It’s The Culture War, Stupid
By: Tom Williams
Tags: Politics, Socialism, Culture, Elections, Election 2020

As of writing, who will control the White House and Senate remains uncalled; though, in the former race you’d much rather be the Vice President than Donald Trump and — in the latter — you’d much rather be Mitch McConnell than Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile, on the House side, things are looking more clear cut: Democrats have maintained control, but are likely to have lost around a dozen seats.

In true 2020 fashion, the election has delivered a result that seemingly no-one is happy with; Republicans, who thought they had won on election night, are now staring down the barrel of a Biden Presidency, while Democrats, who wanted an overwhelming repudiation of Trumpism, didn’t get it. Neither side can claim the overwhelming mandate they had hoped for.

Moreover, both sides should be disappointed: Donald Trump’s loss as a first term President, despite overwhelming support from within his party, is a historical anomaly that speaks to his unique incompetence as a candidate. Meanwhile, it speaks volumes that Democrats could only barely squeak out a win against an almost uniquely unpopular incumbent leader, who managed to embody both the incompetence of Veep’s Selina Mayer and the psychopathy of House of Card’s Frank Underwood (and the narcissism of both).

Instead of setting out a bold, new vision of America, Democrats instead chose to waste political capital trying to prove they *weren’t* socialists. They ran on what they were running away from

In fact, it is Democrats — not Republicans — who will leave this election most in need of some major soul-searching. For their part, the Democratic Party managed to lose ground with the more-important-than-ever Latino and Black demographic and, in the process lost close to a dozen freshmen Congress-members and, wasted what was probably their best chance for a long time to regain the Senate.

What’s worse for Democrats is that they don’t have an immediately apparent reason for why they lost. While Republicans can point to the many, many personal short-comings of their nominee and simply conclude that all they need to change is the personality at the top of their ticket, Democrats, on the other hand, seem set to spend another four years arguing over whether they went too far to the left or not far enough.

At surface level, the argument that Democrats loss can be blamed on their supposed association with socialism makes sense: — they lost ground with Cuban voters (who understandably get nervous whenever the s-word is thrown around), and the main line of attack against the House-Democrats who ultimately lost was that they were “radical socialists”.

D emocrats could only barely squeak out a win against an almost uniquely unpopular incumbent leader, who managed to embody both the incompetence of Veep’s Selina Mayer and the psychopathy of House of Card’s Frank Underwood (and the narcissism of both)

However, even if you accept this as the reason for Democrat’s disappointing results, the question of how you overcome it is hard to answer. Republicans have been painting Democrats as socialists since the beginning of time itself and, in nominating Joe Biden — a fetishist of bipartisanship, with a penchant for compromise — Democrats did all they could reasonably be expected to do to fend off a red scare. Not just did these attempts fail to pay off in the way the Biden team had hoped, they were an utter failure down-ballot; where countless Democratic incumbents who had based much of their identity on their moderatism lost to Trump-lackeys.

The knee-jerk reaction of many Democrats to Tuesday’s results has been to call for the party to take further steps to distance itself from socialism. But this would be a mistake, because to do so would mean continuing to allow the GOP to set the parameters of the debate. Instead, Democrats need to ask themselves why, in the face of record unemployment and mass death, the Republicans were able to win over 70 million Americans with the utterance of one word (“socialism”).

The answer is that for all of Trump’s failures, Democrats were never able to directly connect the declining living standards of millions of Americans with the policies of Trump and the GOP. In focusing on the Republican’s socialism scaremongering, the Democrats created a vacuum when it came to the war of ideas: a vacuum that was eventually filled with vague, vacuous Republican rhetoric about fending off socialism. In portraying Democrats as thugish, police-hating, Antifa-lovers, the Republican Party managed to paint a grossly inaccurate, hellish and dystopian idea of the Democratic Party. Without Democrats offering an effective, opposing, but equally strong, vision of their party, they allowed Republicans to score an open goal. What was a cartoonishly inaccurate caricature of the Democratic Party became fact in the eyes of millions of voters. Meanwhile, the Democrats constant insistence that they weren’t socialists; that they didn’t support Government health care or banning fracking, alienated countless left-leaning younger voters.

In short, while we shouldn’t overstate how disappointing Tuesday’s results were for Democrats (they did win the House and probably the Presidency), it’s clear that their willingness to buy into Republican narratives — instead of forging their own — paved the way for a much better than expected night for Republicans. Instead of setting out a bold, new vision of America, Democrats instead chose to waste political capital trying to prove they weren’t socialists. They ran on what they were running away from. Thankfully for the future of American democracy, the final results weren’t nearly as catastrophic as they could’ve been, but if Democrats want to not just win the fight against Trump, but also the battle against Trumpism, they need to treat Tuesday’s results like the massive wake up call that they were.