Thomas B. Edsall: We See the Left. We See the Right. Can Anyone See the ‘Exhausted Majority’?

If it’s gone, the consequences are enormous

@ NYTimes.com, March 24

Does Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 represent the last gasp of an exhausted moderate tradition or does a potentially powerful center lie dormant in our embattled political system?

Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, argues in a series of essays and a book, “Unstable Majorities,” that it is the structure of the two-party system that prevents the center — the moderate majority of American voters — from asserting their dominion over national politics:

Given multiple dimensions of political conflict — economic, cultural, international — it is simply impossible for two internally homogeneous parties to represent the variety of viewpoints present in a large heterogeneous democracy.

Inevitably, Fiorina writes,

Each party bundles issue positions in a way that conflicts with the views of many citizens — most commonly citizens who are economic conservatives and culturally liberal, or economically liberal and culturally conservative, but also internationalist or isolationist-leaning positions layered on top of other divisions.

Fiorina is addressing one of the most important questions in America today: Is there a viable center and can such a center be mobilized to enact widely backed legislative goals with bipartisan support?

This issue is the subject of intense dispute among strategists, scholars and pollsters.

In Fiorina’s view, polarization has been concentrated among “the political class: officeseekers, party officials, donors, activists, partisan media commentators. These are the people who blabber on TV /vent on Facebook/vilify on Twitter/etc.”

This process effectively leaves out “the general public (a.k.a. normal people)” who are “inattentive, uncertain, ambivalent, uninvolved politically, concerned with bread-and-butter issues.”

The first, “A Not So Divided America,” conducted by the Center on Policy Attitudes and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland for a centrist group, Voice of the People. It found that if you compare “the views of people who live in red Congressional districts or states to those of people who live in blue Congressional districts or states,” on “only 3.6 percent of the questions — 14 out of 388 — did a majority or plurality of those living in red congressional districts/states take a position opposed to that of a majority or plurality of those living in blue districts/states.”

Of those 14, according to the Voice of the People study, 11 concerned “ ‘hot-button’ topics that are famously controversial — gay and lesbian issues, abortion and Second Amendment issues relating to gun ownership.”

The second study, “Hidden Tribes,” was conducted for “More In Common,” another group that supports centrist policies.

According to the study [....]

Just ran across this

Nov. 18, 2016 op-ed at NYTimes.com written a few weeks after Trump was elected

The End of Identity Liberalism

By Mark Lilla

[....] One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life.

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)

When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of — “diversity issues.” Fox News and other conservative media outlets make great sport of mocking the “campus craziness” that surrounds such issues, and more often than not they are right to. Which only plays into the hands of populist demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in the eyes of those who have never set foot on a campus. How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them? How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in “His Majesty”?

This campus-diversity consciousness has over the years filtered into the liberal media, and not subtly. Affirmative action for women and minorities at America’s newspapers and broadcasters has been an extraordinary social achievement — and has even changed, quite literally, the face of right-wing media, as journalists like Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham have gained prominence. But it also appears to have encouraged the assumption, especially among younger journalists and editors, that simply by focusing on identity they have done their jobs.

Recently I performed a little experiment during a sabbatical in France: For a full year I read only European publications, not American ones. My thought was to try seeing the world as European readers did. But it was far more instructive to return home and realize how the lens of identity has transformed American reporting in recent years [....] 

Needless to say, Joe gets this--the main meme of his campaign basically being "we are all Americans", as does Jim Clyburn who basically anointed him at the primary stage.

And then there was that also that now famous Dem "family meeting" after losing seats in the House in 2020 election:

http://dagblog.com/link/democrats-post-election-family-meeting-descends-chaos-32924

And guess what? Do it "Joe's way" (instead of Bernie bros identity-politics way) and suddenly Bernie has some of his wildest dreams happen shortly thereafter, including support from *gasp* registered Republicans of the type he always dreamed of convincing but never could because he hung with divisive identity politics types:

Krugman sounds awful optimistic that the Democrats under Biden are going to get a lot done and Republicans are in a hopeless state, that they haven't a clue how they are going to stop it

The Decline of Republican Demonization

Why has opposition to Biden’s plans been so low energy?

• March 25, 2021, 7:00 p.m. ET

The American Rescue Plan, President Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief effort, is law. But it’s only a short-term measure, mainly designed to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic and its immediate aftermath. The long-term stuff — which is expected to combine large-scale infrastructure spending with tax increases on the rich — is still being formulated. And everyone says that turning those longer-term plans into law will be much harder than passing the ARP.

But what if everyone is wrong?

Just about every analyst I follow asserted, almost until the last moment, that $1.9 trillion was an opening bid for the rescue plan and that the eventual bill would be substantially smaller. Instead, Democrats — who, by standard media convention, are always supposed to be in “disarray” — held together and did virtually everything they had promised. How did that happen?

Much of the post-stimulus commentary emphasizes the lessons Democrats learned from the Obama years, when softening policies in an attempt to win bipartisan support achieved nothing but a weaker-than-needed economic recovery. But my sense is that this is only part of the story. There has also been a change on the other side of the aisle: namely, Republicans have lost their knack for demonizing progressive policies.

Notice that I said “policies.” There’s certainly plenty of demonization out there: Vast numbers of Republican voters believe that Biden is president thanks only to invisible vote fraud, and some even buy the story that it was masterminded by a global conspiracy of pedophiles. But the G.O.P. has been spectacularly unsuccessful in convincing voters that they’ll be hurt by Biden’s spending and taxing plans.

In fact, polling on the rescue plan is so positive as to seem almost surreal for those of us who remember the policy debates of the Obama years: Something like three-quarters of voters, including a majority of Republicans, support the plan. For comparison, only a slight majority of voters supported President Barack Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, even though Obama personally still had very high approval ratings.

Why the difference? Part of the answer, surely, is that this time around Republican politicians and pundits have been remarkably low energy in criticizing Biden’s policies. Where are the bloodcurdling warnings about runaway inflation and currency debasement, not to mention death panels? (Concerns about inflation, such as they are, seem to be mainly coming from some Democratic-leaning economists.)

True, every once in a while some G.O.P. legislator mumbles one of the usual catchphrases — “job-killing left-wing policies,” “budget-busting,” “socialism.” But there has been no concerted effort to get the message out. In fact, the partisan policy critique has been so muted that almost a third of the Republican rank and file believe that the party supports the plan, even though it didn’t receive a single Republican vote in Congress.

But why this somnolence? Republicans may realize that an attempt to revive Obama-era critiques would expose them to ridicule over their record of hypocrisy: After declaring deficits an existential threat under Obama, then dropping the issue the minute Donald Trump took office, it’s hard to pull off another 180-degree turn [....]

the 60 Minutes hit on DeSantis is a major fail - I have been to Publix quite a few times and agree with Barro's comment on that PLUS the other points made in exchange with Yglesias here finally totally make clear to me why my moderate bi-coastal brother vastly prefers DeSantis to Newsom (it's hard to get him to articulate on that, but he has expressed to me that he thinks pols like Newsom have ruined California "once a paradise") he's not a registered Republican but pretty much despises lefties and wasn't raised that way, that comes from life experience (mom was a bleeding heart liberal)

"beware" is a good warning. We read a lot of DeSantis bashing because he supported Trump, but that was not the whole story about him, lots of people in Florida are happy with him, it might surprise they think of him as a moderate