Divided Attention

U.S. President Joe Biden celebrated a major win on Monday as he signed a $1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill into law, but his Democratic Party also incurred a number of losses in recent weeks: Biden’s approval rating dipped to a new low of 41 percent in a Washington Post poll and Democrats lost the governor’s race in Virginia while falling way short of expectations in the governor’s race in New Jersey.

The current political climate will be influenced by a range of factors—including Americans’ dim view of the economy—but some Democrats are blaming these recent election results on cultural dynamics. “What went wrong is this stupid wokeness,” the prominent Democratic strategist James Carville argued. Carville expressed frustration with the influence of left-wing slogans like “Defund the Police” and what he sees as out-of-touch progressive language. The political analyst Jeff Greenfield wrote in Politico, “One of [Republicans’] most powerful political assets is alive and well: the power of cultural issues over policies.” Is this true?

David Kusnet worked as the chief speechwriter to President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s. Though he shares some of Carville’s convictions—that “Defund the Police” is a bad slogan, and a bad idea, and that Democrats should speak in accessible, relatable language—Kusnet is wary of attacking “wokeness” as a political strategy for his party. He sees contemporary Republicans as picking up an established tradition in theirs of speaking to cultural grievances over economic grievances Americans might have. For Kusnet, the solution isn’t to denounce every radical-sounding idea Republicans try to associate with Democrats but rather to focus on real, pressing economic issues facing a multi-cultural working class.

Graham Vyse: What do you see happening here?

David Kusnet: The country has been hurting since the start of the pandemic, which has affected the economy, education, people’s lives, and the social fabric. In a deeper sense, the country has been suffering since the 1970s and “the Great U-turn,” when working-class real wages went down and inequality increased. Further back, since the 1960s, Republicans have had a strategy of trying to convert every grievance that people have into a cultural grievance and then making cultural grievances code for race. All of those things periodically intersect, if I can use a fashionable word.