Left economics can make the rest of your agenda more popular
Reject the false choice between economic progress and unpopular politics.
Democrats are too focused on issues of identity, abortion, and climate, and aren’t doing enough about the economy, according to new polling by The New York Times and Ipsos. In coverage of the poll released this morning, the NYT argues that
The issues that people cited as most important to them personally were the economy and inflation, health care and immigration, the poll found. The kinds of social causes that progressive activists have championed in recent years ranked much lower.
Just scanning the online reactions to this piece, it’s clearly reignited the old class vs. identity arguments that have defined the liberal-left since 2016. On one side, there is a faction of activists who insist that deemphasizing identity issues would amount to abandoning various oppressed and marginalized demographics to the agenda of the reactionaries. The liberals in this faction, of course, are also using the argument as an opportunity to insist that class politics is intrinsically antithetical to the egalitarian cause.
Since it has been some time since I’ve seen the left spell out its response to this argument, I figure now is as good a time as any to give my take on it.
Here’s my theory: if you run on a good enough economic platform, tons of people just won’t care what else you’re doing. This is because, as we see in poll after poll, people tend to prioritize economic issues over every other.
The bad news is that a popular economic platform can work as a vehicle for some truly dangerous politics. The most recent example of this happening, of course, is Trump, who ran on an agenda of lowering prices but who instead has spent most of his first weeks in office pushing a hard-right political agenda. Polling thus far suggests that most of these other items are relatively unpopular, but since he also promised to lower grocery prices he gets to do them, too.
But the good news is that a popular economic platform can also work as a vehicle for politics that are unpopular but important. If for example people are generally not favorable to climate action but do want you to lower the cost of eggs, you can run on a platform of lowering egg prices and they’ll probably forgive you for insisting on climate action too.
The implications for Democrats are straightforward. There are all kinds of items on the liberal-left agenda that are demonstrably unpopular even though they are the right thing to do: for example, certain gun bans, or requiring insurance to cover gender-affirming surgeries. But instead of abandoning these positions, Democrats should simply make their economic agenda so compelling that people are willing to accept the other stuff, too.
Since liberalism can’t rely on a popular economic agenda, it generally has three strategies for dealing with important-but-unpopular issues:
Abandon them.
Run on them and lose — but celebrate your principled defeat.
Try to persuade people to change their mind through logic and facts.
The first two strategies hardly count as strategies at all. The third, meanwhile, faces a simple objection: instead of trying to persuade people on the merits, why not just persuade them with a strong economic platform? Why bother trying to convince stubborn voters that an assault rifle ban is necessary when you can just give them universal healthcare to win their vote — and then ban assault rifles?
Liberals tend to reduce this dilemma to a choice between a strong economic platform and a strong “social” platform, but the left should reject that as the false choice that it is. Instead, we should leverage economic progress to make progress on everything else — and if that doesn’t work, instead of abandoning social progress, we can take that as a sign to strengthen our economic platform even further.
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