“Fundamentally, this is about whose side the government is on,” Joe Biden tweeted Tuesday night. Biden was linking to an op-ed he co-bylined with Elizabeth Warren, who uses that sort of “whose side” rhetoric pretty often.
It’s pretty standard populist talk from basically every Democratic candidate for many decades.
Here’s a Bernie tweet from three months ago.
This election is fundamentally about whose side you are on. #PetesBillionaires pic.twitter.com/hZi3uzCmvJ
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 7, 2020
Al Gore in 2000 built his campaign around the line, “They’re for the powerful, we’re for the people.”
Like Barack Obama, Gore rhetorically ran against “Big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs.”
Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter did the same. Heck, so did Adlai Stevenson, who, in 1956, promised to “take the government away from General Motors and give it back to Joe Smith.”
It’s a good line. It’s a simple idea. And it taps into a widespread and accurate perception that large and powerful special interests have too much sway in Washington and that the policies the big guys win are often at odds with the public interest.
But “Us-versus-Them” is a cleaner, easier argument when most swing voters are pretty sure they’re in the Us and not the Them. Democrats have lost the trust of many working-class voters on that score by trading some of their economic populism for the culture war.
It is official dogma of the Democratic Party that you are a bigot if you believe marriage is between a man and woman. In fact, you’re a bigot if you don’t think you should ask people which pronouns to use when addressing them.
If you own guns and value gun rights, you have blood on your hands. God forbid you belong to the National Rifle Association, which is public enemy No. 1 of the Democratic Party. And you’re wondering how Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin?
WATCH: “You’re full of sh*t,” @JoeBiden tells a man who accused him of “actively trying to end our Second Amendment right.”
“I support the Second Amendment,” Biden adds while vising under-construction auto plant in Detroit. @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/sueOSBaY9P
— Bo Erickson CBS (@BoKnowsNews) March 10, 2020
If you voted for Trump in 2016, you are a bad person. You’re probably deplorable. You’re probably a bitter clinger to either your gun or your Bible.
So even when the Democrats are doing lunch pail economic populism, the “whose side are you on” talk is far more divisive and far more worrying than it used to be. It used to be that you were on the wrong side only if you were a General Motors lobbyist. (Though, of course, those lobbyists were plenty close with Democratic politicians behind closed doors.)
But when I saw Biden’s tweet this morning, before I saw what it was linking to, I assumed it as a culture-war salvo. Would the government be on the side of the pro-choice, gender-identity Left or the gun-owning or pro-life Right? Since Warren went pretty hard on the culture war stuff this election, seeing her face on the tweet didn’t prove it was about economics.
My own confusion about which dividing line Biden was drawing is probably not rare. It’s probably a reason Hillary Clinton lost so much of the white working class in 2016.
The naked culture war, running against half the country, is exactly what Donald Trump does. It’s one of his worst traits. If Democrats follow his lead and keep prosecuting the culture war, they’ll pay the price in 2020.
