The big news in the Democratic effort to take back the Senate is the emergence of rugged guys running. In Nebraska and in Maine we see men who work with their hands — Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic, and Graham Platner, an oysterman — going after long-time Republican seats. And in Iowa another rugged-looking guy running for the Senate, Nathan Sage, is getting attention. He’s a veteran but not actually doing blue collar-style work, but he looks the part. As he put it: “I might be a little bit hairy, I might be a little bit fat, I might be a little tattooed.”
The question is: does looking the part do the trick — whether or not it’s coupled with actually having the right résumé?
Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump: Authentic?
Connecting to the working class is not a new problem for Democrats. Going all the way back to George McGovern’s insurgent candidacy in 1972 the party has struggled with appealing to the “hard hats.” That year it mystified some that McGovern wasn’t given his proper due for being a fighter pilot in WWII. Apparently his “AAA” views — amnesty, acid, and abortion — trumped any advantage he gained among blue collar voters from his service to the country. (He was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross.)
Then there was Reagan. His résumé included lifeguard, radio announcer, actor, and tv pitchman before getting into politics. No war service. No working with his hands — unless CPR as a lifeguard counts. And he’d been divorced, which at the time was still controversial, even as his campaign was based in large part on traditional family values. Somehow, though, he attracted blue collar voters — so-called Reagan Democrats — in large numbers, which helped turn the tide for him in 1980.
And how about George W. Bush. A cheerleader at an Ivy League school, and a blue blood to boot who never wore a blue collar. On top of all that he was a Vietnam War draft dodger, as people who avoided service through connections were called, who, in 2000, was going against another blue blood who actually did serve in that war. Yet Bush was the guy with the special connection to people who worked with their hands.
Skipping a few years there’s the current president. Wealthy family (although maybe not a blue blood), Ivy league, draft dodger, no manual labor, and the opposite of a paragon of family values. Yet supported in large numbers by working class whites and Hispanics as well as family-values Christians.
Bill Clinton was an interesting case for a Democrat. He managed to break through among less-educated whites even though he, too, was a draft dodger, that supposed mark of shame among the working class. He was from very modest means, but in many ways met the stereotype of the out-of-touch elite Democrat, what with the Georgetown-Yale-Oxford pedigree. What was he able to do, at least to a degree, in reaching voters Democrats were losing that McGovern, Carter, Dukakis, Gore, et al, were unable to? To get at this let’s delve into the relatively new field of moral psychology.
The moral foundations of our political thinking
The field of moral psychology was pioneered by Jonathan Haidt,1 whose 2012 book on the subject, The Righteous Mind, provides valuable insights into the fundamentals of the polarization of our politics. In terms of understanding how a plutocrat like Trump appeals to people with whom he has no obvious connection, there is no better place to start. Reading the book cover-to-cover will reward your patience, but in lieu of that here, in an article by Joseph Schuman, is a solid overview. Or simply read on.
Haidt and his colleagues originally identified five moral foundations, or moral pillars, of our thinking: compassion/caring, fairness/justice, authority/order, loyalty, and sanctity. They added a sixth, liberty, a bit later. The key finding in their studies in comparing liberals and conservatives was that strong liberals drew mainly from only three of the moral pillars, whereas conservatives drew substantially from all six.
Across the ideological board compassion/caring, fairness/justice, and liberty mattered, while conservatives also drew heavily from concepts of authority/order, loyalty, and sanctity (which liberals had much less use for).
The differences between the polarized ends of the political spectrum are even greater when one considers that fairness, for example, means different things to conservatives and liberals. That is, a liberal typically sees fairness in terms of equity and individual rights. Conservatives see the concept more in terms of proportionality and the group.
Moral universes collide: Trans rights and immigration
What’s “fair” in terms of the issue of transsexual rights? For liberals the just thing is the individual being able to express their identity, which might translate to participating on a sports team of their identified gender. On the other hand, conservatives see fairness in terms of the interests of the larger group of girls, who might not be as competitive against someone who was originally a biological male.
Sometimes moral pillars clash, as with immigration. Liberals tend to focus on the compassion/caring angle when it comes to illegal immigrants — openness to their inclusion in American society being of concern. Whereas conservatives focus on authority/order — people are breaking the law — and the unfairness of giving amnesty to illegals when other immigrants played by the rules to gain their legal status.
Other issues
Another useful example: Back when Colin Kaepernick was playing football, liberals, according to Schuman, defended “kneeling for the national anthem as a valid protest against a society that did not treat African Americans with fairness while [conservatives] decried a lack of national loyalty, defending the sanctity of the national anthem.”
And then there’s health care: Schuman argues that liberals “say that attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act show that [c]onservatives don’t care about low-income Americans while [conservatives] say that [government overreach as reflected in the ACA] infringes on their liberties.”
The list could go on. There’s crime: liberals focus on fairness tied to racism and poverty, the causes of crime as they see it; conservatives think first and foremost of order and the interests of the larger community. Abortion? liberals think of the infringement on the liberty of women; conservatives focus on compassion for the unborn. Student loan forgiveness? Liberals think of fairness in the context of equity for those worse off striving to get an education; conservatives view the fairness question from the perspective of all those who played by the rules and paid off their loans.
At the end of the day, when it comes to connecting to certain classes of voters, liberals sometimes don’t, in effect, speak the language. They don’t value loyalty, authority, and sanctity much, and lose many voters as a result. Conservatives, on the other hand, can, in their own way, speak the language of all the pillars, even caring/compassion as their views on abortion show.
Did Reagan’s or Bush’s or Trump’s résumés and backgrounds resemble conservative blue collar voters? Not at all. But those three understood the language of religious reverence, loyalty to nation, and law and order.
How did Clinton manage to get over the hump with so many of these voters? He relentlessly pitched his campaign to those who “work hard and play by the rules,” essentially a paean to conservative notions of fairness and order. His draft dodging was beside the point when he made that connection.
Those “rugged men running”
Democrats need, at the very least, to understand the moral roots of many conservative blue collar voters’ thinking if they are to make a real effort at attracting them. Calling them “deplorables,” or saying they “cling to guns and religion” — as two prominent Democrats have put it — betrays an unwillingness to make an even rudimentary connection.
As for those rugged men running in Iowa, Nebraska, and Maine: what they look like and what their résumés say won’t matter a bit if they fail to connect on a moral level with the voters Democrats need in those states. Wearing Carhartt shirts or what have you doesn’t cut it; acknowledging that liberals haven’t cornered the righteousness market and that there are other principled perspectives out there is step one.
Haidt, a liberal, has been vilified for years by the campus left for his criticisms of the capture by that left of the humanities and social sciences. More recently he and his colleagues have relentlessly publicized the damage done to teenagers and pre-teens by the toxic mix of iphones and social media. The movement across the country to ban iphones in schools can be credited (or blamed, if that’s your view) in significant measure to him.