A week ago I wrote about a new CNN poll and how it showed Democrats were pretty evenly divided over “left” vs “centrist” politics (should the Ds “move to the left” or “move to the center”) but very united over fight vs accommodation. So focus on the latter and agree to disagree on the former. I also noted however that these terms are wildly over-determined and mostly don’t mean very much. For this specific question, those polling results are still broadly valuable because those are the catchphrases by which a major intra-party debate is identified. So if that’s the language being used and people split roughly down the middle, you know it’s very divisive and no one side is going to beat the other. It’s a standoff, and what you really want going into a critical midterm is unity.
But it’s still important to remember how little these terms actually mean, and to consider the complexities and uncertainties they paper over. I was reminded of this when I saw Axios describing a Reuters poll which Mike Allen said showed that independents are “progressive-curious.” The evidence was that substantial majorities of independents support higher taxes on corporations and billionaires (64%) and government-provided health care for all Americans (60%). But 43% are less likely to vote for a candidate who identifies as “democratic socialist.”
If you study or spend much time thinking about public I don’t think either of these findings will surprise you at all. They’re both pretty textbook, in fact. And this quickly brings us up against the fact that most of the definitions and categories we use to discuss these factional and ideological debates are either fake and meaningless or confused. Even weirder is that most of us know this despite the fact that we use them. Let’s start with the idea that “independent” voters are or tend to be “moderates” or “centrists” — something that is mainly not true. Most of those who self-label as independent are people who don’t like to identify with a political party. You have people who by every marker are clearly Democrats or Republicans. They just don’t like being owned by a political label.
The best descriptive use of “independent” is probably swing voters, voters who swing back and forth between parties. So they should be in the “center.” Only they’re not. Or rather, if you’re familiar with public opinion data, you know that those people follow politics the least and have the least settled and least coherent political beliefs. They’re all over the place, and tend to have very weird or inconsistent politics ideas in the view of people who follow politics closely.
Within the Democratic Party, we often talk about “establishment” Democrats vs the progressive left. I don’t know any Democratic voter who identifies as “establishment.” They may tend to vote for elected officials who can fairly be classed, in descriptive terms, as “establishment.” But that’s not the same thing. One of the backdrafts in this primary cycle has been complaints from progressives that Black voters are “establishment” and that gets in the way of the political left. Some Democratic voters identify as “moderate” or “centrist,” but far fewer than did a generation ago. It’s fairly telling that we don’t actually have a word for the non-progressive left group in the Democratic Party that isn’t either a line of attack or some version of pundit-speak. If really pressed most of those people would just call themselves “Democrats.”
Of course we’re not running a poli sci class here or trying to come up with the perfect political taxonomy. If we’re just talking about semantics, who cares? But we’re not. One of the things people find the hardest to accept in politics is that most problems can’t be solved, only managed. The greatest sin of punditry is the idea that one clever guy can fix the big vexing challenge with one weird trick. But if you’re going to manage these challenges effectively — and factional divisions among Democrats are one of those things — you have to understand them, accept their nuances beyond zero-sum binary oppositions. That gives you a sense of what definitely won’t work and areas where creative solutions might allow people to work together, if not necessarily agree. A lot of these divisions come down to different instinctive attitudes about risk aversion, pragmatism and ideology. Another central division is more accommodating or oppositional attitudes toward traditional social mores and customs: trans rights, language politics, sexual morality, identity politics. To the extent people are fighting or trying to grab attention these points don’t really matter. There’s us and them, and we need to beat them. But if you want to keep things on the rails we usually want and need better and more creative solutions.