikes me as extremely strong. Given that most other advanced industrial countries spend less on police, and more on the social safety net than the United States—and experience less poverty and less violent crime—shifting resources in that direction strikes me as a good idea as well.

There’s nothing wrong with arguing that it’s morally correct to give African Americans reparations and shift funding away from police. There’s also nothing wrong with arguing that advocating such policies will harm Democrats politically. The problem is that, too often, political commentators blur the lines between the two. It’s depressing to argue for something you believe is passionately right—and then admit that if Democrats adopt your view they might help elect Donald Trump. And it’s uncomfortable to tell Democrats what they need to do to win—and then admit that you’re advising them to adopt policies you consider immoral. In a recent New York Times column, Ezra Klein cited the pollster David Schor, who suggested that if Democrats want to win, they need to learn from Bill Clinton’s success among more conservative voters. That’s easy to say in the abstract. But as Times columnist Jamelle Bouie noted in response, Clinton achieved that success by, among other things, leaving the campaign trail in 1992 to preside over the execution of a mentally impaired African American man. When political commentators urge Democrats to be politically realistic, they rarely acknowledge how ugly that political realism can be in practice.

But that’s what honest political discourse requires. It requires acknowledging that good morality and good politics are not always—or even usually—the same thing. In their efforts to be more candid about this, political pundits could take a lesson from African American voters and politicians. Polling suggests that most African Americans support both reparations and a dramatic reallocation of resources away from the police. Yet African Americans voted overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary for Joe Biden, one of the candidates least committed to that agenda. Why? In part, because they did not believe that a candidate who forcefully espoused policies they considered morally correct could win the general election.

In so doing, African American voters echoed the approach of James Clyburn, South Carolina’s first African American Congressman since Reconstruction, whose endorsement played a critical role in Biden’s campaign-saving victory in that state. After Biden defeated Trump, Clyburn told reporters that he and the late John Lewis, the civil rights hero turned Georgia congressman, “were very concerned when these slogans came out about ‘defund the police.’” Clyburn didn’t critique the idea on moral grounds. Indeed, he insisted that “I’m just as progressive as anybody else.” But he pointed to Joe Cunningham, a moderate South Carolina Democrat who had lost his reelection bid, and declared, “we lost him over ‘defund the police.’”

As the columnist Charles Blow noted in 2016 when explaining African Americans’ preference for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, “History and experience have burned into the black American psyche a sort of functional pragmatism,” a willingness to vote for the lesser evil while still recognizing it as evil.

It’s a sensibility political commentators should emulate. There’s nothing wrong with making moral arguments. There’s nothing wrong with taking account of political reality. The problem is when pundits can’t distinguish between the two.

Other stuff:

A right-wing talk show host accused progressives of launching an “inquisition”—then apologized for defaming the original Inquisition, which he kind of likes.

The Hindu American civil war and the Jewish American civil war have a lot in common.

For Jewish Currents’ podcast, I had a conversation with editor-in-chief Arielle Angel about the use and abuse of the notion of Jewish peoplehood.

Currents (to which you should subscribe) is also hosting a webinar on the future of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Judaism.

I re-watched this debate from last year between Bret Stephens and Yoram Hazony about the relationship between nationalism and conservatism, and found it alarming and engaging at the same time.

On October 14 I’m speaking at Tufts University.

See you on Friday,

Peter