From Mike Rose
Mike wants this to go out everywhere, so I’ll do my part.
Heads vs. Hearts
As political commentators look toward the next four years, they are carving up the map of the United States and making big claims about the nation’s culture. Many Democrats are buying into this red-blue thinking, and it could limit their appeal once again. Listen to one strategist quoted in the New York Times: “There has been and continues to be a common tendency of Democrats trying to reach people through their brains and Republicans through their hearts. And in politics, hearts win the day.”
Assumptions like these will keep Democrats from talking about ideas with the electorate, with common folk particularly. This would reinforce the perception that the Democrats are condescending and clueless about average people’s lives.
There are cultural divides in the country, and they do play into electoral politics. But it would be simplistic to assume that the divides only involve hot-button moral issues. It’s more complicated than the pundits think.
One divide has to do with beliefs about intelligence. There is a list floating around the internet breaking down red and blue states by IQ. Its intent is to demonstrate the stupidity of red-state voters, but it sure speaks volumes about the attitudes that contribute to Democratic troubles.
Consider as another example of such attitudes the general lack of recognition of the intelligence that it takes to do everyday work, from waitressing to welding. Working folks daily solve problems, weigh alternatives, make nuanced judgments, tease out variables, draw on knowledge and experience, question grand claims. But you won’t hear any of that in the language we use to describe what they do, especially in this high-tech era. The work of the so-called new economy is “neck up” while old-style manufacturing or service work is “neck down.” In the body only. Mindless.
Many Americans, red states and blue, bristle at distinctions like these, catch the sense of being unimportant and not all that bright. And while one can’t downplay the role that issues like abortion and gay marriage played in this election, for many those issues are mixed with the anger that comes from feeling dismissed—an anger that Limbaugh and company stoke unceasingly. It would be a terrible mistake for Democrats to miss this point, to underestimate the capacity of the average person to consider issues seriously.
The admittedly huge challenge for the Democrats—and for our democracy—is that the current administration so restricts what the public hears. Republican spokespersons like to claim that their party has won the war of ideas. But the fact is that there is a monumental distrust of ideas in the White House, a great effort exerted to constrain public thought. If this is a war of ideas, then ideas themselves are the casualty.
Democrats have to get better at presenting what the administration hides about everything from military unilateralism to the flat tax, but also better at articulating what the country can become. Their program needs to display knowledge of the textures of average people’s lives, and find the compelling statistics, analogies, and stories that match policy with those lives. Assume intelligence, assume a desire to make an informed decision and appeal to it.
Facts without a moral vision are inert, bloodless, but moral pronouncements that aren’t driven by facts soon ring false, the rhetorical equivalent of kissing babies. Imagine the vibrant national education that could take place over the next four years, wrenching us out of what social critic Benjamin DeMott has called the junk politics of our era. The Democrats’ challenge is to not be blinded by the colors on those maps, to breathe deep and craft a language that speaks to the head as well as the heart.
Mike Rose is on the education faculty at UCLA, and author of The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.