Something that people in our party say a lot is, “The problem with Democrats is they talk too much about issues and they don’t talk enough about values.” And I think that’s actually exactly backward. I think the problem is that fundamentally, swing voters generally don’t share our values and only and mainly vote for us because they agree with us on issues.
Yeah this kind of crystallises my thinking on this. I cringe whenever Dems (or progressives in general) lead with values because it’s such bad politics.
One simple and clear example is healthcare. I frequently see people lead with “healthcare is a human right”. I think this is a dumb and meaningless proposition because “healthcare” is a collection of many disparate things, some of which (insulin for diabetics) are arguably a human right and some of which (million-dollar experimental treatments that might extend a terminally ill person’s life by a couple weeks) no government in their right mind should pay for. Saying “healthcare is a human right” doesn’t help at all with the question of what should and shouldn’t be publicly funded.
The larger problem, though, is that it’s a terrible way to convince people that M4A is a good idea. Telling people that “healthcare is a human right” amounts to badgering them about their values and morals. If you’re not a vegan, think about how you would react if a vegan was to lecture you about being a bad person for eating animal products. I don’t know about you, but my reaction is “fuck off”. If anything, the fact that I think they have good points about the ethical treatment of animals makes me less, not more, receptive to an attack on my values. I might well support a whole range of policies which lead to more ethical treatment of animals, but arguing that my values are inadequate makes me instantly hostile. It’s the same with any political issue.
It would be one thing if moralizing was the only way to argue for M4A, but in reality it’s easy to argue for M4A on simple grounds of cost, efficiency and so forth, given the particular pathologies of the American healthcare sector. To make it your mission to convert other people to your values is to be a slave to a pointless middleman. Just advocate for policy. I don’t give a shit whether other people’s values accord with mine or not if they’re willing to support the policies I want.
The way the Democratic party builds its coalition around shared values is the enemy of class politics (because class politics is supposed to involve shared material conditions, not shared values) and is a major driving force behind the Democrats becoming the party of educated city-dwellers. I’ve used Joe Rogan as an example of someone not welcome in the Democratic coalition a number of times because I think it’s illustrative. While I’m sure there are a number of concrete Democratic policies he would oppose, it’s noteworthy that all the actual complaints about him are values complaints. That is, he has bad men on his show, he says problematic things about trans people, and (unspoken but a major driving force imo) he is a dumbass who doesn’t really value intellectual rigour.
The Democrats are constantly on the attack on values and have very little to show for it, for example the line for four years of Trump was “racism racism racism white supremacy” and the result was that in 2020 he peeled off a substantial chunk of Latino voters and got, if anything, a higher share of Black voters than Republicans typically do. I mean Jesus, even attacking people on THEIR OWN VALUES clearly doesn’t fucking work, look at Evangelicals and Trump. It’s not that Evangelicals are uniquely hypocritical among human beings, it’s that people are just generally willing to compromise their values if they don’t like the conclusions they lead to (recall my veganism example earlier) and that everyone hates being lectured on their values. Despite this, I still see people leading with values in political arguments on a daily basis. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the point of this is that they enjoy lecturing people and feeling superior to them, rather than that it’s a serious attempt to change minds or build coalitions.