Lessons for Biden
Here’s how the new president can unite the country — and pick up votes, says Richard Cockett
Richard Cockett provides a check list for the new president to woo the Republicans he needs
Joe Biden won by a hefty margin, amassing the highest number of votes ever cast for a presidential candidate in a feat that surpasses Donald Trump’s achievement of attracting the record number of ballots cast for an incumbent — a blue wave crashing into a red wave. Yet this won’t bring much cheer to the Democrats, whose party high-ups have already been holding post-mortems into why they performed so dismally. Allowing Trump to rack up such a huge number of votes is one thing, but to actually go backwards in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, losing five seats, took some doing, and the Democrats might yet fail to take the Senate.
Overall, it was calamitous considering the tailwind the Democrats enjoyed: a raging pandemic, a tanking, partly shut-down economy and a Republican president feared and loathed by everyone except his extensive fan club. Meanwhile, moderate Republicans, business people and economic liberals sense an opportunity.
They were never reconciled to Trump’s relentless assaults on free trade and immigration in the first place. Now they see a vulnerable president-elect and a humiliated Democratic Party that might best reinvigorate its prospects by defying its “progressive” wing to advocate their kind of pro-choice and free-market solutions in vital policy areas.
This would also give real substance to Biden’s oft-repeated, but characteristically vague, claims to bridge the profound cracks in American society. Biden says he wants to heal and can accomplish a little of that just by not being as nutty and provocative as his predecessor. But if he really wants to stay true to his word and govern on behalf of all Americans he could, and should, go further, and give something to the Republicans. He may well win back some voters in the process too.
Where to start? With school choice, and in particular
charter schools. These are set up by local communities with federal funds, beyond the reach of the self-serving and statist educational bureaucracy and teaching unions. The schools are analogous to the “free schools” set up by Michael Gove when he was education secretary in David Cameron’s government. At a recent (virtual) meeting of the Atlas Network meeting of free-market and libertarian think-tanks around the world, the American participants were impressively unanimous in plumping for charter schools as the place where Biden might begin to build consensus.
The reason is simple. Regardless of the educational merits of charter schools, of which more later, Biden has political incentive to do so. Belying pretty well every pundit in this incendiary year of Black Lives Matters, the Democrats performed lamentably among ethnic minority voters. The proportion of blacks voting for Trump rose from 15 per cent in 2016 to 18 per cent. Of Latino voters, 32 per cent backed Trump — up from 28 per cent last time around.
Among these often highly aspirational voters, charter schools are extremely popular, viewed as the essential passport to economic and social advancement in America. They are also extremely popular among Republicans; Trump made much play on them during the election, claiming (falsely, as usual) that a Biden administration, in hock to the teaching unions, would destroy them. This undoubtedly fed into the general fears of “socialism” often expressed by Latino voters, and ushered them towards voting for Trump. Hence Biden coming out in support of charter schools would allay their fears — as well as being excellent for their education.
Blacks and Latinos have good cause to love charter schools: they do very well out of them. Whereas blacks, in particular, perform poorly in the generally underperforming public system, they can prosper in charter schools. A remarkable example of this is the tale of post-Katrina New Orleans, a city where blacks make up about 60 per cent of a population of about 400,000, the highest percentage of any big city in the country.
Following the devastating hurricane in 2004, the state of Louisiana took the opportunity to close nearly all the existing schools, took an axe to the old bureaucracy and embarked on one of the most radical and ambitious education reforms in America’s history. Rather than operating schools itself, the state became merely a regulator, commissioning independent operators to open and run schools instead. The results were startling. Before the reforms, across the core subjects New Orleans students performed well below the state
He goes on: “Democrats have historically taken voters from communities of colour for granted because of some of the harsher rhetoric in the last couple of decades. Now you see people more focused on economic issues. They want to make sure there is more freedom, which leads to more opportunities. And when Republicans talk about that we can put our policies up against anyone else’s. When you can talk about conservative policies, how they help communities and how they give families opportuaverage, nities to achieve the American dream, that’s how you’re going to win them.” Hurd says that there are two national takeaways from the election: “Number one, don’t be an asshole. Number two: don’t be a socialist.”
Meanwhile, the Democratic conviction that a rising demographic tide would usher in a generation of dominance has once again been undercut by a more complicated reality. The Emerging Democratic Majority, the title of a 2002 book by the
political scientists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, has become something of a shorthand for this belief that demography is destiny. But Teixeira, now a fellow at the left-wing think tank the Center for American Progress, tells me this is a “completely bowdlerised” version of the argument he and Judis made nearly 20 years ago.
He is not the first author to complain that a nuanced booklength argument has been oversimplified in the political conversation, but in this case the grumbling is justified. In the book, they lay out a demographic recipe for electoral success. The party needed to win “professionals by about 10 per cent, working women by about 20 per cent, keep 75 per cent of the minority vote, and get close to an even split of white working-class voters”. To build that coalition, they argued that Democrats needed to advocate what they called a “progressive centrism” that would keep white working-class voters on board.
However, the kind of left-liberal progressivism epitomised by policies like defunding the police and the wholehearted embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement, hasn’t just jeopardised support among white working-class assumptions. Teixeira thinks the election results have exposed an assumption among Democrats that BLM would “have the support not only of black voters but also Hispanic voters, and that all non-white people were united in thinking that systemic racism is what holds us back and America is a white supremacist society. And I just don’t think that is true at all.”
The decisions made by the Biden campaign suggest that they understood Teixeira’s point. The president-elect went to great lengths to distance himself from calls to defund the police, for example. Nevertheless, the broader trend is towards a party increasingly dominated by white college-educated liberals, who Teixeira describes as “probably the most woke constituency in the United States”.
The mismatch between elite liberal attitudes and the concerns of most Hispanic Americans is perfectly exemplified by “Latinx”, the woke left’s preferred, trans-friendly word to describe Hispanic Americans. Designed to skirt around the gendered Latino and Latina, it makes absolutely no sense in Spanish. Pew polling this year found that just 3 per cent of Hispanic Americans use the term, only one in four had even heard of it and a clear majority opposed its wider adoption.
As for GOP support among non-white voters, Teixeira says that Republicans “still have a long way to go with the Hispanic working class and a really long way to go with the black working class. So it’s a little early to even start pencilling that one in.”
Racial depolarisation is only half of the explanation of the electoral shifts in places such as Starr Country. The other is a broader realignment that was under way before this election, as rural and urban America, as well as college and non-college educated America, drift further apart. One way to think about Trump’s surprisingly strong showing with non-white voters is that what happened among white working-class voters in 2016 happened this year among a significant slice of working-class Latinos and blacks.
Michael Lind, a professor at the University of Texas and the author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, thinks the emphasis on racial polarisation over-generalises a story that is particular to black voters. “The real story is that African Americans are the only group that is polarised along racial lines,” he tells me. “Whites are divided and Latinos are divided as well. So it’s a class thing.” Asian Americans (which may be an even less helpful catch-all term than Hispanic American) are divided too.
Lind argues that for the Republicans to realise their desire to become a diverse working-class party, they must avoid pressure from the party elites to shrink the state. “They were on the verge of becoming this multiracial workers’ party under Reagan, and then probably again under George W. Bush, but their donors insisted that they try to cut social security and Medicare and all these working-class and middle-class entitlement programmes,” he says. “If you had carried out the preferred policies of Republican voters for the last 50 years, then we would have very limited immigration and we’d have a bigger welfare state.”
The last voters i talk to before leaving Rio Grande City are four middle-aged women, all Hispanic and all Republican, having lunch together. Norma Lopez dominates proceedings, explaining her journey from Democrat to enthusiastic Trump supporter. “It’s not over until the fat lady sings, and she ain’t sung yet,” she says of the election result in an echo of the president’s refusal to accept defeat. “I voted for Obama,” she says, “but he didn’t support the military and he never did anything for America. I got this sour taste in my mouth.” After citing gun rights, abortion and policing, she brings up illegal immigration. “We’ve got to think about America,” she says. “We’ve got to stop thinking about all these illegals. Are we ever going to do anything for America?”
Lopez’s hard line proves nothing definitive about the future of the Republican Party. But the remarkable thing about our conversation is how typical it is of the Trump supporters I have spoken to across the country. There is no effort to explain her views in light of the fact that she is Latina. There is no self-consciousness about a Mexican-American sitting a mile from the border taking such a position.
In electoral terms, the Republicans of the Rio Grande Valley represent an opportunity for the GOP. But zoom out from party politics and they represent a welcome rebuttal to the idea that contemporary America is best understood as a clash between threatened whites and discriminated-against non-whites. Thankfully, the country’s politics cannot be understood as a battle between racial blocs.
The results of the election, both in Starr County and nationally, reveal a society that is far healthier and more complicated than many liberal Americans want to admit. It is a place where Hispanics in a working-class border town feel more unambiguously patriotic than white liberals at the top of the pile. And where nothing, including your politics, is predetermined.