A Status Quo Theory of American Politics
The Charles Booker-Amy McGrath race was one of the final major primaries of 2020. So we are nearing the end of essentially a two-year intraparty debate among Democratic activists, party officials and ultimately voters that really launched with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory in a New York City-area congressional district over incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley. (Ocasio-Cortez won that primary on June 26, 2018.)
You know the general parameters of this debate. It pits figures like Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, James Clyburn, McGrath and Nancy Pelosi against people like Booker, Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The Biden-Pelosi bloc is winning overall in my view--Biden is the Democratic presidential nominee, Pelosi controls the House, candidates like McGrath are generally defeating candidates like Booker in key races. But the Sanders-Warren coalition is having successes too. They are effectively forcing the Biden-Pelosi bloc to move left on issue after issue, because a lot of Democratic voters like what they are hearing from Sanders and Warren. Biden may be an older white man who portrays himself as a moderate, but his actual policy proposals are well to the left of what Barack Obama ran on in 2008 and on some issues to the left of how Hillary Clinton ran in 2016. (Did you know Biden supports the idea of a commission to study reparations?)
But I think it’s important to really break down what the two sides are really arguing about.
The political media often casts this as a fight between the establishment (Biden, Pelosi, McGrath) and the anti-establishment (Booker, Sanders, Warren). But that’s not a great description--Booker, not McGrath is an elected official after all, Sanders has been in politics his entire adult life.
The candidates often describe their differences in terms of policies, but Biden and Sanders spent a year arguing about Medicare-for-All, even though both of them know that policy has virtually no chance of passing anytime soon. That debate is kind of fake, honestly.
Liberal/leftist/progressive (Booker, Sanders) v. centrist/moderate/center-left (Biden, Pelosi) tells us something, but it’s not quite right either. Politicians change their positions all the time, so it’s hard to suggest that many of them are anchored to some kind of set ideology.
There is an age element to this debate, but the leading figures of the movement that represents younger people are in their 70’s (Warren and Sanders) and Buttigieg is aligned with the older movement even though he is just 38.
Practical/reasonable/electable are terms used by the Biden/Pelosi bloc that suggest wisdom that they don’t have (the people who pushed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 might want to be more humble about their ability to know who is electable) and a moral vision they would backtrack from if pressed. (Who was more electable, practical and reasonable in 1964, Lyndon Johnson or Martin Luther King Jr.?)
Having covered this debate for two years, I’ve concluded that we are really debating two questions:
How good or bad is the status quo in America? (Thinking about this across all spheres, but really the economic/racial/power/structural status quo)
If you think that the status quo is bad for a lot of people, how bold of changes would you actively push for to change it?
This is a very fraught way to discuss political divides. Many people heavily involved in politics are doing quite well in America as it is structured now (Congress is full of millionaires, from both parties). But they read the polls showing that most rank and file Americans are dissatisfied. So the incentives are for politicians to suggest in their rhetoric that the status quo is really bad, even if they don’t really believe it.
So their policy proposals became a way to signal their views of the status quo. Let’s stipulate Medicare-for-All has no chance of passing any time soon, which I think is correct. (So discussing the technocratic details of such a proposal are not particularly useful.)
Politicians loudly supporting Medicare-for-All (Warren, Sanders) are trying to signal that they view the status quo of America, particularly in terms of health care, as really, really bad and in need of radical change. Politicians touting Medicare-for-people-who-want-it but also in favor of keeping the employer-based insurance system in place (Biden, Pelosi) are signaling that they want to change the status quo but not go overboard in doing so. Politicians opposed to either of those ideas (Mitch McConnell) are suggesting that the status quo is decent or at least good enough that radical changes should not really be considered. The people taking this in position in American politics right now are generally Republicans.
What you found around this time last year (pre-Ukraine scandal) was that Democratic politicians who supported Medicare-for-All often also supported a wealth tax and Trump’s impeachment and Democratic politicians who opposed one of those ideas opposed the other two as well. These issues are very different in terms of policy, so it’s likely that policy details aren’t driving people into two clear camps on these issues. Instead, the aggressively-anti-status-quo bloc generally favored all three ideas (Warren, AOC) and the less-anti-status-quo bloc opposed all three (Biden, Pelosi.)
The status quo explanation fits a lot of the evidence. It helps explain the age divide in Democratic politics, where the younger people are more left. (Of course a generation full of people who had to get both undergraduate and graduate degrees to get stable, decent-paying jobs but ones that don’t have pensions are more upset about the status quo than a generation that is at the end of their careers and is more likely to have pensions and not have massive college debt.) It helps explain the electability conversation. (Of course a candidate who is calling for very transformational changes to American society is going to introduce more electoral risk than one who isn’t proposing big changes.) It helps explain the establishment vs. anti-establishment conversation. (Of course people who have powerful jobs or access to power in the current political system are going to be wary of people like Ocasio-Cortez who seem intent on tearing down the current system.)
Another way to think of this divide is to consider which Democrats are basically calling for a restoration of October 2016 (when Obama was still president but America also had a massive racial wealth gap) and which Democrats don’t really look back on Obama’s presidency with that much fondness (like Sanders.)
If you think of politics in terms of A. How does politician X view the status quo? B. How aggressively will he or she seek to change it? I think you will ultimately reach more understanding than analyzing their health care plans.
Here’s the problem with the status quo theory---it requires an honest and at times harsh portrayal of various political actors. As I implied earlier, being a defender of the status quo or not being aggressively-anti-status quo is not easy to declare publicly right now, particularly if you are a Democrat.
So there is an incentive to obscure beliefs that are tilted toward defending the status quo. Chris Matthews, the former MSNBC host, wrote a recent column urging Biden to pick Kamala Harris as his running mate, in part to add racial diversity to the ticket. Perhaps this is Matthews’ sincere and deeply-held view. But the column, in my view, would have been more credible if Matthews had acknowledged what I observed during the Democratic primary: he seemed to really, really dislike Warren. I know a lot of upper-income white men who really hate Warren, whose views on issues challenge the status quo more than Harris’ views do. Those men often cast their opposition to Warren solely in terms of electability, as opposed to the fact that they oppose her vision.
I worry that the new way to oppose Warren for VP is to suggest this moment calls for a black VP, which allows people to cloak their opposition to changing the status quo too much under the banner of promoting racial diversity.
Similarly, the discussion about racial inequality in the wake of the George Floyd protests has led to more public debate about reparations--and I worry that discussion creates incentives for less-than-frank arguments. My prediction is that we are about to see a wave of technocratic and electorally-framed opposition to reparations from people who identify as Democrats. (“How can people prove that they are descendants of slaves? Can we really afford to reduce the racial wealth gap? No one can really agree on the right form of reparations, right? Isn’t it just too divisive? Won’t it help the Republicans win the election if we talk about that?”) Some of these objections will be sincere. But some of them will just be a way for Democrats to avoid saying, “I don’t personally support reparations.” Reparations are a very aggressively-anti-status quo idea, and many Democratic-leaning people are opposed to such ideas.
And that brings me back to Kentucky. In the wake of McGrath’s win in the primary, I have heard two points made several times by Booker supporters. “My grandparents/uncle/older cousin told me he/she/they would have voted for Booker but they turned in their ballot very early,” and “Booker did so well in this race, he would have won if he had surged a bit earlier.”
I’m skeptical. McGrath never really attacked Booker, correctly assuming that she was far enough ahead not to need to. But let’s say the primary was on August 1, and that polls on July 1 showed that Booker and McGrath were tied. I think McGrath would have borrowed from Biden’s playbook against Sanders: casting herself as electable and practical and suggesting Booker was proposing unrealistic things and was therefore unelectable in a general election; attacking Booker’s support for Medicare-for-All in particular; and really focusing on winning older and more moderate (and in my view, less-anti-status quo/less-aggressive-changes) Democrats.
And that might have worked for McGrath, because attitudes about the status quo and changing it are a and perhaps the dividing line in Democratic politics right now.
Thanks for reading.
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