“Live First, Philosophize Later”
From the Latin: Primum vivere, deinde philophari
The 2022 political primaries are upon us. Six Democrats have already jumped into the race to replace Ron Johnson in the U.S. Senate. Several more are on the diving board. Few of us will resist the temptation to look at this and other primaries across the country as contests between political philosophies. A choice between “bold and transformational” and “incremental”.
There is a more productive approach. Voters in general are not caught up in philosophical arguments over identity and ideology. They want to feel some human connection. “Let me see who you are. Talk to me in words that tell me you understand my experience. Show me you can make that experience better going forward. Give me confidence.”
By their nature, political campaigns are a referendum on the candidate as a whole person, not just where they fit on the ideological scale. Their experience, demeanor, connections, organization, support, attitude, values, goals, competence, and the words and visuals they use to convey meaning, all matter.
Then, there are the intangibles of presence and charisma.
It is a truism. But we tend to forget. We vote for a person, a name on a ballot. Our choice is limited to those few who decide to run. Our decision is a complex balancing of what we think of each candidate as a person and potential office holder, and the extent to which our values are embodied in that candidate. Our values, even those that compete with each other, are not on the ballot. Neither is perfection.
Unlike a track meet, no political race starts out even. Some candidates start out far ahead of others.
Good intentions, hard work, and right ideas are rarely enough to defeat those who have spent their lives as politicians, who have worked to establish relationships and credibility, who know the issues that divide people, who are familiar with the motivations that move individuals and groups, who have practiced the skills of communicating, who know the people to call to get things done, and who work at their vocation every day.
When everything is taken into consideration, where a candidate falls on the moderate to progressive continuum does not explain much about the result. Although arguably Democratic voters had become more progressive in their thinking during the interim, Bernie Sanders, the most aggressively progressive of the Democratic candidates did less well in the 2020 presidential primaries than in 2016.
In the recent primary for mayor of New York City, home of AOC and a stronghold of Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party, Eric Adams, a former captain in the New York Police Department and a long-time elected politician in the city, had a substantial lead after the first round of voting.
Adams, who earned a reputation as a critic of the Department while an officer, as a candidate rejected “defund the police” as a slogan of young, affluent white people.
His argument was nuanced and recognized conflicting values. “We want to have justice and safety and end inequalities. And we don’t want fancy candidates.” That resonated in neighborhoods with high crime rates and high incidents of police violence and abuse. Adams came across as understanding both and speaking to both. He was not “reimagining public safety” from a theoretical perspective.
In Buffalo, NY, India Walton, a socialist, won the Democratic primary for Mayor, upsetting a longtime incumbent. She too, like Adams, grew up on the difficult side of a blue-collar community, and like Adams avoided “defund the police”.
Instead, she told a New York Times columnist, her pitch to voters was, “We’re going to fully fund community centers. We’re going to make the investments that naturally reduce crime, such as investments in education, infrastructure, living-wage jobs. Nothing stops crime better than a person who’s gainfully employed … The challenge of the left is that we use our jargony activist language and don’t take time to fully explain what we mean to those who may not be as ‘woke’ as we are.”
A recent poll of attitudes on police and policing among Blacks, Hispanics and Whites in Milwaukee captured the ambiguity of voters. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “Only a minority in each group supports the idea of ‘defunding the police’, but majorities in each group would support shifting some money from law enforcement to social services.”
Perhaps the most important conclusion was this: “The survey of 500 Milwaukee residents offers a mixed and nuanced picture. Positive perceptions of the police coexist with negative ones.”
Voters are complicated. They are individuals. They make choices among their different interests. They are more practical than ideological. They resist being profiled. They resist expectations about how they should vote. They are more than the identity boxes that get checked next to their names.
As Democratic Party activists, we get caught up in the drama of the intra-party debate over ideology, our different views of the world, and what is the most effective way for moving forward.
But that is not where voters are. Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University who studies the political views of Black people, was quoted in a recent New York Times opinion piece that asked the question whether progressives can win large numbers of Black votes.
Jefferson’s response indicated the question was misdirected. “Black people talk about politics in more practical and everyday terms. The idea of liberalism and conservatism falls to the wayside. It’s just not the language Black folks are using to organize their politics.”
It is also not the language or the focus of most voters. If we go ahead anyway and use an ideological framework to interpret the results of an election, we’ll get it wrong. Too much else is in play that has to be considered if we want to understand why Adams won in New York, Walton won in Buffalo, and the mixed results in other primaries.
At times, it seems, we are more interested in engaging voters in our ideological fights than we are in engaging with voters over what matters to them.
The temptation is not new. The political novel “Bread and Wine” written in the 1930s by Ignazio Silone when the fascists were in power in Italy, tells the story of a communist organizer who, going back to work in the rural region where he grew up, finds his people are not interested in grand principles. The essentials of life were what mattered: wheat bread to eat and red wine to dip it in.
“The ideal of the boldest spirits among them was to have work and be able to eat their fill. To have work and be able to sleep peacefully without having to worry about the next day.”
The message from voters today is much the same.
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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