I spent part of my Fourth of July at a Nationals baseball game with two Georgetown interns in Washington, D.C. During the fifth inning, the conversation turned to politics.
Voting for Joe Biden, they smugly told me, would be the “stupidest decision I ever made.”
“So give me a candidate who can appeal to the Rust Belt,” I fired back. They laughed, but didn’t offer up any names. “Liberal elites,” a balding man in front of us muttered.
You couldn’t have written a better paradox. Two radical, socialist left-wingers dissatisfied with current politics, at a baseball game, a classic symbol of patriotism. Their hatred for a capitalist such as Biden outweighed their understanding of who votes in this country. They forgot who we were sitting with: America.
This isn’t surprising, as the Democratic Party is increasingly demanding socialism. But the Left needs to be pragmatic and make a conscious effort to include those left behind in 2016. Socialism, echoed on today’s college campuses, is condemned to be an academic fantasy. Democrats should appeal to moderates and let liberal elitism take the back seat to reasonable politics.
Modern socialism, as championed by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., now means supporting expansive government programs such as Medicare for All and tuition-free college. When polled by YouGov, a majority of Democrats prefer socialism to capitalism. Yet only 33% of young people who said they support socialism could accurately define it.
But aside from mere confusion, socialism carries a history of tension in the U.S., even as recently as the Cold War. Socialism to many older voters means communism and the Soviet Union, but the oldest millennials were just children when the Berlin Wall fell. There is a divide between young radicals and older moderates. Left-wingers demand “socialism” but forget that populism won in 2016.
Democrats lost in 2016 with Hillary Clinton when we couldn’t appeal to the white working class. While we coasted on our liberal elitism, the underestimated populist Right gained power with disillusioned voters.
Some of the most important swing voters are white, middle class, suburban, moderate, not socialists. Hispanics and other groups are experiencing record low unemployment with Trump. Meanwhile, Democrats have failed to condemn its anti-Semitism, and some Jewish voters are feeling estranged from the party. Then there’s typical swing voters, the white bourgeois. “Socialism” could easily be seen as elitism, the hallmark of a party that doesn’t see rural America or the Rust Belt as equals.
The political center is up for grabs. Will the Democratic Party cry out for socialism, or will we re-acquaint ourselves with moderates?
The Democratic Party can no longer afford to be the party of “coastal elites.” Candidates such as Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders may have political clout with elite liberals, but it will take a candidate like Joe Biden who is high in the polls and respected by voters from both parties to beat Trump.
Well, what does all this have to do with a Nationals game? The two Georgetown interns, content with themselves, stood up to leave. That’s when I realized that I had spent an hour talking to the wrong people: liberal elites, those who cry out for socialism.
So I turned to the conservative, balding man in front of us. “Who would you vote for?” I asked. And that’s the question we all should be asking.
Maddie Solomon is a politics major at Occidental College from Denver, Colorado.
